Poverty and hunger drive wild meat consumption in some regions of Madagascar, but wealthier citizens also drive illegal trade in lemurs. Will emerging solutions help?
For years now conservationists have warned that many of Madagascar’s iconic lemur species face the risk of extinction due to rampant deforestation, the illegal pet trade and the emerging market for the primates’ meat.
Yes, people eat lemurs, and the reasons they do aren’t exactly what we might expect.
One 2016 study found — perhaps not surprisingly — that Madagascar’s extreme poverty drives the poorest families to hunt and eat lemurs and other wildlife. The study was conducted in Masoala National Park, home to ten of Madagascar’s 110-plus lemur species, including several critically endangered species.
Local hunters know that killing lemurs is against the law, but there’s a reason that doesn’t stop them. The study, published in Biological Conservation, found that “almost all children in lemur-hunting households were malnourished.” Wild-caught meat, tragically, is the only readily available solution for hungry families. The authors concluded that “unless lemur conservation efforts on the Masoala [peninsula] prioritize child health, they are unlikely to reduce lemur hunting or improve lemur conservation.”
Although poverty is endemic in Madagascar, it’s not the only factor driving lemur consumption. Two additional studies published that year in PLOS One and in Environmental Conservation revealed that Madagascar’s wealthier and middle-class citizens are equal participants. The studies uncovered a massive supply chain that transports meat from lemurs and other endangered species into urban and semi-urban areas, where it is sold in restaurants, open-air markets and even supermarkets.
The studies, the result of almost 2,000 interviews throughout the northern half of Madagascar, found that the meat trade in these more urban areas is not about poverty. Instead, it’s because people have a preference for wild-caught meat over more commercially grown livestock.
Combined with the first study, the two supply-chain papers reveal a complex answer as to who is eating lemurs and why.
“It’s not just poor, rural people and it’s not just rich, urban people,” said Temple University researcher Kim Reuter, the lead author of the PLOS One and Environmental Conservation papers and a co-founder of the Lemur Conservation Network. “There are a lot of people in the middle, your average Malagasy person living in semi-urban areas for example, who eat bushmeat.” In fact, Reuter and her colleagues found, these urban consumers eat twice the amount of wild-caught meat as people living in rural areas, and they’re willing to pay more for it.
Reuter’s studies concluded that this trade could be enough to push several species closer toward extinction.
She also pointed out that it’s important to study what happens to lemurs outside of natural habitats and protected areas, and that conservation programs need to address the meat trade in addition to other efforts such as forest preservation.
Three years after those studies were published, some progress is being made on the bushmeat front. Again, it’s probably not what you expect. According to a report in Mongabay, several ongoing projects aim to produce a new protein-heavy cash crop to help wean people off of lemur meat.
Insects, it turns out, may fit that bill.
Insect consumption in Madagascar is already fairly common, with locusts and beetles being among the most popular choices. Anthropologist Cortni Borgerson from Montclair State University hopes to take that further and has embarked on a three-year study to see if insect farming can provide enough food to reduce both malnutrition and the need to hunt wild meat.
“You can see that there is a clear correlation between malnourishment, food insecurity and lemur hunting,” Borgerson told Mongabay. “But that also makes it very solvable: We just need to solve what you put on top of your rice. If we can fix this, people will shift off.”
Another thing that may help: tourism. Recreational travel to Madagascar, which plunged during the country’s recent political unrest, has soared in recent months, and vacation bookings for this summer at more than a third higher than they were at this time last year. This could bring much-needed income to the Malagasy people and provide an incentive to protect wild lemur populations for viewing by eco-tourists. (On the other hand, it also has the potential to further incentivize the lemur pet trade. Many hotels and restaurants have been known to display “cute” lemur in cages or on chains in order to attract tourists, who are unaware that the animals have been snatched from the wild and may not live long in captivity.)
Lemur at a hotel by Leonora Enking (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The tourism boom and the insect research remains in their early phases, but still, they represent progress for the world’s eighth-poorest country, a land where at least 95 percent of lemur species are threatened with extinction and far too many people suffer in poverty. With those threats continuing to weigh heavily on both wildlife and people, every step forward is critical — both for humans and wildlife.
(An earlier version of this article was published by Scientific American.)
The University of California at San Francisco’s new fossil fuel industry documents library offers a tool to help the legal, political and public education fight against climate change and the companies responsible.
On every front, academics, journalists and policymakers compare the fossil fuel industry to the tobacco industry. The two industries share the same playbook: strategies of delay, exculpating blame by making the consumer responsible, denying scientific consensus, publishing industry-funded science and fostering public confusion over the real impacts of their products.
A major difference between the two industries, however, is the timescale and scope of the harms caused. While public health professionals are executing coordinated efforts for a “tobacco endgame” to reduce smoking and tobacco prevalence to five percent of the population or less, with the possibility of ending the tobacco epidemic in certain areas within a couple decades — we’re far from making similar progress when it comes to climate change.
Even if all fossil fuel production and consumption ended today, the fallout from 50 years of delay caused by industry obfuscation will have ramifications for humans and other species for centuries or even millennia. If disruptive climate change continues unabated, the impacts on the planet may be essentially irreversible, at least as far as any humanly relevant scale.
That’s why it’s important to know what we’re up against with the fossil fuel industry — and that’s why the University of California at San Francisco’s Industry Documents Library now houses a trove of information on the fossil fuel industry, providing an essential complement to the already nearly 15 million and growing internal industry documents from the tobacco, food, pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
These documents come from diverse sources, including the Climate Investigations Center, discovery processes in litigation and documents published on Climate Files. They provide key evidence regarding what the fossil fuel industry knew regarding the catastrophic impacts of climate change, when they knew, and how these companies used every means possible to protect themselves and their shareholders at the expense of everyone else.
Photo: Glenn Beltz (CC BY 2.0)
UCSF’s collection of Fossil Fuel Industry documents — which are freely available to all researchers and the public — highlight the mechanisms that have been used to thwart concerted action. A key aspect of this was the early knowledge the fossil fuel industry had about the ramifying consequences of unabated anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and the contrast between this and their public stance. For example, Exxon and other fossil fuel companies’ own research showed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s that a doubling of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 would likely cause “major shifts in rainfall/agriculture,” polar ice melt, coupled with “3°C global average temperature rise and 10°C at poles.”
Yet they doubled down on business-as-usual policies of continued — and even intensified — extraction of oil, gas and coal, and spent significant amounts of money to create the impression in public that climate science was highly uncertain.
Why is this collection being housed at UCSF — a university known for its health and medical programs?
One reason is the parallels between the misrepresentation and denial of climate science and the misrepresentation and denial of the harms of tobacco use. Just as the tobacco industry promoted smoking not as a threat to public health but rather a “personal choice,” this same refrain is now being used by the fossil fuel industry urging people to make lifestyle choices as the solution to climate change. Such industry-sponsored “solutions” shift the blame from the industry to consumers.
This parallel is not just analogical: Documents show that many of the same individuals, PR and advertising companies, and think tanks have been involved in both. For example, the American Petroleum Institute attempted to recruit the president and affiliates of the Tobacco Institute in 1997 for its own president and CEO position.
