Historical pressures combined with new threats from climate change have pushed more than a dozen species close to extinction.
It’s not too hard to find salmon on a menu in the United States, but that seeming abundance — much of it fueled by overseas fish farms — overshadows a grim reality on the ground. Many of our wild salmon, outside Alaska, are on the ropes — and have been for decades.
Twenty years ago Pacific salmon were found to have disappeared from 40% of their native rivers and streams across Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California. In places where they remain, like the Columbia River system, the number of wild fish returning to streams is estimated to have plunged by as much as 98%. Today 28 populations of West Coast salmon and steelhead are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
New research is helping to put the problem — and solutions — into focus. But in some cases, policy to implement changes still lags.
1. Trouble in Washington
With 14 salmon and steelhead species listed as endangered in Washington, a new report by the state declared that “too many salmon remain on the brink of extinction. And time is running out.” Four key factors, the researchers say, have been attributed to their historical decline: habitat, harvest, hydropower and hatcheries.
2. Upstream changes
Along with historic threats, there’s another new factor making salmon recovery challenging for Washington and other West Coast states: climate change. Increasing temperatures are causing snowpack declines, resulting in warmer streams that can stress or kill salmon. Additionally, more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow causes rivers to run faster earlier in the season, which can wash away salmon nests and sweep young salmon out of their calm-water habitat before they’re ready — reducing their chances of survival.
3. Ocean woes
It’s not just freshwater habitat for salmon that’s changing. A recent study in the journal Communications Biology looked at how eight populations of wild spring-summer Chinook from the Snake River Basin fared during the ocean phase of their lives. And it’s not good. If ocean warming continues, by the 2060s mortality for Chinook could be as high as 90%.
4. Ripple effect
Pacific salmon are an integral cultural resource for Pacific Northwest tribes and provide thousands of regional jobs. But the fish don’t just feed people. They also nourish freshwater and marine ecosystems, along with more than 100 species.
And for one animal in particular, the critically endangered Southern Resident killer whale (Orcinus orca), the decline of Chinook is an existential threat. It’s been long known that Southern Residents feed primarily on Chinook — the largest Pacific salmon species — during the summer. But a new study published in the journal Plos One found that Chinook were also important year-round.
Southern Resident killer whales. Photo: NOAA
5. Implementing solutions
In an effort to help the recovery of Southern Residents and help boost salmon populations in the region, conservation groups have increased their calls to remove four dams on the Lower Snake River, a major tributary of the Columbia River in Washington.
While the science supports dam removal to save salmon, putting that into action has run into a wall of political opposition — mostly from conservatives. However, a recent plan proposed by Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson to breach the Snake River dams was a rare showing of Republican support, which could signal more bipartisan efforts ahead.
Other dam removals — both large and small — have proved beneficial for salmon in Washington and other states. In California a groundbreaking project to allow rivers to flood fallow farm fields in winter has helped provide both food and rearing habitat for salmon — and has helped prove that water managers don’t have to choose between fish and farmers.
There’s still a long road ahead to help keep our remaining salmon populations from the brink. For more on these issues, check out these stories from The Revelator’s archive to better understand the threats, what’s at stake, and what’s working to help save wild salmon.
The company claims to be restoring its former diamond mines to nature. My research revealed a still-barren landscape and shattered lives.
In early 2021, De Beers — the world’s biggest diamond company — achieved something of a public relations coup when it announced two new prestige jewelry lines intended to position the notoriously polluting corporation as environmentally friendly and responsible.
The first, the high-end “Reflections of Nature” jewelry line, supposedly celebrates the natural landscapes from which the corporation unearths its diamonds. It includes five unique sets and a total of 39 “exclusive” pieces that, according to De Beers, are meant to honor and “immortalize the glorious triumph… [and] raw beauty of nature untouched by man.”
De Beers also announced its “ReSet Forever Love” collection, a collaboration with three young designers on pieces that “celebrate love and sustainability.” According a recent article in Harper’s Bazaar, De Beers stresses that the diamonds included in this collection’s intricately shaped rings, necklaces and brooch were “sourced sustainably to ensure it has a lasting positive impact for people and the planet.” By “it,” one can assume the company means the jewelry itself, though this seems grandiose and makes no sense.
Harper’s Bazaar isn’t the only publication to fall under the spell of De Beers’ spin doctors. The Robb Report was also quite taken with the “Reflections of Nature” line and De Beers’ campaign to place “the source of its most magnificent gems front and center.” The Report further amplified the claim made by De Beers Jewellers CEO Céline Assimon, who said, “With this collection, we wanted to take everyone on a journey and escape to these locations that reside in the countries close to De Beers’ heart.” British Vogue has been seduced onto the bandwagon as well, gushing, “No one shows off the variety and natural beauty of rough coloured diamonds quite like De Beers.”
De Beers promotional image.
These pieces — rings and necklaces designed to reflect the dramatic hues and curves of the Namibian sand dunes, or diamonds cut to evoke a coral reef and its fish — range from $18,000 to $121,000 and are unlikely to save the Earth, mitigate climate change or have much of a “lasting positive impact” on humanity.
But such greenwashing rhetoric, when mapped over and onto the actual environmental consequences of diamond mining, does indeed emphasize the impact and audacity of De Beers’ PR machine.
Environmental Destruction Is Forever
This is just the latest example of claims laid out in what De Beers calls its “Building Forever” reports, wherein the conglomerate — in a forced nod to increasing public concern over sustainability and environmental ethics — purports to address the “environmental impact” of its diamond-mining business. According to Dr. Patti Wickens, De Beers’ senior environmental manager, the reports are “driven by our commitment to have a net positive impact on biodiversity.” But these reports are often scrutinized only by the company’s own stakeholders, not outside authorities who can verify the information presented.
The reality is that the landscapes De Beers claims it wants to “immortalize” via the “Reflections” line and “sustain” via the “Forever Love” line have been so thoroughly ravaged they’ve resisted nearly all efforts at rehabilitation.
I spent the better part of 2016 on South Africa’s Diamond Coast — one of the landscapes the corporation wishes to “honor” with its new collection — conducting research for my book, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers. There I interviewed Johann MacDonald, manager of the De Beers Namaqualand Diamond Mine, who had a slightly more nuanced view of the company’s environmental concerns. (MacDonald’s name has been changed here and in my book to protect his identity.)*
“It’s a bit of a challenge to wring life out of this at this point,” he told me, gesturing to the mine property, a landscape so arid and fallow it appeared more Martian than earthly.
The soil of South Africa’s Diamond Coast has suffered since De Beers took it over in 1925, and the Namaqualand mine is no exception. De Beers had recently deemed this 79,000-acre expanse of land to be “over-mined,” and MacDonald was responsible for slowly laying off the workforce and shutting down the mine (and, to some degree by extension, the entire town it once supported), and attempting to rehabilitate the desert soil after the decades of corporate pillaging.
Claims Fall Flat
The De Beers Family of Companies guidelines long stipulated, “We use lower hazard alternatives to high-risk hazardous substances when possible; We manage effluents, wastes, emissions and hazardous substances to prevent pollution wherever possible; We aspire to normal levels of discharges to sea, including sewage.”
Despite these claims, the soils around the mines have suffered for the better part of a century.
In Namaqualand the corporation’s Environmental Division has attempted to restore portions of the land via an agenda of phytoremediation.
