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The Tragedy of the Bat

Monday, April 5th, 2010

By David L. Brown

01_fungusbatBats have always gotten a bum rap. These furry little flying creatures have been associated with vampires, witches and ghouls for generations, and they’re the first to be blamed for rabies and other diseases. In fact, nearly all bats are harmless and do much good for humanity. The only exception is the vampire bat of Central and South America, a blood sucking species. Most bats are either insectivores or fruit-eaters, and the North American varieties are generally good neighbors, not fearsome monstrosities as many people imagine.

Now, bats are in trouble. So-called white nose syndrome is caused by a fungus that grows a white coating on the muzzles of bats and results in their death. It’s spreading from the Northeastern U.S., where it was first noticed near Albany, NY, in 2006. So far, the little brown bat has been the major victim of the widening plague, but other species also seem to be at risk. The photo at left shows an infected bat with the fungus in evidence not only on its muzzle but on its wings and ears as well.

According to an article in New Scientist magazine, the suspect in the disease is the fungus itself, Geomyces destructans, although scientists speculate that it may be a secondary opportunity infection riding piggy-back on some other disease pathogen.

Unlike many if not most people, I have a warm place in my heart for bats, which I have often observed in their busy evening task of swooping up millions of mosquitoes. Back in my youth I belonged to the University of Missouri campus spelunking club. (That’s a fancy name for cave exploring.) We used to crawl, wade, raft, or rappel into holes in the ground as a form of weekend sport, but also for science because we searched out and mapped caves in the limestone-rich region of central Missouri.

I have two personal anecdotes to report relative to bats. First is a memory of a late afternoon when I emerged after a lone venture into a  cave that was host to a large colony of bats. As I walked toward the oval opening, facing west across a small valley, sunset was fading and twilight was descending. The bats were beginning to stir, and soon I was standing in the mouth of the cave in the midst of a stream of bats leaving for the evening. Hundreds of them were swooping and dodging around me, a virtual river of bats, as I stood with my hands stretched overhead.

Yes, I realize that for some of you this would have been a nightmare scenario, but to me it was a marvelous experience of nature. The bats, of course, have built-in sonar navigation systems that would make a submariner jealous. They would never hit someone, any more than they collide with each other or run into the sides of their cave. The sonar is so good they can zero in on insects as tiny as gnats and mosquitoes, which are their foods of choice.

The second anecdote is a sad one. We once owned a house in Prescott, Arizona, in the high Ponderosa pine country. It featured a deck with a western view, and my wife and I enjoyed sitting there at dusk watching the bats swoop and dodge, catching the mosquitoes that would otherwise be feasting on us. The little colony of bats had found a home beneath the roof eaves of our house, and we were glad to have them there.

After a few years we moved away, but kept the house and rented it out. It wasn’t long before I got a call from the rental agent. The new tenants had complained that the house was “infested with bats,” and were insisting that an exterminator be hired to eliminate them. “Infested!” I cried. “Those are our bats!” I asked him to explain to the tenants, but nevertheless the ignorant fools insisted that the bats be killed. To this day I hope they were eaten alive by mosquitoes every time they tried to enjoy the deck. Disgusted, when the tenant’s lease ran out we insisted that they leave (they didn’t want to, but life is sometimes cruel) and sold the house. I still have bittersweet memories of those bats and their evening acrobatics.

Anyway, there’s my little collection of bat stories. They are often maligned, feared, and murdered for no good reason. In reality, they are an important part of the natural cycle of nature, helping to control those flying insects that, ironically, do suck our blood.

Posted in Disease and Pandemics, Diversity Loss, Extinction | Comments Off

Sushi — Or Not Sushi? That Is the Question

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

By David L. Brown

How can we tell when a species is endangered? One clue is when people are willing to pay an arm and a leg to eat the unfortunate few remaining members.

tuna-sushiRecently a 511 lb. northern bluefin tuna, one of the most sought-after fish in the world for sushi, was sold at Tokyo’s Tuskiji fish market for $175,000. By that afternoon, customers at Kyubey, a nearby star-rated restaurant, were chowing down on the tuna’s fatty belly meat. The story was reported by Scientific American on-line, here.

