A Stone on the Ledge

May 6, 2015 / PK Read / Leave a comment

I want to talk about a couple of pieces of legislation that seem unrelated, namely new water regulations to deal with drought in California, and new Chinese laws making the purchase of illegal animals parts punishable by jail time.

But first, I’d like to talk about a large white stone that sits atop a window ledge of my neighbor’s house.

Back when we moved to this mountainside French village in the late 1990s, mail was still delivered via bicycle by a certain Madame Pils, who knew everyone and also everyone’s business.

There were no house numbers, but Mme Pils had no trouble finding mail recipients. Gone on vacation, out running errands, or otherwise unavailable for an important bit of mail? No problem. Mme Pils wrote a personal note, and the tiny village post office, knowledgeably staffed, was open for regular business hours, six days a week.

Thus had it been for decades.

Those were the good old days.

Unfortunately, Mme Pils retired many years ago, and things have never been the same.

A fleet of La Poste bicycles.
Source: Wikimedia

House numbers were mandated to keep up with the expanding population, which has tripled since we moved here.

The central post office, located a few miles away from here, is now responsible for distribution. Mail delivery employees have more territory to cover, and more mail boxes to stuff, than ever before. The faces change every few months or weeks as people try the job and then quit.

Which brings me to my neighbor, born and raised here in the village. She is not a happy customer.

For decades, her mail box has been mounted next to her front door, which is down a small walkway and hidden by a stone entryway. Her house number is visible from the street, so deliverers, who now drive small vans, find the house but not the box.

Our little La Poste vans still look mostly like this old-fashioned one. Loud and yellow.
Source: Vieilles Voitures Villeneuvoises

Mme Pils knew where to find it, but these whippersnappers have neither the time nor the inclination to seek out her secret mail box. So they take the easy route: they dump her mail on a window ledge that faces our shared driveway. Rain or shine, windy or still, the mail lands on the ledge. Sometimes it stays there, sometimes it doesn’t.

So she put out a stone. And now the mail doesn’t blow away.

I ran into her a couple of days ago and she was outraged: One of the changing faces of La Poste told her if she wanted her mail delivered to a box, she’d have to put the box out on the street like all the new houses and apartment buildings that carpet what was still forest and meadow when we moved here.

“Why should I have to pretend like I’m some newcomer? Where would I even put a box, out on the street? I don’t own the street!”

The mail stone.
Photo: PK Read

So she refuses. She says she’s been here all her life, and La Poste should find her mail box like they used to back in the day. In the meantime, anything larger than a regular envelope just doesn’t get delivered.*

I said, why not relocate your box to the front of the house, at least? That’s not an option for her, because her box has always been where it’s been, the La Poste should do its damn job and find it.

Business as usual should mean business as usual for her and from her own decades-long perspective.

She’d rather have a stone on a ledge, lose her mail to wind and rain, or not even get it, than move her mail box.

Old ways die hard.

And so to the news items I saw today.

Severe drought conditions reveal more than 600 empty docks sitting on dry, cracked dirt at Folsom Lake Marina, which is one of the largest inland marinas in California.
Caption/credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

First: California is, four years into an epic drought, finally introducing mandatory limits for the water agencies that distribute water across the state. But the real black hole of water distribution, namely century-old water allocations to agriculture and industry, require more than the introduction of a few new rules.

It requires a legislative rethinking of how water is used, how farming and industry work, and deeper attitudes about abundance and genuine shortfall. The water system is built on assumptions that were probably wrong in the first place, and it’s these assumptions that are due for reexamination.

Second: China has passed new laws meant to protect trade in illegal animals and their parts by allowing for the prosecution of end consumers. Anyone ordering pangolin in a restaurant or buying ground tiger bone could, potentially, face a 10-year prison term.

Tiger bone wine.
Photo: Michael Rank

This is certainly a step towards raising awareness among the Chinese populace, currently the largest market for endangered animals, both imported and domestic.

