Breeding the ‘Snot Otter’

The gigantic Ozark hellbender salamander is in trouble in the wild, but one zoo — and a hard-working team — is helping to boost its populations.

The two-foot-long salamanders that live in Missouri go by a lot of different names.

Scientifically they’re known as Ozark hellbenders (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis bishopi).

More colloquially these massive amphibians have a few more colorful sobriquets, including “mud devil,” “snot otter,” “Allegheny alligator” and even “old lasagna sides.”

But if they could talk, some of the Ozark hellbenders living at Saint Louis Zoo might call each other by different names: Mom and Dad.

Saint Louis Zoo is the only institution in the world that’s breeding Ozark hellbenders, and they’re doing it well. Since 2011 their program’s parent hellbenders have laid more than 6,500 eggs that have resulted in the births of more than 5,100 tiny hellbender hatchlings.

Ozark hellbender hatchlings — Newly hatched Ozark hellbenders. Photo courtesy Saint Louis Zoo

That’s critically important, because the species isn’t doing well outside the zoo walls. Ozark hellbenders are admittedly hard to count in the wild — they’re nocturnal and live under big rocks in remote rivers — but the most recent estimates suggest that the adult population has fallen from about 27,000 just a few decades ago to around 600 today. That’s due to a combination of threats, including habitat loss, pollution, pesticides, disease, river sedimentation from construction and the illegal pet trade.

The zoo is helping to boost that number. Over the past several years many of the salamanders born in the zoo — along with more hatched from eggs collected in Missouri’s rivers — have been returned to their native habitats as juveniles. As of last October the zoo has released 5,792 juvenile Ozark hellbenders, along with an additional 319 eastern hellbenders (a separate subspecies).

Caring for these hellbenders is a heavenly responsibility. “To be part of a program that works with a relic species that’s been around for millions of years, and it’s right in our backyard here in Missouri, that’s just very special,” says Mark Wanner, the zoo’s manager of herpetology and aquatic species.

“I am still mind-blown every time I walk into this center,” adds Lauren Augustine, the zoo’s curator of herpetology. “They’re a really incredible species and a great way to connect us with the people in Missouri. Personally, I like how they eat like crocodiles.” Hellbenders, which have notoriously big mouths, eat mostly crayfish in the wild, but they’ve been known to chow down on just about anything that they can swallow whole.

The eating may be cool, but it’s the breeding that matters. Like many species brought into captivity, hellbenders require very specific conditions in their artificial habitats in order to live and thrive. At the zoo, adult hellbenders live in two outdoor artificial streams, each 40 feet long and 6 feet deep with plenty of rocks for hiding, plus another 32-foot, indoor stream housed in one of four climate-controlled rooms.

The indoor facilities are carefully adjusted to copy the ebb and flow of the hellbenders’ natural rivers. “We try to mimic the natural conditions as close as we can,” says Wanner. “We have chillers and boilers, and all year long the temperature is tweaked according to historical wild river temperatures.” They can also simulate rain events, adjust the water speed, and raise or lower the river at any given time.

But the real trick for successfully keeping hellbenders in captivity is the water itself — or more specifically, what’s in it.

“We think the golden ticket was paying closer attention to the total dissolved solids and ion concentrations in the water,” Wanner says. The addition of nitrates, nitrites, nitrogen ammonia and phosphates makes the water in the zoo’s streams much more like that of real rivers and that, along with the efforts to mimic other annual river conditions, has contributed to the breeding success. The number of fertilized and hatched eggs took off after the zoo came up with what Wanner calls “our recipe” in 2011.

It turned out the water used before that may have been a little too clean. “We’re still not 100 percent sure, but what we believed was happening was that the hellbender sperm was being damaged by the hard water,” Wanner says.

Hellbenders, it turns out, breed more like fish than other salamanders. The female lays a clutch of eggs and the male comes by and releases sperm (“or ‘milt,’ as we call it in the hellbender world,” he says). The sperm enters the water column on its way to the clutch, but if the water damaged the sperm it couldn’t penetrate the egg. Changing the composition of the water appears to have solved this problem.

Another important tool in the program is a series of artificial nesting boxes, which the males use to solicit a nest site. After the eggs are fertilized, the males stick around and guard them. “If another male tries to enter the next box, the male guardian will sometimes flight to the death to protect the nest,” Wanner says. “Usually it doesn’t end up that way. Mostly it’s a good bite on the head or the front arm and the other male goes in the other direction.”

The water and the nest boxes work well with each other. “We think that’s the combination of things that allowed us to have this success,” he says.

Ozark hellbender at two weeks. 2011 photo by Mark Wanner, Saint Louis Zoo

Of course, the hellbenders don’t do it all on their own. “The incredibly dedicated staff that meticulously care for these animals is also in the recipe,” Augustine points out. “There’s an amazing attention to detail. They have very specific husbandry procedures and being able to track and keep data on these animals over the years has obviously been very beneficial to the success of the program.” The team includes three full-time hellbender keepers, one more part-timer, a seasonal keeper and “a plethora” of interns every semester. It has partners at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Missouri Department of Conservation, not to mention the support of zoo veterinarians, nutritionists, volunteers and other aides.

“It does take an army to manage the program,” Wanner says.

Most recently that army has been witness to the program’s latest success: This past October a 7-year-old hellbender male — one of the first of his kind born at Saint Louis Zoo — became the proud papa of 39 little hatchlings. It was the first time a group of second-generation Ozark hellbenders had been produced by a first-generation, captive-born parent.

Wanner recounts the period leading up to the hatching. “It was a really rainy day, and Jeff Briggler, the state herpetologist — who is hands down probably the best hellbender biologist in the world — just happened to be here at the zoo checking eggs and we found a fertile clutch. It was what Jeff called a ‘yahoo’ moment. It was definitely a great day.”

