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

Thor Hanson’s new book explains the biology behind climate change and why some species may be better able to survive a quickly changing planet.

When it comes to climate change, nature hasn’t had the luxury of waiting for foot-dragging politicians or stonewalling corporations or science deniers. Countless species are already on the move.

“Just as the planet is changing faster than anyone expected, so too are the plants and animals that call it home,” writes biologist Thor Hanson in a new book that explores the field of climate change biology.

In Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change, Hanson talks to scientists all over the world about how plants and animals are moving and changing, and why some are inherently better set up for success than others. Hanson also discusses evolution-in-action, what happens when hundreds of thousands of species hit the road at once, and what we can learn from scientists with a front-row view of the climate crisis.

Hanson’s own understanding of the climate crisis comes from decades of fieldwork where climate issues rose to the top, even when it wasn’t the intended area of investigation. “You’d go to the field expecting to study one thing and come home with a very different dataset because the conditions on the ground had changed so much,” he told The Revelator.

What have you learned about which species are most vulnerable to climate change and those that are better capable of adapting?

If you start to look for overarching themes in the field of climate change biology, one that comes out quickly is the difference between specialists and generalists in nature. And by that I mean the creatures or plants that are very flexible and general in how they can behave and adapt. Those are the ones that are particularly good at thriving under a variety of conditions. And there are many examples of this that we’re so familiar with, like dandelions, which can bloom any time of year. They can grow in the gravel of your driveway and be small and tiny. Or they can grow in the lush area of the lawn that you water and be gigantic. They’re just extremely flexible generalists.

Author and biologist Thor Hanson. Photo: Kathleen Ballard Photography

So animals or plants that are in that category are already well-suited to cope with change.

The ones that stand out as the most vulnerable oftentimes are the specialists that depend upon a particular type of habitat or relationship. For example, the very tightly co-evolved relationships between pollinators and the flowers they pollinate. Sometimes it’s one pollinator specializing on one particular flower. Those kinds of tight relationships are very much at risk from this kind of rapid environmental change.

Is it possible to quantify how many species are moving in response to climate change and how that’s changing ecosystems?

I spoke with a number of people about this, but one in particular, a scientist named Greta Pecl, said that we know that between 25% to 85% of species on the planet are moving already in response to climate change. But when it comes to what that means and how those novel ecosystems with all these new neighbors will get along in the future, she said “we haven’t really got our shit together on that.”

It’s extremely complicated to try to predict how these ecosystems will settle through this period of change. Animals, plants, pests, pathogens — all of these things are moving and recombining in habitats in ways that they never have before.

Are you surprised by how fast some of the change is happening?

Yes, the speed of the responses for some things has been almost instantaneous. One of the great examples of that would be the Humboldt squid in the Gulf of California. When the waters warmed, fishers and everyone there thought that the squid had moved on. It’s a mobile species and things had gotten too hot and they disappeared.

But when folks went out and did surveys, they found in fact that the squid were still there and more plentiful than ever. But the warm water or the stress from that heat had triggered a complete lifestyle change where they were maturing twice as fast, reaching only half their normal size and eating different foods.

Their adult bodies were so much smaller and so different that they were too small to bite the hooks that people had been using for decades to catch these big squid. The few that they could hook, they assumed must be juveniles or maybe even another species, and they were throwing them back.

So that is an example of the inherent flexibility built into a species. We all have a bit of what they call in biology, plasticity. It’s built into your genome to be able to deal with a certain amount of environmental change. Some species, like this squid, have a lot of it. Some species have very little. So it’s the ones that lack plasticity that are more at risk.

That’s an example of what we see a lot in nature right now is these plastic responses that are already built into species’ genomes. But there are now a few examples of evolution taking place in response to climate change and taking place quickly.

One of these stories comes to us from a scientist named Colin Donihue, who did some work on a little anole lizard that lives in the Turks and Caicos islands in the Caribbean. Colin and his team were there surveying and taking all these measurements of the lizard because there was going to be a project to remove non-native rats that were eating the lizards. And they wanted to see the response to getting rid of those rats.

But two weeks after their field season, two category four hurricanes slammed across the island with extreme winds, uprooting trees and destroying structures and causing flooding. That took the rat eradication project off the books, but Colin and his team realized it was a rare opportunity to look at what impact the hurricane had on those lizards.

So they went back down there, repeated the same field measurements and learned that the surviving lizards had measurably larger toe pads and stronger front legs for gripping tight to the branches and tree trunks they were holding onto during those high winds. And the odd part was that their back legs were smaller.

To figure out why they simulated hurricane-force winds with a leaf blower and watched the behavior of the lizards. They learned that, in fact, they hold on tightly with those strong front legs and their back legs and tail flap out like a sail in the wind. So if you have smaller back legs, it’s less drag and you have a better chance of hanging on through the hurricane.

They documented all of this and then went back again later and showed that indeed these traits were being passed on to the next generation. And then they looked at a broad sweep of anoles across the Caribbean and found that this sort of selection — this evolution — has been going on in response to hurricanes all over the place. Wherever you have frequent, strong hurricanes, the anoles in those populations have these larger toe pads and stronger front legs.

So you can really see the effects of extreme weather playing out just over the course of a few generations.

Are you ever worried that when people read about the ways that some species are adapting it may make them think that climate change won’t be a problem for most plants and animals?

Yes, it’s a concern, I think, of anyone working in this field. They want to document what’s going on, but not give people the sense that everything’s going to be fine. In fact, it’s not going to be fine. There’s still a great cause for worry. This is still a crisis.

It’s always important in a discussion of climate change biology to call out that we have some very compelling and even inspiring examples of rapid change and response and survival. But those are counterbalanced by the many species that can’t respond quickly — that don’t have that flexibility — and that are at risk of perishing.

But what the study of climate change biology allows us to do is not to cease worrying, but rather to worry smart. It puts us in a much stronger position in terms of how we allocate scarce resources to these problems. If you understand the species and the systems that are most vulnerable, if you understand the ones that have some natural resilience, you’re in a much better position to manage the crisis.

