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Like Corey, I am mainly interested in current environmental problems. But now and then I wade into the debate over the extinction of Australia’s Pleistocene megafauna [editor's note: Chris literally wrote the book on Australian mammal extinctions over the last 50,000 years], those huge animals that wandered over the Australian landscape until about 40,000 years ago.

This is an endlessly fascinating topic. The creatures were wonderful and bizarre – it’s great fun doing work that lets you think about marsupial lions, giant kangaroos, geese bigger than emus, echidnas the size of wombats, and the rest. The cause of their extinction is perhaps the biggest mystery, and the most vexed controversy, in the environmental history of Australia. And for reasons that I will explain in a minute, solving this mystery is profoundly important for our understanding of contemporary Australian ecology.

The latest bit of work on this is a paper that a group of us (including Corey’s close colleague, Barry Brook) published in Science. You can see it here (if you don’t have access to Science, email me for a copy). So far, research on this problem has concentrated on dating fossils to find out when megafauna species went extinct. Several recent studies have found evidence for extinction between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, which is about when people first came to Australia. But the conclusion that people caused a mass extinction of megafauna has been strenuously criticised, because so far it is based on only a few species with good collections of dates. The critics argue that other species disappeared before humans arrived, maybe in an extended series of extinctions caused by something else, like a deteriorating climate.

This argument over fossils will be with us for a long time. Because finding and dating fossils is such hard, slow work, the fossil record will inevitably give a seriously incomplete picture of what happened. One way around this problem would be to analyse the fossil record using mathematical approaches that take into account the problem of incomplete sampling. Corey is lead author of a recent paper that introduced a great new set of tools for this, and we are part of a group that is currently assembling a complete database of all recent dates on Australian fossils so that we can analyse them using these tools. Stay tuned for the result.In our recent study we took a different tack, using an ecological proxy that provides a continuous record of the abundance of big herbivores. We looked at Sporormiella, a fungus that produces spores in the dung of herbivores. Big herbivores produce lots of dung and therefore lots of spores, making Sporormiella a neat proxy for the relative abundance of megafauna. We counted spores in swamp sediments at Lynch’s Crater in northeast Queensland, sampling the last 130,000 years of environmental change at the site. Our results show that megafaunal abundance was stable, despite dramatic shifts in climate, until it crashed about 41,000 years ago, which is about when people appeared in the area. We analysed vegetation as well, and found no change in vegetation leading up to, or coinciding with, the megafauna crash. This makes it clear that climate change was not involved, because if climate had caused the extinction it would have transformed the vegetation too.

And this is where it gets really interesting. The vegetation did change at Lynch’s Crater, and fire increased as well, but not until just after the megafauna declined. These events were well known from previous study of the site, but had always been attributed to landscape burning by people. Our results suggest that they are best explained by the removal of megafauna. This did not surprise me, because I have always suspected that Australia’s megafauna had a large impact on vegetation. This is shown by the structure of the plants themselves. Many Australian Acacia, for example, have spines and densely tangled branches that are classic adaptations for defence of leaves against large browsing mammals. Some trees have preposterous growth strategies whereby they maintain this form until they reach a ghost browse line at about three metres above ground, and then adopt a different, non-defensive, leaf and branch structure.

The existence of these traits suggests that browsing by large mammals drove the evolution of Australian plants. For that to be true, big animals must have had strong effects on the fitness of individual plants. If mega-herbivory did that, it must also have shaped the structure of vegetation communities. The sudden removal of big animals by some external factor (like the appearance of people) would therefore cause a major ecosystem shift. That, I argue, is what we’ve described at Lynch’s Crater.

The reason this should matter to ecologists now is that we need to come to terms with the fact that large herbivores were once a major control on Australian environments, but the continent has recently been transformed into a land without very large animals. That loss provides part of the explanation for why Australia environments are they way they are, and it tells us there is no reason to think that environments like Acacia scrublands, that evolved with big herbivores but are now bereft of them, are in a natural or equilibrial state. One unsettling implication of this knowledge is the idea that, if important interactions between Australian plants and animals were lost with megafaunal extinction, we might be justified in introducing alien species to reinstate those interactions.