The idea that a single fish could be worth $342.50 a pound is astonishing, especially considering the number of people on Earth who go to bed hungry each night. It is a fact that many struggle to survive on as little as a dollar a day. For one of those unfortunate individuals, (should they become immortal) $175,000 could equal their income for 480 years, or about 20 generations. Or, conversely, it would be equal to the income of 480 impoverished people for an entire year. Just one fish.

There is growing evidence that the norhern bluefin may be in danger of extinction. The SciAm article reported on a move toward banning harvest of the increasingly rare fish, one of the top predator species of the ocean. Only the northern bluefin would be affected, not the Pacific and southern varieties—but it appears the northern bluefin is the one most loved by diners, especially in Japan which imports 80 percent of the bluefin catch in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

Markets and the effects of greed and avarice are more powerful than nature, common sense, and human self-preservation all added together, at least for the time being, so with demand for bluefin sushi so high that it can support stratospheric prices it seems likely that protecting the fish will be difficult or impossible. One problem is that even experts have difficulty telling the difference between the three varieties of bluefin (although sushi eaters apparently can, or at least believe they can).

Listing as an endangered species does not necessarily have much effect. The demand for rhinoceros horns for dagger handles among Arabs and potions among aging Chinese and Vietnamese has forced many rhino species to the very edge of extinction. Modern-day poachers hunt rhinos with AK-47s and sometimes from helicopters, quickly removing the horns with chainsaws and leaving the bodies to rot. The market for rhino horns has continued to thrive even though several major rhino varieties have been  placed on the world endangered species list (CITES) and even China banned the sale of rhino horn 17 years ago.

In a similar way, it seems likely that greedy fishers, fish mongers, and restaurant operators will find ways around a bluefin tuna ban. After all, the mindset of our present world economy seems to be that money is the root of everything that is good and the environment be damned. The plundering of nature will continue apace as long as humans have a yen (or dollar, euro or pound) for rare delicacies from the sea.

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Posted in Diversity Loss, Environmental Activism, Extinction, Ocean Depletion | Comments Off

Rock Meeting Hard Place On Extinction Express

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

By David L. Brown

The evidence continues to mount that the Earth is entering into a mass extinction event that could dwarf even the one that ended the age of dinosaurs. One of the most ominous clues is the widespread die-off of amphibians.

Why frogs, toads and salamanders should be disappearing is puzzling. After all, amphibians have been around for 250 million years and survived the extinction event 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs bit the dust. There seems to be no single answer, but the suspicion is that it all has to do with the changes Man has brought to the planet.

Frogs may be the “canary in the mine” for many other species, which already have either disappeared or are in danger of doing so. According to an article this morning on the ScienceDaily.com web site:

“There is no consensus among the scientific community about when the current mass extinction started,” [David] Wake [professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley] said. It may have been 10,000 years ago, when humans first came from Asia to the Americas and hunted many of the large mammals to extinction. It may have started after the Industrial Revolution, when the human population exploded. Or, we might be seeing the start of it right now, Wake said.

But no matter what the start date, empirical data clearly show that extinction rates have dramatically increased over the last few decades, Wake said.

The global amphibian extinction is a particularly bleak example of this drastic decline. In 2004, researchers found that nearly one-third of amphibian species are threatened, and many of the non-threatened species are on the wane.

According to Wake, a virulent fungus is a major cause of frog extinctions, but he said that global warming and habitat constriction are two other major killers of frogs. He added that the amphibians in the Sierra Nevada that he studies are also affected by pesticides carried by the wind from nearby croplands. “The frogs have really been hit by a one-two punch,” he said, “although it’s more like a one-two-three-four punch.”

