From the Riviera to Rivierenbuurt

I have moved from the shores of the Mediterranean to the banks of the Amstel River in Amsterdam. I am now in the land of windmills, canals, clogs, and parakeets.

Parakeets? There are flock of bright green Rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameri) in Amsterdam. They are noisy birds, and the story goes that one owner got so fed up with his pet parakeets that he let them fly off. Since they came from the foothills of the Himalayas, they had no problem surviving and breeding in the Netherlands.

Will the parakeets compete for resources with the local bird populations? Probably not catastrophically. Owls and goshawks now feed on them, keeping their numbers down. But they are probably here to stay.

Are bonobos hippie chimps?

Probably not. Very good article in The New Yorker.

Most of our current knowledge comes from observing bonobos in captivity.

Captivity can have a striking impact on animal behavior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, recently put it, “Stuck together, bored out of their minds—what is there to do except eat and have sex?”

Gorillas murdered

The BBC reports from Congo’s Virunga National Park,

Conservationists have expressed concern over the “senseless and tragic” killing of four mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The bodies of three females and one male were discovered by rangers earlier this week in the Virunga National Park.

Officials said the “executions” were not the work of poachers because they would have taken the bodies.[...]

Because poachers would have sold the bodies as food or trophies, conservationists think the apes were killed by a group that was trying to scare wardens out of the park.

Similar killings of mountain gorillas took place in Rwanda to get back at the late Dian Fossey, of Gorillas in the Mist fame. She was widely hated in the local community because of her outspoken racism and violence against local people. It makes one wonder if community relations in the Virunga National Park are as good as they should be. And do the benefits to the local population of Virunga National Park outweigh the opportunity costs of the park?

Update: National Geographic reports that “Virtually all the charcoal supplied to nearby Goma—worth an estimated U.S. $30 million a year—is made from wood harvested illegally inside Virunga National Park”.

Pleistocene Park

BBC has the story about Pleistocene Park, the recreation of an Ice Age ecosystem complete with megafauna, including horses, reindeer, bison, musk oxen, elk, wolves, Siberian tigers and possibly mammoths.

Here is an article in Science from 2005,

In the mammoth ecosystem, the collective behavior of millions of competitive herbivores maintained the grasslands. In the winter, the animals ate the grasses that grew the previous summer. All the while they fueled plant productivity by fertilizing the soil with their manure, and they trampled down moss and shrubs, preventing these plants from gaining a foothold. It is my contention that the northern grasslands would have remained viable in the Holocene had the great herds of Pleistocene animals remained in place to maintain the landscape.

So restocking the land with herbivores may allow grasslands to expand and be maintained, and create a Serengeti in Siberia. It is an interesting experiment. We wish them the best of luck!

Hadza hunters-gatherers under threat

The Washington Post reports on the Hadza hunter-gatherers,

50,000 Years of Resilience May Not Save Tribe

Tanzania Safari Deal Lets Arab Royalty Use Lands

YAEDA VALLEY, Tanzania — One of the last remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers on the planet is on the verge of vanishing into the modern world.

The transition has been long underway, but members of the dwindling Hadzabe tribe, who now number fewer than 1,500, say it is being unduly hastened by a United Arab Emirates royal family, which plans to use the tribal hunting land as a personal safari playground.

The deal between the Tanzanian government and Tanzania UAE Safaris Ltd. leases nearly 2,500 square miles of this sprawling, yellow-green valley near the storied Serengeti Plain to members of the royal family, who chose it after a helicopter tour.

A Tanzanian official said that a nearby hunting area the family shared with relatives had become “too crowded” and that a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family “indicated that it was inconvenient” and requested his own parcel.

The official, Philip Marmo, called the Hadzabe “backwards” and said they would benefit from the school, roads and other projects the UAE company has offered as compensation…

The long-run threat to the Hadza is habitat loss. Tanzania has for many years had one of the fastest growing human populations in the world, and the Hadza have lost land from encroachment by farmers and the destruction of woodlands. Ironically, what caused the destruction of one forest was the demand for charcoal from the neighboring Ngorongoro Conservation Area.