This would be a radical and almost heretical proposition if it had not already happened. Europeans have introduced many large mammalian herbivores that have become well-established as wild species in Australia. Some of them seem to make a poor fit with Australian environments, but in other cases that is not quite so clear. For example, one large chunk of the megafauna was made up of large, dry-country kangaroos that browsed on the tough leaves of shrubs and small trees. That ecological role disappeared when those kangaroos went extinct, but it may have been partly re-taken by goats and camels.

While there is no doubt that both species do environmental harm when they are over-abundant, they are also capable of providing environmental benefits, for example by controlling woody weeds. At the Ecological Society of Australia conference in Hobart in December 2011, the central Australian botanist Peter Latz gave a talk arguing that Acacia woodlands were in a healthier condition when browsed by camels than when not. But at present, Australian ecologists and conservation managers see goats and camels only as destructive pests, and would eradicate them if they could. That can’t be done, so the goal of management is usually to reduce their population densities as far as possible.

I suggest that we might manage Australian environments better if we took the long history of large herbivores in Australia to heart [editor's note: a proposition analogous to our ideas about letting dingos do the feral management for us], and re-evaluated the ecological potential of invasive large herbivores. The key to this new thinking would be to estimate, for species like goats and camels, the population densities at which they bring more environmental benefit than harm, then aim to manage populations to hold them close to those densities. I suspect this would be a for more achievable proposition than current pest control operations, because it might often be that the densities at which those species provide ecological benefit are not far below the high densities that result in clear environmental damage. It’s a fine balance and will require a lot of work to ascertain, but it’s probably better than the ad hoc way we manage these species now.

Chris Johnson

© Y. Sugiura

Just a quick post this week about something I’ve been contemplating for a while.

What if every Australian pledged to eat a feral animal a week?

Yes, I know that it’s a bit out of the pitch, and I’m sure not everyone would do it. Nor would it be physically possible for one person to eat an entire camel, buffalo or deer in a week – but hopefully you get the picture.

Why propose this? Australia is quite over-run with feral animals. Some quick stats:

• We have well over 1,000,000 camels (Camelus dromedarius), possibly closer to 1.5 to 2.0 million
• There are in excess of 150,000 swamp buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), most of which are found in the Top End
• Although estimates are rather imprecise, there are possibly up to 23 million feral pigs (Sus scrofa) across the country
• As equally variable, there are an estimated 2.6 million feral goats (Capra hircus) in Australia
• There are around 5000 to 7000 banteng restricted to the Cobourg Peninsula
• I’m not aware of any population size estimates, but Australia hosts six species of feral deer: fallow (Dama dama), red (Cervus elaphus), chital (Axis axis), hog (Hyelaphus porcinus), rusa (Cervus timorensis) and sambar (Rusa unicolor) in 1000s of subpopulations spread around the continent’s fringe

Now we have, of course, many other ferals (cats, rats, foxes, mice), but I don’t think too many people would want to eat them. I have personally eaten feral pigs, camels, buffalo, goats, and red, fallow and sambar deer, mostly from my own research trips or from friends who hunt.

Camel is delicious, if not a little tough (nothing a good marinade and tenderiser won’t fix), buffalo is fantastic, any sort of venison is wonderful, and pig, well, pig is divine with almost anything.

Feral animals cost Australia billions in damage each year, wreak havoc on our native ecosystems and cost millions more to control (largely unsuccessfully).

Sure, many small-scale industries exist to provide meat to commercial markets, but remoteness, hygiene and transport issues have meant that they’re largely specialised industries with little impact on our nation’s meat-consumption patterns.

Nonetheless, if we instilled the notion in your average Australian that it was his/her duty to eat more feral animals to do some environmental good, perhaps the increased demand would fuel more culling. A corollary would be that we’d need to eat fewer sheep and cattle, which would improve our rangelands.

So, be a proud Australian and eat a feral a week!

CJA Bradshaw

This post doubles as a Conservation Classic and a new take on an old concept. It’s new in the sense that it updates what we believe is an advance on a major milestone in conservation biology, even though some of the add-on concepts themselves have been around for a while.

First, the classic.

The ‘evil quartet’, or ‘four horsemen of the ecological apocalypse’, was probably the first treatment of extinction dynamics as a biological discipline in its own right. Jarod Diamond (1984) took a sweeping historical and contemporary view of extinction, then simplified the problem to four principal mechanisms:

1. overhunting (or overexploitation),
2. introduced species,
3. habitat destruction and
4. chains of linked extinctions (trophic cascades, or co-extinctions).

