The United Nations has taken a good first step, but here’s what needs to be done next to make sure climate refugees get the protections they deserve.
Imagine if you couldn’t feed your children and had to leave your home because of fossil fuels burned in a far-off country. That’s what people on the front lines of climate change face today.
The climate crisis is now creating more refugees than war. In recent years tens of millions of people around the world have been driven from their homes by drought, storms, flooding and fires. Over the next 50 years, climate change could cause a refugee crisis on an unprecedented scale.
Where will people go when their countries become inhospitable? Will the governments of the world accept them?
In January the United Nations recognized the severity of these questions and formally stated that it may be unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives would be put at risk by the climate crisis.
The United Nations should be applauded for standing up for some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. And while this opens the door to establishing protections to ensure climate refugees receive the same legal protections as those fleeing war or persecution, it doesn’t yet guarantee that: We need a comprehensive international plan.
Climate, Conflict and the Universal Right to Life
Time is already running short for some.
Pacific island states, in particular, find themselves at imminent risk from climate change, as even moderate sea-level rise may swamp many beneath the waves.
It’s this threat that drove Ioane Teitiota, a resident of the Republic of Kiribati, to apply for asylum in New Zealand in 2015 — the first time a person identified himself as a climate refugee. Teitiota cited overcrowding, failing crops, contaminated water supplies, social tensions and violence as among the reasons he needed to leave his island home, which at its highest point isn’t even 10 feet above sea level.
Teitiota is far from alone. Around the world the climate crisis is making violence more likely by causing shortages of food, water and safe environments. This has had a role in multiple conflicts already, including the devastating Syrian civil war.
Despite the risk to his island nation, Teitiota’s application was rejected because the Supreme Court of New Zealand ruled his life was not in immediate danger. The 10-15 years before Kiribati will be underwater, the court found, would be enough time for other arrangements to come to light.
But Teitiota brought his case to the U.N. Human Rights Committee — the body of experts responsible for upholding international civil rights — which led to January’s decision. While the committee accepted New Zealand’s original judgment, there was one hopeful outcome: It stated that in the future countries may be acting unlawfully if they return someone to their country of origin when that person’s right to life is threatened by the climate crisis.
Essentially, this sets the stage to provide climate refugees a similar legal status to people fleeing war or persecution.
This is significant, but it raises even more questions.
We don’t know how immediate the danger should have to be for someone to be able to claim asylum because of the climate crisis, or how an individual might be required to prove their level of vulnerability.
We do know that individuals can still be returned to their home country if there’s any safe location in that country at all.
The aftermath of Cyclone Idai, which displaced hundreds of thousands in Mozambique in 2019. Photo by Denis Onyodi: IFRC/DRK/Climate Centre (CC BY-NC 2.0)
This is important because few countries — for example, relatively small island nations — will be so affected by the climate crisis in the short term that no safe place exists for people to be sent back to within them. Forcing refugees from larger nations to stay in, or return to, their home countries will create that same overcrowding, tensions and competition for resources that Teitiota feared — situations we’ve already seen in Syria and other places. And the communities they’re resettled into may not remain safe much longer.
Three Key Next Steps
These outstanding questions — what makes someone a climate refugee, the immediacy of danger required, and how to assess the safety of whole countries — must form the fundamental building blocks of an international agreement on tackling the climate crisis and the changes in migration patterns it will bring.
This new international agreement, separate from the Geneva Convention, should provide a legal definition of climate refugees, and how they should be protected, as the first step to a global agreement. If countries can agree on what being a climate refugee means, then people forced to leave their homes because of rising seas, unbearable heat, or related threats will get the protection they deserve.
Beyond these direct effects, climate breakdown often acts to magnify and multiply conflicts and resource shortages. An international agreement on climate refugees must recognize the complex and multifaceted nature of climate change and its related societal threats.
On the topic of the safety and integrity of entire countries, a new international agreement must also resist the temptation to buy a small amount of time by sending people to areas that are only temporarily safer than the ones they left. It must seek long-term solutions that can secure notions of sovereignty and cultural identity alongside the economic, social and environmental needs of forced migrants.
The United Nations has laid down the first stage of the theory. Now all nations must come together to make climate justice a reality.
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.
Residents will vote on a ballot measure to reintroduce endangered gray wolves. There’s a strong ecological argument for why they’re needed, says biologist Joanna Lambert.
This November voters in Colorado will get a chance to do something historic: vote on a ballot measure that proposes the reintroduction of gray wolves into the wilds of their state.
It’s the first time the question of reintroducing an endangered species has been placed in the public’s hands at the ballot box.
With or without a public vote, wolves seem to be reintroducing themselves: Last month Colorado Parks and Wildlife confirmed that a pack of six wolves has settled in the state for the first time in 80 years. But they’ll need political support to thrive there.
And an official reintroduction program could take wolves’ return further by encouraging the state to establish additional populations by the end of 2023. Proponents believe it could be a big ecological boost for Colorado, and they point to Yellowstone as proof.
Gray wolves were reintroduced in the national park 25 years ago, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. The wolves trimmed deer and elk populations, which had over-browsed vegetation. Riparian areas flourished again and attracted songbirds, beavers, foxes and other animals. It was proof that bringing a top predator back into an ecosystem has a beneficial ripple effect.
We spoke with University of Colorado Boulder ecology professor Joanna Lambert about the science of wolf reintroduction and what previous efforts have taught us about coexisting with apex predators as they recolonize a landscape.
University of Colorado Boulder ecology professor Joanna Lambert doing field research in Yellowstone National Park.. Photo: Courtesy of Joanna Lambert
What are the ecological arguments for returning wolves to Colorado?
Gray wolves evolved in North America, probably somewhere in western Alaska about 800,000 years ago. There were a lot of wolf species in North America and Eurasia at that time. The one that prevailed is the one that we know today as Canis lupus.
They dispersed throughout North America, and in so doing, they evolved alongside all of the other species that were there — all of their prey species, and all of the plant species that their prey were eating. But as a result of the concerted effort by the federal government to remove these apex predators that co-evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, the ecological interactions have been knocked out of balance.
We have huge populations of whitetail deer, mule deer and elk that can be a real issue. We saw that with thousands of elk in the northern parts of Yellowstone that the National Park Service had to cull every year. Over the decades, upwards of 75,000 elk were removed by the National Park Service before wolves were put back in.
So the argument is that by putting back in wolves — an apex predator that has evolved alongside their prey species — we’re putting things back into ecological balance.
Is this the first time that the public will vote on a ballot measure to determine whether an endangered species will be reintroduced?
It is and that’s why this is such a profound moment if it does pass.
And if it does — I’m not advocating one way or another — the conversation doesn’t end there. Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission would then have to officially request a permit from U.S. Fish and Wildlife. This is all outlined in section 10 of the Endangered Species Act.
Ultimately this will be a conversation among scientists. And the scientists will determine where the wolves would be reintroduced. How to do it and where to do it will not be mandated or dictated by citizens, who aren’t trained in ecology. What we do know is that there are vast tracts of public lands in the form of national forest and BLM lands throughout the western slope of Colorado. There’s ample room for wolves.
Because gray wolves are an endangered species, we can think of this as another tool in the toolbox of conservation measures. But because this is a measure about wolves, people have extremely strong opinions one way or another. I think that’s adding to the significance of this. There have been several surveys, and one that just went online indicates over 80% of Colorado citizens want this measure to go through.
