Early arrival: Cape Cod Bay is an important mid-winter and early spring feeding ground for North Atlantic right whales. Historically, they show up around February or March and stay until May. This year, there were right whales in the Bay at Thanksgiving. A few stragglers wouldn’t be unheard of, but the number of early arrivals this year was remarkable.
Wart and her calf: Despite her unflattering name, Wart’s story is movie-worthy. For reasons not fully understood, North Atlantic right whales have suffered from low reproductive rates (not a good strategy for rebuilding a population hunted to the brink of extinction). But not Wart. For years, she produced calves at regular, three-year intervals. Then, in 2008, she got tangled in fishing gear. She dragged it around for three yearsbefore being freed, only to disappear. No one had seen her for two years until this January, when she showed up in Cape Cod Bay with a new calf – a cause for celebration, but also concern because a baby so young had never been seen this far north. And then, they disappeared again (maybe they headed south?). The story has a happy ending, though. Wart and her calf were sighted again May 1st.
The end of right whale surveys? Researchers at Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies have been keeping tabs on right whales in Cape Cod Bay for going on three decades – conducting boat-based and aerial surveys, learning their behaviors, and examining their diet. The program has yelded invaluable insights. Unfortunately, due to government budget cuts, the future of the program is in jeopardy.
North Atlantic right whale, Wart, with her weeks-old calf in January, 2013.Credit Allison Henry / NEFSC under Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies NOAA permit #14603
Today 234 birds are living in the wild (194 of them captive bred), but the prognosis for the species is scarcely brighter than in 1982; they’re being poisoned. When lead bullets strike bone they tend to splinter, impregnating meat and entrails with toxic fragments, any one of which can kill a condor. All manner of carrion-eating birds and mammals feast on the poisoned gut piles left when hunters field dress game…
…When vertebrates ingest lead, their bodies mistake it for calcium and beneficial metals, incorporating it into vital tissues. Symptoms include anemia, convulsions, paralysis, and deterioration of brain, eyes, kidneys, and liver. Humans generally survive lead poisoning, albeit with diminished motor and cognitive capacity. (Research indicates that after lead was removed from U.S. gasoline in the 1970s, children’s IQs rose an average of six points.) But to make it in the unforgiving world of nature, wildlife has to be fine-tuned. So lead-poisoning in wild mammals and birds is rarely survivable.
Today wild condors are on life support because of lead in their blood. They must be routinely captured and detoxed with calcium-based drugs. But the drugs strip away nutrients as well as lead, weakening the birds so they can’t be released for a month or more. A study by the University of California, Santa Cruz found that 48 percent of condors tested and treated between 1997 to 2010 had potentially lethal blood-lead levels.
Just one more reason that hunting is a culture and tradition that needs to evolve.
A California condor is treated for lead poisoning by National Park Service biologists. (Photo by U.S. National Parks Service)
Time-lapse of our icebreaker, the Nathaniel B. Palmer, traveling through the Ross Sea, Antarctica. Two months of sequences, condensed into less than five minutes, with a surprise at the end. Enjoy! To learn more about the current movement to protect the Ross Sea, visit http://www.lastocean.org and http://www.asoc.org.
Just another reminder that the Antarctic is special, and should be protected. (Also a great advertisement for a career as an environmental scientist).
PS: If you are not familiar with the story of Nathaniel Palmer, it is a story worth knowing.
Americans, particularly on the right of the political spectrum, like to make fun of Europe. But here’s one more example that makes me wish we were more European on this side of the Atlantic.
The problem: Scientists have been worrying about, and pondering, the collapse of bee populations. There is reasonable suspicion (but not conclusive proof) that the collapse is related to a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. So, what to do?
The European Union, for its part, is now moving to ban a certain class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, as a precautionary measure:
The European Commission will enact a two-year ban on a class of pesticides thought to be harming global bee populations, the European Union’s health commissioner said Monday. …
Mr. Borg made the announcement after representatives of the 27 E.U. member states failed for the second time in two months to reach a binding agreement on a proposal to ban the pesticides, known as neonicotinoids. The commission had proposed the ban after the European Food Safety Authority recommended in January that use of the pesticides be restricted until scientists determined whether they were contributing to a die-off in bee colonies.
Recent studies have found that neonicotinoids can adversely affect bee health, though there are still doubters. (One key question is whether lab results in this area are applicable to the real world.) Here’s how an overview in Nature puts it: “a growing body of research suggests that sublethal exposure to the pesticides in nectar and pollen may be harming bees too — by disrupting their ability to gather pollen, return to their hives and reproduce.” But other scientists insist “there is insufficient evidence to implicate these compounds.”
Even so, the European Commission is putting in place a two-year ban so that officials can review the evidence on the topic and “take into account relevant scientific and technical developments.”