And another thing that can be in short supply is emotional capital. I think it’s very easy to feel despair, to feel overwhelmed by such a large problem. So worrying smart also allows us to allocate our emotional capital, too.

On that note, did you come away from this research feeling more worried or hopeful?

When you think about all these scientists who’ve spent their whole careers studying species or ecosystems that might be really suffering, you’d think that they would have more reason to worry and lose hope than anyone.

Yet what I encountered, without fail, was people who remained passionate and committed to their research efforts really felt like what they were doing was making a difference. And I came away from that surprised and somewhat gratified by the power of curiosity as a response to this crisis. It’s a balance to the negative feelings.

I mean, despair, if you will, just leads to more despair. But curiosity leads to learning. And it leads to action. I really saw that across the board with the scientists that I spoke with. And I took that as a message of inspiration.

Vanishing: A Bond Across Centuries

A trip to a remote Newfoundland island to visit one of the last strongholds of the extinct great auks.

What happens to us as the wild world unravels? Vanishing, an occasional essay series, explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis.

A few years ago, after traveling more than 1,500 miles by plane, car and boat, I finally found myself on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island. I was there to visit the great auk — or at least its memory.

A gentle and curious diving bird, much like a penguin, the great auk once thrived in the North Atlantic and numbered in the millions. Awkward on land, it was a strong swimmer capable of accelerating underwater, then shooting itself above the ocean’s surface onto an island ledge, where they would hop ashore to find a mate. The largest colony was at Funk Island, about 30 miles northeast of Fogo Island.

To know where certain animals thrive is to know something special about our world. I take comfort in thinking about the penguins in Antarctica, the blue-footed boobies of the Galápagos, the Tasmanian devils, and even the star-nosed moles that live in the eastern United States and Canada. It doesn’t matter that I have never seen these animals in person. What matters to me is that they have found their place in the world, somewhere they belong.

The great auk I went to visit was a five-foot-tall bronze sculpture created by artist Todd McGrain for his Lost Bird Project. He installed larger-than-life sculptures of five extinct North American birds at places where they last thrived. The others pay tribute to passenger pigeons, heath hens, Labrador ducks and Carolina parakeets.

On Fogo Island, at the eastern end of the village of Joe Batt’s Arm, a handmade sign pointed the way to the sculpture. It was an hour’s walk along a grassy trail, with a sound of terns calling in the wind and waves crashing against the granite rocks in the small bay. For millennia great auks would have swum here, catching fish, resting on the rocks.

The tragedy of the great auk was to breed — in the thousands — on Funk Island, not far from the abundant cod stocks in the Grand Banks. When European fishing vessels came to Newfoundland in the early 16th century, they saw the birds as a bonanza and seized on them as a source of fresh meat, as well as oil for lamps. Their feathers became pillows and mattresses, and their eggs were collected for food.

Eyewitnesses reported seeing fishermen guide the tame, penguin-like birds up gangplanks onto boats. It was a wholesale slaughter, and their numbers plummeted through the 1700s. In 1785, English explorer George Cartwright wrote about the crews of men who lived on Funk Island all summer to harvest feathers and warned, “If a stop is not soon put to that practice, the whole breed will be diminished to almost nothing.”

By 1800 no great auks remained on Funk Island. They were soon gone from Fogo Island, too.

When I arrived at the sculpture, I found myself struck by its elegance. I couldn’t help but run my hand over its smooth lines. The sculpture looked east across the ocean toward a similar sculpture in Iceland. I took photos and then sheltered in the crevice of some boulders to sit with the sculpture for awhile.

Hike out to the #greatauk at Joe Batt’s Arm on #fogoisland #extinction #memorial pic.twitter.com/vnrW2Mc5fF

— Dr. Daniel Hudon (@daniel_hudon) August 24, 2018

I thought about the facts that I knew: Great auk partners both tended to their single large egg laid on bare rock; they took turns going into the ocean to feed; eggs had unique marbled markings; the last pair of great auks was strangled off Iceland in 1844 while incubating an egg.

Here was a special moment alone with the sculpture, shielded from the wind, carved out of the long history of the area, where I could think why it was there in the first place.

Before we left, I felt I needed something to signify our visit, some sort of ritual. I grabbed my water bottle and approached the sculpture again. I poured some water into my cupped hand and let it drip onto its head. In that moment, the ritual caught me and suddenly felt significant. It was a moment of honoring the memory of the great auk and grieving its loss. As I thought about it afterwards, perhaps it wasn’t me blessing the sculpture, but the great auk blessing me.

It was strange for me to form a bond with a bird that has been extinct for nearly two centuries. That bond would undoubtedly be much stronger if the great auk still existed here, occupying its place in the world, rather than only in our imaginations. Our grief for lost animals is an expression of our love. It’s a reminder that the beauty and diversity of the tree of life should never be taken for granted, and that we, with all our strivings, ingenuity and empathy, still need to understand our own place on the tree.

Explore the rest of the Vanishing series and discuss these and other #VanishingSpecies on Twitter.

California’s Reliance on Dams Puts Fish in Hot Water

Water releases from dams aren’t that good at mimicking natural conditions, a new study finds.

As California’s prized salmon runs teeter toward extinction in another crushing drought, a new study highlights the need to rethink dams — a key part of the state’s water management.

For decades, water managers have released water from reservoirs in an attempt to mimic natural stream flows and temperatures, with a special eye on keeping water cold enough for salmon, which can’t tolerate temperatures above 72 degrees Fahrenheit. The belief was that California could dam most of its rivers to grow cities and food but continue to support wildlife if enough cold water was released from dams at the right time.

