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.

Debunking the Biggest Myth About Wildfires

A new book from ecologist Chad Hanson explains why misunderstanding fire is dangerous for communities, wildlife and fighting climate change.

Ecologist Chad Hanson calls his new book Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate, but it could just as well be titled Why We Should Love Dead Trees.

Hanson, director of the John Muir Project, uses the book to explain why wildfires are beneficial to forest ecosystems and why keeping fire-burned trees on the landscape creates a biodiversity-rich landscape that rivals old-growth forests.

Smokescreen, steeped in scientific details and personal stories, is written for the average reader — one who’s likely been primed by media and policymakers to regard wildfires as “devastating” and “catastrophic.”

The book examines why, from an ecological perspective, they’re neither. It also tackles the tough issue of why state and federal resources aimed at keeping communities safe from wildfires often do just the opposite.

The Revelator spoke with Hanson about how logging drives fires, what can be done to keep homes safe, and why protecting forests is crucial to fighting climate change.

In some ways it seems like your book is a PR campaign for wildfires, which get a very bad rap despite their ecological benefits. Why should we learn to value them?

Wildfires in our forests are villainized and vilified in many ways that are similar to how native predators like wolves and bears are villainized and vilified in the media, in movies, and by policymakers.

People have this tendency to think about fire in the forest in the same way they think about fire affecting their home. If their home burns, that’s devastating. And therefore, they think if a fire burns in the forest that must also be devastation. So they want solutions from policymakers. They want people to tell them that they’re going to fix the problem out there somewhere in the forest.

And I think we need to fundamentally shift that perception so that people understand that fire is a natural and beneficial ecological force out in the forest.

We actually have a deficit of fire in almost every forest ecosystem relative to natural pre-suppression levels. The real losses and harms that are happening in communities are almost entirely preventable if we focus our resources and attention near homes, but it’s going to take a 180-degree shift in direction from our current policies.

In the book I mentioned the example of a community that really focused on home fire safety and defensible space, pruning within 100 feet of homes. That made a difference in the 2017 Creek Fire in the mountains in Southern California.

There were 1,400 homes ultimately within the fire perimeter and only five burned. You can only see that kind of success when the focus is on home safety and community protection, as opposed to back-country vegetation management — removing trees, chaparral and other native vegetation — and thinking that’s somehow going to stop a weather-driven fire, which it doesn’t.

One of the things you cover extensively in the book is why logging after fires can be so ecologically detrimental. Why are these so-called “snag” forests of dead trees so important?

Fires, including mixed-intensity fires, have been burning in the forests of this planet for over 350 million years. We’ve had fires, including high-intensity fire patches, in our forests since 100 million years before the dinosaurs walked the Earth. These are deep evolutionary processes, and there’s a deep evolutionary history of dependence and relationships with ecosystems and wildlife species related to that.

And it’s not just fire that burns at low intensity and creeps along the surface. Some species like that just fine, but others like it hot and they need the areas where fire burns more intensely and kills most, or all, the trees in patches.

woodpecker in tree — Black-backed woodpeckers eat beetles on fire-burned trees. Photo: budgora, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

It turns out that these places where fire or drought or other natural processes kill most or all the trees, these places are not destroyed. They’re not damaged from a biodiversity standpoint. They’re ecological treasures.

These snag forests are oftentimes areas that support the single highest levels of wildlife abundance and diversity in the entire forest ecosystem in a given region, provided that those areas are not subjected to post-disturbance logging — what they call “salvage logging” — which destroys all that wonderful rich complex habitat by taking away those dead trees that so many wildlife species need.

The Forest Service and other agencies engage in post-fire logging and thinning projects that they say will keep communities safer from fire. You point to science that says otherwise. Can you explain?

When people hear the term “thinning,” they think about workers out there with pruning shears and rakes. They don’t think chainsaws and bulldozers, which is the reality of thinning in the vast majority of cases. These are really just commercial logging operations.

“Thinning” is oftentimes a stand-in for what the agencies called “fuel reduction,” which is just another stand-in for logging. The reality is most of the time a thinning project will kill and remove upwards of 60 or 70% of the trees in a given stand. And that includes many mature trees, even oftentimes old-growth trees.