The actions of the Abu Dhabi royal family may or may not threaten the Hadza’s livelihood, but obviously some Hadza believe it does. What the Hadza need are clear and well-defined property rights to their land, including rights to charge tourists and hunters.

Here are a few photos.

Good news from Africa

Carl Zimmer writes that the first aerial survey of southern Sudan in 25 years has revealed vast migrating herds, rivaling those of the Serengeti plains, that have managed to survive 25 years of civil war.

The Quartenary Conundrum

The Quartenary Conundrum is this: While current empirical and theoretical ecological forecasts suggest that many species could be at risk from global warming, during the recent ice ages surprisingly few species became extinct.

In a recent paper in BioScience, Forecasting the Effects of Global Warming on Biodiversity (pdf), Daniel Botkin et al. state that

Fossil evidence and recent ecological and genetic research, along with specific problems with present forecasting methods, lead us to believe that current projections of extinction rates are overestimates. Previous work has failed to adequately take into account mechanisms of persistence. [...]

Until recently, it was thought that past temperature changes were no more rapid than 1 degree Celsius (°C) per millennium, but recent information from both Greenland and Antarctica, which goes back approximately 400,000 years, indicates that there have been many intervals of very rapid temperature change, as judged by shifts in oxygen isotope ratios. Some of the most dramatic changes (e.g., 7°C to 12°C within approximately 50 years; Macdougall 2006) are actually of greater amplitude than anything projected for the immediate future. [...]

What, then, is the answer to the Quaternary conundrum? The answer appears to lie in part with the ability of species to survive in local “cryptic” refugia, that is, to exist in a patchy, disturbed environment whose complexity allows faster migration than forecast for a continuous landscape, within which species move only at a single rate. The answer also lies in part with greater genetic heterogeneity within species, including local adaptations,which allows rapid evolution. For example, populations close to latitudinal borders are likely to be better adapted to some environmental changes than the average genotype. However, the conundrum is not completely solved, and some important genetic research suggests that species are more vulnerable than the fossil record indicates. A fuller solution to the conundrum will be important for improving forecasts of climate change effects on biodiversity.

HT Carl Zimmer.

Note that this is not a call for complacency, it is a call for better models of climate change effects on extinctions.

Veterinarian loses arm to crocodile

A veterinarian in a Taiwan’s Shaoshan Zoo gave a 17 year old 200 kilogram Nile crocodile tranquilizers before attempting to give it medicine. Obviously it wasn’t adequately tranquilized; it bit his arm off.

Other zoo employees shot the crocodile twice and retrieved the arm. It was reattached during a 7-hour operation.

The vet is doing well, considering the circumstance. So is the croc. The shots did not penetrate its skin. They did shock it, and the shock made it open its mouth and release the arm.

The croc has been in the zoo for 10 years. Before that it was a pet in the home of a local resident.

Chang Po-yu after the operation.

Source: AP.

Elephant hunting

Shooting an elephant with an .458 Winchester Magnum is about as heroic as shooting a barn, but trophy hunting can be a socially useful activity (via Café Hayek),

NGO destroys African wildlife

- and subverts democracy in Kenya. A pretty good rant from Michael Norton-Griffiths (who has put some new articles on his website),

“Since 1977, Kenya has lost 60%-70% of all its large wildlife…

The last stand of the orangutan

The distribution of the orangutan on Borneo.

From The Last Stand of the Orangutan - State of emergency: illegal logging, fire and palm oil in Indonesia’s national parks (pdf).

A UNEP rapid response assessment prepared for the 2007 UNEP Governing Council. The survival of orangutans and other rain forest wildlife in Indonesia is seriously endangered by illegal logging, forest fires including those associated with the rapid spread of oil palm plantations, illegal hunting and trade.

