"WHAT YOU DO MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND YOU HAVE TO DECIDE WHAT KIND OF DIFFERENCE YOU WANT TO MAKE. THE GREATEST DANGER TO OUR FUTURE IS APATHY."
- DR. JANE GOODALL
Commonly called the
crested crane, it is a bird of national significance to Uganda, occupying a
prime position on the country's national flag and coat of arms. Yet despite its
serenity, beauty and popularity, the crested crane is facing the threat of
extinction.
Once widespread, only
about 10,000 to 20,000 gray crowned cranes are left in Uganda, compared with an
estimated 100,000 four decades ago, according to statistics from Nature Uganda
and the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife.
Conservationists say
habitat loss has had a particularly negative impact on crane numbers over the
years because a number of seasonal wetlands and swamps where the birds nest and
breed have been converted into agricultural land or used for other development
projects.
"This
unfortunately brings them in conflict with farmers for actual and perceived
damage caused to crops," said Mr Mafabi, adding, "The cranes' nesting
manner is unique because they often return to the same spot year after year.
Any threat or destruction to such a habitat means the chances of breeding are
also reduced."
The illegal wildlife
trade also blights local communities. International criminal gangs are involved
in the $20bn annual trade that is now the fourth largest global illegal
activity after drugs, counterfeiting and human trafficking. Their activities
cause instability and threaten national security in many African nations,
blocking much-needed development in impoverished rural communities.
The UK’s domestic
ivory market provides ample cover for illegal activity. Between 2009 and 2014,
40% of all the seizures made by the UK’s Border Force were ivory items and in
2015, 110kg of ivory were seized at Heathrow airport in one of the UK’s largest
hauls of illegal ivory. This is just the tip of the iceberg as ivory sold
legally in the UK domestic market is exported to illegal markets in other
countries, contributing to high prices and fuelling demand for elephant
products. Many nations have already taken action. In July 2016, the US
government passed a new law that substantially limits imports, exports and
sales of African elephant ivory, providing exceptions for some antiques and
musical instruments.
Two pups were left alone in a car while their owner ran into
a grocery store in Wayne, West Virginia. The woman left the car running so the
dogs could stay cool, but they had other plans.
Once she was in the store, the dogs somehow switched the car
into gear and went rolling straight for the store.
The joyride didn't last long. The car came to a halt when it
rolled into a concrete pillar. Shoppers ran to the runaway car to make sure
everyone was all right, only to find a dog in the driver's seat.
A little over a century ago there were perhaps a million
lions in Africa.
By the 1940s that number had dropped to about 450 000, and
today there are fewer than 20 000.
It’s a sorry tale of annihilation by man.
I can find no statistic giving a reliable, or even
unreliable, figure on the number of lions in the wild in South Africa today,
but there are apparently about 1 000 captive bred lions lined up to be shot as
trophies (known as canned lion hunting).
Apart from trophy hunting, lion bones are being sold to far
eastern countries for use in traditional Asian medicine.
Stop the freight train
— brand-new DNA study involving North American wolves and coyotes threatens to
derail the whole concept of what we consider “pure wolves,” as well as the
federal reintroduction programs dealing with them.
Researchers from
Princeton University studied the genomes from a variety of gray and red wolves
as well as coyotes. Both the gray species (Canis lupus) and the red (Canis
niger, so-named from a black phase of them) wolves were initially listed as
endangered in 1973.
The federal Endangered
Species Act allows for the protection of threatened or endangered species and
subspecies (the Mount Graham red squirrel is one of the latter) but does not
authorize safeguards for hybrids.
The U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service may well be attempting to change the policies of the
Endangered Species Act after this recent DNA study. In the meantime, other
stakeholders in the Mexican gray wolf reintroduction here, such as ranchers,
are contemplating their own DNA studies. And the controversy is bound to continue.
The article, which can
be found on the web under the title "Whole-genome sequence analysis shows
that two endemic species of North American wolf are admixtures of the coyote
and gray wolf" says that a red wolf is about 75 percent coyote with some
gray wolf thrown in. The lesser known eastern wolf, which is not listed as an
endangered species but could be, is, according to the report, about 25 percent
to 50 percent coyote and the rest is gray wolf.
The students’ petition
was picked up and circulated by conservation groups, such as the Wildlands
Network; other petitions were folded into it. But its more than 498,369 signees
are an impressive number. In comparison, some 77,000 people signed online or
paper petitions calling for an end to oil-and-natural gas leasing off the
Southeast coast, said Oceana, although 1.4 million comments were made in a
public review including those signatures.