What is the opposition’s point of view?
Certainly there are folks that don’t want it. Very similar issues that arose in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem are occurring here, namely stakeholders from the ranching industry have concerns. It’s not an insignificant thing to have an apex predator suddenly put back into a system.
There are myriad ecological benefits, but there will be some costs, and those ranchers who have a permit to graze their cattle on public lands will lose some cattle for sure. Ignoring that fact would be naive.
The good news is that there’s language in the initiative to address that directly. And in addition to that, we’ve learned a lot already from wolf reintroduction in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. A tremendous amount of knowledge exists on how to ranch with wolves and grizzly bears.
What we’re all hoping for is a landscape where we can coexist with the species that were originally here, but also acknowledging that humans need to make a living and that the costs of this initiative will be felt by some folks more than others.
But humans evolved alongside large-bodied predators, and we have had livestock alongside them for hundreds and hundreds of years. We can regain that knowledge. There are other examples from Europe where livestock owners are learning how to live with wolves. People are learning how to use guard dogs and increase vigilance. There are some fairly simple things that we can do.
If we’re not just going to kill everything that comes into our backyard or kill everything that comes into our rangeland, then we’ve got to learn how to live with them and how to seek mechanisms of coexistence, and I think we can do it.
Is the reintroduction effort in Yellowstone a primary model, or other areas guiding planning on how wolves could be reintroduced in Colorado?
In terms of just scientific documentation, Yellowstone has received the most attention because it was wildly successful. Wolves did incredibly well and they started dispersing out of Yellowstone at a rate that no one expected.
But that’s not the only place. Since 2000 we’ve had, globally, over 200 reintroduction initiatives of predators back into their native habitat. So this has been done elsewhere for sure, including in Africa where cheetahs are being put back into areas. We’ve got a lot to rest this on it — it has been done not just in Yellowstone but around the world.
What’s most exciting to you about wolves?
I have a yearning for wild places and wild things. And I have a yearning for putting things back together again. Humans have transformed this planet into a system that we view as just serving us. And in so doing, we have dismantled ecosystems and native species assemblages.
There’s a lot of grief around the world about what we’ve done. In fact, this has been documented in a phenomenon known as ecological grief. As we lose wild places, the very landscapes that we ourselves evolved in, we are feeling the emotional burden.
I guess that’s how I view this initiative: It’s a way of rewilding. It’s rewilding landscapes and putting a wild thing back into a wild place that used to be there, but that we’ve lost in the last hundred years because of unchecked human growth.
Livestock owners needlessly fear these massive South American birds — and lure them to their deaths with illegal poisons. That puts the entire species at risk.
It starts with the whiff of death.
High above the Argentinian plains, an Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) — one of the world’s largest flying bird species — catches the distinctive aroma of decaying flesh on the wind. It’s quickly joined by other condors, perhaps a dozen or more, who start circling in the familiar pattern of all carrion-loving vultures.
Soon the massive condors spy the source of the delicious smell: a dead sheep or goat lying in a field. The hungry birds quickly angle in for descent, land around the body and begin to feed, tearing into the skin and meat with their sharp beaks.
Then the condors also begin to die.
At first they appear merely disoriented. Then they start to stumble, convulse and fall around the dead sheep. A few may try to fly, flapping mighty wings that span 10 feet — only to crash to the ground just a few yards away.
Eventually the field is littered with dead condors. Few, if any, escape.
This gruesome scene has played out several times in Argentina in recent years. In one incident that made worldwide headlines, 34 Andean condors died at a single site in 2018 — a major blow to a species with an estimated population of just 6,700 mature individuals, about 2,500 of which live in Argentina.
What’s killing these birds? Tragically, it’s a case of persecution by pesticide. Livestock owners who needlessly fear the imposing condors — which only eat carrion (not live prey) — attract the birds with dead sheep and other animals laced with powerful, illegal neurotoxin pesticides such as carbofuran and parathion. They know that anything that eats the carcasses will quickly die — in theory, leaving the rest of nearby livestock “safe” from predators.
Andean condors aren’t the only target. Farmers also use the pesticide-laden bodies to lure in pumas, foxes, lynx, eagles and other predators that really do occasionally prey upon livestock.
But it’s condors that have been hit hardest by the practice. A new paper published Jan. 15 in the journal Biological Conservation calls the poisonings “the greatest threat to the Andean condor.”
“We conclude that this problem can lead to the extinction of the species if we do not take action urgently,” says the paper’s lead author, Carlos I. Piña, a biologist with Universidad Autonoma de Entre Rios.
Piña and his fellow researchers — Rayen Estrada Pachecoab, N. Luis Jácome, Vanesa Astore and Carlos E. Borghi — studied 301 birds treated or collected by the Andean Condor Rescue Center in Argentina between 2001 and 2018. Using records and necropsies, they identified 21 poisoning events in Argentina that killed a total of 99 condors — 77 deaths in 2017 and 2018 alone (the paper does not include data from 2019). They also identified another 29 incidents of possible poisoning. In some cases the rescue center located birds suffering symptoms of poisoning that died a few hours after discovery.
The researchers also found that the poisonings occur throughout Argentina, have increased in frequency since the beginning of 2017, and now represent 79% of deaths reported to the rescue center.
An Andean condor in the conservation breeding program at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The deaths are particularly alarming because condors already face a range of other threats, including illegal hunting, lead poisoning (similar to California condors) and collisions with power lines.
On top of that, their populations grow slowly under the best of circumstances.
“Condors have a very low reproductive rate,” Piña explains. They don’t reach sexual maturity until they’re 9 or 10 years old, and then they only nest every two years and raise a single chick at a time.
It’s now likely that more Andean condors are dying than are being born.
“These deaths occur at a rate and on a scale that does not allow the natural recovery of individuals to the population,” says Piña.
And it’s not just the condors being killed. The bodies of animals from eight other species have been found near dead condors, according to the paper. These include American black vultures (Coragyps atratus), kelp gull (Larus dominicanus), Molina’s hog-nosed skunks (Conepatus chinga) and pumas (Puma concolor).
The poisons are also potentially harmful to humans. “There are oral records of cases of people poisoned by the placement of these poisons,” Piña says. This poses a risk for officials tasked with cleaning up kill sites. The EPA links acute short-term parathion exposure to central nervous disorders, depressed red blood cell activity, nausea and other health risks.
And then there’s the big picture: the environmental cost of not having condors on the landscape if this problem persists.
“Vultures occupy a fundamental role in the ecosystem, since they eliminate the carcasses of dead animals which, if not removed, become sources of infection and can affect human health,” Piña says. “They’re like great natural cleaners.”
In additional to fulfilling that ecological role, condors also have cultural importance.
“For the native peoples of South America, it is the sacred bird that connects the world we live in with the cosmos,” Piña says. “We see condors on the emblems, shields and flags of the Andean countries. The loss of these birds also represents a great cultural loss for our society.”
An Andean condor spreads its wings at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
With the condors fulfilling so many important roles, and the frequency of poisonings increasing, how do we solve this problem?
Piña and his fellow researchers recommend a three-tier approach.