Phytoremediation is the process by which a variety of plants are carefully sewn into a ravaged and contaminated soil in the hopes of eradicating said contaminants and restoring the soil to a “pure” and healthy state, capable of once again supporting the growth and subsequent thriving of endemic flora and fauna. If this rhizosphere biodegradation proves successful, then the plants will release nutrients into the soil via their root systems, essentially “defibrillating” the naturally occurring microorganisms therein and compelling the contaminants to degrade. In the successful application of phyto-stabilization, on the other hand, the plants yield specific chemical compounds that — rather than destroy the contaminants in the soil — entrap and paralyze them. In this way the toxins are still present in the soil but are — so to speak — cryogenically frozen within it.
Various other sub-processes of phytoremediation are employed if these two methods fail to clean the soil — from phyto-accumulation (wherein the plants actually absorb, sponge-like, the soil’s impurities), to phyto-volatilization (where the plants suck up contaminated groundwater, “clean” that water, and then discharge the contaminants into the air through their leaves), to phyto-degradation (where the plants take in the soil’s toxins and metabolize them within their tissues, therefore destroying them).
De Beers brags about its efforts, but none of these processes have restored the land.
A Bleak Landscape, a Bleaker Community
The De Beers Namaqualand mine, in fact, is the antithesis of a “pure” landscape. A description of the place demands prefixes — other, extra, pre and post: otherworldly, extraplanetary, prehistoric, post-apocalyptic. It is nothing more than beige barrenness, littered with holes, chemicals, explosives and decomposing machine parts.
Photo: Matthew Gavin Frank
The people who live in this region have also suffered. Beginning slowly in 2007, and accelerating in 2009, De Beers downscaled its interests along the Diamond Coast, compelling an already-exploited labor force into an exodus to other parts of South Africa, onto the couches of distant family members and friends, and into other possible occupations. The company did nothing to help these people find future housing or alternative work. Many once-thriving municipalities became ghost towns.
For those who remain, survivalist proposals hang over the towns. One suggests turning the pit mines into hazardous-waste dumps; another calls for converting the migrant worker dorm into a prison.
Terms like love and forever and sustainability, especially when applied to luxury jewelry lines, ring hollow to those whose land this once was, later indentured to the machine of corporate colonialism. It’s like an oil company claiming innocence of the environmental consequences of drilling into the seafloor by building a gas tank in the shape of a coral bed.
On the Diamond Coast, the Indigenous Khoisan populations told me they wish to try to once again farm using traditional methods. They’re busy fighting — likely in vain — De Beers’ efforts.
De Beers perpetuates the propaganda that the desert here has ultimately suffered not from mining, but from the grazing of the Indigenous population’s farm animals.
The corporation maintains ownership of the mineral rights here, and as such, controls the land and how it’s used. It has, in fact, gone so far as to compel local lawmakers to issue a ban on farming in the area. It doesn’t want anyone else making money off this land while it’s busy making claims about “restoration” and patting itself on the back.
Having successfully blocked Indigenous people from farming here, the corporation, after extracting its diamonds, appears to want to use the land as a private garden — a little spot to play in with their bulldozers, compost cocktails, cardboard “grow” circles, shovels and pails.
The Restoration Fallacy
Restoration and conservation seem to be fallacies here, mirages of corporate disinformation. To what level does De Beers want to restore this land, and why, after all these decades of plunder, should it be the company’s to manage in any case? Even if the stab at rehabilitation did work, and even if the company’s Environmental Division could make something verdant out of this havoc, wouldn’t that also be insufficient? Wouldn’t it be a case of environmental restoration as concealment of decades of gleeful corporate atrocity?
Even Namaqualand mine manger Johann MacDonald got frustrated beholding a plot of barren soil. He scooped up a fistful of sand and tossed it into the wind.
“This attempt to replant is a complete failure!” he told me. “The big challenge is to get things to grow. Some of these dumps have been reshaped and replanted for ten years, twenty years, and still nothing grows.”
Photo: Matthew Gavin Frank
Still, the PR machine chugs on, and this year gullible publications lauded the company for its supposed environmentally minded efforts, willingness to work with up-and-coming designers, and “fancy shapes and fancy colors.”
But in 2021, if you want to behold the once “lush” landscapes of the diamond-bearing lands that De Beers claims to honor and sustain via its two new collections, the closest you’ll be able to come is an image of a $100,000 brooch.
Which is all that’s left. No sunny rhetoric can change that.
* Editor’s note: A clarification on a source’s identity has been added.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
Researchers continue to find new information about how widespread plastic pollution has become, but also how we can help stem the tide.
Our plastic pollution problem has reached new heights and new depths.
Scientists have found bits of plastic on the seafloor, thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface. Plastic debris has also washed ashore on remote islands; traveled to the top of pristine mountains; and been found inside the bodies of whales, turtles, seabirds and people, too.
Tiny plastic particles are now ubiquitous and insidious. And the mounting pollution that swirls in ocean gyres and washes ashore on beaches poses a big threat to wildlife and ecosystems. So too, does the production of that plastic.
A number of recent studies — not to mention articles and essays published here in The Revelator — have helped pinpoint just how bad things have gotten and also what we can do about the problem. Here’s what you should know about plastic:
1. There’s a lot of it.
In a September study published in Science about the growth of plastic waste, an international team of researchers estimated that 19 to 23 million metric tons — or 11% of plastic waste generated — ended up in aquatic ecosystems in 2016. And even with countries pledging to help cut waste or better manage it, the amount of plastic pollution is likely to double in the next 10 years.
A study about solutions to plastic waste, published in the same issue, attributed the plastic pollution epidemic to a rise in single-use plastic and “an expanding ‘throw-away’ culture.” The researchers also found that waste-management systems simply can’t deal with the onslaught of plastic, which is why so much of it ends up in the environment. We now know that only 9% of the plastic products we use actually get recycled.
2. The United States is a big culprit.
Plastic pollution is a global problem, but the United States plays an outsized role. In 2016 the United States was responsible for more plastic waste than any other country, a new study in Science Advances found. Some of that waste was dumped illegally within the country and some was shipped to other countries that lacked the necessary infrastructure to handle it.
“The amount of plastic waste generated in the United States estimated to enter the coastal environment in 2016 was up to five times larger than that estimated for 2010, rendering the United States’ contribution among the highest in the world,” the researchers concluded. Part of that is because the United States ranks second in exporting plastic scrap.
3. It threatens wildlife and ecosystems.
A giant otter plays with a plastic bottle. (Photo by Paul Williams, CC BY-NC 2.0)
Out of sight (for Americans) is not out of mind — and definitely not out of our waterways. An estimated 700 marine species and 50 freshwater species have either ingested plastic or been entangled in it.
“If we don’t get the plastic pollution problem in the ocean under control, we threaten contaminating the entire marine food web, from phytoplankton to whales,” George Leonard, the Ocean Conservancy’s chief scientist and coauthor of the September Science study about plastic waste’s increase, told National Geographic. “And by the time the science catches up to this, perhaps definitively concluding that this is problematic, it will be too late. We will not be able to go back. That massive amount of plastic will be embedded in the ocean’s wildlife essentially forever.”
Microplastics have also been found in terrestrial animals, soil, drinking water and, not surprisingly, in our own bodies, although it’s not clear yet just how dangerous that is for people.
4. The fracking boom is producing a plastic boom.
Despite the known risks of plastic pollution and concern over its mounting presence in the environment, plastic production — driven by fossil fuels like fracked gas and its component chemicals — is on pace to increase by 40% in the next 10 years.