“One of the critical
narratives about the red wolf program is that it has lost public support. The
reality is clearly different,” said Ron Sutherland of the Wildlands Network. If
the program is ended, “it may be decades before another reintroduction is
attempted in some other Eastern state. Eventually (captive red wolf keeper)
zoos will lose interest if it is clear the wolf has no future in the wild.”
The service in
February said it was on track to make a decision on the program’s future by
summer. Asked Thursday, a spokesman did not update that schedule.
Britain’s shores are
about to get a whole lot cleaner, and it’s all thanks to a very small change.
Single-use plastic bag consumption has plummeted by more than 85% following the
introduction of the 5p/bag charge last October, early figures suggest.
Single-use plastic
bags are handy if you’re a customer, but they’re an environmental nightmare for
the planet. In an attempt to reduce the number of such bags that shops provide
their customers with, England introduced a modest 5p charge per bag last
October. It was the last part of the UK to adopt the tax on plastic bags, after
it was successfully implemented in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
This little tax has
had an enormous effect: the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(Defra) reported that the number of plastic bags handed out by supermarkets
dropped from the 7bn in the year before the tax to only 500m in the six months
after it. The charge also raised enough cash for retailers to donate more than
£29m towards causes including charities and community groups, Defra added.
A quaking aspen made up of 47 thousand trees with a single
root system. It could be saved with a simple fence. Estimates place Pando’s
age at 2000 to one million years old.
Meet Pando, thought to
be the world’s largest living thing by mass. It’s a forest, but all of its
47,000 trees come from a single root system spread over 43 hectares in Utah,
making it genetically one individual.
But Pando is dying.
Hungry deer and cattle have been eating its young stems, and many of the oldest
trees are reaching the end of their natural lifespan. It’s falling apart on
our watch,” says Paul Rogers of Utah State University and the Western Aspen
Alliance. “The old trees are dying, and the young ones are being eaten.”
At about 6000 tonnes,
Pando, which is Latin for “I spread”, is some 35 times heavier than the
heaviest living animal, the blue whale. The largest living thing by area is
thought to be a fungus in Oregon, while the tallest record is held by a redwood
tree in California.
Pando is also likely
to be the world’s most ancient living organism, though estimates of its age
vary widely, from 2000 years to 1 million years old.
But saving it may be
as simple as putting up a good fence.
The island of New
Guinea is home to some of the rarest animals on the planet. Among them are over
800 species of ants with a diverse range of fascinating characteristics, each
well-suited to their unique island habitat. Scientists estimate that around 60%
of these ants are found only in New Guinea. In many cases, a single species
originally colonised the island and then developed into multiple distinct
forms.
This one.
Now two new species of
ant have been discovered with the help of a major technique that uses 3D
imaging technology to identify insects. The ants themselves have a particularly
striking appearance thanks to their formidable spine-covered exoskeletons. Perhaps just as
notable as their appearances, though, are their names, Pheidole viserion and
Pheidole drogon, inspired by the fire-breathing dragons from the fantasy series
Game of Thrones. While not quite in the same size bracket as their mythical
namesakes, the ants do have a strong resemblance to the dragons thanks to the
distinct blade-like serrations adorning their backs.
New fossils discovered
in the southwest African country of Namibia reinforce a theory that Earth's
first mass extinction was caused by the planet's earliest animals, known as
metazoans. These animals, which comprise most common forms of life today
including vertebrates and arthropods, arrived on the scene roughly 540 million
years ago. The effects of the diversification and spread of animals across the
globe is known as the Cambrian explosion, and scientists now think it may have
also led to the extinction of Earth's first multicellular organisms, known as
Ediacarans.
"These new
species were 'ecological engineers' who changed the environment in ways that
made it more and more difficult for the Ediacarans to survive," said Simon
Darroch, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at
Vanderbilt University, in a statement. Ediacarans are thought to have evolved
from the planet's single-celled organisms and populated Earth about 600 million
years ago.
Megafauna Rules
Wipe out the “mega”and
it is likely that the insects will end up as the dominant species. Maybe not, but it could leave the planet to
rats and mice. Sounds like fun.
In a public declaration published in today's
edition of the journal BioScience, a group of more than 40 conservation
scientists and other experts are calling for a coordinated global plan to
prevent the world's "megafauna" from sliding into oblivion.
