Meet the Fab Five: A combination of visual and virtual community engagement tools using charismatic species to help win hearts and minds toward saving the ocean.
How do you get people to care about something they can’t see?
That has always presented a challenge in environmental conservation messaging, where a consumer’s decisions can affect people or species on the other side of the planet. It can be hard to connect the dots between a candy bar containing palm oil sold in Indiana to the destruction of an orangutan’s habitat in Indonesia, or how purchasing a cheeseburger in Nebraska contributes to deforestation of the Amazon.
While advocates have had some notable successes communicating these threats, promoting similar efforts to protect ocean life has proven even harder — even for communities that live right next to those waters.
“For many people in the public, thinking about what lives in marine environments is a foreign concept,” says Nina Wootton, a marine researcher at the University of Adelaide. “Unless you’re a fisher or you love to SCUBA dive, the chance of you ever seeing the marine environment is low, especially for offshore areas. The benefits of protecting the ocean … are unknown and unseen to many people.”
A new study hopes to turn that around.
The (Hidden) Value of MPAs
Two of the biggest threats to marine biodiversity come from unsustainable overfishing and habitat loss — both of which also threaten the food security and livelihoods of coastal communities.
To fight these threats, governments have increasingly turned to creating marine protected areas (MPAs), essentially underwater national parks that protect habitats and organisms that live within them.
Well-designed and well-implemented MPAs have more fish, bigger fish, and more species of fish than in similar unprotected areas, allowing recovery of once-overfished species and benefitting surrounding waters. Recovered species don’t stay in MPAs — they expand their habitats through what is known as the “spillover effect.”
But misunderstandings about the goals of MPAs, and a sometimes top-down heavy-handed approach to implementing them, can make no-fishing zones a tough sell in coastal communities which depend on fishing. This, in turn, can reduce an MPA’s effectiveness, or make it impossible to establish them in the first place.
What can we do to build local support for MPAs and enhance their success? Wootton and her colleagues tried using an innovative collection of virtual and visual tools to persuade people of the benefits of an MPA. It focused on beloved marine species that would be protected by an MPA network, which the researchers called the “Fab Five.”
A study about their efforts was published this March in the journal Biological Conservation.
“In the end it’s mostly community members who use those MPAs, so it is essential that everyone is on board,” says Wootton. “Many coastal communities rely on marine resources, such as fishing and marine tourism, for their livelihoods, and implementing an MPA without community input leads to conflict and potential economic losses. But when we engage with the community during the MPA planning process, it can help address concerns and mitigate negative economic impacts.”
Past efforts to generate community buy-in for new protected areas have shown that the process is complex, time-consuming, and can meet with mixed results. The communities’ costs from limiting fishing are clear and immediate, while the benefits are uncertain. And for people who don’t depend directly on fishing for their livelihoods, it can be hard to get them to think about marine biodiversity at all.
Wootton and a team of marine scientists, in partnership with First Nations Sea Country peoples, wanted to assess what gets community members to care about the ocean and support an MPA. Working in South Australia, which has 26 commonwealth or state marine parks, they picked five iconic local species who benefit from the MPA, including the Australian sea lion (Neophoca cinerea), giant Australian cuttlefish (Sepia apama), white-bellied sea eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster), great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), and southern right whale (Eubalaena australis).
Australian sea lions. Photo: Graham Winterflood (CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed)
With these charismatic but varied species in hand, they then engaged in a large outreach project involving virtual tools and artwork featuring those animals.
And it worked. The authors report that the visually engaging narrative created by their “Fab Five” tools not only got people engaged in the discussion, but they contained to engage over time. Schools held “Fab Five” art contests, community festivals featured “Fab Five” mascots, and museums planned exhibits around the animals. Volunteers at each event handed out educational materials directing people to learn more about the MPA.
This had a collective effect, too. Media coverage of the South Australia MPAs and associated issues dramatically increased, spreading once-low background awareness far and wide.
Marketing for a Good Cause
“The Fab Five is based on the big 5 safari animals from Africa,” Wootton says, referring to the most famous and beloved species that people want to see (and originally wanted to hunt) when visiting Africa. “By choosing five charismatic animals that are particularly important to South Australia, we were able to get the public to form a connection with the marine environment, which helped in guided a deeper understanding of what MPAs do and why they’re good.”
Graphic used in community outreach (including on t-shirts and stickers) by the research team, courtesy of the authors.
The use of these “Fab Five” beloved Australian marine animals was an example of conservation marketing.
“Conservation marketing is leveraging the same tools and techniques that businesses use to sell us products, but for social good like the conservation of biodiversity,” says Diogo Verissimo, a research fellow at the University of Oxford who was not involved with this study. “Threats to biodiversity come from things people do, and stopping or mitigating these threats means we need to get people to think or act a little bit differently. Marketing tools are great for that.”
And while Verissimo suggests taking a step back and doing some initial marketing research to see which species would be most effective at generating public support for an MPA, he was pleased with some of the selections.
“Anyone who is involved in conservation tends to assume that a given species is beloved by all, but even with really popular animals there will be people who dislike them, so it’s very important to understand local cultural and social contexts when using featured animals,” he says. “Whales and seals are used very widely as featured animals, but species like sharks are more polarizing, with some people who love them and some people who really dislike them. And it was really nice to see a cuttlefish featured, because not many invertebrates make the cut in conservation marketing.”
Strikingly, this new paper reports that traditional community advisory panels, often used to establish a formal place for community input on a proposed MPA, did not work here — people didn’t even show up to have the conversation. And surprisingly, despite the importance of coastal resources to local communities, many of the people her team spoke with had no opinion about the MPA because they had never heard of it.
This failure of traditional outreach makes the success of the Fab Five campaign even more valuable.
“We found that visual engagement, including the use of artwork, helped significantly in getting the public to connect with the marine environment,” Wootton says.
Emmalene Richards and Nina Wootton in Barngarla Country with an artwork created with Port Lincoln High School students. Photo courtesy Nina Wootton
With this success in South Australia, Wootton says she believes that the Fab Five model could easily be adapted to other locations, focusing on species found there.
“I suggest trying to include a range of animals, some of which are well known and some of which are not, so you can get people interested while also teaching them something new,” she says. “And try to pick a few species that are a little bit whacky and weird. It makes it more fun!”
Its growth driven to epic levels by climate change and fertilizer runoff, sargassum puts dozens of species — and people — at risk.
Originally published by Centro de Periodismo Investigativo with The BVI Beacon, The Virgin Islands Daily News, America Futura – El País América, Jamaica and the RCI Guadeloupe.
For more than 20 years, Mexican biologist María del Carmen García Rivas has led a crusade to protect the coral lining the Yucatan Peninsula in the Caribbean Sea.
As director of the Puerto Morelos Reefs National Park in México, she has advocated for reforms to reduce runoff and other pollution from coastal development.
She has spearheaded efforts to control lionfish, an introduced species that has put at risk the nearly 670 species of marine fauna that inhabit the park. And since 2018, she has organized brigades to restore reefs damaged by tissue-destroying coral diseases known as white syndromes. But now, yet another threat has been keeping her awake at night: massive blooms of sargassum seaweed reaching the coast of the park.
“When the sargassum, a macroalgae that usually floats, reaches the coasts, it begins to decompose, generating an environment without oxygen that kills different organisms,” she said. “It mainly affects species that cannot move or move very little, such as some starfish, sea urchins, the sea grasses themselves, and of course corals.”
Along the coast of Quintana Roo, the Mexican state where the Puerto Morelos Reefs National Park is based, the local government collected 70 tons of sargassum during 2023 alone, said Huguette Hernández Gómez, the state’s Secretary of Ecology and Environment. Added to what they collected during the last four years, the figure reaches 200 tons.
Regional Problem
This story is familiar across the Caribbean. Though modest amounts of sargassum benefit marine life in the region, massive influxes arriving since 2011 have upset the ecological balance in some areas in ways that could be irreversible. Scientists blame the explosive growth of the seaweed on global pollution, climate change, and other international problems that Caribbean islands did little to cause and lack the political power to resolve.
The seaweed has exacerbated existing stress on the region’s reefs, which last year faced a massive bleaching event linked also to warming waters associated with climate change. Exposure to extreme temperatures for extended periods breaks down the relationship between the corals and the algae living inside of them. Corals are left pale or white, and the lack of food from algae can lead them to die, according to the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Sargassum mats have also blocked sea turtle nesting sites and inundated mangroves, which serve as crucial nurseries for countless aquatic species.
Birds feed on small fish caught in seaweed mat along the South-Eastern coast of the Portmore Causeway in St. Catherine, Jamaica on May 2, 2023. Photo by Kirk Wright | Television Jamaica
In some areas, beaches have been eroded by the seaweed and by the heavy machinery used to remove it. Many fishers complain that their catch has dwindled sharply.
But because of the magnitude of the relatively recent problem — which is affecting coastlines from West Africa to the Americas — the true extent of the environmental damage is poorly understood, according to Dr. Brian LaPointe, a biologist and sargassum expert at Florida Atlantic University.
“We haven’t gotten very far in the research to understand the causes or how to deal with it and manage and mitigate the impacts on the environment,” LaPointe said.
Second Largest Barrier Reef
The effects that García Rivas has seen in Mexico illustrate the implications for the entire region. The park she oversees is part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, which stretches along more than 600 miles of coastline in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras.
As the second longest barrier reef in the world — only the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is longer, at about 1,400 miles — the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef is home to some 500 species of fish and 60 species of stony corals, according to the World Wildlife Fund. It also supports the livelihoods of one to two million people in the region, the WWF states.
Floating sargassum can provide a healthy habitat, but when it washes against the shore in mass quantities it often suffocates certain organisms, said James Foley, director of oceans for The Nature Conservancy.
