DAILY QUICK READ - JULY 13, 2016

It’s the Speed of Things

The natural world is always changing.  That’s why we believe in evolution.  But, human caused climate change accelerates the process.  Not quick a global extinction event, but pretty close.  Stress, disease, lack of natural predators all feed this discrete disaster.

Much of New England has been slammed by a gypsy moth infestation that has denuded trees of leaves on some 150,000 acres in Massachusetts alone, forestry managers say.

The gypsy moth population exploded this spring across large swaths of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island after drought conditions impeded the spread of a fungus that usually keeps the number of gypsy moth caterpillars under control.

It was the second year in a row that a lack of springtime rain triggered an explosion of the voracious caterpillars, which can strip the leaves from trees with alarming efficiency.

Caterpillar defoliation can have cascading effects on local ecosystems… Removing the forest canopy can make it too hot for nesting birds, which abandon their nests, and it eliminates habitat for insects that feed many bird species.

Exposed nests are also subject to infiltration by cowbirds, which, like cuckoos, lay their eggs in the nests of other species. When cowbird hatchlings emerge, they force the other chicks from the nest.

Gypsy moth caterpillars also devour oak pollen that produces acorns, an important food source for turkeys, deer, bears, and other animals.

Acorn shortages can also eradicate large numbers of white-footed mice, which depend on the nuts to get through the winter. In springtime, the mice feed on gypsy moth caterpillars, helping to control their population.

Greed, Greed, Greed

Democratic Senators are trying to highlight the coordinated lies and the organizations hired to do the lying.  Fossil fuel companies and their enablers have been identified.  Will they every face prosecution?

Championed by Senators Whitehouse, Markey, Schatz, Boxer, Merkley, Warren, Sanders and Franken, the resolution condemns what they are calling the #WebOfDenial—"interconnected groups—funded by the Koch brothers, major fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, identity-scrubbing groups like Donors Trust and Donors Capital and their allies—developed and executed a massive campaign to deceive the public about climate change to halt climate action and protect their bottom lines."

As DeSmog Blog, ExxonSecrets, Climate Investigations Center and others have documented repeatedly over the past decade, the oil and coal industries and their friends have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on an immoral and potentially fraudulent campaign to deceive the public about the scientific consensus on manmade global warming and the need for urgent action to curtail fossil fuel pollution.

Just last week, DeSmog Blog published the latest round of Exxon's funding of climate denial groups still peddling doubt, bringing the total known funding from Exxon to nearly $34 million over two decades. Add to that the nearly $90 million pumped into the denial machine by the Koch Family Foundations, as well as the largesse emanating from the dark money ATM, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Plague Dogs

M&M are often considered a cure around my house.  Using them to vaccinate massive populations of prairie dogs in order to save ferrets, that is awesome.

The US government is set to unleash drones that fire vaccine-covered M&Ms in a bid to save the endangered black-footed ferret, a species that is facing a plague epidemic across America’s great plains.

The US Fish and Wildlife (FWS) has developed a plan to bombard ferret habitat in Montana with the vaccine, which will be administered via specially designed drones that will be able to shoot M&Ms in three directions simultaneously.

The vaccines will be targeted at the prairie dog population at the UL Bend National Wildlife Refuge in north-eastern Montana. Black footed ferrets – North America’s only native ferret – are completely dependent upon prairie dogs, which are a type of burrowing rodent, for their food and shelter.

Choking on Our Own Garbage

The oceans are full of garbage, yet supposedly advanced societies can’t figure out how to deal with the waste they create.

Over the past several weeks, Hong Kong residents have become increasingly angry about the unprecedented amount of trash landing on the city’s beaches.

While Hong Kong certainly generates plenty of its own garbage, activists and residents noticed that a majority of the trash landing on the city’s beaches had labels popular in mainland China, not Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department (EPD) believes the mainland is to blame, too. The amount of trash surfacing on the city’s beaches is six to ten times the ordinary amount at this time of year, the EPD said in a statement to Quartz. Floods and storms in mainland China are the reason.

Water from the storms flows into China’s municipal sewage system, out into streams, into the Pearl River, and eventually, out into the South China Sea. This water carries a huge amount of trash because China has a number of open dump sites that are not well maintained or regulated (more on this below).

Normally, that trash would just drift further out into the South China Sea. But winds blowing from the southwest towards the northeast caused the filthy water to flow towards Hong Kong in recent weeks…

195 to 1

Sadly, Donald Trump is not the only person running for the Republican presidential nomination who rejected the science of climate change.  Still he is unique in the world in his stupidity.

Donald Trump would be the only national leader in the world to dismiss the science of climate change should he become president, putting him out of step even with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea.

The potential isolation of the US on climate change has been laid bare by a new Sierra Club report which found universal acceptance of climate science among the leaders of the 195 countries recognized by the US state department.

Close US allies such as Britain, Israel, Canada and France all have heads of government who have voiced their understanding that the world is warming primarily due to human activities.

Even totalitarian or undemocratic leaders accept mainstream climate science, with Assad calling for nations to “respond more effectively” to the issue and Kim supporting a tree-planting initiative to mitigate greenhouse gases. The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, has labelled climate change a “major global challenge”.

By contrast, Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called global warming “bullshit” and a “hoax” that was “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing noncompetitive”.