Among the threats cited by the group as
drivers of this mass extinction are illegal hunting, deforestation and habitat
loss, the expansion of agriculture and livestock into wildlife areas, and the
growth of human populations.
"The more I look at the trends facing
the world's largest terrestrial mammals, the more concerned I am we could lose
these animals just as science is discovering how important they are to
ecosystems and to the services they provide for people," said Dr. William
Ripple, professor of ecology at Oregon State University and lead author of the
study.
Ripple worked with other authors on the
study to examine population trends of many species, including many of the most
well-known, charismatic species such as elephants, rhinos, gorillas, and big
cats that are now threatened with extinction.
The biggest alpine lake in North America is
warming faster than ever thanks in large part to a changing global climate.
That’s according to scientists who study
Lake Tahoe to produce reports on everything from water temperature to clarity
to invasive species.
The latest data in the State of the Lake
report shows average water temperature in the lake increased nearly half a degree
in one year, that’s 15 times the long term rate of warming. The average surface
temperature reached 53.3 degrees. The overall average water temperature is a
little over 43 degrees.
Geoffrey Schladow of the University of
California-Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center said the changes at Lake
Tahoe highlight the magnitude of human-caused global climate change.
“That is a huge amount of water,” Schladlow
said of Lake Tahoe, which reaches more than 1,600 feet in depth. If the water
were spread out over an area the size of California it would still be 15 inches
deep, he said.
“It takes a lot of energy to raise that a
half degree,” Schladow said.
The question that
intrigued Estes when he began his marine studies in the Aleutians in the 1970s
was straightforward: given its voracious appetite for urchins, crabs and the
like, what was the ecological consequence of that calamitous drop in sea otters
numbers last century? To find an answer, he began surveying sea floors around
islands where sea otters had survived and others where they had disappeared and
had yet to be reintroduced.
What Estes found was
striking: around islands that now lacked sea otters, sea urchins – their main
prey – had increased in size and in numbers with devastating consequences. The
forests of kelp that once grew there in profusion had disappeared. Instead huge
urchins littered the barren sea floor, having consumed every kelp plant in
sight.
By contrast, near
islands where sea otters survived or had been reintroduced, kelp flourished.
The discovery was important given the nourishment kelp’s underwater forests
provide for fish and other sea animals. “Kelp forests, with their high biomass
and extreme productivity are key controlling elements of coast ecosystems,”
says Estes.
The International
Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) published an assessment this week that
found hunting, habitat destruction and degradation, and habitat fragmentation
to be the biggest drivers of Bornean orangutan population loss, Mongabay
reported.
The authors wrote that
"the combined impacts of habitat loss, habitat degradation and illegal
hunting equate to an 86% population reduction between 1973 and 2025,"
according to Mongabay.
Only 59.6 percent of
Borneo's forests were suitable for orangutans in 2010. Most of the land,
Mongabay reported, is protected by Indonesian, Malaysian and Brunei
governments. But illegal logging and uncontrolled burning continues to threaten
the population.
"This is full
acknowledgement of what has been clear for a long time: orangutan conservation
is failing," Andrew Marshall, one of the authors of the assessment, told
Mongabay.
Even with the
remaining forest, it might not be enough to sustain the current Bornean
orangutan population, Mongabay said:
A controversial
rightwing American lobbying group that denies climate change science and
promotes gun ownership paid for the Tory prime ministerial hopeful Andrea
Leadsom to fly to the United States to attend its conferences.
The American
Legislative Exchange Council – Alec – is a neoconservative organisation with
close links to members of the Tea Party movement. Championed by supporters of
the free market, it has been attacked by critics for exerting a “powerful and
undemocratic” influence on US politics.
It is part funded by
the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, whose empire spans mining,
chemicals and finance. Leadsom’s links to the council will be scrutinised
closely by those trying to gauge her political leanings.
In the US the council
produces hundreds of putative bills that it seeks to have made into law by US
legislators who attend its conferences, where they are treated to generous
corporate hospitality at lavish cigar parties.
A hopeful new study shows the Endangered
Species Act has been extremely successful in stabilizing and increasing
threatened or endangered bird populations, including two Pacific Island species
that have been in the care of Chicago-area institutions since the mid-1980s.
The nonprofit Center for Biological
Diversity released its report titled "A Wild Success" in June. Among the findings: 85 percent of birds
protected by the Endangered Species Act have recovered in the continental U.S.
