# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Despite its extraordinary intelligence, the life of an octopus is a solitary one. So perhaps it is no wonder that the mighty brained cephalopod engages in a little thuggery to relieve the boredom.

Scientists have discovered that, on occasions, an octopus will "punch" a fish for no reason other than "spite".

It is known that octopuses are able to escape captivity, solve problems, use tools and even possibly show humour, but they are, in fact, the playground bullies of the undersea world. Indeed, according to new research, they assault fish when they are supposed to be working together.

A report led by Eduardo Sampaio, a researcher at the Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre in Lisbon, found that the octopus has a tendency to punch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Octopuses are ocean thugs that punch fish

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Despite its extraordinary intelligence, the life of an octopus is a solitary one. So perhaps it is no wonder that the mighty brained cephalopod engages in a little thuggery to relieve the boredom. Scientists have discovered that, on occasions, an octopus will "punch" a fish for no reason other than

# data[].attributes.headline
None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use | Grist

# data[].attributes.subject
None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use | Grist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The notion of "externalities" has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs.

While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I've always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics - it makes them sound Serious - but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary.

To see what I mean, check out a recent report [PDF] done by environmental consultancy Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program. TEEB [Editor's note: TEEB is now known as the Natural Capital Coalition] asked Trucost to tally up the total "unpriced natural capital" consumed by the world's top industrial sectors. ("Natural capital" refers to ecological materials and services like, say, clean water or a stable atmosphere; "unpriced" means that businesses don't pay to consume them.)

It's a huge task; obviously, doing it required a specific methodology that built in a series of assumptions. (Plenty of details in the report.) But it serves as an important signpost pointing the way to the truth about externalities.

Here's how those costs break down:

The majority of unpriced natural capital costs are from greenhouse gas emissions (38%), followed by water use (25%), land use (24%), air pollution (7%), land and water pollution (5%), and waste (1%).

So how much is that costing us? Trucost's headline results are fairly stunning.

First, the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 "global primary production and primary processing region-sectors" amounts to $7.3 trillion a year - 13 percent of 2009 global GDP.

(A "region-sector" is a particular industry in a particular region - say, wheat farming in East Asia.)

Second, surprising no one, coal is the enemy of the human race. Trucost compiled rankings, both of the top environmental impacts and of the top industrial culprits.

Here are the top five biggest environmental impacts and the region-sectors responsible for them:

The biggest single environmental cost? Greenhouse gases from coal burning in China. The fifth biggest? Greenhouse gases from coal burning in North America. (This also shows what an unholy nightmare deforestation in South America is.)

Now, here are the top five industrial sectors ranked by total ecological damages imposed:

It's coal again! This time North American coal is up at number three.

Trucost's third big finding is the coup de grace. Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world's top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. Zero.

That amounts to an global industrial system built on sleight of hand. As Paul Hawken likes to put it, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.

This gets back to what I was saying at the top. The notion of "externalities" is so technical, such an economist's term. Got a few unfortunate side effects, so just move some numbers from Column A to Column B, right?

But the UNEP report makes clear that what's going on today is more than a few accounting oversights here and there. The distance between today's industrial systems and truly sustainable industrial systems - systems that do not spend down stored natural capital but instead integrate into current energy and material flows - is not one of degree, but one of kind. What's needed is not just better accounting but a new global industrial system, a new way of providing for human wellbeing, and fast. That means a revolution.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
None of the world's top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The notion of "externalities" has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab.

# data[].attributes.headline
Fire Science - New Revelations due to West Coast Fires

# data[].attributes.subject
Fire Science - New Revelations due to West Coast Fires

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On the windy, hot day of July 26, 2018, as record 113-degree temperatures baked Redding, California, in the northern Sacramento Valley, Eric Knapp toiled in an air-conditioned government office. After work, he planned to meet his wife and 3-year-old daughter, and some family friends, for dinner. Slender and fair-skinned with a gentle smile, Knapp is a research ecologist for the US Forest Service. He was well aware that, three days earlier, in coastal mountains west of town, a wildfire had started when a trailer got a flat tire and the metal wheel rim scraped the asphalt, sending sparks into dry brush.

Like the vast majority of wildfires, this one, called the Carr Fire, burned initially as a wide but shallow band of flames advancing slowly, like a battalion of infantrymen marching shoulder to shoulder, and left behind charred grass and lightly scorched trees. The Carr Fire was also typical in that it moved according to the dictates of wind, ground slope, and flammable fuels-southeast around a lake, then up a hill, in part because heat rises. Early on that particular morning, the fire had crested a rise above Redding and, with a northwesterly breeze at its back, crawled downhill toward town.

Knapp was finishing up for the day when his friend Talitha Derksen, a wildlife biologist with a daughter close in age to Knapp's own, sent a text saying that her neighborhood might have to be evacuated. One of the agencies tasked with that judgment call, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection-aka CalFire-is one of the world's largest and most effective wildland firefighting organizations. CalFire bases evacuation recommendations on predictions of where, and how quickly, a flame front will move next. That day, the fire appeared likely to reach the floor of the Sacramento Valley at a subdivision called Land Park, about a mile northwest of Derksen's house.

Knapp and the others changed plans: They'd meet at Derksen's, order pizza, and help her get ready to leave in case it came to that. Knapp stopped at his house to grab fireproof Nomex clothing. As he headed to Derksen's, he considered dropping by the office again to pick up his hard hat and emergency fire shelter-a sort of fire-resistant pup tent-but decided he was unlikely to need them.

As he turned onto Derksen's street, the flame front was a couple of miles away and hidden by trees, but Knapp could see the smoke rising in a straight and tall plume that turned the sun orange. When he arrived at Derksen's house, she was already packing bags. Knapp, to be sure he knew what they were dealing with, jogged out the nearby Sacramento River Trail for a view. Upriver, on the far bank, he could see red flames torching gray pines and scrubby oaks.

Knapp was shooting photos when he noticed something odd: The wind where he stood blew out of the south, into the fire, but the flame front still moved the other way, driven by that northwesterly at its back. Then he saw something else: Portions of the smoke plume swirled in different directions, as if beginning to rotate.

Knapp knew this could signal a once rare and dangerous phenomenon known as plume-driven fire, in which a fire's own convective column of rising heat becomes hot enough and big enough to redirect wind and weather in ways that can make the fire burn much hotter and, with little warning, spread fast enough to trap people as they flee.

As Knapp ran back down the trail, he passed neighbors walking and recommended they turn around. But even he had no idea how much peril they were all in. At the house, as Derksen left, Knapp and others hosed down the roof and rain gutters and cleared the yard of flammable material like cardboard boxes and lawn furniture. Knapp was the last person there, spraying water on the fence and yard.

Even as Knapp cranked the spigot, the swirling smoke he'd seen was fast accelerating, transforming much of the Carr Fire's enormous lower plume into the biggest fire tornado ever observed, a whirling vortex of flame 17,000 feet tall and rotating at 143 mph with the destructive force of an EF-3 tornado, the kind that erases entire towns in Oklahoma.

While Knapp blithely sprayed water around Derksen's house, that fire tornado-hidden from him by all the smoke in the air-leaped across the Sacramento River, touched down in Land Park, snapped high-tension power lines, uprooted trees, wrapped steel pipes around utility poles, and obliterated hundreds of homes, igniting and shredding them and hurling their burning debris up to altitudes at which commercial passenger jets fly.

Not far from where Knapp stood, CalFire captain Shawn Raley was evacuating a woman and her daughter in his truck when all the windows imploded, showering them with shattered glass. Close by, a 37-year-old fire inspector named J. J. Stoke radioed Mayday moments before the tornado lifted his 5,000-pound Ford F-150 off the asphalt and flipped it repeatedly down Buenaventura Boulevard, killing him. Three other CalFire workers were driving bulldozers on that same boulevard when their windows also shattered. One of the 25-ton vehicles got spun around and dropped on top of a truck driven by a retired police officer, who then jumped out and crouched behind the bulldozer's blade while his truck caught fire.

That's about when flaming debris that had been sucked into the Carr Fire's plume of smoke drifted out of the updraft column into what fire meteorologists call the fallout zone, which is exactly what it sounds like. Knapp couldn't possibly have seen that happening; it was tens of thousands of feet above him. Nor could he see the flaming remnants of homes and trees hurtling downward like firebombs, smashing onto roofs and igniting dozens of houses. While looking up into the black whirling darkness overhead, Knapp, who still thought the Carr Fire was advancing with the slow predictability of a classic shallow flame front, watched embers rain down on the bark chips upon which he stood, lighting them afire. At the same moment, with the very ground at his feet aflame, Knapp felt an even more powerful pulse of heat.

California's 2018 fire season became the most destructive on record-a title it maintained slightly less than 20 months, when it was overtaken not by the 2020 fire season but by a mere four weeks in late summer 2020.

That fire tornado, and the blaze that raged for weeks after, ultimately destroyed more than a thousand homes and buildings, killed eight people, and scorched nearly a quarter-million acres. Yet it was neither the biggest California fire of 2018, nor the most destructive, nor even the only one to behave in frighteningly anomalous ways. The Mendocino Complex fire, about 100 miles south of the Carr, which started the day after Knapp lingered unwittingly below a tornado, was also briefly plume-driven and ultimately burned almost 460,000 acres in what was then the largest California wildfire of all time. In early November, the Woolsey Fire near Malibu destroyed 1,643 structures while ripping trees and power-line posts out of the ground with a force suggestive of yet another fire tornado. The infamous Camp Fire, likewise in November, burned 70,000 acres in 24 hours-about a football field a second, for a while-and created an urban firestorm that destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 85 people, mostly in the town of Paradise, generating billions of dollars in insurance claims and bankrupting the state's largest utility, PG&E.

By the time California's 2018 fire season was over, it had burned more than 1.6 million acres to become the most destructive on record-a title it maintained for slightly less than 20 months, when it was overtaken not by the 2020 fire season but by a mere four weeks in late summer 2020, during which an estimated 3 million acres burned. But that's not the truly worrisome part. In making sense of Western wildfires, total acres burned are far less important than the increasingly capricious violence of our most extreme blazes. It is as if we've crossed some threshold of climate and fire fuel into an era of uncontrollable conflagrations.

"Not only is the size and severity increasing, but the nature of fire is changing," says David Saah, director of Pyregence, a group of fire-science labs and researchers collaborating on the problem. Still more concerning, given the trend toward fires dramatically more catastrophic than anything we've yet seen: The physics of large-scale wildfires remain so poorly understood that fire-modeling software is often effectively powerless to predict where they will next occur, much less how they will unfold once they do. If there is any good news, it is that, as Saah puts it, "the science for a lot of this stuff is under way."

About a year after the Carr Fire, on a bright June day in 2019, Brandon Collins, a big-jawed fire-science researcher at the University of California, drove a white pickup down a cedar-scented mountain road into the Blodgett Experimental Forest, a 4,000-acre university property near Lake Tahoe where he studies the effect of forest management practices on wildfire risk. All of those practices begin with the inescapable fact that California is flammable. It is hard for us moderns to accept-conditioned, as we are, by Smokey Bear-but fire is every bit as natural and inevitable in the American West as flooding in the Mississippi River Basin and hurricanes in Florida. Fire is not only guaranteed by climate and ecology; it is vital to the health of many ecosystems. The 20th century, in fact, during which large wildfires were far less common in the West than they are today, should properly be seen as the unnatural outlier. Prior to that, and especially before Anglo-American conquest, wildfire burned an estimated 6 million to 13 million acres each year in California, according to one study, far more than even the current record-setting season.

Most of those frequent fires past were different, though, in a critical way: Burning with a shallow flame front, like the early stages of the Carr Fire, they ripped through grass, pine duff, and fallen branches-so-called surface fuels-on the forest floor instead of torching whole trees and leaping crown-to-crown as our biggest fires do today. Those regular surface fires generally kept overall fuel loads so low that each subsequent fire could only do the same-scorch out the understory without harming mature trees. Over time, this sustained forests of old-growth conifers, oak, and madrone widely spaced on carpets of grass and shrubs, which in turn made terrific forage for deer. Indigenous people lit wildfires all over the American West for millennia to manage land for this outcome-with such success that, in the late 19th century, Anglo-American ranchers and even lumbermen adopted the practice.

Collins, to show me what that looked like, stopped the truck at a section of the Blodgett Forest that had been managed for 16 years in the old way, with regular fire. We have all experienced varied responses to landscape, from apprehension at a bleak desert or dark cave to calm in a tropical cove. I can report that a forest, when allowed to burn the way it evolved to burn, feels wonderful, a sun-dappled gallery of enormous sugar pine, Douglas fir, and black oak shading meadow-like ground at once sheltered from weather but open enough to move freely.

The Forest Service, which currently controls about 20 million acres of California, put a well-meaning end to this kind of land management almost from the founding of the agency in 1905. Seeing forest in near-term dollar signs-lumber, watershed, game-and dismissing the idea that wildfire played any positive ecological role, the Forest Service learned to snuff every blaze in every forest as quickly as possible. The wrongheadedness of this approach became obvious to the agency itself by the 1940s, when its researchers began to catch on to the fact that the longer a forest goes without fire, the more fuel will pile up and the worse the blaze will be.

That insight made it into official Forest Service policy by the 1970s, encouraging regional employees to use deliberate controlled burns as a means of keeping fuel loads low. By that point, unfortunately, lumber and paper companies had come around to the burning-is-bad position, as had civilians who disliked smoky air, enjoyed recreation in national forests, and thought of fire in purely destructive terms. Combined with issues of legal liability-who pays for damage to private property caused by prescribed burns on public land?-it all made Forest Service officials understandably reluctant to follow through with any particular prescribed burn. Private property owners, who control California's other 13 million acres of forest, were (and still are) even less motivated to light their own land ablaze, much less to tolerate a neighbor doing so. CalFire, meanwhile, tasked with responding to every fire on 31 million acres of nonfederal land inside state borders, has, compared to the Forest Service, almost no fuel-management authority. CalFire's straightforward mandate, for which it spends upward of $2 billion a year and operates more than 700 fire engines and 75 aircraft, is to extinguish every blaze, fast-a job it does extraordinarily well on about 6,400 wildland fires annually.

CalFire chief Brian Estes, who commands firefighting operations for just three of California's 58 counties, says, "We're running 400 to 500 fires a year. In the heat of summer, five or six a day-and most you'll never see. Anytime I have a 911 dispatch to a vegetation fire"-a grass fire, say, on somebody's lawn-"you're going to get seven engines, a battalion chief, two bulldozers, two air tankers, an air attack, and two hand crews. They're going to roll out the barn. But if you do that for a hundred years, and you don't allow people to do prescribed fire, the fuel just gets more and more dense."

Collins showed me a graphic example at our next stop, a patch of forest that hadn't been logged or burned in more than 100 years. Crowded tight with young trees among the big, old ones, it was piled deep not only with surface fuels like pine duff and leaves but so-called ladder fuels, the big fallen branches and shrubs that help surface fire leap up into the crowns and spread more quickly up high. That patch of forest also felt intuitively awful: dark, shadowy, mazelike, and cavernous, the nightmare forest of an old fairy tale.