Cigarette butt litter. (Photo by Tavallai, CC BY-ND 2.0)
The other reason is that climate change is a major global health threat. From the Lancet Countdown to the World Health Organization’s Climate Health Country Profile Project, the public health and medical communities worldwide are in agreement that climate change affects every aspect of health, often disproportionately harming those with the least resources for resilience. The World Health Organization estimates that children five years or younger bear 88 percent of the health burdens of climate change.
Anthropogenic climate change will define the future of health for humans and life on this planet. It has already fundamentally shifted the geography of disease and increase in prevalence of both chronic and infectious disease.
Documents like those in this collection will be crucial in helping the public come to terms with the implications of these harms.
Mark Fisher (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Consider the current climate lawsuit Juliana v. United States, filed by 21 youth plaintiffs against the U.S. government on behalf of youth and future generations for actions that jeopardize the constitutional rights of children to life, liberty and property threatened by climate change. The fossil fuel industry initially intervened in a failed attempt to dismiss the case; now they face numerous lawsuits themselves, both in the United States and across the globe. More than 80 prominent scientists and physicians, as well as health organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, have submitted amicus briefs. As U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken wrote in her 2016 decision denying motions to dismiss Juliana v. United States, “Exercising my ‘reasoned judgment,’ I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.”
These documents also highlight the relationships between industry and government and the conflicts of interest that develop when government and industry are intertwined. One notices, for example, a persistent revolving door between government and the fossil fuel industry, of which ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s brief tenure as the U.S. secretary of State is but one instance.
As we increasingly face the costs of climate change, this information can play a critical role for researchers, journalists, litigators, legislators and many others. It can provide documentary evidence for legal action and historical record. And it can also serve a political, scientific and moral purpose: helping to make people aware of the long and complex history of industry disinformation and malfeasance, and, at least in part, inoculate the public against further disinformation.
A version of this story first appeared in the University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library blog.
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.
Journalist Christopher Ketcham explains why we’re running out of time to save the West’s public lands and wildlife.
If you’re a lover of wilderness, wildlife, the American West and the public lands on which they all depend, then journalist Christopher Ketcham’s new book is required — if depressing — reading.
“It is still possible in this country to find wild, clean, open spaces, where the rhythms of the natural world go on as they should, relatively undisturbed by industrial man,” he writes. “I fear the opportunity, though, could disappear in our lifetime.”
And the reason is pretty simple: Government agencies tasked with protecting our lands have failed. But how this happened is complex and has taken decades to unfold, as he explains. “The private interests that want the land for profit have planted their teeth in the government,” he writes. “The national trend is against the preservation of the commons. Huge stretches are effectively privatized, public in name only.”
This is clear in Escalante, Utah — home to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — a crucial battleground in the fight over public lands. Ketcham writes about the biggest scourge on public lands there and across the West: cattle.
“Grazing is today the most widespread single use of the public domain, occurring on 270 million acres of national forest and BLM land,” he writes. The grazing of privately owned cattle on public lands has polluted streams, decimated native plants, and turned a biologically diverse ecosystem into a monoculture of grassland.
But in areas where cows have been removed, wildlife has returned with great abundance. Raptors and songbird populations jumped 350 percent after eight years without cattle, according to one study he cites.
That’s only possible if we take drastic steps. “How can you preserve a wild and unspoiled landscape with a ruinous alien bovine on it?” he asks. “You can’t. It’s an impossibility, an absurdity.”
And this gets at one of the book’s key points: Government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service manage for “multiple uses,” which includes logging, mining, grazing and drilling — activities that are at their core incompatible with conservation and wildlife protection. “The BLM and Forest Service are schizoid,” Ketcham writes. “With one hand they protect; with the other they ravage.”
While grazing gets a lot of ink and ire from Ketcham, he also writes about the harm from roadbuilding. We now have 400,000 miles of roads through our national forests, facilitating the profits of private companies from oil and gas drilling, timber sales and other extractions. “Roading was the means by which all other industrial development could proceed, the crucial first step in the domination of the wild,” he writes.
Ketcham also explores the role of Wildlife Services, the USDA program that uses “an arsenal of poisons, traps, and aerial gunships at a cost of tens of millions of dollars annually” to kill wildlife perceived as a threat to ranchers. “During the twentieth century, the agency was probably responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of animals,” he writes, “…including twenty species of carnivores and twelve taxa of mammals listed as endangered, threatened, or as candidates for protection under the Endangered Species Act.”
It’s not just Wildlife Services failing endangered species, of course: Ketcham writes about the government-industry collusion that has betrayed the grizzly bear and sage grouse, among other species.
While the Trump administration’s anti-environment agenda has ramped up some threats, including slashing vast amounts of protected public lands, the wheels of this machine were set in motion long ago and supported by both Democratic and Republican administrations. It was Obama’s administration, he writes, that “perpetrated the worst offenses, removing protections for some of the most charismatic species in the West, the veritable last vestiges of the wild West. In so doing, it was Democrats who set up for evisceration the Endangered Species Act, a law crucially important for the future of biodiversity on the public lands.”
So-called “Big Green” groups, those large national environmental nonprofits that get most of the money and media, also take considerable fire from Ketcham for their willingness to compromise away environmental protections and countless acres of wilderness, like with the 2014 Rocky Mountain Front legislation, which was celebrated for creating 67,000 acres of new wilderness south of Glacier National Park, but opened up 200,000 acres of roadless areas to industry.
If there’s any failure in Ketcham’s well-researched and engaging prose, it’s that it’s 400 pages of brutally bad news. And it’s hard to know what to do with it all, which he readily admits.
“Sometimes I’m glad my job as an investigative reporter is mainly to lay demolitions under corrupt structures, blow them up, walk away, and let you people deal with the rubble,” he writes. “I’m no policy wonk. Frankly I have no idea how to save the public lands from a system that marches on inexorably, not in a way that’s politically doable in the near term.”
He does have a few thoughts, though, and calls for ending the federal timber sale program, beginning a vast decommissioning of roads, and what he calls the “single most important action we could take for the public lands, for wild plants and wild animals” — evicting cattle.
And while there’s no grand plan for how we save our public lands, he does present a clear case for why they’re under assault, who’s responsible and what’s at stake. And there’s a rousing call to action.
“What’s needed is a campaign for the public lands that is vital, fierce, impassioned, sometimes dangerous, without hypocrisy, that stands against the tyranny of money, coupled with a campaign of public education that explains in the simplest terms what the lands are, the glorious extent of them, the ecosystems they encompass, the wild things that live in them,” Ketcham writes. “We need to bring the good news to every citizen, the news that he or she has a say in what happens on the public lands. This land is our land.”
How does reporting on the environment promote democracy? A journalism professor describes conditions in the Republic of Georgia, where the media isn’t equipped to cover issues like pollution.
What happens when an illegally logged tree falls or poachers kill endangered brown bears in the forest, but there’s no journalist to report it?
That’s the situation in the Republic of Georgia, which faces challenges that include poaching, deteriorating air quality, habitat disruption from new hydropower dams, illegal logging and climate change. The effects cross national borders and affect economic and political relationships in the Caucasus and beyond.