How can the advent of humanity be having the effect of driving tens of thousands of species into extinction. After all, the last time anything like that occurred, it took this to do the job:

dinoextinctpic.jpg

How can we little ol’ harmless humans be doing anything to equal such a devastating event? Well, the answer is that we are dealing the environment with death by a thousand cuts. Remember that a trickle of water can carve a deep canyon, one tiny grain of stone at a time. Similarly, ever since the dawn of agriculture about ten thousand years ago, Humankind has been changing the Earth, one bit at a time. Each time a tree is felled, the Earth grew a little poorer. Each time a factory ship dredges the fish from the sea, the Earth dies a little. Each time a new power plant is fired up and begins to belch carbon dioxide into the air, the planet’s ecosphere shrinks by just a wee bit.

Now that there are nearly seven billion of us crowding almost every square kilometer of Earth, what was a trickle has become a torrent. Unlike a tiny stream that can take millennia to carve even a modest canyon, a surging tsunami can cause major change quite quickly.

That is a fair analogy to what is happening today, as the heavy footprint of humanity weighs on the once rich and diverse flora and fauna of our dear Mother Earth.

Unfortunately, we are like passengers who happily boarded a train to see where it would go, and now it has run out of control and is crashing off the tracks. The on-going extinction is running full steam ahead, and only now are we realizing that we are riding on the Extinction Express. As the diversity and richness of life on Earth continues to diminish, will even we humans be able to avoid the long, cold sleep of extinction? That is truly a question that we should consider.

What can we do about this? Sure, there could be some solutions, but there is woefully little sign of the kind of major commitments it would take to achieve them. Without strong motivation to change, it looks like we’ll continue to ride the train to oblivion.

The novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick is about extinction. It is set in a future world when virtually all animal life has been destroyed and only humans remain. Humans still yearn for animal companionship, and robots are used to replace the extinct creatures. For example the hero of the book, police agent Rick Deckard, keeps an artificial sheep on the roof of his apartment building. (The movie Blade Runner was based on this book, although it does not include this critical part of the story from which the book’s title came.) At the end of the book (not the movie) Deckard goes into the desert and thinks he has found a living toad. He takes it home with great excitement. But when he shows his wife the toad, she turns it over and shows him the cleverly concealed compartment where the batteries go.

There’s one thing we can say about extinction, and that is that it lasts for a long, long time. In fact, it’s like diamonds which, as the de Beers company has always told us, are forever.

Posted in Climate Change, Diversity Loss, Extinction | 1 Comment »

Catch 22 and the Polar Bear’s Dilemma

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By David L. Brown

It’s official — the U.S. Department of the Interior has added the polar bear to the list of endangered species. The story is here on the N.Y. Times news site, which reports:

…the long-delayed decision to list the bear as a threatened species may prove less of an impediment to industries along the Alaskan coast than many environmentalists had hoped. While further protecting the polar bear from direct or immediate threats — like hunting — the Interior Department added stipulations, seldom invoked under the act, that will make it relatively easy for oil and gas exploration and development activities to proceed.

The decision builds on scientific evidence about the retreat of sea ice, which the bears use as a platform to hunt seals and as a pathway to the Arctic coasts where they den. But it does not directly link the threat to the bears to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Mr. Kempthorne [Dick Kempthorne, secretary of the Interior] said the Endangered Species Act was “never meant to regulate global climate change” and that it would be “inappropriate” to use the polar bear listing that way. He said he made the decision because “sea ice is vital to polar bears’ survival,” and scientific models show the rapid loss of ice will continue.

The secretary, who earlier in his political life was a strong opponent of the Endangered Species Act, added: “This has been a difficult decision. But in light of the scientific record, and the restraints of the inflexible law that guides me,” he made “ the only decision I can make.”

Many fear that so-called “environmentalists” such as members of activist organizations like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, will use the listing of the polar bear as an excuse to bring legal action against any and all sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the U.S. As the statement above from the Interior secretary shows, the administration is aware of those possibilities and has attempted to put up firewalls against actions that could be detrimental to the economy. However, the fact that the Arctic sea ice is rapidly melting could no longer be ignored, and because the polar bear depends on that ice it is ipso facto endangered.