“In coastal areas like Belize, the problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the sargassum also attracts a lot of marine rubbish: local garbage that runs off from the rivers that come into the Caribbean from Central America. So it ends up being a pretty toxic environment,” he said.
The sargassum also creates a barrier that blocks light and prevents organisms below it from photosynthesizing, according to Foley.
A 2021 study published in the scientific journal Climate Change Ecology, which analyzed the situation in three bays in Quintana Roo, Mexico, found that under the sargassum mats the light seepage decreased up to 73% and the water temperature could be as much as 5 degrees Celsius warmer.
Bacterial Diseases
In addition, García Rivas said, bacteria carried by the sargassum may be affecting the corals as well.
“Some of the diseases suffered by the corals could be related to all the bacteria brought in by the sargassum or that arise during its decomposition,” she said. “Although it becomes an environment without oxygen, there are bacteria that may be able to survive, affecting not only the corals but also generating fish mortality.”
Such effects exacerbate existing threats to the reef, she said, noting that the worst historical damage has come from coastal development and inadequate management of sewage and other waste.
“In general, contaminated seawater does not allow corals to live properly,” she said. “It weakens them. And when they present diseases or are stressed by heat, it is easier for them to die.”
A similar scenario has played out in Jamaica, according to Dr. Camilo Trench, a marine biologist at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.
“The problem is that the seaweed grows fast and the corals grow slowly,” Trench said. “So if the sargassum is in the area with other macroalgae, it can overgrow the coral reef area quite quickly. So now it will not only reduce the space that the corals will have to grow: It will also reduce the settlement area of the coral nursery.”
Sargassum Smothers Other Species
Coral might be one of the most visible animals affected by sargassum, but is not the only one. A study published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin analyzed a massive sargassum influx that swamped the shores of the Mexican Caribbean in 2018, decomposing and turning the water cloudy. As a result, the researchers found, organisms from 78 wildlife species died. The worst affected were demersal neritic fish, which live at the bottom of shallow areas of the sea, and crustaceans.
Other scientists have raised concerns about sargassum’s effects on turtle nests. In 2017, Briggite Gavio, a professor of marine biology at the National University of Colombia, visited Cayo Serranilla, a tiny 600-by-400-meter island at the northernmost tip of the Colombian Caribbean. The island is only inhabited by military personnel and it’s a perfect place for sea turtles to nest.
But when Gavio was there as part of a scientific expedition, sargassum had formed a mat up to 40 centimeters (16 inches) high on the beaches. “We were able to observe that some turtle hatchlings had trouble getting past the barrier posed by the sargassum mat, and were vulnerable to predation by ghost crabs, rats and other predators,” she wrote in a 2018 paper about her observations.
Similar observations about the effects of sargassum in sea turtles have been made by scientists on other islands such as Antigua and Barbuda.
Killing Mangroves, Too
Sargassum also appears to have a potentially lethal impact on Caribbean mangroves, an important natural barrier for extreme hurricanes.
“These are plants that live on the seashore and are tidal plants, but they depend on their aerial roots and their respiratory roots, which are underground, for oxygen,” said Trench, the biologist in Jamaica. “Now imagine a mat covering those roots and preventing oxygen from flowing through them. It can definitely cause death if it is long-term and similar to the impact of something like oil slicks on the mangrove or litter, such as solid waste.”
As with corals, mangroves sometimes end up smothered, sustaining damage themselves and putting at risk other species that depend on them.
No ‘Virtuous Circle’
For García Rivas, the biologist in Mexico, one fact is particularly alarming: Unlike many other problems facing the reefs she oversees, the sargassum influx has no clear solution.
“We haven’t come up with a virtuous circle as we have, for example, with lionfish,” she said. “Despite being an invasive species, [lionfish] can be fished and eaten, which mitigates the problem.”
Local Government Looks for Solutions
Faced with this problem, last year the state of Quintana Roo created a committee of 60 experts from different areas that worked for seven months to help create what is now known as the Integral Strategy for the Management and Use of Sargassum in Quintana Roo.
The strategy covers eight areas: health; research and monitoring; knowledge management, processes and logistics; utilization; legal framework; economic instruments and cross-cutting axes. Its key advances include designating the state of Quintana Roo as the authority in charge of granting permits to researchers and companies working to turn sargassum into a product.
“The state government is the one that gives all the permits for issues ranging from transportation, collection to final destination. With that we avoid that companies are going around in circles between whether to ask the federal or municipal government where to acquire the permits,” said Hernández Gómez, the ecology and environment secretary.
The response is costly. Last year, she said, the Secretariat of the Navy was assigned about $3 million to collect sargassum at sea using its ships and anchorage barriers, while the Federal Maritime Terrestrial Zone was assigned about $7 million more to collect it from beaches. In Quintana Roo, through the Secretariat headed by Hernandez Gómez, another $1.7 million is coming in to address the problem.
“And this year that investment will be maintained,” she said.
This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations. Read the rest of the stories in this series.
The captive predator industry threatens the welfare of thousands of big cats kept for entertainment, hunting, and commercial trade of live animals and their body parts.
In South Africa, an insatiable desire for lions — whether to view the big cats in captivity, interact with cubs, hunt them for sport, or trade in their body parts — has created an explosion in their captive populations. Approximately 8,000-10,000 lions are now kept in captivity across the country, compared to the estimated 3,490 wild lions across our reserves and national parks. Activists and the media have given extensive attention to this cruel, inhumane industry, but significantly less is known about the other exotic cat species bred, kept, traded, and even hunted for this burgeoning industry built on greed and cruelty.
For instance, in 2022 the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment confirmed that at least 70 captive facilities kept 463 tigers across South Africa. Yes, tigers — the same endangered Asian big cats subject to intense conservation efforts, with a wild population estimated at just 5,500 animals.
Those of us working against this captive trade suspect the actual number of tigers in the country is much higher, as the department does not require captive facilities to register the big cats. The data provided by provincial authorities is only as accurate as the information provided by willing facilities.
And tigers are just one element of this industry. Across the country approximately 400 captive facilities keep indigenous and exotic cats of multiple species for tourism activities, breeding, trading in live animals and their body parts, and hunting.
The Blood Lions documentary and subsequent campaign — I’m part of the team and the campaign coordinator — has been instrumental in exposing the cruel realities of the captive predator industry. Our work focuses on conducting research and lobbying in both public and government spheres to influence policy. An important and necessary challenge we now face is not only pushing against the captive lion industry and all its associated activities, but also addressing the proliferation of other big cat species in captivity for commercial gain.
South Africa’s Contribution to the Legal and Illegal Trade in Body Parts
Tigers bred in South Africa don’t always stay here. From 2012 to 2022[1], South Africa exported a minimum of 397 live tigers and 101 tiger body parts and hunting trophies, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species trade database.[2] And that’s just the so-called legal trade.
I recently spoke with Karl Ammann, an environmental photographer and investigative filmmaker who has spent years uncovering the ties between South Africa and the international wildlife trade.
Through his work in Vietnam, he’s interviewed dealers who sell tiger “cake” (boiled-down tiger bone) for use in traditional medicine. They’ve revealed that their stock is primarily imported from South Africa. Some were even able to provide shipment dates when they expected stock to arrive, all without legitimate documentation.
The demand for wildlife products like this threatens multiple species. With tiger bone supplies dwindling and an ever-increasing demand for bones for medicinal purposes, traffickers have turned to lion bones sourced from captive-bred lions in South Africa as substitutes.
Meanwhile the trade in live tigers bred in South Africa and destined for Southeast Asia is thriving, according to Ammann. His investigations show that Southeast Asian breeding farms lose a significant number of cubs to inbreeding, making the live trade from South Africa necessary to supplement the captive gene pool.
This shouldn’t be allowed, as tigers are protected under CITES Appendix I, which restricts virtually all trade in the species. But exporters game the system by using the CITES Z code, which declares the animals they’re shipping are destined for zoos and public display. “The fact is, they are all for primarily commercial purposes, which should not be possible,” says Ammann.
Concurrent Legislation Hampers Regulation of the Captive Industry
South African authorities have announced their intent to close the commercial captive lion industry. But conservationists and welfare advocacy groups remain concerned. We worry that this will turn increased attention to the breeding, keeping, and trading of exotic big cats like tigers, jaguars, black leopards and pumas.
South African law currently considers these big cats “alien species” due to their natural occurrence outside of South Africa; but possessing, breeding, trading, and controlling these species is still considered a restricted activity under Chapter 7 of our Threatened or Protected Species Regulations (TOPS).
Dr. Louise de Waal, campaign manager of Blood Lions, highlights that this is a gray area, as South Africa’s provinces have the autonomy to implement national legislation differently regarding exotic species. Provinces may or may not implement national legislation concurrently with their own local laws; it’s up to them.
For example, provincial authorities in Gauteng, Limpopo and Eastern Cape do not require permits to possess exotic animals in captivity. However, owners in these provinces must still hold permits for other restricted activities, such as transport, for exotic species to move within and between provinces, although violations have been reported.
This issue has become prevalent in Gauteng, where several instances of inappropriate, negligent, and cruel tiger ownership have been exposed by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and in the media. In January 2023 a privately owned tiger escaped its cage before attacking one person and killing two dogs in Walkerville. Later that same month, a second tiger escaped in a residential area in Edenvale. In 2021 two tigers were found kept in a residential back garden constrained by nothing more than a fence, despite the obvious safety hazards this posed to neighbors and the children.
An inbred white tiger. Stephanie Klarmann, Blood Lions
As for hunting exotic species, that’s considered a restricted activity under the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act and requires a TOPS permit. But communication with the provincial authority in the North West revealed that the province does not issue hunting permits. For exotic big cat species, a hunt can occur if written permission is provided by the landowner. Hunting clientele coming to South Africa for a big game trophy hunt can bag an exotic big cat bred and raised in captivity with nothing more than the landowner’s consent.