The first involves educating livestock owners about the importance of condors and the health risks from the pesticides. “We believe that working on education about the dangerousness of the use of these toxic baits is one of the lines of action needed to address this problem,” Piña says.
That won’t solve everything, he acknowledges, because some people already know the poisons are dangerous but use them anyway.
That brings us to the second solution: protecting livestock. “It’s essential to find ways to reduce predation without affecting environmental health,” Piña says. “An example could be the incorporation of cattle protection dogs, which have been shown to considerably reduce predation in Patagonia Argentina.” The researchers have started studies with cattle breeders to understand various techniques already in use in different parts of the country, as well as how ranchers perceive livestock losses they experience.
The third tier involves the law. These pesticides are already illegal — parathion was banned in Argentina in 1993, and a new law banning carbofuran and four other pesticides went into effect this past October — but they’re widely used anyway. Piña says adding one more law could help address that. “We believe that it would be better to have a national law on traceability and prescription of agrochemicals so that their trade is regulated, and sales of these products are under a professional’s prescription,” he says. “This way the easy access of these products would be diminished a little.”
Argentina, meanwhile, isn’t taking the problem lightly. In addition to the recent pesticide bans, the country and a partner foundation recently launched the Estrategia Nacional contra Cebos Tóxicos (“National Strategy Against Poisoned Carrion”). “The [program] aims to improve the detection and treatment of cases of poisoning, minimizing the risk to personnel involved in these processes,” Piña reports. “The plan also aims to generate a more precise knowledge of the sites of greatest conflict in order to guide conservation efforts and community outreach and education.”
A lot of work remains to be done to save the Andean condor from this emerging threat, but with more than 1% of all Andean condors killed since 2017, researchers say it’s time for Argentina — and perhaps neighboring countries — to act. Otherwise the great birds may become just another faint waft of death on the wind.
Manatee deaths from watercraft strikes have doubled in the past five years. But that’s not the only threat they face.
Florida manatees had another deadly year in 2019.
An estimated 531 manatees died in Florida waters in the past 12 months. That’s a significant decrease from the number of deaths in 2018, when 824 manatees died, but it still represents a nearly 10% loss to their population in the state.
Some manatees die from natural causes each year, but most of this year’s mortalities were caused by a particularly human element:
Boats.
According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which keeps track of manatee mortality, at least 136 manatees died last year after being struck by speeding watercraft. That’s nearly two times the number of manatees killed by boats in 2014. The number of boat strikes started to climb in 2016 — the same year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed downlisting the species’ conservation status from “endangered” to the lesser category of “threatened.”
As a result of this and other threats, manatee populations appear to be on the decline again. The most recent annual synoptic survey, conducted at the beginning of 2019, found 5,733 manatees in Florida waters — down from 6,620 just two years earlier. (Florida uses these surveys to provide a general view of manatee populations and but does not use them to assess long-term trends.)
What else killed manatees this past year? Watch our video below to learn more.
No whale hunts in Iceland last year were just one sign of the public's fading appetite for whale meat.
One of the most important global conservation events of the past year was something that didn’t happen. For the first time since 2002, Iceland — one of just three countries that still allow commercial whaling — didn’t hunt any whales, even though its government had approved whaling permits in early 2019.
Many people may think of whaling as a 19th-century industry in which men threw harpoons at their quarry by hand. But humans are still killing whales today in other ways. Thousands of whales are struck by ships, entangled in fishing lines and harmed by ocean noise every year.
However, most nations support a commercial whaling ban that the International Whaling Commission, a global body charged with whale management, imposed in 1986 to prevent these creatures from being hunted to extinction. Iceland, Norway and Japan have long been exceptions to this international consensus.
I study marine ecology and conservation and spent the 2018-19 academic year on a Fulbright fellowship in Iceland. It is encouraging to see countries come to realize that whales are worth more alive than dead — for their spiritual value, their role in tourism and the ecological services that they provide. As more Icelanders adopt this view, it will be good news for ocean conservation.
The Ecological Value of Large Marine Mammals
For years, ecological studies of whales focused on how much fish they ate or krill they consumed, which represented costs to fisheries. Starting around 10 years ago, my colleagues and I took a fresh look at whales’ ecological role in the ocean.
Whales often dive deep to feed, coming to the surface to breathe, rest, digest — and poop. Their nutrient-rich fecal plumes provide nitrogen, iron and phosphorous to algae at the surface, which increases productivity in areas where whales feed. More whales mean more plankton and more fish.
Whales also play a role in the carbon cycle. They are the largest creatures on Earth, and when they die their carcasses often sink to the deep sea. These events, known as whale falls, provide habitat for at least a hundred species that depend on the bones and nutrients. They also transfer carbon to the deep ocean, where it remains sequestered for hundreds of years.
Whales are economically valuable, but watching them brings in more money than killing them. “Humpbacks are one of the most commercially important marine species in Iceland,” a whale-watching guide told me one morning off the coast of Akureyri. Whale-watching income far outweighs the income from hunting fin and minke whales.
Whale watching in Skjálfandi Bay, Iceland. Photo by Daniel Enchev, (CC BY 2.0)
The End of Icelandic Whaling?
For years after the international moratorium on whaling was adopted in 1986, only Norway allowed commercial whaling. Japan continued hunting in the Antarctic under the guise of “scientific whaling,” which many whale biologists considered unnecessary and egregious.
Iceland also allowed a research hunt in the 1980s, with much of the meat sold to Japan, but stopped whaling under international pressure in the 1990s. It resumed commercial hunting in 2002, with strong domestic support. Iceland was ruled by Norway and then Denmark until 1944. As a result, Icelanders often chafe under external pressure. Many saw foreign protests against whaling as a threat to their national identity, and local media coverage was distinctly pro-whaling.
This view started to shift around 2014, when European governments refused to allow the transport of whale meat harvested by Icelandic whalers through their ports, en route to commercial buyers in Japan. Many European countries opposed Icelandic whaling and were unwilling to facilitate this trade. Whalers no longer looked so invincible, and Icelandic media started covering both sides of the debate.
In May 2019, Hvalur — the whaling business owned by Kristján Loftsson, Iceland’s most vocal and controversial whaler — announced that it wouldn’t hunt fin whales, which are internationally classified as vulnerable, this year, citing a need for ship repairs and declining demand in Japan. In June, Gunnar Bergmann Jónsson, owner of a smaller outfit, announced that he wouldn’t go whaling either. These decisions meant that the hunt was off.
During my year in Iceland, I met for coffee every couple of weeks with Sigursteinn Másson, program leader for the local whale-watching association IceWhale and representative of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. At times he seemed animated about the prospect that no whaling permits would be allotted. At others, he looked gloomy because whalers and their allies in the Icelandic government had co-opted the conversation.
“I worked on gay rights in Iceland, which was opposed by the church, and mental health for 10 years,” he told me. “They were peanuts compared to the whaling issue.”
Campaign Whale led a protest in 2009 outside of the Icelandic Embassy in London demanding an end to whale hunts. Photo by Campaign Whale, (CC BY-NC 2.0)
At first, both companies insisted that they would start whaling again in 2020. But Jónsson’s outfit no longer plans to hunt minkes, and Másson doubts that whaling will continue. “Nobody is encouraging them anymore — or interested,” he told me last summer.