The problem with this is that there is nothing that humankind can do to change the basic fact. The “Big Melt” is well underway and will continue no matter what we do, even if all GHG emissions could be stopped in their tracks. The polar bear is not only endangered, it is probably doomed to extinction in its natural habitat because that habitat is going to disappear.

This situation is different from past examples of the effects of the Endangered Species Act, in which steps could be taken to preserve the environment required by the species in question, whether a spotted owl, some rare fish or amphibian, an insect or plant. Those have included such steps as preventing forest cutting, dam building, road construction, or real estate development that would impact he species’ habitat.

In the case of the polar bear, the only thing that we could do to mitigate the bear’s plight would be to reverse climate change and reinstate the Arctic environment. That is not possible.

Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch 22 introduced the concept of bureaucratic nonsense concerning the fitness of military pilots to fly combat missions during World War II. The “catch” was that if someone were crazy he would not be allowed to fly — but if he were to admit that he had a problem, that would be considered as proof of sanity and he would be required to continue to fly. The term “catch 22″ therefore came to mean something self-contradictory. The case of the polar bear as an endangered species is a good example. No matter how crazy human-induced global climate change becomes, or what steps are taken to attempt to reverse it, those bears will continue to fly into possible extinction, just like Heller’s fictional pilots.

Here is more from the N.Y. Times article:

Few natural resource decisions have been as closely watched or been the subject of such vehement disagreement within the Bush administration as this one, according to officials in the Interior Department and others familiar with the process. After the department missed a series of deadlines, a federal judge ruled two weeks ago that the decision had to be made by Thursday.

Barton H. Thompson Jr., a law professor and director of the Woods Institute of the Environment at Stanford University, said Wednesday that while the Interior Department gave itself “sufficient room” to list the polar bear, it did not provide “environmental organizations with a mechanism for trying to address climate change.”

He said that lawsuits challenging the connection between a factory’s greenhouse-gas emissions and the threat to individual polar bears might provide difficult to win.

“Interior has a reasonable case here that the connection is just too far removed,” he said.

The provision of the act that the department is using to lighten the regulatory burden that the listing imposes on the oil and gas industry — known as a 4(d) rule — was designed to permit flexibility in the management of threatened species, as long as the chances of conservation of the species would be enhanced, or at least not diminished.

Kassie Siegel, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of three groups that originally sued to have the polar bear listed as threatened, said Wednesday that the decision was an acknowledgement of “global warming’s urgency,” but that it fell short of helping the polar bear.

“The administration acknowledges the bear is in need of intensive care,” Ms. Siegel said. “The listing lets the bear into the hospital, but then the 4(d) rule says the bear’s insurance doesn’t cover the necessary treatments.”

The really good news in all of this is that the Bush administration, by this action on behalf of the polar bear, has finally and irrevocably agreed that global warming is real and that climate change is taking place. Although belated, this is a giant step forward so I guess it is better late than never.

It remains to be seen whether the bears can change their lifestyle to survive on land without the sea ice that is rapidly disappearing. As the Arctic Ocean becomes more ice free, 24 hour Summer sunlight will warm the open waters even more, leading to melting of adjacent tundra and dramatic changes in the region’s ecology. Most scientists believe the bears are incapable of adapting to such rapid and significant change, and they are probably right.

Posted in Climate Change, Diversity Loss, Extinction, Politics | Comments Off

Where Have the Bees and Butterflies Gone?

Monday, April 16th, 2007

By David L. Brown

When I was a child in post-World War II America we had no videogames or even television, and like many others at that time I collected butterflies. Many times I would go forth with my net into a bright summer morning eagerly seeking new additions to my growing display of lepidoptera, the order of insects that also includes moths and skippers.

In those days butterflies were in profuse abundance. Every flowering bush was surrounded by a colorful cloud of wings, each puddle of water ringed by thirsty insects, every field of blooming clover teeming with busy lives.