But the new laws don’t get at the long-standing Chinese licensing system that allows for the consumption of species classified as endangered or illegal – as long as the animal in question was ‘bred in captivity’ by a licensed breeder. There are few controls of these ‘breeders’ or their stock once they receive a license, allowing for the sale of illegal stock with almost no oversight.

So, as promising as both these steps are, they amount to little more than my neighbor’s stone on the ledge.

A makeshift solution to completely changed circumstances, an approach based on habit, stubbornness and an unwillingness to alter behaviour to solve current challenges.

And like my neighbor’s damp and windblown letters and bills, until old assumptions are held up against current realities, there won’t be solutions that bring what’s valuable in from the elements.

*Our house doesn’t have the same problem because, well, the mail box is right out in the open next to our front door and under the house number. If they can find the house (not always the case, but usually), they can find the box.

Unexpected Communication

April 30, 2015 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Raven’s Breath
Photo: Doug Dance

Before I started this post on talking turtles this morning, I moseyed over to Wikipedia to see what words we use to describe acoustic communications between turtles. Dogs bark, geese hiss, tapirs whistle, giraffes bleat and most rodents squeak – at least, that’s what they do when we’re talking about them in English.

But turtles? Apparently, turtles have always been considered voiceless.

As of last year, we’ve known that some turtles use chirps, clicks, meows and clucks to communicate with one another. Just not at levels we were ever able to hear before the advent of modern sound equipment.

Yellow-Spotted Amazon River Turtle
Artist: Brin Edwards

But even among the animals that produce vocalizations we can hear, conversations take place that remain out of our range.

Giraffes don’t really bleat much, but they do communicate via low-frequency moans and grunts. Sumatran rhinos, for example, have been found to emit low frequency whistles that might travel up to 9.8 km (6.1 mi).

In terms of all we’re not hearing, it’s not a one-way street. Animals of all kinds can hear the infrasonic melody being sung by the earth’s surface and waters – migratory birds use it to navigate, homing pigeons use it to find their way back to their lofts.

Sources of infrasound signals that can be detected by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s listening stations.
Note that this graphic doesn’t include any of the sounds discussed here, mainly because the signals being listened for by these infrasound stations are either disaster-related or human-generated.
Graphic: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization

Pulling on this thread of unheard sounds brought me to the story of some tamarin monkeys in the Central Park Zoo who were found to be whispering about a particular zoo supervisor, a person associated with unpleasant medical examinations.

The tamarins had, for a time, responded to the threat of his presence with screeches and loud vocalizations. After a while, however, researchers found that the monkeys switched to low frequency communication when the supervisor approached, as if to better discuss the real threat level and necessary response.

Golden lion tamarins
Artist: Sally Landry

I started with turtles, but all these whispering monkeys comforting one another and a soft-spoken earth put me in mind of one of my favorite films, Wim Wender’s 1987 Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin). Two angels spend immortality listening to all the unspoken thoughts of humanity, the inward whispers no one else can hear. They offer succor where they can.

But one of the angels becomes so entranced by a lonely woman that he decides to become human just so he can experience the world as humans do, from the taste of food to the emotion of love. All of which had been abstract to him, because he could only hear one kind of communication.

Listening closely, in the end, made the angels want to experience the lives of humans more closely, to protect those assigned to their care beyond offering simple words of reassurance.

Maybe listening closely will have the same effect on us?

World Wildlife Day 2015

March 3, 2015November 28, 2016 / PK Read / 2 Comments

Today is World Wildlife Day 2015, which this year highlights the challenges of the illegal trade in wildlife.

World Wildlife Day, on the 3rd of March, marks the day of the adoption of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

The global trade in wild animals and their body parts is estimated by UNEP at US$50-150 billion per year. The global illegal fisheries catch is valued at US$10-23.5 billion a year and illegal logging, including processing, at US$30-100 billion.

These numbers don’t include the costs of fighting poaching, the impact that fight has on local communities, or the indirect costs of border security – after all, 90% of all illegal animals and animal parts are shipped across international borders.