Now trade is getting even tougher. In 2018 Japan announced that it would leave the International Whaling Commission, stop its controversial Antarctic whaling program and focus on hunting whales in its coastal waters, reducing the demand for Icelandic whale meat.
Tourist behavior in Iceland is also changing. For years, tourists would go out whale watching, then order grilled minke in restaurants. After the International Fund for Animal Welfare started targeting whale watchers in 2011 with its “Meet Us Don’t Eat Us” campaign, the number of tourists who ate whale meat declined from 40% to 11%.
A Generational Shift
For many Icelanders, whale meat is an occasional delicacy. Over dinner a few months ago, I met an Icelandic woman who told me she thought whale was delicious, and she didn’t see why whaling was such a big deal. How many times had she eaten whale? Once a month, once a year? “I’ve had it twice in my life.”
About a third of Icelanders now oppose whaling. They tend to be younger urban residents. A third are neutral, and a third support whaling. Many in this last group may feel stronger about critiques of whaling than about hvalakjöt, or whale meat. Demand for hvalakjöt in grocery stores and restaurants has started to dry up.
Although few observers would have predicted it, whaling may end in Iceland not through denial of a permit but from lack of interest. How long until the world’s remaining commercial whalers in Japan and Norway, who face similar shifts in taste and demographics, follow a similar course?
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.
Climate change has caused record-breaking ocean temperatures, and that means more dangerous storms, trouble for coral reefs and big changes for our marine ecosystems.
Part of Joellen Russell’s job is to help illuminate the deep darkness — to shine a light on what’s happening beneath the surface of the ocean. And it’s one of the most important jobs in the world right now.
Russell is a professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona. From that dry, landlocked state, she’s become a leading expert on how the climate is changing in the Southern Ocean — those vast, dark waters swirling around Antarctica.
“This is an age of scientific discovery,” she says. But also, “it’s very scary what we’re finding out.”
Researchers like Russell have been ringing alarm bells in report after report warning that the world’s ocean waters are dangerously warming. Most of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gas emissions we’ve spewed into the air for decades has actually been absorbed by the ocean. Over the past 25 years, that heat amounts to the equivalent of exploding 3.6 billion Hiroshima-sized atom bombs, according to Lijing Cheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of a new study on ocean warming.
Now we’re beginning to witness the cascading repercussions of that oceanic warming — from supercharged storms to dying coral reefs to crashing fisheries.
There’s still a lot left to learn about these problems, but here’s a look at some of the top findings from researchers, along with what they hope to uncover next.
1. Yes, It’s Definitely Getting Warmer
There’s no doubt among scientists that the ocean is heating and we’re driving it.
The latest confirmation is the study by Cheng and colleagues, published this month in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, which bluntly stated, “Ocean heating is irrefutable and a key measure of the Earth’s energy imbalance.”
The study found ocean waters in 2019 were the warmest in recorded history. And that follows a pattern: The past decade has also seen the warmest 10 years of ocean temperatures, and the last five years have been the five warmest on record.
“Every year the ocean waters get warmer, and the reason is because of the heat-trapping gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere,” says John Abraham, one of the study’s coauthors and a professor in mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas. “It’s concerning for sure.”
2. The Southern Ocean Has Been Hit Worst
Much of this warming occurs between the surface and a depth of 6,500 feet. It’s happening pretty consistently across the globe, but some areas have experienced higher rates of warming. One of those is the Southern Ocean, which has acted as a giant sink, absorbing 43% of our oceanic CO2 emissions and 75% of the heat, scientists have concluded.
That’s because the ocean basin functions like an air conditioner for the planet, says Russell. Strong winds pull up cold water from deep below, and then the cold surface water takes up some heat from the air. When the winds slow, the water sinks, more cold water rises, and the process repeats.
“The sinking water isn’t warm, per se, just a bit warmer than it was when the wind pulled it up,” she says. “In this way the Southern Ocean can sequester a lot of heat well below the surface.”
For that reason what happens in the Southern Ocean is globally important. And it makes new findings all the more concerning.
Melt water from the Nansen ice shelf fracture in Antarctica. Photo by Stuart Rankin (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Normal upwelling of waters from deep in the Southern Ocean has traditionally brought nutrients to the surface, where they then get moved by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world’s strongest ocean current, to feed marine life in other areas. But new research from Russell and colleagues found that this process will be disrupted as warm waters cause the Southern Ocean’s ice sheets to melt even faster. This will change the historical upwelling and could trap nutrients instead of pushing them out.
That, she says, will “begin to starve the global ocean of nutrients.”
3. A Lot of Changes Are Happening
As bad as that sounds…there’s a lot more.
One of the most obvious results of ocean warming is higher sea levels. That’s caused in part because water expands as it warms.
But there’s also the effect on sea ice. The warmer the water gets, the more ice melts — as is happening in Antarctica. Not surprisingly rates of global sea-level rise are accelerating. This means more property damage, storm surges, and waves lapping at the heels of our coastal communities.
Warmer waters also mean more supercharged storms. An increase in heat drives up evaporation and adds extra moisture to the atmosphere, causing heavy rains, more flooding and more extreme weather events.
The aftermath of Cyclone Idai, one of the deadliest storms in history, in Mozambique, March 2019. Photo by Denis Onyodi: IFRC/DRK/Climate Centre (CC BY-NC 2.0)
In some places it can make drier conditions worse, too. When air rises and cools below the dew point, it turns into clouds or precipitation. “But in places like Arizona or Australia, where rain is generally formed when air is pushed upward over mountains, “the warmer atmosphere might not be cold enough to cause rain,” explains Russell. “This is how a warmer atmosphere carrying more moisture might actually rain less in some places — contributing to drought and therefore fire.”
The recent study in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences identified warming waters as “one of the key reasons why the Earth has experienced increasing catastrophic fires in the Amazon, California, and Australia in 2019 (extending into 2020 for Australia).”
And that’s not all.
Warming ocean waters also contribute to the rise of colonies of algae that can produce toxins deadly to wildlife and sometimes people.
These harmful algal blooms pose a problem even way up in the Gulf of Alaska, where the annual algae season has gotten longer, says Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“That’s all, of course, due to warmer water,” he says.
The biggest change in the region may be along the coast of the Bering Sea, where water temperatures have historically been too cold for the blooms to occur — but that’s starting to change.
“Now the water temperatures are getting up to the point where they’re warm enough to support these harmful algal blooms,” Thoman says. Toxins from the blooms can work their way up the food chain and have even shown up in some marine mammals in the areas. “People are concerned about whether it’s safe to eat their staple foods,” he says.
4. Marine Heat Waves Are Getting Worse
While temperatures are rising across the world’s oceans, some areas are also seeing dangerous short-term spikes known as marine heatwaves.
Scientists anticipate that these heatwaves, which can be fatal to a long list of sea creatures, will continue to get more severe and more frequent as the ocean warms. By the end of the century, conditions in some areas may be akin to a permanent heatwave.
That’s likely to be bad news for everything from seaweed to birds to mammals, and it could result in fundamental changes for food webs and the animals and coastal economies that depend on those resources.
“Collectively, and over time, an increase in the exposure of marine ecosystems to extreme temperatures may lead to irreversible loss of species or foundation habitats, such as seagrass, coral reefs and kelp forests,” a December 2019 study in Frontiers in Marine Science found.