Populations in the Pacific Islands have also shown recovery, but to a lesser
degree at 61 percent.
Roughly three decades ago, the Lincoln Park
Zoo and Brookfield Zoo set up critical captive breeding populations of two bird
species native to the Pacific Island of Guam – the Guam rail and Guam
kingfisher. These birds “would have been lost to extinction if not for
dedicated captive-propagation programs,” the report states.
The Lincoln Park Zoo currently has four Guam
kingfishers and one Guam rail in captivity. There are 16 Guam kingfishers at
the Brookfield Zoo.
Experimental programs to reintroduce these
birds in the wild are under way, specifically on the islands of Rota and Cocos
near Guam. However, the wild populations aren’t yet well established, which is
why the birds are still classified as extinct in the wild by the International
Union for Conservation of Nature.
Bionic Bugs – Tiny Terminators
This is just a bit creepy.
Explosive detecting bugs, OK. But, what’s next – having your house bugged
takes on more literal meaning.
Researchers at Washington University in St.
Louis hope that in the future, cyborg locusts could play an important role in
defense in national security.
Baranidharan Raman, assistant professor of
biomedical engineering, and his team are actually biologically engineering
locusts to be able to detect the scent of explosives and let us know.
The project is being done under a 3-year
grant funded by the Office of Naval Research.
Because locusts detect smells through their
antennae, the researchers will implant electrodes into the locusts’ brains to
read the electrical activity passing through their antennae. To transmit this
electrical activity data, each insect will be equipped with a tiny backpack
that acts as a transmitter.
On a hot and lazy afternoon in Palm Beach,
the only sign of movement is the water gently lapping at the grounds of
Mar-a-Lago, the private club that is the prize of Donald Trump’s real estate
acquisitions in Florida.
Trump currently dismisses climate change as
a hoax invented by China, though he has quietly sought to shield real estate
investments in Ireland from its effects.
But at the Republican presidential
contender’s Palm Beach estate and the other properties that bear his name in
south Florida, the water is already creeping up bridges and advancing on access
roads, lawns and beaches because of sea-level rise, according to a risk
analysis prepared for the Guardian.
In 30 years, the grounds of Mar-a-Lago could
be under at least a foot of water for 210 days a year because of tidal flooding
along the intracoastal water way, with the water rising past some of the
cottages and bungalows, the analysis by Coastal Risk Consulting found.
The world has to solve an impossible
conundrum: the amount of fish coming out of the ocean peaked in 1996, yet the
world’s population will grow to a peak of 10-billion by 2050. About half of
that population will live near the Equator and will rely on fish. But, largely
as a result of illegal fishing and overfishing, the food source will have
plunged.
That means 845-million people will be denied
this protein source and critical micronutrients, according to a report, Fall in Fish Catch Threatens Human Health,
in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.
Previous research into the fall in fish
stocks has looked at what happens when people lose their primary source of
proteins.
Climate change will exacerbate the problem,
according to the Harvard research. Floods and droughts are happening more often
in this region. This is destroying crops on land, leaving the ocean as the last
source of staple food. In these cases, the team said: “Fishing for food has
become an act of desperation.”
It’s been suggested that aquaculture can be
the solution for declining fish stocks. On an industrial scale, it would allow
natural fish stocks to recover. But, said the researchers, developing countries
do not have the resources to do this. They also found that farmed seafood ends
up being sold in Europe and North America.
EU For Ivory
Trade
South Africa
is leading the block that wants to allow the “controlled” trade in ivory. Most African governments are opposed to even
limited trade. Now the EU has sided with the traders. Bad news for elephants.
Wildlife officials in nearly 30 African
states say they are appalled by an EU decision to oppose a comprehensive global
ban on the ivory trade.
In a position paper released on 1 July, the
European commission said that rather than an all-encompassing ban it would be
better to encourage countries with growing elephant numbers to “sustainably
manage” their populations.
An existing global embargo on ivory sales is
due to end in 2017 and Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa and Botswana are pushing
for it to be replaced with a decision-making mechanism for future tusk trading,
at the Convention on International Trade in International Species (Cites)
conference in Johannesburg this September.
Continued
habitat destruction (Chinese oil extraction) and poaching (by oil installation
guards) will drive the species to extinction in the wild.
The Saharan Addax antelope has been pushed
to the brink of extinction by poaching and loss of habitat to the oil industry,
the international organization that tracks threatened species warned.