These numbers don’t include issues like the introduction of non-native species in the form of exotic pets and the havoc they can wreak on local eco-systems (not to mention the introduction of foreign pathogens).

They don’t include the cost of fighting the organized crime that is funded via illegal wildlife trade.

What can each individual do besides sign a petition, make a donation or offer support today at #SeriousAboutWildlifeCrime?

As I said in an earlier post on ivory, we can cut of the trade on the consumer end. That saltwater fishtank might be a nice conversation piece, but the fish in it were likely harvested at the cost of an entire coral reef habitat.

Find sustainable alternatives to traditional medicine that calls for endangered species like pangolin or rhino (after all, people have been substituting buffalo horn for rhino for years).

That supposedly antique ivory trinket was probably made from poached elephant tusk. If that hardwood lumber for your floors is being sold at a price too good to be true, chances are its been illegally logged. And so on.

What you buy as a consumer ripples out through the entire environment of the illegal wildlife trade.

I thought I’d repost Farewell, Forest Symphony, something I wrote a couple of years ago on the interconnectivity of one single endangered species, the elephant, on its entire ecosystem.

It’s not a short post – but what is true for this particular animal is true in other ways for all the other endangered animals and plants:

They, and we, are all part of something larger.

Sunset over the Congo rainforest
Photo: David Beaune via Mongabay.com

The fundamental chords that hold a symphony together aren’t always apparent to the untrained ear. The symphony of an ecosystem is often more complex than we comprehend.

A recent study draws a vital connection between elephant poaching, tree reproduction and forest ecosystems. Certain trees – in this case, large bush mango trees – have evolved alongside large animals, in this case, forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis).

The trees have developed seeds which are best dispersed via elephants eating the seeds, walking long distances, and then depositing digested seeds far from the parent tree. The seeds of these trees are too large to be properly digested and dispersed by smaller mammals.

Unfortunately for both the wild trees and the elephants, up to 75% of the elephant population has been killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where this study was carried out, and an estimated 60% of all forest elephants in the world have been killed in the service of the illegal ivory trade – all in the last ten years.

From an interview in an article on Mongabay.com:

“[The] Congo forest without elephants would certainly lose part of its soul, but elephant extinction with their seed dispersal services would also affect the entire plant community,” lead author David Beaune with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology told mongabay.com. Forest elephants are “important gardeners of the forest,” says Beaune, so important in fact that when elephants go extinct in a part of the forest, important trees are unable to reproduce. “If we can’t replace elephants, then the reproduction of these plant species is hugely compromised.”

Irvingia gabonensis, the African mango, an edible fruit with nutritious nuts at their core. Source: Herbwisdon

Irvingia gabonensis, the African mango, an edible fruit with nutritious nuts at their core.
Source: Herbwisdom

The bush mango tree used in the study, Irvingia gabonensis, happens to be one that is also important to the economy of many African regions, and has been successfully cultivated. Its reproductive patterns are well-known.

It plays a key role in preventing soil erosion as well as being useful as a cash crop.

What of the many other fruits and seeds eaten by forest elephants which are less-studied, with lesser known roles in the ecosystem? Without the massive ‘gardeners of the forest’, what aspects of the ecosystem will crumble?

It puts me in mind of the final movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 45, in which all the instruments disappear. There is a final song of the remaining violins, but it is thin and lonely without the other melodies.

Ivory Trade Antics

February 27, 2015 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Elephant Eye
Artist: Kristan Benson

There have been several elephant and ivory-related news items over the past few weeks, including a year-long ban on ivory imports announced by China this week, and the announcement by several Hong Kong retailers that they will no longer be selling elephant products.

New regulations have just come into effect in the United States, one of the leading markets for legal and illegal ivory, that further restricts ivory imports and sales.

New laws that would ban ivory trade outright in New York and California (proposed) reflect findings that in these national markets, the first and second respectively, between 80-90% of all ivory being sold is illegal.