The other thing to understand is that thinning fundamentally changes the microclimate of the forest, and it changes it in ways that make the forest more susceptible to a wildfire, have a faster rate of spread, and a higher fire intensity most of the time.

That’s because thinning reduces the forest canopy cover. When that happens, it creates hotter and drier conditions on the forest floor, because it’s letting through more sunlight. Things are getting more desiccated during fire season.

By removing so many trees, thinning also reduces the windbreak effect that a denser forest has against the winds that drive the flames. So when areas are thinned, the fires can spread through faster.

In the first six hours of [California’s 2018] Camp Fire — between the point of ignition and reaching the town of Paradise and claiming 85 lives and over 14,000 homes — the fire burned through several thousand acres that had been heavily logged in the preceding decade. Some of that was post-fire logging where thousands and thousands of dead trees were removed under the guise of fuel reduction. Some of it was commercial thinning on national forest lands and also on private lands.

Those were the areas that the fire moved through by far the fastest and most intensely.

Outside of those areas, once the fire got into other forests that had no logging history or very limited logging history, it burned overwhelmingly at low and moderate intensity.

If weather and climate are the biggest drivers of fire, how should that inform our response to it?

Yes, weather and climate are definitely the primary drivers of wildfire behavior. In the largest scientific analysis that has been conducted on this question, we looked at the whole western United States — three decades of data, millions and millions of acres of fires — and what we found are two key things. Number one, weather and climate variables are dominant. That’s primarily what drives wildland fires. That means what you do with chainsaws is not going to stop these fires because essentially you’re trying to fight the wind and you can’t fight the wind with a chainsaw.

The secondary finding was that forest management, specifically logging, is also a relevant factor. A lot of people think if you have a denser forest, it’s going to burn more intensely. If you have a forest that’s protected from logging, and therefore it’s going to have more trees typically, then that forest has more fuel and it will burn more intensely. We found exactly the opposite.

Even though weather and climate were the primary factors, logging is a key secondary factor, and it strongly tends to make fires burn more intensely.

How do we better protect forests and value them as a tool for fighting climate change?

In order to really usher in an era of ecological management and climate-friendly management on our national forests and other federal public lands, we need to get the Forest Service out of the logging business. That means we’re going to need to enforce existing laws and we’re also going to need to pass new legislation to accomplish that.

There’s a broad consensus, among climate scientists and forest ecologists in this country and around the world, that moving away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible is absolutely necessary, but it is also not sufficient in order to overcome the climate crisis.

We need to draw down CO₂ that’s already in the atmosphere. And the most environmentally beneficial way to do that is to protect natural habitats, especially the carbon-rich ones like forests and wetlands.

That is an essential part of climate solutions. In fact, we cannot succeed unless we do that. And the United States must play a leadership role internationally on this, because more logging [by volume of wood removed] happens in forests of the United States than in any other country in the world.

That puts us in a position of culpability, but also potential leadership to turn the corner.

Nectar Thieves: How Invasive Bumblebees Threaten Hummingbirds

Buff-tailed bumblebees are robbing hummingbirds of nutrients — just one of several threats facing the tiny birds, a new book reveals.

South America has 24 known species of bumblebee native to it, but the buff-tailed bumblebee is not one of them. In 1998 the first buff-tailed bumblebees were introduced from Europe to Chile — nobody seems particularly sure why they were brought to the country, but one must assume that agriculture of one kind or another lay behind the decision.

Buff-tailed bumblebees are bred in vast numbers in Europe to be sold as fledgling colonies for seeding around commercial crops — for example, tomatoes — to assist with pollination. Inevitably, some bees have escaped into the wild and, provided they can find a source of nectar and a reasonably conducive climate, they go native, and spread. Chile is far from unique in this regard, as at least thirty countries worldwide now have buff-tailed bumblebees at large where they ought not to be.

One might think that having something as inoffensive as a pollinating insect introduced into an ecosystem would pose no significant risks, but it appears as if this is far from the case. Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex and preeminent bumblebee scientist, has suggested that the invaders may be contributing to the decline of native bumblebee species, through competition and, perhaps, through diseases they carry to which native bumblebees have little or no resistance.

