DAILY QUICK READ -AUGUST 15, 2016

Unintended consequences? 

If you’re a poor farmer and lions are preying on your livestock, you take action.  How do you explain the ecological consequences of this behavior to men trying to feed their families?

At least 119 vultures were killed in a poisoning incident recently in Maun, after farmers laced cattle carcasses with a chemical in order to eliminate troublesome lions attacking their livestock.

Yesterday, Birdlife Botswana director, Kabelo Senyatso told Mmegi the incident was the latest in a string of poisonings involving the endangered birds. Numbers of the ecologically important birds have been on the decline for years in Botswana, with hundreds dying due to poisonings committed by farmers and poachers.

“We were made aware of the incident in Maun on Sunday but it happened, most likely, 10 days before that and we were handling that over the weekend,” Senyatso said.

“We suspect farmers were attempting to poison lions and they laced two cattle carcasses. No lions were found dead in the area and the only victims were the vultures that came to feed on the carcasses. “Usually, these poisons are so strong that if a lion had eaten the carcass, it would have died within the vicinity,” he said.

Guess Who?

Humans represent the greatest threat to wildlife.  What a surprise.  But, we can be the agents of destruction or salvation.

…a new study published in the journal Nature reveals that human's harvesting of species and our over-expanding agricultural footprint is the main driver of wildlife extinction, not climate change.

Scientists found that three-quarters of nearly 9,000 "threatened" or "near threatened" species are being over-exploited for human needs.

The Western gorilla and Chinese pangolin are on high demand for their meat and body parts that cause them to near extinction.

In order to suffice the growing commodity for livestock and crops, 50 percent of the plants and animals observed in the study had their habitat converted into industrial farms or plantation.

"Addressing the old foes of over-harvesting and agricultural activities are key to turning around the biodiversity extinction crisis," said lead author Sean Maxwell, a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, told Science Daily.

If we are the problem - we can also be part of the solution.

One at a Time

Saving wildlife one animal at a time is the way things work at most rescue centers.  Here’s a rescue that ended well. 

Three months ago Sonoma County’s Wildlife Rescue got an unexpected call from the department of U.S. Fish and Wildlife: an orphaned female mountain lion cub was sick, under-weight and needed immediate care. KRCB’s Tiffany Camhi reports the Petaluma based rescue center was up for the task.

You can help here.

An Island Full

Saving wildlife in today’s world is an incredibly costly and difficult endeavor.  Yet, it may be the only chance we have to save our own humanity.  Saving the island fox is a true success story. 

So goes the island fox, an achingly beautiful creature that lives here on Santa Cruz Island (and a handful of other Channel Islands), off the coast of Southern California. Just 12 years ago, fewer than 100 foxes remained on Santa Cruz, driven toward extinction by voracious golden eagles who’d incidentally pick off the foxes while hunting the island’s feral pigs. Now, thanks to Boser and her colleagues at the Nature Conservancy, the island fox numbers over 2,000. On August 11, the Environmental Protection Agency pulled the island fox from the Endangered Species List—the fastest turnaround ever for an endangered mammal.

As humanity inflicts more and more harm on the ecosystems of Earth, conservationists have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of saving imperiled species. Santa Cruz Island is just one battleground in a larger war, as humans grapple with the threat of invaders—including themselves.

Make no mistake the salvation of the island foxes required cold calculation and the eradication of several invasive populations.   This story about eliminating invasive populations so that a native population could flourish has an ironic twist so read the whole article.

A Complete Ecosystem

The price tag to salvage the Great Barrier Reef is starting to become clear.  This payment may just be the first installment. 

Attempting to fix the water quality for the Great Barrier Reef will cost $8.2bn in the next decade but even then some of the targets will be impossible to meet, according to a landmark report commissioned by the Queensland government.

The targets are part of the federal government’s Reef 2050 Plan, the implementation of which is required by Unesco in order for the reef to avoid being included on the world heritage in danger list. Currently, state and federal governments are spending less than a tenth of what the report finds is required.

There is a compelling fiscal argument for saving the reef.  Humans tend to respond to if dollar signs are involved.

Human impact on the GBR

The report notes that farms are the major source of pollution for the Great Barrier Reef, and identifies seven policy “solution sets”, including improving management practices for cane farmers and graziers; remediating gullies; completely shifting the land use for some areas; and improving urban stormwater management.

It found that the currently available policy solutions, even with the suggested level of investment, will not be able to meet all the targets because they “cannot be applied widely enough, or they simply cannot address the scale of load reductions”. As a result, new policy actions will need to be considered, it said.

The report notes that farms in the relevant areas employ about 35,000 people and contribute $3.7bn to the economy each year. Meanwhile, industries relying on the Great Barrier Reef employ twice than number of people and contribute about $6bn to the economy each year.