But the study, published in PLOS One, could call some of that management paradigm into question. Researchers from the University of California, Davis analyzed stream temperature data from 77 sites, including 27 dams. They found that only one site — Shasta Dam — created temperature patterns that resemble natural ones.

salmon under water — Adult fall-run Chinook salmon on the American River in Sacramento County, Calif. Photo: Carl Costas / California Department of Water Resources

The rest of the dams created artificial temperature patterns, some of which persisted for more than 100 miles downstream. In streams fed by mountain runoff, for example, the natural conditions are usually colder than what dams — which store heat along with water — can produce. These altered temperature patterns can stress or kill fish like salmon and alter cues and processes for a range of other aquatic species.

“The biggest takeaway from this study is the idea that we really can’t engineer ourselves into a better natural environment than what nature can produce itself,” says Ann Willis, a senior staff researcher at the U.C. Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and co-author of the study.

That may be tough news for water managers to hear in a state that has 1,500 dams. But the realization comes at a critical time.

If dam regulation can’t provide enough cold water for salmon and healthy ecosystems today, that’s likely to get even worse in the coming years. Climate change is expected to reduce by half the amount of cold-water habitat across the country. And warming temperatures mean California will see less water in its reservoirs from snow melt.

That’s bad news for species barely hanging on. Extinction is likely for three quarters of California’s native salmonids, the study reports.

“For dams that lack both the capacity to produce a stable or variable cold regimes and lack passage above the dam, these barriers may be insurmountable for species’ recovery,” the researchers wrote.

It’s also far more than salmon that will be affected.

“We know that healthy, functioning streams benefit everything, including people,” says Willis. “Temperature is really an indicator of how the whole system is doing. When a stream is not the right temperature, just like when you and I would get a fever or become hypothermic, that’s an indication that there’s a whole system collapse happening.”

Dams also affect the quality of the water — something that’s especially apparent with groundwater-fed springs that come to the surface loaded with important nutrients derived from the rocks underground. These nutrients flow downstream and help nourish the ecosystem. Water flowing through a reservoir, however, doesn’t have those same properties.

Willis says that while they found the outlet of Shasta Dam can mimic the temperature pattern of a spring-fed stream, it still lacks these nutrients needed for a healthy and resilient river.

The study, however, could help shine a light on that and improve how resources are spent in the state by helping to identify high-quality, cold-water habitats that could be prioritized for conservation.

“Thermal regime classification developed in this study can be used to identify areas where conservation investment will support the recovery and persistence of valued native species,” the researchers wrote.

Willis also hopes these findings help spur a change in thinking about California’s water portfolio. In the past, the answer to water woes has been to build more infrastructure. During California’s last drought the state passed a water bond allocating billions for new water storage projects, including potential new dams.

But if we double down on more dam building, it will come with a big environmental cost.

spider excavators removing dam — Spider excavators remove a dam on San Juan Creek in California’s Cleveland National Forest. Photo: Julie Donnell, USFS

“I think what this study really says is if we go down that path, we are unlikely to achieve any of the other conservation goals we have set for ourselves,” says Willis. That includes protecting species like salmon, but also creating resilient ecosystems as buffers against climate change and conserving 30% of our land and water — a target of both the Newsom and Biden administrations.

“I would really urge people to keep in mind that it wasn’t because we didn’t build enough dams that we’re in this mess,” she says. “It’s that we really underestimated our ability to influence natural processes that we were relying on for water security.”

Instead, she suggests, it’s time to begin looking at removing dams — like four on the Klamath River — and many others that have outlived their usefulness. There are other options for increasing water security, including recharging aquifers to utilize natural below-ground storage.

“Dams were never meant to be permanent,” she says. “And so now we have an opportunity to be very mindful and deliberate about where we start removing some dams to restore the natural processes that we all need to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

Hot Reads: Ten Essential New Books About Fighting Climate Change

These books offer essential lessons for talking to a science-denying neighbor, local elected officials, your kids or the corporations causing our worst problems.

Read, then act. That’s the message from the best of this year’s new books on climate change.

Written by an impressive array of scientists, journalist and activists, these 10 hot-off-the-presses books offer insight into why we’re in a crisis — greenhouse emissions, obviously, but also corporate malfeasance and social inequity — while providing essential tools, strategies and recommendations for getting us out of this mess.

A few of the books are written specifically for activists, while one is for active kids. All offer hope for the future in an era when that commodity is rarer than ever.

You’ll find the list below, along with each book’s official description and some extra insight from us. Links go to publishers’ sites, but you can also order most of these titles from your local bookseller or library.

Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katharine Hayhoe

Science, meet society. Available Sept. 21, this gets our pick for book of the month.

“Called ‘one of the nation’s most effective communicators on climate change,’ Katharine Hayhoe knows how to navigate all sides of the conversation on our changing planet. A Canadian climate scientist living in Texas, she negotiates distrust of data, indifference to imminent threats, and resistance to proposed solutions with ease. Over the past 15 years Hayhoe has found that the most important thing we can do to address climate change is talk about it — and she wants to teach you how.”

Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation by Paul Hawken

An indispensable follow-up to Hawkin’s previous book Drawdown.

“Regeneration describes how an inclusive movement can engage the majority of humanity to save the world from the threat of global warming, with climate solutions that directly serve our children, the poor, and the excluded. This means we must address current human needs, not future existential threats, real as they are, with initiatives that include but go well beyond solar, electric vehicles, and tree planting to include such solutions as the fifteen-minute city, bioregions, azolla fern, food localization, fire ecology, decommodification, forests as farms, and the number one solution for the world: electrifying everything.”

Our World Out of Balance: Understanding Climate Change and What We Can Do by Andrea Minoglio

A great book for the next generation.

“Encouraging and easily digestible, this illustrated nonfiction guide introduces children ages eight to twelve to the important topic of climate change with tips on ‘How You Can Help’ and citizen scientist activities.”

The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael E. Mann

An essential battle cry from the climate scientist behind the famous “hockey-stick graph.”