And these changes likely aren’t far off. These marine heatwaves “will emerge as forceful agents of disturbance to marine ecosystems in the near-future,” the researchers wrote.
We’re already seeing what that would look like.
Marine heatwaves off Australia have spurred oyster die-offs and losses to the abalone fishery, and one event in 2016 caught the world’s attention when it caused severe bleaching of the biodiverse Great Barrier Reef, triggering mass coral deaths.
An aerial view of widespread coral bleaching in the northern Great Barrier Reef, 2016. Photo: Terry Hughes, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CC BY-ND 2.0)
And scientists now believe that “the blob,” a mass of warm water that persisted off the Pacific Coast from California to Alaska from 2014 to 2016, led to the starvation of an estimated 1 million common murres (Uria aalge) — a normally resilient seabird. The warm waters likely reduced and changed phytoplankton communities — an essential part of the marine food web. But that’s not all. The warm waters increased the metabolism — and the appetite — of big fish like pollock and salmon. That demand spike crashed populations of forage fish that murres usually find plentiful.
Most recently a prolonged marine heatwave off the coast of Alaska led to the closure of region’s commercial Pacific cod fishery for 2020 — the first time that’s ever happened.
“When you cancel whole fisheries, that really impacts people’s lives and livelihoods,” says Thoman.
5. What We Don’t Know
Scientists have enough information now to tell us that we need to quickly change course. But there’s still a lot to learn about how warming temperatures will affect myriad species in the sea, not to mention weather patterns and coastal economies.
One current line of research is to better understand how ocean warming affects weather.
“We know that a warmer ocean means more water evaporates into the atmosphere,” says Abraham. “Consequently, it makes the weather more severe because humidity drives storms. We would like to quantify this. So how much worse is weather now and how bad will it be?”
Some of that information will come from existing systems.
Deploying an Argo float. Photo by NOAA
“We live in a time of great change, and the ocean is telling us these stories mostly through our incredible Argo floats,” says Russell. This global network of nearly 3,900 floating sensors can measure temperature, salinity and pressure at varying depths across the world’s oceans.
But in the Southern Ocean, Russell works with an even more advanced group of biogeochemical sensors. They measure nitrates, which can tell researchers about the building blocks of nutrients for the food web. They also measure oxygen, “how the ocean is breathing,” she says, and pH, which helps tell the carbon content of the water.
Russell says she’d like to see this technology put to use in more waters around the world.
“We’re trying to get a global biogeochemical Argo array, but so far haven’t gotten funding for it,” she says. “I’m desperate to see the rest of the ocean because it’s all connected and it’s mixing quickly.”
The Arctic, she says, is one place where this technology would play a particularly valuable role.
“It’s so shallow in many places, and under ice for so much of the year, that we haven’t really been able to get a big float array up there,” she says. “But the Arctic is critical to our national interest and it’s relatively unstudied. Can you imagine that, in this day and age?”
There’s plenty to keep researchers busy, but the rest of us also need to act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because, the researchers of the Advances in Atmospheric Sciences study concluded, the oceans are so vast that they’ll require years to dissipate all of this excess heat and register the changes we’re starting to make today. Cutting emissions, they wrote, is the only way to reduce “the risks to humans and other life on Earth.”
And they’re not the only ones in trouble — orchid species around the world face increasing threats from illegal trade and habitat destruction.
More than 200 years ago, the Scottish botanist William Roxburgh published Hortus Bengalensis, a thick book cataloging hundreds of medicinal plants collected at the East India Company’s botanical gardens in Calcutta.
Among the hundreds of plants appearing in the book’s pages was an orchid originally collected in the Chittagong region of what is now Bangladesh. Identified at the time as Cymbidium alatum, the orchid now goes by the taxonomic name Theocostele alata.
You can’t find the species in Bangladesh anymore, though. No one has officially observed Theocostele alata there since Roxburgh made note of it in 1814.
And it’s not alone. According to research published this month in the International Journal of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Theocostele alata is one of 32 orchid species native to Bangladesh that no longer appear within its borders.
That represents the extinction of 17% of Bangladesh’s 187 known orchid diversity.
Researchers call the loss “alarming” due to the flowers’ ecological uniqueness and their potential medicinal, horticultural and ornamental values.
“If this rate continues, there will be no trace of orchids in the near future,” says Mohammed Kamrul Huda, a professor of botany at the University of Chittagong and lead author of the study.
Huda and his colleagues spent nearly a quarter of a century, from 1996 to 2019, conducing field research throughout Bangladesh to catalog the country’s existing orchids and look for previously described species. They even searched herbariums and private collections for species they couldn’t find in the wild, to no avail.
The paper blames habitat destruction for most of the disappearances, although it’s hard to determine exactly when these orchids went extinct in Bangladesh. In most cases the last official observation of a species, like the plant described by Roxburgh, occurred more than a century ago.
A species called Anaectochilus roxburghii, which grew in damp gullies at the edges of forests, was last recorded in 1830 near Sylhet, a large and culturally important Bangladesh city. Huda and his coauthor Ishrath Jahan, also with the University of Chittagong, blame the area’s “rapid deforestation” for the orchid’s disappearance.
Another species, Habenaria viridifolia, grew in the Lower Bengal region and hasn’t been observed since 1890. The paper ascribes its disappearance to habitat destruction and overexploitation.
And then there’s Spathoglottis pubescens. This species, which once grew near Sylhet and Chittagong, was last seen in Bangladesh in 1999 — ironically enough, by Huda and his fellow researchers. Its last known habitat was developed shortly after the observation.
The Bigger Picture
Experts say the loss of orchid species in Bangladesh embodies similar problems that orchids face around the world.
More than 1,500 orchid species currently appear on the IUCN Red List, the international database of threatened species and their known extinction risk. Of those 195 are assessed as “critically endangered,” 349 as “endangered,” 185 as “vulnerable to extinction,” and 74 as “near threatened.” Another 212 species appear on the Red List as “data deficient,” meaning no one knows how well they’re doing in the wild.
That’s just a fraction of the estimated 30,000 orchid species worldwide, but the Red List still provides a snapshot into the conservation status of these unique plants, which face threats ranging from habitat loss to overzealous commercial exploitation. Collectors have been known to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for rare orchids, and the trade has already driven several species extinct. In one of the most recent examples, collectors wiped out 99% of a newly discovered species in Vietnam once they got word of its location (many researchers now keep species locations secret to avoid a repeat of the tragedy).
The loss of local orchid species affects people, too. Many are edible or have medicinal qualities, and familiarity with orchid species plays an important role in nearby communities. Orchid declines in China, for instance, were accompanied by a loss of traditional knowledge associated with the orchids and a decline in their cultural role, according to a study published this month in the journal Anthropocene.
So why are so many orchids at risk, despite the ubiquitous nature of some well-known varieties in our garden stores and grocery shops?
For one thing, habitat loss and illegal trade are hard forces to counter.
For another, most orchid species are not commercially or even experimentally cultivated — because we don’t know how to do so.
In part that’s because orchids evolve in incredibly specific habitats. Take them out of those conditions and they simply don’t grow.
It’s more than depending on a certain temperature range or given pollinator: Orchids evolved to rely on very specific fungi at different points in their life cycles. Each species has a series of symbiotic relationships (called mycorrhizae) with various fungi, first as seeds and then as adult plants. If we don’t know which fungi an orchid species uses throughout its life, then we can’t grow them.