Flammable as it looked, even forests mismanaged like that patch burned until recently in the historical way, at low severity along the forest floor. As a result, the entire field of wildfire science-including every modeling tool with which firefighters make life-or-death decisions and society structures itself in fire-prone areas-is based on that kind of fire behavior. The core mathematics of this science date to the early 1970s, when a Forest Service researcher named Richard Rothermel used small laboratory fires to produce equations expressing the relationship between wind speed, ground slope, and how fast a fire spreads. Rothermel knew his approach worked properly only for wildfire in light surface fuel like that in his lab-and failed to capture what happened when blazes got into treetops and jumped crown-to-crown. But these so-called Rothermel spread equations were applicable to so many wildfires that the Forest Service quickly developed paper-and-pencil ways for firefighters to plug in numbers for wind and slope angle and make reasonable guesses about how fast and in which direction a fire might spread-in a single heading, on a straight line. Eventually that modeling framework was run on cumbersome supercomputers, then on handheld calculators. In the early 1990s, PC-based software finally allowed firefighters to predict fire spread in two dimensions on a map.

That software, created by a Forest Service scientist named Mark Finney, was severely limited by a lack of mapping and fire-fuel data. It didn't do much good, in other words, if you couldn't load it with topographical maps and vegetation data for the fire you needed to fight. Over time, though, other researchers compiled these data sets on their own and shared them with one another until, in 2009, they were available for the entire US. Finney's software now does such a good job predicting fire spread in light ground fuels that it has become the industry standard, used thousands of times each year by firefighters nationwide. And versions that allow simulation of possible future fires are also used by land managers eager to prevent them.

As early as 1994, though, Finney could see that the contemporary modeling framework had more serious limitations. In central Washington state that year, a large and unusual blaze called the Tyee Creek Fire behaved in ways utterly outside the bounds of Finney's model. Instead of burning with a shallow flame front that followed wind and terrain, Finney says, "the fire basically spread in three directions, all about the same rate, every day in the afternoon"-as if the wind had somehow blown 360 degrees outward from the center of the fire.

The Tyee Creek Fire also kept its huge central area ablaze for days on end, a somewhat speculative phenomenon known as mass fire. "It would just kind of bulge out and put up a giant plume, and then just expand, expand, expand, every day," Finney says. "I remember thinking, 'Wow, this is so much beyond anything that we are able to model now, it'd be silly to even try.'"

Finney realized that no amount of modification to the Rothermel spread equations could ever make them account for a fire like Tyee Creek. Not only had they been developed around small lab fires, but 20 years' experience using them had focused on shallow flame fronts moving quickly through light fuel, with no accounting for slow-burning heavy fuels ignited along the way, much less feedback between ground fire and the immediate atmosphere. Put another way, as Finney recalls saying to a colleague at the time, "the truth is, we have no idea how this stuff really works."

To chip away at the problem, starting in the early 2000s, Finney went back to first principles, assuming nothing. He lit new experimental fires at a research station in Missoula, Montana, and revisited basic questions like whether wildfire spreads through simple heat radiation-conventional wisdom at the time-or through direct contact with flames.

"It's a very hard problem," Finney says, "because if you've ever sat around a campfire and watched it, the thing that keeps you transfixed is that the flames are always dancing around. How do you characterize such a nonsteady phenomenon in order to model it?" Light ground fuels, Finney learned, caught fire strictly through convection, and typically consumed themselves in 30 seconds or less at about 1,500 degrees. Heavy fuel like logs and fallen trees would smolder or glow with embers for hours or days, releasing heat all that time. They tended to burst into flaming combustion, quickly releasing their stored energy, under sustained wind. Like when you blow on a campfire.

While conducting that basic research, Finney happened across a book titled Fire and the Air War, about Allied bombing campaigns during World War II. He learned that British and American commanders, while pressing the war against the Germans and Japanese, had discovered that it was easier to burn cities down than to blow them up. The trick lay in first knocking the buildings over, then lighting them on fire. The Royal Air Force did just that to the German city of Dresden in 1945. Military intelligence officers studied recon photographs to identify older districts built largely of wood, then saturation-bombed them with high explosives. A second wave of aircraft hit those same districts with more than 2 million pounds of magnesium-thermite incendiary bombs. This had the desired effect of lighting the city afire, but it also triggered something unexpected. Shortly after all those buildings got to burning-30 minutes after, as it happened-a single giant plume of heat and smoke rose over Dresden, and took on a shape similar to a giant thunderstorm.

The Dresden firestorm famously produced hurricane-force winds powerful enough to uproot giant trees and snap them in half, suck up roof gables and furniture, and send countless humans flying like fallen leaves into the whirling fire tornado. Before it was done, that firestorm wholly incinerated several square miles of city.

Finney also unearthed a stack of obscure research reports, published during the Cold War, that analyzed the Dresden firestorm and a similar one above Hiroshima after the detonation of the atomic bomb (yet again, roughly 30 minutes after). One of these reports, commissioned by the Defense Nuclear Agency, compared bombing-induced firestorms with those generated by natural disasters, like during a 1923 Tokyo earthquake when a flaming cyclone lifted floating boats up off a river-and the river water itself nearly 50 feet into the air-before hitting a military depot in which 40,000 people had taken refuge, killing nearly all of them.

Yet another of these reports, titled Mass Fire and Fire Behavior and published by the Forest Service in 1964, looked at what might happen if a national forest got hit by a nuclear weapon. Detonation of a multimegaton warhead, the authors calculated, could simultaneously ignite as much as 1,200 square miles and cause a firestorm that ultimately burned out 10,000 square miles. The researchers involved were well aware that naturally occurring wildfires could, at least theoretically, cause the same level of damage. This was particularly frightening in light of the population boom in fire-prone wildlands out West. To better understand the risk, the Forest Service conducted a series of gigantic live tests in which, on federal land in Northern California, they laid out street grids similar to those in both urban and suburban neighborhoods. Each home site in these neighborhoods was piled with wildland fuel-juniper and pinyon trees, in one case-and set ablaze. This not only produced small tornadoes; it also confirmed that mass fires of wildland fuel burn in ways remarkably similar to the firestorms of World War II.

As he read all this stuff, Finney told me, something clicked. "I realized, 'Oh, my gosh, we're creating the conditions for mass fires,'" he says. "These fires aren't just big because of, say, climate change or some accident. They're big because we have a landscape full of long-burning heavy fuels, just like cities."

The key ingredient in a firestorm, whether in a wartime bombing campaign, a plume-driven fire like the Carr, or a wind-driven fire like the one that destroyed Paradise, appears to be the simultaneous burning of many small fires in a combination of light and heavy fuels over a large area with light ambient wind. As that broad area continues to burn with glowing and smoldering embers over many hours, the separate convective columns of all those many little fires begin to join into a single, giant plume. As the hot air in that plume rises, something has to replace the air at its base-more air, that is, sucked in from all directions. This can create a 360-degree field of wind howling directly into the blaze with the same effect as vents on a forge, oxygenating the fire and pushing temperatures high enough to flip even heavy fuels (giant construction timbers, mature trees) into full-blown flaming combustion. Those heavy fuels then pump still more heat into the convective column, creating a feedback loop: The column rises ever faster and sucks in more wind, as if the fire has found a way to stoke itself.

The project not only produced small tornadoes; it confirmed that mass fires of wildland fuel burn in ways remarkably similar to the firestorms of World War II.

That seems to be what happened during the Carr Fire. According to Neil Lareau, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Nevada, a weather balloon released on the morning of July 26 detected a lid of warm air, known as an inversion layer, several thousand feet above the Sacramento Valley.

While Knapp settled into work at his office, this inversion layer trapped the Carr Fire's heat plume near the ground. But as the day wore on, the heat plume forced its way to higher altitudes, steadily cooling.

About the time Knapp jogged out to the river to get a view of the fire, this plume reached 18,000 feet, high enough for water vapor, carried aloft, to condense into liquid cloud droplets, spawning a pyrocumulonimbus, or fire-generated rotating thundercloud. That process of condensing hot vapor or steam into liquid releases heat; you can think of it as the inverse of the cooling effect caused by evaporation, like we've all felt emerging from a swimming pool into wind. In the case of the fire plume, this condensation of water vapor into liquid cloud droplets delivers new heat to the plume itself, causing it to rise even faster and higher.

Back down at ground level, meanwhile, the rising plume pulled in new air by sucking at those two preexisting wind fields, the ones that Knapp noticed blowing into the fire, out of the south and northwest, respectively. Blowing toward one another at an askew angle and intersecting at the flame front, those two winds wrapped around each other and drew in flame to create a whirling vortex of fire. The higher the plume rose, the faster the vortex spun. Lareau likened it to a figure skater: "The skater starts a slow rotation with their arms out wide, and they draw their arms inward and maybe put them up over their head, and they suddenly start rotating very, very quickly."

As the fire tornado splintered homes and launched flaming debris into the sky over Knapp, it set up one of the most dangerous of plume-driven phenomena-the raining of firebrands. A classic surface-driven wildfire ignites only the immediate area crossed by the fire's own shallow flame front; falling firebrands, by contrast, allow plume-driven fires to propagate miles from the core burn, as if launching incendiary bombs to ignite entirely new mass fires like the one that burst up around Knapp.

"If you roll a map of California out, I can give you 150 communities that have exactly the same combination of factors as Paradise."

Brian Estes, CalFire chief

Fires of this type can be nearly impossible to suppress, because they can move too quickly for firefighters to get out of harm's way and burn too hot to extinguish, but also because so many people in the West have settled in places where these fires are increasingly occurring-the wildland urban interface, or WUI (pronounced woo-ee), exurban sprawl in California's many mountain ranges.

"We have crammed millions and millions of people and roads and homes and yards into this highly volatile Mediterranean climate," says CalFire chief Estes, who grew up in the town of Paradise. Worse, Estes says, enormous numbers of these people have gravitated to quaint old Gold Rush towns that, like Paradise, happen to sit atop river and creek drainages where wildfire fuel accumulates and winds tend to blow especially hard.

"If you roll a map of California out," Estes says, "I can give you 150 communities that have exactly the same combination of factors as Paradise."

In every one of those communities, according to Estes, "when we have disastrous fires, we have to get those people out, and that makes it so much more complex, I can't even tell you." For at least the first 16 hours of the Camp Fire in his hometown, Estes adds, firefighters were mostly just pulling residents out of homes and using bulldozers to clear roads blocked with cars abandoned by drivers who'd gotten trapped in traffic and fled on foot. During that whole period, Estes says, "there was not a single fire engine fighting that fire. They were all trying to rescue people."

The final elephant in the room, of course, is climate change-and the likelihood that it is already pushing even our current nightmares toward holocausts beyond imagining. Knapp, Finney, Collins, and several other researchers (most of whom are now involved in Pyregence, the fire-science consortium) have already identified an especially frightening way in which that might happen. Current climate-change patterns suggest we are headed for ever-less winter snowfall in the West, with hotter summers, ever-worsening droughts, and ever-more acute spells of extreme fire weather-long periods of dry heat that bake moisture out of grass and trees, combined with winds ferocious enough to whip even a small spark into a conflagration. The collapse of commercial logging, meanwhile, mostly due to environmental regulation, has combined with our collective intolerance for prescribed burns (nobody likes smoky air) to let forests grow unnaturally dense with young trees. More trees means more roots competing for the same underground water. During the drought of 2011 to 2016 in California, that competition, with help from bark beetles, killed a breathtaking 150 million trees in the largest mass die-off ever recorded in the United States.

Nobody knows how all those dead trees will affect wildfire. Initial research suggested that tree mortality would moderately increase risk of severe fire for several years, as dry needles helped fire spread crown-to-crown instead of just along the forest floor. Once all those pine needles fell, which appears to be happening now, risk of severe fire was expected to decrease for a while. The scariest part was thought to lie at least 10 or 15 years in the future, when all 150 million dead trees-an estimated 95 million bone-dry tons of firewood-were expected to fall on top of an already deep kindling pile of fine conifer duff heaped with small twigs and ever larger tree branches. At that point, we would have collectively prepared the entire western slope of the Sierra Nevada, through more than a century's work with taxpayer dollars ostensibly aimed at preserving wilderness and the economic value of wood, to incinerate in the greatest firestorm ever seen by human beings.

Neither this horrifying long-term risk nor the overall trend toward increasingly destructive fires has been lost on the California state government, which is how Pyregence came into being. Coordinated by Saah from the University of San Francisco, Pyregence has set out to create an entirely new software ecosystem, including for mass fires and plume-driven megafires. The idea is partly to help firefighters respond and partly to help the rest of us make smart decisions about urban planning and fuel treatments like prescribed burns. The overall challenge is too big and urgent for any single lab, so Pyregence has divided it up into a sort of distributed Manhattan Project of collaborative fire-modeling research.

Finney has joined a Pyregence working group studying the behavior of large woody fuels piled deep, like in our National Forests out West. Field researchers have gone out and taken detailed measurements of wildfire fuel beds, while Finney, back in Montana, has commissioned the construction of a new burn chamber the size of a grain silo. Once complete, that chamber will let him replicate wildfire fuel beds by piling logs and other material as much as a few feet deep. He will then ignite them, hit them with wind and moisture, and quantify their burn rate and energy-release rate-what he calls the "heat-engine part of mass fires."

"Really what we're looking for," Finney says, "is how these things transition to flaming. Instead of just smoldering on the forest floor, how do they become actively involved in these large fires?"

If all goes well, Finney's working group will eventually code three-dimensional digital simulations of various wildland fuel beds-digital cubes, in essence, not unlike Minecraft voxels-that can be stacked and arranged in infinite variation across landscapes generated by GIS mapping data.

Yet another group, led by Janice Coen of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has split California into eight fire regions and studied severe past blazes in each. By analyzing how and when those blazes spread, Coen's team has identified days when fire grew at exceptional speeds, then combed weather-station and satellite data for two related sets of data: local weather conditions like hot local winds that are consistently associated with extreme fire growth; and large-scale weather patterns 500 miles wide and more that are consistently associated with those local conditions. The hope is to create a meteorological early warning system for extreme fire weather in every region. Coen has already run proof-of-concept testing with an experimental model called Coupled Atmosphere Wildland Fire Environment, or CAWFE (pronounced coffee). An atmospheric weather simulator coupled with fire-spread algorithms, CAWFE has allowed Coen to plug in the precise local and large-scale weather that occurred around past events like, say, the Carr Fire. She has even triggered fire ignition at the exact point where the Carr Fire began and watched the fire tornado spin up on its own. The hope, according to Saah, is someday to supplement the fire-spread component of CAWFE with a fuel model like the one Finney hopes to produce, accounting for the enormous additional heat contributed by long-burning heavy fuels under open flaming combustion. By then feeding in live real-time weather data, Pyregence should someday be able to produce, for the first time, accurate near-term predictions of extreme plume-driven mass fire all over California.

At UC Merced, meanwhile, a climate researcher named LeRoy Westerling leads a Pyregence group tackling the crucial long-term problem of how to prevent apocalyptic fires in the future. This becomes especially pressing, says Westerling, when you consider that every future fire season in the American West is likely to be worse than the last, on average. "How do you adapt to that? It's not just California," he says. "It would be the whole West Coast and the Rockies and parts of Canada and Alaska all going off on a regular basis. So just the magnitude of managing fires over that geographical scale simultaneously is staggering, right down to the psychological impact of living with that." By way of solution, Westerling's group is even now developing what Saah calls "statistical machine-learning monstrosities"-big simulation engines that will allow researchers to run various long-range climate scenarios in which ground fuel, regular fire, and even land-management practices like prescribed burns interact with each other. In an ideal world, this will let policymakers ask questions like, If we get stuck with doomsday-level climate change but do lots of smart prescribed burning while allowing only fire-hardened home construction in the mountains, what might the firestorms of 50 years from now look like?