Far from a mere review or list of unrelated mechanisms, Diamond’s evil quartet crystallized conservation biologists’ thinking about key mechanisms and, more importantly, directed attention towards those factors likely to drive extinctions in the future. The unique combination of prehistorical through to modern examples gave conservation biologists a holistic view of extinction dynamics and helped spawn many of the papers described hereafter.It would now appear prudent to add a fifth ghoul to the team - severe anthropogenic interference with the global climate system. The response of biodiversity to past global climate change characteristically unfolded over thousands to millions of years, whereas anthropogenic global warming is now occurring at a greatly accelerated rate. If carbon emissions are not reduced rapidly, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report 2007 projects a rate and magnitude of 21^st Century planetary heating that is 5–9 times greater than that of the past century. This is comparable to the difference between now and the height of the last glacial maximum.

A clear lesson from the past is that the faster and more severe the rate of global change, the more devastating the biological consequences, and as I’ve covered before here on ConservationBytes.com in a separate Conservation Classic, this has seriously negative implications for biodiversity.

Now it’s time though to add a sixth rider – extinction synergies (Brook et al. 2008). For example, exacerbating the problems associated with recent climate change is that species trying to shift distribution must now contend with massively modified landscapes. Even in cases where global warming might allow species to expand their range, these benefits can be outweighed by other threats such as habitat change. The new conditions and altered communities might also allow more invasions by alien species that outcompete native species or act as predators to reduce their populations further. Harvest, habitat modification and changed fire regimes will also interact with and probably enhance the direct impacts of climate change.

In summary, we now appreciate that most extinctions involve a synergy of these factors (Brook et al. 2008), with individual causes being difficult or impossible to isolate. These synergies thus represent a situation where the combined effects are substantially more problematic for biodiversity than the mere sum of their individual effects.

To extend the apocalypse analogy further, it’s as though the horsemen’s orgy of species destruction has finally produced a bastard son far more evil then his vile parents.

We should no longer talk of the ‘evil quartet’ – it is now (at least) the ‘evil sextet’.

CJA Bradshaw (& Navjot Sodhi, William Laurance & Barry Brook)

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References

• Brook, B.W.; Sodhi, N.S. & Bradshaw, C.J.A. (2008). Synergies among extinction drivers under global change. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 25: 453-460
• Diamond, J.M. (1984). ‘Normal’ extinction of isolated populations In: Extinctions, M.H. Nitecki (Ed.), 191-246, Chicago University Press, Chicago, USA

I finally got around to uploading it on Youtube. I hope I haven’t contravened some copyright law, but I figure after such a lag, no one will care. I await the imminent contradiction from the ABC’s lawyers…

I hope you enjoy.

For the scientific papers arising from the work, see:

• Bowman, DMJS, BP Murphy, CR McMahon. 2010. Using carbon isotope analysis of the diet of two introduced Australian megaherbivores to understand Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions. Journal of Biogeography 37: 499-505
• Bradshaw, CJA, Y Isagi, S Kaneko, BW Brook, DMJS Bowman, R Frankham. 2007. Low genetic diversity in the bottlenecked population of endangered non-native banteng in northern Australia. Molecular Ecology 16: 2998-3008
• Bradshaw, CJA, BW Brook. 2007. Ecological-economic models of sustainable harvest for an endangered but exotic megaherbivore in northern Australia. Natural Resource Modeling 20: 129-156
• Bradshaw, CJA, Y Isagi, S Kaneko, DMJS Bowman, BW Brook. 2006. Conservation value of non-native banteng in northern Australia. Conservation Biology 20: 1306-1311
• Brook, BW, DMJS Bowman, CJA Bradshaw, BM Campbell, PJ Whitehead. 2006. Managing an endangered Asian bovid in an Australian national park: the role and limitations of ecological-economic models in decision-making. Environmental Management 38: 463-469
• Bradshaw, CJA, WH White. 2006. Rapid development of cleaning behaviour by Torresian crows Corvus orru on non-native banteng Bos javanicus in northern Australia. Journal of Avian Biology 37: 409-411
• Bradshaw, CJA, LW Traill, KL Wertz, WH White, IM Gurry. 2005. Chemical immobilisation of wild banteng (Bos javanicus) in northern Australia using detomidine, tiletamine and zolazepam. Australian Veterinary Journal 83: 616-617

CJA Bradshaw

P.S. Thanks to host Paul Willis (@Fossilcrox) for putting together such a great little exposé of our research.

