New roads can be treacherous — even fatal — for wildlife, native forests, and the global environment.
If you don’t believe this, just watch this two-minute video, “Why Roads Are So Dangerous”
New roads can also be surprisingly risky for human economies and societies, as shown in this brief video, “Why Roads are Like Pandora’s Box”.
Clown fish couple (Amphiprion percula) among the tentacles of anemone Heteractis magnifica in Kimbe Bay (Papua New Guinea) – courtesy of Mark McCormick. Clownfish protect anemones from predators and parasites in exchange of shelter and food. The fish tolerates the host’s venom because its skin is protected by a mucus layer some 2-3× thicker than phylogenetically related species (12); clownfish fabricate the mucus themselves and seem to obtain anemone antigens through a period of acclimation (13), but whether protection is acquired or innate is still debated. Clownfish are highly social bony fish, forming groups with one reproductive pair (up to 11 cm in length each) and several smaller, non-reproductive males. Reproduction is protandrous (also known as sequential hermaphroditism), so larvae are born male and, as soon as the reproductive female dies, her widower becomes female and the largest of the subsidiary males becomes the alpha male. The IUCN lists clownfish, generically named ‘anemone fish’, as threatened by the pet-trade industry and habitat degradation, although surprisingly, only 1 species has been assessed (A. sandaracinos). The clown anemone fish A. ocellaris is the species that inspired Nemo in the 2003 Academy-Award fiction movie – contrary to the logical expectation that the Oscars Red Carpet would generate support for conservation on behalf of Hollywood, of the 1568 species represented in the movie, only 16 % of those evaluated are threatened (14).
Smell is like noise, the more scents we breathe in one sniff, the more difficult it is to distinguish them to the point of olfactory saturation. Experimental work with clownfish reveals that the increase in dissolved carbon dioxide in seawater, mimicking ocean acidification, alters olfactory physiology, with potential cascading effects on the demography of species.
Places such as a restaurant, a hospital or a library have a characteristic bouquet, and we can guess the emotional state of other people by their scents. Smell is critical between predators and prey of many species because both have evolved to detect each other without the aid of vision. At sea, the smell of predators dissolves in water during detection, attack, capture, and ingestion of prey, and many fishes use this information to assess the risk of ending up crunched by enemy teeth (1, 2). But predator-prey interactions can be modified by changes in the chemical composition of seawater and are therefore highly sensitive to ongoing ocean acidification (see global measuring network here). Experts regard ocean acidification as the ‘other CO2 problem’ of climate change (3) — just to emphasize that anthropogenic climate-change impacts terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems alike. Acidification occurs because the ocean absorbs CO2 at a rate proportional with the concentration of this gas in the atmosphere and, once dissolved, CO2 becomes carbonic acid (H2CO3), which in turn releases protons (H+) — in simple terms, pH is the concentration of protons (see video about ocean acidification): Read the rest of this entry »
Last year I posted about a paper that attempted to gauge the opinions of modern-day conservationists about the perceived role of conservation biology today and in the near future.
My main point was that it’s not a dichotomy (or trichotomy, etc.), and that the complexity of the modern discipline means that many different approaches and philosophies must be implemented.
Following that article, Chris Sandbrook of the United Nations World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the University of Cambridge just contacted me to promote a new survey that allows a broader section of the conservation community to contribute views.
The new survey will provide data to establish whether there are any factors (such as nationality, educational background, or experience of different ecosystems) that explain some of the variation in the views held by conservationists. Read the rest of this entry »
Anyone familiar with this blog and our work on energy issues will not be surprised by my sincere support of nuclear power as the only realistic solution to climate change in the electricity (and possibly transport and industrial heat) arena. I’ve laid my cards on the table in the peer-reviewed literature (e.g., see here, here, here, here, here & here) and the standard media, and I’ve even joined the board of a new environmental NGO that supports nuclear.