The American Chemistry Council boasted that shale gas drilling is driving a surge in plastic production, including the investment of more than $200 billion to fund new and expanded operations at 343 production plants in the United States.
On the ground this means more harmful pollution along the Gulf Coast’s “Cancer Alley,” where petrochemicals have been manufactured for decades in low-wealth communities of color. And it means the build-out of new facilities in Rust Belt states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Fracking also causes harmful greenhouse gas emissions, like methane, to be released into the atmosphere — amplifying the climate crisis. The refining process and the incineration of plastic waste also further drives greenhouse emissions and hazardous pollution.
A petrochemical plant in Houston’s ship channel. Photo: Louis Vest, (CC BY-NC 2.0).
5. Solutions are multifaceted.
Beach cleanups tend to make headlines, but it’s a losing battle as long as petrochemical companies keep producing so much plastic and we keep using plastic for products we’re meant to toss after a single use.
The September study in Science on plastic solutions found that it’s possible to cut plastic pollution — perhaps as much as 80% by 2040 — but it will take systemic change both in reducing the amount of plastic produced and in better managing the waste stream.
Regulatory efforts can help this process, including by regulating plastic as a pollution source under the Clean Water Act.
Efforts to ban single-use plastics, as the European Union aims to do by 2021, are another positive step. So too are “circular economy laws,” which have been introduced, but not yet passed, in the United States.
These laws would halt the production of new petrochemical facilities and encourage businesses to take responsibility for the full lifecycle of the products they produce by requiring them to be reused, adequately recycled or composted.
Getting circular economy laws enacted, though, will mean enough public and political will to counter the petrochemical, fossil fuel and plastic industries.
At The Revelator, we’ll keep covering the push for solutions to the plastic problem and new science to better understand the threats. And if you want to know more about how wildlife has already been affected, what laws could help, whether industry will be held accountable and more, check out these stories from our archives:
An Indigenous-led resistance raises the alarm about a tar-sands pipeline that would cut through treaty territory of Anishinaabe people, threatening wild rice, fresh water and the climate.
One of President Joe Biden’s first acts in office put an end to a decade-long fight over the Keystone XL — a pipeline that would have carried climate-polluting tar sands from Alberta, Canada into the United States.
Biden’s Executive Order said the Keystone XL’s approval “would undermine U.S. climate leadership” and that instead he would instead “prioritize the development of a clean energy economy.”
Tara Houska of Couchiching First Nation hopes the Biden administration makes good on that promise — and its implications beyond Keystone.
Houska, an attorney and Indigenous rights advocate, is the founder of the Giniw Collective, an Indigenous-led resistance against another cross-border tar-sands pipeline — Line 3. Construction has already begun on this 340-mile-long Enbridge pipeline, which would carry nearly a million gallons a day of tar-sands crude across northern Minnesota — crossing 200 water bodies — en route from Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin.
Environmental organizations have joined Native groups, including the nonprofit Honor the Earth, as well as the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and White Earth Band of Ojibwe in raising legal challenges and joining on-the-ground resistance efforts.
The Revelator spoke with Houska about what’s at stake with Line 3, how Standing Rock helped grow a movement, and why we should rethink what direct action means.
How did you get involved in being a water protector?
When I was in law school, I started doing tribal law work and ended up in Washington, D.C. representing tribes all over the country. At the same time there were serious environmental issues coming through D.C. My first internship was at the White House when Obama was reviewing Keystone XL and I saw a lot of breakdowns in the efficacy of the federal system and a lack of movement.
When the Cowboy Indian Alliance staged a protest in 2014 against the Keystone XL pipeline, I went. It was my first protest. After that I kept working on environmental justice issues for tribal nations, and then two years later a group of runners from Standing Rock came out to D.C. [to raise awareness about the Dakota Access Pipeline that would carry Bakken crude across the Plains].
I listened to LaDonna Brave Bull Allard [from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe] on Facebook Live ask for help. I could tell she meant everything she said, so I just packed up my stuff, rented a car and drove out to North Dakota.
I planned on being out there [at the Standing Rock protest camp] for a weekend. I ended up staying six months.
Something was different about this Native tribe saying no. There’ve been lots of tribes that have said no for hundreds of years, but these guys weren’t just saying it, they were putting their bodies in front of the machines and refusing to move. The groundswell of youth, the encampment, the legal fight against the federal government — it all came together in this moment.
I think for a lot of tribal people it felt different. We were very united in the struggle.
It was also eye-opening for a lot of other people around the world. Mostly because I don’t think a lot of people are even aware that Native people still exist. And that we’re still very much engaged in an ongoing struggle for our land and water against either the United States or these foreign interests.
And now you’re engaged in a similar struggle against another Canadian energy company — Enbridge. What’s at stake with Line 3?
After the ground fight at Dakota Access ended and they bulldozed our camp, I went back to D.C., but I had a hard time coming back to the world as I understood it, because it’d been changed.
So in 2018 I founded the Giniw Collective. It was in response to the Minnesota Public Utility Commission unanimously approving Line 3 after years of work and tens of thousands of comments and engagement against the project by Minnesotans.
I started building and finding others to build with, to create a strong resistance community that was also engaging in traditional foods and establishing foundational relationships with the land.
Line 3 is much more personal because it goes through my own people’s territory. To me, the critical piece of this is not just the drinking water and the emissions and all those irrevocable harms of expanding the fossil fuel industry — particularly the tar-sands industry — but it’s also specifically about the threats to wild rice.
[Northern] wild rice is at the center of our people’s culture and connection to the world. This is the only place in the world that it grows. This is where the creator told us to come — to where the food grows on water. And to me, Line 3 is an extension of cultural genocide to put something like that at risk.
Construction has already begun. Where do things stand legally with efforts to stop it?
There’s a set of legal opinions due March 23 that are very critical in terms of the feds hearing what we are bringing forward, particularly from the tribal nations that have signed onto these lawsuits and are impacted directly by Line 3.
Then there’s also an ongoing lawsuit by the Minnesota Department of Commerce against the Minnesota Public Utility Commission. The state is actually suing itself for not being able to demonstrate that there’s a need for this project. The tar sands and oil products that will go through the pipeline are for foreign markets. They’re not for Minnesota or the United States.
What about at the federal level?
There’s also this huge push on [President Joe] Biden, who canceled Keystone XL on day one and has centered himself as the climate president. We’re looking to the administration to intervene on something that’s an obvious climate disaster.
How can we say we’ll cancel one pipeline but build another? It’s the same types of violations and the same types of climate impacts coming out of the Alberta tar sands.
Building Line 3 will have the equivalent emissions of building 50 new coal power plants. That’s insane.
We are seeing progress, though. We just secured another meeting with the Council on Environmental Quality. I had a number of meetings with members of the Biden transition team and different agencies. I know [National Climate Advisor] Gina McCarthy was just questioned a couple of weeks ago by Showtime about Dakota Access and Line 3. So the message is getting into their ears. It’s just that we need to hear some response.
Where are you finding inspiration now?
The pieces that inspire me the most and give me the most hope are seeing people engaged in resistance during a pandemic to defend the planet and defend life for someone who’s not even born yet. That’s incredibly powerful to be part of and to see that happen in real time.
Protest against Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. Photo: Dio Cramer
To watch someone harvest wild rice for the first time, to watch someone stop destruction of a place in real time for a day — that’s really powerful. To see young people finding their voices and using their bodies to try to protect what’s supposed to be their world. They are literally fighting for life and their right to a future. That’s a really beautiful thing to see, and it’s really inspiring and hopeful.