Conservation Letters

• A mismatch of scales: challenges in planning for implementation of marine protected areas in the Coral Triangle (Mills et al.)
• Climate change: helping nature survive the human response (Turner et al.)
• Protecting degraded rainforests: enhancement of forest carbon stocks under REDD+ (Edwards et al.)
• The scale of illegal meat importation from Africa to Europe via Paris (Chaber et al.)
• Exposure of Africa’s freshwater biodiversity to a changing climate (Thieme et al.)
• Predicting willingness-to-sell and its utility for assessing conservation opportunity for expanding protected area networks (Guerrero et al.)
• Synchronization and portfolio performance of threatened salmon (Moore et al.)
• Land conversion at the protected area’s edge (Kramer & Doran)
• Incorporating asymmetric connectivity into spatial decision making for conservation (Beger et al.)

CJA Bradshaw

I am currently attending the 2010 International Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) in Sanur, Bali (Indonesia). As I did a few weeks ago at the ICCB in Canada, I’m tweeting and blogging my way through.

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Yesterday I attended a talk by my good friend Trish Shanley (formerly of CIFOR) where she highlighted the disconnect between conservation research and actual conservation. I’ve posted about this before (see Out of touch, impractical and irrelevant & Make your conservation PhD relevant), but this was a sobering reminder of how conservation research can be a self-perpetuating phenomenon and often not touch the people who need it most.

Presenting the highlights of her paper published earlier this year in Biotropica entitled Out of the loop: why research rarely reaches policy makers and the public and what can be done, one comment she made during the talk that really caught my attention was the following (I’m paraphrasing, of course).

Most of the world’s poor living off the land are unconcerned about biodiversity per se. As conservationists we should not therefore adopt the typical preamble that biodiversity (e.g., forests) represent the “lungs of our planet” – what people (and especially women) need to know is how biodiversity loss affects “food for my children”.

“Ensuring rigor and scientific validity of unpublished research by independent, qualified experts through the peer-review process has crucial benefits as a means to guarantee scientific quality and is a foundation of modern science”.

While I wouldn’t necessarily agree with all of these points, there is no doubt there are some pearls of wisdom within this list. Something to contemplate as you expand your research career.

I just want to leave you with one other morsel from Trish. Show a man the value of all the bushmeat he collected under around tree of species x, and then compare that to the concession he’d receive for that tree from a logging company, it’ll be quite clear to him that the tree is worth more alive than dead (and by quite a bit too).

CJA Bradshaw

Shanley, P., & López, C. (2009). Out of the Loop: Why Research Rarely Reaches Policy Makers and the Public and What Can be Done Biotropica, 41 (5), 535-544 DOI: 10.1111/j.1744-7429.2009.00561.x

© The Sun

As promised some time ago when I blogged about the imminent release of the book Conservation Biology for All (edited by Navjot Sodhi and Paul Ehrlich), I am now posting a few titbits from the book.

Today’s post is a blurb from Paul Ehrlich on the human population problem for conservation of biodiversity.

The size of the human population is approaching 7 billion people, and its most fundamental connection with conservation is simple: people compete with other animals., which unlike green plants cannot make their own food. At present Homo sapiens uses, coopts, or destroys close to half of all the food available to the rest of the animal kingdom. That means that, in essence, every human being added to the population means fewer individuals can be supported in the remaining fauna.

But human population growth does much more than simply cause a proportional decline in animal biodiversity – since as you know, we degrade nature in many ways besides competing with animals for food. Each additional person will have a disproportionate negative impact on biodiversity in general. The first farmers started farming the richest soils they could find and utilised the richest and most accessible resources first (Ehrlich & Ehrlich 2005). Now much of the soil that people first farmed has been eroded away or paved over, and agriculturalists increasingly are forced to turn to marginal land to grow more food.

Equally, deeper and poorer ore deposits must be mined and smelted today, water and petroleum must come from lower quality resources, deeper wells, or (for oil) from deep beneath the ocean and must be transported over longer distances, all at ever-greater environmental cost [my addition - this is exactly why we need to embrace the cheap, safe and carbon-free energy provided by nuclear energy].

