The Bramble Cay melomys, a tiny island rodent, was wiped out by sea-level rise, according to the government of Australia.
It’s official: Climate change has claimed its first mammal extinction.
This week the Australian government declared the extinction of a tiny rodent called Bramble Cay melomys (also known as the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat, Melomys rubicola). The quiet announcement was buried in a press release about enacting stronger protections for other endangered species. It comes three years after a more detailed declaration by the state government of Queensland, which itself followed an exhaustive search of the cay seeking any evidence of the species’ existence.
The Bramble Cay melomys lived in just a single habitat, a small reef island at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, near Papua New Guinea. The sandy cay — which only measures about 1,100 feet by 500 feet and rises just three feet above sea level — has in recent years been buffeted by storm surges from extreme weather events. The heavy waters have reportedly wiped out about 97 percent of the land mass’s vegetation — the melomys’s only source of food.
According to the 2016 report, the last person confirmed to have seen the Bramble Cay melomys alive was a fisherman who spotted one in late 2009. It now seems possible that could have been the last surviving member of the species.
The Bramble Cay melomys was once described as relatively common, but that was no longer the case by the end of the 20th century. A 1998 survey estimated the population at 93 individuals, down from “hundreds” two decades earlier. Additional surveys in 2002 and 2004 turned up just 10 and 12 of the rats, respectively, according to accounts published in a 2008 recovery plan for the species. That plan, which now seems painfully prescient, called out sea-level rise, flooding and coastal erosion as then-potential threats.
Sadly, not much was ever done about that 2008 recovery plan, and those threats became very real. Tim Beshara, federal policy director for the Wilderness Society, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the plan was never finished or acted upon.
The Australian government’s announcement should come as no surprise. When Queensland announced the likely extinction in 2016, they identified “human-induced climate change [as] the root cause of the loss of the Bramble Cay melomys” — a fact picked up in headlines at the time around the world.
Now those headlines are repeating. Even Fox News picked up the melomys’s extinction in an article warning about a sea-rise “time bomb” that Antarctic melting will pose for the region.
That’s something, at least. Perhaps this second declaration of the extinction of the Bramble Cay melomys will finally inspire enough attention to prevent the loss of similar species — or at least give governments a push to mobilize protective efforts before it’s once again too late.
What border communities really need are solutions to address economic, health and climate problems — and the mesquite tree can help.
President Trump has declared a national emergency to fund a wall along our nation’s southern border. The border wall issue has bitterly divided people across the United States, becoming a vivid symbol of political deadlock.
But for many of us who actually live along the U.S.-Mexico border, the wall is simply beside the point. We know that a wall can’t fix the problems that straddle the boundary between our nations; nor will it build on our shared strengths. So a group of us — ranchers, farmers, conservationists, chefs, carpenters, small business owners and public-health professionals from both sides of the border — have come up with a better idea. We call it the Mesquite Manifesto.
Our plan would tackle the root causes of problems that affect border communities on both sides. While the media have fixated on the difficult conditions in Mexico (and other Central American nations) that propel immigrants northward, there are real problems on the U.S. side too. The poverty rate in this region is twice as high as for the nation as a whole, and joblessness drives many into the lucrative drug trade. Poor diets and inadequate healthcare contribute to high rates of disease: Nearly one-third of those who live along the border suffer from diabetes. And a rapidly growing population, along with rising demand from industry and agriculture, is stressing the region’s limited water supply — a problem made worse by the changing climate.
To address these problems and build a sustainable future for the region as a whole, we look to mesquite, the iconic native tree that grows in every county and municipio along the border. Its gnarly branches have provided food, fuel, medicine, shade and shelter to indigenous communities in the borderlands for more than eight millennia.
Deep-rooted mesquite trees such as velvet mesquite (Prosopis velutina) and honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) are remarkably drought-resistant, anchoring the arid desert land and fixing nitrogen to improve the soil. Their seeds contain more protein than soybeans and can be milled to make flour with a low glycemic index, which helps regulate blood sugar.
A bee visits a mesquite tree blossom in Arizona. (Photo by Ken Bosma, CC BY 2.0)
It’s no wonder that mesquite long sustained indigenous communities in this fragile land. What is remarkable is that mesquite is seen as a nuisance tree by many who live here now. Indeed there’s scientific consensus that mesquites are among the most “under-managed” resources on our continent, though they cover nearly 200 million acres of arid and semi-arid lands in Mexico and the United States.
We believe that targeted investments in restoring and managing mesquite could become — dollar for dollar and peso for peso — the most cost-effective investment ever made in the future of arid America.
Mesquite-pod flour, which is now used in baking, brewing and in the preparation of low-glycemic food products, sells in many states for $22-24 per pound;
Sustainably harvested hardwoods that are of stunning color, texture, shape and durability. Mesquite wood can be sold for $5-10 per board foot, to be used by furniture makers, floor designers, guitar-makers and builders;
Fuelwood that is already valued at $200-400 million per year by the “mesquite barbecue” industry, which now uses trees selectively harvested from rangelands in the U.S. Southwest;
Mesquite honey, which is already a multimillion-dollar industry in most states along the border;
Other products with emerging markets, including biofuels, biochar, culinary and medicinal gums, and mesquite-smoked beer, coffee and whiskey.
