Ecosystem Failure
For a spell in Spring ‘08, this URL was dedicated to the topic of extinction. Here’s a snapshot of what once was, along with a few posts…
The site: Ecosystem Failure
Almost two years ago, honey bees around the country started dying by the millions.
Why is that important?
Because without the penny-sized pollinators, your neighborhood grocery could be forever without:
- alfalfa
- almonds
- apples
- avocados
- blueberries
- cantaloupe
- cherries
- cranberries
- cucumbers
- pumpkins
- sunflower seeds
- watermelon
Not to mention honey.
The phenomenon, dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder, remains a puzzle. Brainy researchers and embattled beekeepers have pointed to mites, parasites, pesticides, viruses, industrialized agriculture and even the practices of commercial beekeepers. But CCD continues its creep.
And honey bees are not alone.
Within the last year, bats in the northeast began losing numbers at genocidal rates. Bats may not be responsible for pollinating 1/3 of America’s food, but they are key members of the ecosystem as limiters of insect populations.
So, why the blog?
Because honey bees and bats are getting the short end of an “artificial selection” stick. Extinction is a sad reality - think the Ibex or the Black Rhino - but these new phenomena are moving too fast for Darwin.
You should know about them.
ALSO: The reporter is not immune to the plights of animals with less utility than bees or bat, but more cache for the stuffed-animal crazed milieu (I like monkeys), so, the blog will keep up with tigers, loons of the Great Lakes, turtles of Madagascar and more…
The reporter: Sol Lieberman
- Working for a master’s at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism
- Born and raised in Minneapolis
- B.A., political science, the University of Wisconsin - Madison
POSTS…
APRIL 13th - Oregon teacher wills $1.8 mil to Minnesota loons
NEWS: A schoolteacher gave all of her estate to the Nature Conservancy in Minnesota to protect the state bird. Star Tribune, Terry Collins - March 31, 2008
READ: Iva Weir has a smile that’s sweeter than a slice of key lime pie.
Not sure if she has kids, but all of the roughly 12,000 loons in Minnesota would thank her if they could understand the concepts of money, extinction, human indifference and jealous family members.
Iva Weir, Star Tribune
April 14th - Burt’s Bees and Haagen Dazs battle CCD
NEWS: Burt’s Bees and Haggen Dazs are putting money behind separate CCD awareness campaigns.
Haagen Dazs’ helpthehoneybees.com
READ: I wanna hang with Burt. Or at least, pull on his beard. Burt’s Bees isn’t the only biz group taking action to bolster the CCD awareness campaign. Haagen Dazs started www.helpthehoneybees.com, a cute site where you can learn about CCD and send a “bee mail” to your friends.
According to a February 2008 CNNMoney article, bees are responsible for 40 percent of Haagen Dazs flavors.
A United States without strawberry Haagen Dazs is a scary thought. That’s an extreme, but if CCD continues unabated, you can bet your boots that pint of ice cream will cost more than $4.
And that’s just dessert.
April 21st - White nose syndrome is bat’s colony collapse disorder
NEWS: It’s already got a wiki. Here’s the first line:
“White nose syndrome is a poorly understood condition associated with the deaths of thousands of bats.”
READ: Appropriately ominous.
Rather than hashing out the freaky details, read what my favorite DailyGreen writer wrote in February (before NYT took notice) and then jump back here for some more bat-talk: Dan Shapely puts the story together well
Seriously. Read the Shapely piece first.
Okay. So do you know why we need to care about bats?
Growing up in Minnesota, I used to take to the street at dusk and slap tennis balls into the air, hoping to attract some bats. Bats hunt insects at night and they have trouble distinguishing between a felt ball and a bug - lucky for an easily entertained kid.
Now that I am…larger…I dig bats because they are hugely important to the ecosystem as pollinators and natural regulators of insect populations. Not to mention guano (bat poop), which is a wonderful fertilizer. More on bat-value from BatCon
Small potatoes? No.
Why? because in our domino-defined ecosystem, when a small check is removed, the whole system is thrown out of balance.
Something I’m looking into: According to an April 14 release on E Wire, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forrest Service, and other conservation groups are threatening to sue George W. Bush & Co. unless the team “reviews all its activities that may be harming endangered bats.”
April 21st - Harvard smarties (humans, not candy) tie treating disease to protecting biodiversity
NEWS: Try walking down the street and yelling “Frogs could cure AIDS!” Would people laugh and point? Absolutely. Would you be wrong? No.