We’ve trained hundreds of people over the last two and a half years in direct action. I try to push folks to think about direct action not just as being about getting arrested or something like that. To me, it’s about standing with the Earth in a real way, putting something at risk and being uncomfortable. I don’t think that we’re going to solve the climate crisis comfortably. I don’t think we’re going to solar panel or policy-make our way out of this massive existential threat we’re facing.
To take action is to do something in community with the Earth. To think about our own connection to her in everything that we do. I like to remind people that Native people are 5% of the world’s population and we’re holding 80% of the world’s [forest] biodiversity.
That isn’t by accident or happenstance. That is because we have a deep connection to the Earth and an understanding that the Earth is a living being, just like we are.
New research has uncovered a forgotten species that went extinct under two centuries ago — probably due to colonialism.
Most tourism sites use a common word to describe La Désirade Island in the French West Indies: “pristine.” They rave about this 8-square-mile island’s beautiful beaches, abundant wildlife, snorkel-worthy waters and healthy nature reserve.
In truth, this small rocky outcropping in the Guadeloupe Islands has seen its fair share of human-driven change since colonial settlers arrived. Once a haven for pirates hiding out from the law, the island served as a colony for lepers and lawbreakers for two centuries. The land, despite its modern reputation and protected status, was heavily cultivated and disturbed for much of that time — much like the other islands around it.
“There’s no ‘pristine’ environment when it comes to the Guadeloupe Islands,” says Corentin Bochaton, a postdoctoral researcher with Université de Bordeaux in France and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, who conducts studies in the archipelago. “These islands were all strongly impacted by European colonization starting in the 17th century. La Désirade is nowhere close to what it was before this period.”
He points out that research published 15 years ago links that disturbance to several local extinctions — and now, thanks to his work, we can add one more to the list.
Hidden Biodiversity
According to a paper published last month in the journal Zootaxa, La Désirade was once home to a unique lizard, a relative of the curly-tailed iguana-like lizards common to the West Indies. The authors, including Bochaton, have dubbed it Leiocephalus roquetus.
Long forgotten by science and the residents of La Désirade, the evidence of L. roquetus was hiding under our noses — and La Désirade’s soil — for nearly two centuries.
The first line of evidence for this lost lizard’s existence has sat on a shelf for most of that time — since 1835, in fact. And like La Désirade, it was far from pristine.
“Around 2015 we consulted on a very old and rather poorly prepared stuffed specimen of Leiocephalus indicated as originating from Guadeloupe,” Bochaton recalls. The 10-inch-long taxidermied lizard came from naturalist named Théodore Roger, who deposited it at the Natural History of Museum of Bordeaux in France three years before his death in 1838. The original label has been lost to time, but a mid-20th century replacement identifies the specimen as Holotropis herminieri (a species named by scientists in 1837 and later moved into the Leiocephalus genus) from the vague location of “Guadeloupe.”
Bochaton points out that L. herminieri, another extinct species last seen in the 1830s, lived on the island of Martinique, also in the West Indies. Despite the “Guadeloupe” label the specimen did, indeed, bear external anatomy suggesting it was the Martinique species. “Because of that, it was never studied in detail,” he says.
Modern Evidence
It’s easy to see why the specimen was ignored for so long. While previous research had indicated a need to reassess the species in the Leiocephalus genus, at least seven of the 24 previously known species are long gone and the supply of specimens or bones to study were, until recently, slim.
A northern curly-tailed lizard (Leiocephalus carinatus) on Cat Island, Bahamas. Photo: Trish Hartmann (CC BY 2.0)
That’s where new archaeological evidence came into play. Bochaton and others have conducted numerous digs in the Guadeloupe Islands and uncovered hundreds of lizard bones from days gone by. The most successful excavation took place in 2018 at a cave on La Désirade, where they found what Bochaton calls “the largest assemblage of Leiocephalus bone so far in Guadeloupe.”
Like the museum specimen, which the researchers examined through CT scanning, those newly uncovered bones contained enough common morphological differences to declare it a new species, one that hasn’t been seen on La Désirade or any other Guadeloupe island since…well, no one knows when. Perhaps since Roger’s time.
Exactly how and when this species went extinct remains a mystery, but the paper suggests it could have been a combination of “introduced mammalian predators, human-induced changes to landscapes and intensive agricultural practices.”
And while we may not know what killed off the lizard, Bochaton says the evidence of its extinction has relevance to modern times.
“To me, this highlights the rapid damages modern societies and their agro-pastoral practices have caused to insular ecosystems and shows what might also happen in the long run in more resilient continental systems,” he says. This could help us learn to prevent more extinctions in the future.
Meanwhile, he hopes it will help to inspire more research and protection in the region.
“There are still several questions that remain poorly explored in the Guadeloupe islands regarding its past fauna, especially for the periods preceding the arrival of human populations,” he says. “I hope that this research will motivate the public and the government to do their best to save the remaining Guadeloupe and Lesser Antillean endemic reptile fauna by highlighting how fast and easy it is to lose and completely forget an endemic species that will never come back.”
And speaking of short-term memories, La Désirade’s official tourism site calls the island itself “The Forgotten” — a name that might now equally apply to the creatures we caused to vanish there before we even knew they existed.
Materials needed to make the batteries for electric cars and other clean technology is driving interest in deep-seabed mining, and scientists fear the cost to the ocean will be steep.
The internal combustion engine had a good run. It helped get us to where we need to go for more than a century, but its days as the centerpiece of the automotive industry are waning.
As countries work to cut greenhouse gas emissions, electrification is stealing the limelight.
While there’s still a long road ahead — electric vehicles only accounted for 3% of global car sales in 2020 — EV growth is finally climbing. From 2010 to 2019 the number of EVs on the road rose from 17,000 to 7.2 million. And that number could jump to 250 million by 2030, according to an estimate from the International Energy Agency.
The growing demand for electric vehicles is good news for limiting climate emissions from the transportation sector, but EVs still come with environmental costs. Of particular concern is the materials needed to make the ever-important batteries, some of which are already projected to be in short supply.
“Climate change is our greatest and most pressing challenge, but there are some perilous pathways to be aware of as we build out the infrastructure that gets us to a new low-carbon paradigm,” says Douglas McCauley, a professor and director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California Santa Barbara.
One of those perilous pathways, he says, is mining the seafloor to extract minerals like cobalt and nickel that are widely used for EV batteries. Extraction of these materials has thus far been limited to land, but international regulations for mining the deep seabed far offshore are in development.
“There’s alignment on the need to go as fast as we can with low-carbon infrastructure to beat climate change and electrification will play a big part in that,” he says. “But the idea that we need to mine the oceans in order to do that is, I think, a very false dichotomy.”
Supply and Demand
Tesla may have made owning an EV cool, but a slew of other companies now hope to make it commonplace.
Chevy Bolt charging beside a Nissan Leaf. Photo: Steve Rainwater, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The latest is Volvo, which announced at the beginning of March that it will make only electric cars by 2030. This follows news that Jaguar will be all-electric in 2025 and Volkswagen after 2026. General Motors says it’s aiming to make its cars and light trucks electric by 2035, while Ford is doubling its investments in EVs and plans to sell only electric cars in Europe by 2030.