Chilean scientists from the Universidad de los Lagos in Osorno have also been studying the invaders and quickly realized that the European bumblebees, in the temperate forests of Chile, were proficient and widespread nectar thieves. The bumblebees have learned to hack the usual pollinator and plant relationship, whereby a plant provides a pollinator—whether it’s an insect or a hummingbird — with nectar in return for pollination services rendered by the inadvertent transmission of pollen from one flower to another. Instead, the bumblebees bite the walls of a flower’s nectary and suck the nectar from within, bypassing entirely the effort involved in entering the flower via the petals in the usual manner evolution had intended.

The flowers examined in the study in question were those borne by bushes of hardy fuchsia — a plant that has evolved to be pollinated by green-backed firecrowns, hence its alternative English colloquial name, hummingbird fuchsia. Considering the possible impact of this nectar theft on the plants and their hummingbird pollinators, the scientists suggest that nectar robbing may trigger reductions in plant populations due to lowered reproductive success, and this in turn may impact upon the hummingbird populations associated with those plants. The very shape of the flowers may change in time as the bumblebees exert new evolutionary pressures upon the plants, with unforeseeable implications for the hummingbirds.

The study in question was only examining the incidence of nectar robbing in fuchsias, but, of course, there is no reason to suppose that buff-tailed bumblebees will not be robbing other species of flowering plant wherever they are found in the Americas as a whole. Given that hummingbirds are found throughout the Americas, it is not unfair to suppose that other species of hummingbird far rarer than the widespread and adaptable green-backed firecrown may, in time, find themselves the unwitting victims of nectar crime performed by an invasive species of bumblebee.

Meanwhile, the fates of bees and hummingbirds alike are colliding across the Americas with the continuing widespread use of neonicotinoid (neonic) pesticides. These pesticides are widely used in agriculture, persist in water and soil for months or even years, and in plants are systemic — permeating everything from the tips of the roots to a plant’s pollen and nectar. They are highly toxic to insects — and to birds too.

The American Bird Conservancy has discovered that one seed coated with imidacloprid, a popular neonic, is enough to kill a songbird. Researchers are concerned that repeated ingestion of nectar laced with neonics will have the same effect it does on bees — a disruption of their brain function and, specifically, their short-term memory and their ability to navigate.

For many hummingbirds, both of those brain functions are critical. On a day-to-day basis hummingbirds, like bees, return to favored and remembered nectar sources time and again. Birders sometimes refer to this as “working a trapline,” a reference to the activities of fur-hunters in Alaska and Canada. Moreover, some hummingbirds, like the rufous hummingbirds I had searched for in Alaska, are long-distance migrants, and will rely on their brain function to navigate distances that seem unfeasibly long for such a small creature. The loss of this ability, in what is known as migratory disorientation, could lead to significant mortality.

Species Spotlight: The Gentle and Quirky White-Bellied Pangolin

This is not your regular anteater. It’s one of the world’s only scaly mammals, representing millions of years of evolution.

The white-bellied pangolin is one of eight evolutionary distinct pangolin species split equally between Africa and Asia. They’re among the very few mammals with scales and have a tongue that, when pulled out of its cavity, is longer than their entire body, which measures about 30 inches. These gentle and somewhat quirky animals should be celebrated, but instead they’re often killed for their unique scales, believed in some cultures to harbor medicinal properties.

Species name:

White-bellied pangolin, also known as the tree or three-cusped pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis)

Description:

White-bellied pangolins look like armadillos, except that they have scales, not rings. They get their name from the white patch on their bellies, one of the few areas not covered in scales. These scales are made of keratin and overlap each other, acting as the animals’ main defense against predation. With the help of their long tongues, these toothless mammals feed almost exclusively on ants and termites and roll into a ball when threatened. Adults usually grow to about 3-4 pounds.

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Where it’s found:

Tropical lowland forests and secondary forests in 23 west, central and east African countries make good habitat. These pangolins also live in savanna-forest mosaic and dense woodlands.