Here’s a better strategy if activism is in your blood: Go to Harvard, win a Nobel Peace Prize, then team-up with another big-brained crimsonite and write a book. Oh, btw, it’d be sweet if E.O. Wilson and Kofi Annan could write forewords.
Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity
I have not read this book, so I cannot speak to its strengths and weaknesses, but I’m guessing the latter are likely few and far between.
April 25th - I agree. I disagree. I did not know that.
April 26th - Canada’s polar bears now a ’special concern’
From the blogosphere to big-money broadcast media, images of polar bears stranded on broken ice flows are ubiquitous these days. Here’s another one, taken by Amanda Byrd. There is an interesting story behind the photo, too.
NEWS: In sessions that closed April 25, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada placed a “special concern” risk assessment on Canada’s 15,500 polar bears - 2/3 of all polar bears in the world.
Not labeled endangered yet, but close.
In early April, Sen. Barb Boxer (D-Calif.) pointed the finger as Prez Bush for soft-shoeing while polar bears were drowning.
Or, just floating away.
April 26th - Dino extinction theory all too familiar
The Paleozoic Era, Mesozoic Era (Age of Reptiles) and Cenozoic Era (Age of Mammals…that’s you) are separated by mass extinctions. The picture at left imagines the climax of the K-T Extinction between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, in which the dinos kicked the bucket.
I love this picture. Very Pavlovian for me. I get stuck staring at it and after 30 seconds I’m back in kindergarten, it’s nap time, and I can’t decide if I want to sleep, go to the bathroom or ask for more milk & cookies.
I used to think Rex had just slaughtered a triceratops in pure Hobbsian fashion. But now I see sadness in Small Hands. Its a sort of “Last of the Mohicans” moment: The world is coming down around him, he’s alone, and all he can do his release a pained, guttural roar. Yep, the dead Trike was Rexy’s wife.
The photo comes from a site detailing the Deccan Traps Volcanism-Greenhouse Dinosaur Extinction Theory. The work by Dr. Dewey McLean is expectedly dense, but worth taking a look at.
Here is an interesting section:
“Major carbon cycle perturbations affect nearly every aspect of earth’s surficial systems, and in often drastic ways. As carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, causing greenhouse climatic warming, climate zones shift causing tropical conditions to migrate over temperate zones. These shifts in climate zones trigger great ecological instability, migrations of animal and plant populations, expand the range of tropical diseases to plague temperate-adapted organisms, and cause them to experience elevated body temperatures, a condition known as hyperthermia, beyond their experiences.
In the oceans, warming, and acidification of the upper waters as atmospheric carbon dioxide diffuses into them, can kill life on a massive scale. For example, warming of Pacific Ocean waters during modern El Niño events devastate marine life. Based on my studies of the impact of greenhouse warming upon life, I believe that a major perturbations of the carbon cycle can trigger transitions in the biosphere from order into chaos, and are the most dangerous phenomenon that life can experience.”
GETTING TO THE POINT: Today at the dog park, I watched my little buddy Ralphie — a 10-month-old, 15-pound miniature schnauzer who is convinced he’s a 200-pound saint bernard — attack playfully an actual 200-pound saint bernard that was clearly the veteran dog on the block.
Ralphie jumped and yelped and nipped and prodded and the big doggie just sat there, ignoring the instigating youngster — but its patience was wearing thin. Soon enough, the biggie snapped, and Ralphie cowered. But then, the little bugger went back for more.
We are Ralphies, and big momma earth is only gonna snap so much more.
May 5th - Bats are ‘natural pesticide’
NEWS: Ohio University journalism major Cathy Wilson writes well in a column about white nose syndrome, calling bats a “natural pesticide.” Wilson also hints at the economic toll WNS could take if it continues, unabated:
“From a business point of view, fewer bats mean more pesticide use, and at a time when food prices are already high, another burden on farmers and consumers is not necessary. According to the Department of Agriculture, there are almost 300,000 farms between Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Pennsylvania — losing bats, the natural pesticide, will be detrimental to those farms.”
READ: Nice to see another voice picking up this subject.
May 5th - Wanna adopt some whales?
NEWS: Through his Web site www.3rdwhale.com, professor Boyd Cohen of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia is offering YOU the chance to adopt a pod of Arctic beluga whales - assuming you got enough green in ‘ya.
In what Cohen called the “American Idol for green people” in a Canadian Press article by Sean Patrick Sullivan, the whole world will vote for the greenest person…um…in the world. And with the title comes the adoptive rights to the all-white marine mammals. To apply: Go to 3rdwhale, fill out a short survey, and write a short essay. Finalists will make a five-minute video showing their green life , and if selected, represent his/her country in worldwide voting.