Again, that’s important, because Ozark hellbenders face increasing pressures in the wild — climate change may be the next looming threat — and proving that captive-raised animals can go on to produce the next generation may be a key to the subspecies’ survival, both at the zoo and in the wild.

“I think that this program can safeguard us from any kind of tragedies,” says Augustine before she brings up a painful example. One of the hellbenders’ native river systems recently experienced a major flood, and surveys after the event did not turn up any remaining salamanders, meaning an entire genetic line could have been wiped out in the wild. “Luckily, we have animals from that river system in our collection,” she says. “That gives me the confidence that this program is going to save hellbenders.”

Meanwhile, the brood at Saint Louis Zoo is expected to keep growing. Hellbenders take six to eight years to reach sexual maturity, so more of the animals born at the zoo will soon start entering the dating pool. The younger females won’t produce many eggs at first — Augustine says that’s typical with many species of reptiles and amphibians — but the clutch size will increase as they get older, meaning the number of captive hellbenders could soon expand exponentially — as could the number of juveniles eventually eligible for release back into the wild.

Of course, the real proof of the program’s impact will come in a few years when we learn how the juveniles have done after release. Each animal is tagged so it can be identified as coming from the zoo if it’s later recaptured. Following those released hellbenders will reveal whether all the hard work has paid off.

“The first time we find a male that’s been raised here, released to the wild, guarding a nest with fertile eggs,” Wanner says. “That would be, I think, the culmination of success for us.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Swampy Thing: The Giant New Salamander Species Discovered in Florida and Alabama

The Four Most Thought-provoking Environmental Books Coming in February

New books hitting shelves this month ask if we’re doomed (or at least how badly) while laying out critical solutions to the climate crisis.

This month sees the publication of four striking new environmental books, at least two of which promise to make a stir.

Let’s start with the big one: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells. The book lays out a pretty tough scenario, asking if the current extent of climate change means we’re already doomed. If the title and premise sound familiar, that’s because this is an expanded, book-length extrapolation of the author’s bleak, widely read and controversial New York Magazine article from 2017. Both the book and the article present a worst-case climate change scenario — warming and sea-level rise are just the start of the chaos to come, writes Wallace-Wells — and the book serves as a fright-fest and a call to action.

If you want to know more about taking action, or about climate change in general, try The Thinking Person’s Guide to Climate Change by Robert Henson. This second edition of Henson’s classic book lays out the science of climate change, illustrates how we know what we know, talks about the debates in politics, and lays out a series of solutions for people, politicians and companies. The previous edition of this book, by the meteorologist-turned-journalist, is considered a must-read in many circles.

Speaking of solutions, is one going to happen naturally? Just about every statistical model shows the Earth’s human population growing at enormous rates through the coming century, but the new book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson predicts the exact opposite. They argue that the growing empowerment of women around the world means the projected population bomb could soon be a dud. If the human population really does decline, the authors say, that could bring massive benefits to the climate and the planet — as well as a few growing pains for the people who live here. The book, likely to generate quite a bit of debate, explores the possibilities.

While most of this month’s books look to the future, it also helps to examine the past. That’s the point of Power Trip: The Story of Energy by Michael E. Webber, which looks to key moments in history to see how society has adapted to new energy technologies — and show how we can do it again. Along the way Webber writes about the potential costs of new technologies, the need to tailor solutions for different parts of the globe, and the requirement for public support of innovative new science.

That’s our list for this month. For dozens of additional recent eco-books, check out our “Revelator Reads” archives.

Meet Australia’s Newest Species: An Endangered Tick

The ancestors of the newly described Heath’s tick date back to the time of the dinosaurs, but climate change and invasive species could soon wipe the tick out.

Ticks have been making headlines recently. Whether it’s due to tick-borne disease, range expansion, or the emergence of invasive tick species — as far as most folks are concerned, ticks are bad news. And to an extent this is true, although only a small number of tick species actually threaten the health of people and their pets. The vast majority of tick species leave humans well alone and actually serve important roles in their ecosystems.

Unfortunately a few of these harmless ticks are teetering on the brink of extinction, including one that’s just been discovered.

Each year a team of conservationists from Zoos Victoria head out to survey wild populations of the mountain pygmy possum (Burramys parvus). These cute little marsupials live in alpine boulder fields on some of Australia’s highest peaks and are listed as critically endangered by the IUCN. While undertaking health checks last year, the team stumbled upon some small ticks riding along on the possums, and a few samples were taken and forwarded to my lab. I examined them, and their distinctness was immediately obvious. In conjunction with the team at Zoos Victoria, we have described them as a new species: Heath’s ticks (Ixodes heathi), which we named after the eminent tick biologist Allen C.G. Heath.

Apart from the fact that this is only the second endemic tick species to be described from Australia in the past 20 years, what was so surprising was the fact that Heath’s tick seems to survive exclusively on mountain pygmy possums above the snowline, a truly precarious lifestyle. It was for this reason that we realized we were not only dealing with a new species, but a critically endangered one. The tick is on the brink of extinction, as the loss of a significant additional portion its host’s population would likely spell the end.

So clearly Heath’s tick need protection — but why should we save a parasite? you ask. Well, unlike some parasites, Heath’s tick is a rather good neighbor to its host, and surveys have revealed no ill effects caused by it. That’s certainly a good thing for both host and parasite.

Heath’s possum tick is also unique. Its closest genetic relatives live in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, thousands of feet above the tropical lowland forests. This peculiar habitat preference suggests that Heath’s tick and its relatives may descend from a group of relic ticks from the time of the Gondwanan supercontinent, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and the climate was much cooler and wetter.

So what’s driving this unlikely duo toward extinction? The threat posed by introduced animals is a significant factor. Invasive cats and foxes hunt the vulnerable little possums, and feral horses overgraze mountain plum pines (Podocarpus lawrencei), which the possums partly rely on for shelter and food. Habitat loss is another major threat facing both species: The land they occupy is also ideal for skiing, which sometimes results in land clearing for ski slopes.