I researched environmental journalism in the Republic of Georgia as a Fulbright Scholar there in the fall of 2018. I chose Georgia because many of its environmental and media problems are similar to those confronting other post-Soviet countries nearly 30 years after independence. As I have found in my research on mass media in other post-Soviet nations, journalists risk provoking powerful public and corporate interests when they investigate sensitive environmental issues.
But when the media don’t cover these problems, Georgians go uninformed about issues relevant to their daily lives. Eco-violators operate with impunity, and the government and Georgia’s influential private sector remain opaque to the public. At a time when government hostility to journalists is rising in many countries, Georgia illustrates how environmental damage, pollution and ill health can spread, and go unpunished, when powerful interests are unaccountable to the public.
Georgia’s habitats range from alpine peaks to river floodplains and the Black Sea coast. Giorgi Balakhadze/Wikimedia, CC BY
An Unstable Mediascape
Levels of press freedom, autonomy and media sustainability have fluctuated since Georgia became independent in 1991. The latest constitutional change greatly strengthened Parliament and eliminated direct election of the president, whose office is primarily ceremonial.
The governing Georgian Dream coalition has become increasingly anti-press over the past two years. Georgia’s mediascape is fairly diverse but dominated by its two largest television channels. The 2019 World Press Freedom Index ranks Georgia 60th out of 180 countries, a substantial improvement from 100th in 2013. However, it notes that media owners still often control editorial content, and threats against journalists are not uncommon.
Shallow, uninformed coverage
In addition to my own observations during 3 ½ months based in Tbilisi with visits to other cities, my findings draw on input from 16 journalists, media trainers, scientists and representatives of advocacy groups and multinational agencies whom I interviewed or who spoke to my media and society class at Caucasus University.
Source after source bemoaned what they saw as generally shallow, sparse, misleading and inaccurate coverage of environmental topics. In their view, the legacy of Soviet journalism as a willing propaganda tool of the state lingered. Tamara Chergoleishvili, director general of the magazine and news website Tabula, put it bluntly: “There is no environmental journalism… There is no professionalism.”
One major complaint was that journalists lacked knowledge about science and the environment. “If you don’t understand the issue, you can’t convey it to the public,” said Irakli Shavgulidze, chair of the governing board of the nonprofit Center for Biodiversity Conservation & Research.
Another concern was that journalists often failed to connect environmental topics with other issues such as the economy, foreign relations, energy and health. Sophie Tchitchinadze, a United Nations Development Programme communications analyst and former journalist, said the Georgian media was just starting to view itself as “an essential part of economic development and equally important to social issues.”
Tourists swim and sunbathe in the Black Sea resort town of Batumi. Georgia’s government has attracted top foreign investors to build hotels and develop tourist sites. AP Photo/Maria Danilova, File
Transparent in Principle, Not in Practice
Lack of access to information was also a common complaint, despite transparency laws entitling the public and press to government documents.
For example, when Tsira Gvasalia, Georgia’s leading environmental investigative journalist, reported on the nation’s only gold mining company, she was unable to obtain full information on possible government actions from the local prosecutor, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture or the courts. “The company has a close connection with the government,” she noted.
Georgian citizens weren’t much help either. In the small mining town of Kazreti, Gvasalia saw thick layers of dust on roads and bus stops from uncovered trucks transporting ore to the company’s processing facility. When she asked residents how pollution affected their everyday lives, people were “very careful. Once I mentioned the name of the company, everybody went silent. … Everyone worked for the company,” she said.
Who Sets the Priorities?
In my sources’ view, environmental coverage was not a priority for Georgian journalists and media owners, especially at the national level. Lia Chakhunashvili, a former environmental journalist now associated with the nonprofit International Research & Exchanges Board, observed that covering the environment “is not as glamorous as being a political reporter or on TV all the time or having parliamentary credentials.”
“If the environmental sector becomes a priority for the government, journalists will try to cover it better,” Melano Tkabladze, an environmental economist with the Caucasus Environmental NGO Network, predicted.
What coverage exists is weakened by misinformation, disinformation and “fake news.” Much of it originates from Russia, which briefly invaded Georgia in 2008 to support two breakaway provinces seeking independence, and vehemently opposes Georgia’s efforts to join NATO and the European Union.
Tabula’s Chergoleishvili asserted that Georgian journalists could not distinguish fake news from legitimate sources. As an example, Gvasalia described planted reports on Facebook that claimed a hydroelectric project would “elevate local people” and provide “great social benefit.” “Seventy percent of this needs to be double-checked,” she warned.
Cultivating Better Reporting
Although Georgia’s media sector remains politically and economically vulnerable, I see two encouraging signs. First, young journalists are increasingly interested in covering the environment. Second, Georgian leaders strongly desire to join the European Union, where multinational eco-issues such as curbing climate change and building a pan-European energy market are priorities. This step would be significant for Georgia, given the trans-border nature of environmental problems, the country’s progress toward energy self-sufficiency and its strategic location.
In the meantime, more support for independent fact-checking could improve Georgian environmental coverage. Some already occurs: For example, FactCheck.ge, a nonpartisan news website based in Tbilisi, critiqued a claim in 2016 by Tbilisi’s then-mayor, who had campaigned on a promise of bolstering the city’s green spaces, that the city had planted a half-million trees.The larger truth, it reported, was that many planted saplings were extremely small and closely packed. A large fraction had already dried up and were unlikely to survive.
Another partial solution would be for environmental nonprofits to offer the Georgian media more press tours, trainings and access to experts. However, eco-NGOs also have agendas and constituencies, so this type of outreach can’t substitute for informed professional journalism.
Covering the environment is challenging and can be dangerous in any country. But fostering environmental journalism in emerging democracies like Georgia is one way to hold government officials and powerful businesses accountable.
For 12 years, Janet Kessler has chronicled the behavior and family life of San Francisco’s growing population of coyotes as the city itself undergoes big changes.
San Francisco is changing, and not everyone is happy about it. Many long-term residents feel pushed out by the city’s flood of high-tech jobs and start-up cash, a situation that caused The Washington Post to proclaim that the “city of love” had broken America’s heart.
It’s not the first such story. Locals have penned their own defenses, but no one doubts the cultural bedrock — not to mention the actual landscape — beneath San Francisco is shifting.
Does this affect more than just the city’s human residents? Amateur naturalist Janet Kessler has kept a close eye on one slice of the city’s wildlife — its coyotes, which returned to the area in 2002 after being wiped out in the mid-1900s.
It hasn’t always been a happy reunion. Coyotes have been blamed for the deaths of a handful of dogs and cats, prompting concern from some residents.
Can that situation turn around? Kessler thinks it can. For the past 12 years she’s been photo-documenting coyote behavior and family life — building a case for the coexistence of the city’s growing populations of both urban residents and wild canids.
She admits she’s drawn in by the drama of it — getting to know the coyote families, watching the youngsters set off for new territories, seeing rivalries and partnerships develop. It’s something akin to a wildlife soap opera. And she tunes in day after day.