The US, in contrast, is waffling around:
A big new report (pdf) out Thursday from the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency argued there were a wide variety of reasons for the disappearance of U.S. honeybees since 2006. Neonicotinoids are only one possible factor.
Here’s the summary:
–Consensus is building that a complex set of stressors and pathogens is associated with [colony collapse disorder], and researchers are increasingly using multi-factorial approaches to studying causes of colony losses.
–The parasitic mite Varroa destructor remains the single most detrimental pest of honey bees, and is closely associated with overwintering colony declines
–Multiple virus species have been associated with [colony collapse disorder].
–The bacterial disease European foulbrood is being detected more often in the U.S. and may be linked to colony loss.
–Nutrition has a major impact on individual bee and colony longevity.
–Acute and sublethal effects of pesticides on honey bees have been increasingly documented, and are a primary concern. Further tier 2 (semi-field conditions) and tier 3 (field conditions) research is required to establish the risks associated with pesticide exposure to U.S. honey bee declines in general.
The report emphasized the fact that the contribution of pesticides still needs further study: “It is not clear, based on current research, whether pesticide exposure is a major factor associated with U.S. honey bee health declines in general, or specifically affects production of honey or delivery of pollination services.”
As such, U.S. regulators aren’t ready to ban pesticides the way Europe just did. The EPA is slowly conducting a review on the topic that “should be completed in five years.”
Five years? So what sort of shape will bee colonies be in if five years of study finally tags neonics as the cause of colony collapse? It’s hard to imagine a more clear example of how public policy in the US tilts toward corporate interests at the expense of common sense, the planet, and the public interest.
In fact, I’ve never understood why, when it comes to chemicals, that the burden of proof is on those who suspect a chemical might be dangerous. Wouldn’t it make more sense to require that companies that want to use chemicals and pesticides prove that they are safe before they are used?
When we sat down to plan our first issue of Nautilus, we asked ourselves a simple question. What is the biggest statement that science has made about humans and our place in the universe in the past few hundred years? The answer suggested itself immediately: it seems we’ve been told that we just aren’t very important.
This was a bit of a surprise. We’re fans of science, you see. And some of our best friends are people. Where was this narrative of mediocrity coming from, and, more importantly, was it true? Our story seemed to kick off with Copernicus, who around 1514 understood that the heavens do not revolve around us. In fact, they more or less ignore us completely.
Over the next half millennium, things got worse. Genetics revealed that we are a script written in the same language as rats and slugs, and with mostly the same words. Social psychology shook our faith in our rationality. Zoology painted a picture of complex, human-like animals. And artificial intelligence nipped at the heels of some of our most cherished abilities.
But the story turned. We learned that cooperation, fashion, metaphor, and energy set us apart in surprising ways. While science has indeed undermined the most naïve versions of our self-importance, we began to understand that it has replaced them with others that are more complex and deeper.
Finally, the opposition between unique and not-unique imploded. For one thing, we found that the category of “human” is a moving target—especially for cyborgs—and that makes it hard to ask what makes humans unique. For another, the very biggest science there is—cosmology—is answering the question with a big fat question mark.
Most people assume that humans are fundamentally different from the rest of the animal world. What do you think?
Many people believe that. But to biologists we are animals. It’s hard to believe we are fundamentally different because there is no part of the human brain that is not present in a monkey’s brain. Our brains are bigger and we certainly have a more powerful computer than any other animal, but the computer is not fundamentally different.
So there’s no fundamental divide between humans and chimpanzees?
No. If you were to ask what the big difference is, I would say it’s probably language. But like all capacities, once you break them down into pieces, you are going to find some of these parts in other species.
Why are so many people wedded to the idea that humans are special?
We’re raised with those ideas. It’s an old Christian idea that humans have souls and animals don’t. I sometimes think it’s because our religions arose in a desert environment in which there were no primates, so you have people who lived with camels, goats, snakes, and scorpions. Of course, you then conclude that we are totally different from the rest of the animal kingdom because we don’t have primates with whom to compare ourselves. When the first great apes arrived in Western Europe—to the zoos in London and Paris—people were absolutely flabbergasted. Queen Victoria even expressed her disgust at seeing these animals. Why would an ape be disgusting unless you feel a threat from it? You would never call a giraffe disgusting, but she was disgusted by chimpanzees and orangutans because people had no concept that there could be animals so similar to us in every possible way. We come from a religion that’s not used to that kind of comparison.
The deeper you look, the more you realize that we are all related on some level, and that the traditional hierarchy that places humans high atop the list of earthly species leads to terrible consequences for non-human animals.