California's catastrophic 2020 wildfire season kicked off midway through the hottest August on record with a dry thunderstorm in which 12,000 lighting strikes ignited hundreds of fires over the course of a week. Three were among the state's largest of all time by early September, when hard northeasterly winds blew them into an entirely new realm of superlatives. Near the Blodgett Forest, those northeasterlies pushed the relatively small Bear Fire into a giant pyrocumulonimbus storm; in the space of 24 hours, it ripped across 230,000 acres, one of the largest single-day fire spreads ever observed, destroying hundreds of structures and killing 15 people. Across the Sacramento Valley, those same winds fused other wildfires into the gargantuan August Complex, the state's all-time biggest fire by nearly a factor of two, at more than 850,000 acres.

Still more astonishing is the Creek Fire, which ignited on September 4 in an area with a lot of dead trees in the southern Sierra Nevada. By the very next day, a huge pyrocumulonimbus formed and helped burn 115,000 acres through so many popular lakes and cabins and campgrounds-somehow tearing gigantic live trees out of the ground and hurling them across roads-that more than 360 people and 16 dogs got trapped on the shores of the Mammoth Pool Reservoir. That, in turn, forced the California National Guard to rescue hundreds of people overnight in military helicopters, something that had never been done before.

"That's a weird beast," says Saah of the Creek Fire. "In our research group, there's so much conversation around that specific fire, because it's doing things that are just out of the norm." Among the most peculiar was the fact that energy release across the Creek Fire's vast center remained just as hot and high as along its periphery. This classic hallmark of mass fire may well mean that the scary part-the future in which 150 million dead trees go up in flames-is already upon us. "If you look at satellite images of the Creek Fire," says Saah, "it looks like a nuclear bomb went off. It's crazy-just its behavior and its intensity and how fast it grew."

Lareau, the atmospheric physicist, was dumbfounded too. "I'm just kind of at a loss for words," he says. "Having looked at plenty of big fires that produced big pyrocumulonimbus clouds in the Sierra, I mean, this thing just blows everything out of the water. Instead of the cloud going to 40,000 feet, it's going to more than 50,000 feet. It's producing long-lived tornado-strain vortices for periods of hours."

Those vortices knocked huge live trees to the ground in circular patterns, some inside a campground and others onto roads, blocking escape routes. The fire's plume also generated lightning on and off for 12 hours, and another unusual behavior known as plume collapse in which all that hot rising air, upon cooling up high, suddenly reverses direction into a powerful downdraft toward the middle of the blaze, forcing fire outward in all directions, igniting huge new swaths of land.

"It stands out to me as potentially one of the most intense firestorms we've ever seen," Lareau says. "I think it's in many ways a way more intense fire than the Carr Fire was."

For Knapp, of course, no fire is ever likely to be more intense than the Carr. Especially that moment when he found himself in the middle of a blazing patch of bark chips while burning firebrands ignited homes all around. At that point, Knapp told me recently, "I just had to recognize I didn't have all my safety equipment, I wasn't attached to any firefighting resource"-there was nobody to call for help-"and I had a family on the other side of town."

Heading for his car, Knapp drove right into a traffic jam of terrified neighbors. Slowly, with that tornado roaring overhead and their own homes afire all around, they inched their way down the road to safety. The next day, Knapp drove back to look at Derksen's house. More than 60 homes in her neighborhood had been destroyed overnight, including the one right next door. A single ember made it through a ground-level screen vent at Derksen's place, slowly igniting a floor board. It appeared that, before this fire could burn out of control, passing firefighters had snuffed it out.

The scene was "intense and sad," as Knapp put it, not least because he and everyone else-unable to see the forest for the trees-had been so unaware of how much danger they were in.

Daniel Duane (@Danielduane) is the author of six books. He's at work on the next, about the Sierra Nevada. His last story for WIRED, about San Francisco's response to the pandemic, was in issue 28.09.
Marcus Yam photograph: Copyright© 2017. Los Angeles Times. Used with Permission. Cover photograph by Kevin Cooley/Redux Lettering by Cymone Wilder This article appears in the November issue. Subscribe now. Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The West's Infernos Are Melting Our Sense of How Fire Works

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On the windy, hot day of July 26, 2018, as record 113-­degree temperatures baked Redding, California, in the northern Sacramento Valley, Eric Knapp toiled in an air-conditioned government office. After work, he planned to meet his wife and 3-year-old daughter, and some family friends, for dinner.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Every year, as many as 400 million people are infected with life-threatening diseases by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. It wasn't always so dangerous.

Melanie Lambrick

For about a week this past September, I adopted a wellness routine that-at the time-felt like neurotic overkill. I didn't bother with masks or hand sanitizer; back then, the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2 was still presumably nestled in the warm body of an unknown animal. Instead, each morning, I spritzed my arms and legs with picaridin, a chemical repellent meant to ward off parasitic bugs. Then I covered myself with one of several increasingly crusty sets of khaki pants and long-sleeved shirts that I had infused with the insecticide permethrin. Only then, force field up, would I venture outside.

I had come to Dakar, Senegal, to get close-but not too close-to Aedes aegypti, a globally invasive mosquito that is arguably the worst animal in the world. The species carries yellow fever and dengue, both of which can cause more severe disease in young adults than SARS-CoV-2; Zika virus, which can lead to birth defects; and chikungunya virus, which can leave victims with debilitating joint pain.

Unlike viruses that travel person-to-person, most of these pathogens can spread only in places where mosquitoes live. Then again, aegypti 's range is immense. All told, her bites-and only females bite-cause an estimated 400 million infections each year, which means that several dozen people have been infected in the time it took you to read this sentence. In 2019, when the World Health Organization compiled a list of threats to global health, dengue got a whole slot to itself. Zika showed up in another slot, sharing billing with Ebola, SARS, and "disease X," the prospect of some then-unknown pathogen with epidemic potential.

In Senegal, my own illusion of invulnerability lasted until I met Mawlouth Diallo, a medical entomologist from the Pasteur Institute in Dakar. Wearing a matching blue kaftan set, he sat with me in my hotel lobby for more than an hour, earnestly explaining his team's mosquito research in smooth, French-accented English. Finally, I had to ask a nagging, basic question.

"Sitting here, right here," I said, gesturing to the air-conditioned lobby, "where is the nearest Aedes aegypti?"

Diallo seemed confused at the question. "Where?"

"Like, could we go find some of them outside right now?"

"No, it is inside," he said, then laughed out loud at the expression on my face. "For sure, aegypti is inside the hotel." When dengue broke out in Dakar in 2009, the city's Lebanese population was hit the hardest. One reason, Diallo said, was that mosquitoes and wealthy foreigners are both drawn to luxury indoor environments. In this lobby, he said, the best place to find Aedes aegypti would be the flowerpots.

I laughed with him, albeit less easily. Of the 3,000-plus mosquito species alive, most are fairly harmless. Only a handful are a concern for public-health officials. But Aedes aegypti is different. Whether in Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, or Miami-Dade County, it will breed in clean water supplies, it will come indoors, it will make a beeline toward human odor, and it will bite when the sun is up, circumventing bed nets that protect at night. Masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 won't make a difference. Neither will staying at home, unless you live in a closed, air-conditioned house. No other mosquito is so perfectly suited to live with, and on, human beings.

Traveling the world to see microbes, plants, and animals in oceans, grasslands, forests, deserts, the icy poles-and wherever else they may be.
Read more

The problem will get worse. Beyond the tropics and subtropics, the species has strongholds in Florida, Texas, California, and Arizona, and at least one population has managed to survive multiple winters in Washington, D.C. One recent study projected that by 2050, thanks to the climate crisis, the North American range of Aedes aegypti will extend to Chicago; in China, its range will go as far north as Shanghai.

In response, the world is readying an arsenal of shiny new biological tools. But as scientists and policy makers plan to subvert the species' evolutionary future, it's especially important to grapple with its origins, the kind of processes that begin long before once-obscure pathogens emerge from clear-cut rainforests or animal markets. In tropical Africa, especially Senegal, researchers are uncovering the shared history of aegypti and its favorite host, learning how environmental change, slavery, and colonialism turned a local mosquito into a global menace.

After chatting in the hotel lobby, Diallo agreed to find me some mosquitoes. Outdoors, we walked half a block and poked around a construction site, looking for standing water in buckets and concrete blocks before fending off a nervous manager. Then Diallo saw a tire leaning against a wall. Reaching inside with a discarded coffee cup, he scooped out a little water-in which he pointed out at least a dozen larvae.
Read: A new way to keep mosquitoes from biting
Cup in hand, Diallo hailed us a cab and negotiated a fare to the Pasteur Institute. In his lab, he led me into a room full of mesh cages of aegypti from all over the country. The mosquitoes looked, in my paranoid imagination, very eager to get out.

That afternoon, when I returned to my hotel, I walked over to the pool. I waited until nobody was watching, then bent to look into the wet, shaded basin under one of the large flowerpots. The shadows wriggled, and I recoiled. The next morning, despite all my defenses, I noticed the first bites on my arm.

Aedes aegypti, whatever else you want to say about it, is a good-looking animal. Entomologists have described it to me as "elegant," "quite attractive," and even "beautiful." Photographs often show it perched delicately on pink skin, displaying long limbs with black-and-white jailbird stripes. That pretty pattern belies an ugly disposition; the name of its scientific genus is derived from the Greek for "unpleasant."

Fair enough. But aegypti wasn't always unpleasant. Within the past few thousand years, somewhere in Senegal or farther down the continent in modern-day Angola, biologists suspect that aegypti took its first step toward world domination.

Early hints of this story surfaced in the 1960s, when medical entomologists in the Rabai region of Kenya saw the species breeding in earthenware pots of water and feasting on their human hosts. "Every house they'd go into would just be teeming with these mosquitoes," says the Princeton evolutionary biologist Lindy McBride, who has revisited the same sites.

No surprise so far. This was the familiar, human-obsessed aegypti. But outside the Rabai houses, researchers spotted another form of aegypti. This variant laid its eggs in holes in the trunks of trees, not pots of water; it preferred to bite animals, not people. Yet it wasn't a new species. It was a trace of the ancestral aegypti, a relic of a more innocent time.

Related Stories

Scientists have since found undomesticated populations of the species across tropical Africa. They hope to understand not just how the domesticated form picked up its particularly nightmarish set of skills, but how other species might be bending the same way under the same forces. "If we can understand where [ aegypti] comes from and how it works, the hope is, we can figure out how to stop it," says Noah Rose, a postdoc in McBride's lab at Princeton.

Senegal, especially, might be the key. Starting in 2017, Rose went on a series of road trips across sub-Saharan African countries. In Senegal, Rose teamed up with the ecologist Massamba Sylla, who had already discovered something unique about the country's mosquitoes.

After an hour-and-a-half-long cab ride inland from Dakar, during which I watched the scenery change from very dusty to extremely dusty, I met Sylla in a café in the city of Thiès. Over croissants and café au lait, we flipped through photos from his expeditions on his laptop as he described his lifelong, wife-vexing passion for field entomology. "Once it catches you, you put all your time into doing it," he said.

During his travels, Sylla discovered a pattern. Senegal's climate ranges from desert in the northwest to tropical rainforest in the southeast; as these habitats blend into one another, so do the parasites. In dry cities on the coast such as Saint Louis and Dakar, Sylla and collaborators found only domesticated mosquitoes. But in towns in the far southeast, they collected almost exclusively undomesticated mosquitoes, breeding in tree holes or in the husks of fallen fruit. Between the two extremes, Sylla found a continuum of domesticated and undomesticated aegypti.
Read: No one knows exactly what would happen if mosquitoes were to disappear
When Rose came to the country in August of 2018, he and Sylla drove along the same gradient, from dry Dakar in the south to where the countryside flushes green and rivers block the roads. The trip was not without risk: A decade earlier, another American researcher working in the southeast with Sylla flew back home before developing flu-like symptoms-Zika, it turned out, which he then transmitted to his wife through sex.

This time, though, no one got sick, and the collection process they followed was alarmingly easy. They collected the eggs in oviposition traps lined with filter paper, upon which the eggs can survive dormant for months. Once back in New Jersey, Rose submerged the eggs in water; most hatched overnight. "You've suddenly just transferred a whole population of mosquitoes between continents," he told me, "with almost no effort expended."

Rose tested mosquitoes from across the Senegal transect and other countries, imprisoning them in plexiglass cages and presenting them with two olfactory options. They could fly down a tube that led to his own arm, or down another that led to a hapless guinea pig. Screens shielded both Rose and the guinea pig from actual bites.

These tests, recently summarized in the study, show that places in northern Senegal near Dakar - with severe dry seasons but crawling with people, who come with their own water supply - host the most human-craving mosquitoes Rose harvested anywhere in Africa. But the country also contains the widest range of aegypti behaviors, from almost exclusive animal-biting in the southeast to exclusive human-biting in the northwest. This diversity suggests that Senegal could be where the transformation happened.

Scientists still don't know the specific reasons for the change. But here's one plausible scenario of aegypti evolution, described to me by the biologist Jeffrey Powell at Yale University. Imagine a city near or encroaching on the forest. The climate slides into a drought, and animals are scarce. But human communities still offer warm-blooded bodies to drink from and cisterns of clean water to lay eggs in, enough to support aegypti until the rains return. Now imagine aegypti, over several generations, adapting to this new, more reliable lifestyle.

Some 500 years ago, after our domesticated aegypti had evolved in dry coastal cities in Senegal, Angola, and elsewhere on the African continent, European ships arrived on the Atlantic coast and began to carry away human beings. As the global tragedy of slavery unfolded, aegypti unleashed itself on the wider world.

Dakar, a French- and Wolof-speaking city clogged with determined street vendors, honking cabs, and clomping horse-drawn carts, was once the administrative center of French West Africa. Now it's Senegal's capital. The larger metropolitan area, home to some 3 million people, is still trying to cram itself onto the Cape Verde peninsula, which curls out into the Atlantic from the westernmost point of Africa like an arm bent at the elbow.

When the Portuguese sailed into the peninsula's enclosed harbor in 1444, the city of Dakar did not exist. For societies living between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers, the Atlantic was a dead end. Trade came instead from the Muslim world to the east. But after Europeans arrived, the slave-trading outposts they built along the African coast began to exert their own gravity.

To meet the European demand for enslaved people, some societies launched massive manhunts against neighbors. Normal economies collapsed. Famines struck, leaving victims so hungry that they offered themselves up to enslavers. "This predatory business, which reduced the producer to an export commodity, pushed Senegambian societies into a state of regression," writes the West African historian Boubacar Barry. "Violence became the dominant motive force of their history."

At staging grounds such as Goree Island, enslavers conducted invasive physical examinations to screen out unhealthy people. After loading their captives on boats, though, they locked many inside the hold in rank, appalling conditions rather than risk having them revolt or jump overboard. Disease and death were rampant. For the crew and a profitable percentage of the captives to survive the two-to-four-month journey across the ocean, the ships also needed to carry dozens of water barrels. The concentrated humanity combined with the abundant standing water offered domesticated aegypti everything it needed to stow along.

Meanwhile, the same bottomless avarice that brought enslaved people and aegypti to the Caribbean had terraformed their destination. After uprooting indigenous populations, enslavers cleared large areas for sugarcane, then razed even more forest for the fuel they needed to reduce cane juice to crystals. Clearing the dense, moist stands, they assumed, would also eliminate the noxious miasmas that they believed to be the ultimate source of disease.