The tasks of conservation biologists are made more difficult by human population growth, as is readily seen in the I=PAT equation (Holdren & Ehrlich 1974; Ehrlich & Ehrlich 1981). Impact (I) on biodiversity is not only a result of population size (P), but of that size multiplied by affluence (A) measured as per capita consumption, and that product multiplied by another factor (T), which summarises the technologies  and socio-political-economic arrangements to service that consumption. More people surrounding a rainforest reserve in a poor nation often means more individuals invading the reserve to gather firewood or bush meat. More poeple in a rich country may mean more off-road vehicles (ORVs) assulting the biota – especially if the ORV manufacturers are politically powerful and can succesfully fight bans on their use. As poor countries’ populations grow and segments of them become more affluent, demand rises for meat and automobiles, with domesticated animals competing with or devouring native biota, cars causing all sorts of assults on biodiversity, and both adding to climate disruption. Globally, as a growing population demands greater quantities of plastics, industrial chemicals, pesticides, fertilisers, cosmetics, and medicines, the toxification of the planet escalates, bringing frightening problems for organisms ranging from polar bears to frogs (to say nothing of people!).

In sum, population growth (along with escalating consumption and the use of environmentally malign technologies) is a major driver of the ongoing destruction of populations, species, and communities that is a salient feature of the Anthropocene. Humanity , as the dominant animal (Ehrlich & Ehrlich 2008), simply out competes other animals for the planet’s productivity, and often both plants and animals for its freshwater. While dealing with more limited problems, it therefore behoves every conservation biologist to put part of her time into restraining those drivers, including working to humanely lower [sic] birth rates until population growth stops and begins a slow decline twoard a sustainable size (Daily et al. 1994).

Incidentally, Paul Ehrlich is travelling to Adelaide this year (November 2010) for some high-profile talks and meetings. Stay tuned for coverage of the events.

CJA Bradshaw

The book strives to “…provide cutting-edge but basic conservation science to a global readership”. In short, it’s written to bring the forefront of conservation science to the general public, with OUP promising to make it freely available online within about a year from its release in early 2010 (or so the rumour goes). The main idea here is that those in most need of such a book – the conservationists in developing nations – can access the wealth of information therein without having to sacrifice the village cow to buy it.

I won’t go into any great detail about the book’s contents (mainly because I have yet to receive my own copy and read most of the chapters!), but I have perused early versions of Kevin Gaston‘s excellent chapter on biodiversity, and Tom Brook‘s overview of conservation planning and prioritisation. Our chapter (Chapter 16 by Barry Brook and me), is an overview of statistical and modelling philosophy and application with emphasis on conservation mathematics. It’s by no means a complete treatment, but it’s something we want to develop further down the track. I do hope many people find it useful.

I’ve reproduced the chapter title line-up below, with links to each of the authors websites.

1. Conservation Biology: Past and Present (C. Meine)
2. Biodiversity (K. Gaston)
3. Ecosystem Functions and Services (C. Sekercioglu)
4. Habitat Destruction: Death of a Thousand Cuts (W. Laurance)
5. Habitat Fragmentation and Landscape Change (A. Bennett & D. Saunders)
6. Overharvesting (C. Peres)
7. Invasive Species (D. Simberloff)
8. Climate Change (T. Lovejoy)
9. Fire and Biodiversity (D. Bowman & B. Murphy)
10. Extinctions and the Practice of Preventing Them (S. Pimm & C. Jenkins)
11. Conservation Planning and Priorities (T. Brooks)
12. Endangered Species Management: The US Experience (D. Wilcove)
13. Conservation in Human-Modified Landscapes (L.P. Koh & T. Gardner)
14. The Roles of People in Conservation (A. Claus, K. Chan & T. Satterfield)
15. From Conservation Theory to Practice: Crossing the Divide (M. Rao & J. Ginsberg)
16. The Conservation Biologist’s Toolbox – Principles for the Design and Analysis of Conservation Studies (C. Bradshaw & B. Brook)

As you can see, it’s a pretty impressive collection of conservation stars and hard-hitting topics. Can’t wait to get my own copy! I will probably blog individual chapters down the track, so stay tuned.