And the truth is we don’t know much about most of those fungi.
“There are certain groups of fungi we know are more common with orchids than other groups,” says Dennis Whigham, founding director of the North American Orchid Conservation Center. “But at the species level, they’ve just never been described. In my lab we have the largest collection of living orchid mycorrhizae, and probably 99.9% of the ones that we’ve analyzed are new to science.”
If orchid habitat is destroyed, we could potentially also see the extinction of unique resident fungi.
“When we change the environment, the fungus is probably the first thing to sort of bite the dust,” says Whigham. “When that happens, it’s impossible for the orchids to be sustained.”
Back to Bangladesh — and Beyond
Although the habitat that these extinct orchids needed may no longer exist in Bangladesh, there could still be hope for some species.
For one thing, it never hurts to keep looking. Huda reports that even though field expeditions failed to turn up those 32 species, other surprises awaited them. “We rediscovered some orchid species while doing field observations,” he says. “Some of them were thought to be extinct by other researchers.”
And few of these species, like Acanthphippium sylhetense — last seen in Bangladesh around 1880 or 1890 — have been successfully cultivated in other countries for years. Even Theocostele alata, the species last seen by Roxburgh, occasionally turns up for sale online in the United States — for as little as $29.99.
Finally, many of these species have historic ranges spreading beyond Bangladesh into other countries and may still exist there. Even Spathoglottis pubescens, the species Huda himself last observed in Bangladesh, is still known from India and China.
That doesn’t necessarily mean these wider-ranging species are in the clear. In fact, it’s impossible to know. Of the 32 species Huda and Jahan list as regionally extinct in Bangladesh, only four have been assessed by the IUCN. Podochilus khasianus appears on the Red List as a species of “least concern,” although the listing notes it has disappeared from four countries and its presence in one more is “uncertain.” Paphiopedilum venustum (the “charming paphiopedilum”) and P. insigne (the “splendid paphiopedilum”) both appear as “endangered” due to “ruthless collection for regional and international trade.” Gastrochilus calceolaris is listed as “critically endangered” because of habitat degradation and trade — an assessment that hasn’t been updated since 2004.
Huda says other nations should take their study as incentive to protect these 32 species, as well as other orchids within their borders.
“If those countries meet the same factors responsible for the loss of species in Bangladesh, the same result may happen,” he cautions. “Immediate action plans are required from conservationists and leaders on a global level to protect these beautiful and valuable species.”
As for Bangladesh, Huda and his colleagues have now turned to assessing the 155 species that remain there. They hope to determine the various species’ conservation status and suggest possible remedies to prevent further biodiversity loss in the country. “Maybe we can look through the status of other plant species as well to evaluate the degree of threat,” he suggests.
And he hopes others will join them. “I think all conservationists and researchers of biodiversity should work to raise awareness regarding these issues,” he says.
“This is a global issue,” echoes Whigham. “We need to conserve hotspots where there are a lot of orchids now and use scientific approaches to figure out how to grow and restore native species in the future.”
Unfortunately, the time to pay attention to orchid conservation grows short as species around the world continue to lose ground or disappear. Bangladesh is just one example, but it wasn’t the only one announced this month. Just a few days after Huda’s paper appeared, another study in the journal Oryx suggested that nine more orchid species from Madagascar — each observed by scientists just a single time — may have also joined the ranks of the extinct.
Sadly, more are sure to follow.
Art credits: Gastrochilus calceolaris by G. King and R. Pantling from “The Orchids of the Sikkim-Himalaya,” 1889. Dendrobium ruckeri by Sarah Anne Drake (credited as “Miss Drake”) from Edwards’s Botanical Register, 1843. Vrydagzynea albida by Carl Ludwig Blume from “Collection des Orchidées les plus remarquables de l’archipel Indien et du Japon,” 1858.
Citizen scientists are helping speed up efforts to replant and regrow dying reefs, but is the labor-intensive process really the best answer?
Visit a coral reef off the coast of Miami or the Maldives and you may see fields of bleached white instead of a burst of colors.
Coral reefs are in a death spiral. Many of the world’s major reefs — which give the oceans life, support fisheries, prevent storm damage, provide medicine and create ocean-based tourism opportunities — are expected to disappear by 2100. Experts say coral decline has numerous causes, including chemical runoff, plastic pollution, disease and overfishing.
But the main culprit is climate change, a crisis with no quick fixes.
As the late Ruth Gates — one of the world’s foremost coral experts and former director of the Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology — told me two years ago, shortly before her death: “A significant cut in greenhouse gas emissions is required to save corals…not to mention, us. Such an endeavor will require government and public cooperation, and it will take time.”
Coral reefs don’t have much time, so experts around the world have used whatever tactics were in their reach to try to give corals a fighting chance. Much of their focus has been on top-down, policy-driven approaches like creating marine protected areas, banning toxic sunscreens, and cracking down on the illegal capture of reef fish.
But a growing number of experts, building on efforts by Gates and others, have taken a more bottom-up approach: coral reef restoration, or the process of repopulating deteriorating reefs with healthy coral. And they’re tapping citizen scientists to help with the effort — people participating in scientific projects organized by experts.
There’s evidence that this type of restoration could solidly support the full range of reef-conservation efforts underway. But given the extent of the crisis and what’s at stake, is repeatedly putting new crops of corals into harm’s way the answer?
Climate Change Threats
Though reefs cover less than 1% of Earth’s surface, they support more than a million different species, including many types of algae — like sea grasses and sea lettuces — and a broad range of animals from starfish to shrimp to sharks, as well as people. Experts estimate that corals pull $375 billion into the global economy every year, mainly by fostering tourism, supporting fisheries, and contributing to medicine and storm protection.
Despite their value corals have been in decline for decades. Scientists responded by initiating the first reef-restoration efforts about 50 years ago. Since then restoration efforts have been tailored to meet the needs of corals prioritized at specific times and places. In the 1970s, as coastal development boomed, scientists focused on expanding corals’ habitat by strategically placing shipwrecks, concrete pipes, tires and other manmade structures underwater on which corals could grow. By the early 2000s, scientists had become more interested in addressing other localized risks to reefs — such as overfishing, irresponsible tourism and invasive species.
But climate change poses an even more far-reaching threat.
Bleaching — a precursor to coral death caused by stressors including warming waters — has left nary a reef unscathed around the world. Most corals thrive in temperatures between 73-84 degrees Fahrenheit. Oceans naturally undergo seasonal warming, which leads to temperature fluctuations high enough to bleach some corals. In the past corals could recover from bleaching events once waters cooled. Scientists say it takes 15 to 25 years for a reef to recover from serious bleaching and become healthy enough to support a rich host of marine life. But today, with the relentless and extreme warming our oceans now face, corals are running out of possible recovery time. It’s becoming much harder for them to make a comeback.
A major coral bleaching event on part of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Photo courtesy of Oregon State University, (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Not only does climate change raise the temperature of the oceans, resulting in inhospitable conditions for corals, it deposits excess carbon dioxide into the water —increasing seawater’s acidity. More acidic waters can erode hard corals’ skeletons and make it more difficult for corals to grow. The cumulative effects have been seen around the planet. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more than 27% of the world’s coral population has died over the past three decades.