An extensive aerial and on-the-ground survey
in the antelope’s native region in Niger found only three specimens in the
wild, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reported.
“It is a desperate situation,” said
Alessandro Badalotti, coordinator for Save Our Species, an IUCN-managed body
that provides grants for the protection of highly threatened animals. “In the
current context, the species is doomed to extinction in the wild.”
It wouldn’t
be an extinction event without some Chinese involvement.
As recently as 2010, surveys concluded that
there were still some 200 Addax in the wild. However, a massive oil-extraction
installation set up by the China National Petroleum Corporation has proven a
double threat.
Giant lorries and bulldozers have ripped up
large swathes of the antelope’s habitat, reducing the land on which it forages
for sparse shrubs and herbs.
However, military personnel assigned to
protect the oil operation have also been poaching the animals in their last
haven, the Termit and Tin-Toumma National Nature Preserve, the IUCN said.
Yes, the
only hope for the Addax is a network of zoos.
What good are zoos – number infinity.
If there is still hope for the species, it
lies in coordinated captive breeding programs in zoos around the world, especially
in the U.S., Japan and Australia.
It’s a familiar story: a group of Stanford
and tech-industry alums get together and found a startup accelerator. But this
venture wouldn’t focus on creating picture sharing apps or the next Uber. It
would foster the types of companies that address an issue largely left behind
by Silicon Valley: climate change.
An accelerator was never the group’s first
choice. They first experimented in hackathons, a White House Climate Data
partnership, and a CrunchBase-inspired platform called GreenBase. But the
four-man crew founded the Silicon Climate accelerator in late 2014 as they
identified the need for something that more directly empowered entrepreneurs to
turn their idealistic ideas into viable companies.
Some of their young companies have logical
paths to monetization. Zuli, a smartplug that reduces energy use that is
already in partnership with Google’s Nest, has a direct reduction in the
consumer’s bill. Likewise, GridCure uses big data to help utility companies
boost revenue through increased reliability and efficiency. Others, while they
have promise in long term environmental impact, struggle to make an argument
for venture capital investment.
Renewable energy advocates have long warned
that grid parity — once it arrives — will transform the relationships between
consumers and utilities, and the power markets in which they operate. But,
despite these warnings, few utilities, regulators or policymakers have fully
appreciated just how rapid and far-reaching this technological revolution will
prove. Many have avoided engaging with this impending transformation, putting
it into the “too hard,” “not our business” or “irrelevant” categories.
Once it becomes economic over the long term
to install renewable energy and storage technology without subsidies, uptake
will accelerate beyond the control of incumbents and the authorities as the
free market takes over. This will have profound implications for electricity
markets around the world.
In both developed and developing countries,
utilities have clung to outdated business models and have been on the wrong end
of the spectrum with respect to renewable energy growth, suffering as a
consequence. State-owned power monopolies such as Mexico’s CFE and Eskom in
South Africa have only recently opened their markets to renewable energy
tenders. The big utilities in Japan have denied grid access to solar farms. And
Nevada’s utility, NV Energy, has recently won what is likely to be a Pyrrhic
victory against its own ratepayers over grid connection charges for solar
generation.
Birds are capable of extraordinary
behavioral feats, from solving complex puzzles to tool making. There may be
good reason for that. A new study shows that, pound for pound, birds pack more
neurons into their small brains than mammals, including primates.
Published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, this study is the first to systematically measure the
number of neurons in the brains of more than a dozen bird species, from tiny
zebra finches to the six-foot-tall emu. By doing so, neuroscientist Suzana
Herculano-Houzel and her team at Vanderbilt University discovered that avian
brains contain more neurons per square inch than mammalian brains.
This means that birds pack more brain power
per pound than mammals, offering an explanation for their remarkable cognitive
talents. What’s more, the study shows that evolution has found more than one
way to build a complex brain.
The site’s main page allows you to click on
a U.S. map that shows ongoing, recent and significant past events, including
heat waves, floods and other weather disasters as well as ecosystem shocks such
as wildfire and high-latitude ice loss. Click on an event and you get a brief
summary, together with a curated list of media reports and relevant research
findings. Each event also features a schematic “tree” that shows the chain of
physical and social processes running from greenhouse gases to the event. Some
of the trees are richly branched; others have as little as a single connection.