They were wrong. With forests gone, invasive species replaced insect-eating birds. Erosion caused flash floods. Loose sediments collected into marshland, creating new breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Native Anopheles mosquitoes ingested the malaria parasite from the blood of incoming West Africans and spread malaria throughout the islands. As for the arriving aegypti, it found the Caribbean's ports and sugar plantations teeming with human victims, standing water, and pure cane juice-which the species will also drink in a pinch. By the 1640s, aegypti had made itself at home in the islands, and was quietly setting the stage for something worse.

Around this time, the yellow-fever virus must have also made the trip over from Africa, likely volleying between mosquitoes and infected enslaved people or sailors during the long voyage. Yellow fever wreaks special havoc on adult immune systems that have never encountered it before. First victims get flu-like fever and aches for a few days, then appear to recover. Typically this recovery sticks. Otherwise, they get sick again, this time with jaundice-hence the "yellow"-and start vomiting up blood, hence the disease's Spanish name, vomito negro.

An early outbreak hit Barbados in 1647, leaving 6,000 people dead before rippling through the rest of the Caribbean. Yellow fever then sloshed from port to port for centuries, borne on silent wings. Ships, ports, and cities formed an invisible circulatory system. In summertime, the yellow-fever virus could materialize far outside its normal range-as in 1793, when one of America's foundational disease outbreaks killed one in 10 Philadelphians and abated only once fall brought frost.
Read: Two ways of making malaria-proof mosquitoes
Here aegypti, itself shaped by history, began to shape history back. Once established in the Americas, as the historian J. R. McNeill argues in his 2010 book, Mosquito Empires, endemic malaria and especially yellow fever gave local populations an advantage against foreign powers, whose soldiers would show up to fight with less seasoned immune systems. All locals had to do was survive outright confrontation-and wait. Yellow fever helped Spain defend its holdings against European competitors; malaria weakened British forces during the American Revolution. When Toussaint L'Ouverture fought to liberate Haiti, yellow fever may have been his staunchest ally.

The domesticated aegypti had established itself quickly across the Atlantic, altering the history of the Americas in the process. In 2018, Powell at Yale published a landmark study showing that mosquito genomes and epidemiological records reflected the historical timeline. "The histories of the slave trade, the mosquito populations, and the disease outbreaks are all telling the same story," he said.

And then aegypti kept going. After ships crossed from Africa to the Americas, they headed back to Europe laden with goods such as sugar. Soon, a few mosquitoes likely hitched a ride on this leg of the trip too. In 1801, Spain's queen consort, Maria Luisa de Parma, suffered from a disease she called dengue. Around then, aegypti was making itself comfortable in the Mediterranean, and would go on to cause outbreaks of yellow fever and dengue there for decades. When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, it offered the species a back way out of the Mediterranean into the Pacific. Before that century's end, the first clear outbreaks of chikungunya and dengue had appeared in Asia.

Meanwhile, yellow fever kept burning through the tropics. Nobody even knew what carried it until the 1880s, when a Cuban doctor named Carlos Finlay made a then-preposterous proposal: Maybe mosquitoes caused these outbreaks. The U.S. Army pathologist Walter Reed proved Finlay's theory in 1900, finally giving humans a chance to slow the spread of the disease by putting up screens and getting rid of standing water. Between then and now, though, the sun still hasn't set on aegypti 's empire.

Yellow fever itself has been mostly brought to heel. The breakthrough came in 1928, when competing American, French, and English research teams across Africa convened in Dakar to discuss the tragic case of one Adrian Stokes.

After France had abolished slavery in Senegal, in 1848, the colonial government conquered inland states and set up peanut farms, devising new systems to profit from African labor that soon expanded into other colonies. "Senegal was a laboratory for the European powers," says Mor Ndao, a historian of tropical medicine at Dakar's Cheikh Anta Diop University.

Disease stood in their way. Yellow fever "was an obstacle for the exploitation of the African continent," Ndao told me. Senegal's coastal cities had long been gripped by their own yellow-fever outbreaks, which public officials and even scientists invoked to justify race- and class-based "sanitary" segregation long after the mosquito hypothesis had proved what really carried the disease. But the death of Stokes, an Irish pathologist, offered a new way forward.
Read: How the rise of cities helped mosquitoes thrive
The year before, in 1927, Stokes had contracted yellow fever while helping isolate the virus from the blood of a Ghanaian man named Asibi. The pathologist demanded that his colleagues draw his blood and let mosquitoes bite him. Injections of that blood and bites from those mosquitoes both caused fatal yellow-fever cases in monkeys, proving that the team really had captured the infectious substance itself. Stokes died four days after contracting the virus, and was buried in Lagos. He was the first author on the pivotal scientific paper.

Upon hearing of this success, the French team at the Pasteur Institute isolated their own strain from a local patient named Francois Mayali. After sharing their findings in the Dakar meeting, multiple groups of scientists started working on vaccines. Mass vaccination campaigns began in the following decades, pushing yellow fever and its bloodsucking vector out of mind and making the tropics less scary for Ndao's would-be exploiters. Today, virtually every yellow-fever vaccine, including the one I got before visiting Dakar, bears a hint of these colonial beginnings: They still use a watered-down version of the strain taken from Asibi.

With the world's attention diverted, this win soured. During the past century, similar viruses emerged from forests in Africa and Asia. Reaching urban areas, they all found aegypti ready to ferry them from person to person. First came dengue, which leaked out into a bigger global problem as southeast Asia urbanized after World War II. Then in 2006, more than a million people in India may have caught chikungunya. This past decade, Zika emerged on a similar scale in the Americas. Even yellow fever-still the only aegypti-carried disease with a safe, publicly available vaccine-has staged a comeback: two African outbreaks in 2016.

All this, remember, wrought by what were once inoffensive forest insects.

Rose's study projects that Africa's milder, wilder populations of aegypti may crank up their own appetite for humans by 2050, as dense cities spring up across the continent. In response to that alarming forecast, a new collaboration of scientists from across the Sahel, the semiarid region south of the Sahara, is collecting more local eggs-but that research has gotten off to a slow start thanks to COVID-19 and extremist groups in the region, Rose says.

Perhaps a deeper worry is that thousands of other mosquito species out there have their own capacity to change. During the Second World War, when Londoners hid in the city's Underground tunnels to escape bombing during the Blitz, they were swarmed by a form of the mosquito Culex pipiens that had already adapted to the world's oldest subway system. That same pest now haunts subterranean Manhattan. And just in the past four decades, Aedes albopictus, an aegypti cousin from Southeast Asia that carries many of the same diseases, has exploded its range through Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Not to mention unknown others. "We could be missing the tip of the iceberg here," says Scott Weaver, who directs the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas. "I think understanding aegypti, as a first step, will be very important."

As we approached the island, a crumbling stone fort with grass growing on top came into view, then a few buildings painted in fading pastels. Then a dock next to a small beach. The ferry engine kicked into reverse, sending a deep rumble through the deck.

This is Goree Island. Within sight of Dakar, it's the kind of place where aegypti likely hitched a ride across the Atlantic. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the island is already steeped in the global memory of slavery. First established as a coastal base by the Portuguese, Goree was controlled by the Dutch, the British, and the French until Senegal achieved independence in 1960.

After disembarking and buying admission to Goree, I headed southeast, passing a massive baobab tree and a few lounging stray kittens on my way to a museum called the House of Slaves. Since the 1990s, historians have argued that Goree was a relatively minor location in the overall slave trade-that perhaps "only" 33,000 captive human beings came through the island-and that the role of this specific house might have been mostly symbolic.

But memory, once established, doesn't work that way. The three U.S. presidents before the current one came here, and when Nelson Mandela visited, the story is that he sat by himself for five minutes in a cramped chamber marked for "recalcitrant" captives-and then came out shaken, his eyes red.

After the entrance, visitors pass through a pink courtyard. The ground floor under the house is divided by stone walls into various dim holding chambers, each room labeled by the museum with a sign in French: "women," "children," "the sick." Running your hand along the wall, you can feel the occasional seashell embedded in the stone.
Read: The quest to make a better mosquito repellent
Behind the house, visitors paused for selfies in the Door of No Return, an empty frame backlit by the sky and ocean. I waited my own turn. The conceit here is that anyone kept under this house and then led through that door never came back. Their world was forever altered. The wider world was also altered, both by the tragedy of slavery and by its still-unfolding consequences, among them 400 million annual infections.

For this insect problem, at least, fixes are in the works. By asking questions about where aegypti came from, scientists such as Diallo and Sylla in Senegal and their overseas colleagues hope to save lives too. Understanding aegypti's evolution on its home turf might also help us anticipate and counter copycat trends in other mosquitoes or disease-vector species. And unraveling why aegypti and its viruses are so good at parasitizing us could also help us fight them.

For example, if McBride can pinpoint the genes and neurological systems that control the domesticated aegypti's fixation on people, hijacking that system to find new chemical repellents could be easier. So would crafting new kinds of bait, which would manipulate aegypti to avoid populated areas and head elsewhere. "We might be able to design a super-stimulus that would be more attractive than humans, that would pull them into traps," she says.

But the limiting factors in 2020 are focus and funding, especially with another virus falling on the world like an anvil. "I'm optimistic that people are finally understanding we can't continue this boom-and-bust funding cycle," Weaver says, "where a new outbreak occurs and we put a lot of resources into that virus-whether it be chikungunya, or Zika, now SARS-CoV-2-and we do that by taking away resources from other diseases."

For now, though, public-health systems across the Global South have also been diverted to coronavirus work, scientists say, leaving papers unpublished and mosquitoes uncollected. And whereas vaccines for Zika and chikungunya have been in development for many years, the fact that the outbreaks of those diseases are unpredictable and their victims clustered in poorer countries-unlike those of the more widespread COVID-19-means that the vaccines are difficult to test and less lucrative for the pharmaceutical industry, and thus still haven't made it to market.

As for engineering options to target the mosquitoes themselves, new technologies are already out in the world, aiming to reshape this little critter at the nexus of so much suffering.

One option is a bacterium called Wolbachia, bred into laboratory aegypti and then into wild populations. A greedy pathogen itself, the bacteria competes with the viruses that want to piggyback on the mosquito's life cycle. Tested in Indonesia, Malaysia, and even in Fresno, California, it reduces the mosquito's ability to spread disease.

An even more formidable option might be the gene drive, a type of genetic modification that would spread altered genes from a few sterile or disease-free mosquitoes throughout entire wild populations. The method is undergoing preliminary testing in Burkina Faso and elsewhere, and aegypti is high on the list of potential targets.

Meanwhile, less fancy kinds of genetically altered aegypti are already out in the wild. From 2013 to 2015, for example, one mosquito-control program released millions of modified male mosquitoes designed by a British company called Oxitec in the city of Jacobina, Brazil. The idea was that when they mated with wild females, the resulting offspring would die in infancy, causing populations to plummet-which they did.

Apparently, though, not all those doomed offspring actually died. Some found a way to live and breed, passing on little bits of themselves. As Powell and other researchers pointed out in an eyebrow-raising study this past September, the wild aegypti population near Jacobina now contains a sprinkling of mosquito genes from Mexico and Cuba, where the Oxitec mosquitoes' ancestors were harvested.

This crossbreeding might have actually strengthened the Jacobina aegypti, the study suggested-sparking a media firestorm, a fierce response from Oxitec, and concern from several of Powell's Brazilian co-authors. "I thought I was pretty conservative," Powell said, "but it seems like that got blown out of hand." This summer, both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Florida granted Oxitec permits to begin releasing a version of the same technology in the Florida Keys, although there are still regulatory hurdles to clear.

As we continue to influence its evolution, aegypti, as it always does, is beginning to respond. Standing on Goree Island, though, I didn't think much about the wizardry of all these fixes in the works, or the engineering required, or the consideration of known and unknown consequences. Instead, I took a moment to dwell on what has already happened.

And maybe with this past in mind, or maybe because of a simpler superstition, I didn't walk through the threshold of the Door of No Return when I got to it. I just stood there, blinking in the light, looking out at the turquoise waves.
Ousmane Balde contributed reporting.

Joshua Sokol is a science journalist based in Raleigh, North Carolina. His work has appeared in Science, Quanta, The New York Times,and elsewhere.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Every year, as many as 400 million people are infected with life-threatening diseases by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. It wasn't always so dangerous. For about a week this past September, I adopted a wellness routine that-at the time-felt like neurotic overkill.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The "crazy worms" remaking forests aren't your friendly neighborhood garden worms. Then again, those aren't so great either.

Myriam Wares

On a sweltering July day, I follow Annise Dobson down an overgrown path into the heart of Seton Falls Park. It's a splotch of unruly forest, surrounded by the clamoring streets and cramped rowhouses of the Bronx. Broken glass, food wrappers, and condoms litter the ground. But Dobson, bounding ahead in khaki hiking pants with her blond ponytail swinging, appears unfazed. As I quickly learn, neither trash nor oppressive humidity nor ecological catastrophe can dampen her ample enthusiasm.

At the bottom of the hill, Dobson veers off the trail and stops in a shady clearing. This seems like a promising spot. She kicks away the dead oak leaves and tosses a square frame made of PVC pipe onto the damp earth. Then she unscrews a milk jug. It holds a pale yellow slurry of mustard powder and water that's completely benign-unless you're a worm.

Seconds after Dobson empties the contents inside the frame, the soil wriggles to life.

"Holy smokes!" she says, as a dozen worms come squirming out of the soil-their brown, wet skin burning with irritation. "Disgusting." I have to agree. There is something unnerving about their slithering, serpentine style; instead of inching along like garden worms, they snap their bodies like angry rattlesnakes. But the problem with these worms isn't their mode of locomotion. It's the fact that they're here at all.

Until about 10,000 years ago, a vast ice sheet covered the northern third of the North American continent. Its belly rose over what is now Hudson Bay, and its toes dangled down into Iowa and Ohio. Scientists think it killed off the earthworms that may have inhabited the area before the last glaciation. And worms-with their limited powers of dispersal-weren't able to recolonize on their own.

For someone like me, who grew up in the Midwest seeing earthworms stranded on the sidewalk after every rain, this was a shocking revelation. With the exception of a few native species that live in rotting logs and around wetlands, there are not supposed to be any earthworms east of the Great Plains and north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

But there are, thanks to humans. We've been moving worms for centuries, in dirt used for ship ballast, in horticultural plants, in mulch. Worms from South America now tunnel through the global tropics. And European earthworms live on every continent except Antarctica. Dobson, a forest ecologist at Yale University, calls it "global worming."

But of all the earthworms people have shuttled around the world, the ones Dobson shows me at Seton Falls have scientists most concerned. Originally from Korea and Japan, they are known as jumping worms, snake worms, or crazy worms. And they have the potential to remake the once wormless forests of North America.

The perils of an earthworm invasion are hard to grasp if you've been raised to believe that earthworms are good. "They seem so symbolic of a healthy ecosystem," Dobson says. For their stellar reputation, they can thank none other than Charles Darwin. In addition to developing the theory of evolution, Darwin studied earthworms for 40 years at his home in England.

With characteristic curiosity and rigor, the naturalist conducted all manner of earthworm experiments: He observed their reaction to the sound of the bassoon (none) and to the vibrations of a C note played on the piano (panic). He watched how they pulled leaves into their burrows, and tested their problem-solving skills by offering them small triangles of paper instead (most figured out how to drag them by a corner). Darwin also measured how quickly worms covered up a large paving stone in his garden with their castings. He estimated that they could move at least 10 tons of soil per acre per year.
Read: A creationist sues the Grand Canyon for religious discrimination
Traveling the world to see microbes, plants, and animals in oceans, grasslands, forests, deserts, the icy poles-and wherever else they may be.
Read more

Dirty, slimy earthworms weren't especially popular in Victorian England. But in 1881, shortly before his death, Darwin compiled his worm studies into a book called The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits, in which he praised the humble critters. "It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures," he rhapsodized. The book became a best seller, giving worms' dingy public image a makeover in the process.