It is a matter of serious concern to me that the picture is quite different today. Where once the sight of dancing clouds of butterflies was a common delight, today a glimpse of the occasional wandering Monarch or Tiger Swallowtail is a rare event.

I have also noticed a dearth of honeybees, those busy little workers that flit from flower to flower spreading pollen and gathering the nectar from which to make their honey. In my youth, wherever flowers were blooming there was always the buzzing hum of busy bees at work. We harvested their honey for our table each year. Today, even though my backyard is filled with flowering plants only an occasional bee is seen.

I have often wondered where those insects have gone. Now the current issue of New Scientist magazine brings even more distressing news, at least for the bees. The story reports how late last year beekeepers in Florida suddenly found that entire colonies of bees were vanishing almost overnight. Soon similar mysterious disappearances were being reported in 22 Southern states.

The article quotes May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who said: “Bustling honeybee colonies, tens of thousands strong, were emptying in only a matter of days.”

According to Danny Weaver, president of the American Beekeeping Federation (ABF), up to half of the nation’s approximately 2000 commercial beekeepers have reported losses that fit the model of the syndrome, which has been termed “colony collapse disorder” (CCD).

Insect scientists are puzzled by the rapid rate of bee extinction, in which entire hives are suddenly found to be empty. One commercial beekeeper reported that the bees from 11,000 of his 13,000 hives have mysteriously gone missing. Another reported the total loss of virtually all of his 10,000 colonies.

According to Maryann Frazier, an apiculture (beekeeping) extension worker at Penn State University quoted on the ABF website, “This has become a highly significant yet poorly understood problem that threatens the pollination industry and the production of commercial honey in the United States.”

Researchers are puzzled, for there seems to be no easy explanation for the sudden outbreak of CCD. Investigators are eyeing a variety of suspects, including pesticides and viral, bacterial and fungal infection. So far there is no answer, and as spring arrives beekeepers in the northern part of the country will soon know whether CCD has spread to their cold climate areas as well as across the South.

The disappearance of bees is more serious than just the loss of honey, because it also threatens production of fruits and vegetables that rely on bees for pollination. A surprising number of crops depend on bee pollinators, including apples, almonds, blueberries, cantaloupe, cucumbers, squash and watermelon to name just a few.

According to one estimate, up to one-third of the human diet is affected directly or indirectly by bee pollination. The annual value of honeybee pollination to U.S. agriculture is approximately $9 billion, and bees play an important role around the world.

The New Scientist article also quoted Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota, St. Paul: “The bees are really at the base of a lot of agriculture and if they go tumbling down, what’s going to happen on top of that?”

Washington is beginning to notice the problem. The House Agriculture Committee scheduled a hearing on CCD with the ABF’s Danny Weaver and others from the industry scheduled to testify.

Weaver told New Scientist that he plans to ask the Department of Agriculture to double its funding for the nation’s four bee research labs. He noted that bee science gets just $8 million of the $93 billion the government spends each year on agricultural research.

Meanwhile, what about all those butterflies that are gone missing? That seems to be a problem worldwide, even in the faraway South Pacific. A recent press release from the Monarch Butterfly NZ Trust asks: “What’s happening to New Zealand’s butterflies?” The organization’s Jacqui Knight says that people contact her each day to inquire about the shortage of butterflies.

“Insects spread pollen, kill pests, clear away waste and improve our soil,” Knight says. “They do a lot of work in Nature’s background that we don’t imagine.”

The growing awareness of the problem could lead to some solutions. Although small and easily overlooked, insects are a wonderful and valuable part of our world. Someday soon I hope I can once again gaze with delight upon clouds of butterflies and listen to the busy hum of hard-working bees.