There are a number of factors that will determine how quickly people adopt the technology — charging infrastructure, battery range, affordability — but top of mind for some is manufacturers’ ability to keep production pace, particularly when it comes to the lithium-ion batteries that are used in not just EVs but other technologies like cell phones and laptops, as well as energy storage for solar and wind.
A 2019 study by the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney found that demand for lithium could exceed supply by next year, which would drive up prices and interest in more lithium mining. Demand for cobalt and nickel, also key battery components, will exceed production in less than a decade.
“Cobalt is the metal of most concern for supply risks as it has highly concentrated production and reserves, and batteries for EVs are expected to be the main end-use of cobalt in only a few years,” the report’s authors found.
Vying for control of these crucial materials has geopolitical implications. Right now, many of the materials are concentrated in a few nations’ hands.
Most of the cobalt used in batteries today is claimed by China from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where extraction has come with human rights abuses and environmental degradation. Most of the global lithium supply is found in Australia, Chile and Argentina.
Supply-chain issues have also caught the attention of President Joe Biden, who issued an executive order in February directing the secretary of Energy to identify “risks in the supply chain for high-capacity batteries, including electric-vehicle batteries, and policy recommendations to address these risks.”
As pressure mounts to claim terrestrial minerals, commercial interest is growing to extract resources from the deep seabed, where there’s an abundance of metals like copper, cobalt, nickel, manganese, lead and lithium. Investors already expect profits: One deep-sea mining company recently announced a plan to go public after merging with an investment group, creating a corporation with an expected $2.9 billion market value.
But along with that focus comes increased warnings about the damage such extraction could do to ocean health, and whether the sacrifice is even necessary.
The Deep Unknown
The high seas are “areas beyond national jurisdiction,” and mining their depths will be managed by an intergovernmental body called the International Seabed Authority.
The group has already approved 28 mining contracts covering more than a million square kilometers (360,000 square miles). It’s still drafting the standards and regulations for operations, but when companies get the go-ahead they’ll be after three different mineral-rich targets: potato-sized polymetallic nodules, seafloor massive sulphides and cobalt-rich crusts.
But there’s also concern that we still don’t adequately understand the risks of operating giant underwater tractors along the seafloor.
“There are a lot of conversations about the real risks and unanswered questions about ocean mining,” says McCauley. “There’s now more than 90 NGOs that have come out and said that we need a moratorium on ocean mining and we shouldn’t be sprinting to do this until we are able to answer some of the serious questions about the impact of mining on ocean health.”
The deep sea is one of the least-explored places on the planet, but we know that these dark depths are teeming with life and are interconnected with other parts of the ocean ecosystem, despite often being 10,000 feet deep or more.
“These spaces out in the high seas, which include undersea mountain ranges, are really quite biodiverse and they’re full of very unique species,” says McCauley.
That includes “Casper,” a newly discovered, ghostly white octopus; the sea pangolin, a snail that lives on hydrothermal vents; and black coral, which can live thousands of years.
The deep seabed is also home to countless species we don’t even know exist yet and a large diversity of carbon-absorbing microbes that build the base of the ocean’s food chain.
Extracting minerals from the deep sea could put thousands of these species at risk from the direct impacts of the mining operations, as well as the associated light and noise. Plumes of sediment from discarded mining waste pose another danger.
“Those plumes could be quite large and persistent and could have a smothering effect on ocean life,” says McCauley.
That could even be bad for those of us onshore.
A report by the Worldwide Fund for Nature found that “the loss of primary production, for example, could affect global fisheries, threatening the main protein source of around 1 billion people and the livelihoods of around 200 million people, many in poor coastal communities.”
There’s also the potential that mining the deep seabed could affect our ability to cope with a changing climate. Currently the deep sea is what McCauley calls “a big bank of safely stored carbon.” He says “there’s a lot of unanswered questions about what would happen if you actually started redistributing that carbon back into circulation in the oceans. This isn’t the time that we want to be doing grand new experiments in an ecosystem like the ocean, which is our biggest ally in storing carbon.”
Another big concern is the ability of the deep ocean ecosystem to recover from disturbance.
“It’s such a special place biologically and physically,” he says. “It’s essentially a slice of the planet where life just moves slower and in a way that we don’t see anywhere else.”
Species at these depths tend to live a long time, take a while to reproduce and have low fertility rates. “And that means that life recovers more slowly than the other parts of the planet,” he adds.
A small-scale simulated mining experiment done in 1989 proved just that. “Scientists have returned to the site four times, most recently in 2015,” an article in Nature explained. “The site has never recovered. In the ploughed areas, which remain as visible today as they were 30 years ago, there’s been little return of characteristic animals such as sponges, soft corals and sea anemones.”
Alternatives
In order to keep heavy machinery off the ocean floor, McCauley says we can look to promising developments in battery technologies that are helping to reduce the amount of supply chain-constrained material, like cobalt.
Most of the people designing new battery technologies probably don’t have deep-sea biodiversity at the top of their minds, he says. “They’re designing it because these batteries are cheaper, more stable and have similar performance capabilities.”
Still, the end result could help make the case for holding off on plundering the ocean’s riches.
Cobalt has long been considered a key stabilizing component in lithium-ion batteries, but new chemistries have begun to whittle down the amount of cobalt needed. EV batteries containing the previous mix of equal parts nickel, manganese and cobalt in the cathode — or negatively charged electrode — can now be replaced with 80% nickel, 10% manganese and 10% cobalt. These batteries, known as NMC 811, are already being used in electric vehicles in China.
“So we’ve reduced the amount of cobalt from 33% down to 10%, but if you look at the projections of electric vehicles by 2030, it’s going to be hard to have even 10% cobalt in the cathode because of the limited cobalt reserves that are available,” says Matthew Keyser, a mechanical engineer with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
That means that new developments are now trying to move away from cobalt entirely. But that may end up shifting demand to another metal — nickel, which is fast becoming the most valued mineral for EV batteries and could still put the ocean on the target list.
Batteries made with lithium manganese oxide or lithium iron phosphate are new alternatives that don’t require nickel, but Keyser says they’re still not ideal.
“They have lower energy densities and they don’t work as well in vehicles,” he says. “The ultimate thing that we’re all trying to [achieve] is a battery with lithium sulfur, because sulfur is widely available.”
Working out the kinks in that technology is still five or 10 years away, he estimates.
Beyond changing the chemical composition of batteries, we can also help reduce demand pressure on scarce minerals in other ways.
“Instead of mining the oceans we can do a better job of mining the wrecking yards where EVs will be, which is to say doing a better job with recycling batteries,” says McCauley.
Currently only about 5% to 10% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. In part that’s because the process is still more expensive than acquiring most of the raw materials. It’s also complex because the different variations of lithium-ion batteries on the market today each require a different recycling process.
But earnest efforts are underway to sort that out. One is Redwood Materials, started by Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel, which says it’s the largest battery recycler in North America and can recover 95-98% of elements in batteries like nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper.
There’s concern that recycling can’t meet short-term demand because there aren’t enough batteries ready for recycling yet, but researchers believe it will be useful as a long-term solution for reducing scarcity.
“Recycling is going to be key,” says Keyser. “It’s going to be very important in the future and we need to do better than what we’re doing right now.”
Research also suggests that demand for EV cars with higher driving ranges increases the size of the batteries needed and influences the materials chosen to make them. But we can shift our technology, personal expectations and driving behavior.