Gardeners now rejoice to find earthworms in their soil, and you can purchase a 1,000-pack of "Nature's Wonder Workers" on Amazon for $45. There's even an entire canon of worm-centric children's literature, including Wiggling Worms at Work and Richard Scarry's Best Lowly Worm Book Ever! But Peter Groffman, a soil ecologist at the City University of New York, says that while worms may do some good in your compost bin, they don't deserve all the credit for your bumper crops and lush ornamentals. "The earthworms are in the soil because the soil is healthy," he says. "They are not necessarily doing anything for it."

And though they can be helpful for breaking up compacted soils and breaking down organic matter, worms can also cause trouble in agricultural fields. Their burrows create channels that allow nutrients and pesticides to leak from fields into nearby waterways, and carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide to escape into the atmosphere. In fact, a 2013 review of recent research found that worms likely increase greenhouse-gas emissions.

But Darwin wasn't thinking about these things-and he certainly wasn't thinking about the consequences of introducing worms into ecosystems that had evolved without them.

The mustard pour, which Dobson had done partly for my benefit and partly just to check in on the worm population, is over a few minutes after it begins. The worms-bothered but otherwise unscathed-have disappeared back into the forest floor. So Dobson and I head back to where we left her assistant, Mark, toiling among a jungle of knee-high poison ivy and Johnny jumpseed.

He's searching for the pink flags that Dobson left here last year to mark a few dozen specimens of native plants. Her goal is to track them as they grow and reproduce to see if they show any potential of adapting to jumping worms. Mark, an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut, is doing his best. But it's his first day on the job, and also, someone has deposited a filthy, yellowing mattress over much of Dobson's research plot.

"That's the beauty of working in urban systems," Dobson jokes.

By now, it's after 11 a.m. and the heat has grown unbearable, so Dobson suggests we decamp to a nearby McDonald's. We pile into her silver Subaru Impreza, where the dashboard thermometer reads 38 degrees Celsius-100 degrees Fahrenheit. (Dobson and her car are both Canadian.) There is no gauge for the humidity, but it's stifling.

Related Stories

Inside the restaurant, air conditioning and cold beverages revive our spirits. We settle into a booth, and I ask Dobson about North America's first wave of earthworm invaders. Common species like Lumbricus terrestris, better known as the night crawler, arrived hundreds of years ago with European settlers, and have long been welcomed in gardens and farmland. In the 1980s, however, researchers began to find European worms in the forests of Minnesota and other northern states. One hypothesis is that people spread them when they throw away extra fishing bait next to lakes and streams.

The discovery alarmed scientists. In the absence of worms, North American hardwood forests develop a thick blanket of duff-a mille-feuille of slowly decomposing leaves deposited over the course of years, if not decades. That layer creates a home for insects, amphibians, birds, and native flowers. But when worms show up, they devour the litter within the space of a few years. All the nutrients that have been stored up over time are released in one giant burst, too quickly for most plants to capture. And without cover, the invertebrate population in the soil collapses.

Where millipedes and mites once proliferated, now there are only worms. "If you were to think about the soil food web as the African savanna, it's like taking out all the animals and just putting in elephants-a ton of elephants," Dobson says.

With their food and shelter gone, salamanders suffer and nesting birds find themselves dangerously exposed. Plants like trillium, lady's slipper, and Canada mayflower vanish, too. This may be because the worms disrupt the networks of symbiotic fungus that many native plants depend on, or because worms directly consume the plants' seeds. Or that native species, accustomed to spongy duff, are ill-prepared to root into the hard soil left behind when the worms have finished eating. It could be all of the above.

Perhaps most worryingly, early studies suggest that worms can sometimes halt the regeneration of trees. Josef Görres, a soil scientist at the University of Vermont, says he often struggles to find a single seedling in invaded portions of New England's famous maple forests. His theory is that the worms take out all the understory plants, leaving nothing for deer to chew on but the young trees. And that could spell trouble for the region's prized maple syrup industry. "In 100 years' time, maybe it's going to be Aunt Jemima," he says. "That's a real bad horror story for people in Vermont."

Read: How to make a half-gallon of maple syrup in 20 easy steps
These sweeping powers are why earthworms are often called ecosystem engineers. And Dobson and her colleagues fear that jumping worms pose an even greater threat than their European predecessors. Jumping worms appear to have many of the same effects, except that they grow larger and exist in dense colonies, sometimes numbering more than a hundred individuals per square meter of ground. And while European worms range throughout the upper four to six feet of soil, jumping worms stick to the top six inches or so, churning it relentlessly into a loose sediment that Dobson likens to ground beef. (Others I talked to compared it to coffee grounds.)

The disturbed soil erodes easily, dries out quickly, and generally makes poor habitat for many plants. At McDonald's, Mark pipes up to say that he noticed patches of it during his basic training at Fort Knox last year. While there, he cursed the lack of understory in which to take cover during tactical exercises.

Dobson explains that the worms act like a funnel, winnowing away the diversity of the forest. First, they take out the most sensitive native plants, leaving only hardy species like poison ivy and Virginia creeper. Then they prime the ground for invasives. Even more than their European relatives, jumping worms seem to reshape the forest from the ground up.

"Every single thing that they do is transformative," Dobson says.

Until it moves, a jumping worm looks a lot like any other earthworm: long and thin, with rosy brown skin divided into bellows-like segments. Experts will tell you to look at the clitellum-the band that holds the reproductive organs of worms, which are hermaphrodites. In European worms, the smooth, pink clitellum is found closer to the middle of the body. On jumping worms, it's milky white and sits near the head.

There are many species of jumping worms. The first arrived in the United States in California in the 1860s. Others have been in the Southeast for more than a century-long enough to earn colloquial names like the Alabama Jumper. (You can buy these online, too, but worm experts advise against spreading them.)

The three species that Dobson and others worry most about are newer arrivals, and likely hitchhiked on imported plants, where they caught the attention of groundskeepers. "The gardeners were out there saying, 'I know these are earthworms; they are supposed to be good. But I swear, they are killing my plants,'" Dobson says.

An oft-repeated anecdote holds that jumping worms first appeared in Washington, D.C., among the cherry trees in 1912. By the 1940s, they were spotted at the Bronx Zoo, where one species was later raised to feed the resident platypuses. They have been in a few other New York parks for more than 50 years, which is why Dobson chose these forests to study their long-term ecological effects. For some reason, however, jumping worm populations have exploded in the last decade or so. And the worms are spreading even faster than Dobson imagined-including within city limits.

While in New York, I meet with Clara Pregitzer, a forester at the nonprofit Natural Areas Conservancy, who takes me on a tour of Forest Park in Queens. When I find her next to the statue of a somber soldier at the Richmond Hill War Memorial, she's wearing tortoiseshell glasses, a loose white blouse, and dirty jeans cuffed above leather boots. We stroll up the tree-lined avenue, then turn off onto a shady path. "This is one of my favorite parks for showing off high-quality forest," Pregitzer says.

Indeed, it's a beautiful spot. Hundred-year-old oaks stretch their boughs across the wide trails and the understory is neither bare nor overgrown. (Pregitzer says the park has good "sight lines.") The gently undulating landscape is a textbook example of the "knob and kettle" terrain left behind by retreating glaciers.

Earlier, over email, Pregitzer had warned that we might not find any jumping worms here. In 2013 and 2014, she led a survey of New York's green spaces, tallying up the trees and understory plants and noting the distribution of jumping worms. She found heavy infestations in 12 percent of the plots she studied, though they may have been present in close to a third. Less than 5 percent of the plots at Forest Park showed signs of jumping worm activity.

But within ten minutes of walking, I spot the coffee-ground soil on the edge of the trail. Pregitzer decides to do her own version of the mustard pour: a dilute solution of dish soap. Within a few minutes, a parade of jumping worms emerges from the ground."Oh, nasty," says Pregitzer, scrunching up her nose.

We follow the worm soil away from the trail, 10 feet, 15 feet, 50 feet, into a shallow depression. There, we don't need the dish soap. Brushing away the leaf litter reveals a dozen worms in an area the size of a dinner plate. Pregitzer picks up a six-inch-long monster with a stick. "Nasty," she says again.

She is visibly unsettled by the discovery. "This is one of the best parks, and now that we are digging in a little bit and really looking for them, they're everywhere," she says, gazing around. "There have got to be, like, millions." We keep walking for another hour or so, and, much to her dismay, find only one worm-free site-on a steep hill where the topsoil has washed away.

That's a big change from a few years ago, and when I report the news to Annise Dobson, who is using Pregitzer's survey data in her own work, she immediately decides to revisit the original study sites. A week after I get home, Dobson emails me to say that she's finding worms everywhere. "I'm floored and honestly reeling from the extent of it," she says. They are now in 64 percent of the plots across the city.

Myriam Wares

It's not entirely clear how the jumping worms have spread. Conventional knowledge holds that they can't cover much ground on their own-perhaps 30-odd feet in a year, although one researcher I talk to swears he's seen a single worm move that far in an afternoon. Their cocoons, which are about the size of peppercorns, can be carried much farther in water, and scientists have noticed that invasions often march down hillsides and along waterways.

But experts suspect that the blame lies primarily with humans. It's all too easy to unwittingly transport worms and cocoons in plants, mulch, and soil, in the treads of shoes and tires, or caked onto landscaping equipment.
Read: Is the insect apocalypse really upon us?
Perhaps we've been moving more earth in recent years, and carrying worms with it. A few major nurseries could be spreading them by accident. Or the worms may be benefiting from favorable conditions or some clever adaptation to their new environment. Whatever the reason, jumping worms have fanned out across the northern United States over the past few decades and continue to expand their territory. They were first identified in Rhode Island in 2015 and in Oregon in 2016, though they may have arrived earlier in both places.

As of late 2017, there had only been one sighting of jumping worms in Canada, but the country's vast tracts of carbon-rich, worm-free boreal forest are already under siege by their European cousins. And scientists there know it's only a matter of time before the jumping worms follow.

Bernie Williams remembers when she discovered jumping worms in Wisconsin. October 3, 2013, was "the day that ruined many of our lives," says Williams, a worm expert at the state Department of Natural Resources.

She was leading a group of researchers and managers on a tour of the University of Wisconsin arboretum. Scientists already knew European worms had taken up residence there, and Williams led the visitors to a heavily invaded spot. But as soon as she saw the soil, she knew something was wrong. "These worms were everywhere," she says.

Over the next three years, the jumping worms stormed across 25 acres of forest in the arboretum, effectively eradicating their European rivals. They have now been reported in 52 of Wisconsin's 72 counties, Williams tells me, disproving predictions that the harsh winters would keep them at bay.

Many Madison residents know and loathe the worms, which can decimate flowers and vegetables. At a community garden near campus, I meet a man sifting compost through a screen as a precaution. "That usually catches 'em," he says.

Sometimes, under the right conditions, the worms can reach "infestation" levels, and come pouring out of a house's foundations "like Medusa's head," Williams says. "If you like invertebrates, you squeal with delight." Homeowners, however, tend to be less thrilled, and in bad years, Williams spends her days fielding calls from disgruntled residents.

Dobson hears similar frustrations in heavily impacted parts of the East Coast. People are seeing changes in their gardens, in their local woods, even on their kids' soccer fields (the worms can damage the roots of turf grasses). She's watched people break down in tears and pick fights with their neighbors over who's to blame for introducing the worms. "A lot of my time is taken up trying to comfort very upset people," Dobson says.

Unfortunately, there isn't much anyone can do once invasive earthworms get established. This becomes clear one day as I watch Brad Herrick and Marie Johnston crawl around for hours in Wisconsin's mosquito-infested woods, plucking jumping worms from inside a series of two-foot-wide metal enclosures. Herrick and Johnston, both researchers at the UW arboretum, want to test one of the few promising weapons against jumping worms: a low-nitrogen fertilizer called Early Bird, commonly used on golf courses. To assess its effectiveness, they've been manually removing all the worms from each of 24 high-walled rings before adding back a known number of victims. (When I ask Herrick what they do with the evicted worms, he says, "We gently chuck them.")

The problem is that the cocoons act like a seed bank. Mature worms lay them in the fall before they die, and the cocoons hatch throughout the spring and summer, providing a seemingly endless source of young worms. "It's like a two-headed monster," Herrick says.

Herrick and Johnston each claim an enclosure and start sweeping through the leaf litter. In his first, Herrick finds 37 jumping worms; Johnston counts 52 in hers. Then they move on to the next. This is their sixth removal attempt, and Herrick is baffled by the high number of holdouts. "Maybe they are climbing in," Johnston muses, only to look over and see a worm crawling up the outside of a nearby enclosure. "Crap!"

Even if Early Bird is effective, Herrick says, it will only be useful for small infestations in gardens or urban landscapes. Scientists are wary of applying it to forests. Prescribed burning shows some promise, but everyone agrees that by far the best solution to the worm problem is to stop spreading them in the first place.

Johnston and Herrick recently published a study showing that heating compost and soil to 104 degrees Fahrenheit effectively kills both worms and cocoons. That's something that mulch and compost companies could do. The bigger challenge is educating the public, which Herrick has made a personal mission.

The day I visit, he and Johnston give a talk to a few dozen teachers who are visiting the arboretum for a training workshop. That same night, he drives three hours across the Illinois border to speak with a group of master gardeners. He tells them to buy only mulch and compost that have been treated to kill stowaways, and to avoid city compost made of leaves collected from sites all over town. He urges them to inspect potted plants for jumping worms and to buy bare-root varieties whenever possible. Some scientists go even further, advising local garden clubs not to hold plant swaps at all.

Read: When conservationists kill lots (and lots) of animals
Under its invasive-species rules, Wisconsin has officially banned the transportation and sale of jumping worms, as has New York. But Williams says the state focuses more on helping limit worm movement than on punishing people who spread them, since it's usually unintentional.

The day after our meeting, she heads up north to talk to a group of loggers about the risks of invasive worms and what they can do to stop them. She recommends using a broom to knock soil off trucks and tires. She's under no illusion that this will solve the problem, but "you'll slow them down," she says.

In general, it's hard to change people's opinions about earthworms. "We have this Eurocentric mind-set that whatever is good in Europe has got to be good here," Dobson says. "People don't take it really seriously unless they're actually seeing the impacts on the ground."

In a perverse way, the jumping worm has been something of a blessing: Unlike European worms, they elicit an intense feeling of repulsion in most people. "They only get more gross over time," Dobson says.

"They are the stuff of nightmares," says Justin Richardson, a soil biogeochemist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who studies heavy-metal accumulation in worms. Remembering his first encounter with them, he says, "It was like Night of the Living Dead."

Bernie Williams is the only person I talk to who has anything nice to say about jumping worms. "They're much faster. They're aerodynamic, almost. They're smooth. They're handsome," she says. "I really think they are an amazing animal."

Williams's enthusiasm for worms knows few bounds. She tells me that the annelid phylum, to which earthworms belong, has been around for at least 500 million years. It contains more than 7,000 species of worms, which come in all different shapes and sizes, including one native to eastern Washington State that reportedly grows up to three feet long. And, as if that weren't enough, earthworms have five hearts-or the worm equivalent. (However, it's a myth that cutting a worm in half makes two; it usually just makes one dead worm.)