Posted in Diversity Loss, Extinction | 1 Comment »

Oceans Dying Under CO2 Siege

Sunday, February 25th, 2007

by Val Germann

Climate change on the Earth’s land masses, as bad as it may turn out to be, is only one likely effect of the recent and gigantic increases in atmospheric CO2. The Earth’s oceans, too, are feeling the effects which will only worsen as this new century unfolds. A recent article in the Vancouver SUN states the case bluntly:

Unless we halt completely the emission of carbon dioxide from the world’s energy systems, we risk an oceanic catastrophe worse than the one associated with the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

Note the words “halt completely” in the sentence above and think about the chances of a total suspension of CO2 emissions from human energy use. Yes, it looks like there may be a problem, somewhere.

The basis for the quote above is a study presented at a recent conference on the world’s oceans held in Vancouver. One of the presenters, a Stanford oceanic specialist, is the ultimate source.

Ken Caldeira, who teaches out of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in California, says the level of acidification caused by dumping hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the world’s oceans is so great that it could cause a major disruption on par with, or worse than, the sudden dumping of sulphuric acid into the oceans 65 million years ago when an asteroid slammed into the Earth’s surface.

To quote a famous TV character, Homer Simpson, “Would that be bad?” Yes, it would, as one of the sponsors of Dr. Caldeira’s speech, Daniel Pauly, explained:

. . . if there’s no more fish, is that okay? No, it’s not.

Of course, this problem at its worst is most likely a few decades away, thank heaven, and so safely beyond the reach of any revenge by today’s electorate, as today’s politicians and executives are safe from any revenge from the future. All in all, a win-win for everybody involved, I think most people would agree. That is, how bad could it actually get?

When [the last oceanic extinction] happened, [Caldeira] said, it took 500,000 years for plankton to reappear, two million years for corals to redevelop, and 10 million years for the current level of oceanic biodiversity to re-emerge.

Well, not a problem! That’s a long way off, as even the most die hard whale-hugger must admit. Read this entire article and see if you don’t agree. As Keynes once said, tongue in cheek, “In the long run we’re all dead.” So, even if we do drag nearly all other life on Earth down with us to that infinite and eternal night, what difference could it make to us, living here today?  None, I think, none at all.

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Posted in Climate Change, Diversity Loss, Extinction, Ocean Depletion | 2 Comments »

Alien Invaders Taking Over Everglades

Sunday, December 17th, 2006

By David L. Brown

So, shall we kiss the bio-diverse Everglades goodbye? Probably, thanks to an invasion of Burmese python snakes that grow up to 26 feet long and are rapidly multiplying. There are now several thousand of these happy huggers lurking in the fabled ‘Glades, munching on native wildlife including raccoons, possums, muskrats and native cotton rats and even birds such as the house wren, pied-billed grebe, white ibis and limpkin.

For this we have to thank the many morons who actually buy the cuddly snakes as pets (yes, I know, it’s hard to believe but trust me on this) when they are small enough to wrap around their owners’ necks without fatal results, only to give them their freedom in the swamp when they become large enough to strangle and ingest everything up to and including small children and large dogs.

According to an Associated Press report on the invasion of these alien monsters:

The Burmese python, one of the six biggest snakes, does not possess fangs and is not venomous. Rather, it is a sit-and-wait ambush hunter of the first order. Typically, it bites prey with six rows of needle-sharp, back-curving teeth, which dig deeper when its target tries to pull away. It then coils itself around its victim, squeezes the life out of it, and swallows it whole. Its stomach acids quickly dissolve even bone, [wildlife biologist Skip] Snow says.

In the wild, pythons often reach 20 feet in length, weigh more than 200 pounds, and grow strong enough to overpower a grown man. Hinged jaws, in fact, enable the snake to open its mouth wide enough to accommodate humans.

“Once they reach 8 to 9 feet in size,” Snow says, “you don’t want to be alone with a python.”

Native to Southeast Asia, the Burmese python – Python molurus bivittatus – has come to the Everglades by way of the burgeoning, global trade in exotic pets, creatures of many kinds shipped to America legally and distributed through pet shops and flea markets. Today, Americans may own 22 of the 24 python species that exist.

Since 2000, slightly more than 1 million pythons have been imported by the United States for commercial sale; nearly half are shipped to Miami, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says.