Forest fire and deforestation in Indonesia are also resulting in substantial emissions of carbon dioxide, in addition to the decrease in habitat for Orangutan and other keystone species of the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra. The smoke from the burning forests are spreading over Southeast Asia in the summers. As burnt forest areas are left open, they are commonly claimed for rubber and palm oil plantations, thus permanently reducing the available habitat…

More here. Maps and graphics from the report here.

The Tibetan antelope

Photo by George Schaller. The Tibetan antelope, also called the chiru, was  treatened by the demand for shahtoosh shawls made from its wool. It takes 3 to 5 dead antelopes to produce one shawl. And the newly opened Pan-Himalayan railway line may interfere with its migration routes.

But the Tibetan antelope may be recovering as local communities begin to embrace conservation efforts to protect the endangered species. “China has made a major effort to control poaching,” says George Schaller.

Source: BBC. Related story, Kashmir rethinks shahtoosh ban.

Declining fish stocks

A Chinese trawler fishes inside the protected marine zone at Conkouati Douli National Park in the Republic of Congo. The area is reserved for local fisherman in canoes who say the trawlers have made fishing very difficult (Source: BBC).

On the connection between declining fish stocks and the consumption of bushmeat, read this post.

Primate Research

BBC writes that “UK experts back primate research”. Mind you, there is primate research and there is primate research. They are not talking about primatologists running around in the bush with binoculars and a clipboard.

About 3,300 primates are used in British laboratories each year…

Many researchers say primates’ genetic and physiological similarities to humans make them a prime candidate for testing the safety and efficacy of drugs…

…non-human primate research remained vital for understanding the basic biology of the brain, neurological diseases, communicable diseases, and some aspects of fertility and ageing.

They are no doubt right. But I remember when I first thought that other primates’ senses and emotions are probably just like ours. It was during a memorable meal of cassava and roasted baby monkey in the Ituri forest in Congo. Eating cassava paste is like eating glue, and the monkey looked just like something the fire brigade had recovered from a burnt down home.

Laboratory research using primates serves a useful purpose, no doubt about it. But I still think that using non-human primates in this way is not all that different from using humans.

Ebola kills gorillas

Ebola kills over 5000 western gorillas, says BBC, quoting Science (subscription necessary). That is about a quarter of the total gorilla population.

Abstract

Over the past decade, the Zaire strain of Ebola virus (ZEBOV) has repeatedly emerged in Gabon and Congo. Each human outbreak has been accompanied by reports of gorilla and chimpanzee carcasses in neighboring forests, but both the extent of ape mortality and the causal role of ZEBOV have been hotly debated. Here, we present data suggesting that in 2002 and 2003 ZEBOV killed about 5000 gorillas in our study area. The lag between neighboring gorilla groups in mortality onset was close to the ZEBOV disease cycle length, evidence that group-to-group transmission has amplified gorilla die-offs.

Update: here is the story in the New York Times (hat tip John Hawks).

Endangered birds

Source: Butchart et al. Measuring Global Trends in the Status of Biodiversity: Red List Indices for Birds.

Birds in the Indomalayan region show a steep rate of deterioration during the 1990s because of intensifying deforestation in Indonesia. All those forest fires…

More information here.

The great revival of wildife in Europe

Trends in French forest area and population

The Times has a gloom and doom story about wildlife taking over depopulated fringes of Europe (hat tip Demography Matters). Actually, the story could just as well have been written as a success story about conservation and the great reversal of wildlife depopulation and deforestation. As can be seen on the graph above, this is not a recent trend e.g. in France. The same process is documented across countries in Returning forests analyzed with the forest identity, see yesterday’s post.

Bears at the dustbins, wolves in main street as Europe goes wild

WOLVES, wild boar and brown bears are moving west in Europe as nature takes hold of rural regions abandoned by people seeking work in the cities.Wildlife migration is shadowing human migration and, according to population experts, is set to transform the way we look at the Continent. Wild boar are already ransacking dustbins on the outskirts of Berlin and bears are startling schoolgirls in Austria.

Pay for the life of a whale

Whaling in Iceland, from BBC,

The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) will auction “rights” to a whale’s life on the online site.