According to UNESCO, bleaching on coral reefs across the world was first documented in 1983, but since then its frequency and severity has quickly accelerated. In a 2017 report, the organization identified the cause of bleaching on 72% of its so-called “globally significant” reefs from 2014 to 2017 as record-breaking ocean temperatures.
Marine biologist Maria Anderson says a dying coral reef is a painful thing to witness.
“During bleaching, the usual reef hues of browns, purples and greens are replaced by a white ghost town,” says Andersen, a resident marine biologist at Ocean Group Maldives who is part of an upstarting coral reef replanting project based at InterContinental Resort, a hotel on Raa Atoll. “Soft corals appear as white blobs that melt off rocks and hard corals turn into fragile skeletons. The only way I can describe it is heartbreaking.”
Secret Weapon # 1: The Public
To stem this tide, restoration efforts now mostly involve growing corals in undersea nurseries and transplanting them onto dying reefs that are losing coral. Like saplings being replanted in a fallen forest, young corals can help regenerate an ecosystem that’s becoming barren.
But the work can be expensive and labor-intensive. According to researchers it can cost more than $150,000 to restore one reef — a small fortune in low-income coastal communities that may struggle to find funding.
That’s why restoration efforts have grown increasingly reliant on the help of citizen scientists. This has significantly reduced the high price tag of restoration by replacing paid labor with volunteers — without any noticeable decline in success. Research shows the growth and survival rate of the corals planted by citizen scientists is almost identical to corals planted by experts. When handled properly, the corals replanted by volunteers survive at a rate of at least 80%, and often exceeds 90%, says Dalton Hesley, a senior research associate at the University of Miami Benthic Ecology and Coral Restoration Lab, who led that study.
“Replanting is an investment,” Hesley says. “These corals should, in theory, live indefinitely, and you should expect to see growth over the years.”
A healthy staghorn coral colony two years after it was planted on a reef in the Florida Keys. Photo by FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
But that’s only if we also take necessary action to prevent further degradation of, and ultimately remediate, the oceans, he says. Unless the world addresses climate change, runoff, pollution and development, reefs will continue to decline and risk being lost forever.
At this moment in Earth’s history, “I don’t think it should be a matter of choosing one over the other,” says Andersen. Both large-scale efforts to address the climate crisis and labor-intensive replanting efforts are necessary to give reefs a chance of surviving Earth’s current extinction crisis. “We have to meet somewhere in the middle, finding renewable resources while also restoring reefs. We can’t just sit around and wait, leaving corals in limbo.”
Secret Weapon # 2: Genetics
“On first glance replanting may seem like a distraction from mitigating climate change, which is what we have to do if we want to save reefs,” says Andersen. But she says restoration can give corals a better chance — especially when they’re coupled with recent efforts to supercharge replanting by genetically identifying the most diverse and resilient species.
A well-planned, diverse reef is probably the best remedy to bleaching, Andersen says.
“I’ve heard of hundreds of restoration projects around the world, but none that have failed,” she says. “But if one happened to fail, I would assume its leaders failed to create enough coral diversity.”
Hesley agrees: “With high diversity there’s strength.”
Thousands of species of hard and soft corals have been identified to date, and each of these species has varying levels of resistance to stressors. Even within a species, scientists have identified different gene patterns that can convey different benefits.
“Some corals grow very quickly, some are less prone to disease, some bleach less, some are hardier during storms, for example,” Hesley says. “There’s not one coral species or individual that excels across the board, so we must focus on creating high levels of coral diversity.”
Larger-scale reef restoration projects, like the program Hesley is involved in at the University of Miami, keep track of coral genetics using DNA analysis, ensuring coral diversity. Smaller-scale programs in rather remote places, like Andersen’s project in the Maldives, often do not have in-house access to labs and genetics testing, which can be prohibitively expensive.
Andersen says these challenges require her to go through a complex research process and collaboration with coral geneticists on a different atoll to pinpoint the most and least resilient coral species. Then, she must carefully remove fragments of coral from reefs known to have survived past bleaching events so that they can be used to spawn more hardy corals. After that, she monitors the donor reef and fragments to ensure they stay healthy. These preliminary parts of the replanting process, which require permits and extraordinary precision, are left up to the professionals.
Choosing coral parent colonies to aid reef restoration efforts. Photo by FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Promise and Challenges
When it comes to giving dying corals another shot, Hesley acknowledges that coral reef restoration is not a perfect solution. He says finding adequate funding, staff and volunteer labor, and addressing the root causes of reef decline — climate change and local stressors to reef health — are lingering challenges.
However, Anderson says the benefits of reef restoration, especially those powered by citizen scientists, are strong compared to their drawbacks. This has led to projects cropping up on reefs all around the world, developed by scientists hired by research institutions and hotels alike.
One of the most exciting she’s seen is a citizen-science restoration project led by Peter Harrison of Southern Cross University in Australia, who has developed a backpack-sized inflatable coral spawn catcher and nursery pool in which baby corals can grow until they’re big enough to be replanted.
Of course, even volunteers can only do so much. Harrison has also pioneered use of robots to swiftly distribute baby corals onto nearly 7.5 acres of damaged reefs, doing a job in just six hours that would take several human hands at least a week. If perfected, it could put volunteer seeding efforts effectively out of business.
But there’s always a role for people willing to help. After corals are propagated, whether it’s by hand or machine, citizen scientists can help care for them in undersea nurseries.
All of this requires careful planning. Andersen emphasizes the importance of establishing clearly defined goals for restoration, based around a community’s needs and available resources. Another aspect of a successful restoration effort, she says, is an effective and accessible training program that primes citizen scientists on how to participate and, ultimately, care about the future of corals.
And that ties into the fundamental reason why citizen science still matters: because restoration buys time for corals. Experts at the Smithsonian Research Institute have found that the more living coral a reef has when exposed to highly acidic waters, the more likely it is to survive, instead of bleaching and dying.
Meanwhile, the efforts help to connect people to something that otherwise might stay out of sight and out of mind beneath the surface of the ocean.
“I don’t think a lot of people who get involved in restoration initially have that emotional attachment to coral reefs simply because they haven’t had a chance to care about them,” Andersen says. “Restoration gives them the opportunity to make a connection, to really understand how dire the situation is, and to do something that can help.”
When a species is critically endangered, every individual matters.
Visitors to the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery in Colorado can get a chance to meet a rock star of the wildlife world: a black-footed ferret named Stevie Nicks.
Named after singer Stevie Nicks, this cute and ferocious little carnivore is part of the captive-breeding and release program that has saved her species. Today more than 1,400 black-footed ferrets live in the wild — a major success for a species that was believed to be extinct just 30 years ago.
Unfortunately Stevie can’t be released to live in the wild — she’s blind, so she could never survive on her own.
But she’s still part of the breeding program, and as a resident of the museum she helps her species by serving as a public face of the extinction crisis. From her safe enclosure, she can inspire visitors who get the rare opportunity to see a live black-footed ferret play and even hunt whenever her keepers give her live rodents.
Black-footed ferrets aren’t out of the woods yet. They still face threats from habitat loss and sylvatic plague and other diseases, but hardworking conservationists have managed to save them from disappearing forever.