The most pressing threat to both species, however, is the danger posed by a warming climate. Both the tick and the possum are highly adapted to snowfall and the cool temperatures afforded to them by mountaintop living. A reduction or complete disappearance of wintertime snowfall could spell disaster for these highly threatened critters.

Fortunately help is at hand for the mountain pygmy possum, and perhaps soon also for Heath’s tick. Conservationists at Zoos Victoria are running a highly successful captive-breeding program for the mountain pygmy possum, and Heath’s tick may soon be added into the program. Such a move would help preserve one of many complex interactions within the Australian alpine ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, ecosystems with more complex interactions are generally more resistant to change, and collapse.

Bringing Heath’s tick into an ex situ conservation program would make it the first such program in the world — something other zoos would also do well to incorporate into future efforts. As we’ve seen with parasites like the Californian condor louse (Colpocephalum californici), not taking the conservation of these tiny passengers into consideration can lead to their extinction by the very scientists tasked with preserving the planet’s rich biodiversity.

For now, though, this new species remains at risk in its threatened alpine habitat. Only time will tell if Heath’s possum tick will survive or if this chance discovery will be both our first and our last glimpse of this remarkable little beast.

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.

Why We Should Care About Parasites — and Their Extinction

Healthy parasites are one sign of a healthy ecosystem, but there’s a lot more to them than that.

Parasite. To most people, the very word is cause for fear or disgust — which is a shame, because most parasites don’t actually harm their hosts. In fact their very existence is a sign of a healthy ecosystem, as I discussed on a recent segment of the Green Divas podcast. We also talked about the values some parasites provide, what we can learn from them, and what we lose when they go extinct.

Listen in, below:

For more, check out the articles mentioned in this interview:

When This Rat Went Extinct, So Did a Flea

Parasite Lost: Did Our Taste for Seafood Just Cause an Extinction?

From Snow Leopards to Soldiers: Conservation in a War-torn Land

Alex Dehgan’s new book The Snow Leopard Project details successful strategies for conserving endangered wildlife — and helping people in the process.

In 2006 Alex Dehgan, then the newly hired Afghanistan country director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, was given a daunting task: to strengthen biodiversity conservation and create the first national parks in a country that had weathered three decades of war.

His first assignment was getting field biologists safely from the capital, Kabul, to remote, treacherous terrain to determine whether enough wildlife still existed to even merit establishing protected areas.

That was only the first in a long series of logistical and political hurdles to achieve the project’s goals.

To everyone’s surprise the team eventually found a wealth of biodiversity in Afghanistan — notably Persian leopards (surprisingly, found just outside Kabul), Marco Polo sheep populations, musk deer, and double the estimated population of snow leopards thought possible in the country.

Dehgan and his colleagues’ arduous efforts, chronicled in his new book The Snow Leopard Project: And Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation, highlight one central key to their success: the importance of empowering local people to govern their natural resources.

Despite the land mines, bombings, lack of infrastructure and threat of attack, Dehgan says “Afghanistan was the easiest conservation job I’ve ever had.” Prior to his work there, he’d studied lemurs in Madagascar, helped rewrite environmental laws in post-Soviet Russia, and helped rebuild scientific capacity in Iraq. Compared to those places his latest assignment was a breeze, he says, because the Afghan people were so welcoming and invested in the process.

“The most important investment we made was in the Afghan people,” he says. “You have to harness human behavior, rather than work against it.” To that end his team helped piece together the funding, enhance scientific capacity, strengthen existing institutions and create new ones, where necessary, and empower people to own management systems of national parks.

Dehgan recalls how he had goosebumps as he watched the Afghan people assemble and seize opportunities to manage their own system of national parks. “This was about the people, protecting their identity, which helped us be successful in the face of difficult odds,” he says. The largely rural Afghan population understood, perhaps more than most, that human conservation and species conservation go hand in hand. “For them, natural security was clearly tied to national security,” he says.

Dehgan left Afghanistan in 2007, but his efforts ultimately led to the country’s first national park, at Band-e-Amir, that year, which the Wildlife Conservation Society documented was home to ibex, Persian leopards and Himalayan lynx, among other species. After that the momentum continued. In 2014 the 4,200-square-mile Wakhan National Park was established in a corridor of 20,000-foot-high mountains that connects Afghanistan to China and separates Tajikistan from Pakistan. The park encompasses the entire distribution range of Marco Polo sheep in Afghanistan and 70 percent of its snow leopard habitat.

Dehgan credits these and other achievements to the enthusiasm of a vast team of conservationists, from WCS Asia director Peter Zahler to Afghan officials such as wildlife enthusiast Prince Mostapha Zaher, grandson of a popular former monarch and then head of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency.

All of this was about more than just setting aside land. As the team laid the groundwork for the protected areas, they realized the snow leopard faced distinctive threats — notably, poaching and a lack of prey. Illegal trade of exotic pelts was largely driven by humanitarian military presence from the West, Dehgan says. One American soldier reportedly ordered 100 lynx and snow leopard comforters.

To collapse demand for exotic pelts, Dehgan and colleagues first developed an awareness campaign to make it socially unacceptable to own endangered cat rugs, bedding or coats. The team also went undercover to measure the illicit trade supply and demand, trained customs officials how to spot illegal items, and shut down wildlife trade at pop-up markets on military bases. The Wildlife Conservation Society even began training American soldiers about wildlife concerns, including illegal trade, before they were dispatched to Afghanistan. To Dehgan’s surprise Afghan fur-store owners, whose shops had been hurt in the crackdown, asked him for training to identify which species they could sell legally and without impact on their country’s wildlife.