IUCN Red List status:

Although no formal population estimate exists for white-bellied pangolins across their range, the species was recently reclassified from vulnerable to endangered to reflect the increasing magnitude of threats to their survival.

Major threats:

Like all pangolin species, white-bellied pangolins are threatened by overexploitation for their meat and scales, which are consumed as food and in traditional medicine, respectively. However, the growing demand from Asia for the scales of African pangolins is disproportionately affecting white-bellied pangolins, since they’re the most common African pangolin species. In addition to poaching, white-bellied pangolins are threatened by habitat loss.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

The Convention on the International on the Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) restricts the international commercial trade in all pangolin species, including their derivatives. National laws in many white-bellied range countries also prohibit their killing, with anti-poaching patrols conducted in their habitats to deter poachers and enforce these laws.

My favorite experience:

Seeing my first living white-bellied pangolin after more than a decade of being a pangolin enthusiast filled me with excitement and hope. My challenging 11-hour hike into the heart of Nigeria’s Cross River National Park to monitor these mammals was a success, as I found and tagged about five of them. Seeing these animals in their natural environment was even more exciting, as I had only ever seen their carcasses and scales on display in wild meat markets.

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

While scientists are working to further understand the ecology and dynamics of the illegal pangolin trade to inform science-based conservation actions, governments of countries where pangolins exist and those involved in their trafficking should establish laws protecting pangolins (where they do not already exist) and uphold already-enacted laws. Governments and the public can also support pangolin conservation through increased anti-poaching patrols and the arrest and prosecution of poachers and traffickers, as well as campaigns to increase awareness of their plight.

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Key research:

Buckingham E, Curry J, Emogor C, Tomsett L, Cooper N. 2021. Using natural history collections to investigate changes in pangolin (Pholidota: Manidae) geographic ranges through time. PeerJ 9:e10843 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10843
Simo, F, Difouo Fopa, G, Kekeunou, S, et al. Using local ecological knowledge to improve the effectiveness of detecting white‐bellied pangolins (Phataginus tricuspis) using camera traps: A case study from Deng‐Deng National Park, Cameroon. Afr J Ecol. 2020; 58: 879– 884. https://doi.org/10.1111/aje.12762

5 Things to Know as Wildfire Season Heats Up

New research sheds light on how increasing wildfires are affecting ecosystems and communities.

In early May scientists discovered a plume of smoke wafting from a smoldering sequoia that ignited during 2020’s Castle fire, which set California’s Sequoia National Forest alight last August.

The fiery remnant is the result of another too-dry winter in California and an ominous marker for the beginning of the 2021 fire season, which experts say looks “grim” for California and across much of the West.

March and April were the driest in more than 126 years for Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah, and the third and fourth driest for California and Colorado. Oregon, meanwhile, had its driest April ever. Things are predicted to continue to be both hotter and drier than normal across the West and Plains, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

That combination, driven by climate change, caused record-breaking wildfires last year. And this year could be similar.

“More frequent drought, hotter summers and warmer and drier autumns, tied to climate change, are stacking the deck for large and destructive fires during the heart of the fire season,” The Washington Post reported. “And this year, a lack of rain in spring could mean fires arrive early in some areas.”

An increase in the size and number of fires is also driving more research. Here’s what scientists have found recently about how wildfires are affecting ecology and communities:

1. California’s Troubling Trends

If it seems like wildfire danger is getting worse in California, that’s on target.

A new study published in Nature Scientific Reports found that the frequency and total area burned by wildfires in California have both increased significantly in the past 20 years. Wildfire season is now longer, and the yearly peak comes a month earlier.

The researchers also found geographic changes. “Hotspots” with severe fire risk — once limited to Los Angeles County — are now found in other parts of Southern California and across northern parts of the state. “Natural wildfires became more concentrated in Northern California,” the researchers found. But “human-caused wildfires have even emerged [in] new hot spots…along the west coast and the Sierra Nevada mountain range.”

Climate change and human land-use activities are the major drivers of these increases, but the expansion of the “wildland-urban interface” and continued development now also put more people and property in the way, according to the study.