“Mann argues that all is not lost. He draws the battle lines between the people and the polluters-fossil fuel companies, right-wing plutocrats and petrostates. And he outlines a plan for forcing our governments and corporations to wake up and make real change.”

Hoodwinked in the Hothouse, third edition

Available as a free download (and worth a lot more than that).

“Authored by grassroots, veteran organizers, movement strategists and thought leaders from across our climate and environmental justice movements, the third edition of Hoodwinked in the Hothouse is an easy-to-read, concise-yet-comprehensive compendium of the false corporate promises that continue to hoodwink elected officials and the public… As a pop-ed toolbox, Hoodwinked promises to be instructive for activists, impacted communities and organizers, while providing elected officials with critical lenses to examine a complex, technocratic field of climate change policy strategies, from local to national and international arenas.”

The Climate Diet: 50 Simple Ways to Trim Your Carbon Footprint by Paul Greenberg

Provides more than enough food for thought.

“Award-winning food and environmental writer Paul Greenberg offers us the practical, accessible guide we all need. It contains fifty achievable steps we can take to live our daily lives in a way that’s friendlier to the planet — from what we eat, how we live at home, how we travel, and how we lobby businesses and elected officials to do the right thing. Chock-full of simple yet revelatory guidance, The Climate Diet empowers us to cast aside feelings of helplessness and start making positive changes for the good of our planet.”

1,001 Voices on Climate Change: Everyday Stories of Flood, Fire, Drought and Displacement From Around the World by Devi Lockwood

If we’re going to solve climate change, we need to know how it’s affecting people and communities.

“Over five years, covering 20 countries across six continents, Lockwood hears from Indigenous elders and youth in Fiji and Tuvalu about drought and disappearing coastlines, attends the UN climate conference in Morocco, and bikes the length of New Zealand and Australia, interviewing the people she meets about retreating glaciers, contaminated rivers and wildfires. This book is a hopeful global listening tour for climate change, channeling the urgency of those who have already glimpsed the future to help us avoid the worst.”

The Fight for Climate After COVID-19 by Alice C. Hill

We live in a world of increasingly overlapping problems, and that often requires addressing more than one at once.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has hit our world on a scale beyond living memory, taking millions of lives and leading to a lockdown of communities worldwide. A pandemic, much like climate change, acts as a threat multiplier, increasing vulnerability to harm, economic impoverishment, and the breakdown of social systems. Even more concerning, communities severely impacted by the coronavirus remain vulnerable to other types of hazards, such as those brought by accelerating climate change. The catastrophic risks of pandemics and climate change carry deep uncertainty as to when they will occur, how they will unfold, and how much damage they will do. The most important question is how we can face these risks to minimize them most.”

How to Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre

In this time of both Covid and climate, breaking through the bubbles we create around ourselves and our cultural identities becomes even more essential.

“These days, many of our fellow citizens reject scientific expertise and prefer ideology to facts. They are not merely uninformed — they are misinformed. They cite cherry-picked evidence, rely on fake experts, and believe conspiracy theories. How can we convince such people otherwise? How can we get them to change their minds and accept the facts when they don’t believe in facts? In this book, Lee McIntyre shows that anyone can fight back against science deniers and argues that it’s important to do so. Science denial can kill.”

Becoming a Climate Scientist by Kyle Dickman

A great primer for people interested in looking to develop new solutions and understanding — we need you more than ever.

“A hands-on, revealing guide to a career as a climate scientist written by acclaimed Outside magazine writer Kyle Dickman and based on the experiences of a preeminent researcher studying permafrost in the Arctic — essential reading for anyone considering a path to this timely profession.”

Species Spotlight: Sunda Clouded Leopard, the Ethereal and Declining ‘Tree Tiger’

Isolated on just two islands in southeast Asia, this little-known, forest-dependent wild cat persists in the region experiencing the world’s fastest deforestation.

In 2006 genetic analyses revealed that the clouded leopard exists as two distinct species rather than one, as previously believed. Today what we know is the Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) is native to the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra, while the Indochinese clouded leopard (N. nebulosa) ranges from the Himalayan foothills of Nepal, India and Bhutan, and across mainland Southeast Asia. While it’s believed both species’ populations are in decline due to rapid habitat loss and conversion, the ecology and status of the highly secretive Sunda clouded leopard is poorly known, with only about a dozen ever radio-collared.

Description:

The Sunda clouded leopard is one of the largest of the small wild cats, with a head typical of a “big cat,” such as the tiger, lion, jaguar or snow leopard. The species’ name refers to the cloud-like patterns found on its gray-yellow fur. It averages 26-57 pounds, with a tail known to grow as long as its body.

Sunda clouded leopards — The tail on full display. Photo: Steve Winter/Panthera

The leopard’s anatomy suggests it’s a tree-dwelling or at least tree-loving wild cat, hence its “Tree Tiger” nickname. Its canine teeth are considered to be the longest of any living wild cat’s.

Where it’s found:

The species is native to Borneo and Sumatra, with strongholds in the Leuser, Kerinci Seblat and Bukit Barisan Selatan National Parks, as well as the Heart of Borneo Landscape that spans the three territories of Malaysian Borneo, Indonesian Borneo and Brunei Darussalam.

IUCN Red List status:

Vulnerable

Major threats:

Habitat loss — driven by extensive, unsustainable agricultural development, including oil palm plantations — has led to the disappearance of the Sunda clouded leopard from approximately 50% of Borneo and two thirds of Sumatra, Indonesia.

Like many of the big cats, the Sunda clouded leopard is also subject to poaching for the illegal wildlife trade, in which the species’ coveted coats, bones and meat are sold.

Notable conservation programs:

The latest member of Panthera’s Global Alliance for Wild Cats — Jon Ayers — recently pledged $20 million over 10 years to wild cat conservation, with a focus on small cats — the largest-ever commitment to small cat conservation. Invigorated by these new funds, Panthera is working to identify the core conservation regions for the Sunda clouded leopard and learning how the species adapts and responds to habitat modifications to prioritize our protection efforts.