Fast charge stations for electric cars in Canada. Photo: Duncan Rawlinson, (CC BY-NC 2.0)
“The introduction of shared-mobility services and establishing thorough charging networks can … significantly reduce material demand from the transport sector,” the WWF report recommends. “Other technological developments that can reduce material demand are advances in widespread charging infrastructure to increase the range of small-sized battery EVs as well as improved battery management systems and software to increase battery efficiency.”
McCauley hopes that a combination of advances will help take the pressure off sensitive ecosystems and that we don’t rush into mining the seabed for short-term enrichment when better alternatives are on the horizon.
“One of my greatest fears is that we may start ocean mining because it’s profitable for just a handful of years, and then we nail it with the next gen battery or we get good at doing low-cost e-waste recycling,” he says. “And then we’ve done irreversible damage in the oceans for three years of profit.”
These crimes threaten tens of thousands of species around the world, causing extinctions, hurting people and spreading disease.
In August 2020 federal authorities charged a dozen people for illegally trafficking millions of dollars of shark fins in Florida and two other states over the previous seven years.
According to the indictment, the defendants and their two shell companies also smuggled marijuana across the country and laundered their ill-gotten gains into gold, jewels and other commodities.
Although the court cases could still take months, the arrests represent a rare victory in the world of wildlife crime.
Poaching and wildlife trafficking affect thousands of species globally and have caused hundreds of extinctions. Yet the issue rarely gets much media attention — let alone high-profile arrests or convictions.
Here are 10 things you should know about wildlife trafficking:
1. It’s big business. One study put the value of wildlife crime at up to $23 billion a year, and since that study was published more than a decade ago, the value today is probably even higher.
2. It puts tens of thousands of species at risk — and has caused more than a few extinctions along the way, including the western black rhino. From birds to pangolins, lions and tigers, and even orchids and hardwoods…you name it, someone’s probably killing it and shipping it across the world.
Southern white rhino, a frequently trafficked species, in Uganda. Photo: Rod Waddington (CC BY-SA 2.0)
3. It also harms humans. The COVID-19 pandemic was likely a byproduct of the wildlife trade, which has been linked to numerous other disease outbreaks through the years. Poachers and traffickers have also been tied to murder, intimidation, bribery, organized crime, terrorism and a host of other threats that destabilize families, communities and national security.
4. It takes many forms. Wildlife trafficking can involve the transit of whole bodies, meat, scales and other parts — or live animals, sold for the pet trade or for later consumption. And when live animals are caught and shipped, few survive the process.
An illegally trafficked king cobra recovered in Los Angeles. Photo: USFWS (public domain)
5. It’s distinct from the legal wildlife trade and illegal poaching by subsistence hunters, but tied into both. Many hunters turn to the illegal trade for much-needed income, and trafficked products all too often get laundered through legal markets.
6. It often includes collateral damage. Elephant poachers, for example, frequently use poisons to eliminate nearby vultures, which would otherwise circle the dead pachyderms and alert authorities to kill sites. In Southeast Asia wire snares are placed to target “valuable” animals but kill indiscriminately.
Illegal wildlife snares in Laos. Photo: Bill Robichaud/Global Wildlife Conservation (CC BY 2.0)
7. It’s not just animals. Plants, insects, corals and other creatures are all heavily trafficked. That wood flooring your neighbor just installed may have come from a protected forest.
8. It’s often tied into other crimes like drug smuggling, human trafficking and terrorism, which use the same methods to transport cash and goods around the world. Customs agents frequently find shipments of wildlife products in the same containers as illegal drugs, firearms and other products.
9. The punishment rarely fits the crime. Most poachers and smugglers get off with a slap on the wrist — if that. Although some countries have started to take these crimes more seriously, the average jail terms and fines remain so small that they fail to act as a disincentive for future crimes.
10. Virtually all countries are complicit — either as sources or as buyers. And yes, that includes the United States.
The Revelator has always committed to shining a light on these crimes and the threats they create. Here are links to some of our most important articles and commentaries on these issues.
Pursuing unorthodox queries about smaller, “uncharismatic” species often comes with difficult hurdles, as one researcher found out.
Years ago I decided to focus my research and conservation efforts on the smaller carnivores of Bangladesh. It was not an easy decision, as there appears to be a bias against studying these smaller species. Researchers in my country seem to be focused on saving larger, iconic species like tigers, leopards, bears and striped hyenas.
Although the smaller carnivores that roam the forests of Bangladesh do seem to appear frequently in stories told among my colleagues, they remain more elusive in the wild and are seldom the subject of published research — difficult to understand and rarely surveyed.
But there’s a lot to study. One of the smallest countries in Asia, Bangladesh provides habitat to 127 different existing mammal species. Of these, 21 were newly recognized during the latest Red List assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Perhaps even more surprisingly, Bangladesh boasts nearly half of the entire carnivore diversity of the Indian subcontinent. The 28 extant carnivore mammals represent six different terrestrial families: Viverridae (six species), Felidae (eight species), Herpestidae (three species), Canidae (three species), Ursidae (two species) and Mustelidae (six species). That’s impressive for a country that has less than 7% natural forest coverage and a population density of more than 1,000 people per square kilometer.
Muntasir Akash and his team have recorded a variety of mammals in the national parks of northeastern Bangladesh using camera-traps. Pictured (clockwise, from top left): golden jackal, northern pig-tailed macaque, yellow-throated marten and leopard cat. Courtesy of Muntasir Akash
How the smaller carnivores are faring in a land so challenging and crammed has been an enigma. Like a moth to a flame, I was drawn to find more answers.
In 2018 I led a small camera-trap survey in a 2.5 square-kilometer national park in northeast Bangladesh. What we found amazed me. Nearly 600 days of camera trapping yielded 17 different mammals, including ten carnivores. The study showed that the Asiatic wild dog — a globally endangered apex predator with a wild population of only 2,215 known mature individuals — visits the park frequently, making it an important habitat for this rarely studied and little-understood carnivore.
In 2018 Muntasir’s camera-trapping survey in a national park in northeastern Bangladesh provided the first evidence that the Asiatic wild dog, or dhole, is a frequent visitor. Courtesy Muntasir Akash
I was thrilled that these often-overlooked carnivores seemed to be clinging to life in their ecologically uncharted habitats — and eager to find out more.
After gaining my first international grant last year, I’ve been able to continue my research on small carnivores in three of the six northeastern forest reserves. These semi-evergreen, undulating hilly swaths comprise 191 square kilometers of natural forests at the border between India and Bangladesh.
The wildlife here faces numerous threats, including conflict with people and loss of suitable habitat. Uncovering the secret lives of our country’s lesser-known and less-valued carnivores can therefore help protect them from these threats and engage others in vital conservation efforts.
However, pursuing unorthodox queries often comes with difficult hurdles. In addition to my ongoing studies in the parks, I recently co-wrote a manuscript reviewing the previous research on the mammalian carnivores of Bangladesh. This past August I received feedback from one peer reviewer who landed an unexpected blow, observing, “Small carnivores are rarely a subject of research, usually studied within the large-scale landscape-level projects.”
The idea that my research seemed to this reviewer as of little consequence hit me hard, and I sensed impostor syndrome creeping in.
I finally summoned enough confidence to defend the manuscript, mainly through support from my peers — many of whom are also working on species poorly known to the outside world that are rare and often very secretive. The manuscript is now published, and I’m continuing to try to shine a spotlight on the lesser-known carnivores in Bangladesh. I hope to push back against the apparent bias against them and encourage others to care about them through unique approaches. These include ongoing, systematic camera-trap surveys in my northeastern study areas, using scientific illustrations as a conservation tool, and sharing knowledge about camera-trapping with other aspiring researchers.