And there is hope, despite the ever-increasing human population, rising consumerism, dwindling resources, and the ubiquity of ideologically driven and ethically compromised politicians. I am hopeful for several reasons, including rising safety and reliability standards of modern nuclear technology, the continued momentum of building new fission reactors in many countries, and even the beginnings of real conversations about nuclear power (or at least, the first steps toward this) in countries where nuclear energy is currently banned (e.g., Australia). I’m also heartened by the fact that nearly every conservation scientists with whom I speak is generally supportive, or at least non-resistant, to the idea of nuclear power as part of the climate change solution. An open letter by our colleagues attests to this. In fact, every day that passes brings new evidence that we cannot ignore this solution any longer.
Even despite the evidence in support of implementing a strong nuclear component into climate change-mitigation strategies, one of the most frequent arguments for not doing so is that society can achieve all of its energy needs and simultaneously combat climate change by constructing 100% renewable-energy pathways. While it is an easy mantra to repeat because it feels right intrinsically to nearly everyone with an environmental conscience, as a scientist I also had to ask if such a monumental task is even technically feasible. Read the rest of this entry »
blue-striped grunt (Haemulon sciurus)
Coral reef fishes are wonderfully diverse in size, form, and function, as well as their need for different habitats throughout the life cycle. Some species spend all of their life in the same kind of coral habitat, while others need different places to breed and feed.
Fishes requiring different habitats as they progress through life often have what we call ‘nurseries’ in which adults lay eggs and the subsequent juveniles remain, and these places are often dominated by mangroves or seagrasses (i.e., they are not part of the coral reef).
While we’ve known for quite some time that when these nursery habitats are not around, adjacent coral reefs have few, if any, of these nursery-dependent species. What we haven’t known until now is just how far the influence of nurseries extends along a coral reef.
In other words, if a nursery is present, just how many new recruits do different areas of a reef receive from it? Read the rest of this entry »
Last year I wrote what has become a highly viewed post here at ConservationBytes.com about the plight of the world’s freshwater biodiversity. In a word, it’s ‘buggered’.
But there are steps we can take to avoid losing even more of that precious freshwater biodiversity. The first, of course, is to stop sucking all the water out of our streams and wetlands. With a global population of 7.5 billion people and climbing, the competition for freshwater will usually mean that non-human life forms lose that race. However, the more people (and those making the decisions, in particular) realise that intact wetlands do us more good as wetlands rather than carparks, housing developments, or farmland (via freshwater filtering, species protection, carbon storage, etc.), the more we have a chance to save them.
My former MSc student, the very clever David Deane1, has been working tirelessly to examine different scenarios of wetland plant biodiversity change in South Australia, and is now the proud lead author of a corker of a new paper in Biological Conservation. Having already published one paper about how wetland plant biodiversity patterns are driven by rare terrestrial plants, his latest is a very important contribution about how to manage our precious wetlands. Read the rest of this entry »
Bat gantry on the A590, Cumbria, UK. Photo credit: Anna Berthinussen
Tired of living in a world where you’re constrained by inconvenient truths, irritating evidence and incommodious facts? 2016 must have been great for you. But in conservation, the fight against the ‘post-truth’ world is getting a little extra ammunition this year, as the Conservation Evidence project launches its updated book ‘What Works in Conservation 2017’.
Conservation Evidence, as many readers of this blog will know, is the brainchild of conservation heavyweight Professor Bill Sutherland, based at Cambridge University in the UK. Like all the best ideas, the Conservation Evidence project is at once staggeringly simple and breathtakingly ambitious — to list every conservation intervention ever cooked up around the world, and see how well, in the cold light of evidence, they actually worked. The project is ongoing, with new chapters of evidence added every year grouped by taxa, habitat or topic — all available for free on www.conservationevidence.com.
‘What Works in Conservation’ is a book that summarises the key findings from the Conservation Evidence website, and presents them in a simple, clear format, with links to where more information can be found on each topic. Experts (some of us still listen to them, Michael) review the evidence and score every intervention for its effectiveness, the certainty of the evidence and any harmful side effects, placing each intervention into a colour coded category from ‘beneficial’ to ‘likely to be ineffective or harmful.’ The last ‘What Works’ book included chapters on birds, bats, amphibians, soil fertility, natural pest control, some aspects of freshwater invasives and farmland conservation in Europe; new for 2017 is a chapter on forests and more species added to freshwater invasives. Read the rest of this entry »
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