Video courtesy of Panthera.

Panthera’s Small Wild Cats Program currently carries out biological monitoring and anti-poaching efforts in the Deramakot and Tankulap Forest Reserves in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Known as the Dupot Scouts — the word Dupot references “wildlife” in the Dusun indigenous language — the team is fully comprised of Malaysian Indigenous people, including two female rangers, all of whom partner with Sabah Forestry Department Protect. This region is located within the Heart of Borneo.

Sunda clouded leopard — Caught on camera. Courtesy Panthera

The Gunung Leuser National Park, in the Aceh Province in Sumatra, Indonesia, is one of the largest protected areas in Asia and is a stronghold for Sunda clouded leopards, Asian golden cats and marbled cats. Panthera is currently working with a local Indonesian NGO, Sintas, to implement a long-term monitoring program for these three species. Our team is working to understand their population trends and mitigate the threats they face from agricultural expansion, poaching and human-wildlife conflict.

My favorite experience:

I have been privileged to work across the rainforests and National Parks of Sumatra and Borneo for over a decade. However, I have not yet had the good fortune of seeing a Sunda clouded leopard in the wild — a testament to its rare and elusive nature. But our patrol teams based in the Deramakot and Tankulap Forest Reserves in Sabah have been more fortunate, with a number of clouded leopard encounters. These forest reserves are two of the best places across the species’ range where they can be seen in the wild. There are several reputable ecotourism companies operating in the area that offer Sunda clouded leopard sightings.

What else do we need to understand to protect these species?

While the Sunda clouded leopard is gaining conservation attention, particularly across Borneo, knowledge gaps still hamper its conservation. Further research is needed to better understand the ecology, distribution and conservation status across the species’ range. Additionally, the threats of habitat loss and poaching are increasing, and it’s critical to understand how these threats are affecting populations and use this information to inform effective conservation interventions.

Key research:

- Haidir, I., MacDonald, D., Wong, W-M., Linkie, M (2020). Population dynamics of threatened felids in response to forest cover change in Sumatra. PLoS ONE 15(8):e0236144
- Kaszta, Z., Cushman, S., Hearn, A.J., Burnham, D., MacDonald, E.A., Goosens, B., Nathan, S., MacDonald, D. (2019). Integrating Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) conservation into development and restoration planning in Sabah, Borneo). Biological Conservation 235(4).
- Hearn, A.J., Cushman, S., Goosens, B., Ross, J., MacDonald, E.A., Hunter, L.T.B., MacDonald, D. (2019). Predicting connectivity, population size and genetic diversity of Sunda clouded leopards across Sabah, Borneo. Landscape Ecology 34(1)
- Haidir, I., MacDonald, D., Linkie, M. (2020). Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) densities and human activities in the humid evergreen rainforests of Sumatra. Oryx 55(2):1-8

Scientists Find New Way to Reduce Marine ‘Dead Zones’

Wetlands can help remove nutrient pollution causing low-oxygen “dead zones.” But how much benefit we reap depends a lot on placement, a new study finds.

Summer in the Gulf of Mexico is a time to celebrate the region’s bounty, including its prized shrimp, which are the star of local festivals. But shrimpers this summer found themselves contending with another, competing event — the annual measuring of the Gulf’s “dead zone.”

This one doesn’t draw tourists, but instead scientists who calculate how large an area has become low enough in oxygen that it can kill fish and other marine life like shrimp.

This hypoxia stems from activities on land. When it rains, excess nutrients — mostly nitrogen and phosphorus from Midwest farm and livestock operations — wash into the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers. Those nutrients make their way to the Gulf, fueling an overgrowth of algae which deprive the waters of oxygen, driving away or killing marine life.

Over the past five years the average size of the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone has stretched to more than 5,400 square miles. But these hypoxic areas are also found in other parts of the United States and across the world. And climate change, experts predict, will cause them to get bigger and persist for longer.

graphic of dead zone across gulf of mexico — Map of the measured Gulf of Mexico hypoxia zone, July-August 2020. Image: LUMCON/NOAA

So what’s to be done?

Efforts to curb excess nutrients in waterways have so far included reducing the use of fertilizers or animal waste applied to agricultural fields and planting cover crops to limit runoff.

Protecting wetlands can also help. They slow the flow of water running off fields, and the roots of the plants absorb nutrient pollutants.

But do these types of efforts work? In a recent study published in Nature, researchers from the University of Waterloo and the University of Illinois Chicago found that efforts to restore wetlands in the United States “are often carried out in an ad hoc manner,” meaning they lack comprehensive strategy.

Most notably, they found that the areas where wetland restoration has been undertaken don’t necessarily coincide with nitrogen hotspots.

That means we’re not making the best use of these natural water purifiers.

If we were to target restoration efforts in these heavily farmed areas, however, we could greatly maximize the water quality benefits of wetlands. The researchers calculated that a 10% increase in wetlands in the United States focused in heavily farmed areas could remove up to 40 times more nitrogen.

That could go a long way in helping to achieve water quality goals. It would be especially helpful for areas that have high amounts of nitrogen, which they advise should get preferential placement. So, while they recommend a 10% increase across the country, some areas would see more wetlands restored. Under one their models, the Mississippi Basin, where nitrogen runoff is high, would actually see a 22% increase in wetlands, which in turn would provide about a “54% decrease in nitrogen loading to the Gulf of Mexico,” the researchers found.

They estimate this nationwide 10% bump in targeted restoration would cost $3.3 billion annually, twice as much as restoration of non-agricultural lands, but the costs “are in line with current expenditures to achieve water quality goals,” they wrote.

It could also go a long way to helping coastal economies. A report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that nitrogen loading from upstream agriculture has caused between $552 million and $2.4 billion annually in damages to Gulf of Mexico fisheries and the marine habitat.