2. Midwest Flames

The West isn’t the only part of the country battling increasing blazes. A state of emergency was declared in Wisconsin on April 5 as wildfire season there arrived two weeks early.

“Between 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin averaged 742 fires per year and lost 1,200 acres to fires,” The Guardian reported. But just four months into this year, there were already 365 fires, totaling 1,518 acres.

The state is expected to see its biggest fire season in five years.

3. Learning From Australia

Of course, everything is relative.

Last year 4 million acres burned in California wildfires. That’s dwarfed by the 46 million acres consumed in Australia’s 2019-2020 bushfires.

Wildfire is a natural part of many ecosystems in Australia and beneficial for some species. But research is beginning to show some of the short-term effects of Australia’s recent fires on plants and wildlife.

Koala in tree — A Koala in a tree near the Tambo Complex bushfire in Australia, Jan. 2020. Photo: BLMIdaho, (CC BY 2.0)

Recent research found that the critical habitat of more than 830 native vertebrate species was affected. Seventy species lost nearly one third of their range, with 21 of those species already at risk of extinction before the fires.

Another study found that more than 800 vascular plant species were “highly impacted.” The ranges for 116 species were entirely burned and another 173 lost 90% of their habitat.

“The megafires occurred within globally significant biodiversity hotspots with high richness and endemism across important plant groups,” the researchers wrote.

The good news is that many of the affected plants are resilient to fire, although the researchers say that some areas may not be able to recover. “The massive biogeographic, demographic and taxonomic breadth of impacts of the 2019–2020 fires may leave some ecosystems, particularly relictual Gondwanan rainforests, susceptible to regeneration failure and landscape-scale decline,” they wrote.

4. Landscapes Shifting

Landscape-scale changes as a result of climate change and wildfires are happening elsewhere, too. A study published in Ecosphere found that when a wildfire in southwest Colorado’s Rocky Mountains follows a severe bark beetle outbreak, Engelmann spruce trees are unable to recover.

The loss of conifers following that one-two punch is likely to lead to more quaking aspens taking root, and a possible shift in forest type — and the species that depend on those trees.

Changes are afoot in California too, particularly in chaparral. That ecosystem is made up of assemblages of native woody shrubs found along many of the state’s coastal foothills and inland mountain slopes. The natural interval for fire return to chaparral is between 30 and 150 years, but in some places that’s been shortened to just 10 years.

Not all species are able to adapt to that change. Some chaparral shrubs are being replaced by weedy annual grasses, which in turn drive more fires in an unfortunate feedback loop.

An increase in the frequency and severity of fires in chaparral also threatens an oft-overlooked part of the ecosystem: lichen, which play a key role in retaining moisture in the soil and providing food for wildlife.

A new study found that while most lichen don’t survive wildfires in chaparral, they can recolonize in the decades following. However, with fires happening more frequently, we’re likely to see “substantial lichen biodiversity losses in chaparral shrublands.”

5. Fighting Fire With Fire

Parts of California’s chaparral may be seeing too much fire, but other areas are still in fire deficits after a century of fire suppression policies. Land managers are beginning to see that bringing fire back to the landscape can be an important tool, though.

Of course, Indigenous communities already knew that and have employed cultural burning practices for millennia. Some of that Indigenous environmental knowledge is being shared by tribes like the Yurok, Hoopa and Karuk in Northern California.

But there are still many barriers to prescribed burns, including air-quality regulations and the capacity and funding to implement projects.

Want to know more? Below you’ll find a selection of stories on wildfire from The Revelator’s archive.

Here’s What Climate Change Means for Wildfires in the West

Western Wildfires Will Be a Boon for These Native Species

The Bad Seeds: Are Wildfire Recovery Efforts Hurting Biodiversity?

How Do We Solve Our Wildfire Challenges?

The Pantanal Is in Flames — We Mapped the Damage

Australia’s Bushfires: An Extinction Crisis Decades in the Making

Four Ways Alaska’s Unending Warming Impacts Everyone

California Tribe Hopes to Conquer Climate Woes — With Fire

How One of Australia’s Rarest Trees Was Saved From Wildfires

The Climate Flames Come for Us All