Over the past 25 years, C. Drew Harvell has meticulously recovered more than 200 models in a mostly forgotten collection of 570 glass sculptures created by a pair of father-and-son glassmakers, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, in the 1860s. (Photo: Jeffery DelViscio/The New York Times)
I’ve been a marine biologist my entire professional life, spending more than 25 years researching the health of corals and sustainability of reefs. I’m captivated by the magic of sessile invertebrates like corals, sponges and sea squirts — creatures vital to the ecosystem yet too often overlooked in favor of more visible animals like sharks and whales.
The filmmaker David O. Brown and I want to change that. To make a documentary, “Fragile Legacy,” we are on a quest to lure these elusive and delicate invertebrates in front of the camera lens.
Our inspiration springs from an unlikely source: a collection of 570 superbly wrought, anatomically perfect glass sculptures of marine creatures from the 19th century.
These delicate folds and strands of glass make up theBlaschka collection of glass invertebrates at Cornell, of which I am the curator — enchanting and impossibly rare jellyfishes of the open ocean; more common but equally beautiful octopus, squid, anemones and nudibranchs from British tide pools and Mediterranean shores.
How many will be thriving? How many will be impossible to find? It’s an interesting snapshot of what has happened in the oceans over the past 200 years.
Salon magazine taps into the most important truth about climate change, which is that the single greatest change any human can make to help reduce greenhouse warming is to eat a lot less meat:
In their report, Goodland and Anhang note that when you account for feed production, deforestation and animal waste, the livestock industry produces between 18 percent and 51 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Add to this the fact that producing animal protein involves up to eight times more fossil fuel than what’s needed to produce an equivalent amount of non-animal protein, and you see that climate change isn’t intensified only by necessities like transportation and electricity. It is also driven in large part by subjective food preferences — more precisely, by American consumers’ unnecessary desire to eat, on average, 200 pounds of meat every year.
If you find it demoralizing that we are incinerating the planet and dooming future generations simply because too many of us like to eat cheeseburgers, here’s that good news I promised: In their report, Goodland and Anhang found that most of what we need to do to mitigate the climate crisis can be achieved “by replacing just one quarter of today’s least eco-friendly food products” — read: animal products — “with better alternatives.” That’s right; essentially, if every fourth time someone craved, say, beef, chicken or cow milk they instead opted for a veggie burger, a bean burrito or water, we have a chance to halt the emergency.
Here’s more from Goodland, who says that even the below video underestimates the massive contribution meat consumption makes to greenhouse warming. And the Daily Dish notes that others, like Mark Bittman and economist Tyler Cowen, are on board.
So it would be better to stop buying burgers than it would be to keep buying Priuses. Plus, you’ll be doing your heart a favor, too.
The UdderSinge uses a [oxymoron alert!] low temperature flame passed 2-4″ below the udder and belly that removes hair quickly and painlessly. Removing hair aids in creating a healthier cow by reducing the occurrence of mastitis in the cow’s udder.
Mastitis is a painful disease that causes painful swelling and infection in the udder and is potentially fatal for the cow. Removing udder hair decreases somatic cell counts in milk thus making the product safer for the consumer.
Hmm. I wonder how come we don’t see humans using such an ingenious and “painless” device for hair removal on their sensitive parts? I mean, why go to all the trouble and pain of waxing when this baby is available?
(This latest update in bizarre factory farm practices, courtesy of Free From Harm).
You could say cinema and nature got off on the wrong foot, or paw, right from the start. In 1926, to much excitement, an adventurer named William Douglas Burden brought back two komodo dragons to New York’s Bronx zoo – the first live specimens the western world had ever seen. Most of that excitement had been generated via a movie Burden had made depicting these semi-mythical reptiles in the Indonesian wild, voraciously devouring a wild boar. By comparison, the real, live komodo dragons were something of a disappointment. They just lay about lethargically in their cage, and died a few months later. It later transpired that Burden’s film had been heavily edited and staged to amp up the drama. The dragons hadn’t actually killed the boar; it had been put there by Burden as bait. The slow reality of nature was no match for the drama of the screen, it turned out. The science couldn’t match the fiction. One of the first to learn this lesson was the film-maker Merian C Cooper. He went on to incorporate elements of Burden’s Komodo expedition into a fictional movie: King Kong.
We have come a long way since Burden’s day in many respects, but that tension between rigorous natural history and populist entertainment is still very much at work in the nature genre, especially now that it has migrated on to the big screen in a big way. Where once we flocked to see animals painted as man-eating monsters in the movies, Jaws-style, now we want to get closer to them, physically and spiritually. There could be several explanations. Maybe it’s guilt at our destruction of their habitats, the proliferation of internet-related animal cuteness or because there are parents keen to give their children something more edifying than Iron Man 3. Or maybe it’s just because we’ve got so much better at filming wildlife. Nature films are one place where all the technological advances of film-making really come into their own: high-definition, 3D, surround sound, lightweight cameras.