Python hatchlings, which can cost as little as $20 at a flea market, tickle armchair herpetologists. “They’re so darling when they’re tiny,” Oberhofer says. “Later, the big attraction at home is being able to watch your python kill something – like a rat – and gobble it whole in its tank.”

Wow, talk about entertainment! Just imagine the thrill of zoning out on your couch and watching living creatures actually dying and being consumed right there in your living room, not on the TV or video game screen but in real live action! Makes you want to run right out and buy another six pack of lab rats to keep the thrill going, doesn’t it? No? Well, me neither. I used to have a pet white rat, and I wouldn’t have wanted to let a snake anywhere near it. If you haven’t already tuned out in disgust, here’s a picture to keep your interest:

boa.jpg

This picture from Google Images is identified only as “a boa constrictor,” so it may not be the actual Burmese python breed presently taking over the Everglades. However, it does give you an idea of what a fun pet these giant snakes can be, fun for the whole family. This one is just about big enough that it’s time to take it off to the swamp to join its friends, before that little girl becomes Purina snake chow.

I recall a story my father told of his time in the Pacific Theater of World War II when some of the men in his unit brought a huge python into the camp. This was in the Philippines I think. The giant snake had swallowed an entire adult pig, and was thus unable to escape due to having a lump the size of a Barcalounger in its middle. As my father related it, it took about six soldiers to carry the beast into camp. I don’t recall how the story ended, but the memory has lurked in my mind for well over a half century.

So what does this mean for the Everglades? Frankly, I think we can say goodbye to that great swamp and its unique and diverse ecology, at least as it has existed until now. There is no practical way to stop the expansion of the snake population, and as they get bigger and more ferocious they are capable of killing ever larger prey, up to and including boy scouts, alligator hunters, and yes, even the alligators. More from the AP story:

Three years ago, a party of bird-watchers walking along the eastern Everglades’ Anhinga Trail stumbled upon a death match of super predators – python versus alligator. The gator, it appeared, had the upper hand: Its jaws, capable of a bite pressure of more than 3,000 pounds per square inch, were clenched on the snake, and for hours the gator carried its prey about, waiting for the python to go limp.

But it didn’t; after nearly 30 hours the python wriggled free of the alligator’s jaws and swam off into the high grass. “We looked for buzzards feeding on a snake carcass,” Snow recalls, “but we never found any.”

That a python could survive a gator attack was a red flag, and it was soon followed by others.

In February 2004, tourists at the Pa-hay-okee Overlook watched, stunned, as a python wrapped itself around an alligator, which countered by rolling over and grabbing the snake in its mouth and swimming off. And then, last fall, the carcasses of a 13-foot python and a 6-foot gator that had squared off were found later floating in a marsh, the gator’s tail and hind legs protruding from the split-open gut of the python.

Note that the snake in that last report was only half grown, a mere 13-foot teenager, and that a 6-foot gator is nothing to be taken lightly. Imagine when some of those snakes reach the 20+ foot range. Well, OK, don’t even think about it.

I seem to remember reading somewhere not long ago that the Everglades is also now home to South American anacondas (once more thanks to moronic pet owners). Now those are really big snakes that could probably swallow a hippopotamus! Hmmm, perhaps all is not lost. If only the anacondas will eat the pythons … but then we would need to up the ante and find something even bigger to take out the anacondas, so that isn’t a very good idea.

Whatever the fate of the Everglades, I have stricken if off of my list of favorite places to visit. It was bad enough with the gators and cottonmouths. Let the pythons and anacondas have it, I guess. I’m not taking any chances. Hey, maybe global warming will kill the snakes, and that would be a good thing? Well, not really. Sigh.

Posted in Diversity Loss, Extinction | 2 Comments »

Gorillas on the Brink

Friday, December 8th, 2006

by Val Germann

From the BBC this morning comes some bad news that many people had been expecting, though perhaps not so soon: the gorillas of Africa, under increasing pressure from habitat destruction and human predation, are now rapidly approaching extinction.  The final blow, however, is being delivered not by human beings but by ebola. 