The emergence
of the Zika virus and its rapid spread are adding increased relevance to a
number of studies of the impact of deforestation on the spread of animal borne
disease to humans. Several factors are
involved, but there is no question that the widespread destruction of forests is
contributing to the likelihood and increase in the spread of diseases such as Ebola
and Zika, as well as increasing the prevalence of malaria, dengue fever and a
variety of others. From the Smithsonian Magazine:
"The idea was that something
fundamental is going on in this era that is driving all these pandemics,"
says Peter Daszak, who has studied wildlife and human disease for more than two
decades, "but no one was bringing the whole thing together."
Now, a series of studies, built upon
research over the past two decades, provides increasing evidence that the loss
of forest creates the conditions for a wide range of deadly diseases to jump
from animals to humans.
Throughout history, diseases have moved from
forests into humans through animal carriers. But the increasing proximity of
humans to recently deforested areas magnifies the risk.
Research in the late 1990s into
deforestation and malaria in the Peruvian Amazon by Amy Vittor, now an
assistant professor of medicine at the University of Florida, first sounded the
alarm.
Clearing forests for agriculture increases
sunlight exposure and often disrupts small streams, creating pools of warm
water perfect for mosquito breeding.
Eventually, farming becomes unsustainable as
the land becomes infertile and people depart, abandoning land to low-lying
shrubbery, also conducive to mosquito breeding.
Research by Vittor and others show that the
malaria-carrying species in a deforested area of Peru bit 278 times more
frequently than the same species in an untouched forest.
The global
spread of the Zika virus is another example of the impact of human interaction
both in driving climate change and then becoming victims of the results of
climate change.
The Zika virus, the cause of birth defects
in Brazil, is another example. It emerged in mosquitoes in the Zika forest of
Uganda in the 1940s, but there were few human cases until 2007. Aedes aegypti,
the mosquito species that carries Zika and many other diseases, spread first to
Asia where it likely mutated, then gained a foothold in the Brazilian Amazon,
thanks to global travel. There, the mosquitoes carrying the disease flourished
in the heat of places like Recife, a Zika hotspot and a city that had its
hottest three months on record late last year.
Deforestation there has contributed to a
record drought in Brazil, which leads to more people storing water in open
containers. That leads to a rise in the mosquito population. Too, when
temperatures go up, mosquitoes require more blood so they feed more often and
reproduce faster.
It isn’t
just mosquitoes. Deforestation is creating
more opportunities for disease carrying bats, rats, wild dogs, even snails to
spread a wide variety of diseases to humans.
Destruction of habitat weakens these populations increasing the number
of diseased members or depletes their natural predators. Reduction of habitat puts these disease
vectors in closer proximity to humans.
The result isn’t beneficial.
The snails that carry flatworms that cause
schistosomiasis prosper in warm, open areas created by deforestation. A 2015 Lancet Commission study concluded
there is "circumstantial" evidence that changes in land use increased
the likelihood of Ebola outbreaks. The prevalence of hantavirus, which can have
a mortality rate as high as 30 percent, has increased in rodent populations in
areas of Panama disturbed by human activity.
The nipah virus, a neurological disease with
no known cure, emerged in the late 1990s in Malaysia in the aftermath of
slashing and burning to create pig farms. Bats ate fruit in nearby orchards.
Pigs ate the mangoes in those orchards and the virus made its way into humans.
In the initial outbreak, 257 people were infected, killing 105.
Deforestation
continues across the world directly impacting climate change. We now can add the potential for
increased epidemics of once rare diseases to the cost of deforestation.
The long border between China and Myanmar has always been
porous. A variety of illegal goods find
safe passage between to two countries.
On the Myanmar side, the town of Mongla typifies the nature of the illicit
and unrestrained cross-border trade.
Although in Myanmar, Mongla is far more connected to China.
The town - virtually
an independent fiefdom operating on Chinese currency, electricity and mobile
phone networks - is run by Sai Leung, also known as Lin Min Xiang, who has his
own 3,000-strong National Democratic Alliance Army.
Every day thousands of
Chinese tourists pour over the border to Mongla… a haven for gambling,
transvestite shows and illicit drugs. Fondly known as the “arsehole of China” (äžćœçèéš), this former backwater has also become the
centre of the region’s booming illegal wildlife trade.
The most ubiquitous representative of the illegal animal trade
in Mongla is the pangolin. Sold both
live and dead by the roadside and in open air markets. Pangolin fetuses soaked in wine are sold in
shops, where dressed out pangolin bush meat is also for sale. Higher end shops sell pangolin scales at
prices approaching rhino horn levels.