Instilling pride in a region’s native wildlife is a powerful tool, he says. In the 1970s the international nonprofit conservation organization Rare created a successful marketing campaign that incorporated St. Lucians’ namesake parrot as part of their identity, featuring it on everything from billboards and T-shirts to local music and artistry. The parrot made a dramatic comeback, an example that long resonated with Dehgan and inspired his work in Afghanistan.

In addition to working toward a decline in poaching, the team took steps to tackle the other threat facing the snow leopard — a lack of prey, which led to conflict with farmers, including retaliatory killings, when snow leopards attacked livestock for food. Their efforts focused on restoring rangelands, which, Dehgan says, not only prevents desertification but also serves to better support a prey base to keep hungry snow leopards fed, thereby relieving stress on livestock owners.

The experiences in Afghanistan demonstrated the power of conservation to rebuild governance and diplomacy in conflict areas, which Dehgan says he hopes is one of the main lessons of his book. There are additional areas where it could prove a useful strategy, he adds. For example, one of the largest ungulate migrations in the world was found in 2007 in south Sudan, having persisted over 25 years of civil war.

“Conservation allows a way to reintegrate opposing sides, provides a common language around a new sense of identity, and brings in development dollars to support a struggling country,” he says. It also offers work options for former military in post-conflict areas. Dehgan suggests the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, or even former poachers could be retrained as park rangers or wildlife guardians.

“If we are in places to rebuild societies and reinforce rule of law, rebuilding identity is core to that mission,” says Dehgan. “It’s important not to see ourselves as apart from nature, but that nature is part of who we are.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Amur Leopard Population Triples — to 103

Trump Administration Drills Down on Alaska’s Arctic Refuge

The deeply unpopular plan would benefit a few rich oil companies while threatening people, wildlife and the climate.

The Trump administration is barreling ahead with plans to drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the largest refuge in the country and an area of global ecological importance.

Many refer to the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge — the very place where oil drilling is being planned — as the “American Serengeti.” A home for grizzly bears, wolves, musk oxen and a host of other species, the area is famous as the birthing ground for the enormous Porcupine caribou herd, which each spring floods across the refuge’s coastal plain in the tens of thousands, arriving in time to raise newborn calves amid fresh tundra grasses. The coastal plain is also the annual destination for millions of migrating birds, who come from nearly every continent on Earth to raise the next generation of swans, terns and over 200 other species. In late summer these avian visitors disperse to backyards, beaches and wetlands across the planet.

Drilling on the Arctic Refuge has long been opposed by most Americans. Among the staunchest opponents of drilling are indigenous people in northern Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, whose cultures and diets are entwined with the Porcupine herd. They include the Gwich’in people of northern Alaska, who have lived in the Arctic for millennia and reside alongside the Arctic Refuge. Their name for the coastal plain is Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, or “the Sacred Place Where Life Begins,” a name reflecting the shared destiny of the caribou and the people. For the Gwich’in and others, fighting against drilling is a cultural imperative and a civil-rights issue.

The refuge has another cultural relevance: It’s a unique part of American conservation history. President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1960 protection of the area followed decades of research and advocacy by some of the tallest figures in American conservation, including Mardy and Olaus Murie, Bob Marshall and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, among many others. These proponents held that the northeastern corner of Alaska should remain as one of America’s last truly wild places, to benefit future generations and the land itself. Informed by the predator-prey research of Olaus Murie and disappointed by a trend toward development in the national parks, advocates pressed for a version of preservation that excluded roads, facilities and interference with predators or other natural ecological forces. They wanted to preserve wilderness.

When Eisenhower’s order protected the area’s “unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values,” it marked the first time federal law specifically protected a thing called wilderness. As Roger Kaye describes in his book The Last Great Wilderness, the move was a precursor to the 1964 Wilderness Act, which the Muries also helped shape and which remains among our bedrock conservation laws. Later, in 1980, Congress affirmed the national significance of the Arctic Refuge by nearly doubling its size.

But to the current administration and its loyal allies in Congress, the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge is destined to be an industrial oilfield. Caribou, birds, native people and history be damned — to say nothing of the climate, which needs another industrial oilfield about as much as Donald Trump needs another criminal investigation into his presidency.

We arrived at this pivotal moment after Republicans, following decades of failed attempts, used the 2017 tax law to pry open Arctic Refuge protections. Led by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, they tacked a provision onto the law’s last page, in Section 20001, mandating drilling on the area’s coastal plain. The law even amended the refuge’s enabling legislation to include oil drilling as a purpose of the refuge. Absurdly, drilling for oil now stands alongside other refuge purposes such as maintaining environmental health, conserving wildlife and protecting the wilderness values Eisenhower singled out back in 1960.

The law also prescribed a strict timetable for drilling. It orders the government to offer a minimum of two massive lease sales in the next 10 years, with the first to be completed by 2021. Each must encompass at least 400,000 acres of the coastal plain and include rights-of-way for a tangle of pipelines, roads, airstrips and other infrastructure, all certain to harm the natural values of the refuge.

Designing those lease sales is the focus of the government’s work today. The process began with an initial public comment period last spring, which garnered nearly 700,000 responses that overwhelmingly opposed drilling. We are now in the second comment period, which quietly opened during the holidays and was originally scheduled to close on February 11 — a period mostly characterized by President Trump’s 35-day government shutdown. The purpose of the comment period is to gather input on an array of generally weak environmental restrictions proposed to govern the lease sales the administration hopes to offer this year. It’s all part of a fast-tracked attempt to transfer large swaths of the coastal plain into oil-industry hands before the 2020 election.

Comments have now been extended through March 13, but the shutdown also resulted in the Interior Department postponing a series of public meetings, which would have enabled people to learn more about the sales. Those meetings are now scheduled to take place this week.

