Owl at dusk

Horned owl

Chapter 24: Xenoglaux 

page 334: tipping point.  Some scientists say an Arctic thaw may be the first in a cascade.  "Perhaps the worst news of all is that there may be no warning of impending flips." But there is also push-back against the idea.

page 335: sixth extinction.  Today's extinctions, say some scientists, may be the result of damage humans did in the early 20th century; our own extinction legacy could ultimately be far worse.   There has been excitement this year about the possibilities of de-extinction (also here). Cooler heads point to ecological and other challenges.

page 336: the consequences of climate changes for species survival, abundance, distribution are hard to predict, and likely to be complex and variable. A short article on birds is here. Generally, about one third of animal species are predicted to be affected. And disruption can travel the other way:  "wiping out top predators like lions, wolves and sharks is tragic, bad for ecosystems – and can make climate change worse."

page 337: owls fascinate humans. A recent science-based reason being the discovery of how they are able to turn their heads through 270 degrees.

page 337: horned owl. According to David Abram, the great horned owl has long been regarded as the preeminent prophet or seer among birds.

page 339: protect and restore the beautiful...and create new possibilities for future flourishing.  A shift from trying to conserve individual species to protecting ecosystems as a whole (and making some hard choices about which to protect) is underway. Scientific paper here, press report here. about See also Feral by George Monbiot.


This is the twenty-fifth in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

Unicorns

Rhinoceros beetle

Chapter 21: Unicorn

page 307: Unicorn's horn was the Viagra of its day. Rhino horn is the "natural" Viagra of ours. In February it was reported that a rhinoceros has been killed every 11 minutes since the beginning of the year. In April the last 15 rhinos in a Mozambique park were killed by poachers.

 


page 308: An informative post on narwhals today at Why Evolution is True.

page 308: Sawfishes are arguably the most threatened family of marine fishes in the world. See: Exaltation to extinction.

page 311: humans...kill many tens of millions of sharks every year.  See this graphic.

page 311: obligate metaphorists. Robert Sapolsky elborates here. 


This is the twenty-second in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

It's the ecology, stupid

Jacquelyn Gill considers de-extinction:

Is one lonely calf, raised in captivity and without the context of its herd and environment, really a mammoth? Does it matter that there are no mammoth matriarchs to nurse that calf, to inoculate it with necessary gut bacteria, to teach it how to care for itself, how to speak with other mammoths, where the ancestral migration paths are, and how to avoid sinkholes and find water? Does it matter that the permafrost is melting, and that the mammoth steppe is gone? As much as I love mammoths, the ecologist in me can’t help but answer: no.

'Gone'

Isabella Kirkland's picture is the subject of her talk at TedX's DeExtinction event today.

The revival of an extinct species - the Wooly mammoth - is now a real possibility, says Hendrik Poinar

Hannah Waters see narcissism in de-extinction. Stuart Pimm argues conservation of species still alive should take precedence.

Elephant and forest

As go the elephants, so go the trees. That’s the message of a new study published in the May 2013 issue of Forest Ecology and Management that found more than a dozen elephant-dependent tree species suffered catastrophic population declines in new plant growths after forest elephants were nearly extirpated from their ecosystems. The fruit-bearing trees all rely on forest elephants as their primary means of seed distribution, a process known as megafaunal dispersal syndrome.

-- John R. Platt

The number of African forest elephants has "declined by 62% in 10 years."

See also Gomphotheres of the Rambunctious Garden

Big bird

On page 298 of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings I describe Stirton's Thunder Bird, which could grow three metres tall and weigh half a tonne as "probably the largest bird ever to have lived." 

Sebastian Robinson, a reader, recently got in touch with the following:

According to my limited information (Extinct Birds by Errol Fuller), there have in historic times been birds both taller than Stirton's, and about as heavy. 

According to Fuller, the moas (genus Dinornis) "were all truly spectacular birds, the tallest known examples towering to heights in excess of 3.6m (12 ft)."  Just when they died out seems to be a confused and controversial question, but at least one species is listed as having disappeared after 1600 -- and there are vague reports of individual giant flightless birds in New Zealand as late as the 19th century. 