The pangolin is the world’s most widely poached and
illegally traded animal. Pangolins represent
an estimated 20% of the global wildlife black market.
Unfortunately, the pangolin has been the world’s most anonymous
extinction candidate. Pangolins are
reclusive, mostly nocturnal insectivores that once ranged across Southeast
Asia, India and Africa. Today, there are
eight species of pangolins still extant in the wild. Of those, the four Asian species have been
hunted close to extinction. With
the supply of pangolins in Asia depleted, poachers and smugglers are turning to
Africa to fill the void.
Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy in China and Vietnam. Often, at a meal to celebrate the close of big business deal, a panolin is slaughtered at table side. Pangolin fetuses pickled in wine are sold both as curatives and as displays of ostentation.
Unfortunately for the pangolin its most distinctive characteristic is the protective scales that cover its body. Made of keratin, the same material as human hair or nails, its covering of scales make the pangolin unique among mammals. Pangolin scales are considered to have the same sort of curative power as rhino horn and are coveted by the same market.
There have been a few
seizures in other parts of northern Myanmar around Mandalay and across the
border in Yunnan province in southwest China, but no real action to stem the
daily flow over the border. Between
2010-2014, pangolins and their parts worth US$3.09 million in Myanmar were
seized according to CITES data, but the authorities have not reported a single
case to the international body. Seizures only reflect a fraction of the total trade,
indicating the size of the problem.
Myanmar and China are both signatories of the CITES treaty banning the international trade in wildlife. Myanmar has virtually no control over its border area with China. And, despite commitments to stop the trade, China has done little to crack down on the illegal trade in Mongla. Nor has China (or Vietnam) made enforcement of existing laws against trafficking in either country. Until China steps forward, pangolins will continue to be sacrificed in the markets and shops of Mongla.
The pangolin has some strong advocates, here is a list of some of them. They could use your support.
Excellent article in The Guardian. Saving wildlife starts at the community level. Native poachers are mostly the poor, but the real profits from their work goes to international criminals. In Kenya community activists are working to find ways to rob these international criminals of the first link in the chain that stretches from the killing fields in Kenya to the shops in China and Vietnam.
“She got me out of a mud pool and into a pool of light,” Lotak said of Josephine Ekiru, the chair of the Nakuprat-Gotu conservancy, a community-run conservation area in northern Kenya where the two former poachers now work.
In a pastoral community where women are traditionally expected to defer to their husbands and keep their opinions private, a 16-year-old Ekiru insisted on attending community meetings that were normally the preserve of men, and began trying to reform the men she knew were poaching. But confronting the poachers put her own life on the line.
“First they wrote a letter to me threatening me. The second time, they called in [five men] to me and threatened me. That time they were pointing guns at me. I said I was ready to die but can I tell you some reasons [why she was trying to persuade them],” she recalled.
For 20 minutes she told them they were being used, that they were creating conflict between ethnic groups and were destroying the “treasure” that was their local wildlife.
“One of them said: ‘Don’t kill her’, he dropped his gun. He said, ‘Nobody has ever told us about this.’”
To Ekiru, the answer lies in having local people run the show. “The only future we have for this wildlife is in the hands of the communities living with this wildlife.”
Of course to really end this trade the chain must be broken at every link.
Garamba
National Park is a World Heritage site and a free fire zone for the dregs of
every country in central Africa. The
parks rhino population was eliminated years ago by these groups. Once home to 22,000 elephants, today only 1,300 have managed to survive the onslaught of rebels, war criminals and
poachers. The park has been decimatedby the various groups each intent on
using elephant ivory to help fund their activities.
Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army has
funded its rampage of rape, kidnap and killing through the ivory trade, but
there's a newer, bigger threat.
The park borders South Sudan, the world's
youngest country, which has been tearing itself apart in civil war for more
than two years.Disparate heavily armed rebel groups
regularly pass through, killing the animals, cutting off their tusks and
handing them over to traffickers, who smuggle the ivory across the continent
and on to its main markets in Asia.
The 5,500 square miles of Garamba are patrolled by a force of 100 rangers, supplemented by 50 to 100 Congolese soldiers. In a cash starved country, they have few resources and are routinely out-gunned by the armed groups of poachers they manage to discover.