There are other benefits, too. Wetlands provide ecosystem services such as flood prevention, carbon sequestration and critical habitat. And, after environmental rollbacks by the Trump administration, water quality is likely to be an even bigger concern.

As the researchers concluded, “These results provide critical context to discussions of wetland restoration and water quality that are especially important today when a new Clean Water Act rule is reducing protections offered to existing wetlands.”

Do Species Awareness Days Work?

New research into events like World Pangolin Day and International Tiger Day reveals how to make these celebrations more effective.

For those of us in the conservation community, there’s only one holiday each year that truly matters: World Pangolin Day.

No, wait, scratch that. It’s really Manatee Appreciation Day.

Oh, no, I forgot about Panamanian Golden Frog Day. That one’s important.

But what about International Tiger Day? Or World Otter Day? Or…

Okay, there are a lot of these “species awareness days” each year. They cover everything from birds to marine mammals and from big cats to tiny fungi. Some are established by international bodies like the United Nations. Others are declared by species’ home nations, while many are created by conservation nonprofits. In fact, just about anyone can declare a “holiday” and put it on the calendar. That’s how Earth Day got its start, after all. (We found enough environmental holidays to fill an entire calendar.)

These awareness days have obviously become a popular way to honor endangered species and fundraise for their conservation, but one big question looms over the concept: Do they work?

The answer, according to a paper published recently in the journal Biological Conservation, is yes — at least, to a certain degree.

The researchers examined 16 awareness days honoring pangolins, rhinos, wombats, polar bears and other species or taxonomic groups. Overall, they did fairly well. Google searches for these species increased an average of 3.07% on those dates (no small feat in the world of search-engine optimization), while average Wikipedia views for the critters in question rose by a remarkable 34%.

And that sometimes generates cash for conservation efforts. A dozen nonprofits that organize awareness days spoke to the researchers about their effectiveness, and six of them reported an increase in donations on those dates. The two events that opened the most wallets were Bat Appreciation Day and World Rhino Day.

This answered several long-brewing questions for the research team.

“The question whether species awareness days — or any similar awareness-raising interventions — work had been a question at the back of my mind for about five or six years before the study,” says lead author Marcus Chua, a biologist and Ph.D. candidate at George Mason University who says he often participates when he sees these events pop up on social media. “I wondered whether all these efforts amount to anything and felt that someone should really investigate this. Things got more organized after my co-author, Audrey Tan, wished me ‘Happy Whale Day’ in February 2019 and we made plans to embark on this study.”

gray whale and calf — Gray whale and calf. Steven Swartz/NOAA

Tan, a journalist with Singapore’s The Straits Times, sees the research — and the days themselves — as an embodiment of “the nexus of biological conservation and communication” that will help with her own wildlife coverage in the future. “For example, it will help me decide on which ‘days’ to use as a news peg for relevant stories or in determining the medium of the content — story? online interactive? photo essay? — and so on.”

In addition to generating media coverage, the research identifies several ways sponsoring groups can make their days more effective. For one thing, they found, days devoted to the typical “charismatic” species didn’t do noticeably better than others, perhaps due to “fatigue from information overload … since these species are often featured regularly in other conservation campaigns or by the media.” For example, Google searches for whales and elephants decreased on their respective awareness days.

On the other hand, a species’ novelty may make people more interested in learning more. This obviously occurred during the early years of World Pangolin Day, when fewer people were aware of the species’ threats from poaching and the illegal wildlife trade.

The researchers also found that specific calls for action — like “go to this website” or “share your knowledge” — resulted in greater engagement on Twitter. “This could certainly be incorporated in their campaigns,” says Chua, who adds that this “could help organizers focus resources or experiment to improve their awareness day effectiveness.”

Of course, the most important question is whether these days translate species awareness to conservation action. The researchers found that holding actual events on awareness days resulted in the greatest influx of donations. (That’s probably the only metric that matters, since most people don’t have the opportunity to physically assist in efforts to conserve far-flung or hard-to-find rare species.)

An endangered lesser long-nosed bat visits a hummingbird feeder. (Photo by Nancy Bailey, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

One thing that didn’t work: declaring an awareness day without checking to see what else is already on the calendar. Of the 16 days they studied, three were held on the same date in 2020, which the paper suggests may have diluted their effectiveness across the board.

The researchers acknowledge a few limitations of their study, which focused on a relatively small number of awareness days, all of which were promoted in English. They didn’t examine geographic patterns to see if species did better or worse in certain parts of the world or how paid advertisements may have affected fundraising outcomes.

Still, Chua says he was pleasantly surprised by the results, as he didn’t expect the days to do as well as they did.

“I was probably a little cynical, but happy to be proven wrong.”

Why Rewilding Our Landscapes Needs to Include Bugs

If we are to successfully restore the natural world, we’ll need to focus on some of the smallest creatures in the ecosystem, says the author of the new book, Rebugging the Planet.

The following excerpt is from Vicki Hird’s new book Rebugging the Planet: The Remarkable Things that Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – And Why We Need to Love Them More (Chelsea Green Publishing, September 23, 2021) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

What is rewilding? Basically, it’s the attempt to recreate the natural ecological systems that once covered our landscapes — woods, rivers, wetlands — and trusting nature to look after itself, perhaps with some help at the start to fix the most broken pieces.

Many rewilding projects are large in scale, to allow nature to really do its stuff without interference and pollution from us. It is about vast estates and landscapes, large herbivores or carnivores and huge decisions made by distant landowners or institutions. These are invaluable. But is not always about completely removing people — after all, humans are part of the natural world.

Instead, we need to find new ways to live while reconnecting with the ecosystems we live in, creating a richer world in which people and nature can thrive together. We can live alongside more bees, worms and flies, and I believe there is a benefit to taking the debate on rewilding down to the tiny scale of some of the smallest creatures on the planet.

Invertebrates are core to any rewilding project: ideal foot soldiers for the cause at every level as they travel, adapt and multiply so brilliantly. And, aside from farmed honeybees, silk moths and biological control agents, almost all the invertebrates we encounter, wherever we encounter them, are wild. They may be there because we created the environment for them, but they are not domesticated or tame — or even that interested in us.