Coyotes in San Francisco having a playful tussle. (Photo by Janet Kessler)
Coyotes, she’s found, don’t have much trouble figuring out how to navigate a changing urban landscape. In San Francisco, despite the high-rises looming ever taller and new condos filling empty lots, coyotes are finding space.
And that’s true across the country. These days you can find coyotes in most cities in the United States, according to the Urban Coyote Initiative.
Kessler says public opinion of coyotes has improved in recent years, but that’s come with another set of problems. We talked with her about what she’s learned, how San Francisco’s coyotes are coping with a changing city, and the value of making space for wildlife in urban areas.
What’s captivated you about coyotes to devote so much time to getting to know them?
Janet Kessler has been photo-documenting coyotes in San Francisco since 2007. (Photo courtesy of Janet Kessler)
I met my first coyote up on Twin Peaks 12 years ago. I didn’t know about coyotes and I was overwhelmed by what I saw in a wild animal. This little coyote got up and danced and was curious, intelligent, had emotions and personality. That’s what pulled me in. I went away needing to find out more.
From then on I always carried a camera. I would watch whenever I saw that coyote appear. After that I started expanding more. Every day, I’ll spend anywhere from 2 to 4 or more hours watching. If they’re there, I’ll stay, get myself in the distance and I just watch to see what happens.
If it’s not immediately obvious what they’re doing, I’ll keep watching to understand; it’s a saga, a thrilling story with cliffhangers and all. By slowly getting to know more and more, you get into it and you become part of what it is.
What have you learned about them?
All my initial impressions have been confirmed repeatedly during my observations. These animals are social: they communicate and interact with each other all the time. They are always doing something and always aware of what the others are doing and each other’s moods. They communicate in various ways — using body language, facial expressions, their eyes, their vocalizations.
Two young coyotes in San Francisco, Calif. (Photo by Janet Kessler)
They are known to live in nuclear families that sometimes check on family members over distances. They mate for life and both parents help raise the young. But every coyote situation, just like every coyote, is different, and they actually live in a variety of situations. I’ve seen some that live as loners and even siblings that formed a “family” on a territory.
I feel like I can relate to them — their jealousies, their angers, their curiosities — and it helps me connect with them, but I also want other people to see these things so that they will connect and not be so fearful and negative toward them.
What’s the biggest threat to urban coyotes?
I think human fears, because of what that can lead to. If people don’t know about coyote behavior they will report [what appears to be] aggressive behavior when that’s not really what’s going on. Often people confuse defensive or even playful behavior with aggressive behavior.
Both misunderstanding and misinformation are threats to coyotes.
And the opposite is true. Loving them too much is also dangerous. We’ve had people feeding them from cars, which leads to them chasing cars and getting killed.
I was asked to help at one park where people were leaving food for a coyote — I found 4-pound bags of meat and whole chickens. One woman was releasing live mice. It took two years to get that coyote to stop chasing cars. Cars are the biggest coyote killers in the city.
San Francisco has changed a lot in the past decade — the number of people and number of cars has grown. Are changing demographics affecting urban wildlife like coyotes?
Yes, 15 years ago I could go to bigger parks and not see anyone — that’s not true anymore. There’s just more people. Also our parks used to have wild areas that were not very manicured and now they are more and more manicured and that means that coyotes are more visible.
Most importantly is that our dog population has grown, and dogs are coyotes’ biggest nemesis. Dogs chase coyotes, and coyotes may see a small pet as prey or feel territorially competitive with any size dog. If you’re walking your dog and you see a coyote you need to leash your dog and walk in the opposite direction. Always keep your distance. It’s so easy but some people don’t know this.
A coyote in San Francisco, Calif. (Photo by Janet Kessler)
But also the population of coyotes has grown since 2002. They used to be in only the biggest parks, but those territories are now all taken, so you have coyotes owning fragmented territories made of small parks and pockets of green space and they move between them usually during the darker hours.
The big thing I’ve noticed is more territorial fights. Does this mean the area has reached a coyote population saturation point and they have to fight for their territories? An ecologist at the Presidio has found that when radio-collared coyotes from the Presidio disperse they move south and out of the city. Maybe coyotes from other parts of the city do the same. The Presidio, which is part of the federally run national parks program, puts tracking collars on coyotes that live there and those that pass through the park.
What is the value of having wildlife like coyotes in our urban parks?
Without them, you’re missing a lot. The people I know who have met coyotes and even those who see them regularly are thrilled — there is something that is fulfilled that they’re not getting from living in a concrete building.
When people ask me where they can see coyotes in San Francisco I tell them that I don’t reveal locations, but they should take a walk, enjoy nature and they might come across a coyote. It’s thrilling.
Releasing captive-bred monarchs doesn’t benefit wild butterflies — in fact, it may make the problem worse.
Monarch butterflies haven’t had it easy lately. Populations of these beloved insects have crashed 80 percent or more in most parts of their range as a result of pesticides, habitat loss, climate change and other environmental threats. As a result, monarchs are now being considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act.
A lot of people are working hard to protect monarchs, but one all-too-common activity intended to help may actually do more harm than good: mass releases of captive-raised butterflies.
Why is that a problem? Check out our video.
The most common danger to larvae at these mass-rearing operations is a pathogen called Ophyrocystis elektroscirrha, a protozoan parasite that can harm a butterfly’s ability to emerge from chrysalis or deform its wings so they can’t extend or flatten. Although the threat posed this pathogen is well-known there are currently no requirements for breeders to test for its presence, according to a recent joint letter from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and other experts.
This isn’t the only problem. Mass captive breeding also has the potential to reduce monarchs’ genetic diversity — ironically, making them even more susceptible to disease and other dangers. Shipping insects around the country can also result in geographically adapted monarchs being released into areas where they’re less likely to survive.
Released monarchs that live and make their way into the wild pose a different kind of problem, as their presence interferes with scientists’ ability to track and understand monarch declines. “When we see a butterfly, we don’t know if it’s gotten there because somebody has released it or if it got there naturally,” monarch researcher Karen Oberhauser told NPR.
Even if these threats were mitigated, new research finds that captive-raised monarchs wouldn’t necessarily help wild populations because they sometimes lose their ability to migrate. Instead of flying south, second-generation butterflies (those born from captive stock) just flutter in random directions. Researchers suspect a genomic anomaly from the captive-breeding process.
So what’s the best way to help monarchs? As we show in our video, wild monarchs need a steady supply of milkweed plants, the host plant for their eggs. Planting milkweed — especially on a community level — will help to provide a steady supply of food for emerging caterpillars. Monarchs in each area of the country need different types of monarch plants, and you can find the best ones to plant here.
Adult monarchs, meanwhile, require various kinds of nectar-producing plants. The Xerces Society has a good resource for the best varieties here.
Still feel the need to do more? The best option, according to experts, is to ask your community to use fewer pesticides. Individuals and groups can also help gather information about wild butterflies to assist broader conservation efforts. Monarch Joint Venture has a list of citizen science opportunities for tracking migration and population sizes. You can even download an app to report monarch sightings in your neighborhood.
A collaborative fisheries-management plan could decrease illegal fishing and help a decades-old impasse between Argentina, the United Kingdom and the Malvinas/Falkland Islands.