But while cinema has made all these advances, nature itself hasn’t really got with the program. Unlike characters in Madagascar or The Lion King, real wild animals haven’t learned to take direction any better than Burden’s giant lizards. It can take years of uncomfortable, patient, expensive observation to gather enough footage for a feature-length documentary. And although it was common practice in the past, faking it is very much frowned upon. We like our wildlife cinema authentic, but we also want it exciting and dramatic, and that is still a challenge.
My view, based on the fact that the more we learn about almost any animal, the more we realize that their thinking and social lives are more complex and sophisticated than we assumed, is that we should err on the side of anthropomorphism. But perhaps “anthropomorphism,” is not even the right word anymore. It is a concept that is based on the idea that humans are unique in the animal world, and so to assume nonhuman animals have intelligence, or emotion, is to assume they are like humans. Instead, I think what science is showing us over time is that intelligence and emotions are to greater and lesser degrees universal among animals. And so perhaps we should start thinking of emotion and intelligence in the animal world as qualities which don’t necessarily set us apart from other animals, but connect us to other animals.
One of the elements of Blackfish that strikes audiences is the degree to which the orca brain has an architecture that suggests cognitive abilities we don’t yet comprehend, cognitive abilities which may in certain respects be superior to human cognitive abilities. So maybe one day as we come to better understand orca cognition and the relative quality of human cognition we will find ourselves orcapomorphizing.
I’m happy to say that this article picks up on exactly that, because Blackfish should make you think, for the first time, that the hierarchy of intelligence and cognition might not always have humans at the top:
Another new film in this vein throws the anthropomorphism debate into fresh relief. Blackfish by Gabriela Cowperthwaite deals not with animals in the wild, but in captivity, namely killer whales at the SeaWorld chain of resorts in the southern US. These creatures are essentially coerced into performing entertaining tricks for the benefit of a public audience, but one whale has been linked to the deaths of three people. Free Willy it ain’t.
As the story progresses, ex-trainers express regret over the treatment of whales, and the lies they routinely trotted out about how “happy” the whales were. There is much sinister footage and gruesome description showing just what killer whales can do to humans if they feel like it.
Blackfish makes no attempt to anthropomorphise its whales and it doesn’t need to. Like chimpanzees, they are evidently highly intelligent and social creatures, and they clearly don’t like what SeaWorld is doing to them – which is in effect imprisoning and torturing them until they snap. Where once they roamed the open ocean, they are now confined to tiny pools, mothers are separated from their calves, and they are forced into unnatural, violent behaviour towards themselves and us. If anything, we empathise with the whales more than the humans because they’re treated like animals. Does that mean they haven’t been anthropomorphised enough?
Like the other nature docs, Blackfish is a gripping movie, with drama and characters and emotion, but unlike them, it’s one that reminds us how much of a gap there is between humans and animals, and between movies and reality, which often amounts to the same thing. Thanks to cinema, we’re able to see nature better, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re any closer to it.
During filming, one of the ideas we used to joke about a lot with the former SeaWorld orca trainers is the idea that Blackfish is like “Planet Of The Apes,” except the humans are the apes who are incarcerating a being who they don’t really understand or credit with intelligence and emotion. After a few beers, we’d have Tilikum banging the tank walls, protesting “I am not an animal!”
The idea that an orca, say, or a chimpanzee, might have intellectual or emotional capabilities that exceed a human’s obliterates the idea of anthropomorphism. That makes it a revolutionary, and thrilling, idea that can completely change how you think about, and relate to, animals.
As I’ve noted before, Steve Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project is just about the most powerful campaign out there that is trying to change the way humans relate to animals.
Wise really gets it, and has started a series of video interviews exploring the issues at the heart of humanity’s immoral treatment of nonhuman animals.
First topic: the degree to which humanity is deeply involved in the exploitation of animals (and therefore resists giving animals rights that would change that relationship).
As Wise points out, it is almost, or simply flat-out, impossible for a modern human not to be involved in the exploitation of animals.
That is probably true, and something I am acutely aware of in my own life. But there are degrees of complicity, and the biggest step anyone can take to greatly reduce their complicity is to go vegan. After that, you need to pay attention to details like: products which use animal testing, or medicines which are developed with animal testing (a very complicated issue).
Beyond direct exploitation, there is the vast question of all the many ways in which humans indirectly exploit animals by lifestyles and choices which destroy habitat.
How far can you go to balance your life with the lives of nonhuman animals? What is the most difficult form of exploitation, direct or indirect, to reduce or eradicate from your lifestyle?
(Thanks to JV for tipping me to this video series).
Americans, particularly on the right of the political spectrum, like to make fun of Europe. But here’s one more example that makes me wish we were more European on this side of the Atlantic.
The Earthist Chronicles 