DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 16, 2016

How We Make Things Worse

If you’ve every camped in Northern California, you know how aggressive and pesky blue jays are around the campground.  Jays will steal the food off your table if you turn your back and sometimes while you looking.  Take that aggressiveness and turn in loose on the nest of other birds and you have a recipe for disaster.

“Steller's Jays are attracted to campgrounds for foraging opportunities provided by campground visitors,” says Will Goldenberg, a graduate researcher at Humboldt State University and the coauthor of a new paper on the topic, published this month in The Condor. Steller's Jays are generalists; they thrive in a variety of environments and readily take advantage of new resources. When campers consistently leave food waste behind, generalist species like Steller's Jays learn to hang around those sites.

The real victim of this phenomenon is the Marbled Murrelet, a federally threatened seabird whose eggs are a food source for Steller's Jays. The Marbled Murrelet nests in old-growth forest in California, Oregon, and Washington. Due to loss of old-growth forests, many of the remaining California-dwelling murrelets nest in protected state parks, areas with an abundance of campgrounds. Seabirds are also creatures of habit; they return the same tree and branch each year to lay a single egg.

Avatar Was Right

We are all connected.  Well, at least trees are apparently connected to each other through fungi.  Not just a symbiotic relationship, but a partnership.

…the miraculous fact of Epping’s existence remains: almost six thousand acres of trees, heath, pasture, and waterways, just outside the city limits, its grassland still grazed by the cattle of local commoners, and adders still basking in its glades. Despite its mixed-amenity use—from golf to mountain biking—it retains a greenwood magic.

For centuries, fungi were widely held to be harmful to plants, parasites that cause disease and dysfunction. More recently, it has become understood that certain kinds of common fungi exist in subtle symbiosis with plants, bringing about not infection but connection. These fungi send out gossamer-fine fungal tubes called hyphae, which infiltrate the soil and weave into the tips of plant roots at a cellular level. Roots and fungi combine to form what is called a mycorrhiza: itself a growing-together of the Greek words for fungus (mykós) and root (riza). In this way, individual plants are joined to one another by an underground hyphal network: a dazzlingly complex and collaborative structure that has become known as the Wood Wide Web.

The implications of the Wood Wide Web far exceed this basic exchange of goods between plant and fungi, however. The fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources—sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus—between one another. A dying tree might divest itself of its resources to the benefit of the community, for example, or a young seedling in a heavily shaded understory might be supported with extra resources by its stronger neighbors. Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send one another warnings.

Phony Global Warming

The global warming that Republicans (and Donald Trump) swear is not happening is apparently uncovering all the garbage we left under the ice and snow in Greenland.  It’s not a pretty sight.

A recent report has warned that melting ice in Greenland may soon spit up hazardous Cold War radioactive waste at the abandoned US base, Camp Century. Unfortunately, it’s not the only American legacy that was left behind.

In southeastern Greenland's pristine landscape lies the remains one of the most remote United States Air Force bases from World War II. Called Bluie East 2 (pictured above), it was built in 1942 as an auxiliary airfield meant to serve as a plane refueling depot and a strategic spot to keep German U-boats out of shipping lanes. It was abandoned in 1947 and much like the eerie remnants of a ghost town, everything was left behind. The once spotless icy tundra and moody mountains remain littered with the detritus of war; the skeletons of military vehicles, dilapidated structures, and over 10,000 aviation fuel barrels. The Inuits who live in the region call these sad rusted souvenirs American Flowers.

More Broken Treaties

OK, what could go wrong?  One of the people decide to remove Endangered Species protection is a trophy hunter.  Oh, and maybe we didn’t check with the Indian tribes as obligated by treaty.

A federal official has rebutted complaints that the government is not working with Native American tribes and that it has put a trophy hunter in charge of removing the Yellowstone-area grizzly bear from Endangered Species Act protection.

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman said tribes have been represented on a committee that’s recommending delisting the bear. The federal agency — not a single person — makes such recommendations based on science and study, she said.

Oh...Wait, could there be another reason to delist the grizzlies?

 Federal actions continue a pattern that date back to “the violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty,” and the “illegal 1874 Custer Expedition,” into the sacred Black Hills to support gold miners, Poor Bear wrote. Among tribes’ complaints are that delisting would open grizzly habitat to mining.

“In USFWS’s proposed delisting rule it acknowledges some 28 prospective mines in the heart of Greater Yellowstone — in our ancestral homelands and where many sacred sites exist in core grizzly habitat,” Poor Bear wrote. “According to USFWS, those mines could become operational upon the delisting of the grizzly bear.”