More than 5,000 gorillas may have died in recent outbreaks of the Ebola virus in central Africa, a study says.  Scientists warn that, coupled with the commercial hunting of gorillas, it may be enough to push them into extinction.  

The lesson here is a hard one: by the time we humans figure out there is a problem in the natural world things are likely very far along.  In fact, they are probably so far along that the ’the full exponential stage’ has been reached, with the badness increasing so rapidly that no remedy exists. 

We might all think about this, and about the gorilla, as we read the headlines about climate change.  The bell could one day be tolling for us, too, and not that far down the road.

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Posted in Disease and Pandemics, Diversity Loss, Extinction | Comments Off

An Incredible Story the Press Never Noticed

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

By David L. Brown

What if a four-year project by “the world”s top biologists” to study the subject of biodiversity loss revealed that the threat of imminent extinction was hanging over 12 percent of all mammals, 23 percent of all birds, and 32 percent of all amphibians? Surely there would be a huge outcry, with bold headlines screaming from the top of every newspaper front page and TV anchors wailing and gnashing their teeth. Right?

Well, as it happens, no.

Exactly that finding of widespread and imminent extinction, resulting from a survey called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, was published 16 months ago, according to a news item in this week’s New Scientist magazine … and “its findings didn’t even make the front pages.”

Incredible? Yes. Surprising? Not when you consider the dimwittedness of the mainstream media and the politicians and pundits who play the MSM like Nero with his fiddle.

This week, according to the New Scientist report:

…conservationists will try again. In a declaration published in Nature, 19 leading biologists from 13 countries are calling for the creation of a new international body – modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) – to hard-wire the science of extinction into government policy-making. (read full story here; subscription required.)

According to Bob Watson, chief scientist at the World Bank and former chair of the IPCC, “virtually all aspects of biodiversity are in steep decline. There is an urgent need to bridge the gap between science and policy to take action.”

(more…)

Posted in Diversity Loss, Extinction, Forest Destruction, Resource Depletion | Comments Off

Missouri Tigers, Real Tigers, facing Extinction?

Friday, July 21st, 2006

by Val Germann

The last twenty years or so have been pretty tough on Missouri Tiger sports fans. In general, our University of Missouri “revenue” teams (that’s what they call football and basketball) have not done well, and the athletic department has been rocked by scandal after scandal. Luckily, the state’s sports fans are pretty much proof against reality and continue to show up for games, saving the MU Tiger from what some might call a well-deserved extinction.

If only things were working out as well for the real tigers, the ones in south Asia. But they’re not, as this quote from THE GUARDIAN today bluntly states:

But yesterday, a landmark study by leading conservationists warned that their plight is even more serious than previously feared. The big cat, the report warns, is close to extinction and the area in which it lives has been nearly halved in the last 10 years.

The situation is quite plain. The human population of India has shot through the roof while that of the Tiger has headed into the basement. The one is the same as the other, two halves of the same walnut, and all the hand-wringing in the world is not going to make one ounce of difference. But that isn’t going to stop some people, of course, who think that like King Canute they can bade the tide be still. Groups like Save the Tiger continue to have hopes:

The authors of the report – Setting Priorities for the Conservation and Recovery of Wild Tigers 2005-2015 – advocate a “tiger summit”, involving the heads of state of the 13 countries which still host the species.

But it’s all in vain, as anyone knows who has kept up with the overall situation. India, and all of south Asia, is “developing” at breakneck speed and its rampaging population needs more natural resources every day.

So, let’s hope the Missouri Tigers can avoid athletic extinction and MU’s athletic director can keep that tiger skin (donated by an alum who shot a Bengal Tiger in 1957) hanging on his office wall. That is, what a tragedy it would be if the tiger were to totally disappear!

Read the entire GUARDIAN article here.

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Posted in Conservation Issues, Diversity Loss, Extinction, Forest Destruction | Comments Off

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