We propose the establishment of capacity-building centers to develop mesquite-based industries in every watershed crossing the border. These centers could provide bilingual training in a variety of skills related to arid lands agro-forestry and sustainable forest-product development. Schools and churches that have been closed down in impoverished rural areas and border cities could be renovated by local construction workers and repurposed as training centers for a binational “Green New Deal” effort.
Mesquite wood ready for a BBQ. (Photos by Forest and Kim Starr, CC BY 2.0)
There are many bilingual teachers, researchers, craftsmen, brewers and chefs who already have the capacity to train and mentor others in range management, ecological restoration, permaculture, hardwood craftsmanship and furniture making, honeybee management, mesquite pod milling, brewing and baking, and the marketing of non-timber forest products.
Mesquite could be cultivated on private, state and federal rangeland (but not in parks or wildlife refuges, which should remain pristine). Millions of acres could be managed in ways that restore, rather than exploit, the land. For example, the trees can be pruned or thinned for their wood, rather than clearcut. And seedpods can be selectively harvested to leave enough for wildlife and regeneration.
Managing mesquite in this way could produce environmental benefits. Mesquite forests and the plant communities they shape offer numerous “ecosystem services,” including wildlife habitat for beneficial insects, birds and bats involved in pollination and pest control; flood control; heat amelioration in urban settings; and recreational amenities such as birdwatching and the hunting of gamebirds like quail and doves.
Communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border need help. We do not, however, need a multibillion-dollar wall of concrete or steel. Instead, let us recognize our shared culture, economy and geography — and value the tree that has long sustained the people of this unforgiving land. By investing in mesquite, we can build a restorative economy that enables communities on both sides of the border to prosper and thrive.
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.
President Trump’s invocation of a national emergency to build his border wall is worrying and “illegal,” according to scholars.
By Julian Hernandez and Molly Stellino, Cronkite News
PHOENIX – President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Friday to redistribute government funds to build his long-sought after wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but experts question whether it’s constitutional.
“So we’re going to be signing today, and registering, national emergency and it’s a great thing to do, because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people and it’s unacceptable,” Trump said in a Rose Garden address.
In a statement, Rep. Tom O’Halleran, D-Flagstaff, said this action would divert resources from the Department of Defense and law enforcement programs to fund a border wall.The statement also said that $3.5 billion from the Pentagon’s military construction fund, $2.5 billion from the Pentagon’s drug interdiction initiative and $600 million from the Department of the Treasury’s drug forfeiture program will be shuffled to fund the construction of the border wall.
Although the National Emergencies Act of 1976 grants the president broad authority to declare a state of national emergency, there is debate as to whether any federal laws grant the president the authority to redirect funds to the border wall construction and to instruct the military to build the wall.
The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, a law and public policy center that specializes in constitutional issues, compiled a list of federal laws and the powers they grant to presidents that can be used in a time of war and during national emergencies.
The exact statutory powers that President Trump plans to use aren’t yet known because the emergency text has not yet been made public.
That uncertainty worries Jon D. Michaels, professor at the UCLA School of Law, because he says the president has not shown the same level of responsibility, discretion and caution as previous presidents who have declared a national emergency.
“The level of responsibility that has been exercised (by earlier presidents) has been sufficient that we haven’t worried about all these extra statutory authorities kicking in because they’re not being exploited,” Michaels says.
The Brennan Center said that statutory powers 10 U.S.C. 2808 (a) and 33 U.S.C. 2293 might offer some legal cover for the president’s wall-building ambitions.
During a state of emergency, statutory power 10 U.S.C. 2808 (a) says that the secretary of Defense may undertake military construction projects that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces.
And statutory power 33 U.S.C. 2293 allows the Army to terminate or defer any Army civil works project and apply the resources to authorized military construction, civil defense projects that are essential to national defense.
Some constitutional law experts say there is no explicit power granted to the president by any federal laws or by the constitution, to use the military to build the border wall.
Professor Bruce Ackerman, Sterling professor of law and political science at Yale University and a constitutional expert, says Trump’s use of a national emergency presents a grave constitutional problem.
“It is illegal for the commander in chief to use military resources for domestic law enforcement, except where explicitly authorized,” he says, adding that no explicit authorization exists.
Ackerman says this will provoke a constitutional crisis involving the military if Trump orders his generals to begin construction on new border barriers.
“The important point is that the generals are going to have to decide immediately: Are they going to follow the law of the United States or are they going to follow the commander in chief?”
Because Trump “only pointed to issues of domestic law enforcement, criminal enforcement and the like in his remarks today,” Ackerman says, it would be an unconstitutional use of his executive powers.
In 1952, he says, the Supreme Court ruled in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer that a president can’t use his commander in chief powers for domestic law enforcement. The case arose during the Korean War, when President Truman ordered the secretary of Commerce to seize and operate most of the nation’s steel mills to avert a expected steelworker strike.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government ethics watchdog based in Washington D.C., already has filed suit against the Department of Justice for failing to provide documents outlining the legal authority of Trump’s emergency declaration. The American Civil Liberties Union and Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., announced they intend to file separate lawsuits in the coming weeks.