In the Southern Atlantic, approximately 200 miles off the coast of Argentina, so many fishing vessels gather in one place that they can be seen from space. They’re engaged in intense competition for the valuable illex squid (Illex argentinus), which themselves are drawn to the nutrient-rich shelf break beneath the surface.
Fishing vessels at night — what NASA describes as “a city of light” in the middle of the South Atlantic. NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA National Geophysical Data Center
While many of these vessels operate legally, many others do not. As many as 300,000 tons of squid are taken illegally from the region each year — much more than the 50 to 150 tons that are allowed to be harvested legally.
In part this massive illegal fishing operation is the result of the distant and remote nature of the fishery itself. But it’s also inspired by longstanding political angst that impedes cooperation between Argentina and the United Kingdom territory known to some as the Falkland Islands and others as the Islas Malvinas.
The question of sovereignty over these islands has been festering for nearly two centuries. Argentina argues that the British have illegally occupied the Islas Malvinas since 1833, a matter it first raised with the United Nations and other international bodies in the 1940s. This dispute later erupted in the brief but brutal 1982 Falkland/Malvinas’ War, in which Argentina tried (but failed) to retake the islands by force.
Decades later the sovereignty struggle continues. Currently Argentina has the backing of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice to negotiate with the UK over the Malvinas. But the UK refuses to negotiate the sensitive issue of sovereignty, stating the self-determination of the Islands’ residents — who voted in 2013 to remain a British Overseas Territory — should be respected.
Regardless of conflicting interpretations of sovereignty, the fate of the Islands lies in the oceans around them.
Economically 52.4 percent of the Islands’ GDP — approximately $86.3 million — depends on fisheries, with squid being the most valuable resource. In a good year, the Islands can provide nearly 10 percent of the world’s illex squid supply. By comparison Argentina is less dependent on fisheries — which only account for 3.4 percent of its GDP — but their value still amounts to approximately $20.2 billion, more than 230 times the value of the Falklands’ fisheries.
Illegal fishing threatens both Argentina and the Islands with significant financial and ecological losses, but the issue remains difficult to resolve. Legal fishing vessels purchase permits from either the Argentinean or the Falkland Island government for access to fish in their respective exclusive economic zones (EEZs). As part of obtaining the permit, the vessel must adhere to certain standards for vessel safety and catch documentation. Additionally, depending on who issued the permit, vessels must adhere to different fishing regulations, seasons, and allowable gear type for squid. This can cause some problems, as Argentinean permit holders may unlawfully fish in Falkland Islander waters and vice versa.
However, the major of vessels committing illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing don’t hold any type of permit. These vessels, usually from Asia, often operate at “mile 201,” meaning that they linger in the high seas or areas beyond national jurisdiction, which under international law have no fishing regulations. They then dip into the Argentinean or Falkland Island EEZ, an illegal act. Because these boats do not have permits from a government that requires certain safety requirements to be licensed, many of these IUU vessels are associated with poor working conditions and even forced labor.
While Argentina’s military, the UK’s Fisheries Protection Squadron, and the Falkland Islands Fisheries Department make patrols in their respective areas, it’s still too difficult to maintain enforcement over such a large area.
There was some promising progress on all of these issues, but it didn’t last. Between 1990 and 2005, a collaborative regional fisheries management organization called the South Atlantic Fisheries Commission facilitated the exchange of fisheries data, joint research cruises and joint scientific analysis, and recommended coordinated conservation advice, including illegal fishing, between the Falkland Islands, Argentina and the UK. But in 2005 Argentina pulled out of this commission in an effort to diminish any type of recognition other than Argentinian related to the Islands. Since then the illegal fishing has increased, as have illegal transshipments (transferring cargo secretly at sea rather than officially at port) and incidents at sea such as fires, collisions and jumping ship.
Meanwhile the cost of these disputes and the resulting illegal activity continue to pile up.
Ecologically, illegal fishing undermines conservation plans for multiple species in the area. These squid have rapid lifecycles; in just 1 to 2 years they grow to nearly a foot in length, reproduce, and then die. Throughout that process they serve as an abundant source of prey items for whales, seals, marine birds and fish species. Scientists have expressed concern that taking too many squid, especially premature squid, will affect future stock populations and disrupt the food chain. This past year Argentina closed its squid season early due to low stocks. Given the massive scale of the fishing occurring in the South Atlantic, there’s a need for monitoring these squid populations, their harvest and the possible cascading effects on other species — especially endangered species in the area like the grey-headed albatross.
Albatrosses and penguins West Point Island in the Falkland Islands. Both species eat squid. Photo: Liam Quinn (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The good news is that talks on fisheries cooperation between Argentina and the UK have resumed. It is possible that another collaborative fisheries-management arrangement could be negotiated in the future. But talks could also fail if the sovereignty issue overshadows the needs for fisheries coordination. As decision-makers come together, it will be necessary to keep in mind that a strong and collaborative squid fishery-management plan will mean higher profits for national economies, better working conditions for fishing crews, and safeguarded ocean ecosystems for all those involved. Even though the issue of sovereignty remains to be resolved, an agreement of this nature could be a significant milestone in Argentina-UK relations surrounding the Malvinas/Falkland Islands and could serve as a positive stepping-stone in advancing peace and resolving the political stalemate that remains.
And in the long run, all of those positive outcomes — for people and for nature — could come about because of squid.
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.
New kinds of flood plans put nature back in charge, help populations adapt to a changing climate, reduce risk — and more.
In 2016 California’s rainy season kicked off right on schedule, at the beginning of October. The rains came — and then just kept on coming. By February there was so much water filling Northern California’s rivers that Oroville Dam, the tallest in the country, threatened to break after its spillway and emergency spillways both failed.
Water managers averted a crisis at the dam, but not before 180,000 people living downstream were evacuated.
It was a wake-up call. In just a few months California had gone from five-year-drought to deluge, ending up with the second wettest year on record for the state. It served as a warning of things to come. With rising temperatures from climate change and an increase in the number of extreme storms predicted, scientists have warned of “climate whiplash” — more pronounced swings between wet and dry that could make floods even more dangerous and costly.
It’s an issue that’s top of mind not just in California, but across the country. The United States just endured the wettest 12 months on record, and flooding this spring resulted in federal disaster declarations in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. Dozens of other states and counties declared emergencies, and at the time of this writing, floods had already claimed 67 lives nationwide. They’ve also caused billions of dollars in property damage and swamped farmers have experienced billions more in economic losses.
In all of these cases, we see a common thread: It’s not just the direct blows from nature that are the problem. We’ve made things worse by paving over floodplains, channelizing rivers, and draining wetlands.
But change could be on the horizon. Today more and more communities are beginning to realize that 20th century development practices are harmful. It’s ushering in a new era of thinking about floodplain management — one that involves letting rivers behave like rivers.
Making Room for the River
In February 2017, when managers released water out of Lake Oroville to prevent the dam from failing, it went raging down the Feather River, a tributary of the Sacramento River. Another disaster could have occurred downstream where the Feather River’s channel narrows and the levee has failed before.