Williams understands the concerns about invasive worms' effects on forests, and she spends a lot of her time teaching people how to prevent their spread. But she also takes a more pragmatic view. "We are going to have to live with them," she says.

It's a sad truth about most biological invasions. If humans catch the problem early on, or if the intruders are confined to an island, we can sometimes eradicate an unwanted visitor. But more often than not, the offending organism infiltrates the landscape long before we fully grasp the threat. Think of chestnut blight, which toppled 4 billion trees in the early 20th century, or the Burmese python, now a top predator in Florida's Everglades.

Given that earthworms won't likely fell giant trees or swallow your cat, I wonder if they will fit into the category of lesser-known offenders, like house sparrows and starlings. Both were introduced in the late 1800s from Europe to New York. The sparrow was brought over for pest control and old-world nostalgia, the starling by a group of Shakespeare enthusiasts intent on importing every species mentioned in his writings.

The birds outcompete native songbirds for nest sites and hurt agricultural yields by eating seeds, pooping on grains stored in silos, and transmitting diseases. By one estimate, starlings cause $800 million in damage every year. But the birds have not set off alarms in most ordinary citizens. They are just part of American life.
Read: Eat an invasive species for dinner
Will worms be the same? There is no question that forests are changing in fundamental ways as a result of the invasion. "Do they store less carbon? Probably. Are they more susceptible to drought? Probably," Peter Groffman says. "Are they supporting a different suite of biodiversity? Yeah, they are." But the impacts are invisible to most of us, and represent metamorphosis as much as destruction.

Perhaps it's not a matter of whether worms are good or bad. Maybe such projections of human values-from the Victorians to Darwin to today-are what got us into this mess in the first place, Dobson says. "What I've come to realize is that that's not the right way to think about anything in an ecosystem."

On my last day in New York, Dobson picks me up and we battle our way along the Gowanus Expressway toward Staten Island and more city parks. With brick warehouses and shiny skyscrapers rising around us like mutant trees, it's tempting to dismiss New York's parks as urban anomalies with little bearing on the fate of the rest of the continent's forests. But Dobson pushes back against that idea.

For one thing, she says, the ecosystems aren't that different; native hardwoods dominate the overstories of both, and the understories of New York's parks often hold surprising troves of rare plants like true Solomon's seal. More importantly, the stresses urban forests experience-including biological invasions, pollution, and human disturbance-presage those that other North American forests will encounter in the future. "What happens here is going to predict potentially what happens beyond," Dobson says.

Eventually, the traffic thins and we cross the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, passing from a world of glass and concrete into one overrun by lush vegetation. We head south and soon arrive at a quiet sweep of forest called Wolfe's Pond.

Dobson parks on an empty street and we take a few minutes to ready ourselves. I follow her lead, tucking my pants into my socks to protect against ticks, as she prepares three jugs of mustard slurry. Then we set off into the woods, using the GPS on her phone to locate one of Pregitzer's plots.

We find the site next to a muddy wash, surrounded by dented beer cans and faded plastic debris. The ground is solid poison ivy and Virginia creeper, both mowed down to ankle height by deer. The soil looks like the dregs in a French press. "Wow, this is so wormy," Dobson says. She throws down the PVC frame and pours out half of the mustard mixture. Then she sets a 10-minute timer and starts counting. Within five minutes, she's at 24. She dumps out the rest of the bottle, and another wave appears. "Oh, there's 30," she says. "31."

Dobson suspects that this is a relatively new invasion, like the one I saw at Forest Park. Worm infestations tend to peak and then decline. Their numbers climb quickly when resources are abundant. Then, after the worms eat themselves out of house and home, the population density drops. "This is the top of the parabola," Dobson guesses.

Next, we head to another plot, across the road. Upon setting foot in the woods, we can tell it's different. We retreat to the sidewalk and clean the treads of our shoes with sticks to avoid transporting cocoons into what appears to be a worm-free forest.

Dobson points out dainty Canada mayflower growing along the trail. She pulls out a handful of duff and lights up when she sees the thin white tendrils of hyphae-symbiotic fungi-weaving through the humus. "There are so many beautiful things here!" she says.

We continue a few hundred yards up the trail to another of Pregitzer's plots. Dobson lays down the frame, carefully fitting it over a few fragile plants. Then she pours. We hold our breath, waiting to see if anything moves. After a minute, a jumping worm emerges, then another. She counts four in all. For the first time, Dobson appears crestfallen. This forest seems so healthy. She looks over her shoulder, back toward the worm-infested spot across the road.

"This might very well look like that in a few years," she says. While it may not be good or bad, it will certainly be different.

Julia Rosen is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, High Country News, National Geographic, Hakai and elsewhere.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The "crazy worms" remaking forests aren't your friendly neighborhood garden worms. Then again, those aren't so great either. On a sweltering July day, I follow Annise Dobson down an overgrown path into the heart of Seton Falls Park. It's a splotch of unruly forest, surrounded by the clamoring streets and cramped rowhouses of the Bronx.

# data[].attributes.headline
Fires: Biologists Fear for Vulnerable Species

# data[].attributes.subject
Fires: Biologists Fear for Vulnerable Species

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
© 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
COLONIA BERLIN, Bolivia - A few months ago, a representative from Cargill traveled to this remote colony in Bolivia's eastern lowlands in the southernmost reaches of the vast Amazon River basin with an enticing offer.

The American agricultural giant wanted to buy soybeans from the Mennonite residents, descendants of European peasants who had been carving settlements out of the thick forest for more than 40 years. The company would finance a local warehouse and weighing station so farmers could sell their produce directly to Cargill on-site, the man said, according to local residents.

One of those farmers, Heinrich Janzen, was clearing woodland from a 37-acre plot he bought late last year, hustling to get soy in the ground in time for a May harvest. "Cargill wants to buy from us," said Mr. Janzen, 38, as bluish smoke drifted from heaps of smoldering vegetation.

His soy is in demand. Cargill is one of several agricultural traders vying to buy from soy farmers in the region, he said.

Cargill confirmed the accounts of colony residents, and said the company was still assessing whether it would source from the community. That decision would depend on a study of the area's productivity and land titles, said Hugo Krajnc, Cargill's corporate affairs leader for the Southern Cone, based in Argentina. "But if a farmer has burned down its forest we'll not source from that grower," he said.

A decade after the "Save the Rainforest" movement forced changes that dramatically slowed deforestation across the Amazon basin, activity is roaring back in some of the biggest expanses of forests in the world. That resurgence, driven by the world's growing appetite for soy and other agricultural crops, is raising the specter of a backward slide in efforts to preserve biodiversity and fight climate change.

In the Brazilian Amazon, the world's largest rain forest, deforestation rose in 2015 for the first time in nearly a decade, to nearly two million acres from August 2015 to July 2016. That is a jump from about 1.5 million acres a year earlier and just over 1.2 million acres the year before that, according to estimates by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.

Here across the border in Bolivia, where there are fewer restrictions on land clearance, deforestation appears to be accelerating as well.

About 865,000 acres of land have been deforested, on average, annually for agriculture since 2011, according to estimates from the nongovernmental Bolivia Documentation and Information Center, an area nearly the equivalent of Rhode Island in size. That figure has risen from about 366,000 acres a year, on average, in the 1990s and 667,000 acres a year in the 2000s.

Now, a new study by an environmental advocacy group points to fresh indications of large-scale forest-clearing by Bolivian and Brazilian farmers who trade soybeans with Cargill.

That organization, Washington-based Mighty Earth, used satellite imaging and supply-chain mapping information from the Stockholm Environment Institute, an environmental think tank, to identify deforestation in Brazil where two American-based food giants, Cargill and Bunge, are the only known agricultural traders. The supply-chain mapping by the environmental institute uses customs, shipment and storage data, as well as production data from Brazilian municipalities to trace agricultural exports back to producers.

According to Mighty Earth's analysis, the Brazilian savanna areas in which Cargill operates, a region called the Cerrado, saw more than 321,000 acres of deforestation between 2011 and 2015. Mighty Earth also linked Bunge, the other agricultural giant, to more than 1.4 million acres from 2011 to 2015.

In Bolivia, where supply-chain mapping is not available, Mighty Earth sent employees to areas where Cargill operates. The organization used drones to record the clearing of forests and savannas in areas where Cargill operates silos.

The study was funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation and a nongovernmental organization, Rainforest Foundation Norway.

A reporter for The New York Times independently traveled to remote areas of Bolivia described in the environmentalists' report and interviewed farmers engaged in deforestation who said they sold soy to Cargill. The farmers described what they called Cargill's push to increase its purchases of locally produced soy and its attempts to enhance bonds with local producers.

The reports of fresh deforestation come despite a landmark deal signed three years ago by Cargill and other companies that included a target of "eliminating deforestation from the production of agricultural commodities like palm oil, soy and beef products by 2020." Experts at the time said the deadline, laid out in the New York Declaration of Forests, would require companies to start straightaway to make their sourcing more sustainable.

Both Cargill and Bunge said the report seemed to inflate its role in the region's deforestation. Cargill's share of soy in the Bolivia municipalities in which it operates came to about 8 percent, Cargill said. Meanwhile, in Brazil's Matopiba region, Bunge's share was about 20 percent, the company said.

And soy is just one crop behind deforestation, said Stewart Lindsay, Bunge's vice president for global corporate affairs.

"One company alone cannot solve this issue," Mr. Lindsay said. "A positive step would be for more companies to adopt zero deforestation commitments, apply controls to block crops grown in illegally cleared areas from entering their supply chains, report publicly on progress and invest millions of dollars to support sustainable land use planning efforts, all of which Bunge has done." (Bunge, however, is not a signatory to the New York Declaration of Forests.)

In an interview, Cargill chief executive David MacLennan said the company was studying the allegations of deforestation in Bolivia and Brazil linked to the company. "If there's something there, if it's substantiated, we'll do something about it," Mr. MacLennan said. "If that's accurate, it's not acceptable.

"We're going to honor our obligations and our commitments," he continued. "We've committed to ending deforestation and to do our part in ending deforestation. Our word is our bond."

National Priorities

Forest loss is detrimental to the earth's climate. The clearing of woodlands and the fires that accompany it generate one-tenth of all global warming emissions, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, making the loss of forests one of the biggest single contributors to climate change.

Only about 15 percent of the world's forest cover remains intact, according to the World Resources Institute. The rest has been cleared, degraded or is in fragments, wiping out ecosystems and displacing indigenous communities, scientists say.

Behind the rise in deforestation is a strategy by multinational food companies to source their agricultural commodities from ever more remote areas around the world. These areas tend to be where legal protections of forests are weakest.

The Brazilian Amazon, a poster child for the global forest-conservation movement, has enjoyed increasing protections, like a moratorium announced in 2006 on forest clearing for soy production. Between that time and 2015, Brazil reduced Amazon deforestation by almost two-thirds, according to estimates by Mongabay, the environmental news site, based on data from the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

The uptick in forest loss since then, however, has raised concerns that the progress is far from secure.

Brazil was aware of the challenge of keeping deforestation at bay, Everton Lucero, the secretary of climate change and forests of Brazil's Ministry of the Environment, said in an interview.

"We are very uncomfortable with the bad news that we had a rise in deforestation, and we are taking every possible measure to reverse it next year," Mr. Lucero said. Budget shortfalls amid Brazil's recent economic and political turmoil, he said, had wreaked havoc with its policing of its rain forests.

When traveling to remote regions, "Sometimes our command and control units were without fuel for helicopters," he said. "Hopefully we are on a recovery path."

Bolivia, on the other hand, presents a different situation. President Evo Morales, a socialist, has made securing "food sovereignty" a major part of his agenda, driving Bolivia's agricultural expansion. There are relatively few forest protections, and the government's Forestry and Land Authority is tasked with the potentially conflicting roles of regulating land use, forestry and agriculture, and issuing concessions for logging and farming. The landlocked country has declared that it expects to clear almost 14 million more acres of forest by 2025, to convert into farmland.

Bolivia's greenhouse gas emissions levels per capita exceed that of many European countries, despite having a far lower per capita income. Deforestation is responsible for more than 80 percent of Bolivia's total carbon dioxide emissions, according to a recent study by researchers at Insead, a graduate school based in Fontainebleau, France.

A major culprit is the cultivation of soy, which has jumped more than 500 percent in Bolivia since 1991, to 3.8 million hectares in 2013, according to the most recent agricultural censuses. Little of that soy is consumed domestically. The vast majority is processed and exported as animal feed in a commodities trade that serves a global appetite for hamburgers, chicken and pork.

"The forest is seen as useless land that needs to be made useful," said Nataly Ascarrunz, executive director of the Bolivian Institute of Forestry Investigation, a Bolivian nongovernmental organization that monitors and researches the country's forests.

"There's a lot of pressure for economic development," Ms. Ascarrunz said. "When resources are flowing, production is happening and people have work. It's very hard to argue with that."

Looking Toward 2030

Victor Yucra, the director general of Bolivia's forest and land management at the Forestry and Land Authority, stressed the need for the Bolivian government to balance the protection of its forests with the needs of its agricultural sector.

"Our concern is in ensuring that intensive agricultural production takes place within a framework that also provides for sustainable forestry and protection for standing forests," Mr. Yucra said.

Mr. MacLennan, the chief executive of Cargill, described a business trip to Brazil last year, during which he saw the Amazon from a plane window. "You look down and you see this beautiful forest," he said. "Kilometers and kilometers of forest. But you also see these big chunks of dirt.

"The brown really contrasts with the green," he continued, comparing the forest and deforested areas. "When you see it, it's like, 'Holy cow. That's what's happened.' It just hit me when I saw it in broad daylight - the impact the deforestation has."

Mr. MacLennan initially garnered praise among environmentalists for pledging to extend the no-deforestation pledge it had made regarding palm oil to cover every commodity the company handles. Cargill's commitment was called one of the most sweeping environmental pledges ever made by a large agricultural company. It earned Mr. MacLennan a photo opportunity with Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general at the time.

Even before the New York Declaration, Cargill had made significant efforts to buy palm oil sourced only from land not linked to fresh deforestation, according to a supply-chain expert with extensive experience working on Cargill's global sustainability efforts. The expert spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that to do so openly would jeopardize professional relations with the company.

Cargill continued to invest millions of dollars adding extra staff members and hiring third-party auditors to verify that the palm oil was coming from established fields, not farmland freshly carved from the forest, he said. But Cargill has been less aggressive with other commodities, he said.

Part of the issue was Cargill's decentralized setup, the expert said. Another problem was the resistance from commodities traders, whose incentive is to seek supplies from as many sources as possible in order to drive down costs. Buying only sustainably grown commodities would mean a more limited supply.

Now, environmental groups accuse Cargill of backtracking on its 2020 deadline. In recent statements, Cargill has adopted a 2030 deadline for elimination of deforestation from its supply chain - a separate deadline, mentioned elsewhere in the New York Declaration, that was meant to apply to ending all forms of deforestation, not just those related to agricultural commodities.

"They're willfully misinterpreting the Declaration," said Glenn Hurowitz, chief executive of Mighty Earth. "They're breaking their own pledge."

Cargill is committed, Mr. MacLennan said, to eliminating by 2020 deforestation from its production of palm oil, a commodity widely used in food, detergents and cosmetics. But, he said, Cargill had always understood the declaration to give all signatories until 2030 to tackle deforestation.