Even on the national level, the registration and subsequent permitting for exotic species does not provide regulations for the welfare, well-being, and husbandry needs of the animals, according to Karen Trendler, an animal welfare expert from Working Wild and an NSPCA board member. Overall the regulations are completely inadequate, especially for exotic species being kept, bred, traded and hunted in South Africa.
False Justifications for the Captive Industry
One commonly touted justification for keeping exotic big cats in captivity is that they provide educational and conservation value. Despite these claims, breeding and keeping wild cat species for commercial purposes does nothing to aid their conservation in wild habitats. In fact, many exotic species kept in captivity in South Africa are endangered in their home ranges.
Realistically, how can tigers kept in captivity in South Africa contribute to conservation in India or other countries? Due to inbreeding and hybridization (or the breeding of two different species), captive tigers could never be used for wild conservation projects. Given that tigers occupy less than 6% of their historical range, it’s more urgent than ever that genuine conservation be prioritized.
As for education, Trendler asserts that “there are better ways of educating than keeping animals in sub-standard welfare conditions.” Although the conditions in public-facing facilities are better than those away from the public eye, Trendler warns that the public are often unaware of an animal’s complex needs and the many ways in which facilities fail to provide for them.
All of which makes South Africa’s continued embrace of the trade more perplexing and discouraging. South Africa is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which declares that captive facilities holding tigers need to support conservation of wild Asian big cats. But the minister has stated the opinion that we do not need to comply with that, since South Africa is not a range state for Asian cats such as tigers.
Captive jaguar. Stephanie Klarmann, Blood Lions
Her choice to ignore the CITES decision indicates the industry’s lack of commitment to genuine conservation and prioritizing commercial interests instead. Captive-industry claims regarding educational and conservation value continue to fail and undermine genuine conservation efforts by misdirecting attention and funds away from those working to protect species and habitats on the ground in their native habitats, according to Dr. Ullas Karanth, conservation zoologist and tiger expert.
What Does the Future Hold for These Big Cats?
The same attention lions have received now needs to be given to all predator species, both indigenous and exotic, that are being exploited in captivity.
According to South African law (Section 56 of NEMBA), the minister may declare “any species” — native or not — as “critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable.” That means it lies firmly within the minister’s power to grant other big cat species increased protection under South Africa’s legislation.
According to Trendler, exotic wildlife needs to be recognized as deserving of a high standard of well-being, regardless of their country of origin and conservation status.
White tiger cub kept separated from their mother. Stephanie Klarmann, Blood Lions
The Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment is in a position to effect change, for once, in the animals’ favor. The minister has the power to prohibit activities that affect “the holistic circumstances and conditions of an animal, which are conducive to its physical, physiological, and mental health and quality of life, including the ability to cope with its environment.” Any animal in South Africa, regardless of its indigenous or exotic status, needs to receive consideration for its well-being in terms of its management, conservation, and sustainable use.
The commercial captive predator industry won’t do this on its own. These breeders, owners and traders have continuously demonstrated that commercial gain trumps all welfare and ethical considerations. To them, big cats exist for nothing more than a trophy, bones, or trivial entertainment.
[2] The CITES Trade Database is subject to the accuracy of submitted forms. Some exported animals and derivatives were not properly declared, so exact numbers were not recorded.
Two studies of California bird populations show how shifting environments can rewrite animals’ genomes — for better or worse.
As the environment shifts — due to climate change, habitat destruction, or other threats — we can often observe some of the ways that wildlife responds. Populations may decline. Individual animals may move. Some species may alter their behavior.
But at the same time, scientists warn, wild plants or animals may experience harder-to-detect changes — for example, alterations to their genomes, the very DNA that defines them.
It requires a sophisticated genetics laboratory to see these otherwise invisible changes at first, but they may have important implications for populations’ futures.
How exactly can threats such as climate change and habitat loss have hidden effects on a species’ genetic code? Two studies on California birds, both published in the past year, illustrate the potential — both beneficial and problematic.
A New Adaptation
The endangered southwestern willow flycatcher (Empidonax traillii extimus), ranging from California east to New Mexico and Colorado, depends on rapidly disappearing riparian habitats. As those riverbanks dry up, scientists began to wonder how the birds have adapted. They found the answers by looking to the past.
Photo: USFWS
In summer 2023 a group of scientists published a study comparing the genomes of flycatcher specimens collected in the San Diego around the turn of the 20th century — taxidermied birds preserved in museums — with those of contemporary birds, using blood samples collected from individuals captured across willow flycatchers’ breeding range today.
The study was only possible due to rapid advances in technology.
“Until recently, it was very difficult to sequence historical specimens across their entire genome,” says Sheela Turbek, a postdoctoral fellow at Colorado State University who led the project. “DNA tends to degrade over time, and older specimens can have really low DNA concentrations.”
The results surprised Turbek and her colleagues: San Diego flycatchers’ genetic diversity has increased over time.
Most notably, this increased diversity included areas of the genome linked with climate adaptation.
According to the study, it appears the San Diego birds have bred with flycatchers originally from populations in other areas of the West, which may have moved in response to local habitat losses. And as natural selection has acted on this increased diversity, the San Diego birds’ genomes have shifted away from those of neighboring populations, potentially making the local birds better suited for life in a wetter, more humid environment being shaped by climate change.
It’s the first time, as far as Turbek knows, that genetic adaptation to climate change has been documented in a wild bird population.
“These genetic changes are imperceptible to the human eye, and we don’t know exactly what [these genes] are controlling,” says Turbek, “but we were able to identify several genes that are likely involved in heat tolerance and the birds’ ability to effectively dissipate heat in humid environments.”
Turbek cautions that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the future of the San Diego flycatchers is rosy. “Given the unprecedented rate at which environmental conditions are changing, I think this rate of adaptation is likely insufficient, and current records show that the San Diego population is still declining,” she says. But, she admits, it’s “encouraging.”
Losing What Matters
Scientists call this exchange of genes between populations “gene flow.” Gene flow has also helped boost the genetic diversity of another threatened California bird population — but at a cost.
Phred Benham, now a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, spent his time as a Ph.D. student investigating how two savannah sparrow subspecies, Passerculus sandwichensis alaudinus and Passerculus sandwichensis beldingi, have colonized coastal saltmarshes and adapted to life in a saline environment. “While spending a lot of time driving around California, I became interested in the human impact on these marshes,” he says.
Photo: Peter Pearsall/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
He led a study published in January that documented how the genomes of California’s coastal savannah sparrows have changed over the past century — a period during which up to 90% of the birds’ habitat has been destroyed by human activity. Like Turbek, he sequenced the genomes of historical bird specimens preserved in natural history museums and compared them to those of birds alive today.
Benham’s study encompassed six tidal marsh populations, and he expected that those that had lost the most habitat would also have lost the most genetic diversity. Instead, he and his colleagues found, in the San Francisco Bay area — where birds had experienced the greatest levels of habitat loss — genetic diversity remained relatively high. This, Benham believes, is probably due to immigration from inland populations of savannah sparrows.
There’s just one problem: Those inland birds don’t share the genetic adaptations that make the coastal birds so perfectly suited for life in saltmarshes.
Coastal sparrows have larger kidneys, the ability to excrete salt in their urine, and even the ability to distinguish between more- and less-salty water when they need a drink. Now genes from inland interlopers may be diluting the traits that make saltmarsh birds unique.
There’s no way to really stop birds from other parts of the state from dispersing into these coastal areas, so Benham would rather focus on preserving and restoring saltmarsh habitat.
“The population can tolerate immigrants if the selection [for salt-tolerant traits] is stronger than the rate of gene flow from those immigrants,” he says. In other words, if there’s enough intact saltmarsh habitat for salt-tolerant traits to really have a big impact on the birds’ success, genes from inland immigrants will be naturally weeded out.
Genetics Reveal Conservation Priorities
Taken together, these two studies illustrate the hidden ways in which environmental change can rewrite animals’ genetic code, and how the same unseen force — in this case, gene flow — can be helpful or harmful, depending on the context.
According to Benham, wildlife managers’ views on gene flow have swung back and forth over time. In some cases, conservationists have pushed to eliminate “hybrid” populations, where subspecies have interbred, to preserve genetic purity. On the opposite side of the spectrum, wildlife officials famously brought cougars to Florida from other parts of North America to revive the state’s inbred population.
“There’s a lot of evidence showing that when you have a very tiny, inbred population, gene flow can rescue it from the negative effects of inbreeding,” Benham says.
But if intermingling populations are adapted for very different environments, the cure may be as bad as the disease.
Both studies also highlight the value of natural history collections, an invaluable but underfunded and underappreciated resource for understanding environmental change. Duke University, for example, recently announced that it will close its herbarium, which houses 825,000 plant specimens dating back a century.
“I don’t think we can fully grasp at this point the value of all those specimens in museum collections,” says Turbek. “We’re going to continue uncovering that as the technology develops to fully mine them for further information.”
It’s too soon to say for sure how these newly revealed genetic-level changes might ultimately affect the health of San Diego’s willow flycatchers or San Francisco’s savannah sparrows. Researchers still lack the data necessary to connect the genetics to the physical traits of individual birds, or to say how those traits might impact their survival.
But as climate change continues to accelerate, understanding how it may rewrite the genetic code of the species it impacts will only become more crucial.
“Our understanding of [genetic] adaptation to changing climate conditions is surprisingly limited,” says Turbek. We’ll need every resource we have — from historical specimens in the back rooms of natural history museums to cutting-edge gene sequencing techniques — if we hope to untangle these complex relationships in the future. The answers we find may provide the clues we need to keep species from suffering in a world that’s changing around them.
To bring more water to the landscape — and fight the growing risk of catastrophic wildfires — a Tribe in California helps to reshape fire management policy.