Once a challenge is filed in court, Ackerman says, “the Supreme Court is going to decide in six months to a year.”
In the meantime, the national emergency declaration can be undone if both the Senate and House of Representatives pass a joint resolution and Trump signs it. If he vetoes the joint resolution, it would require two-thirds of both the House and Senate to override the veto.
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A new book asks, “Can we feed the world without destroying it?” The answers might surprise you.
The world needs to change the way it eats, not just as individuals but as a society.
That’s the message from a groundbreaking report issued last month by the EAT-Lancet Commission, which made a series of societal recommendations to help the world’s ever-increasing human population ensure its food security in the face of global warming.
The recommendations are all designed to accommodate a planet that is projected to contain 10 billion people by the year 2050. They include switching to a diet that’s low in meat and sugar but higher in whole grains, fruits and vegetables; cutting food waste; reducing fossil fuel use and emissions; and incentivizing small and medium farming.
The changes, the report said, would lead to a healthier planet and healthier people, while also helping the more than 820 million people currently suffering from chronic hunger.
Coincidentally, the report came out the same week as a challenging new book that makes many of the same recommendations, while also presenting some contrasting and complementary ideas.
According to Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?, written by food activist Eric Holt-Giménez and published by Polity Press, we already produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, and we’re gearing up to grow even more to accommodate the projected increase in human population.
All that food comes with multiple costs, including climate change, drought, water contamination, habitat loss and species extinctions — which themselves put the very future of food at risk. Holt- Giménez writes, “our greenhouse-gas-spewing industrial food system has entered a dangerous negative feedback loop. The way we produce and consume food is undermining our ability to produce food at all.”
So where is all this food if so many people are still going hungry? Holt- Giménez — who says as many as 2.5 billion people are hungry — argues that hunger is less a problem of production and more a function of our global food system and poverty. “People are going hungry not because of lack of food,” he writes, “but because they are too poor to buy it.”
Much of that poverty, Holt- Giménez claims, is actually caused by the agricultural industry:
“Commercial farmers don’t produce food to feed people: they produce food to sell on the market, where they compete with other food producers. Whoever can produce the most food at the cheapest price will have the most market power — power to flood markets and push out other producers. When smaller, subsistence farmers who are actually growing most of the world’s food go broke, they often go hungry.”
Perhaps more importantly, he writes, the commercial agricultural system forces farmers to grow monocultures for the global market, which doesn’t help anyone living on or near the farms themselves. “Farmers are nutrient-deficient,” he writes, “because they no longer grow a balanced diet.”
And much of what the world produces is never consumed. About 30 to 50 percent of the world’s food rots on the fields or in landfills, resulting in wasted water and energy and excessive production of greenhouse gases — which bring us back to the climate-change threat.
What’s the root cause of these problems? Holt- Giménez places the blame squarely on capitalism. The global food system, he writes:
“…is working precisely as a capitalist food system is supposed to work: it expands constantly, concentrating wealth in a few, powerful monopolies, while transferring all the social and environmental costs onto society. These costs are borne inequitably by women, the poor, indigenous peoples, people of color, the working class, rural communities — the most exploited and vulnerable.”
He calls this the “hunger-industrial complex,” a system that guarantees people will go hungry by refusing to address low wages and economic inequality.
On top of that, and in contrast to the Lancet report, Holt- Giménez argues that the world population isn’t going to explode by 2050. It’s more likely, he writes, to level off, which presents two problems for capitalism: “the specter of stagnant population growth and of communities too poor to buy the food being produced.”
So what are the solutions? Holt- Giménez says hunger and famine will only be solved by putting political power back in the hands of the world’s poorest people. In other words, it requires transforming the concept of food security into one of food sovereignty.
More broadly, he argues that a food movement could “catalyze society to demand the deep systemic reforms on which our collective future depends.” This would require linking food with other concepts such as climate justice, the women’s movement and the indigenous rights movement. That linkage would help address agriculture’s contribution to the climate crisis.
Holt-Giménez lays out a few guidelines for making this possible, including embracing the “polluter pays” principle, where food production will need to be responsible for its water and soil use and greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing livestock production and meat consumption would refocus the grain industry toward producing human food, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and allow farmers to diversify their crops. Providing farmers with living wages would also give communities the financial support they need while removing the incentive for overproduction. Finally, he calls for the dismantling of the world’s food, agriculture and chemical monopolies as another way to protect farmers and consumers.
Like the EAT-Lancet report, Can We Feed the World presents a challenging set of ideas and science and facts to back up its case. As Holt-Giménez writes, global warming threatens the world’s food, while the world’s food system threatens us with worsening climate change and ever-increasing inequality. The two publications may not completely agree, but they do present a unified message that immediate change is needed.
The unexpected announcement reverses a plan to move people out of critical protected habitats — and puts the nation’s amazing biodiversity at risk.
Some of the most important habitats in the United Republic of Tanzania, one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, could soon be inundated with farmers and livestock following a recent decree by President John Magufuli that orders relisting protected lands as village property.