"I don't think I or others appreciated the vast complexity of the task," Mr. MacLennan said. "Let's say that we are trading or buying and selling soybean meal. Where did the soybeans come from? And did they come from deforested land? Maybe we weren't buying the soybeans directly. I don't know."

Holly Gibbs, an expert in tropical deforestation and agriculture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the 2030 deadline interpretation devastating. "If we were to wait until 2030," Ms. Gibbs said, "there would be no forest left."

Fire and Water

In Mr. Janzen's newly cleared field, a long strip of land flanked by vivid vegetation, blue-white smoke drifted from a smoldering landscape.

The German-speaking Mennonites, who live amid horse-drawn buggies and farmhouses that wouldn't look out of place in rural Ohio or Pennsylvania, trace their origins to 16th-century Protestant reformists who migrated to Russia, the United States, Canada, Belize and Mexico in search of farming opportunities and religious freedom. Some moved to Bolivia in the last century, and about 57,000 Mennonites now live in 55 secluded settlements here, eschewing some aspects of 21st century technology, like modern cars, but enthusiastically embracing others, such as tractors and genetically modified seeds.

Their trade with companies like Cargill has transformed their communities into a bloc of relatively prosperous landowners. But in recent years, they have also been targeted by land reforms enacted by Mr. Morales, who has pledged to reverse the centuries of subjugation of Bolivia's indigenous majority.

The farmer, Mr. Janzen, with the help of two laborers, spent the day digging roots from the earth, between smoking woodpiles. There was a brown jumble of slender trees, saplings, shrubs, bushes, vines and roots. Occasional larger trees showed gashes where the bulldozer first made contact, pushing them to the ground.

Farther downfield lay more long, neat cordons of debris, waiting to be burned. "If the rain holds off, I'll burn the rest tomorrow," he said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Amazon Deforestation, Once Tamed, Comes Roaring Back

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
COLONIA BERLIN, Bolivia - A few months ago, a representative from Cargill traveled to this remote colony in Bolivia's eastern lowlands in the southernmost reaches of the vast Amazon River basin with an enticing offer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Amid all the uncertainty today, one thing is sure: This will not be the last pandemic. New infectious diseases are jumping from animals to humans at an accelerating pace. Experts suspect that Ebola, HIV, MERS, and the new novel coronavirus all emerged this way. Other plagues wait in the wings: About half of an estimated 1.7 million unknown viruses that infect mammals and birds might possibly infect people-with unpredictable consequences.

Many officials have called for outlawing wildlife markets and trade to prevent outbreaks, and China has taken short-term measures in recent months. But that's an imperfect solution; such bans hit poor people hard and can drive activity underground. Besides, they address only one of many situations that bring people and wild animals together.

As conservationists point out, infectious "spillovers" are especially likely in places where people cut down forest for farming, logging, grazing, or roadbuilding. Such landscape changes may bring humans closer to animals they once rarely encountered, or transform the habits and mix of species in ways that spread infections. Wild animals that are declining specifically because of habitat loss share twice as many viruses with people, according to research from PREDICT, an emerging pandemic threats monitoring program funded by USAID.

"The same things causing species to decline are causing public health risks," says the program's director, Christine Kreuder Johnson, an epidemiologist and veterinarian at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

Johnson and a small cadre of like-minded experts around the world are working to integrate human health, animal health, and environmental policy. Their hope is that protecting ecosystems may actually help prevent pandemics. However, this equation is not nearly as simple as it sounds: Just as doctors don't treat all diseases with the same medicine, ecological interventions would need to be fine-tuned to reduce a specific threat of infection. "It's not going to be an easy answer like: Conserve biodiversity, period," says Stanford University disease ecologist and veterinarian Susanne Sokolow.

Few systems are studied deeply enough to pinpoint how spillover occurs, but research in Australia offers one example.

Few systems are studied deeply enough to pinpoint how spillover occurs, but research in Australia offers one example. Decades of work showed that deforestation there has led flying foxes to congregate in urban trees, where they pass Hendra virus to horses-which can in turn pass it to humans. To help minimize this risk, Montana State University disease ecologist Raina Plowright has developed a project to restore native flowering trees that can lure the nectar-eating bats back into forests.

A more preliminary study comes from near Uganda's Kibale National Park, where farms border tracts of remnant forest. Models suggest diseases are especially likely to make a leap in these patchy regions. Stanford medical and doctoral student Laura Bloomfield recently found that people often interact with primates when they enter the forest in search of building materials. Her data suggest providing people with lumber or creating forested buffer zones might help.

Yet another proposal, this one in the exploratory stage, targets Sin Nombre, a hantavirus carried by deer mice that can be fatal to humans. The idea: Build nest boxes for barn owls, since a family can devour about 1500 rodents per year. Further research is needed, however, to confirm its effectiveness and that it won't backfire by, for instance, increasing transmission among stressed-out mice.

Most public health officials aren't thinking about ecosystem management quite yet. "If there's a recognition that human health and environmental health are interdependent, and if that turns into something that helps us increase conservation efforts, that would be so wonderful," says Suzan Murray, program director for the Smithsonian's Global Health Program.

The pandemic's catastrophic human and economic toll could consign such plans to the back burner-or provide new urgency, Murray adds. "I hope this time brings out a lot of those ideas, where we understand how dependent we are on the natural world," says Johnson. "It's past time."
This story originally ran in the Summer 2020 issue as "Wildlife Health Is Not Separate from Our Own."​ To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.​

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Protecting Habitats Could Help Prevent Future Pandemics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amid all the uncertainty today, one thing is sure: This will not be the last pandemic. New infectious diseases are jumping from animals to humans at an accelerating pace. Experts suspect that Ebola, HIV, MERS, and the new novel coronavirus all emerged this way.

# data[].attributes.headline
This Volcano Destroyed an Island, Then Created a New One - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
This Volcano Destroyed an Island, Then Created a New One - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After the October blast at Lateiki in the Kingdom of Tonga, a larger island formed over a connected vent in the ocean.

The loss of the tiny island of Lateiki in the archipelagic Kingdom of Tonga in October was short-lived. It was reborn as a new island roughly 400 feet to the west. Credit... Copernicus Sentinel data/Annamaria Luongo/SpaceTec Partners

Lateiki was a tiny island in the archipelagic Kingdom of Tonga, formed in 1995 by an ebullient submarine volcano. Last month, that underwater firestarter decided it was time for some explosive redecorating.

An eruption in the southwest Pacific Ocean was first reported on Oct. 14 by a Tongan ship. The Tonga Geological Service then scanned through satellite imagery and noticed the paroxysm, at Lateiki, began a day earlier. Over the next week or so, various vessels, flights and satellites intermittently saw an ashy plume rising from the island.

By Nov. 1, it was all over; Lateiki was gone, its remnants swallowed by the volcano's erupting maw. But this loss of Tongan territory was short-lived. As quickly as Lateiki self-destructed, it was reborn as a new island roughly 400 feet to the west. The new Lateiki, 1,310 feet long and 330 feet wide, is nearly four times the size of the old one.

Lateiki is highly practiced in the art of volcanic makeovers. Several of its eruptions reportedly built ephemeral shoal islands in the 18th and 19th centuries, and more definitively in 1967 and 1979. Until 1995, these islands lasted a few months before being chewed up by the waves.

Submarine volcanism can be difficult to study and observe. But Lateiki's cycles of death and rebirth give scientists clues to the nature of the magmatic machinations below. And with improving satellite technology, they can be documented better than ever before.

"To see this process happening in our lifetime is pretty spectacular," said Janine Krippner of the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

Sitting midway between the islands of Kao and Late, Lateiki - formerly known as Metis Shoal - is just one member of an extended family of volcanoes. It sits on the Tonga-Kermadec volcanic arc, a 1,740-mile-long trench that delineates where the Pacific plate dives beneath the Australian plate. This titanic tectonic battle fuels many volcanoes in the southeast Pacific, from New Zealand's North Island to the northern tip of the Tongan archipelago.

In August, an unnamed volcano along that spine erupted, producing a San Francisco-sized raft of pumice. Lateiki is just the latest fiery fountain on the arc to put on a show.

The ability of Lateiki to migrate may seem strange. But new vents can pop up anywhere along the volcano's 3-mile long, flat-topped surface, creating islands in different locations.

"I was a little surprised that the old island completely disappeared," said Ed Venzke, who oversees the database of volcanoes at the Global Volcanism Program.

The 1995 island had been partly eroded by waves over the past quarter-century, but nevertheless resisted complete annihilation because it was made of solid clumps of sticky, solidified lava. But the violence of October's eruption finally seemed to cause it to collapse.

It is too early to forecast how long the new Lateiki will persist, said Brad Scott, a volcanologist at GNS Science in New Zealand. Until someone takes a closer look, it is impossible to say how easy it may be for the ocean, or another volcanic explosion, to take it out.

Its construction materials matter. Havre, another submarine volcano on that arc, erupted in 2012, producing a pumice raft 155 square miles across. But no island was created, because pumice, formed when lava quickly quenches in seawater and traps gas, is buoyant, not adhesive, and easily drifts away. Gloopy, degassed lava flows erupting at shallow depths are far better at building islands.

If the new Lateiki does stick around, it may end up like Japan's Nishinoshima or Iceland's Surtsey: other pop-up volcanic islands that, after the embers had cooled, became citadels of marine, microbial and avian life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This Volcano Destroyed an Island, Then Created a New One

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After the October blast at Lateiki in the Kingdom of Tonga, a larger island formed over a connected vent in the ocean. Lateiki was a tiny island in the archipelagic Kingdom of Tonga, formed in 1995 by an ebullient submarine volcano. Last month, that underwater firestarter decided it was time for some explosive redecorating.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As global temperatures rise and the human population expands, more of the planet is vulnerable to desertification, the permanent degradation of land that was once arable.

While interpretations of the term desertification vary, the concern centers on human-caused land degradation in areas with low or variable rainfall known as drylands: arid, semi-arid, and sub-humid lands. These drylands account for more than 40 percent of the world's terrestrial surface area.

While land degradation has occurred throughout history, the pace has accelerated, reaching 30 to 35 times the historical rate, according to the United Nations. This degradation tends to be driven by a number of factors, including urbanization, mining, farming, and ranching. In the course of these activities, trees and other vegetation are cleared away, animal hooves pound the dirt, and crops deplete nutrients in the soil. Climate change also plays a significant role, increasing the risk of drought.

All of this contributes to soil erosion and an inability for the land to retain water or regrow plants. About 2 billion people live on the drylands that are vulnerable to desertification, which could displace an estimated 50 million people by 2030.

Where is desertification happening, and why?

The risk of desertification is widespread and spans more than 100 countries, hitting some of the poorest and most vulnerable populations the hardest, since subsistence farming is common across many of the affected regions.

More than 75 percent of Earth's land area is already degraded, according to the European Commission's World Atlas of Desertification, and more than 90 percent could become degraded by 2050. The commission's Joint Research Centre found that a total area half of the size of the European Union (1.61 million square miles, or 4.18 million square kilometers) is degraded annually, with Africa and Asia being the most affected.

The drivers of land degradation vary with different locations, and causes often overlap with each other. In the regions of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan surrounding the Aral Sea, excessive use of water for agricultural irrigation has been a primary culprit in causing the sea to shrink, leaving behind a saline desert. And in Africa's Sahel region, bordered by the Sahara Desert to the north and savannas to the south, population growth has caused an increase in wood harvesting, illegal farming, and land-clearing for housing, among other changes.

The prospect of climate change and warmer average temperatures could amplify these effects. The Mediterranean region would experience a drastic transformation with warming of 2 degrees Celsius, according to one study, with all of southern Spain becoming desert. Another recent study found that the same level of warming would result in "aridification," or drying out, of up to 30 percent of Earth's land surface.

When land becomes desert, its ability to support surrounding populations of people and animals declines sharply. Food often doesn't grow, water can't be collected, and habitats shift. This often produces several human health problems that range from malnutrition, respiratory disease caused by dusty air, and other diseases stemming from a lack of clean water.

Desertification solutions

In 1994, the United Nations established the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), through which 122 countries have committed to Land Degradation Neutrality targets, similar to the way countries in the climate Paris Agreement have agreed to targets for reducing carbon pollution. These efforts involve working with farmers to safeguard arable land, repairing degraded land, and managing water supplies more effectively.

The UNCCD has also promoted the Great Green Wall Initiative, an effort to restore 386,000 square miles (100 million hectares) across 20 countries in Africa by 2030. A similar effort is underway in northern China, with the government planting trees along the border of the Gobi desert to prevent it from expanding as farming, livestock grazing, and urbanization, along with climate change, removed buffering vegetation.

However, the results for these types of restoration efforts so far have been mixed. One type of mesquite tree planted in East Africa to buffer against desertification has proved to be invasive and problematic. The Great Green Wall initiative in Africa has evolved away from the idea of simply planting trees and toward the idea of " re-greening," or supporting small farmers in managing land to maximize water harvesting (via stone barriers that decrease water runoff, for example) and nurture natural regrowth of trees and vegetation.

"The absolute number of farmers in these [at-risk rural] regions is so large that even simple and inexpensive interventions can have regional impacts," write the authors of the World Atlas of Desertification, noting that more than 80 percent of the world's farms are managed by individual households, primarily in Africa and Asia. "Smallholders are now seen as part of the solution of land degradation rather than a main problem, which was a prevailing view of the past."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As global temperatures rise and the human population expands, more of the planet is vulnerable to desertification, the permanent degradation of land that was once arable. While interpretations of the term desertification vary, the concern centers on human-caused land degradation in areas with low or variable rainfall known as drylands: arid, semi-arid, and sub-humid lands.

# data[].attributes.headline
Sudden oak death spreading fast, California’s coastal forests facing devastation - SFChronicle.com

# data[].attributes.subject
Sudden oak death spreading fast, California’s coastal forests facing devastation - SFChronicle.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It is the forgotten killer when compared to our increasingly frequent climate calamities, but the virulent pathogen known as sudden oak death remains active and is spreading death so fast it could destroy California's coastal forest ecosystem, UC Berkeley scientists reported Thursday.

The deadly microbe has now established itself throughout the Bay Area and has spread along the coast from Monterey to Humboldt County, according to a study of 16,227 trees in 16 counties in Northern California.

Millions of coast live oak and tan oak trees have withered and died over the past quarter century, leaving acres of kindling for wildfires, but the outbreak this year was one of the worst. Oak trees have historically been abundant in California and southwestern Oregon, with hundreds of millions of them stretching all the way to Baja California.

The rate of trees infected almost doubled in 2019 - from 3.5% to 5.9% - and was 10 times higher in some places compared with the 2018 survey, said Matteo Garbelotto, the director of the UC Berkeley Forest Pathology and Mycology Laboratory, which tested leaf samples taken by 422 volunteers.

Infections were found in all the well-known hotbeds, like Marin and Sonoma counties, the East Bay, Big Sur and the Santa Cruz mountains. But the 12th annual survey detected more of the pathogen this year in virtually every location. That's mainly because the disease spreads faster in the kind of wet weather that hit California last winter, Garbelotto said.

"There was a significant increase in infection rates over last year, but that's not totally surprising because we had a lot more rainfall," Garbelotto said. "But it was a surprise to see them all at once. It's telling us we are entering a different phase of the disease, where the organism isn't really establishing itself in new areas, but is showing itself more when weather conditions are favorable."

Sudden oak death is an exotic disease that was discovered in Mill Valley in 1995. It now exists in forests and wildlands in 14 California counties and in Curry County, Ore., just across the state border.