Fire is not coming easily to the pile of dried grass and brush. Four college students fuss with the smoldering heap while Ron Goode, a bear-like man with a graying braid, leans on his cane and inspects their work. Crouch down low, he tells them. Reach farther into the brush with the lighter. Tentative orange flames spring to life and a student in a tie-dyed t-shirt blows gently, imploring them not to die.
It’s a clear November day in the western foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada near the town of Mariposa. The students, visiting from the University of California, Berkeley, are here to help revitalize a patch of live oaks that belongs to Goode’s wife’s family. Goode, the chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, is here to teach them how. Now in his early 70s, Goode and his Tribe have worked for decades to restore neglected meadows and woodlands on private property, reservations belonging to other Tribes, and on their own ancestral homelands in the Sierra National Forest. And restoration, in these dry hills, calls for fire.
Dressed in cotton shirts and pants, the students feeding the thread of smoke in the oak grove look more like landscapers than a fire crew. “We’re not firefighters. We’re burners, professional burners,” Goode explains. “And we’re using Native knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, from centuries ago.” This approach, employed by Native peoples across the world, is known as cultural burning.
Once the fire is rolling, the students use pruning shears to cut more naked stems of Ta-ka-te, or sourberry (Rhus trilobata), down to the ground and toss those onto the now crackling pile. The next morning, after the flames have devoured this fuel, Goode’s grandnephew Jesse Valdez will coach the students on how to mix the cooling ash into the soil with rakes, to fertilize the roots below.
After piles are burned and extinguished, fire practitioners will rake the ash into the soil to fertilize the roots below. Photograph by Ashley Braun
Cultural burning is a kind of gardening. This Indigenous stewardship tradition of clearing, landscaping, and burning mimics natural disturbances, which create a diverse mosaic of habitats and trigger beneficial growth patterns in certain plants. Goode, Valdez, and other practitioners use small, targeted fires to help reshape and rejuvenate landscapes, both for the overall ecological health of the land and for specific cultural purposes, from cultivating traditional foods to sustaining ceremonial practices. Fire, for instance, stimulates Mo-nop’, or deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens), to explode with flowers. Nium people, as the Mono call themselves, use these flexible flower stalks to weave watertight baskets coiled and patterned like rattlesnakes. And towering Wi-yap’, or black oak (Quercus kelloggii) yield bushels of healthy acorns — once a staple in many Native Californian diets. Low-intensity fires discourage competing conifers, smoke out pests, and clear fuels that threaten to carry flames into the oaks’ more vulnerable crowns. Fire also improves fruit production in berry patches — another key food source for people and animals.
Acorns were once a staple among many California Natives, accounting for up to 50 percent of Indigenous diets in the state. Photograph by Ashley Braun
Before foreign colonizers arrived and suppressed the practice, Native Californians often lit low-intensity fires to realize benefits like these. Frequent, low-intensity fire also inoculated the landscape against the kind of destructive megafires that regularly scorch the West Coast today. In fact, fire was so endemic in pre-colonial times that the total area burned in California each year was far greater than that burned by modern megafires. But instead of leaving a blackened moonscape largely devoid of life, the low-intensity fires revitalized the land.
Now, Indigenous peoples across the United States are reclaiming traditional fire stewardship practices, from California and Oregon to Minnesota and Texas. They are reviving their connections to their cultures and homelands, restoring ecosystems, boosting biodiversity, and reducing wildfire risk. In California, they’re even using fire — counterintuitively — to bring water back to the parched land.
“Let’s go way back in time,” Goode says, beginning a Nium story. “Tobahp — Land — married Pia — Water — and they had a mischievous child named Kos. And Kos is Fire. Kos liked to run around out in the forest and leave a trail, and wherever Kos went, his father Pia would follow him and sprinkle water on his trail, and his mother Tobahp would come along and plant flowers and plants.” The ancient allegory describes wildfire in the Sierra, Goode explains: After flames pass over the land, “Water is everywhere, and the first thing that starts popping up are all the cultural plants and the flowers.”
Learning to harness fire and its benefits over millennia allowed Native Californians like the Nium to create and maintain open, park-like landscapes. They wanted clear sightlines to watch for danger and protect their villages and families. And the grassy oak savannas and meadows that they tended with cultural burning were ideal for gathering food, medicines, and other supplies, as well as for travel and hunting.
Meadows are good for more than just people, says Joanna Clines, a Sierra National Forest botanist who has worked with the North Fork Mono on restoration. These wetland ecosystems are often-spring-fed and boast “a huge explosion of diversity,” Clines explains, including dozens of species of sedges, rushes, and grasses, which in turn provide cover and forage for deer, birds, frogs, snakes, and other fauna. Wildflowers like common camas hide delicious bulbs beneath the damp soil and produce blooms that attract native butterflies and bees. Comprising just 2% of the region today — historically they may have covered more than four times that — meadows “are the gems of the Sierra Nevada,” Clines says.
But from the late 18th to the early 20th century, colonists violently removed Indigenous stewards from their meadows, and from the land. Fires were snuffed out or never lit. Indigenous people in the Sierra and beyond were killed in droves, forced to assimilate, and corralled onto reservations. Spanish missionaries were first to ban cultural burning, followed later by the U.S. government. After a devastating complex of wildfires burned 3 million acres in the Northern Rockies in 1911, Congress passed a law establishing a national forest policy of fire prevention and suppression. The Bureau of Indian Affairs later adopted it on reservations.
The land and people are still recovering from their forced separation from fire.
Fifty miles east of Mariposa, Goode surveys a meadow within the North Fork Mono’s homelands, where fragrant native mint and soaproot toast in the autumn sun, alongside a muddy spring. The meadow is part of the 1.3-million-acre Sierra National Forest. For a long time, the Tribe tended deergrass and other resources here, Goode says, but in the early 1980s, many began to feel that the national forest no longer welcomed them in this place. Without the Tribe’s ministrations, ponderosa pines marched in, along with aggressive European invaders like Scotch broom, shading out what had been the largest deergrass bed in their homelands.
In 2003, Dave Martin, a friendly new Forest Service district ranger, invited the North Fork Mono back to this meadow. When the Tribe returned, they found it unrecognizable. But with initial help from an environmental nonprofit and local volunteers, the Tribe chopped brush and selectively logged to mimic what fire would have accomplished had it been allowed. They also performed three cultural burns between 2005 and 2010. Some pines were too large for them to cut or burn, but the utility company PG&E serendipitously felled them later as it cleared space around its powerlines to avoid sparking wildfires.
Freed from thirsty conifers, the meager spring began gushing through the summer. Within a few years, Goode says, these five verdant acres were once again worthy of the label “meadow.” A stately black oak — a favorite tree among many California Tribes — drops acorns at its margin, and Goode points out the sprawling hummocks of returned bunchgrasses, their green glow fading to straw. “These are all the fresh deergrasses,” he says. “They go way up, all the way to the farthest telephone pole now.”
The link between fire and water is well-recognized among fire-dependent Indigenous cultures worldwide, says Frank Kanawha Lake, a Forest Service fire ecologist who collaborates with Goode on research. Historical records suggest that Tribes throughout California, for example, have long known that burning brush makes springs run better and helps save water, according to research by Lake, who has family ties to the Karuk and Yurok. Even in swampy Florida, the Seminole Tribe has a long history of burning in marshes and other damp ecosystems to encourage cultural and medicinal plants that require a higher water table. The Maar-speaking Indigenous peoples of southeastern Australia, meanwhile, tell a story about a vengeful cockatoo who sets a grass fire that prompts a musk duck to shake its wings, filling lakes and swamps with water.
Western science is just starting to catch up with this kind of Indigenous knowledge. Tucked beyond the iconic monolith Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, north of Goode’s restored meadow, Illilouette Creek rushes past streaked granite and patches of charred pines. For almost a hundred years, federal land managers suppressed every blaze in the creek’s fire-adapted basin. Then, in 1968, the National Park Service acknowledged fire’s ecological role with a new policy of “Natural Fire Management.” The policy allowed lightning-caused wildfires to burn in zones where they didn’t threaten human health or infrastructure and where natural fuel breaks contained their reach. By 1972, Yosemite had applied the approach to granite-flanked Illilouette Creek Basin.
In the following four and a half decades, wildfire remade the landscape, though not in the way of the megafires that often grab headlines today. Instead, the blazes were more frequent, smaller, and burned with varying degrees of severity — likely aided at first by the cooler, wetter climate of the 1970s and ’80s. Using aerial photography, ecohydrologist Gabrielle Boisramé and a handful of collaborators discovered that Illilouette Basin’s forest cover shrank by a quarter, more closely approximating historical conditions. New holes appeared in the canopy, filling in with shrublands and meadow-like fields, which have more than tripled in area since 1972. In 2019, Boisramé published a model-based study that suggested these changes have made the basin modestly but notably wetter.
“In the more open areas — which are maintained open by fire — you get deeper snow, and it sticks around longer,” in part because more of it reaches the ground, says Boisramé, who’s now based at the nonprofit Desert Research Institute in Nevada. “That means that water from the snowmelt is getting added to the soil later into the dry season, which is better for vegetation, and can help maintain some of those wet meadows” — as well as boost streamflows and groundwater in a region often grappling with drought. Her previous modeling also shows that fire’s return brings as much as a 30% spike in soil moisture during the summer.
The extra water stored and the smaller number of trees competing for it seem to have helped Illilouette’s trees weather the state’s worst drought in centuries, even as trees in the adjacent Sierra National Forest died in droves, Boisramé says. And the type of fire diversity now found in Illilouette is connected to better long-term carbon storage and greater biodiversity, with documented benefits for bees, understory plants, bats, and birds.