READ: What one does do with a pod of Arctic beluga whales? The belugas at left come courtesy of Baalands/Flickr (thanks), and in real life they are much bigger, growing to 15 feet and more than 3,000 pounds and consuming about 50 pounds of fish/squid/crustaceans/octopuses per day. Details. I’m taking the survey.
(Time has passed) There is no chance I win. My landlord doesn’t offer recycling, and the closest grocery store to my building is a Mobil station.
May 11th - More on India’s vanishing tigers
NEWS: The Ecosystem Failure crew (me) reported on this bummer-news in mid-April.
In a welcome addition to the discourse May 1, Newsweek’s Lily Huang interviewed big-cat advocate Alan Rabinowitz, a man who’s decidedly rabbinical name belies his place as global protector of our felinus maximus.
READ: Rabinowitz is President and CEO of the Panthera Foundation, and he’s kinda like a superhero. Charlotte McDonald Gibson called Rabinowitz the “Indiana Jones of conservation” in her June 2007 piece for Agence France.
And with proper Indy charm, Rabinowitz is…you can’t make up this stuff…allergic to cats.
Everyone here at E.F. (still only me) digs Rabinowitz - partly because he’s both an optimist and a realist.
In the Newsweek piece, he ends by sharing his doubts about what the future holds for India’s tigers. But up until that conclusion, he paints a lucid, sobering and educational picture that’s accessible to any comer.
May 11th - Myanmar cyclone and its animal impact
UPDATED MAY 11, 12:30 p.m.
Five minutes ago, I published a post about Alan Rabinowitz of the Panthera Foundation and his efforts in tiger conservation.
While reading through his Web site, I came across this Myanmar Times article from March 2008 in which Rabinowitz informed about the plight of tigers in the kleptocracy that once was Burma.
He said in March - and I emphasize March - that there were only 200 tigers left in the southeast Asian nation. How many are left now? What happens to animal populations when natural disaster strikes?
is there another body count that needs to be reported? Answers on the way…I hope.
UPDATE: The IFAW’s Emergency Relief team is awaiting approval to enter Mynamar to evaluate and assist the animals of the broken nation. And there are more than tigers to be concerned about - Myanmar boasts a diverse ecosystem, including:
-alligators
-bats
-bears
-deer
-elephants
-livestock
-monkeys
-numerous species of birds
May 15th - Polar bears protected…kinda
NEWS: The polar bear is now under the protection of the Endangered Species Act. Here are the headlines form the nation’s top publications:
Polar Bear is Made a Protected Species - New York Times
Polar bear gets new protection - Washington Post
Polar Bear is Declared a Threatened Species - Wall Street Journal
READ: Boo. Blah. (tomatoes and heads of lettuce are being thrown at the Bush administration in my brain)
Why?
Because they added an asterisk to the inclusion for the benefit of oil drillers. Thankfully, the Chi Trib added the screwy piece of punctuation in its headline, too:
Protected* - Chicago Tribune, from Los Angeles Times Here are the first five paragraphs from Kenneth R. Weiss’ story:
The Interior Department on Wednesday designated the polar bear as threatened with extinction because of shrinking sea ice, making it the first creature added to the endangered species list primarily because of global warming.
The designation under the Endangered Species Act requires the agency to identify critical habitat to be protected and to form a strategy to assist the bear population’s recovery.
But the department also issued special rules designed to exempt from the law offshore oil and gas drilling in prime polar bear habitat off Alaska’s north coast.
Moreover, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced he was taking a series of steps to short-circuit legal plans by conservation groups to use the polar bear’s protected status to block new power plants and other sources of carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global warming.
“Listing the polar bear as threatened,” he said, ” … should not open the door to use the ESA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants and other sources. That would be a wholly inappropriate use of the Endangered Species Act. The ESA is not the right tool to set U.S. climate policy.”
Here is other telling paragraphs from the New York Times piece by Felicity Barringer:
The Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed suit in 2005 to force a listing of the polar bear. The center, based in Arizona, has been explicit about its hopes to use this — and the earlier listing of two species of coral threatened by warming seas — as a legal cudgel to attack proposed coal-fired power plants or other new sources of carbon dioxide emissions.
But in both cases, the Bush administration has parried this legal thrust, saying it had no obligation to address or try to mitigate the cause of the species’ decline — warming waters, in the case of the corals, or melting sea ice, in the case of the bears — or the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, trucks, refineries, factories and power plants that contribute to both conditions.