I know I should say they are encouraging, and these developments are good news.

But my real reaction is: Why are people still buying and selling ivory?

This is the issue with legal ivory sales within countries: If people see an item openly for sale, they assume it’s legal.

Once ivory has entered its destination country, it is extremely difficult to differentiate the illegal stuff (harvested from one of the elephants killed every 15 minutes around the world) from the legal stuff (either antique, or imported before the African elephant was listed in CITES Appendix I in 1990).

I am baffled that the US still allows the importation of hunting trophy tusks. But given the ongoing battles to re-instate permission to allow for the importation of endangered rhino horns even as the rhino population is in steep decline, it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Added to this is a dire lack of awareness among shipping workers and officials as to the methods used for transporting illegal animal parts, even as 90% of the illegal trade crosses international borders.

I’m sure there are many, many dealers who handle only legal ivory, but as a responsible and concerned consumer, would you know the difference?

Origami elephant created by Sipho Mabona
Photo by Philipp Schmidli / Mabona

I know I wouldn’t.

There’s an easy solution to that: Don’t buy the stuff.

Stop buying it anywhere until all imports have been stopped, the elephant populations and those of other catastrophically endangered source animals have rebounded, and the illegal market has dried up. If it’s made of ivory, that means no trinkets, no souvenirs, no fancy gifts for business associates, no allegedly legal decorative items for the home. Don’t admire that new ivory bracelet someone shows you, don’t covet that sculpture.

A thriving market in one kind of animal part only supports all the others, and the trade in general.

Sorry, sellers of legal ivory, the stakes are just too high.

Tipping the Scales

February 20, 2015 / PK Read / Leave a comment

21 February is World Pangolin Day, and anyone who follows this blog knows I have a soft spot for the scaly anteater that is being rapidly hunted into extinction.

The ongoing decimation of the slow and strange pangolin is a grim illustration of the long-lasting impact greed and lack of political willpower can have on fellow inhabitants on the planet.

Pangolin in defensive position.
Source: Project Pangolin

Pangolin scales are used in traditional medicine, mostly in China and Vietnam. I found a site which promises to be a “complete guide to proven herbal remedies.” Note the word ‘proven’.

It lists pangolin scales as being composed of “stearic acid, cholesterol, N-butyl tricosylamide, cyclo (L-seryl-L-tyrosyl), cyclo (D-seryl-L-tyrosyl), and other 18 kinds of microelements” and “16 types of free amino acids.”

This makes it sound like pangolin scales have a chemical composition uniquely suited to medicinal uses. It does not highlight that pangolin scales, along with rhino horn and goat hooves and human fingernails, all have the same basic composition, and are all made of keratin.

I have no doubt that practitioners and adherents of traditional medicines believe in what they are doing with pangolin scales, and by extension, the consumption of pangolin flesh, especially that of unborn pangolins.

However, the same web site volunteers that most practitioners have been substituting buffalo horn for ‘medicinal’ rhino horn since the 1990s due to poaching and legal issues.

Rhino horn.

So if one kind of horn can simply be substituted for another, from entirely different animals, why not just substitute human nail cuttings for pangolin scales?

In the end, they all have approximately the same medicinal value beyond that of a placebo, namely, none.

Traditional medicines were born in a time of fewer humans and more animals. Harvesting these animals from the wild until they are all gone is a ridiculous, illegal and shameful undertaking for all concerned, from those who poach to those who consume.

An African tree pangolin (Manis tricuspis) climbs a tree. Source: British Museum

An African tree pangolin climbs a tree.
Source: British Museum

The various species of critically endangered pangolins (and the rhino, and the elephant, and all the other iconic and lesser known animals being hunted to extinction) have a place in the world, but it’s not in a sack, being traded for every-increasing amounts of money to satisfy our own greed for better health or more income.