Teasing out fire’s precise and myriad influences on hydrology is challenging, given the many variables involved for any particular place or circumstance. However, Boisramé’s studies are part of a small but growing body of work that suggests frequent fire has long-term hydrologic benefits for ecosystems adapted to such blazes. In the mid-20th century, pioneering fire researcher Harold Biswell found that the prescribed burns he conducted on cattle ranches in the Sierra Nevada foothills helped revive summer-parched springs. That aligns with research in the western U.S. showing that some watersheds — particularly those without substantial groundwater stores to feed waterways — see more water in streams after fire, likely thanks to fewer thirsty plants. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, recently published a paper suggesting that European colonization of southeast Tasmania created the region’s dry scrublands and devastating megafires by suppressing Indigenous burning that had maintained waterlogged heathlands.
Fire has less direct benefits, too. Inspired by the knowledge of Indigenous burners in the Karuk Tribe, have shown that wildfire smoke can block enough solar radiation to cool rivers and streams by nearly 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit. In some cases, that could offer localized relief to cold-water species like salmon during the changing climate’s hottest summer days.
As more scientists and conservationists recognize the ways Indigenous people shaped ecosystem biodiversity and resilience with fire, there’s an opportunity to return reciprocity to management, says Lake — and to reconnect people and place. “What is our human responsibility, and what are our human services for that ecosystem?” he asks. “How do we prescribe the right amount of fire today, fire as medicine? Traditional knowledge can guide us.”
There is little question that the land needs help. Of the more than 8,200 meadows that the Forest Service has documented in the Sierra Nevada, the agency has listed 95% as unhealthy, or worse, no longer functioning as meadow ecosystems. The North Fork Mono have taken on the task of reviving some of these places in addition to the deergrass meadow that Goode showed me. Working alongside the Forest Service, they’ve begun restoring at least five others in the Sierra National Forest since 2003. In 2018, and again last year, Goode signed five-year agreements with the Forest Service that he hopes will allow the Tribe to restore many more. Those agreements explicitly acknowledge their authority to carry out Indigenous fire management. But their traditional management practices have been challenging to implement.
Goode and his team have so far assessed nine meadows for restoration — and eventually, for cultural burning. They and the Forest Service are working to cut down encroaching conifers and shrubs, clear dead and fallen trees and other vegetation, create piles for burning, remove noxious weeds, clear gullies, and build structures to stabilize eroding soil. All paving the way for vibrant meadows that will hold onto water.
As some elements of those projects move forward, Goode’s team has so far hit a roadblock when it comes to lighting the actual fires. According to Goode, under the agreements, “it’s us putting fire on the ground, and them participating if they wish.” But the Forest Service won’t allow someone to set a fire unless they have a “red card” obtained through rigorous firefighter training.
“The forest is in dire need of restoration, and cultural burning is certainly going to be a key component going forward,” says Dean Gould, Sierra National Forest supervisor. But the agency wants to operate as safely as possible, he adds. Fire practitioners must work in forests laced with buildings and infrastructure, under unprecedented climatic conditions and huge fuel loads. For his part, Gould blames the delay mostly on a lack of capacity. Several recent historic wildfires within the national forest have kept its staff from building a more robust prescribed fire program, which would coordinate cultural burns. The COVID pandemic added other delays, as did a slew of onerous new nation-wide recommendations for prescribed fire that the Forest Service issued in 2022 after losing control of two such burns in New Mexico.
Tribes hoping to implement cultural burning on federal lands commonly face challenges like the ones the Nork Fork Mono has come up against. “[B]oth state and federal agencies lack an adequate understanding of Tribes and cultural fire practitioners, their expertise and authority, land tenure, and the requirements of cultural burns,” write the authors of a report put together for the Karuk Tribe. That, in turn, has led to “confusion, delay, and red-tape,” as well as interference with tribal sovereignty.
“Either we do cultural burning the way it’s supposed to be done, or we’re not going to do it,” says Goode, whose team has more than a hundred small piles of brush prepped and waiting in two Sierra National Forest meadows — ready for them to light and tend the fires before snow falls.
Indigenous fire stewardship also includes cultural rituals such as burning sage, which is sacred to many Native communities of California and Mexico. Photograph by Ashley Braun
Traditional practitioners often see requirements like red cards as inconsistent with cultural burning, explains Jonathan Long, a Forest Service ecologist who has worked with several Tribes on the issue. Part of the problem is that cultural burning adopts precautions in fundamentally different ways than typical agency burns do. Their intentions and practices, for example, make for safer burns as a general rule. Practitioners tend to ignite only small patches of lower-intensity fire; they welcome both youth and elders to teach and learn; they manicure away risky fuels; and they tend burns closely enough to reduce impacts on cultural resources like deergrass, as well as other plants and wildlife. It’s akin to a city installing bike lanes and traffic-slowing measures so parents can transport kids safely to school by bike, instead of strapping them in car seats inside bulky SUVs. Either way, kids arrive in one piece, but the approaches are vastly different.
There’s also not yet an official playbook for cultural burning within the Forest Service to help guide agency staff, which holds the process back. But Gould says he is part of a regional effort to draft such a policy and that his staff are thinking about how to apply that in the Sierra National Forest.
“I think people are trying to work through, how do we craft the system in ways that will distinguish cultural burning from the wildfire suppression and large prescribed fire events where the risks are different?” says Long.
Still, Long sees more opportunities for traditional fire practices opening up, especially in California, where in recent years the state has rolled out new policies that ease barriers to cultural burning on state and private lands. And at the federal level, in late 2022 the U.S. Forest Service announced 11 major agreements to jointly manage lands with Tribes, including one that allows the Karuk Tribe to conduct cultural burns in partnership with the Six Rivers National Forest in California. The White House followed that announcement with the first-ever national guidance on Indigenous knowledge for federal agencies. The document explicitly recognized the North Fork Mono Tribe for collaborating on research examining cultural burning and climate resilience.
In December, Goode’s grandnephew Valdez trained the Tule River Indian Tribe and Sequoia National Forest staff during a cultural burn at that forest. Sierra National Forest staff also attended, hoping to use the event’s success as a springboard in their own forest, according to Gould. But Goode, now facing serious health issues, is losing patience with the plodding government agency overseeing his Tribe’s homelands, and is even considering legal options for enforcing his Tribe’s right to burn. “You’re not doing it fast enough, not just for the Tribe’s benefit, but for the land,” he says.
As the light retreats after the first day of burning near Mariposa, Goode and Valdez, both of whom also work as tribal archaeologists, gather the students next to a wide meadow. Goode’s wife’s property, where they’ve been working, lies within the ancestral territory of the Miwok people, and a few years ago, Goode, Valdez, and a large volunteer contingent worked with some Miwok to clear and burn this portion of the land. These burns represent an intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture, a core part of the practice and key to its continuity.
While the sky turns citrus, the group stands atop a massive slab of granite bedrock that emerges from the sea of amber grass like the back of a gray whale. It’s pockmarked with deep, perfectly round holes, some filled with rotting leaves and recent rainwater. Here, the pair explains, the Miwok women who lived in this place at least as far back as 8,000 years ago milled acorns with stone pestles, their daily rhythms grinding permanent impressions into the stone. “They need to be cleaned and cleared out,” Goode says of the mortars. “Right now these are all deteriorating.”
Like the meadow here that needed burning, even features as immutable-seeming as these bedrock mortars need tending. They need the Indigenous stewards whose hands shaped them; and people today to remember how to sustain the land. After the archaeology lesson, everyone piles back into trucks to return for dinner: foil-wrapped potatoes, roasting in the embers of today’s fire.
With a habitat of just 2-3 acres, the entire Hendrix’s liveforever species could be wiped out by a single tractor.
Author’s note: My “Extinction Countdown” column will mark its 20th anniversary this summer. As that milestone approaches, it’s time to look back at some previous entries and update them for the world we find ourselves in today. A shorter version of this article was published in 2017 in Scientific American, but a lot has changed since then.
Will a tiny, endangered flower named after musician Jimi Hendrix fade into the purple haze of memory?
Not if the researchers who discovered it have anything to say about it. They announced the discovery of the endangered plant in hopes of mobilizing efforts to protect and conserve the remote region of Baja, Mexico where it and other rare plants are found.
The researchers — who dubbed the tiny new plant Hendrix’s liveforever or Dudleya hendrixii — said it is in desperate need of conservation.
“We estimated there were 5,000-10,000 plants on a few acres, perhaps 2-3 acres total,” botanist Stephen McCabe, one of the authors of a paper describing the new species in the journal Madroño, told me in 2017. McCabe and his co-authors said the site, part of the “botanists’ paradise” known as Colonet Mesa, faces threats from farming, livestock grazing and possible development.
Dudleya species in general are hardy plants — they don’t “live forever” as their name would imply, although they can survive uprooted without water for a year or more — but the new species’ restricted range makes it particularly vulnerable, McCabe said. The researchers warned that the site could easily be damaged or even destroyed, like castles made of sand, by an off-road vehicle or tractor.
The tiny, two-inch flower itself doesn’t immediately bring Jimi Hendrix to mind, but it’s not all about appearances. It turns out that the researcher who first encountered the plant at Colonet Mesa, Mark Dodero of RECON Environmental, was listening to Hendrix’s song “Voodoo Child” when he made the discovery.
That experience led McCabe, who saw Hendrix perform at the Santa Clara County Folk Rock Festival in 1969, to suggest the name, something he hoped would bring this rare flower — and maybe other plants along with it — some much-needed attention. “Jimi Hendrix was one of a number of musicians concerned about what people were doing to the environment,” he said. “This was at least a small part in embracing the choice of the name. I also liked the common name we could give, Hendrix’s liveforever, because when a poet, writer, painter or musician shares something that inspires people, I hope those inspirational creations or insights can live on after the artist passes.”