This is a major reversal for Tanzania, a country known for its wild spaces, including World Heritage sites ranging from the Ngorongoro Crater and Mt. Kilimanjaro to the vast Selous Game Reserve and famous Serengeti National Park. Tanzania’s protected areas support an amazing array of wildlife, including some of the largest remaining elephant and lion populations in Africa and the continent’s largest wildebeest and zebra migrations.
Udzungwa red colobus (Piliocolobus gordonorum) in Udzungwa Mountain National Park. This primate, an endemic to the Udzungwa Mountains, is already in danger of extinction due to habitat loss and fragmentation from agriculture and livestock. Photo courtesy of Brennan PetersonWood.
In addition to the large and well-known national parks, Tanzania also holds many smaller forest and game reserves; in total this network of protected lands accounts for over 30 percent of the country’s land mass. These smaller forest and game reserves, while lacking the large and charismatic species or wide-open views that attract tourists and money, still contain many endemic species and subspecies. The geographically isolated nature of many of the forest reserves — like ones adjacent to a small conservation NGO we managed from 2016-2017 — means the species contained within are vulnerable to habitat loss. Many local species like the Udzungwa red colobus and Kipunji monkey are listed as endangered and critically endangered by the IUCN.
President Magufuli’s announcement puts much of this land, and the survivability of the country’s wildlife, at risk.
This threat wasn’t on the horizon for most conservationists. Prior to the announcement, the government had actually earmarked more than 300 human settlements where people have recently moved in and built houses for removal from protected areas. Some of these forest invaders have been identified as foreign nationals who settled in as recently as July of last year.
The president’s recent directive stopped the eviction of those settlements and directed ministries to begin the process to formalize them into villages. In his statement he also ordered “leaders in the ministries concerned to identify conservancies and forest reserves that have no wildlife so that the same are given to landless pastoralists and farmers.” He decreed that forest reserves lacking trees should also be handed over to farmers and directed an inquiry into changing a current law that prohibits cultivation of crops within about 200 feet of any river — a law that’s already often ignored, at the expense of the health of the country’s waterways.
Tanzania’s population is one of the fastest growing in the world and has expanded from around nine million people in 1961 to more than 55 million today. As the human population has increased, so, too, has the number of domesticated animals. The country currently holds more than 35 million heads of livestock. President Magufuli cited both growing populations as the justification for his directive.
The announcement comes at a time when protected areas and wildlife around the world are facing increased threats, including Brazil’s new president announcing increased Amazon deforestation and the loss of one of the last intact lowland rainforest ecosystems in Central America. Unfortunately the move in Tanzania has not received anywhere nearly the level of international attention as these other actions.
President Magufuli’s directive does compare, however, in its potential for destructiveness. For example, the order lacks any clear guidelines or determining factors for when a reserve would be considered empty and no longer serving a conservation purpose. Regulatory standards based on science are of utmost importance in these situations, as even seemingly empty reserves can still support populations of invertebrates, birds and other more difficult species to visually record. Many of the large charismatic mammals whose presence is often used to establish protected areas are migratory in nature and may only pass through certain areas infrequently. With climate change disrupting rain patterns across Africa, these migrations and timings are becoming more unpredictable and random than before. Habitat loss and fragmentation are the leading threats to wildlife with ever-shrinking protected lands becoming more isolated. This leads to increased edge-effect threats and genetic inbreeding among formerly wide-roaming species. While a reserve may seem empty of permanent occupation by large mammals, the land protected can still serve as a vital corridor linking other protected areas, particularly in times of drought or other disturbances.
Once under control of village leadership the previously protected lands will almost certainly be over-grazed and inefficiently and unsustainably farmed, resulting in the desertification of even more of the country.
Another particular concern is the statement that forest reserves lacking trees should be handed over to farmers. Most rural households in Tanzania cook over open wood fires, and both legal and illegal wood cutting already exist at unsustainable rates. Magufuli is ignoring the fact that reserves currently lacking trees became deforested through past illegal logging and grazing. Rewarding villages by handing over those reserves will most likely encourage further deforestation in protected areas.
A. Harvested firewood taken within the Wildlife Management Area adjacent to Ruaha National Park to be sold in the nearby village of Tungamelenga. B. Firewood being harvested just outside the protected boundaries to be used for home consumption. C. Stacks of firewood in the village of Tungamelenga, which will last only a few days, origins unknown. Photos courtesy of Adam C. Stein and Isacka Lemulebeli
Relaxing the law prohibiting crop cultivation within 200 feet of waterways will also have massive negative impacts on the ecosystems. Agricultural runoff, streambank erosion and overuse of limited water sources will almost certainly occur. Increased farming near water sources will also increase human wildlife conflicts as animals such as elephants, hippos and bush pigs frequenting those waterways will now come into increased contact with crops. Overconsumption of waterways is already a major driver of human wildlife conflict in Tanzania, with rivers running dry and forcing elephants out of national parks and into farmers’ fields.