When it comes to heavy birds, Aepyornis maximus, the Elephant Bird of Madagascar, seems from its remains to have been pretty much in the Stirton's class: an estimate (Amadon 1947) put the weight of A. maximus at 454 kg (1,000 lb), or about three and a third times the weight of a full-grown ostrich. Fuller suggests a potentially limiting factor to even larger size: "Engineers calculate that structurally and functionally it is impossible for an egg to be bigger [than Aepyornis's 30-cm long monster]; they may not be right, of course!"

Drawing of Dromornis stirtoni by Nobu Tamura.

Xenoglaux

Thirty-third in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 24: Xenoglaux

page 333: cloud forests. Things I learned as a field biologist #612 gives a sense of what they're like. See also The Strange Forests that Drink—and Eat—Fog.

page 333: deforestation.  Where to begin? In November it was reported that deforestation in the Amazon was at a record low. An earlier article suggested that Colombia, for one, is increasingly reforesting.  But even where things are ostensibly getting better there may be an 'extinction debt' still to pay.  Commentators on the role of REDD include REDD monitor.

page 335: extinction...do individual species matter?...the eye of eternity...There are numerous blogs about extinction. Here is one.    As species approach extinction they become more and more valuable.  Michael McCarthy has written well about the loss of nature and the nature of loss.  Regarding the very long run consider the beginning of a fine essay by Ross Andersen:

No event, however momentous, leaves an everlasting imprint on the world. Take the cosmic background radiation, the faint electromagnetic afterglow of the Big Bang. It hangs, reassuringly, in every corner of our skies, the firmest evidence we have for the giant explosion that created our universe. But it won’t be there forever. In a trillion years’ time it is going to slip beyond what astronomers call the cosmic light horizon, the outer edge of the observable universe. The universe’s expansion will have stretched its wavelength so wide that it will be undetectable to any observer, anywhere. Time will have erased its own beginning.

On Earth, the past is even quicker to vanish. To study geology is to be astonished at how hastily time reorders our planet’s surface, filling its craters, smoothing its mountains and covering its continents in seawater. Life is often the fastest to disintegrate in this constant churn of water and rock. The speed of biological decomposition ensures that only the most geologically fortunate of organisms freeze into stone and become fossils. The rest dissolve into sediment, leaving the thinnest of molecular traces behind...

page 337: owls [fascinate] humans. Humour from David Sedaris

page 338: The caption to Goya's Capricho 43, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, is more usually translated as 'The sleep of reason produces monsters.' (Sueño means both dream and reason.) One tag translates as 'Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.'

page 339: protect and restore. Kevin McKenna makes a case for bringing wolves back to Scotland. Robert Macfarlane appreciates the philosophy behind a successful rewilding experiment in the Netherlands:

Sea eagles came here of their own accord five years ago, moving down into the area from Scandinavia. They were charismatic proof of the conservation ethic of the Oostvaardersplassen: increase scale, reduce management inputs, resist species farming, avoid deliverables and goals, and let wild nature take its course as far as possible.

But, warn the likes of Oliver Rackham, Peter Marren and Richard Mabey, the rush to reforest parts of Britain in the 1990s and 2000 may have encouraged the spread of new tree diseases (from imported stock), of which ash dieback may be just one example. For a fresh view of rewilding, look out for a book by George Monbiot published later this year. See also a post on Nature 2.0 here.

Yew Tree. Photo Dan Hartwright

Most endangered primates

Conservation organisations have published an updated list of the 25 most endangered primates

Once again, this report shows that the world’s primates are under increasing threat from human activities. Whilst we haven’t lost any primate species yet during this century, some of them are in very dire straits, In particular the lemurs are now one of the world’s most endangered groups of mammals, after more than three years of political crisis and a lack of effective enforcement in their home country, Madagascar. A similar crisis is happening in South-East Asia, where trade in wildlife is bringing many primates very close to extinction.

-- Dr Christoph Schwitzer, Head of Research at the Bristol Conservation and Science Foundation (BCSF).

Wiki page here
 

Ghosts

I am speaking tonight with Andrea Wulf and Simon Garfield at Salon London. One of the themes is extinction.  Here are just three of the many large animal species driven to extinction in the last few centuries that are now barely imaginable:

Tretretre

Stellar's sea cow

Thylacine

'Priceless or worthless?'

The donor community and conservation movement are leaning increasingly towards a ‘what can nature do for us’ approach, where species and wild habitats are valued and prioritised according to the services they provide for people. This has made it increasingly difficult for conservationists to protect the most threatened species on the planet.