I feel even more compelled to act given the seemingly widespread belief that conservation of the smaller carnivores is somehow not viable or worthwhile.
The small-clawed otter, a globally vulnerable small carnivore, can still be found in certain protected areas of northeastern Bangladesh. This is the first camera-trap image from the region. Photo: Muntasir Akash/Northeast Bangladesh Carnivore Conservation Initiative.
In fact I’ve realized that working to save less-understood species has a nobility of its own and has helped me to become a better scientist. In the coming years I dream of a generation of nature enthusiasts emerging from Bangladesh, represented by ecologists and citizen scientists acting as advocates for our lesser-known and less-valued species.
If those species are not “charismatic” according to the standards of conservation, they are nonetheless extraordinary to those of us who study them and critical to healthy ecosystem function. Every form of wildlife has its place in nature and must be appreciated without fear and treated with equal importance. There may be no group better poised to start that process than the lesser-known smaller carnivores.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
A new study reveals that certain kinds of fish are more likely to have ingested plastic — including hundreds of species people depend on for food.
Each year the amount of plastic swirling in ocean gyres and surfing the tide toward coastal beaches seems to increase. So too does the amount of plastic particles being consumed by fish — including species that help feed billions of people around the world.
A new study published in the journal Global Change Biology revealed that the rate of plastic consumption by marine fish has doubled in the last decade and is increasing by more than 2% a year.
The study also revealed new information about what species are most affected and where the risks are greatest.
The researchers did a global analysis of mounting studies of plastic pollution in the ocean and found data on plastic ingestion for 555 species of marine and estuarine fish. Their results showed that 386 fish species — two-thirds of all species — had ingested plastic. And of those, 210 were species that are commercially fished.
Not surprisingly, places with an abundance of plastic in surface waters, such as East Asia, led to a higher likelihood of plastic ingestion by fish.
But fish type and behavior, researchers found, also plays a role. Active predators — those at the top of the food chain, like members of the Sphyrnidae family, which includes hammerhead and bonnethead sharks — ingested the most plastic. Grazers and filter‐feeders consumed the least.
Blue shark at Cape Point, South Africa, 2016. Photo: Steve Woods, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“Overall, the likelihood of plastic ingestion decreases with depth,” the researchers found.
Although bioaccumulation of plastic and its associated chemicals can cause health problems, this isn’t causing noticeable fish population problems — yet. The research revealed that the majority of the species they found to have ingested plastic remain abundant.
But at the same time, 35 species were listed as threatened or near threatened. Another 26 species are vulnerable to overfishing. The authors identified the blue shark, Atlantic bluefin tuna and chinook salmon as “species of high concern due to their threatened status, vulnerability to overfishing and frequent plastic ingestion.”
Meanwhile the researchers found that three-quarters of commercially fished species ingested plastic, including ones common in recreational fisheries and aquaculture that “have the highest likelihood to be part of the supply chain.” Common sole was found to be “most worrisome.”
Even more troubling is that there’s still a lot we don’t know because some areas are better studied than others.
Some nearshore areas are among those where research is lacking. “Only four studies were conducted within the continental United States’ Exclusive Economic Zone, despite more marine plastic originating from the United States than any other developed nation,” the researchers wrote.
Oceanic gyres, those swirling eddies of plastic in the open ocean, are also a black hole when it comes to research. “We uncovered no studies from the Indian, South Atlantic or western North Pacific gyres though there is extensive knowledge of surface debris accumulation in these regions,” they found. “Similarly, there was a paucity of data from high‐latitude seas and none from the Southern Ocean, even though the polar oceans are a sink for microplastic debris with new fisheries developing in these regions as ice retreats and climate changes.”
By comparison, coastal waters — including estuaries — are well studied, as are the seas surrounding Europe. And they found a “recent flurry of studies” from East Asia.
Even with a growing amount of research, the scope and severity of the problem is likely still underestimated.
Filling in these knowledge gaps will be crucial to better understand the extent of the problem, but the researchers say we’ll also need to study top predators more to learn how plastic bioaccumulates in the food chain and how these mobile predators may redistribute plastic across the ocean as they travel.
Little is known about how ingested plastic affects fish and marine ecosystems, and even less about how human health could be affected when plastic-eating fish end up on the dinner table.
“Current evidence for humans ingesting plastic directly from fish remains scant, but there is growing concern,” the researchers wrote. “In particular, the continued aggregation and analysis of information on plastic ingestion by marine fish is vital as these data are inextricably linked to ecosystem and human health.”
A rampant trade in Asian birds for their beautiful songs is emptying forests of sound and life.
The straw-headed bulbul doesn’t look like much.
It’s less than a foot in length, with subdued brown-and-gold plumage, a black beak and beady red eyes. If you saw one sitting on a branch in front of you, you might not give it a second glance.
But this Southeast Asian native stands out in one notable way: It sings like an angel.
“It’s arguably the most beautiful song of any bird,” says Chris Shepherd, executive director of Monitor Conservation Research Society and an expert on Asian songbirds. “It’s amazing,” he adds.
The bird’s beautiful voice serves a vital ecological purpose: Males use it to attract mates. The better the song, the greater the chance of finding a female and propagating the species.
But the song has also come with a terrible modern cost. Humans have come to value the bulbul’s calls so much that they’ve collected the birds from almost every inch of their habitat. Captured birds, quickly caged, have been shipped to markets throughout Southeast Asia. Due to this overwhelming commercial demand, the species has disappeared from most of its range and is now critically endangered. Only a few pocket populations continue to hang on.
And the straw-headed bulbul is far from alone in this decline. Practically every songbird species in Southeast Asia faces a similar predicament. Many birds face the very real risk of imminent extinction, leaving some forests in the region eerily silent.
Recent research finds that several songbirds have become perilously close to vanishing — if they haven’t been lost already.
One Indonesian bird, the Simeulue hill myna, has only just been described as genetically and morphologically unique from other lookalike species. It probably went extinct in the wild in the past two or three years, according to a paper published last spring in the journal Ibis. As the researchers wrote, “On multiple recent excursions to Simeulue, most recently in July 2018, we were unable to find the bird and learned from locals that there had been a great drive to catch the last survivors on the island in response to a wealthy person’s bounty on these birds.”
The paper calls this an “extinction-in-process” and warns that any remaining birds left in captivity may die without producing offspring. Even if they do manage to breed, the researchers fear they could be hybridized with other similar-in-appearance mynas, obscuring their genetic lineage.
That same phrase, extinction-in-process, has also been used to describe the Barusan shama, which according to a 2019 study published in the journal Forktail has become one of the most threatened of Asian songbirds due to rampant collection. It’s now gone from all but one island.
Like the Simeulue hill myna, the Barushan shama’s plight went virtually unnoticed for years because many taxonomists have classified it as a subspecies rather than a full species. Newer research finds that it’s a species with four subspecies, few of which may now survive.
Not that the species/subspecies disputes matter too much at this point.
“Taxonomic debates about the rank of these forms should not stand in the way of trying to ensure the survival of what is clearly an evolutionarily distinct lineage,” says Frank Rheindt, a biologist with National University of Singapore and senior or lead author on both of the papers.
So what happens to these birds once they’re taken from the wild?
That’s where the story gets even bleaker.