This isn’t the only emerging environmental problem in Tanzania. The announcement comes on the heels of a project to dam the Rufiji River at Stiegler’s gorge in the Selous Game Reserve, a World Heritage Site, putting it at risk of losing that classification. Conservationists have expressed grave concern over the project, while economists point out that greater electricity production can be achieved through the expansion of already existing natural gas, geothermal, wind and solar.
Given Tanzania’s rate of human and livestock population growth and reliance on foreign aid, the president’s call to increase land areas for human activities is understandable. But Tanzania relies heavily on wildlife tourism, which accounts for more than $2 billion annually and over 12 percent of employment. Further loss of protected areas — which are crucial to the survival of both isolated endemic species and long-ranging mammals such as lions and elephants — will likely result in a decrease in the tourism income that is vital for the economic health of the country.
Simply delisting protected land is unlikely to achieve long-term results given the unsustainable farming and grazing practices available to most Tanzanians. Specifically, maize is still grown mainly by smallholders and medium-scale farmers using traditional techniques that have yields significantly lower than the potential for the land. In addition, pastoralists’ response to increased livestock deaths as a result of overgrazing and climate change has been to increase herd size to serve as a buffer against further losses, thus exacerbating the problem.
Notably, many alternative methods of increasing human livelihoods while simultaneously protecting sensitive species habitat and forest reserves have successfully been employed in Tanzania. Instead of delisting land, the government should invest in teaching better agricultural practices and income diversification, which would have lasting positive effects and still allow the protection of wildlife and habitat.
This is obviously still a developing situation, but it could become a disaster for Tanzania’s wildlife and subsequently its economy. It’s possible that the government could succumb to international pressure and reverse course, but any delay in strengthening protections for these forests could be what truly turns them into empty woodlands devoid of the life that makes Tanzania so special.
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.
Researcher Emily Francis explains how the coast redwoods and sequoias fared during California’s drought and what that means for future climate resilience.
California’s most iconic trees can live for centuries — but can they survive in a warming world?
Populations of the state’s two redwood species — coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) and giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) — have already declined by 95 percent since 1850 due to logging and development. Now scientists want to know how climate change and drought will affect them in the near future.
Many of California’s other tree species are already known to be at risk. The record-breaking drought that plagued the state from 2011-2016 killed an estimated 129 million trees, mostly in the state’s mixed-conifer forests that include trees like white fir, Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, sugar pine and California black oak. The drought left entire swaths of the Sierra Nevada streaked with the sight of reddish-brown dying or dead trees.
California redwoods didn’t display as much obvious damage, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t impacted. Figuring out how and why they would be affected by future droughts and warming temperatures — and how they’ll resist the changes — remains an important line of questioning, not just for the trees themselves but for everything around them. The famous trees make for great tourist attractions, and also serve important ecosystem functions. They capture more carbon dioxide than any other tree and provide habitat for hundreds of bird species and everything from black bears and elk, to mountain lions and beavers.
“Old-growth forests are important to society for many reasons, but their worth cannot be measured,” says Emily Francis, a fifth-year PhD student in the department of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University who’s studying how redwoods are responding to drought and climate change. “It is humbling to consider the depth of their history and resilience as living organisms.”
We talked to Francis about her research and what the future may hold for these beloved trees.
What have you learned about how climate change is affecting redwoods?
Climate change has resulted in warming temperatures in California, which has increased the severity of droughts. Redwoods are adapted to environments with high water availability, so increasingly severe droughts threaten redwoods.
On the other hand, redwoods are also experts at utilizing water from fog or coastal low clouds. Fog supplies water through condensation on leaf surfaces and fog drip, which in some locations, can exceed water input from winter rainfall in a normal precipitation year.
However, access to fog water is variable depending on where trees are located — at high elevations, or at locations where fog is blocked by a mountain, fog moisture is largely absent. We expect redwoods without access to fog water to be more sensitive to climate change.
Stanford University researcher Emily Francis in a redwood forest. (Photo courtesy of Emily Francis)
How did redwoods fare during California’s recent five-year drought?
Coastal redwood forests suffered less mortality than the mixed-conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains, most likely because fog cover in redwood forests both moderated the exceptionally high temperatures and supplied moisture to redwood forests during the driest and hottest summer months.
But it’s likely that their growth rates and carbon uptake were still severely impacted. We’re currently measuring growth rates from tree rings dating back to the 1950s to study the effect of recent droughts on tree growth rates and to quantify the buffering effect of streams and fog on redwood responsiveness to drought.
Are there any differences between how climate change or drought is affecting the two tree species?
The natural climate conditions of coastal redwood and giant sequoia habitats are very different. Giant sequoias are endemic to the Sierra Nevada mountains, which is a much drier climate with no access to water from fog during the summer. Because of this, redwoods and giant sequoias have variable responses to drought, but both respond by reducing the volume of leaves in their canopy, which seems to be a very effective strategy. Both species suffered relatively low mortality rates during the recent drought.
For giant sequoia in particular, few individuals died during the recent drought, and many of those that did were trees that had suffered damage during recent fires. The low mortality rates of giant sequoias were in stark contrast to other adjacent tree species — in particular sugar pine and ponderosa pine — which suffered high mortality.
Visitors to California’s Sequoia National Park photograph the General Sherman redwood tree. (Photo by Linda Tanner, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
What do we still need to learn about how climate change may affect redwoods?