Shot by elephant poachers, the manager of
DRC's Garamba National Park asked a ranger for help to bind his leg with a
tourniquet to slow blood loss."While we were doing this, I could hear
another person get hit on our right, and then within a few seconds, also hear
another person get hit on my left," Erik Mararv said in an interview with
The Associated Press in Johannesburg, where he received medical treatment.Three rangers - half of a unit that deployed
to the scene of an elephant killing - were killed in the April 23 shoot-out in
Garamba, where armed groups poach elephants for ivory in one of Africa's most
volatile areas.
So a shop in
Hong Kong can sell a carved elephant tusk, elephants and good men are dying. Still they hold on to hope and do what they
can.
“We have lost a lot. We are not winning the
battle today, but we can win the battle, absolutely," said Mararv, 30, who
plans to return to Garamba at the end of the week after getting approval from
doctors to fly. Mararv, on crutches, said the bullet that hit his right leg
"cut my femur bone cleanly" before tumbling out of his thigh, leaving
a "fist-sized hole."
"I was very, very lucky," said
Mararv, who expects a full recovery. A Swede born in the Central African
Republic, he described the rangers who died - Dimba Richard, Anigobe Bagare and
Matikuli Tsago - as "some of our best people."
Two Federal
laws (passed in 2000 and strengthened in 2010) made removal of shark fins
illegal, but did not ban the possession and sale of the fins. Every year millions of sharks are killed only for
their fins. The remainder of the shark
is dumped back into the ocean to die. A 2013 California law made possession and sale of shark fins illegal. A group including restaurant owners, shark
fin suppliers and Chinese American community organizations filed suit against
the state. Monday the United State Supreme Court upheld the California law.
California’s ban on the possession and sale
of shark fins survived a legal challenge Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court
rejected an appeal by Bay Area suppliers and sellers of shark fin soup, a
traditional dish in the Chinese American community.
Federal law prohibits shark “finning,” the
removal of fins from sharks, but does not forbid possessing or selling shark
fins. California lawmakers went a step further with a statute that took effect
in July 2013 and had the impact of removing shark fin soup from restaurant
menus.
Many species of sharks are currently in
danger due to shark finning, including the scalloped hammerhead, which is
endangered, and the smooth hammerhead, which is vulnerable according to the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Between 1.3 and 2.7 million
of just these two sharks are killed every year in the shark fin trade, and the
northwestern Atlantic population of the scalloped hammerhead declined from
around 155,500 in 1981 to 26,500 in 2005. Today, some shark populations have
decreased by 60-70% due to human shark fisheries.
For more
information on the impact of the war on sharks read this report.
You can find
a meaningful discussion regarding
legalizing the trade in rhino horn here.
The South African Supreme Court’s decision to allow rhino horn powder
sale within South Africa is a major leak in the dam that could be followed by a
proposal by South Africa to legalize the international trade of rhino horn.
On the supply side, we are concerned that
occasional, one-off sales of elephant ivory have not reduced
poaching for ivory. We would like to see more detail on how a trade in rhino
horn will be regulated and how the proponents would ensure that income
generated goes back into rhino conservation efforts. Other pre-conditions
include getting a better grip on the abuse and corruption that are contributing
to the present high levels of illegal trade, auditing horn stockpiles and
increasing the database of horn DNA samples, so that – if trade is approved –
legal horns can be distinguished from illegal horns. Without stringent
monitoring, there are risks that a legal trade could serve as a route for the
illicit tracking of rhino horns.
On the demand side, South Africa (if it is
to propose a legal trade at the next CITES CoP in 2016) still needs to
establish a credible trading partner. Neither Vietnam nor China nor any other
country has yet come forward. Being a credible trading partner will entail a
much higher level of law enforcement and political will to combat the illegal
trade in rhino horn than has been evidenced so far. Who knows how rising
affluence in other Asian countries will affect the demand for rhino horn? And
who knows how many more Vietnamese or Chinese will want to buy rhino horn once
the stigma of buying illegal products is removed
Unfortunately, legalizing the trade of rhino horn powder has life or death ramification. Believing that the powdered equivalent of a fingernail can cure cancer results in the deferral of treatment for patients that could actually be saved by real medical intervention. Here's a powerful testimony about the human impact of phony cures.
Prof. Nguyen Ba Duc – Deputy President of
the Vietnam Oncology Association and Deputy President of the Bright Future
Fund, says: “With all the technological advancement, right now there are many
effective treatment options, providing opportunities to cure patients of
cancer. Rhino horns have absolutely no ability to treat this disease.”
There is a huge moral dimension to perpetuating the mythology of the curative power of rhino horn powder.