How Does Rewilding Help Bugs?

Rebugging is looking at the ways, small and large, to nurture complex communities of these tiny, vital players in almost all the natural and not-so-natural places on earth. It means conserving them where they are managing to hang on, and restoring them where they are needed as part of a rewilding movement. And it means putting bugs back into our everyday lives, our homes and where we play and work.

But what does “good” look like for the bugs? We need to better know what the “perfect” habitats and conditions would be for bugs to thrive: the baselines against which recent losses occurred. We can’t tell what the true losses are as we don’t know what was there before people arrived, or even a hundred years ago. But how exciting to discover more new insect habitats through rebugging, as we let nature make its way.

Even rewilding a relatively small area can create something akin to the original habitats of the invertebrates, and we will discover so many intriguing aspects in the process. Rewilding projects are already throwing up some challenges to our previous knowledge about their favored habitats as species take to a habitat in a rewilded area that we had no idea they liked.

Bringing Back Lost Species

Which animals belong where is a fascinating issue in rewilding. It can involve reintroducing a species to re-establish it or to boost numbers of a native animal or plant at risk of going extinct. Or it can be about recreating an ecosystem that has got out of balance, such as a flood plain that needs the plants and animals back to slow water flow.

Would we want to bring invertebrate species back into countries and regions that have lost them? The removal of keystone species — a species that is fundamental to the existence of a particular ecosystem — can be catastrophic for a wild ecosystem, but reintroduction can work in unforeseen ways.

The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the western U.S. created unexpected and positive results for the park ecology. When wolves were removed from the park 70 years ago, elk overgrazing became a problem and only resolved when the wolves were reintroduced, and so elks were naturally managed better. But there was a further impact: beaver populations grew now that their willow trees were not overgrazed by the elk. This created new fish and water invertebrate habitats, which then influenced other species feeding on the bugs and fish. Everything is connected, and while many focus on the furry vertebrate species, we need to recognize and nurture the bugs, too, as vital parts of the arrangement.

Beavers are also being reintroduced into U.K. river systems, leading to new habitats, more diversity, and even floodwater management and boosting green tourism. Sometimes iconic species can be hugely important for building public support for conservation, but also can help fund projects through carefully managed tourism.

But what about invertebrates? Rebugging could allow species lost to an area to be introduced successfully and this is indeed happening.

Given their size and ability to produce numerous offspring quickly, invertebrates have the wonderful ability to recolonize far more quickly when they spot the opportunity than larger species. Just take the aphid, which can produce five to 10 offspring every day. The African driver queen ant can produce an estimated three to four million eggs a month. And they do not need so much careful handling as, say, a wolf.

However, it makes sense also to focus on protecting the native bug species that are still in their habitats, but are just hanging on in pockets of scrub, hedgerows or small woodlands, and even urban parks, where once their habitats would have been far more widespread. And they can help rewild the small spaces as well as the big ones.

The School of Rebugging

Critical to keeping places wild and protected will be helping people to have a stronger relationship with nature. Making public access safe and easy in rewilded space will help create a movement for rebugging. Great wilderness parks such as the 63 federally designated U.S. national parks present a whole other level of invertebrate opportunity. As these areas are managed by government bodies largely for wildlife, rather than farming or other purposes, they can be described as wild — and over 80% of the areas involved are managed as wilderness.

They maintain some of the best habitats, perfect for invertebrates to thrive. This is an extraordinary asset, but one which compares dramatically with other land management in the U.S.: the empty prairies and often car-filled cities, where insects and other invertebrates are subject to massive pressures from industrial farming, pollution and development.

Take the sub-arctic Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska where there is an abundance of invertebrates such as bees and flower flies. People visit this park to see the grizzly bears but the other fur-covered animals should also gain attention. Alongside the flies, the bumblebees are critical for pollination and they have recently found a new species of bumblebee in this park — always an exciting moment.

These are keystone species and the Denali park’s grizzly bears, caribou and wolves would not survive without the bugs because they all need the wildflowers and shrubs for their food or the food of their prey. The grizzlies in particular need the bees to pollinate the blueberries, one of the bear’s main foods. As we know, honeybees are under threat globally, so it is vital that we protect the other pollinators like bumblebees so they can pollinate both wild plants and farmed crops.

Wildlife parks do have threats such as the pressure of visitors, especially at peak holiday periods. Other dangers respect no boundaries — for instance, climate change, illegal hunting and invasive species. But these places provide a fantastic way to conserve bugs in their natural world and to show what they can do.

Rebugging Actions

The joy of rebugging is that you can do it almost anywhere. Give people the chance to act and to encourage some bees, or even hummingbird hawkmoths, in a green patch of land, and you can start to change hearts and minds. From a Costa Rican municipality giving bees citizenship to an amazing three thousand food-growing spaces making space for nature in London, it is possible — and it is happening.

The “rebugging” title of this book was inspired by another, recent book Rebirding: Rewilding Britain and its Birds by Benedict Macdonald, who argues that to have more birds around, larger mammals must be allowed to do their work and re-engineer the landscapes. Letting nature heal itself and letting it get messy is key to a revival in birds and other species. If we can use the lens of birds and beavers to understand rewilding, we should also use bugs.

Vanishing: Avatars of Sweetness

Hummingbirds are a vital force in one writer’s everyday life. Contemplating their loss is almost too much to bear.

What happens to us as the wild world unravels? Vanishing, an occasional essay series, explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis.

There is a frozen sea inside me. Inside all of us. Franz Kafka wrote in a letter in 1904 that a book should shatter our ice-choked inland seas — and as a lover of books and the ways they engineer empathies, I wouldn’t disagree. But it’s loving hummingbirds and contemplating their leaving that has broken me apart recently.