Disposable Love
Songbirds are an important element of culture and tradition for many peoples in Southeast Asia. In Java, for example, it’s almost assumed that every household will have at least one pet songbird. The more birds, the more prestigious the home.
But wild songbirds in captivity…well, they don’t tend to last long.
“We’ve often called the caged songbird trade like cut flowers,” says Shepherd. “The birds look nice. They’re often inexpensive. You bring one home. It sits in a cage for a couple of days and it dies just like a cut flower. They’re not expected to live.”
And because many Asian cities feature massive markets full of birds that have been easily snatched from the wild — usually illegally — any bird that dies is relatively easy and inexpensive to replace.
Cages line the Malang bird and animal market on Java in 2016, Photo: Andrea Kirkby (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Even bird traders don’t put much value on their stock, since a new supply of wild-caught birds always seems to be waiting in the wings.
“I’ve seen some cages where the surviving birds are all sitting on top of dead birds in the cages,” Shepherd says. “You can’t see the floor of the cage. It’s covered with a few layers of dead birds, and then there’s some sick and half-dead birds perched on top of them. And they cost the dealers next to nothing. So, you know, even if they sell a few, they think they must be covering their costs or you wouldn’t have a business model like that.”
Although all of this seems to favor low-cost disposability, some species are captive bred by the thousands, and prices can soar for the right birds.
As with so many other groups of heavily traded species, the rarest birds fetch higher prices from collectors — a “better get them before they’re gone” collector’s mentality that pushes prices higher, drives further poaching and drives birds even closer to extinction.
The Simeulue hill myna, for instance, might have sold for about $100-$150, “certainly if a foreigner or non-Simeulue person asks,” says Rheindt. “This is easily 2-4 monthly incomes for rural people on the island.”
The Caged Bird Sings
Along with its rarity, a bird’s appearance is clearly a valuable trait to collectors. Some of the birds are strikingly beautiful, like birds of paradise and the Javan white-eye.
A kingfisher, looking a little worse for wear, in the Malang bird and animal market in 2016. Photo: Andrea Kirkby (CC BY-SA 2.0)
But the quality that typically drives up a bird’s market price?
That, of course, would be the song.
A good song can earn a bird owner a big payday. Entire competitions have sprung up that offer cash prizes for the birds with the best songs — up to $50,000, according to some reports. On Java these events are known as Kicau-mania (“kicau” is Indonesian for “chirping”).
The bird doesn’t get much for his work. Perhaps some food and a chance to sing again.
But it can take a lot of human effort to inspire them to sing for their suppers.
“People will keep the male birds in captivity for a long time,” says Shepherd. “Some birds don’t want to sing in captivity and take a long time before they adjust to the point where they’ll start to sing. Then they’ll train the bird. They’ll keep it near other males so it sings more frequently, because they naturally compete with their songs.”
This forced companionship changes the very nature of the song.
“Some birds pick up notes and sounds from other species,” Shepherd says. “Some of the species that are disappearing, they’re just training birds. They’re not even the ones used in competition. They just keep them beside other the species that compete so they have a more complex and unique song in the competition.”
After that, it’s a bit like a dog show.
“Everybody takes their bird in a cage and there are songbird judges. They walk around and listen to the song and there’s big cash prizes for the bird with the best.” (Most recently, these competitions have moved online due to COVID-19.)
Through all of this, the gift nature gave these animals to help propagate their species — song — ends up driving them toward extinction.
This makes the trade similar to trophy hunting, which values the biggest animals or those with the most beautiful features. “The strongest bird in the wild, the one with the greatest song, would be the one that would pass on his genes,” Shepherd says. “Those are the ones being removed from the wild. So, you know, only inferior birds are left behind.”
Unlike trophy hunting, however, where an elephant’s tusks can theoretically trade hands in perpetuity, a bird’s song is ephemeral — sung once, then lost to time.
Progress
Shepherd says the Asian songbird crisis went virtually ignored for many years. Relatively few scientists studied it, and funding for conservation remained scarce. That’s been a costly delay.
“One of the interesting and sad things is that lot of the species that I worked on in the early Nineties, the ones I tried to raise the alarm on, are now gone or almost gone,” he says. “And then the ones I was working on that were extremely common at the time are now the next wave that’s disappearing.”
Fortunately, that’s started to change. For one thing, scientific research about the trade and affected species continues to pick up. One of the most worrying studies came out last August and found that Java now has more songbirds in cages than in its forests. The study found that one species, the Javan pied starling (Gracupica jalla), now has fewer than 50 birds remaining in the wild, while 1.1 million live on the island in captivity.
Meanwhile governments, NGOs and other researchers have also stepping up their game. Conservation experts came together in 2015 to hold an event called the Asian Songbird Trade Crisis Summit. Two years later they formed the IUCN Asian Songbird Trade Specialist Group, which had its first official meeting in 2019. And over the past five years governments have started to take action, including seizing several large shipments of poached birds, although the trade remains mostly illegal and unsustainable.
Local groups have helped, too, which brings us back to the Simeulue hill myna and Barusan shama. A Simeulue-based organization called Ecosystemimpact set out to help the two birds at the beginning of 2020. Although their efforts were hampered by the COVID pandemic, they’re still trying to acquire any captive birds they can find to keep them out of the trade. If they do rescue any Simeulue hill mynas — such as four juvenile birds that reportedly recently turned up for sale on Facebook — they’ll need a permit from the government to breed them.
Even then, saving them from extinction won’t be easy.
“Hill myna are notoriously hard to breed, requiring large, tall aviaries with good vantage points over forested areas,” says program manager Tom Amey. “It’s not out of the question that hill myna will breed within our aviaries, but given their specific requirements, we feel it is unlikely.” They’re working on raising funding for new aviaries designed specifically for hill mynas.
They also hope to educate the community, to turn its love of captive birds into one that also supports wild populations.
“There is a distinct lack of bird song on Simeulue, especially within close to medium proximity of [human] habitation,” says Amey. “Our ambition is to bring the beautiful sounds of songbirds back to Simeulue’s forests and culture. Songbirds have played an important role in Simeulue culture and many members of the community wish to see them return.”
As with everything in the past year, progress to protect Asian songbirds has slowed down of late. “Unfortunately, the COVID crisis has been a huge, but legitimate, distraction from the global fight against extinction, and very little attention has been paid to such issues in the last few months,” says Rheindt.
Once the pandemic recedes, Shepherd suggests that tourism may play an important role in keeping birds alive, uncaged and in their natural habitats.
“There’s a very big birdwatching community,” he says, “and I think working with the community and with the birdwatching tour guides to raise awareness of the benefits of having songbirds around is important. The birdwatching industry’s worth millions. I think we need to raise awareness of the fact that you can lose your birds, but also awareness of the facts that having birds around is good for the environment, it’s good for your mental health, it’s good for all kinds of things — but it’s good for the economy.”
Until those messages resonate more than the ka-ching of a cash register, however, Asian songbirds will remain in crisis.
I spent the better part of 2016 on South Africa’s Diamond Coast — one of the landscapes the corporation wishes to “honor” with its new collection — conducting research for my book, 
In truth, this small rocky outcropping in the Guadeloupe Islands has seen its fair share of human-driven change since colonial settlers arrived. Once a haven for pirates hiding out from the law, the island served as a colony for lepers and lawbreakers for two centuries. The land, despite its modern reputation and protected status, was heavily cultivated and disturbed for much of that time — much like the other islands around it.