But the Three Rivers Levee Improvement Authority completed a project in 2010 to set the levee back along six miles of this dangerous stretch of river, which gave more room for high flows to pass through without the risk of levee damage or failure, while also creating 1,500 more acres of riparian habitat.
That plan paid off. “After that huge Oroville dam incident, this area and this new levee were just unscathed by the big flood,” says John Cain, director of conservation for California flood management at the nonprofit American Rivers. “So by setting back the levees, you create room for the river, decrease the flood risk and decrease wear and tear on the system to ensure the levee system’s integrity.”
This idea of setting back levees is one part of the implementation of the Central Valley Flood Protection Plan, first adopted in 2012 and updated in 2017. The plan, Cain says, is groundbreaking in several ways.
A setback levee constructed along the Bear River in Northern California. (Photo by Paul Hames / California Department of Water Resources)
The first is that it’s not a flood-control plan, it’s a flood-risk management plan — and the difference on the ground is much more than semantics.
“When you think about the challenge of managing the risk associated with flooding as opposed to trying to control floods, it dramatically changes the tools you use,” says Cain. “Flood control is really a fool’s errand, particularly in an era of climate change. Flooding is going to happen. The question is, how do we manage it so we limit the consequences for property and people?”
Previous flood plans have been mostly about building infrastructure — levees, dams and flood walls, he says. This new plan still allows for strengthening levees in some places, such as around the cities of Sacramento and Stockton, but there’s also more focus on restoring floodplains and setting levees further back from the river.
That’s not always as easy as it sounds when much of the area you want to allow to flood already contains housing developments, shopping malls or prime agricultural land.
“Private landowners can be reluctant, so coming up with some incentive package is a hurdle,” says Cain. “You’ve got to find the funding and the political will to do that. That’s a very big challenge.”
The plan also prioritizes projects with multiple benefits. So instead of funding efforts that are just about controlling extreme flood events, the plan helps to develop projects that provide a variety of additional outcomes, such as groundwater recharge, open space and recreation opportunities, and clean water amenities and wildlife habitat.
One project in West Sacramento about a mile from the state capitol moved the levee back 200 to 800 feet along a six-mile stretch of the Sacramento River. It’s an area that gets walloped by water in the winter, and now this added levee width decreases the flood risk and creates crucial habitat for endangered salmon that migrate down the river. It also provides habitat for waterfowl and other wildlife.
Tools for a Climate Change Century
On the other side of the country, residents of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, home to the growing city of Charlotte, know a thing or two about flooding. The area got engulfed in 1995 and then again in 1997. Some residents hadn’t finished paying for the furniture and cars they’d lost in the first flood before the second one washed them out again, remembers Dave Canaan, the county’s storm water services director.
And worse, some of the flooding in 1997 wasn’t even in the areas that county officials thought would flood, based on their Federal Emergency Management Agency maps.
Locals weren’t happy, and that spurred the county to re-evaluate its strategy.
“We decided, let’s have a policy where floodplains are meant to flood,” says Canaan.
It seems like a simple idea, but it’s actually groundbreaking in practice and is already offering a brighter future for flood resilience.
“We thought, maybe we’re not doing this as best as we can, maybe we need to take the playbook and throw it out and come up with a whole new playbook on how we’re managing our floodplains,” says Canaan.
By 1999 the board of commissioners had adopted a new floodplain-guidance document. That’s meant big changes for the county.
For one thing, residents now receive better communication about their floodplain risk, including a new notification system to warn homeowners and businesses ahead of a storm, says Canaan.
The county also made a major policy change: It stopped relying on FEMA’s floodplain maps because they weren’t updated frequently enough and didn’t take into account how future land use would affect floods.
When Canaan and his colleagues designed new maps that took into account future development conditions, they projected the community’s flood line would increase dramatically compared to their out-of-date FEMA maps from 1985. “We realized we could literally be permitting a single-family residence that within 10-20 years could have four feet of water,” he says.
So when they rolled out their new maps that showed more homes in the floodplain, they also began a buyout program. Over the past 19 years it’s moved 700 families and 450 buildings from the floodplain. That’s reduced liability in the community and it’s also provided a public benefit — they’ve turned that cleared land into 180 acres of new open-space greenway.“It’s really a quality of life investment that we’re making,” he says.
A floodplain restoration project was completed after flood-prone apartments were removed in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. (Photo by Mecklenburg County)
Since the buyout program started, they’ve spent a combined $60 million in federal, state and local money and have avoided $25 million in losses so far — a number that will grow with each passing storm.
The program is now 100 percent locally funded, and the county keeps cash on hand to use for buyouts so it can step in immediately after a flood and make an offer, instead of waiting several years for federal funding post-disaster. There’s also a retrofit program that helps homeowners stay in homes by making improvements to limit the possible flood damage. Typically homeowners chip in 25 percent of the cost, and the county’s stormwater utility pays the rest, says Canaan. The program has also helped homeowners significantly reduce their flood insurance rates.
In 2012 the county launched a comprehensive tool to help it evaluate risk and determine which areas should be prioritized for taking out of the floodplain. The tool looks at much more than the cost to rebuild a flood-damaged home; it also takes into consideration things like the cost of putting a swift-water rescue team in harm’s way and the benefit of having public land to use for recreation or to build features that will filter pollutants and improve water quality.
“We run the risk scores and that score translates into what the mitigation option ought to be,” says Canaan. Participation by homeowners is totally voluntary, he adds, and the county doesn’t condemn any properties.
He says they’re working now with the Department of Homeland Security to update and improve the tool so it can be of use to other communities. Different regions will have vastly different factors to asses, but he says the methodology that Mecklenburg County used in its approach to floodplain management can be applied anywhere.
Common tools are one thing, but the most crucial part of the development of the new plan actually came from the input of local groups and experts. “Public engagement helps to make sure we keep things in perspective,” he says.
And in the face of unknown risks from climate change, stakeholder groups have also helped county staff add an extra layer of precaution to their risk assessment and planning.
“The more and more I see of more frequent events — not just rainfall, but droughts — I think we need to say we don’t know as much as we think we know and therefore we’re going to put in additional safety factor on top of what we just calculated,” says Canaan.
New thinking about floodplain management allows us to re-evaluate how we determine risk — something that’s crucial today, says American Rivers’ Cain.
“Risk is really the probability of flooding multiplied by the consequences of flooding,” he says. “And what we tried to do in the 20th century was control the probability of flooding. That was generally not a winning strategy and it’s definitely a losing strategy as the climate changes.”
Time is running out to save North Atlantic right whales, but the use of ropeless fishing gear could be a lifeline.
Editor’s note: Six North Atlantic right whales died last month — about one percent of the species’ entire population. Two new papers link the rising death toll for these endangered whales to human activity — and things are going to get worse. Additional research published in May finds that climate change is causing right whales to turn up in places they haven’t traditionally swum, putting them in harm’s way. Below, two researchers talk about how to solve this deadly problem.
Many fish, marine mammals and seabirds that inhabit the world’s oceans are critically endangered, but few are as close to the brink as the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis). Only about 411 of these whales exist today, and at their current rate of decline, they could become extinct within our lifetimes.
