DAILY QUICK READ - MAY 24, 2016

South Africa’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of legalizing the trade of rhino horn powderwithin South Africa.  There is no market for rhino horn powder in South Africa, so the potential for a massive increase in illegal trade to China and Vietnam is very likely.  This is a huge loss for conservationists and an embarrassment for the South African government.

The primary markets for rhino horn are China and Vietnam, where it is often ground into powder for use, fallaciously, as a cancer or headache cure. Even opponents of South Africa's domestic rhino horn ban acknowledge that there is virtually no market for rhino horn inside South Africa. And so the opening of South Africa's rhino horn market brings with it an unpleasant reality: Horn will now most certainly be smuggled out of South Africa to Asia.

As Julian Rademeyer, a senior fellow at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, notes, "Given the levels of corruption in some provincial permitting offices, there are certainly concerns that legal domestic sales could become a conduit for criminal networks to obtain horns which can be smuggled out of the country and sold on the black market. We saw as much prior to 2009 when middlemen for Vietnamese syndicates traveled the length and breadth of the country buying up ‘loose stock’ of horns from game farmers."

The argument over legalizing this trade continues.  Will it fulfill market needs and preserve rhinos or will it generate more market demand and put wild rhinos in increased danger?



First came the fire, then the beasts.  Fort McMurray becomes a bear food court.

Authorities say black bears have been roaming the evacuated city in greater numbers, disoriented by the destruction of their natural habitat and lured by the scent of garbage and rotting food in the city.

“What we’ve got is tons of spoiling food inside houses in the heart of prime black bear range,” Lee Foote, a conservation biologist at the University of Alberta, told Canadian broadcaster CTV News. “You couldn’t create a better potential to attract black bears from a large area … and there are a lot of black bears in the area.”

“They are smart and adaptive. They can smell food from kilometers away,” Brendan Cox, a spokesman for the province’s fish and wildlife enforcement branch told Reuters. “Just as you and I go to the nearby grocery store, or our favourite restaurant, the bears continue to return to a particular food source.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that black bears are not aggressive toward humans, some bears will attempted to stick around this new food sources and the result will not be good for the bears.  Already two have been euthanized as potential threats to humans.

Calamari for everyone.   Warming oceans, reef destruction and overfishing are taking a huge toll on mast marine life, but cephalopods (octopuses, cuttlefish and squid) numbers are generally increasing.

"Cephalopods have this ‘live fast, die young’ life history strategy – the rock stars of the sea, if you like to call them that,” Bronwyn Gillanders, the project leader and a marine biologist at the University of Adelaide, told the Guardian.  Her colleague and the lead author of a study released on Monday, Zoe Doubleday, had a different analogy.

“Cephalopods are often called ‘weeds of the sea’,” she said, because their “rapid growth, short lifespans and flexible development” let them adapt to environmental changes more quickly than other marine animals.  This rapid life cycle, Gillanders said, means cephalopods can “proliferate quickly, perhaps with advantages over longer-lived organisms”.

Flexibility is a virtue if you want to survive.

Any story that includes good news for the critically endangered Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) has to be a good story.  However, any story that includes Vladimir Putin and Steven Seagal has to be handled with care.

The world's most endangered species of big cat has cheated almost certain extinction after a remarkable baby boom earlier this year.

As recently as 2007 only 30 Amur leopards were counted in the wild in the Russian Far East and extinction seemed all but inevitable.

However, now 16 cubs have been spotted in a nature reserve set up by Vladimir Putin to ensure their survival.

Camera traps in the 1,000 square mile Land of the Leopard National Park have counted the new arrivals, including three born to a leopardess named Queen Borte - after the famously fertile first wife of Genghis Khan - by Hollywood action hero Steven Seagal.

In all, eight female leopards are known to have had offspring in recent months and scientists say every one of the cubs has a "healthy appearance".

Saving endangered species also save ecosystems.  Don’t tell Congress.

The places highlighted in our report are the Pacific Ocean kelp forests in California, Florida's Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge, Alabama's Sauta Cave National Wildlife Refuge, Texas' Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge, Maine's Penobscot River, Hawaii's Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, Arizona's San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, the Southeast's longleaf pine ecosystem, the Virgin Islands' Green Cay National Wildlife Refuge and the Midwest's Lake Erie.

"Thanks to the Endangered Species Act and its mandate to save rare species and the places they live, we have more national wildlife refuges -- as well as healthier lands and cleaner rivers, oceans and lakes where we can hike, fish and observe wildlife," said the Center's Jamie Pang, one of the report's authors.