So on this World Pangolin Day, whip up a Happy Pangolin cocktail, celebrate the pangolins and other animals staying right where they belong, and celebrate all those people who are working hard to achieve that goal, maybe make a donation, and most importantly, maybe have a conversation with someone else about not supporting the illegal trade of any animal or plant.

Save Pangolins

IUCN SSC Pangolin Specialist Group

Tikki Hywood Trust (Africa)

Save Vietnam’s Wildlife

Project Pangolin

Pangorarium (Facebook) – keep up with events and news

Forest Reverence

February 16, 2015February 16, 2015 / PK Read / 1 Comment

“A grove of giant redwoods or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great or beautiful cathedral.”

Theodore Roosevelt

Tree Cathedral, a living installation in Bergamo, Italy. The foundation was laid in 2001, and following Mauri's death in 2009, the Cattedrale Vegetale has been completed as a monument to his work and life. Image: Virtual Sacred Space

Tree Cathedral, a living installation by Giuliano Mauri in Bergamo, Italy. The foundation was laid in 2001, and following Mauri’s death in 2009, the Cattedrale Vegetale has been completed as a monument to his work and life.
Image: Virtual Sacred Space

Through history, private family ownership of vast land tracts has had both merits and drawbacks.

When it comes to forests in the United States, almost 60% is under private ownership, 766 million acres of land. For more than half of that land, the average age of the owner is 62.5.

What this means, according to a 2014 Associated Press article, is that as owners pass their land on to younger generations, the land tends to get divided, sold, parcelled into smaller lots and developed in ways that don’t necessarily reflect best forest management or maintain a working forest.

The Tree Cathedral is made of 42 different columns that form five aisles. The columns incorporate 1,800 spruce trunks and 600 chestnut tree branches woven together with 6,000+ meters of hazelnut twigs. Nails, string, and local traditional methods for intertwining and weaving were utilized in order to secure the columns around the trees. Text/Image: EarthPorm/ Santino/Flckr

One of the issues faced by private owners who have worked to protect woodlands is to convey their conservationist commitment to younger, more urbanized generations.

It’s one thing to be deeply affected by forests and enjoy woodland hikes; it’s another altogether to be a private landowner responsible for a long-term forest management plan that encompasses unborn future generations.

As the hornbeam trees within the columns grow and mature, the original support structures will age and fall away, leaving a small forest in the shape of a cathedral.
Image: Arte Sella

There are now organizations that offer support to families in woodland legacy planning – first and foremost, projects like Oregon State University’s Ties to the Land help families talk to one another about their land priorities.

I assume that Giuliano Mauri’s Tree Cathedral, shown in the images here, was planned (at least in part) to remind visitors that a forest is a place of reverence. It is installed in the Italian Arte Selle sculpture park of earth art and natural architecture.

With commitment and communication, some families have done a phenomenal job of protecting forests over decades and even centuries.

It’s a little unnerving to think of the majority of any nation’s woodlands being at the mercy of uninterested successors, because once a natural forest cathedral, or even a forest chapel, has been parcelled and developed, it is changed forever.

Experiencing the forest as a sacred space shouldn’t be something that only happens in an art installation.

Image: Aldo Fedele (left) / Arte Sella (right)

Toothfish Piracy

January 14, 2015July 29, 2015 / PK Read / 1 Comment

*Update below (July 29).

There are a couple of cinema-worthy chase scenes going on right now, all located in the Southern Ocean.

The New Zealand navy is currently chasing two ships sailing under the flag of Equatorial Guinea for illegal fishing, and a Sea Shepherd vessel has been chasing a Nigerian trawler, the Thunder, since December 17. The Sea Shepherd chase, over 1000 nautical miles at this point, has already broken the record for longest documented sea chase. And it’s not over.

So, what’s at the heart of this high seas drama?

Fish
Artist: Si Scott

A deep-sea fish that was once deemed bland, ugly and unmarketable. It got its commercial start as a base for fish sticks. Later, its lack of overtly fishy flavor was turned to culinary advantage because chefs could do almost anything to it; what it lacked in strong flavor it made up for in flaky white flesh.

The Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides) was renamed the Chilean sea bass by an American fish merchant in 1977, and became truly popular in haute cuisine during the 1990s. Also known as White Gold, the fish otherwise known as toothfish can currently be found on the menus of high-end restaurants mainly in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Since luxury markets combined with scarcity usually mean high prices for a product, illegal fisheries have been chasing the toothfish for years now.

Patagonian toothfish
Source: National Marine Fisheries Service

A number of international initiatives were undertaken to protect the toothfish, an animal integral to a number of ecosystems. It reproduces slowly and has a long life span – up to 50 years, two factors that make it vulnerable to overfishing.

For me, the Patagonian toothfish, together with the Antarctic toothfish (Dissostichus mawsoni) also sold as Chilean sea bass, exemplify how difficult it can be to be a responsible consumer.

In the early 2000s, illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing (IUU) was estimated to account for up to 80% of all toothfish that was harvested. Recommendations to avoid Chilean sea bass in stores and restaurants have been cautiously revised because of the success of programs in fighting IUU fishing. The Marine Stewardship Council offers certification for sustainably fished toothfish, and provides possible purchase points.

And yet, we have two groups, a national navy and an environmental organization, in pursuit of industrial-scale operations fishing for what will be sold as Chilean sea bass. The poachers obviously have reliable markets to whom they can sell.

Chilean sea bass with the MSC label can generally be bought with confidence, but how often do we ask our restaurant servers or fishmongers whether the fish they are serving is appropriately labeled?

Levels of toothfish over-fishing (2013). Click on the image for a larger view. Source: Rochelle Price

Levels of toothfish over-fishing (2013).
Dark grey=quota levels, Red=estimated IUU catch. Click on the image for a larger view.
Source: Rochelle Price

* The Sea Shepherd’s spectacular chase only ended in April, with the crew of the Thunder allegedly sinking their own ship to destroy evidence – and then being rescued by crew members of the Sea Shepherd’s two pursuing ships. A riveting article in the New York Times provides more detail than I can here, and I encourage taking the time to read it.

The ships being pursued by the New Zealand navy have been found in Thailand and Cape Verde, respectively – renamed and reflagged.

Portrait of Living Wind

September 29, 2014September 30, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Martha, the world’s last passenger pigeon.
Photo: Scientific American

A century ago this month, the world’s last passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) died in the Cincinnati Zoo, long after the last passenger pigeon had been seen in the wild. The passenger pigeon, once populous beyond imagining, took only a century to disappear.

It seems that more than one factor was responsible for the population decline and how well the passenger pigeon thrived, from breeding habits (they bred communally in large flocks, and didn’t breed in captivity) to human influence (hunting, habitat loss and deforestation).

To a 19th-century European hunter sitting in the middle of a vast colony of the birds, though, it must have seemed like endless flocks of passenger pigeons were just the way of the world. When the first alarms were raised, including an 1857 bill in Ohio to control hunting and protect the birds, the overall response was simple disbelief.

Martha

“The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.” (Wikipedia) Subsequent efforts over the next 40 years were fruitless.

And so to the declines in the shorebirds of the Eastern Hemisphere, epic migrations that take place between Australia and the Arctic along the eastern coastlines of the Pacific Ocean and along the Yellow Sea. An estimated 36 bird species, their populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands, have used the flyway for most of human memory. Their numbers are dwindling. Very quickly.

Some species, including the curlew sandpiper, have seen their numbers collapse by up to 95% over the past few years alone. The culprits? Hunting, habitat loss, deforestation. And yes, there are several international agreements in place meant to protect migratory birds and their habitats.

It would seem the people doing the agreeing and the people doing the hunting and developing don’t share common goals.

Or maybe the hunters and developers and those who support their right to action just don’t believe in extinction.

Remains of the last confirmed wild passenger pigeon, shot by a boy with a BB gun in Ohio, March 1900.
Source: Wikipedia

In 1947, Aldo Leopold said of the passenger pigeon, “Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.”