Still, comments were accepted throughout the shutdown. Based on published media reports we know they already include recent objections from the Canadian government, the governments of the Yukon and Northwest Territories, and several Canadian First Nations groups, who all agree drilling on the coastal plain violates international agreements to protect the Porcupine caribou.

Meanwhile the government is expected to invite more public comment soon, this time on the impacts of seismic testing on the refuge. This destructive process, which will unleash convoys of giant “thumper trucks” onto the coastal plain, was previously conducted in 1985 under the Reagan administration. Monitoring a quarter-century later showed that more than 120 miles of ruts still scar the fragile tundra, their hard angles and straight lines intercepting the ponds and meandering streams of the natural landscape. Although testing was scheduled to begin next month, it has been slowed by evidence it may harm or kill denning polar bear mothers and cubs. Ironically, unseasonable warmth and President Trump’s chaotic government shutdown also slowed the process.

The Gwich’in Steering Committee, which includes Alaska Native people who grew up alongside the refuge and have been nourished by its caribou and other resources, are not laying all of their hopes on the comment period. On January 14 their representatives joined other indigenous people in Houston, Texas, to hand-deliver 100,000 letters pressuring SAExploration to withdraw its bid to perform the testing. The Sierra Club reports at least 200,000 emails, calls and letters have been sent to the company, the sole outfit to bid on the project.

The direct appeal to SAExploration reveals how resistance to drilling continues outside of formal comment periods — and it shows signs of success. Last month international bankers at Barclays responded to public pressure by announcing they are unlikely to finance drilling in the Refuge because it is a “particularly fragile and pristine ecosystem.”

Here’s the final insult about drilling in the refuge: It’s not necessary, either economically or for the energy it would produce. Fracking technology and decades of generous public lands giveaways to the oil industry have already given the United States undeniable global energy dominance. Drilling in the Arctic Refuge is an unnecessary excess, especially when we consider that the oil from far-off northern Alaska would most likely be sold for corporate profit to foreign markets, not to support America’s energy needs. All it would serve is to line a few companies’ pockets.

As the accelerated and sometimes confusing work to drill in the refuge moves forward, the time to stop this from happening — and prevent permanent harm to this extraordinary landscape — grows increasingly short. It’s also a reminder of the threat the current government and extractive industries pose to our vital public lands. This is an important fight for wildlife, for wilderness, for the rights of indigenous peoples and for the climate. The Arctic Refuge may be remotely located and out of sight for most Americans, but it should not be out of mind.

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.

The Toxic Legacy of Environmental Neoliberalism

A look at Poland’s growing ecological disaster — and its polluted past — shows how green ideals can wither on the vine.

At December’s Katowice Climate Change Conference, Polish President Andrzej Duda proudly opened the proceedings by declaring that coal “does not contradict the protection of the climate and the progress of climate protection.”

This bizarre and ecologically immoral statement, and the conference’s general embrace of coal, comes from a country whose history deserves greater attention, especially since it echoes so much of the world’s present situation — and possibly our future.

Since joining the European Union in 2004, the Polish state has doggedly pursued the neoliberal policies of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The “free” market and finance were liberated from state intervention on behalf of the commons and the environment. Limitless economic growth and hyperconsumerism became a mantra. State industries and services were privatized. The economy boomed, and according to Western trade analysts, Polish consumers “are used to doing their shopping seven days a week and at any time of day or night.”

However, this recent history can make it easy to forget that Poles lived under communism for 44 years until 1989. This was an era mostly marked by economic recessions, severe consumer shortages and an absolute condemnation of capitalism. For better or worse, citizens accepted their meager material conditions with stoic resignation, and a few embraced a minimalist lifestyle. Simply put, Polish culture was not driven by mass consumption and materialism. Those were unattainable.

But at the same time, Polish Marxists in the immediate aftermath of a destructive World War were convinced that communism would quickly usher in a proletarian utopia of progress and plenty. Steel mills, aluminum smelting facilities, shipyards and cement plants were constructed in an initial spasm of modernizing dynamism. Forests were cleared, wetlands were drained and the countryside was electrified. An infrastructure of railroads and roads was built and a mostly rural population became rapidly urbanized. Poland experienced tangible progress. Like other Soviet satellites, Poland demonstrated to its citizens that Marxism could deliver material wealth.

An example of this early optimism and success would be the economic development of Kraków. With the construction of new district called Nowa Huta in 1949, the city underwent a transformation from what communists regarded as a conservative and bucolic backwater into a modern Marxist metropolis. Built on farmland that was only seven kilometers from Kraków’s old town square, Nowa Huta quickly became a bustling industrial zone. By 1956 the population of this district reached 100,000, and at its center stood the sprawling Lenin Steelworks, which forged millions of tons of steel a year. No thought was given to the mill’s impact on the environment.

Studies conducted in the 1970s show that the Lenin Steelworks generated stupefying levels of pollution. Millions of tons of cadmium, lead, zinc, iron and other heavy metals were annually emitted directly into the atmosphere and local waterways. When compared to current EPA standards for acceptable heavy metal soil concentrations, Kraków’s soil contained 143 times the norm for cadmium, 20 times the norm for lead, and 27 times the norm for zinc. The entire ecosystem was choked with poisonous levels of SO₂ and NO₂, and the health and populations of local flora and fauna were decimated.

Kraków’s ecological conditions only worsened throughout the 1980s. An average of 121,112 tons of atmospheric particulate matter was released each year by Nowa Huta and Kraków’s other heavy industries. The annual average atmospheric release of carbon, nitrates, fluorine, sulfur and hydrocarbons reached 197,154 tons. The Wisła River, which flowed through Kraków, became a toxic brew of chlorides, sulfur, sodium, phosphates, ammonia nitrogen, calcium carbonate and oxidizable pollutants. Locally grown foodstuffs were heavily contaminated by a variety of toxins such as mercury and lead.