Learn more about Stevie and black-footed ferrets in our video below.
Cat Tale, a new book by journalist Craig Pittman, takes us on a wild ride into the science and politics of saving an iconic species.
It’s not even February yet, and Florida panthers are already having a bad year. Three have been killed by vehicles and one by a train in the first two weeks of 2020 alone.
The big cats once ranged across the South but now are mostly found slinking between fragments of habitat in southern Florida. Traffic poses a significant hazard: Last year 23 panthers were killed by vehicles — a significant blow to a wild population that hovers precariously at only around 230 animals.
But there likely wouldn’t be any Florida panthers today if it weren’t for decades of work to save them. The story of how Florida panthers, a puma subspecies, were rescued from the brink of extinction is expertly told in the new book Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle To Save the Florida Panther, by journalist and New York Times best-selling author Craig Pittman. Pittman’s been tracking the story for 20 years at the Tampa Bay Times.
The cast of characters and wild turns of event in Pittman’s book seem like the stuff of fiction. There’s the Stetson-wearing Texas cougar hunter Roy McBride, who becomes a master panther tracker. Veterinarian Melody Roelke rings the alarm on the panther’s genetic problems, only to have her male colleagues look the other way. And the arch villain of the story, a biologist nicknamed “Dr. Panther,” establishes himself as the preeminent expert but is actually fudging his research and colluding with developers.
Pittman traces these and other characters through years of discoveries, mistakes, public backlash and breakthroughs — a fledgling program to radio-collar and track the animals that taught important lessons about tranquilizing big cats high up in trees; a failed captive-breeding program; a failed reintroduction plan in north Florida; and a last-ditch effort to bring in new genes by releasing Texas cougars in panther habitat.
The story is tragic, inspiring and deeply poignant. In his prologue Pittman calls it a “scientific cautionary tale.” As we grapple with mass extinction across the world, he writes, “This is a guide to what extraordinary efforts it takes to bring back just one sub-species — one that’s particularly popular — and what unexpected costs such a decision brings.”
Pittman talked to The Revelator about the threats that panthers continue to face and what lessons we can learn about saving other endangered species.
When you first started writing about panthers 20 years ago, what did you think about their prospects?
Author Craig Pittman. Photo by Dirk Shadd.
My first stories were around 1998-1999. Nobody knew if the Texas cougar experiment had worked yet. Things looked pretty grim and a lot of developers were proceeding on the understanding that panthers wouldn’t be a problem anymore, so it was OK to build in panther habitat.
Things looked dire at that point and it wasn’t until around 2001 or 2002 where you started seeing these new kittens being born and thinking maybe things would be OK. The concern then became making sure that the Texas cougar genetics didn’t swamp the panther genetics.
We know that panthers aren’t out of the woods yet. Is there clear science on what would be considered a recovered population?
Ever since scientists drew up the very first recovery plan decades ago, they said the key was to have three [geographically] separate populations of about 250 or 300 panthers. Obviously, we’re still a long way from that and from even starting a second population. You could call what’s going on in central Florida the start of a new population, but there’s just a handful of panthers there. If they choose to follow those particular goals, they’re a long way away.
But I phrase it that way because [the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] did not follow their own recommendations when they down-listed manatees [from endangered to threatened]. They didn’t follow their recovery plan. They just said, “Well, this computer model says it’s OK, so we’re going to say it’s OK, even though the threats are still there.”
I call manatees “the endangered species you can see,” because they will show up everywhere people are — they’re in your backyard canal, swimming around your dock. At the time I wrote that book, they were an endangered species, but one that you could see with your own eyes.
Panthers, not so much. Panthers are very elusive. They don’t like to be around people. So they’re more of an abstract concept to a lot of folks. People know the panthers exist, but they’ve never seen one. So it’s not quite as personal with panthers.
And the other thing that I wrote about in Manatee Insanity is that the Save the Manatee Club, and specifically its cofounder Jimmy Buffett, came up with this brilliant marketing concept called “adopt a manatee,” where they took the IDs from a whole bunch of the manatees that the state had been following and, for a contribution of around $5 or so originally, you could adopt a manatee. You’d get a little adoption certificate with the name of your manatee on it and its background.
People became personally invested in the fate of their particular manatee. I was digging through state archives and I saw letters from, you know, Mrs. Johnson’s fourth grade class in Mesa, Arizona to the Citrus County Commission saying, “Why are you being mean to our manatee and not passing this rule to make boats slow down?”
They found a way to make people all over the country care about individual manatees as a way of getting them to care about the species as a whole. There’s no similar project for panthers and generally most of the panthers don’t have nicknames like the manatees do.
There are people who absolutely love panthers, mostly in the abstract. And there are some folks who would dearly love to see a hunting season opened on them and feel like the government’s lying about how many there are. But I think the majority of Floridians support panthers and are happy that they seem to be coming back.
Your book is a really incredibly in-depth case study of what it takes to save one endangered species. Are there lessons we can learn from it about saving other species?
I like what Melody Roelke said — at the point where they started to realize they needed to take action [to save the panthers], it was almost too late to do anything. So her advice was, if you see it heading this way, take action immediately. Don’t dawdle around and get into arguments and get mired down in bureaucratic red tape about what you’re going to do.
They really were almost too late to save the panther. It basically came down to five female Texas cougars breeding with the remaining male panthers. And had that not worked, that would’ve been it. They’d probably be gone by now.
The other thing is, if you’re going to spend this much money and work this hard to bring back an endangered species, think about what’s going to happen afterwards. What are the ramifications going to be? Because as we saw with the captive-breeding experiment that they started and then dropped, they had not planned very well. They had figured out they were going to take these panther kittens out of the wild and breed them in captivity to put [grown] panthers back in the wild, but they hadn’t really thought about where they were going to put them and how they were going to train these captive panthers to be OK in the wild.
What are the biggest threats they face now?
The reason I waited so long to write this book is because I needed a good ending and I finally got one. [Editor’s note: We won’t give it away, but it’s a doozy.]
But just because I found an ending for the book doesn’t mean the story of the panther is over. We’re now dealing with this mystery ailment that’s afflicting some panthers and bobcats, to the point where they can’t walk and scientists don’t know why.
We’ve also got more large development coming down the pike headed for the area [where most panthers live]. In particular there’s a proposal backed by the governor — who is supposedly pro-environment — to build this enormous toll road right through panther habitat, which would bring more development into that area.
One of my colleagues, Lawrence Mower, just wrote a story where we’d gotten copies of some emails from Fish and Wildlife Service biologists who study the panthers saying this will just basically be a stake in the heart of panther recovery if you build this toll road through there.
So there are continuing threats, and we’re a long way from them being considered recovered. But things are looking hopeful in ways they haven’t for a long time and all because of the very hard work from these folks who labored for years mostly in anonymity because they believed in the cause and they believed that what was going on was something worth devoting their lives to — even though it led to burnout and fighting and depression and, in one case, suicide.
In a way, I wrote the book to call attention to the role of those unsung heroes to say, look at what they did, look at the risks that they took, look at the brutal work days they put in trying to figure this out — sometimes even against the public’s own desires.
This gruesome scene has played out several times in Argentina in recent years. In one incident that made worldwide headlines, 
“Every year the ocean waters get warmer, and the reason is because of the heat-trapping gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere,” says 
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