On Wednesday, Mr. Kempthorne specifically ruled out that possibility, saying, “When the Endangered Species Act was adopted in 1973, I don’t think terms like ‘climate change’ were part of our vernacular.”
May 16th - More on polar bears
NEWS: The WSJ’s Jim Carlton put together an excellent 2nd-day piece about the bear story that better explains why a designation of ‘endangered’ is only worth anything if the animal’s habitat is protected, too. Here is an excerpt:
But the announcement contained one significant omission: Polar bears were not — at least for now — getting a measure known as a “critical-habitat” designation. Without that, many environmentalists and legal experts say, the bear’s new protected status will have about as much teeth as a newborn cub.
“It’s not clear to me this will do anything without it,” says Cindy Shogan, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, an environmental group.
READ: “Critical Habitat” was sacrificed for oil and gas drilling - a big show, this was.
May 19th - Primer on white nose with BCI biologist
NEWS: Bat Conservation International, which works to protect bats and bat habitat worldwide, will cosponsor the “Science Strategy Meeting” on June 9-10 in Albany, NY to share findings, explore methodologies and, it is hoped, set a course for combating white nose syndrome.
READ: Progress, but unfortunately muted in the public discourse. Here’s a Hemmingway sentence that most people should add to their daily diet of vowels and consonants: Bats are good.
Biologist Barbara French agrees.
French is Bat Con’s science officer, and in a phone interview Monday, May 12, French provided excellent insight and perspective for the bat-interested, but, unfortunately bat-dumb. Here’s a bare-bones primer on bats and white nose syndrome, courtesy an articulate French:
White nose syndrome?
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said French.
According to French, WNS causes hibernating bats in the northeastern United States to wake-up too early during those winter months - apparently from a lack of sufficient fat stores - and more than 90 percent of the bats in the affected areas die as a result.
This fall, French will work on a project capturing bats before the animals go into hibernation to see if they have sufficient fat reserves. If the bats do not have sufficient reserves, it might indicate that something is wrong with the bats pray bait. If the bats are ready to hibernate, it may point to a metabolic deficiency.
French said many researchers are on the case, but despite their searching, they have not yet come up with any pathogen.
“A methodology to discover [a cure] is critical,” said French.
So what?
“Bats are very critical to pest control in the united states and other parts of the world,” said French.
Bats eat tremendous quantities of crop pests, like army worms and corn-ear worms, not to mention moths that would otherwise lay hundreds or even thousands of cattepilar eggs that once hatched would become big-time crop eaters.
“Taking bats out of that equation would cause a lot of trouble,” said French.
What about pesticides?
“Natural, biological sources of insect control are obviously preferable to the use of pesticdes, because the insects develop resistances to different pesticides in relatively short time,” said French. “The healthier a bat population you have, the less pesticide applications you are going to have to used.”
French said people have contacted Bat Con to learn how to attract bats to their farm because they don’t want to have to use more pesticides than are necessary.
May 20th - A walrus story creates cute questions for this blogger
It does not get much better than this:
In the public pantheon of marine mammaldom, dolphins are adored, whales revered, and seal pups make old Bond girls swoon. But walruses remain perversely, lumpishly obscure, known mostly for their sing-song linkage with a carpenter, an eggman and goo goo goo joob. To which Dr. Schusterman and his colleagues might well respond with a blast of a Bronx kazoo. Odobenus rosmarus is a magnificent creature, they say, behaviorally, anatomically, acoustically and taxonomically in a category all its own. The walrus belongs to the pinniped suborder, the group of blubbery, fin-footed carnivores that includes seals and sea lions. - Natalie Angier, “Who is the Walrus?”, New York Times
NEWS: After reading this piece, its hard not to love the “blubbery fin-footed carnivores.” Personality galore, it seems. But within Angier’s piece, only one paragraph is particularly newsy, in which she explains how the walrus is just as dependent on ice flows as polar bears. But are walruses in need of an endangered tag? Other than being lovable, how do they fit into the ecosystem? Are they a keystone species?
On May 14, CNN’s SciTechBlog did a short piece on the walrus (yes, I am avoiding the word ‘walruses’), and it left something to be desired. My comment: “what makes the walrus a keystone species?” awaits moderation.
READ: This will likely come off cynical, but here goes: Lovable animals are going to go extinct. Some are so cute and lovable that they’ll never go extinct - though they might not be fit enough to survive - because of dedicated human intervention (see giant pandas).
The purpose of this blog from the get-go was to shed light on species that are essential to the ecosystem. Bees and bats, the main subjects of my attention, are hardly favorite animals at story time, but humans depend on them. Humans need them.