While the utilitarian value of nature is important conservation goes beyond this. Do these species have a right to survive or do we have a right to drive them to extinction?

-- Professor Jonathan Baillie, ZSL’s Director of Conservation, Priceless or worthless? 100 Most Threatened Species

The book starts by introducing 100 species from 48 different countries that will be the next to go if conservation action is not taken immediately. Twenty-five of the 100 are highlighted to demonstrate the diversity of life that is about to be lost. We introduce the reader to the unique traits and characteristics of each species – essentially the wonder and natural beauty of each creature, plant and fungi. We then highlight examples of species that have been brought back from the brink of extinction such as Przewalski’s horse or the Chatham Island’s black robin, demonstrating that averting extinction is possible.

'Sixth Extinction'

We didn't mean to help make the mammoth extinct. The wonderful portrait of a mammoth in Pech Merle cave reveals that early homo sapiens was fascinated by these marvellous creatures. This masterpiece of cave art is as acute as any modern work of naturalist observation. The hunters who painted in caves showed the same passion for the natural world as their descendants do. Their culture must have been bereft when the mammoth vanished – even as they helped it on its way.

In the 21st century the same paradox endures. Human activity endangers entire species, yet human culture is profoundly rooted in nature. The loss of a species is also a loss of the images, stories, symbols and wonders that we live by – to call it a cultural loss may sound too cerebral: what we lose when we lose animals is the very meaning of life. Those first artists in ancient caves portrayed animals far more than they portrayed people. It was in the wild herds around them that the power of the cosmos and the mystery of existence seemed to be located.

-- Jonathan Jones

Zombie reefs

A heartfelt and sane contribution from Carl Safina to a discussion of whether it's time to give up on coral reefs:

I can’t remember who dragged me to see the movie “Jurassic Park,” but one resonant line in that movie was worth the price of admission, this unforgettable sentence: “Life finds a way.” It popped out at me because it so economically summed up a truth behind all of nature’s stunning diversity and the continuity of the living adventure of Life on Earth.

Yes, things die, lineages go extinct, and coral reefs are in a world of hurt. All true. Also true is there exist heat-tolerant corals, corals that are regularly exposed to (and routinely survive) the extreme stress of finding themselves out in the tropical air at low tide, and many ocean organisms that live through large swings in pH through tidal cycles.

Yes many coral reefs are degraded. Yes it doesn’t look good. But sometimes living diversity supplies marginal adaptations that suddenly fit perfectly into new conditions. Someone (not Darwin) called it “survival of the fittest.” That’s what the phrase means; not survival of the strongest but of the ones who find themselves in the right place at the right time as conditions change to suddenly suit them. Look around; it works.

Agreed, it is past due to raise the alarm that coral reefs in many areas have largely collapsed, and that their future looks bleak. As an anguished lover of reefs and living things generally, and as an ecologist by profession, I cannot picture what it will take for coral reef systems to survive and thrive. But I also cannot picture a world in which no reef corals adapt, persist, and flourish, simply because it’s true: Life finds a way.

Bradbury seems to suggest giving up and spending money on ways to replace the values (for example, fish) that coral reefs have provided. But what would giving up look like? Overfishing is old news, and plenty of people are, in fact, spending money trying to raise fish. Some are making money. Overpopulation: also old news and crucial to everything from water supplies to prospects for peace. One doesn’t need to certify future coral reef destruction to realize that overpopulation is bad for human health and dignity, not to mention a catastrophe for wild living systems. These problems have caused the losses to date and they continue. Warming and acidification are also building.

But to accept that reefs are doomed implies that the best response is to give up hope, thus give up effort. That means we give up on curbing overfishing and allowing rebuilding (yet these two goals are in fact are increasingly working in many places, specifically because people have not given up, and because letting fish recover can work). It means we give up on controlling pollution (in the U.S., the Clean Water Act brought great improvement to rivers so polluted that they actually caught fire multiple times; developing nations deserve to do no less for themselves). It means we give up on population, whose most effective solving strategy is to teach girls to read and write.

Giving up, while reefs still flourish in many places, means accepting what is unacceptable, and abandoning work on situations that can likely be improved. It means deciding to be hopeless. It means giving up on the reefs, the fishes, and the people, who need all the combined efforts of those who both know the science best—and who, while life exists, won’t give up.