WSPA wants to raise $180,000 (£95,000), the value of meat from a fin whale; it then aims to pay this sum to hunters, and ask them to let one whale go.

At $180.000, I guess you can’t call it a cheap gimmick.

The WSPA doesn’t take the idea far enough.

The North Atlantic Salmon Foundation buys ITQs (Individual Transferable Quotas) for salmon from commercial fishermen. The wild salmon in Iceland, Norway and Scotland has greatly benefited from this scheme.

There is no reason why the same principles shouldn’t be used for the sustainable management of other species. Iceland should allow the WSPA to save whales by buying ITQs.

World Parks at Risk

The October issue of National Geographic has a series of articles on The Future of Parks, including an interesting article by David Quammen. He writes,

“Serengeti National Park tells the world that the people of Tanzania, accepting some burden of inconvenience, find themselves privileged to embrace within their boundaries a vast grassland filled with lions - come and see.”

The truth of the matter is that many Tanzanians, especially the Masai who previously inhabited Serengeti, see parks as places where wild animals are favored over local people for the benefit of foreign tourists.

It is also true that parks and other protected areas work. We need them if we want to conserve biodiversity.

But there are huge opportunity costs associated with protected areas. The long term sustainability of protected areas in poor countries is threatened by inadequate compensations for these costs.

If more poor countries become more democratic, the problem will get worse. Parks are an elite concern. By appealing directly to governing elites, the international conservation community has been able to get the support it needs to maintain the parks. This system may not be viable in the long run in countries that are poor, democratic and where landlessness is a serious problem.

A hint of things to come can be seen in Kenya, where the government, worried about an upcoming election, a year ago downgraded the Amboseli National Park to a national reserve, and handed control over it back to the Masai through the local county council. 29 NGOs wrote an open letter to the president of Kenya complaining about this decision, and arguing that income from Amboseli should continue to be used to subsidize unprofitable parks, and not all be paid to the county council.

Since Amboseli generates substantial revenue from wildlife, it may survive as a protected area rich in wildlife. In the absence of additional payments for conservation or as compensation, other parks are more economically viable if turned into farms or ranches.

For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be any international organizations or NGOs that want to come up with the money so that people in poor countries can receive fair compensation for setting aside their land for the benefit of all of us.

Ecotourism: First, Do No Harm

“I think there’s been a glib … championing of ecotourism, that it’s a win-win situation,” says Martha Honey, executive director of the Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development in Washington, D.C. in an article in Science News,

When ecotourism in an area grows, the site becomes vulnerable to the same problems, such as sewage maintenance, that come with mass tourism, says John Davenport of University College Cork in Ireland.

Even for activities that aren’t usually destructive, a high volume of tourists can create a problem, he says. Such is the case with scuba diving—traditionally a well-managed, environmentally friendly sport. Throughout the world, researchers have seen a link between dive traffic and coral damage, Davenport says. Divers knock into corals or stir up silt that suffocates the reefs, which regenerate slowly.

When divers add an underwater camera to already cumbersome scuba gear—a juggling act that Davenport compares with “driving while having a shave and a smoke”—the damage becomes worse. In Sodwana Bay in South Africa, divers who took underwater photographs damaged reefs by bumping into them in on average, 9 out of 10 dives, whereas divers who didn’t take pictures caused such damage in just 1 out of every 6 dives, he reports.

“Since you’ve got a million new scuba divers [around the world] each year, it’s going to be an uphill battle,” Davenport says…

Currently, good research on ecotourism is difficult to find, says Davenport. Most destinations weren’t studied before ecotourism began, making before-and-after comparisons difficult. Moreover, many governments are reluctant to provide funding for investigations because they profit from ecotourism.

Perhaps the major barrier is the working assumption that ecotourism, with the conservation funds it raises, must be better than typical mass tourism. Says Hueter, “My concern is, that’s where the analysis ends, and only in rare cases do [researchers] look deeper.”

Read the article here.

Where, oh where, are the studies we need?