A 2019 study of bird declines in North America told a heartbreaking story about hummingbirds: There are 18 million fewer of them now than there were in 1970.

Just imagining the absence of hummingbirds sent me to bed for the day, sick with grief.

Enter the icepick beak of the hummingbird. Some species have beaks that have evolved expressly for waging tiny wars, gladiators among the gladioluses. For picking, pinching, poking, lancing and dancing — all to defend precious food sources and duel for mates. And, apparently, to puncture my heart.

Pick, pick. Yours is not a tolerable extinction. (As if any of them ever are.) Pierce, pierce. Trochilidae is the name on your family crest, my dear hummingbirds, my familiars. I could not bear for your bough to be chopped off our family tree.

On Facebook I post, but cannot afford to read, an article about mourning rites for glaciers. I have no idea what similar rites for hummingbirds would look like. Or maybe I do.

Maybe it starts when you interrupt that grim parade of would-be extinctions filing past and say to the Juan Fernández firecrown, No, not you.

Unacceptable, glittering starfrontlet.

I won’t live without you in the world, turquoise-throated puffleg.

Maybe it begins when your blanched interior is once again dyed with feeling, sensation returning to fingertips. With these hands I clean and refill my two glass hummingbird feeders like a devotion, to keep mold and bacteria at bay. Poorly maintained feeders can be fatal for my familiars, so even on days when I can maintain no other ritual, I make sure the sugar water is fresh and twinkling in the sun.

Years ago, when living alone and unwell in the rural Southwest, I was told by my landlord, “I knew you were sick when I saw the empty feeders.” You don’t have to know me well — my landlord certainly didn’t — to know that when I’m not feeding hummingbirds, I, too, am lacking nectar. In fact, I identify with these curio-creatures because they, like me, need constant sweetness to survive. They teach me that it is not weakness to require the scandal of red, the saturated and sugared things.

Every spring my wife hangs baskets of mandevilla (we affectionately call them “Mandy”) amid the other hummingbird-seducing flowers, and it is a joy to watch my feathered cousins hover and drink. This is what I call our “pollinator playspace,” a temporary and tenuous refuge for two Black women, hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees — all of us under threat.

In 1904 one warm-blooded mammal wrote to another: “We need books [and hummingbirds] that affect us like a disaster.” A disaster: If, one spring, hummingbirds didn’t return to me. It would be as if all the libraries in the world were shuttered, never to flutter open again.

Explore the rest of the Vanishing series and discuss these and other #VanishingSpecies on Twitter.

How Wildlife Rescuers Can Protect Public Health

A new surveillance system tracks trends in wildlife illness and death and could help keep people healthy.

An owl hit by a car, a bobcat caught in a trap, a sickened seal on a beach — wildlife rehabilitators are usually the first to provide medical care for injured or ill wild creatures. But their critical emergency services can also reveal bigger threats to wildlife — and potentially people.

That’s the findings of a new study about an early-detection surveillance system being piloted in California that’s designed to analyze near real-time information from hundreds of wildlife rehabilitators and trigger alerts when unusual patterns of illness or death are detected.

The Wildlife Morbidity and Mortality Event Alert System is the result of a collaboration among researchers from the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the nonprofit Wild Neighbors Database Project.

“There are so many disciplines that have come together to develop something unique,” says Pranav Pandit, a veterinary epidemiologist at One Health Institute at U.C. Davis. “We’re using machine learning, computer science, epidemiology and wildlife health.”

But the confluence of these multiple expertise wouldn’t have been possible without work that began years ago by Devin Dombrowski and Rachel Avilla, cofounders of the Wild Neighbors Database Project, who developed the Wildlife Rehabilitation Medical Database in 2012.

“They were working in the rescue centers and realized that there’s a need for digitizing all this data that the rescue centers have been collecting over the years,” says Pandit.

With their database now being used by more than 950 rehabilitation organizations in 48 U.S. states and 19 countries, it provided the groundwork for the new alert system, which has been up and running in California for a year.

pelican on exam table — Dr. James LaCour, LDWF State Wildlife Veterinarian, LSU Veterinary School student (right) and Dr. Erica Miller, Tristate Bird Rescue examines a brown pelican. Photo: (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Early results are encouraging, says Pandit.

During the pilot project, the system found several anomalies that signaled emerging health threats and triggered investigations by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. One of those was domoic acid, first detected in several species of birds in Southern California. The marine biotoxin can also affect shellfish — and sicken or even kill people who eat it.

“It’s bad for wildlife, as well as humans,” he says. “So when wildlife start showing the symptoms, having a very robust surveillance system is also good for public health.”

Making those connections between wildlife health and human health are a crucial part of the surveillance system. One of the things researchers look for are “sentinel species,” which can provide early warnings for diseases that also affect people.

For example, crows and other members of the corvid family can signal the presence of West Nile virus.

“They can show early signals of that outbreak even before the outbreak has happened in humans,” says Pandit.

There’s also the danger of infections jumping from animals to humans. As we all know too well with SARS-CoV-2 — and Ebola and others before that — infectious disease in wildlife can be serious threats to human health, too.

One antidote to that is better protections for wildlife. Another, of course, is not being afraid of animals that can be carriers of the diseases, says Pandit.

“If we really want to stay healthy, we need to maintain the ecosystem balance really well and we should nurture biodiversity in birds, bats and other mammals,” he says.

Furthering the reach of the WMME Alert System is also in the works. Pandit says they’re talking with other interested state and regional wildlife organizations, as well as some international ones that would like to see the system expanded.

“We are also constantly trying to find additional resources so that we can fund our servers, develop new models, make sure the data is secure and continually validate the model [when we go into a new region],” he says.

The other important component is continuing to recruit more rehabilitation centers to make sure the system provides the best representation of the population health of that region.

An expanded surveillance system, along with protecting biodiversity Pandit says, would be good for wildlife and people.

“We know that healthy ecosystems and healthy wildlife means healthy human beings.”