When will we, then the marshes, and finally the shores, begin to forget the last shorebird?

Or have we already begun?

Washed Up

August 5, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Knobby Sea Star
Artist: Jane Kim/InkDwell

Warmer water temperatures, reduced ability to fight illness, pathogens passed on from shellfish – it’s not quite clear which of these, or maybe which combination is raging through the sea star populations of the United States West Coast. But the fact is that millions of sea stars from Alaska to Mexico are wasting away, suddenly and across a number of different species.

Sea stars feed on shellfish, and are apex predators of marine coastal environments – when they suffer, the entire ecosystem is affected. Many of the sea star species affected are endemic to their small regions; they aren’t found anywhere else in the world.

It’s not the first die-off that’s been observed among sea stars, but it’s by the far the largest in terms of geographical area and number of species affected. If the juvenile sea stars can manage to develop immunity to the current illness that is wiping out the adults, the populations will have a chance of eventual recovery. Researchers and citizen scientists up and down the coast observe, record and try to figure out the exact causes of what’s been labelled the sea star wasting syndrome.

The disease forms lesions on the sea star, which eventually cause the limbs to dissolve.
Sea star Pisaster ochraceus, the most commonly affected species, is pictured.
Photo : University of California, Santa Cruz, Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

When I was a kid, we had a salt water aquarium that included a couple of starfish, now more commonly known as sea stars. But we could never get it quite right, and the poor creatures kept making extremely ill-conceived attempts to escape by climbing out of the tank at night. All we could do was pick up their desiccated forms in the morning. We gave up when the seahorses started hurling themselves on to the carpet. We never did quite figure out exactly what we were doing wrong.

As for the Pacific coast, my hope is that the future holds more promise than an increase in the kind of science taking place around sea stars right now – the monitoring and understanding of an extinction in progress.

Shape Shifting

June 16, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Conservation strategies have been historically focused on getting an overview of the species in a region, and then trying to protect those species that are endangered. I’ve written often before about how important a top predator species can be to the overall health and biodiversity of an ecosystem. For example, the presence of wolves in a natural region can impact the health of the forest and even river flow.

Textures of liquid crystals (transitions)
Source: Senyuk/Kent State University

But like reading the ingredient list for a familiar recipe, we’ve worked on the assumption that carrying out a tally of individual species in a certain area and getting a consistent count usually means that the biodiversity is also remaining the same and will result in the same ecosphere profile.

If a major ingredient is missing or in decline, we work to protect it; if a ‘wrong’ ingredient has been introduced in the form of an invasive species, we work to push it back out. The goal has been to prevent a major loss of biodiversity.

Textures liquid crystals Source: Senyuk/Kent State Univ.

Textures liquid crystals (transitions)
Source: Senyuk/Kent State Univ.

But what if the entire ingredient list is shifting, forming a completely new recipe on the page, even as the number of ingredients remains the same?

A study out in Science shows that around the world, monitoring programs are showing a surprising consistency of biodiversity – but only when it comes to the absolute number of species counted. The composition of the species is an entirely different matter: In some coral reef regions, the number of coral species has dropped significantly, even as the number of algae species has increased. Florida has a wide diversity of species – when it comes to non-native ants.

Ashmole Bestiary (early 13th century)
Source: Oxford Bodley Library

According to authors Nicholas Gotelli and Robert Colwell, as habitat ranges shift under the influence of climate change, some areas might see an increase in nominal biodiversity, but it will be at the cost of traditionally local species in favor of successful ‘generalists’ like invasive weeds, rats or ants.

The study concludes that there “is need to expand the focus of research and planning from biodiversity loss to biodiversity change.”

The change is happening quickly, over just a decade or even a year. A bit like putting a cake in the oven, and then when the timer goes off, opening the door to find instead a casserole.

champagnewhisky

Never cry over spilt milk. It could've been champagne. Or whisky.

#endangered