McCabe admitted the naming angle was PR-worthy, but said it was an important aspect of attracting notice for this rare plant. “Cute animals easily get publicity, but it’s trickier for plants,” he told me. “We have to be clever to get attention about plants. Getting people to even register that they exist is the first step in getting people to appreciate the liveforevers and some of our other rare plant species.”
In this case, it worked: The plant’s discovery made headlines around the world. Heck, it even has its own Wikipedia page.
But publicity only lasts so long. Now that the initial attention has died down, the question remains: Will Dudleya hendrixii continue to exist as long as its namesake’s memory? As with any endangered species, there “ain’t no telling” what the future brings, but McCabe told me in 2017 he hoped that the plant will persist, and so far it has.
Let Me Grow Next to Your Fire
Flash forward to 2024, and McCabe himself has persisted in identifying new plants. He’s helped describe three more Dudleya species in the past two years, the most recent in Orange County, California. That discovery, announced in March, confirms a species that another researcher first observed in the 1950s without collecting scientific specimens.
It wasn’t an easy rediscovery. The species grows on cliffs, and McCabe and his colleagues needed permission from a private landowner to access the site. They “bushwhacked their way through dense foliage and poison oak to find the plant’s steep habitat,” according to a report from the American Public Gardens Association. “We got permission from this landowner to come up from the bottom, and there had been a fire there,” said McCabe. “The vegetation had recovered from the fire and included Ceanothus, which has really sharp thorns on it, so it was really unpleasant.”
They named this one Dudleya chasmophyta, or the crevice-loving Dudleya, a shift in taxonomic strategy that reflects the times. “There’s a movement to not name things after people but to try and name them after some feature of the plant, and in this case ‘crevice-loving’ seemed like a good moniker.”
And if that moniker helps spread some love or appreciation for rare flowers with unique characteristics, that’s all the better.
Apes used in animal testing often display symptoms of psychological trauma. Wildlife sanctuaries are helping them recover.
Rachel the chimpanzee grew up in a suburban household under the care of an owner who treated her like a human child. She wore human clothes, ate human food, and took bubble baths. This went on until 1985 when, at the age of 3, Rachel’s owner felt she could no longer keep her animal instincts under control. Given up for adoption, Rachel eventually found herself at New York University’s Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates, where she stayed for more than 15 years.
She spent most of that time in a cage by herself — when doctors weren’t conducting medical tests on her, including 39 liver-punch biopsies.
According to government data, around 1,500 chimpanzees were used in biomedical research at any given time in the United States alone. Plans to abandon the controversial practice started in 2007, when the National Center for Research Resources announced it would stop funding breeding programs. The Great Ape Protection Act, which proposed to ban chimp testing altogether, made its way to Congress the following year, but it wasn’t until 2015 — after every other country in the world had already led the way — that this goal was finally achieved.
The reason chimpanzees were used in research then is the same reason they are no longer used today. While their humanlike DNA — 98.5% identical to ours — made them ideal guinea pigs for the study of medical problems and infectious diseases, their increased brain capacity also rendered them susceptible to sustaining complex and lasting psychological damage.
Although experts disagree on whether to call this post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the majority of chimps emerged from labs with symptoms reminiscent of the condition, including hypervigilance, disassociation, and self-harm.
For years, caregivers and animal behaviorists at wildlife sanctuaries — which have taken on the “retired” medical animals — have worked to treat these symptoms, often to great success. At the same time, rehabilitation efforts remain riddled with unanswerable questions: How do chimpanzees experience traumatic events? Why do some individuals recover better or more quickly than others? Is it possible to apply human psychology to animals, even ones as closely related to us as chimps?
Diagnosing PTSD
Chimpanzee Jeannie arrived at LEMSIP when she was 22 years old. Records indicate that, like Rachel, she was originally kept as a human companion or pet. At LEMSIP she was subjected to a variety of invasive procedures, including vaginal washes, cervical and liver punches, and lymph node biopsies. She was infected with HIV, hepatitis NANB and hepatitis C. Following protocol, she was anesthetized by a dart gun before each procedure.
In total, Jeannie was “knocked down” more than 200 times.
Seven years into her time at LEMSIP, Jeannie had what researchers describe as a “nervous breakdown” that made further testing all but impossible. She suffered seizures and occasionally attacked her hands or feet as though they were not part of her own body. She arranged her food on the floor of her suspended cage instead of eating it. Whenever lab personnel approached her, she would scream, froth, salivate, urinate, defecate, roll back her eyes, and throw herself against all four sides of her confinement.
Rachel also became increasingly difficult to work with. A 2008 study of PTSD in chimpanzees said researchers would exercise extreme caution to avoid “angry outbursts, strenuous lunges, and attempts to grab or injure those who approached.”
Mostly, Rachel injured herself.
“When I met her in 1997, she was having dissociative episodes,” says primate communication scientist Mary Lee Jensvold. “She would attack her hands and hit herself in the head. All the things we talk about with trauma in people, that’s exactly what was going on with her.”
Great ape psychologist Gay Bradshaw, lead author of the 2008 study, made similar points. “Jeannie and Rachel lived under persistent environmental stress in an atmosphere of fear, unpredictability and nearly total lack of control over their world, with a perceived omnipresent threat of violence,” he wrote in the study. Bradshaw concluded their respective symptoms, even though they could only be observed externally, “were pathognomonic for dissociative and attachment disorders and for Complex PTSD.”
Restoring Agency
LEMSIP staff considered euthanizing Jeannie, and they would have put her down if the Fauna Foundation had not agreed to take her in instead. The Canadian wildlife sanctuary expected her to be a difficult chimp to work with, and they weren’t wrong. Jeannie was erratic and unpredictable, her mood switching between withdrawal and aggression on the turn of a dime. She was anorexic, asthmatic, immunocompromised, and uncoordinated, and her prescription medication was ineffective.
Sanctuaries working with traumatized chimps often use prescriptions as part of their treatment plan. Drugs like Depo-Provera, a contraceptive injection used in this case to regulate Jeannie’s blood levels, help with physical ailments. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIS, which were given to Rachel, are used to treat both PTSD and other mental problems like depression or generalized anxiety disorder — two other conditions commonly observed in captive chimpanzees. In this, treatment plans for chimpanzees greatly resemble those of humans.
However, medication forms but one small part of a larger puzzle. Drawing from both psychiatric literature on PTSD in humans as well as the study of chimpanzees living in the wild, sanctuary employees have identified a number of shared strategies to help traumatized chimps recover. The goal, according to Kris Pritchard, caregiver at the Georgia-based Project Chimps, is to ensure “their abnormal behaviors aren’t so bad that it’s affecting their daily life.”
The first of these strategies revolves around building social connection: reintroducing chimpanzees who spent the better part of their life isolated in cages to interact with members of their own species.
“We’re social critters,” says Jensvold, referring to both great apes and humans. “Connection makes us feel safe. When we don’t, we engage in dysregulated behavior, like self-injury, which in extreme cases become catatonic.” It’s possible that, like humans, chimps engage in such compulsory behavior to alleviate negative emotions like anxiety, anger and sadness, though this claim is yet to be investigated thoroughly.
Because of their aggression, traumatized chimps at sanctuaries are typically introduced to the rest of the population while keeping them in separate compounds. Once they are released into the same space, they slowly engage in social behaviors such as grooming. This appears to have a positive impact on their mental health, with studies finding traumatized chimps who spent significant time at sanctuaries becoming “socially indistinguishable” from untraumatized ones.
The second strategy concerns space. Wild chimpanzees live a mobile, semi-nomadic lifestyle, patrolling territories that can span up to 115 square miles. Although no sanctuary has access to such a large amount of land, they provide their chimps with significantly more physical space than the average zoo. Project Chimps’ 236 acres of forested terrain, for instance, allows its residents to engage in other types of behavior observed in the wild, such as making nests, fashioning tools, and foraging for food.
The third and arguably most important strategy — closely connected to the first and second — is about agency.
“Social environments are healing,” says Jensvold. “But I would argue that the experience of captivity and losing agency is in and of itself traumatic. I mean, imagine spending your whole life inside of a cage and being aware of that.”
Bradshaw notes that Jeannie and Rachel experienced a “total lack of control over their world,” making all their surroundings — even the safe ones — appear threatening.
Agency can be partially restored through enrichment, a now widely accepted practice which Bradshaw’s research helped popularize. Put simply, it involves peppering the sanctuary grounds with objects the chimps can use however they like, whether that’s trees to climb on, branches to collect termites, tires to play with, or — in the case of one ape living at Project Chimps — a piece of cloth they can choose to carry around with them like a flag.
Equally vital to restoring agency is giving chimps the freedom of movement. Or, in some cases, the freedom to not move.
“We have a female named Gracie who doesn’t go outside her habitat,” says Pritchard. “She just stays inside her villa, which has a covered outdoor area, even when her whole community is off somewhere. That’s something we allow her to do, though. She lived her whole life indoors, so the outside could be perceived as startling.”
While some abnormal behaviors subside over time, others persist. In some cases, sanctuary workers might make the decision not to push a certain chimp to alter the lifestyle they have become accustomed to, even if it is considered “unnatural.”
Slippery Slope
Treating traumatized chimpanzees presents various challenges, including basic communication. Although a few chimps understand and can communicate using basic American Sign Language, caregivers often have difficulty figuring out the meaning of other behaviors. Take, for example, a chimp who vocalizes and pulls at the bars of their enclosure when someone approaches. “It could be they have not seen that someone in a while and are upset,” says Pritchard. “Or it could be that they are excited to see them and want their attention.”
Then there’s the question of why some chimps seem to recover better or more quickly than others.
“I have heard of chimps biting themselves down on the bone,” says Jensvold. And yet, just as you can have “two soldiers experience a bomb blowing up and have only one come out of it with post-traumatic stress,” so too can you have two chimpanzees go through years of animal testing and arrive at sanctuaries with radically different dispositions and recovery rates.