I have covered polar bears and loons and other species, but looking back, I wonder if that time was contrary to the site’s mission.
Is the polar bear problem sad? Yes. Is it a storyline for this blog? Maybe not.
May 27th - Blogger’s first video
The guy in this video looks a lot like me, but he’s really a rogue ecosystem murderer. Everything he does is backwards - even his writing. Don’t believe his lies!
May 31st - ‘Ummmmmmm…huh?’ and the animal Thylacine
NEWS…KINDA: The un-embeddable video found here is four minutes long, but unless you have nothing better to do, no need to watch more than 45 seconds. It’s a series of screen shots of extinct species - quagga, Capsian tiger, dodo, etc. - all to the dulcet tones of singer Sade. Seriously. I’m not making that nugget up. See/listen for yourself and then jump back here.
READ: Yeah, it made me slightly uncomfortable too. But in true EF tradition, we’re gonna make a silk purse outta this sow’s ear. Did you notice the animal with a striped rump called a Thylacine? I had never heard of the animal before, and rather than hiding my ignorance to preserve a false digital scrim of superiority, I’m happy to share it with you - so we can learn together (tear of joy).
First, a photo, likely familiar:
Second, some info, thanks to a well-linked Wiki:
-The Thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial, was more commonly known as the Tasmanian Tiger. The last known wild “Tazzy Tiger” was shot in 1930, and the last of all - named Benjamin - died in 1936.
-Thylacine were/are misunderstood, and a cult following has survived Benji. Sightings, all unconfirmed, continue to this day. Though definitive proof of a living Tazzy Tiger has yet to surface, a reward of $1.75 million is still on the table in Tasmania.
-The Thylacine hunted at night, and can probably thank European settlers for its extinction. The Tazzies liked sheep, and were wiped-out as a result.
Third, a thought:
Does it matter? A cool animal, but was it valuable to the ecosystem? Would Darwin bat an eye?
June 1st - Ocean sharks and rays are at risk
NEWS: Bad. A comprehensive study by a group of scientists and experts says that sharks and rays are in trouble. Here’s an excerpt from the May 25 story released to ScienceDaily.com:
“The experts determined that 16 out of the 21 oceanic shark and ray species that are caught in high seas fisheries are at heightened risk of extinction due primarily to targeted fishing for valuable fins and meat as well as indirect take in other fisheries. In most cases, these catches are unregulated and unsustainable. The increasing demand for the delicacy ’shark fin soup’, driven by rapidly growing Asian economies, means that often the valuable shark fins are retained and the carcasses discarded. Frequently, discarded sharks and rays are not even recorded.
Sharks and rays are particularly vulnerable to overfishing due to their tendency to take many years to become sexually mature and have relatively few offspring.”
READ: This brings up a geopolitical issue not yet broached on EF - How will the burgeoning economy of China affect animal populations around the world? Transparency is not China’s strong suit, and the country is already in hot water for contributing dangerous and infectious goods to the world over the last year, so I doubt the livelihoods of deep water fish are a priority.
Collateral damage of economic exlposion? May-be.
June 1st - Brown bats bare one pup per year, white nose still kills hundreds of thousands
NEWS: Alvin Powell’s May 29 article in the Harvard Gazette, “Bat die-off in Northeast still mysterious,” provides key kicker:
Surviving populations will be slow to recover, French said, because the affected bats are long-lived and have just a single young each breeding season.
“Their strategy is to live a long time. They don’t need to have a lot of babies,” French said.
READ: These paragraphs come at the end of Powell’s 900 word piece. Powell writes well, but this last point should be the lede. Brown bats are clearly not built to replenish large losses, and that reality drains from EF’s cup of optimism.
BCI meets in June 9 in New York. Fingers crossed…
June 1st - A CCD critic
NEWS: Heather Smith’s July 2007 article on Slate.com “Bee Not Afraid” was good. Too bad I read it for the first time today. Smith breaks down the history of honeybees in North America, and argues the fuss over colony collapse disorder is misguided because they’ve been dying for decades - feral honeybees are almost a memory - and new, genetically engineered pollinators are becoming prevalent replacements.
READ: About a year since her article, and the bees are still dying. According to a May 26 article on ScienceDaily.com, which sites an expert survey, 36 percent of the nation’s honeybees died between September 2007 and March 2008 - up 5 percentage points year-over-year.
According to Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture Magazine, about 10 percent of all the bees in the nation died from colony collapse disorder.
And the costs of pollination are getting higher and higher.