We still need better predictions of the impact of climate change on fog patterns in California to understand how redwoods are responding to climate change.
Current projections of climate change’s impact on fog are contradictory. Is it increasing or decreasing? On the one hand, long-term airport records of fog cover suggest that it declined over the second half of the 1900s relative to the first half. On the other hand, some predictions suggest that warming temperatures in the Central Valley of California could increase the coastal-to-inland temperature gradient, thereby resulting in more fog cover.
Finally, the formation of fog cover is dependent on a cold coastal upwelling zone off of the coast of California, which is also vulnerable to climate change.
What does the long-term picture look like for the health of California’s redwoods?
While temperatures continue to rise in California, drought stress in redwood forests is likely to increase. In response, the natural habitat of redwoods may be reduced.
Over large geographic scales we expect the natural habitat of redwoods to move northward, and over small scales within forests, we expect redwood habitats to become more confined to sites that have high access to water from streams and fog. Because of this, it’s important to identify and protect these redwood stands — especially those that are close to streams and in high-fog environments.
The removal of the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River helped river conservationists reimagine what’s possible.
Welcome to the first edition of “Turning Points,” our new column examining critical moments in environmental history when change occurred for the better — or worse.
More than 1,000 people lined the banks of the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine, on July 1, 1999. They were there to witness a rebirth.
The ringing of a bell signaled a backhoe on the opposite bank to dig into a retaining wall. Water trickled, then gushed. The crowd erupted in cheers as the Edwards Dam, which had stretched 900 feet across the river, was breached. Soon the whole dam would be removed.
The Kennebec hadn’t run free here since 1837.
Those who advocated for the dam’s removal promised that devastated fisheries would return, and the city of Augusta would benefit from new recreational opportunities and a revitalization of the riverfront.
They were right. But it wasn’t just Augusta where change was felt.
The removal of Edwards Dam became a pivotal moment in the history of the environmental movement and river restoration in the United States. It was the first functioning hydroelectric dam to be removed — and the first time the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ever voted, against the wishes of a dam owner, not to relicense a dam.
But most importantly the demolition signaled a shift in thinking about how we balance environmental and economic interests — and that had a ripple effect.
“It was the first big dam that came out that demonstrated to the country that our rivers had other values beyond industrial use,” says John Burrows, director of New England Programs for the Atlantic Salmon Federation, which was a key player in the dam-removal effort. “It helped folks recognize that our rivers, which we’ve not taken good care of for several hundred years, could be a different asset for communities. And for society.”
Killing a River
Building the Edwards Dam was never a popular idea. Even in the 1830s there was concern that the robust fisheries of the lower Kennebec River would be wiped out. But the cheerleaders of industrialism prevailed, and the dam was built in 1837 to bring power to local mills.
The consequences were immediate.
The dam’s construction shut the door on the migration of nearly a dozen sea-run fish species that used to swim up more than 40 miles from the Atlantic Ocean in search of prime spawning habitat in the Kennebec and its tributaries.
“The river was transformed from being a thriving producer of millions of fish such as shad, herring, striped bass, Atlantic salmon, sturgeon and alewives and supporting a wide cornucopia of other species ranging from otters to eagles — into a wastewater drainage system,” Jeff Crane, a dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Saint Martin’s University, wrote in a paper published in 2009.
Within a few years, the alewife run on the Sebasticook River, a tributary of the Kennebec just upstream from the dam, was gone. Where once you’d been able to catch 500 salmon a season in Augusta, by 1850 you were lucky to get five. The state reported that the shad industry there was completely lost by 1867. And the sturgeon catch on the lower Kennebec declined from 320,000 pounds a year before the dam to just 12,000 pounds a year by 1880.
In the 1900s the river’s problems got even worse. The Kennebec River became a dumping ground for toxic waste from paper mills and municipal sewage. Log drives from the upstate timber industry choked the river’s flow, and declining oxygen levels from sewage caused major fish kills. By the 1960s no one wanted to fish or swim in the Kennebec anymore.
Brian Graber, who now works as the senior director of river restoration at American Rivers, grew up in Massachusetts and spent his summers in a family cabin outside Augusta. The Kennebec River of his childhood wasn’t a place to have a good time — or even to live.
“I think what struck me the most as a kid was that all the buildings in downtown Augusta were facing away from the river and were either boarded up or just didn’t have windows at all along the river,” Graber recalls.
But things began to gradually improve after the passage of the national Clean Water Act in 1972.
The state of Maine spent $100 million on water-treatment facilities between 1972 and 1990 to clean up the river and meet modern environmental laws. Improvements in water quality triggered a new interest in expanding river restoration. The Kennebec wasn’t hopeless after all.
But one hurdle remained.
Thinking Big
During the 1980s efforts to improve fish passage at dams and water quality in the river continued. Even though many environmental groups thought dam removal was the best ecological hope for restoring the Kennebec, few believed it was a winnable campaign.
“At that time removal of dams was a pretty outlandish concept and most people who we were interacting with did not see us prevailing,” says Pete Didisheim, senior director of advocacy at the Natural Resources Council of Maine.