From 1980 through about 2010, conservation efforts focused mainly on protecting whales from being struck by ships. Federal regulations helped reduce vessel collisions and supported a slight rebound in right whale numbers.
But at the same time, growing numbers of right whales died after becoming entangled in lobster and crab fishing gear, and the population has taken a significant downward turn. This may have happened because fishing ropes became stronger, and both whales and fishermen shifted their ranges so that areas of overlap increased. In research that is currently in press, we show that 72 percent of diagnosed mortalities between 2010-2018 occurred due to entanglements.
This comes after a millennium of whaling that decimated the right whale population, reducing it from perhaps between 10,000 to 20,000 to a few hundred animals today. And entanglement deaths are much more inhumane than harpoons. A whaler’s explosive harpoon kills quickly, compared to months of drawn-out pain and debilitation caused by seemingly harmless fishing lines. We believe these deaths can be prevented by working with the trap fishing industries to adopt ropeless fishing gear – but North Atlantic right whales are running out of time.
Whalers pursued right whales for centuries because this species swam relatively slowly and floated when dead, so it was easier to kill and retrieve than other whales. By the mid-20th century, scientists assumed they had been hunted to extinction. But in 1980, researchers from the New England Aquarium who were studying marine mammal distribution in the Bay of Fundy off eastern Canada were stunned when they sighted 26 right whales.
Conservation efforts led to the enactment of regulations that required commercial ships to slow down in zones along the U.S. Atlantic coast where they were highly likely to encounter whales, reducing boat strikes. But this victory has been offset by rising numbers of entanglements.
Adult right whales can produce up to an estimated 8,000 pounds of force with a single stroke of their flukes. When they become tangled in fishing gear, they often break it and swim off trailing ropes and sometimes crab or lobster traps.
Lines and gear can wrap around a whale’s body, flukes, flippers and mouth. They impede swimming and feeding, and cause chronic infection, emaciation and damage to blubber, muscle and bone. Ultimately these injuries weaken the animal until it dies, which can take months to years.
One of us, Michael Moore, is trained as a veterinarian and has examined many entangled dead whales. Moore has seen fishing rope embedded inches deep into a whale’s lip, and a juvenile whale whose spine had been deformed by the strain of dragging fishing gear. Other animals had flippers nearly severed by swimming wrapped in inexorably constricting ropes. Entanglement injuries to right whales are the worst animal trauma Moore has seen in his career.
Fishing rope furrowed into the lip of Bayla, right whale #3911. (Photo by Michael Moore, NMFS Permit 932-1905-00/MA-009526, CC BY-ND)
Even if whales are able to wriggle free and live, the extreme stress and energy demands of entanglement, along with inadequate nutrition, are thought to be preventing females from getting pregnant and contributing to record low calving rates in recent years.
Solutions for Whales and Fishermen
The greatest entanglement risk is from ropes that lobster and crab fishermen use to attach buoys to traps they set on the ocean floor. Humpback and minke whales and leatherback sea turtles, all of which are federally protected, also become entangled.
Conservationists are looking for ways to modify or eliminate these ropes.
Rock lobster fishermen in Australia already use pop-up buoys that ascend when they receive sound signals from fishing boats. The buoys trail out ropes as they rise, which fishermen retrieve and use to pull up their traps.
Other technologies are in development, including systems that acoustically identify traps on the seafloor and mark them with “virtual buoys” on fishermen’s chart plotters, eliminating the need for surface buoys. Fishermen also routinely use a customized hook on the end of a rope to catch the line between traps and haul them to the surface when the buoy line goes missing.
Transitioning to ropeless technology will require a sea change in some of North America’s most valuable fisheries. The 2016 U.S. lobster catch was worth US$670 million. Canadian fishermen landed CA$1.3 billion worth of lobster and CA$590 million worth of snow crab.
Just as no fisherman wants to catch a whale, researchers and conservationists don’t want to put fishermen out of business. In our view, ropeless technologies offer a genuine opportunity for whales and the fishing industry to co-exist if they can be made functional, affordable and safe to use.
Switching to ropeless gear is unlikely to be cheap. But as systems evolve and simplify, and production scales up, they will become more affordable. And government support could help fishermen make the shift. In Canada, the federal and New Brunswick provincial governments recently awarded CA$2 million to Canadian snow crab fishermen to test two ropeless trap designs.
Converting could save fishermen money in the long run. For example, California Dungeness crab fishermen closed their 2019 season three months ahead of schedule on April 15 to settle a lawsuit over whale entanglements, leaving crab they could have caught still in the water. Under the agreement, fishermen using ropeless gear will be exempt from future early closures.
A Rebound Is Possible
The Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act require the U.S. government to conserve endangered species. In Congress, the pending SAVE Right Whales Act of 2019 would provide $5 million annually for collaborative research into preventing mortalities caused by the fishing and shipping industries. And an advisory committee to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently recommended significant fishing protections, focused primarily on reducing the number of ropes in the water column and the strength of the remaining lines.
Consumers can also help. Public outcry over dolphin bycatch in tuna fisheries spurred passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and led to dolphin-safe tuna labeling, which ultimately reduced dolphin mortalities from half a million to about 1,000 animals annually. Choosing lobster and crab products caught without endangering whales could accelerate a similar transition.
North Atlantic right whales can still thrive if humans make it possible. The closely related southern right whale (Eubalaena australis), which has faced few human threats since the end of commercial whaling, has rebounded from just 300 animals in the early 20th century to an estimated 15,000 in 2010.
There are real ways to save North Atlantic right whales. If they go extinct, it will be on this generation’s watch.
The Australian icon could lose its fight against climate change, disease, habitat destruction and cars — but not if dedicated conservationists get the tools they need to protect the species.
Ten years ago the shaky video of a dehydrated, wildfire-damaged koala captured headlines and the world’s attention.
Crouched next to a charred tree trunk, a volunteer firefighter named David Tree gingerly poured bottled water into the open mouth of the burned koala. A tiny gray paw rested in his own large, calloused hand, allowing the animal to remain upright as she drank.
The young koala, later nicknamed “Sam,” quickly became the iconic emblem of the fires — the first stages of what would be known as the Black Saturday bushfires that burned through the forests of southeastern Australia in February 2009. The fires occurred during a massive heatwave. They burned more than 1.1 million acres, killed 180 people, and caused more than 1 million animal fatalities.
Sam, who was lucky to survive, received treatment at a nearby wildlife center for second-degree burns.
Unfortunately she didn’t last long. Veterinarians soon discovered she was also suffering from severe cysts caused by inoperable chlamydia, one of a few diseases plaguing wild koalas. With no other options, Sam was euthanized that August.
Today her remains reside at the Melbourne Museum, where she serves as a symbol of not only the bushfires but the multitude of threats facing Australia’s wild koalas.
Those threats have taken a terrible toll on koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), which once numbered in the millions. This May the nonprofit Australian Koala Foundation announced that the marsupials’ wild populations have fallen below 80,000 individuals and the species may now be “functionally extinct.”
In this case “functionally extinct” means that populations have been reduced so drastically that the animals no longer play a significant role in the ecosystem.