DAILY QUICK READ - JUNE 21, 2016

Leopards Got to Eat, Too

Stony Point is one of the bright spots in the effort to save African penguins from extinction.   It is the largest breeding colony for the penguins and through diligent conservation the number of breeding pairs has doubled in the last 20 years to over 2000.  Success does have a downside and the recent leopard attack has resulted in increased diligence from the CapeNature conservancy.

CapeNature has proactively increased nocturnal patrols and has introduced additional scent deterrents at the Stony Point penguin colony in Betty’s Bay after a leopard regrettably killed 33 endangered African penguins during a single visit.

On Saturday 11 June 2016 the leopard was spotted near the colony where it killed 33 birds and left one injured. A surviving chick and five penguin eggs were also found at empty nest sites in the area.

The injured penguin, chick and eggs, were sent to the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) for rehabilitation, rearing and incubation. SANCCOB confirmed the wounds on the birds were consistent with those caused by a leopard.

Following the incident, CapeNature has been conducting daytime vigilance and nocturnal patrols at the colony by using scent deterrents such as lion scat and pepper spray to discourage the leopard from returning to the site. Dog patrols are conducted randomly to aid in defensive scent marking, while camera traps have been set up in locations to remotely monitor occurrences.

Blackfish is Propaganda

“What Freedom Could Look Like for SeaWorld’s Killer Whales” – is a bogus headline.  The war against Sea World continues even after the last battle has been won.  The forces that decimated Sea World with propaganda now want to set Sea World’s killer whales free.  Well, not really free.  They want them in contained ocean cages.  And, only the few whales actually born in the wild. 

“Welcome to Double Bay,” the marine mammal scientist, who has studied captive and wild killer whales for decades, said with a smile. “This, I think, would be a terrific home for Corky.”

As I survey the serene swath of wilderness, I find it hard not to agree. Corky the killer whale is one of the star performers at faraway SeaWorld in San Diego. In 1969, at around age four, the orca was snatched from her family (which still patrols this area each summer) in a notorious roundup in Pender Harbor, on the British Columbian mainland. Six whales were removed from their pod and sold to theme parks and aquariums, hungry for more of the crowd-pleasing ticket sellers. Now, nearly 47 years later, Corky is the longest-held captive orca.

It takes to page two or three of this article to discover that this massively expensive enterprise is only for one or two whales.  More or less this is a vanity project for the agitators of Blackfish.

Retiring captive animals to a seaside sanctuary for the rest of their lives—while complicated and expensive—is one thing. Rehabilitating them for return to the sea is quite another.

Although many people would like to see that happen, captive-born whales and dolphins are poor candidates for such release. Not only do they have no experience in the wild, but they have no families with which to reunite. They might learn to catch food, but without a social group to join they could become solitary social misfits. Though it’s possible to release captive-bred animals, it would not necessarily be ethical or sound.

“I seriously doubt we could teach them how to be normal in a social setting,” Rose said, even though solitary whales and dolphins have been documented in the wild. “The arrogance of thinking we can teach a captive-bred whale or dolphin how to be a wild, competent adult is pretty outrageous.”

Animals obtained from the ocean are better candidates for release. Hundreds of dolphins and several pilot whales and false killer whales (members of the dolphin family) held in tanks around the world were taken from places such as Russia, Korea, the Solomon Islands, Cuba and Taiji, Japan. There are also scores of wild-caught beluga whales, mostly from Russian waters.

Of the 56 orcas in captivity, only a small number were taken from the ocean; the rest were bred in captivity. But knowing where the animals were captured is not the same as knowing where their families are.

What Good Are Zoos?

Question to Jane Goodall.

What does Jane Goodall think of zoos and animals living in captivity? The world’s foremost primate expert says not all zoos uphold the same standards, but if they allow animals enough room, provide a social community, and have enrichment, she “believes that many species of animals can have a reasonable – even a good – life.”

Additionally, Goodall says “being in the presence of a living, breathing animal, knowing the way it smells, looking into his or her eyes, and above all sensing its ‘being-ness’ can be a life changing experience” for a child or an adult. On top of that, Jane points out that the wild isn’t helping animals in certain regions of the world. She said that “we have to realize that life in the wild, in many parts of the world today, is not providing animals with a good life.”

For instance, gorillas are hunted for bushmeat and chimpanzee infants are stolen from their mothers and sold to the exotic pet or entertainment trade. A significant amount of illegal hunting and wildlife crimes make unsustainable living for these and other wild animals.

Prairie Dogs Are Great Communicators

Researchers have discovered the rich and complex communications of what is basically a big squirrel.

You might not think it to look at them, but prairie dogs and humans actually share an important commonality -- and it's not just their complex social structures, or their habit of standing up on two feet (aww, like people). As it turns out, prairie dogs actually have one of the most sophisticated forms of vocal communication in the natural world, really not so unlike our own.

After more than 25 years of studying the calls of prairie dog in the field, one researcher managed to decode just what these animals are saying. And the results show that prairie dogs aren't only extremely effective communicators, they also pay close attention to detail.

According to Dr. Con Slobodchikoff, who turned his vocalization analysis on the Gunnison's prairie dog of Arizona and New Mexico, the chirps these animals use as 'alert calls' are actually word-like packages of information to share with the rest of the colony. Amazingly, these unique sounds were found to both identify specific threats by species, such as hawks and coyotes, and to point out descriptive information about their appearance.