The only other talk of dam removal happening then in the United States was across the country on Washington’s Elwha River. (The Elwha’s two dams wouldn’t end up being removed, however, until 2011 and 2014.)
In 1991 the owners of the Edwards Dam, Edwards Manufacturing Company, applied for a 50-year renewal license to operate it. The newly formed Kennebec Coalition jumped in to convince the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency in charge of the relicensing, to deny that permit. The coalition was made up of the nonprofits American Rivers, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, the Natural Resources Council of Maine, and Trout Unlimited and its Kennebec Valley chapter.
“People began to not only imagine what dam removal would do for the benefit of the fish, but also what it would do for the benefit of the town if they had a functioning, free-flowing river running through it,” says Andrew Fahlund, currently senior program officer at the Water Foundation, who was working for American Rivers during the push for dam removal.
The coalition had a strong argument. The dam produced only 3.5 megawatts of power, providing less than 0.1 percent of Maine’s electricity. It employed only a few people and was aging and unsafe, having been breached numerous times. It blocked critical upstream fish habitat, including the migration of endangered sturgeon.
And a restored fishery would bring economic as well as ecological benefits — profits that could be more widely shared than those of the small company that owned the dam.
But taking down a functioning hydroelectric dam for the benefit of fish had never been done before.
“Initially the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff issued their proposal that the dam should be relicensed,” says Burrows. “It took our organizations doing a lot of work with some experts to actually demonstrate that the ecological values of removing the dam outweighed the power generation.” The coalition produced 7,000 pages of documentation on the impacts of the dam and the economic importance of a restored fishery.
At the same time, they worked to educate the public and earned national attention and the support of Maine’s governor, Angus King, who said that the removal of the dam would help the Kennebec “reclaim its position as both an economic asset and an ecological miracle.”
Dam proponents countered that removal would be too expensive and would cause riverbank erosion, bring more downstream floods and lower property values for those along the riverfront.
But in 1997, after mounting evidence from the coalition, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted to deny license renewal. It ordered that the dam be removed. People campaigning for removal were ecstatic, while dam owners across the country were shocked.
This was the first time the commission used its authority to deny a permit against the wishes of a dam owner. And it hasn’t been done since.
It wasn’t just the commission’s ruling that was groundbreaking; it was also the first time a dam was coming down on the main stem of a river and not a smaller tributary, which Graber says was a significant achievement. “It was a pivotal moment for us to build a national movement to take out dams,” he adds.
A crowd gathers on the banks of the Kennebec River of the breaching of Edwards Dam in 1999. (Photo by NRCM)
The battle wasn’t yet won, though.
It took another year for a negotiated settlement to be reached with the dam owner, conservation groups and federal and state agencies that managed to stave off the threat of lengthy lawsuits from Edwards Manufacturing Company.
Much of the funding for the removal ended up coming from Bath Iron Works, a downstream shipbuilder that was expanding its operations into prime sturgeon habitat. The company paid into the dam-removal settlement as part of its environmental mitigation.
The decision had far-reaching impacts.
“The success of this effort would serve as an example of what could be accomplished for other river restoration activists around the nation, thereby contributing to the dramatic growth of dam removal efforts and fisheries restoration projects,” wrote Crane.
A River Reborn
The removal of Edwards Dam in July 1999 turned out to be a chance for Augusta to rebuild its relationship to the river.
“Like most towns in New England of that era, their backs had been turned to the river for more than 100 years,” says Fahlund, who was on the banks that day. He remembers it feeling electric and the atmosphere festive — music played, commemorative T-shirts were sold and reporters from around the world showed up.
It was also, he says, a day of mixed emotions for some residents. The dam had been a piece of the town’s history for more than 160 years, both infrastructure and monument, but part of the campaign to remove it had been to counter the notion that dams are meant to last forever.
That echoed beyond the town limits. “Even though it wasn’t a huge dam, it had somewhat of a seismic impact on people’s thinking about dams that they’re not necessarily permanent fixtures in eternity on the landscape,” says Didisheim.
As soon as the dam came down, the river rebounded. Fish immediately had access to 18 more miles of habitat, up to the town of Waterville at the mouth of the Sebasticook River. Atlantic sturgeon began to swim past the former dam site, and alewife and shad soon returned. Within a year seals could be seen chasing alewives, a type of river herring, 40 miles upstream from the ocean.
Alewives returned by the millions after the Edwards and Ft. Halifax dams were removed. (Photo by John Burrows/ASF)
And with alewives coming back, so did everything that eats them — river otters, bears, mink, bald eagles, osprey and blue herons.
But the best indicator of the ecosystem’s recovery was the resurgence of aquatic insects like mayflies and stoneflies, which signaled improved water quality.
“They all rebounded and the diversity just skyrocketed,” says Fahlund. “And so we knew something great was happening and that it was going to lead to everything we had hoped.”
Within a few years the river began to meet higher water-quality standards.
“The water… is now that much healthier because it’s no longer sitting still and dead,” stated a 2009 editorial in the Kennebec Journal Morning Sentinel. “Instead, it bubbles and spills its way downstream across rediscovered gravel bars and river ledges, collecting and absorbing oxygen as it moves toward the ocean. The river is alive in a way it hasn’t been for generations.”