It’s no wonder that under such conditions, Kraków became ground zero for an unprecedented public health emergency, with skyrocketing rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease and a variety of other medical maladies. In 1989 Kraków’s Tuberculosis and Pulmonary Clinic estimated that approximately 30 percent of all Krakowians suffered from serious respiratory illnesses. Doctors from Kraków’s regional Mother and Child Team reported that approximately 25,000, or 10 percent, of Kraków’s children suffered from asthma, up from 0.1 percent in 1900. In a study from 1985, researchers demonstrated that 25 percent of Krakowians suffered from high blood pressure, a fivefold increase in comparison to a rural control population. Similar statistics were found for cardiac ischemia (twofold increase), and cardiac arrest (twofold increase). By 1988, 30 percent of all deaths in Kraków were attributed to cancer.

But even though the city was officially deemed an “ecological hazard area” in the 1970s, communist authorities did absolutely nothing to stop the devastating pollution that plagued Kraków and its environs. One reason for this was financial — the nearly bankrupt Polish state could not afford to install pollution-mitigating technology on its heavy industry — but a more important reason was ideological.

As a system of thought, Marxism continued the Enlightenment’s championing of human reason. Yes, Kraków’s industrial development was destroying flora and fauna, centuries-old architecture, the Wisła River, surrounding farmland and the lives of human beings, but communist leaders argued that such immediate sacrifices would eventually and inevitably usher in a better and more rational world. Through proletarian struggle, faith in the process of dialectic materialism and, because of the historical imperative, a worker’s utopia was destined to emerge. Human ingenuity would ultimately heal, reorder and improve both human society, and eventually nature itself.

For a regime that was already seriously compromised by countless political grievances and substantial economic failures, the poisoning of Poland’s ecology and of its citizens proved to be significant. A nascent environmental movement arose in the 1970s.

The founder of Poland’s Green movement is Antonina Leńkowa, whose book The Scalped Earth (Oskalpowana Ziemia, 1961) directly questioned Marxism’s faith in reason, and indirectly criticized the government’s environmental and economic policies. Leńkowa lamented how humans “easily forgot the responsibilities and stewardship due to earth, our mother.” According to Leńkowa, humans treated earth with callousness and cruelty “that was not a symptom of indifference, but was a symptom of open hostility.” Leńkowa attributed this hostility to a fetish for technology and progress. “Many inhabitants of earth are mesmerized by only one aspect of life, technology, and by its magnificent achievements, blinding them to all other earthy considerations [ecological]. They only serve their one chosen master [technology], they only listen to her commands, and they offer her in homage, everything and anything she desires.”

Being careful never to directly criticize Marxism, the Soviet Union or the Polish government, Leńkowa cleverly avoided censorship by apolitically cataloging disastrous environmental conditions across the globe. Years ahead of her time, she outlined the devastating ecological effects of overpopulation, deforestation, livestock production, industrialization, aquifer depletion, monoculture farming, herbicides and pesticides like DDT, antibiotics in agriculture, the mass extinction of flora and fauna, natural habitat destruction, trophy hunting, urbanization, overfishing, naval sonar technology, the polluting of oceans, oil spills and oil exploration, auto emissions, noise pollution, atomic energy, coal mining and the unwillingness of nations to have sustainable economies which practiced conservation.

Leńkowa concluded her book by asking the existential question that is central to today’s climate breakdown age: “Is it worth to continually promote economic expansion that carries with it the danger of annihilating all life, including the lives of human beings?”

This elegant book had tremendous influence on Poland’s first generation of environmental activists. These environmentalists were scientists, men and women who mostly worked in Polish universities, who were the first to discover and understand the developing ecological crisis enveloping Poland. Because these academics were conducting seemingly apolitical research in the physical and natural sciences, or in medicine, they found the necessary space and freedom to document the kind of data I referenced earlier. Sometimes their papers and findings were censored, but news of Poland’s ecocide slowly began to trickle down to the general public.

The year of Solidarity, 1980, proved to be a watershed. That year, the Polish Ecology Club (Polski Klub Ekologiczny, PKE), Eastern Europe’s first legal and independent environmental advocacy group, was established in Kraków. Mostly composed of Jagiellonian University students and faculty, the PKE issued an open letter to the Polish Sejm demanding environmental protections across Poland. Eventually more than 4,500 members of the faculty, staff and administration signed the document.

This brave political act was rapidly followed by a public campaign of environmental protests and lobbying that, among other accomplishments, successfully shuttered a notoriously polluting facility near Kraków, the Skawina Aluminum Smelter, in 1981.

In the PKE’s wake a diverse multitude of vibrant environmental organizations mushroomed throughout the country. Citizens were sympathetic to the warnings issued by Polish Greens. Environmentalists enjoyed support across all sociopolitical classes in Poland.

The 1980s were a decade of intense grassroots political engagement. Poles were angry. Thousands of ordinary citizens engaged in a multitude of public and private acts of dissent that ranged from telling political jokes at the dinner table, to getting arrested for acts of civil disobedience. Almost everyone recognized that Poland’s ecological crisis was concretely political.

Flash forward three decades and so much has changed for the worse: Coal, once again, is king. After the fall of communism in 1989 it certainly was not self-evident that such a transformation was preordained, so how and why did Poles lose their enviro-political consciousness and become consumer zombies with seemingly little or no care for their environment?

Poland pollution — A degraded landscape in Poland. Photo: Mariusz Prusaczyk (CC BY 2.0)

Janusz Okrzesik, a Polish Green who was politicized in the 1980s and went on to serve as a Sejm Member and Senator in post-communist Poland, offers a compelling answer to this query in his book Through Ecology to Freedom (Przez Ekologię do Wolności, 2014):

The committees disappeared, and corporations arrived. The faith in proletarian victory died, but eternal human greed was resurrected. The worker-peasant alliance was replaced by the supremacy of investors “providing” new jobs and new percentages of GDP. Ecologists have a significantly more difficult battle against this kind of ideology: the former had a concrete address and concrete face, while the authority of money is diffused, anonymous, and unshackled from the influence of public opinion. So far, democracy has not discovered the appropriate method of subduing the appetites of neoliberals.