Jensvold points to a chimpanzee named Sue Ellen. Like Rachel, Sue Ellen spent 15 years in research, where she was involved in procedures on a weekly basis. Unlike Rachel, however, Sue Ellen “emerged pretty stable, even though her experience was arguably much worse.”
Jeannie’s progress was moderate. Although her seizures never went away, they occurred once a month as opposed to daily, and while she never became actively involved in the community hierarchy, she did end up seeking out the company of other chimps.
Studies on the mental wellbeing of captive chimps are limited. Not just because the subject is complicated, but also because the scientific community has yet to give it the attention it deserves. Some say research into animal suffering is slowed by pressure from Big Pharma, which sees the subject as a slippery slope. If chimps can suffer from PTSD, who is to say monkeys — whose demand in the animal testing world soared after the outbreak of COVID-19 — can’t sustain enduring and profound psychological trauma as well?
These aren’t books that will get filed under “climate change” or “wildlife,” but they all offer a glimpse into our changing world.
A few months ago, I decided to take a break from reading environmental books.
I didn’t make the decision lightly — I’m an environmental journalist, after all. But I’ve spent the past seven years reading and reviewing hundreds of weighty tomes on climate change, endangered species and environmental justice. With a rare (and now-completed) sabbatical on the horizon, I felt the need to recharge and immerse myself in different forms of writing.
So I chose to put the eco-books aside for a while and devote my free time to history, poetry, philosophy, literature and pure entertainment.
Oh, what a fool I was.
Because you can’t escape tough topics like global warming, extinction and injustice — even in the pages of political analysis, science fiction, Buddhist teachings, poetry and comic books.
The natural world is all around us, and the best writers bring it to life in their work, no matter the broader topic. Science history? That’s an environmental subject. Religion? That’s an environmental issue. Batman? He’s named after an animal, naturally. They’re all reflections of the cultures we live in, the pain we feel, our relationships and our transitions.
I found myself reflecting on the environmental messages contained in these diverse volumes. In my first book-review column of 2024, below, I dig into some of them, mostly published in the past couple of years. Few were marketed as “environmental” books, but they contain wisdom environmentalists may enjoy.
1919 by Eve L. Ewing — This poetry collection is easily one of the most powerful and vital books I’ve read in the past year. It’s based on a painfully real series of events that took place in Chicago more than a century ago, when a deadly heat wave and a history of inequality combined to create an even deadlier racial conflict. This all happened long before the era of runaway climate change, but Ewing’s poetic accounts — drawn from little-seen documents contemporary to what became known as the Chicago Race Riot — feel painfully relevant. Could raging heat and injustice cause a violent crisis like this in the future? You’d better believe it.
How to Walk by Thich Nhat Hanh — Parallax Press has condensed the late Buddhist teacher’s writings and speeches into 11 pocket-sized books called the “Mindfulness Essentials” series. I read them the entire series during my sabbatical, and each volume has at least something to do with the environment — this one more than most. It touches on the importance of placing our feet on the ground and — as we take each step — recognizing where we are in the greater scheme of our neighborhoods, our communities, the planet and the universe. These are lessons I’ve already come back to it a few times. (Also relevant and recommended: How to Fight, How to Connect, and How to Relax.)
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski & Amelia Nagoski — A book every environmentalist should read — or at least keep on the shelf for when they need it. And trust me, you’re probably going to need it. This doesn’t specifically cover environmental topics, and it’s written chiefly for women and the pressures they face, but it contains tips and tools for recovering from burnout that can help us rebuild for the long fight ahead. (Side note: My local library had a 17-week reservation backlog when I first tried to read this, so maybe put in your request early?)
The Einstein Effect: How the World’s Favorite Genius Got into Our Cars, Our Bathrooms, and Our Minds by Benyamin Cohen — A planet-hopping travelog through the late scientist’s achievements and impact on the world, including several surprising environmental tie-ins. You’ll gain a new appreciation for the white-haired icon and a better understanding of how one person can have a powerful ripple effect that lasts for decades. Plus, you get to find out what happened to Einstein’s brain after he died. (Spoiler alert: It ain’t pretty).
Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014 by Ursula K. Le Guin — Only one poem in this book by the late science-fiction author contains any real environmental themes, but coincidentally, it may also be the best poem I’ve ever read. And no, I’m not going to tell you which one. Go find out for yourself.
Poison Ivy Vol. 1: The Virtuous Cycle and Poison Ivy Vol. 2: Unethical Consumption by G. Willow Wilson, Marcio Takara & Atagun Ilhan — Stories featuring this green-clad Batman villain, who controls plants and seeks to wipe humans off the face of the planet, usually leave me cold. In the wrong creative hands, Poison Ivy makes for boring, didactic storytelling. But in this new iteration, Ivy’s in the right hands. This is a marvelously illustrated series, written by the creator of Muslim superhero Ms. Marvel, that deftly tackles all manner of environmental issues in ways that entertain, educate and challenge the reader. Along the way Wilson shows us how a character considered by some as an “ecoterrorist” may have the best intentions in the world (even if she is, in this case, an occasional murderer).
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems by Joy Harjo — Pure beauty (with more than a little emotion thrown in for good measure). This collection by the former U.S. poet laureate touches many themes, including environmental ones, although I found the poems about music and loss to be the most resonant.
Kepler by David Duchovny & Phillip Sevy — This graphic novel flips the script from Duchovny’s X-Files days: What if humans landed on a less advanced alien planet and promptly taught the residents to make the same mistakes we’ve made here? The result: political divides, corruption, injustice, climate change, violence and all the other things that make humanity not so great. The resulting book has flaws, but it wears its satire proudly on its sleeve — and at least it has something to say.
Earthdivers Vol. 1: Kill Columbus by Stephen Graham Jones & Davide Gianfelice — A graphic novel that packs a punch. In a future ruined by climate change, a lone Native American man travels back in time to rewrite history by… well, you can probably guess from the title. (Spoiler: It doesn’t go well.) Like all time-travel stories, the twists and turns and paradoxes get a little confusing if you’re not paying close attention, but it pays off (at least for now; the story is far from concluded in this first book). I came to this expecting some strong Indigenous storytelling about racial and cultural justice, but found the environmental themes provided extra relevance and raised the stakes even higher. It left me wondering: How long do we have to right our wrongs?
Porcelain by Moby — A memoir by the electronic music star, who touches upon veganism and animal rights throughout the book. But it’s also about finding beauty, purpose and community in a harsh, harsh world. It’s told through the lens of New York City in decades past, and that had me wondering about our collective future.
Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis by Michael E. Mann — OK, I had to squeeze one explicitly environmental book into this column, and it’s a good one. Mann, the climate scientist who originated the famed “hockey stick” graph, has a right to be completely pessimistic about the future, but the fact that he leans into optimism gives me strength. I’ve come back to this one a few times as I look for inspiration to reach people with powerful messages about the struggles we’ll face over the coming years.
We’ll be back next month with several brand-new environmental books — and this time they’ll fully embrace the subject matter.
Bad communication can slow or hinder efforts to protect wild species and spaces. We can fix that.
As a conservation journalist, I read a lot of scientific papers, reports and press releases looking for story ideas. And even after doing this for nearly 20 years, many of those documents leave me scratching my head.
It’s not the conservation aspects that confuse me. It’s the jargon — the overly specific language members of a profession use to communicate among themselves that often makes little or no sense to the public (or even well-versed reporters).
Jargon has value, sure. There’s nothing like shorthand for efficiency when you’re talking to your peers. But use that same terminology outside the hallowed halls of your field and you’ll likely be greeted with blank stares — and potentially, resistance to your work.
As I told a group of young ecologists recently, jargon is the kiss of death for effective communication.
So let’s flip the script and kill some jargon. Here are several examples of words and phrases I’ve encountered in recent science communication efforts that do more harm than good.
All Acronyms — The scientific community has an annoying habit of condensing every phrase it can into an ALL-CAPS abbreviation. I call it TMA Syndrome — “too many acronyms” — and I’m not the only critic. A recent study identified thousands of little-used acronyms that, the authors found, only serve to minimize the public understanding of science. It would be fine if these acronyms entered common usage, like USA or TL;DR, but they’re all far from normal parlance. The researchers showed, in fact, that about 79% of acronyms they found across 24 million papers were used fewer than 10 times each. Oh, FFS.
Data Deficient — Is a species endangered? If scientists don’t have the answer to that question, they slap it into this vague category, and that can lead to dangerous false assumptions that a species is doing just fine. Scientist Chris Parsons has suggested we declare “data deficient” species assumed endangered until better information becomes available (and as a way to encourage collecting that information). If that dilutes the power and importance of the word “endangered,” maybe we go with a simple action phrase: research needed.
Developing Nations — This is one of a string of phrases used not just in conservation but in virtually all levels of discourse that value (or devalue) a country based on its wealth and on normative notions of linear progress toward a Western, industrialized ideal, ignoring colonialism, exploitation, white supremacy and saviorism. The journal BMJ Global Health recently catalogued these troubling terms and the damage they cause, while offering some more acceptable alternatives.
Ecosystem Services or Natural Capital — These terms sound like they were invented by someone with a degree from Harvard Business or Trump University. Try this: Nature keeps us alive. There. Fixed it.
Ex Situ and In Situ— Why are we throwing Latin around? These words describe conservation efforts that are either off-site or on-site. Just say so!
Exotic Species — Again, this is colonialist language for plants and animals that humans have moved to new habitats. Calling them “invasive,” “alien” or “non-native” isn’t any better. Indigenous scientist and author Jessica Hernandez uses the word displaced, which has a powerful resonance that instills some respect on these wild species no matter where they live, even if they are harmful to other wildlife.
Extirpated — As serious as this word is, no one understands what it means. Replace it by saying that a species has gone locally extinct or been wiped out of a region.