The benefits spread to the community as well. A park and trails were built along the waterfront. “People are out on the water, mostly paddling a kayak or canoeists,” says Graber. “The downtown is starting to make use of the river more. The buildings that have been redeveloped are now using the river as an amenity. The river’s really just come back to life both for humans and the ecology.”
Ripple Effect
The success didn’t end in Augusta, though. The removal of Edwards Dam ignited efforts to take out the next obstacle up-river, the Fort Halifax Dam on the Sebasticook River in Waterville. After eight years of work that dam was removed in 2008, further extending habitat for native fish.
“We have species like sturgeon, striped bass, rainbow smelt and other key sea-run species which now have access to all of their historic habitat in the watershed,” says the Atlantic Salmon Federation’s Burrows.
The breaching of Ft. Halifax Dam on the Sebasticook River. (Photo by NRCM)
The removal of both dams, in conjunction with active stocking of alewives into lakes and ponds upriver and in other parts of the watershed, has helped the river herring population rebound dramatically. The number of alewives returning to spawn jumped from 78,000 in 1999 to 5.5 million last year.
And the downstream estuary has reaped rewards, too.
When those billions of juvenile river herring leave the freshwater lakes and rivers, they head for the sea and may spend between three and five years in the marine environment. There they serve are a food source for everything from cod and haddock to whales and seals.
“They are really a kind of keystone ecological species for the Gulf of Maine,” says Burrows.
The river herring are also a valuable source of bait for commercial lobstermen, who in recent decades have had such a deficit in securing local supplies that they’ve had to turn to importing bait from southeast Asia, introducing a host of new environmental problems and costs.
“We’ve now got the largest river herring population on the east coast of the United States, maybe even on the entire eastern seaboard of North America, but that population could easily be three, four times what it is now,” says Burrows. “And so we’re continuing to work on restoring more habitat and we’re hoping to see those populations continue to increase.”
Didisheim says an estimated 27 million alewives have reached spawning habitat since the Ft. Halifax Dam was removed, and none of it would have happened without first removing the Edwards Dam.
The Edwards Dam also helped propel a large restoration project a couple hours northeast of Augusta on the Penobscot River. Conservation groups worked with the dam operator on the Penobscot to increase hydropower generation on some other dams and then remove a series of lower dams that opened up more than 1,000 miles of river access for fish, especially critically endangered Atlantic salmon.
While that project was being developed, its proponents could point to the Kennebec River restoration as an example of what could be achieved.
“The Kennebec River activists and city and state leaders did not have the advantage that later river restoration activists would have — namely, the Kennebec River restoration itself as powerful example of how quickly river restoration could work and how successful it could be,” wrote Crane. “This is the one reason that the Edwards Dam removal is so important; it showed other communities the process required and how successful it could be.”
A Movement Grows
Dam removals followed outside Maine. When the Edwards Dam was removed, about five dam removals were taking place nationwide each year. Last year it was 80. Since Edwards, more than 1,100 dams have come down.
Many of these have been small dams, but there have also been high-profile projects, like the two Elwha River dams that were the largest dam-removal project so far in the world.
The removal of the 125-foot-tall Condit Dam in 2011 on the White Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia River in Washington, was a big step in aiding threatened salmon and steelhead. The Condit was removed because adding modern requirements for fish proved to be uneconomical — it was cheaper to remove the dam than build fish passage.
Overall there’s been a shift in public thinking about dams over the past two decades. “It’s not just something that conservationists and environmentalists are advocating for anymore,” says Amy Souers Kober, communications director at American Rivers. “Dam removal also makes sense for economic reasons and public safety in a lot of cases.”
That includes Bloede Dam on the Patapsco River in Maryland, where nine people have drowned, she says. Efforts to remove the dam there began in September.
Dam-removal proponents don’t think we need to take out all of our dams, and of course we couldn’t. The United States has more than 90,000 dams, and many still serve crucial functions. But where dams have been removed, the past two decades have shown the environmental results are unparalleled.
“There’s no faster or more effective way to bring a river back to life than taking out a dam,” says American Rivers’ Graber. “That’s why we focused on it for 20 years. It’s a win for environmental reasons, public safety and a relief from liability for dam owners.”
Ultimately, dam removals are much bigger than the dams themselves, says Kober. “Dam removals are really stories about people reclaiming their rivers.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Mountain pygmy possum, Australian Alps collection – Parks Australia (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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.
According to the 2016 report, the last person confirmed to have seen the Bramble Cay melomys alive was a fisherman who spotted one in late 2009. It now seems possible that could have been the last surviving member of the species.
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Within a few years, the alewife run on the Sebasticook River, a tributary of the Kennebec just upstream from the dam, was gone. Where once you’d been able to catch 500 salmon a season in Augusta, by 1850 you were lucky to get five. The state reported that the shad industry there was completely lost by 1867. And the sturgeon catch on the lower Kennebec declined from 320,000 pounds a year before the dam to just 12,000 pounds a year by 1880.
Let’s start with the big one: 