Poland suffered shattering ecological ravages at the hands of a hated regime, yet it has proceeded to uncritically ignore neoliberalism’s ruination of the environment after 1989. This history serves as a warning to all of us. One would think that Poland’s history would equip Poles to at least question the wisdom of pursuing policies that cause climate breakdown and ecocide. Perhaps this history suggests that humankind will never have the will to cease exploiting our planet?

The recent United Nations-sponsored Katowice Climate Change Conference (COP24) stands as a surreal reminder of our collective refusal to accept the anthropogenic apocalypse unfolding all around us. Most of the 30,000 delegates from around the world few carbon-emitting airplanes to the event. Meanwhile the Polish hosts seemed to deliberately mock the entire occasion. Jastrzębska Spółka Węglowa, the EU’s largest producer of coking coal, and PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna SA, which burns more coal than any other power company in Europe, sponsored the event. On the first day of COP24, delegates were greeted by a coal-miner brass band. Katowice’s commercial pavilion featured coal soap, coal jewelry and coal under glass and in cages, to highlight the region’s efforts fighting climate breakdown.

What must we learn from Poland’s history and current reality? Put simply, we humans are creatures of habit and tradition, even if they end up killing us. In Poland, the people had an opportunity and seemingly the desire to move away from their environmentally destructive ways, and almost did, but they quickly reverted back to the previous paradigm. We must remember that example if we ever hope to carve new traditions and ensure that the planet has a future.

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.

13 Percent of Florida Manatees Died Last Year

2018 was the second-deadliest year on record for the threatened species — and humans are responsible.

Florida manatees just can’t catch a break.

An estimated 824 manatees died in Florida waters last year, a nearly 50 percent increase over the number of mortalities in 2017 and the second-highest death count ever.

Sadly, a large number of this year’s deaths were human-caused, either directly from accidents or from long-term environmental threats created by anthropogenic forces.

What caused the most deaths this year? Watch our video below to learn more.

Further reading: The Simple Thing You Can Do to Save Lovable but Endangered Manatees

Beautiful Catastrophe: An Artist-Scientist Looks Into the Face of Extinction

Louisiana-based scientist Brandon Ballengée turns his research on imperiled ecosystems and species into transdisciplinary works of art.

Brandon Ballengée has found a way to make the unbearable beautiful.

Ballengée has professionally merged art and science, creating transdisciplinary artworks that draw on his research as a scientist to look at issues like pollution, harmful algal blooms, habitat loss and extinction.

And his work comes at crucial moment. Mounting environmental crises can push people to turn away — but Ballengée forces us to look at our problems head on by creating mesmerizing art with extinction and imperiled species as its subject.

His work, he says, is intended not to generate fear but empathy, understanding and action.

For 20 years he has used both science and art to chronicle deformities and declining populations among amphibians. Currently he works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University, where he studies the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.

And his artwork has hit a nerve — it’s been shown across the United States and in 20 countries around the world.

We talked with Ballengée about how he uses art to communicate scientific findings, why he involves the community in his process and how he’s creating his own on-the-ground restoration project.

How did you end up on this overlapping path of art and science, and where do you hope it leads?

Even as a child I always wanted to be both an artist and a scientist. Pragmatically (and academically) it just took time to sort out how to do this. Today my work as a biologist focuses on species impacted by complicated, often degraded, ecosystems such as amphibians and fishes. This research and the experience of working with impacted organisms motivates and inspires my art. While making art I reflect on the science from a different viewpoint, which leads to new questions, experiments and more science. The practices complement one another and I cannot imagine one without the other.

Artist Brandon Ballengée and oil-stained shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico collected after the clean up of the Deepwater Horizon spill and part of the installation of “Collapse.” (Photo by JD Talasek)

Through science, I can methodically achieve a better understanding of ecological phenomenon and share these findings with the research community. Whereas my artworks can carry an expressive message about impacted organisms to a wider non-science audience and inspire action.

What’s one of your favorite pieces of art or exhibitions that you’ve created?

My work with amphibians has been more of an emergency response to the current population crisis they face than a favorite series per se.

More than 40 percent of known amphibian species are considered in decline, and more than 200 species have gone missing in recent decades. These are ancient marvels of evolution with a wonderful array of shapes, forms, colors and behaviors. They are “keystone” species to our terrestrial ecosystems, meaning that when they are gone many other species are impacted. They are disappearing so fast. It is both tragic and alarming.

My series of artworks, Malamp Reliquaries, is my artistic response to this study of deformed and declining amphibians, as well as hopefully a means to inspire people to help protect these amazing creatures.

Morpheus art — “DFA 155: Morpheus,” a cleared and stained Pacific tree frog collected in Aptos, California, from a series on deformities in amphibian populations. Courtesy of artist Brandon Ballengée and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC.

What roles do collaboration and community play in your work?

Growing up in a rural environment, I was always inspired by animals and nature. This entrenched in me a strong desire to conserve and protect biodiversity and ecosystems. Bringing this message to the public underlies all of my work in science and art — what I call an impetus for “ecosystem activism.” My field investigations and laboratory programs stress public involvement, engagement and collaboration. Much of my artistic practice is also collaborative as well.

While conducting ecological field surveys I encourage public participation in “eco-actions.” Citizens contribute by actively helping to collect data on wildlife, monitor, even help to restore wetlands and other ecosystems. In turn, they learn about the ecology and biodiversity of where they live and act to protect it. I also encourage participants to express their experiences by making their own art. Through these direct actions we collectively learn, try to fix habitats and share this story with larger audiences through art.