Fisheries — Technically, this term refers to oceanic or freshwater sites where the fishing industry operates, or where people depend on fish for their food, but that definition has spread like an oil spill to pollute other meanings. Every week I seen biologists use “fisheries” to describe any place where fish live, which unintentionally redefines those locations as worthy of exploitation rather than, you know, the home of those living creatures. Fish habitats will do just fine.
Game — This word, which I see in journals all the time, really means “animals we like to hunt.” That’s not conservation, and “game” animals aren’t the same as a rousing round of Parcheesi. This misnomer needs to be exorcised from scientific papers. More broadly, it should also be removed from the names of state wildlife agencies, where it positions them to serve hunters and fishermen — the very small subset of people who hunt, shoot, trap, or otherwise catch wild animals — rather than the animals themselves.
Habitat Loss — Did the habitat misplace its car keys? “Loss” is too passive a word — species don’t lose something; people take it from them. It also potentially implies that habitat can be found once again, when in many cases it’s gone or changed forever. Let’s get more descriptive: We’re talking about habitat degradation and habitat destruction.
Natural Gas — Technically, so-called natural gas contains about 90% methane, which most people recognize as harmful. That’s why some climate activists have recently rebranded this fossil fuel methane gas, so it doesn’t appear quite so (ahem) natural. (Climate and conservation jargon frequently intersect, and climate jargon also slows public acceptance and action, which is all the more reason to use decisive, clear language across the board.)
New World and Old World — Biologists typically use these words to describe groups of similar species from different halves of the planet — for example, “Old World monkeys” from Asia and Africa, and “New World monkeys” from the Americas. That demarcation is fine, as it represents different evolutionary tracks, but the terminology derives from a colonialist, Western-oriented mindset. What’s wrong with using geographic descriptors for these species, such as “South American” or “African”?
Pest — This pejorative term is like “weed” — it’s in the eye of the beholder, and it doesn’t belong in scientific analysis. Animals didn’t ask to have your precious crops placed in front of them or to become vectors of disease. Even a mosquito has value (just ask a frog). When we describe species as annoyances, it becomes too easy to eliminate them instead of seeking to restore the ecological balance that kept them “in control” in the first place. I don’t have a replacement for this word, but we need to stop using it as though it’s value-neutral.
Poacher and Poaching — I’ve gotten into the racist, colonialist roots of these words before. Don’t make me repeat myself.
These examples barely scratch the jargonistic surface. I could spend another few paragraphs on overly scientific phrases like “interspecific differences,” “phenotypic plasticity,” “thermal breadth” and “zones of recombination,” all of which I recently encountered.
But they’re a good starting point — an invitation for refining the ways we speak, write and think so we have a better chance of communicating with broader audiences. After all, the more people who understand your message, the further your meanings will travel into hearts and minds. And that can mean all the difference to the species you’re trying to protect.
Do you have jargon you’d add to the list? Drop us a line about your language pet peeves — or your solutions for better communication.
We don’t always recognize the wild plants and animals living in our concrete jungles. But when we go looking for them, we realize how much there is to protect.
Last summer I took advantage of my break from teaching by enjoying long, daily walks around my neighborhood. I indulged my mind and body in the blueness, stillness, and leafiness that is North Carolina in June and July. It’s truly astounding how many leaves a willow oak can cram into one tiny piece of sky.
On my walks, the yard of one house stuck out. It was unlike any yard I’ve seen around my city or in any of the other cities in the United States, Canada, and Australia where I’ve lived. It is a forest yard. Nearly a dozen large trees are interspersed amid a dense stand of saplings and shrubs. That summer, leaf litter covered the ground. The top of the house was only visible if I craned my neck to see down the paved driveway, itself narrowing and crumbling as roots, lichens, and fungi worked their inexorable magic.
Depending on your perspective, the house with the forest yard could be seen either as an eyesore — and the scariest place to trick-or-treat — or, as in my case, the most splendid place imaginable.
At this point, I should probably mention that I’m an urban ecologist and that the forest yard makes my heart flutter at the possibility and hope of nature in cities.
I looked at aerial images for the area, and they revealed that the trees around that home, which haven’t been actively “managed,” are about 50 years old. Over that time the forest yard has accumulated a bewildering array of species and ecological interactions. Its tulip poplars, walnuts, cedars, redbuds, pines, and willow oaks have soaked up the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide and turned it into much-needed habitat for wildlife: butterflies, bees, and other insects; lizards, snakes, and turtles; frogs and toads; birds; and mammals. It’s home to a multitude of soil invertebrates and fungi that keep the business side of an ecosystem — aka decomposition — going. All the species that share this shady third-of-an-acre lot are intertwined in a complex tangle of relationships that keeps them fed and feeding on one another, interdependent to varying degrees for their life and livelihood.
And all of this exists amidst a matrix of roads, single-family and multiplex housing, commercial plazas, light industry, and high rises that make up a medium-sized city in the Southeast. The forest yard is a little island of nature in a nearly lifeless sea of concrete, asphalt and lawn.
But, to my inexhaustible surprise, that sea of concrete, asphalt, and lawn is not as empty as we tend to assume. Very far from it. Places of dense human habitation are also where many species reside, including some that are threatened. A recent analysis of the birds and plants that occur in 147 cities across the globe revealed that the sampled cities were home to 2,041 bird species — about one-fifth of Earth’s total avian diversity — and 14,240 plant species. These include 36 bird and 65 plant species threatened with global extinction.
To get a better idea of just how much of the urban biodiversity iceberg lies below the surface of our awareness, consider this: Last year participants in the City Nature Challenge made nearly 1.9 million observations in 480 cities, with the residents of the La Paz metropolitan area in Bolivia recording the high score of 5,320 species.
So why don’t we see it that way? Why do we perceive our urban centers as unworthy and undeserving of our conservation efforts and attention?
One of the reasons we assume that cities are biological deserts, wholly manufactured for our needs and ignoring those of others, is that we don’t seek out — and therefore are not aware of — the other species that live amongst us. We spend 21 of every 24 hours indoors. When we do go outside, we disqualify the pockets of green and blue and brown in our urban and suburban surroundings as examples of real nature. They’re just yards and heavily managed parks; how natural could they be?
But, more and more, I and others who love nature where they live are finding a sparkling array of species right under our noses. I usually don’t have to search under too many rocks in the most urban of streams – the kind with the ominous algae, silt-covered rocks, and overall sludgy appearance that makes me wash my hands as soon as I get home — before I find a slim and sleek two-lined salamander.
And now that I’ve identified the native yellow passionflower vine that pushes up from the ground in my garden each spring, I see it everywhere: intertwined with otherwise immaculate hedges, along roadsides, and in the shady edges of parks. That’s good news for the passionflower bee who relies exclusively on the small, delicate, satellite-dish flowers for pollen.
And last spring, when I checked my neighborhood’s new stormwater pond for amphibian activity, I was surprised to find green and gray treefrogs trilling their little tails off in a water-filled grassy depression in the active construction site next door.
Last but not least, I’ve got to give a shout-out to Mecklenburg County Nature Preserves and Natural Resources staff, who have identified 899 species of moth (and counting) where I live. That’s nearly one moth species per 1,200 county residents in one of the top 25 metropolitan areas in the country.
Our typical lack of awareness of urban wildlife is why the forest yard is so striking. It’s shocking to see nature so readily thrive in a space nominally dedicated to people, almost as if it were trespassing. The forest yard confronts us with what we perceive as uncontrolled growth, unseen animals, fungi, and bacteria creeping and crawling as they feed, reproduce, and die all on their own without intervention from us. The forest yard represents the unknown exactly where it should not be, in the dictated and ordered landscapes that are our cities.
But, as with all unknowns, the forest yard’s power to disconcert and disturb dissolves the more we get to know it — and smaller spaces like it.
Put that to the test. Many of you reading this already have the iNaturalist app downloaded onto your phones to use whenever you’re hiking or in the field — you know, in real nature. But sometime soon, give it a try closer to home. Take a wander around your yard, your street, or your local park or greenway – somewhere familiar. As you go, use the app to take pictures of the fungi, plants and animals you come across and let iNaturalist tell you what species they are. No matter how urban your neighborhood is, I guarantee you that your perception of it will change — from a wasteland to a world filled with tawny emperors, modest masked bees, indigo buntings, magpie inkcaps, marbled salamanders, hedgehog slugs, labyrinth orbweavers, bearded beggarticks, and much, much more.
As you meet these new neighbors, you’ll start noticing even more: sun beetles crossing the sidewalk in front of you, cedar waxwings in the treetops, and native wildflowers in the median at a stoplight. Eventually you’ll realize you don’t need to go to the nearest state park or wildlife preserve to experience nature; you’ll begin to seek out your newfound neighbors by taking more walks, exploring your park with your kids, or I as recently did, watching chimney swifts congregate at dusk. And once those things start to happen more and more, you’ll see more and more opportunities to enhance and protect the wild plants and animals that share your suburban or urban home.
Author’s note: My “Extinction Countdown” column will mark its 20th anniversary this summer. As that milestone approaches, it’s time to look back at some previous entries and update them for the world we find ourselves in today. A shorter version of this article was published in 2017 in Scientific American, but a lot has changed since then.
1919 by Eve L. Ewing
How to Walk by Thich Nhat Hanh
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski & Amelia Nagoski
The Einstein Effect: How the World’s Favorite Genius Got into Our Cars, Our Bathrooms, and Our Minds by Benyamin Cohen
Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014 by Ursula K. Le Guin
Poison Ivy Vol. 1: The Virtuous Cycle
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems by Joy Harjo
Kepler by David Duchovny & Phillip Sevy
Earthdivers Vol. 1: Kill Columbus by Stephen Graham Jones & Davide Gianfelice
Porcelain by Moby
Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis by Michael E. Mann