CJA Bradshaw

Gemsbok (Oryx gazella) in Namibia

Another great line-up in Conservation Letters‘ last issue for 2009. For full access, click here.

• Temperate marine reserves: global ecological effects and guidelines for future networks
• Achieving success with small, translocated mammal populations
• Reducing urban demand for wild animals in Vietnam: examining the potential of wildlife farming as a conservation tool
• Effects of logging on fire regimes in moist forests
• When global environmentalism meets local livelihoods: policy and management lessons
• Forest degradation: it is not a matter of new definitions
• What is “forest?” Response to Guariguata et al.

Posted in bushmeat, conservation, environmental policy, extremism, fire, logging, mammal, marine, marine protected area ]]> http://conservationbytes.com/2009/12/11/december-issue-of-conservation-letters/feed/ 1 -34.925770 138.599732 -34.925770 138.599732 CJAB Conservation Letters Volume 2 Issue 6 http://conservationbytes.com/2009/11/13/crap-environmental-reporting/ http://conservationbytes.com/2009/11/13/crap-environmental-reporting/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:28:29 +0000 CJAB http://conservationbytes.com/?p=3109 ]]> We do a lot in our lab to get our research results out to a wider community than just scientists – this blog is just one example of how we do that. But of course, we rely on the regular media (television, newspaper, radio) heavily to pick up our media releases (see a list here). I firmly believe it goes well beyond shameless self promotion – it’s a duty of every scientist I think to tell the world (i.e., more than just our colleagues) about what we’re being paid to do. And the masses are hungry for it.

However, the demise of the true ‘journalist’ (one who investigates a story – i.e., does ‘research’) in favour of the automaton ‘reporter’ (one who merely regurgitates, and then sensationalises, what he/she is told or reads) worldwide (and oh, how we are plagued with reporters and deeply in need of journalists in Australia!) means that there is some horrendous stories out there, especially on scientific issues. This is mainly because most reporters have neither the training nor capacity to understand what they’re writing about.

This issue is also particular poignant for the state of the environment, climate change and biodiversity loss – I’ve blogged about this before (see Poor media coverage promotes environmental apathy and untruths).

But after a 30-minute telephone interview with a very friendly American food journalist yesterday, I expected a reasonable report on the issue of frog consumption because, well, I explained many things to her as best I could. What was eventually published was appalling.

Now, in all fairness, I think she was trying to do well, but it’s as though she didn’t even listen to me. The warning bells should have rung loudly when she admitted she hadn’t read my blog “in detail” (i.e., not at all?). You can read the full article here, but let me just point out some of the inconsistencies:

• She wrote: “That’s a problem, Bradshaw adds, because nearly one half of frog species are facing extinction.”

Ah, no. I told her that between 30 and 50 % of frogs could be threatened with extinction (~30 % officially from the IUCN Red List). It could be as much as half given the paucity of information on so many species. A great example of reporter cherry-picking to add sensationalism.

• She wrote: “Bradshaw attributes the drop-off to global warming and over-harvesting.”

Again, no, I didn’t. I clearly told her that the number one, way-out-in-front cause of frog declines worldwide is habitat loss. I mentioned chytrid fungus as another major contributor, and that climate change exacerbates the lot. Harvesting pressure is a big unknown in terms of relative impact, but I suspect it’s large.

• She continued: “Bradshaw has embarked on a one-man campaign to educate eaters about the frog leg industry”

Hmmm. One man? I had a great team of colleagues co-write the original paper in Conservation Biology. I wasn’t even the lead author! Funny how suddenly I’m a lone wolf on a ‘campaign’. Bloody hell.

• And this was my favourite bit of sensationalist wank: “He was aghast when he came across a picture of Barack Obama munching on a frog leg, something Bradshaw considers akin to chewing on whale loin.”

“Aghast”, was I? I don’t recall being particularly emotional when I told her that I found a photo of Barack Obama eating frog legs during his election campaign. I merely pointed this out to show that the product is readily available in the USA. I also mentioned absolutely nothing about whales or their loins.

So, enough of my little humorous whinge. My point is really that there are plenty of bad journalists out there with little interest in reporting the truth on environmental issues (tell us something we don’t know, Bradshaw). If you want to read a good story about the frog consumption issue, check out a real journalist’s perspective here.

CJA Bradshaw