How do you see your work helping to educate the public about environmental issues?

Often people feel that environmental problems are too large and too widespread for individuals to make a difference. This is absolutely not the case. All of our individual actions every day have an influence on ecosystems and biodiversity: what we chose to eat; how we live; where we live; how we travel; if we own land, what we do with it; how we discuss these ideas with others; and on and on.

We are part of a larger living community and can individually and collectively make large differences.

Following this concept, my wife Aurore Ballengée and our two children, Victor and Lily, and I have started the Atelier de la Nature project. Two years ago, we purchased heavily farmed soy fields in rural south Louisiana and have worked to regenerate the ecosystems from a transgenic monoculture into a modest nature reserve and outdoor education center.

We offer environmental education programs, sustainable food and art-science events open to all ages. Already participants have collaborated to “sculpt” the land with native species, worked to reestablish “Cajun” prairie, planted over a thousand native trees, created pollinator habitats and grown food without pesticides using permaculture, Creole and other indigenous methods.

The project has already yielded results in the ecological sense, with dozens of species of birds and mammals returning (and breeding), 23 species of amphibians and reptiles currently occupying the property, countless insects — all coming back to once-barren land. In the human sense, hundreds of youth have helped with restoration of the lands or participated in our programs.

Your postdoctoral research has focused on the biological impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. How has art helped you communicate what you’ve you found?

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was the largest environmental disaster in the history of the United States (outside perhaps of industrial agriculture or European colonization). Literally billions of organisms were affected — endangered sea turtles, marine mammals, plankton, deep-water alga, corals, birds, people. There is still so much we do not yet understand about the impact on wildlife populations, coastal (human) communities and the long-term impacts of the Gulf of Mexico food chain and ecosystems. Much more continued research is needed for decades to come.

My installation Collapse called into question the impacts to the Gulf of Mexico’s food chain following the spill and use of harmful dispersants to “clean” the oil. Physically, Collapse was a pyramid shaped installation of preserved fish, other aquatic organisms and Deep Water Horizon contaminates in gallon specimen jars. There were over 20,000 specimens in Collapse — from huge deep sea roaches (isopods), to oil-stained shrimp with physical deformities, to jars packed with tiny sea snails. It was meant to recall the fragile inter-trophic relationships between Gulf species and the way the spill may have altered this.

Collapse was made in collaboration with fellow biologists Todd Gardner, Jack Rudloe and Peter Warny, as well as my former student, artist Brian Schiering, and several Gulf residents who sent oiled specimens but wished to remain anonymous. It took us two years to gather data, specimens and other samples.

Since 2016 my research has focused on locating species of endemic (not found anywhere else in the world) Gulf fishes that have not been reported since the spill. To date there are still 13 “missing” species. With the help of shrimpers, fisherman and Gulf residents I hope we can find these ghosts of the Gulf.

Found But Lost: Newly Discovered Shark May Be Extinct

Carcharhinus obsolerus (that’s Latin for “extinct”) swam in the waters of the western Pacific, but it hasn’t been seen in 80-plus years.

Over the past two decades more than 260 new species of shark have been discovered by researchers around the world, increasing the number of known species by more than 20 percent.

Now we can add one more to the list. A paper published Jan. 2 in the journal PLOS ONE describes a striking new shark species from the waters off the coasts of Borneo, Thailand and Vietnam. It looks like some similar “whaler shark” species — a genus that also includes the well-known bull shark and blacktip shark — but its teeth, snout, fins and vertebrae are distinctive enough that scientists have declared it to be its own species.

There’s just one problem: The shark was identified from decades-old museum samples and hasn’t been seen in the wild since the 1930s.

That’s why the researchers have named the species “lost shark.”

More formally they’ve dubbed it Carcharhinus obsolerus — the second word in the taxonomic name is Latin for “extinct.”

Despite the name, researchers still hope a game of hide-and-seek might find evidence that lost sharks still exist.

“It is quite possible that the lost shark still roams the coastal waters of the South China Sea, but it was so named because we could not locate specimens” in museum collections or the wild, says coauthor Peter M. Kyne, a conservation biologist and senior research fellow at Australia’s Charles Darwin University.

Of course, we don’t know exactly where to look, as “lost shark” was actually only officially observed three times — two juvenile specimens and a late-term embryo. The original researchers that collected the specimens decades ago never adequately described the species, so the current team has taken steps to complete that process, even though the creature’s historic range and role in the ecosystem are not understood.

Why take the effort to describe the lost shark now, so long after it was last seen? As noted in the paper, similar coastal fish species in Southeast Asia currently face enormous pressure from human activity. Last year the Asia Foundation went so far as to say that many marine species in the area are “near collapse from overfishing.” That makes it critical to identify all of the species — shark or otherwise — that swim in the region so we know what needs to be protected before they disappear for good.

More broadly, the identification of lost shark relates to a bigger initiative, the ongoing Global Shark Trends Project, which aims to assess the extinction risk of the world’s shark and ray species (collectively known as chondrichthyan species) by the end of next year. That’s a necessary process for the nations that signed the Convention on Biological Diversity, which by 2020 must ensure that their fisheries are sustainable and that further extinctions are avoided.

As part of the shark-trends project, Kyle says they will spend the coming year examining the conservation status of many other newly described shark species.

Meanwhile there’s hope that by formally identifying and naming this species, even decades after its last sighting, it may be “lost” no more.

That’s happened in the past. “A close relative, the Borneo shark, was once thought to be lost, with no records since 1937,” Kyne points out. “It was rediscovered in 2004 during fish-market surveys. We hope that the lost shark can be re-found in the future, and so we don’t formally consider it to be extinct.”

It may need a new taxonomic name if that rediscovery ever comes to pass, but for now the lost shark’s name is a reminder of the pressure other shark species face from overfishing — and a hope that other species won’t also disappear.