The news made headlines, but other biologists countered that while koalas have declined tremendously, the Australian endemics have not yet reached functional extinction. Regardless, koalas are indeed facing a whammy of threats in the country, and without serious and timely intervention it might not be long before the marsupial goes the way of another famous Australian animal, the extinct Tasmanian tiger.
But even as the koala’s decline continues, many people are stepping up to help — and what they’re learning may help the species survive the newest threat from climate change.
A History of Decline, an Uncertain Future
The koala was once ubiquitous in eastern Australia, ranging from tall eucalyptus forests to low woodlands and coastal islands.
Even today “they cover a huge geographic range,” says Christine Hosking, a koala biologist at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute. Indeed koalas can still be found in all four of the country’s six eastern states, although their remaining habitats have shrunk and become fragmented from each other, and many sites hold increasingly few animals.
“Population sizes vary from place to place,” Hosking says. “That’s why you can’t come up with a statement saying they’re all functionally extinct. However, some pockets aren’t doing so well.”
The decline was a long time coming. The fur trade was the first to decimate the koala population. Between 1890 and 1927, more than 8 million pelts were exported to England, according to research compiled by the Australian Koala Foundation.
Habitat loss followed. Eucalyptus groves were bulldozed for suburbs. People moved in. If the koalas weren’t killed by cars when crossing roads, they’d be found dangling in the jaws of pet dogs.
A koala injured by powerlines. Photo: Ausgrid (CC BY 2.0)
Then came chlamydia, thought to have crossed over to koalas from imported sheep and cattle. The marsupials are keenly susceptible to the sexually transmitted disease, especially when stressed by other factors. In some areas more than 50 percent of koalas exhibit symptoms, which can often prove fatal in its late stages. Climate change and heat stress, therefore, are only the latest in a series of unfortunate events for the vulnerable koala.
Hosking conducts scientific models to understand how climate change has and will affect the koala’s range. She’s found that koalas, already facing reduced and fragmented habitats, will likely now move eastward to the coast, which has a more moderate climate compared to the inland areas increasingly experiencing extreme heat and drought.
“The farther you go inland, there’s already evidence of koala populations crashing by as much as 80 percent,” she explains.
Koalas, it turns out, can’t handle the heat. “We did some modeling on the thermoregulation of koalas and found that over 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) seems to be about their threshold.” As the climate changes, Australia frequently experiences 10 days in a row of 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit). “They’re not coping with that at all. There’s heat stress, lack of water, and their food trees are drying out,” says Hosking.
But moving east also means moving into more urbanized areas. That’s why scientists are hoping to mitigate this migration, using new tools to save the species.
Drink Up
Koalas get most of their moisture from eating juicy eucalyptus leaves, but they’re limited by how much they can eat.
“Not only are these leaves not particularly nutritious, they’re full of toxins,” explains Valentina Mella, a researcher at the University of Sydney. Koalas have developed a specialized intestinal tract to deal with the toxins, but, they have to wait until they’ve digested the toxins before eating more. “If you’re thirsty and there’s no water, it’s not as simple as, ‘I’ll just have another bunch of leaves.’ ”
Can human assistance help koalas get past that biological limitation? In 2016 Mella and her team placed 10 pairs of drinking stations across the Liverpool Plains in New South Wales, an area where koalas hadn’t been doing well. They wanted to see if the marsupials would supplement their all-leaf-diet with water found in tanks on the ground and in trees. To her surprise, when presented with the opportunity, the koalas were enthusiastic drinkers. Mella documented more than 600 visits by koalas during the course of a year. Other species such as sugar gliders, brushtail possums, kangaroos and echidnas also took advantage of the tanks. During hot and dry periods, the koalas chugged down even more.
Photo: University of Sydney
This gives Mella hope that conservationists might be able to help the species by maintaining water stations in the wild for koalas — something that’s already done in rangeland for domestic cattle. Based on this research, the New South Wales government has already adopted water stations as a strategy to assist koalas during heatwaves and droughts.
Dr. Valentina Mella with a koala joey during research fieldwork Gunnedah, NSW. Photo: University of Sydney
The next step, Mella says, will be to assess exactly how the water stations affect the overall health and survival of koalas.
“On the properties where we have these stations, we check on the ‘regular drinkers’ every six months. So far, they seem to be okay,” she says. But that’s just in terms of heat and dehydration. “When you add in the disease situation, then it’s a whole different story. Water is not a medicine. It can’t cure. But it probably helps in terms of making the animal more healthy to fight the infection.”
Medicine for Marsupials
To help koalas battling disease, dog bites, and automobile collisions, koala hospitals still play an essential role.
At the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital in New South Wales, about 200 koalas pass through the facility every year. That’s down from around 300 in previous years. “There are just fewer koalas now,” says Cheyne Flanagan, clinical director at the hospital.
Of the koalas that come in with chlamydia, about 40 percent are euthanized due to severe damage to their urogenital tracts. The other 60 percent can be treated with antibiotics or surgery. In addition to affecting internal organs, chlamydia also affects koalas’ eyes, causing infections or an overgrowth of tissue.
Recovering in a koala hospital. Photo: Tobias Spaltenberger (CC BY-SA 2.0)
“We’ve made progress,” says Flanagan. “It’s definitely better than it used to be because a lot of research is going on. We’ve learned what drugs are knocking chlamydia down. You can never cure chlamydia… but you can put it in remission and sometimes, if the koalas are healthy enough, their own immune system kicks in and keeps it under control.”
Antibiotic treatment has been problematic in the past because it often kills the gut microbes that allow koalas to eat eucalyptus leaves. But scientists have recently discovered one particular protective microbe that, if kept alive, allows the koala to survive the course of antibiotics. Researchers are also working on alternative treatments, such as fecal transplants, probiotics and a chlamydia vaccine.
Yet pressure on state and federal government from the international community, Flanagan says, is still critical. “Some of the laws for biodiversity in this country are disgusting.”
Australia’s Federal Failure, a Local Opportunity
Before the federal election in May, koala conservationists had hoped to turn the tide after decades of apparent governmental neglect.
In its press release ahead of the vote, the Australian Koala Foundation wrote that it had spent 31 years working with “13 environment ministers, many of which could be described as the ‘Who’s Who’ of the political elite and nothing has happened except dead koalas in the wild… No one has written anything to protect the koala in the last six years of government.” A national recovery plan, mandated by law, has never been established. Notably, Australia’s Department of Environment and Energy web page for koalas still says, as of this writing, that the planned publication date of a recovery plan for the species “is expected to be late 2014.”
Further federal progress seems unlikely. On May 18 Australian citizens re-elected the Liberal-National Coalition, notorious for its refusal to sharply reduce carbon emissions and coal. Opposing parties had made far bolder promises on addressing climate change.
Though the federal election was a disappointment to most environmentalists, Hosking notes it’s now up to local and state governments to play the bigger roles in koala conservation.
“There’s a lot of lobbying going on with local government,” she says. “And we’re trying to engage more with state-level governments right now to come up with strategies to protect the koalas. It’s a matter of keeping populations viable, allowing them to move safely and stay healthy. It’s really difficult. It’s gloomy. But it’s certainly not over.”