The science is clear that reefs are in many places degraded and in serious trouble. But no science has, or likely can, determine that reefs and all their associated non-coral creatures are unequivocally, equally and everywhere, completely doomed to total non-existence. In fact, much science suggests they will persist in some lesser form. Bleak prospects have been part of many dramatic turnarounds, and, who knows, life may, as usual—with our best efforts—find a way.

'The walking dead'

The Tree ocelot, the Hoary-throated spinetail, the White-cheeked spider monkey, the Rio Branco antbird, the Brazilian tapir and the Yellow-headed poison frog.

-- list, report, paper

Mass extinction

Adam Rutherford is presenting a three part series on BBC Radio 4 about mass extinction events. This week's episode, the second, asks if humans are causing a sixth mass extinction event.

'A global tragedy'

Fires raging in an Indonesian swamp forest may have killed a third of the rare Sumatran orangutans living there and all of them may be lost this year, conservationists warned Wednesday.

The Tripa swamp forest in Aceh province is home to the world's densest population of critically endangered Sumatran orangutans. About 200 still live there, out of a world population estimated at 6,600, the conservationists said.

More from AP here.

'On Extinction'

Mel Challenger is detained by flu in the family so is unable to take part in an event at the Bath Literary Festival today. I will be there to read some extracts from her book on her behalf, and to talk about the issues it raises. Please join us if you can.

Here is an extract from her marvelous, disturbing account of an abandoned whaling station in South Georgia:

Beyond this large building, freakish instruments and workings cluttered the landscape. There was an overgrown toothed object like a saw, curved and beautiful as a Norse carving. I could see chains under fragile bonnets of snow with links bigger than my hands. In the distance, the disintegrating platforms of mortuary metal were apparent, proportioned to the massive bodies of whales. A short walk away from the strandline, I stumbled across a large tarnished tank on which the words BLUBBER COOKERY were painted in faded white lettering. At the front was a bolted, square-shaped opening. I immediately thought of the pictures in my childhood copy of Hansel and Gretel, the entrance into the oven where the siblings shoved the witch who held them captive to satisfy her monstrous appetite. But perhaps most startling of all was one of several oil vats, a round structure of astounding proportions, bulging through time and disuse. Sunlight nudged into its snowy circular border, and I too nudged forward, amazed, appalled, snow falling soundlessly around me.

Lots of rats and pigeons

...aka 'disaster taxa' in the wake of our current mass exintinction:

Ultimately...life will recover: it always has. The mass extinctions of the past offer hints as to how the ecosystem will eventually bounce back, says Mike Benton at the University of Bristol, UK. The two that we know most about are the end-Permian extinction 252 million years ago, which wiped out 80 per cent of species, and the less severe end-Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago, which famously took out the dinosaurs. The Permian extinction is more relevant because it was caused by massive global warming, but Benton cautions that the world was very different then, so today's mass extinction will not play out in quite the same way.

Recoveries usually have two stages. If ours pans out in the same way, the first 2 to 3 million years will be dominated by fast-reproducing, short-lived "disaster taxa". These will rapidly give rise to new species and bring the world's species count back up

-- from Will there be any Nature Left?, part of a package on the Deep Future. I'd say the future is likely to be less predictable, especially given the human tendency to meddle and manipulate.

Omega frog

The last known Rabb’s fringe-limbed tree frog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum) now lives by himself at Zoo Atlanta in Georgia after the zoo euthanized the only other member of its species. -- report

Small miracle

An as-yet-unextinguished marvel in a time of mass extinction:

A songbird weighing just 25 grams makes a 14,500 km journey twice a year. Northern wheatears fly from Alaska, across Asia to sub-Saharan Africa -- one of the longest migrations on record.

-report, paper.

See too A godwit's flight.

Rhino gone

Poaching has driven the Javan rhinoceros to extinction in Vietnam, leaving the critically endangered species' only remaining population numbering less than 50 on the Indonesian island that gave it its name, the WWF and International Rhino Foundation said on Tuesday. "The last Javan rhino in Vietnam has gone," said Tran Thi Minh Hien, WWF-Vietnam country director. "It is painful that despite significant investment in the Vietnamese rhino population, conservation efforts failed to save this unique animal. Vietnam has lost part of its natural heritage."

-- report