It kills oak trees, including California's signature tree - the live oak - and there are 107 susceptible host plants, including such common garden ornamentals as camellias and rhododendrons. Although some hosts are sickened, they do not always die from the fungus-like ailment. Instead, these plants, bushes and trees help spread the deadly spores.

The samples, taken every year during what organizers call "SOD blitzes," are coordinated by neighborhood and community groups. They represent the state's first citizen-based attempt to combat an invasive environmental blight using science.

The volunteers collect leaves from California bay laurels, which are the biggest transmitters of the affliction, known scientifically as Phytophthora ramorum, and the Berkeley laboratory tests them for infection. The spores from the disease accumulate on the leaves, scientists say, so wherever there are a lot of bay laurels there are usually dead oaks nearby.

Live oaks, which are mostly impacted during wet years, are no longer scientists' biggest worry. Garbelotto said tan oaks - once abundant in southwestern Oregon and California from sea level to 5,000 feet - are the trees that are being obliterated.

That is of particular concern to Native American tribes like the Kashaya, in Sonoma County, and Karuk, near the Klamath River, who consider tan oaks sacred. Besides harvesting their nutritious acorn nuts, the native people to this day use specific trees for traditional ceremonies.

Tan oaks have been steadily dying, even in dry years, according to Garbelotto. Researchers estimate that 50 million tan oak trees have died from the disease. The trees, which can grow up to 100 feet tall, have been wiped out in portions of Big Sur, Sonoma Mountain, Jack London State Park, China Camp State Park and Marin Municipal Water District watershed lands near Mount Tamalpais.

It is a problem, Garbelotto said, because tan oak acorns provide food for at least 38 different animals, including 11 types of rodents, four bird species, deer, bears and racoons. The trees themselves provide habitat and shelter for insects, birds, reptiles and mammals. Biologists are concerned that the loss of so many trees will change the microclimate of the redwood forests where tan oaks are an understory tree.

Dead and dying oak trees also make wildfires hotter and cause them to spread more quickly. A 2017 study by Garbelotto's laboratory found that 37% of the trees sampled in Sonoma County, where the Wine Country fires raged later that year, were infected by sudden oak death.

"Our fear that the disease was going to have a devastating impact on our forests is happening," Garbelotto said. "In fact, it's worse than we thought."

Of the trees tested this year, 1,732 were symptomatic. Most notable, Garbelotto said, is the estimate, extrapolated from thousands of samples, that 12% of the trees in the survey area between Richmond and San Leandro are infected. That's compared with 1% last year.

More than 21% of the trees between Redwood City and Los Altos Hills are believed infected, according to the study. The infection rate also doubled in Sonoma County and went up fourfold in Napa County. At least 18% of the trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains are now infected, Garbelotto said.

Although it was found this year mostly in locations where it had been detected before, new outbreaks were found in El Cerrito, Kensington, Berkeley and farther south along the border between Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties, he said.

The best news, Garbelotto said, is that all the samples in San Francisco came out negative. That means outbreaks detected in the Presidio and Golden Gate Park - tracked in previous years to nursery and ornamental plants - have been eradicated by gardeners who improved plant management and monitoring.

But, if anything, the disease is getting more complicated. Scientists have identified four different strains, much like different forms of the influenza virus. All detections in California have so far been one strain, believed to have originated in Southeast Asia, while a totally different strain from Europe has been found in Oregon.

Forest pathologists are determined to keep the two mating types apart for fear that they could breed - technically known as genetic recombination - and create an even more aggressive strain. Unfortunately, Garbelotto said, one of the detections this year was in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, in Del Norte County, closer to the Oregon infection, and the second strain, than researchers have ever seen it.

The European strain is known to infect different types of trees than the California version, including beech and larch trees. There is no telling what the two strains combined would do, and scientists aren't eager to find out.

"In Europe it has killed thousands and thousands of larch trees, a big conifer," he said, "so my big worry would be Douglas fir trees, possibly also redwoods."

This was the first year the lab screened the samples for the different strains, all part of an effort to track the wily killer's movements and involve citizens in the battle to stop the mysterious and illusive pathogen that is changing California woodlands and forests.

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite

Read the report

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sudden oak death spreading fast, California's coastal forests facing devastation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The infection rate for sudden oak death in California almost doubled this year compared with 2018 and was 10 times higher in some places, according to a study of 16,227 leaf samples by the UC Berkeley Forest Pathology and Mycology Laboratory.

# data[].attributes.headline
Huge trove of mammoth skeletons found in Mexico

# data[].attributes.subject
Huge trove of mammoth skeletons found in Mexico

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Mammoth bones are pictured in Tultepec, Mexico in this handout photograph released by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology (INAH)

Archaeologists said Wednesday they have made the largest-ever discovery of mammoth remains: a trove of 800 bones from at least 14 of the extinct giants found in central Mexico.

Moreover, they believe they have made the first-ever find of a mammoth trap set by humans, who would have used it to capture the huge herbivores more than 14,000 years ago, said Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

"This is the largest find of its kind ever made," the institute said in a statement.

The skeletal remains were found in Tultepec, near the site where President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's government is building a new airport for Mexico City.

Some bore signs that the animals had been hunted, leading experts to conclude that they had found "the world's first mammoth trap," it said.

"Mammoths lived here for thousands of years. The herds grew, reproduced, died, were hunted... They lived alongside other species, including horses and camels," archaeologist Luis Cordoba told journalists.

Researchers said at least five mammoth herds lived in the area of the find.

Mammoth skeletal remains, pictured in this handout photograph released by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology (INAH), were found at a site where President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's government is building a new airport

An expert works with mammoth bones discovered in Tultepec, Mexico, in this handout picture released by the country's National Institute of Anthropology (INAH)

Mexico has been the scene of surprising mammoth discoveries before.

In the 1970s, workers building the Mexico City subway found a mammoth skeleton while digging on the capital's north side.

© 2019 AFP

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Huge trove of mammoth skeletons found in Mexico

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Archaeologists said Wednesday they have made the largest-ever discovery of mammoth remains: a trove of 800 bones from at least 14 of the extinct giants found in central Mexico. Moreover, they believe they have made the first-ever find of a mammoth trap set by humans, who would have used it to capture the huge herbivores more than 14,000 years ago, said Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

# data[].attributes.headline
2,624-year-old Tree Discovered in North Carolina Swamp Is One of the Oldest on Earth

# data[].attributes.subject
2,624-year-old Tree Discovered in North Carolina Swamp Is One of the Oldest on Earth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Researchers have identified a group of ancient bald cypress trees which are over 2,000 years old in the forested wetlands of North Carolina's Black River.

Staggeringly, the scientists found that one of the trees was 2,624 years old. This makes the bald cypress the oldest-known tree in the eastern portion of North America, as well as the longest-living known wetland tree species on Earth, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Research Communications.

The ancient group-consisting of perhaps 50 individuals-was discovered in 2017 by lead author of the study David Stahle from the University of Arkansas and his colleagues, who took 110 core samples measuring about 0.2 inches in diameter from various trees without harming them.

They then counted the annual growth rings to determine the age of the trees while also using radiocarbon dating on the innermost rings of the two oldest specimens for independent confirmation.
Newsweek subscription offers >
Stahle's prior research in the area had already identified bald cypress trees ( Taxodium distichum) which were up to 1,700 years old, but the new data, taken from trees which had not been studied before, suggests the species is longer-lived than previously thought.

"We were not surprised to find these old trees because there are hundreds of 1,000-year-old trees throughout the Black River swamp forest and the oldest trees look old, real old," Stahle told Newsweek. "But we were gratified to finally prove the great age of bald cypress."

"The area of old growth bald cypress was 10 times larger than I realized," Stahle said in a statement. "We think there are older trees out there still."

The trees form part of an intact ecosystem of wetlands that extend along most of the 65-mile length of the Black River, which the researchers call one of the "great natural areas of eastern North America."
Newsweek subscription offers >
The river has been recognized as one of the cleanest and high quality waterways in North Carolina, and Stahle's work has helped boost preservation efforts in the area. In fact, The Nature Conservancy-a private land conservation group which keeps its holdings open to the public-has purchased around 6,400 hectares of this river ecosystem.

However, the researchers say that thousands more hectares of high quality ancient forests remain unprotected.

"It is exceedingly unusual to see an old-growth stand of trees along the whole length of a river like this," Stahle said. "Bald cypress are valuable for timber and they have been heavily logged. Way less than 1 percent of the original virgin bald cypress forests have survived."

Aside from their impressive age, the trees can also help to reconstruct ancient climate conditions in the region. This is because their growth is affected in different ways by both dry and wet conditions, and this shows up in the core samples.

In fact, the researchers say that the tree samples have provided the longest exactly-dated climate proxy-a source of climate information taken from natural material which can be used to estimate past conditions-in eastern North America, showing evidence of drought and flooding during pre-colonial times.

"The old bald cypress trees at Black River record the history of growing season precipitation for the mid-Atlantic region extending back into prehistory over 2,000 years," Stahle said. "The precipitation record in these trees is amazingly accurate and detailed."

"It includes the droughts recorded with rain gauges during the 20th and 21st centuries, and the severe multi-year droughts of 1587-1589 associated with the disappearance of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island and the drought of 1606-1612 concurrent with the hardships suffered during the early years of the Jamestown Colony, the first successful English settlement in the New World," he said.

Katherine Skinner, executive director of The Nature Conservancy's North Carolina chapter, said in a statement that Dr. Stahle's original work on the Black River, which showed trees dating from Roman times, inspired her organization to begin conservation in the area more than two decades ago.

"This ancient forest gives us an idea of what much of North Carolina's coastal plain looked like millennia ago," she said. "It is a source of inspiration and an important ecosystem. Without Dr. Stahle, it would have gone unprotected and likely destroyed."

Living trees over 2,000-years-old are extremely rare worldwide, the researchers say. To date, only eight species have been proven to live for more than this amount of time-six of which are found in the western United States, one in Chile and, now, the bald cypress trees in North Carolina.

The team say that the cypress tree which they determined to be 2,624 years old, is one of the oldest known continuously living trees on the planet. Only individual trees of Sierra juniper (2,675 years old), giant sequoia (3,266 years old), alerce (3,622 years old) and Great Basin bristlecone pine (5,066 years old) have been demonstrated to live longer.

Nevertheless, the bald cypress tree is the oldest-known wetland tree. In second place is the Montezuma bald cypress ( T. mucronatum,) found in Mexico, which can live for up to 1,500 years.

The researchers hope that the latest findings will boost conservation efforts in the area, which could help to mitigate some of the threats that the ancient wetland forest is facing.

"To counter these threats, the discovery of the oldest known living trees in eastern North America, which are in fact some of the oldest living trees on Earth, provides powerful incentive for private, state, and federal conservation of this remarkable waterway," the authors wrote in the study.
This article was updated to include additional comments from David Stahle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
2,624-year-old tree discovered in North Carolina swamp is one of the oldest on Earth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Researchers have identified a group of ancient bald cypress trees which are over 2,000 years old in the forested wetlands of North Carolina's Black River. Staggeringly, the scientists found that one of the trees was 2,624 years old.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Mystery of the Undead Tree Stump - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.subject
The Mystery of the Undead Tree Stump - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Read: Trees have their own song
How best to think about the living stump? Is it a vampiric parasite that sustains its undead existence by leeching the supplies of its fellow trees? Is it a beneficial partner that extends the root network of those other kauri in exchange for water? Is it even an individual entity anymore, or just a part of its neighbors? Without chlorophyll to harness the sun's energy and make its own food, is it really much of a plant, or something more like a fungus or an animal-an organism that gets its nutrients from other living things? "I think this is really exciting," says Franciska de Vries of the University of Amsterdam. "It poses so many questions."

Credit: Sebastian Leuzinger

Underground, trees are intimately connected. The fungi on their roots can wire adjacent individuals to one another and ferry nutrients between them, creating what ecologists have come to call a " wood-wide web." The roots themselves can also graft directly onto one another-a phenomenon that's been documented in about 150 species, but is still mysterious. Why do it? Researchers have suggested that these natural grafts stabilize the trees, or allow them to share resources during times of hardship.

But what if one of the connected trees becomes a stump? Living stumps-no leaves, but intact roots-were documented first in 1833, and several times since. There's a signposted one, for example, in Oregon's Rogue River Gorge. Researchers have long assumed that their roots are connected to those of their neighbors, but that doesn't fully explain how they survive.

Here's the problem: Water isn't pumped through trees, but pulled. The water that evaporates from leaves drags more water up through stems and from roots-a process called transpiration. But without leaves, that pulling force is absent. Water doesn't flow, and neither do the nutrients dissolved within it. The innards of a leafless stump should be stagnant. Instead, they're still on the move. Leuzinger and Bader proved that by inserting small needles into the water-carrying tissues, releasing small pulses of heat from one needle at intervals, and then detecting the pulses with the others. The stump's water flows at a fifth the speed of its neighbors', but it does flow.

The speed of that flow depends on what the surrounding trees are doing. If the neighbors' sap flows faster, the stump's sap flows slower. But if the neighbors reduce transpiration, whether at night or during heavy rain, the stump's sap starts racing. This suggests that it isn't just a passive part of its neighbors' roots. Instead, it seemingly uses their downtime to gain more water.
Read: Tree seedlings have a very good reason to shirk their parents
Why would the intact trees keep their connections to a partner that's no longer contributing anything itself? They might benefit because the stump's roots extend the range over which they can collect water, Leuzinger says. Or it could just be that they can't identify freeloaders in their networks, or dissociate from them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
sebastian leuzinger of  the auckland university of technology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read: Trees have their own song How best to think about the living stump? Is it a vampiric parasite that sustains its undead existence by leeching the supplies of its fellow trees? Is it a beneficial partner that extends the root network of those other kauri in exchange for water?

# data[].attributes.headline
The Astonishing History Locked in Whale Earwax - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.subject
The Astonishing History Locked in Whale Earwax - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
To an extent, that's not surprising: Of course, whales would be more stressed if their pod-mates are being harvested. Still, it's astonishing just how well the two data sets match. Trumble and Usenko could get a pretty good picture of global whaling efforts through the lived experiences of 20 whales.

There are a few discrepancies, and they're telling. For example, whaling fell away during World War II while cortisol levels rose by 10 percent. The oceans may have been relatively free of harpoons, but they were instead filled with battleships, submarines, depth charges, and the sounds of warfare. Those indirect disturbances, it seems, were just as stressful to the whales as their hunters had been-and they continue today.

Since the 1970s, whaling has dwindled to negligible levels in the Northern Hemisphere, but if anything, cortisol levels have risen-slowly at first, and then more dramatically in recent decades. Trumble and Usenko showed that this rise correlates with the number of days when ocean temperatures were unusually high.

The team's 146-year chronicle also has a gigantic spike in the early 2000s when cortisol levels seem to shoot through the roof. That's because of the very first blue whale they studied. It was the only individual whose life spanned those particular years, and for whatever reason, it spent those years in an extreme state of stress. Was it reacting to the noisy shipping lanes that crisscross California's waters? Was it suffering from the mercury, pesticides, and other pollutants in its body? No one knows, but its cortisol was hitting highs that haven't been seen since the days when people killed whales in the hundreds of thousands. "When I look at that, I think: Here's an individual that's under stress levels as if it's being whaled," says Usenko.

"I think this is going to revolutionize our studies of whale biology," says Kathleen Hunt from Northern Arizona University, who was not involved in the work. "Whale biologists are used to gleaning tiny bits of information from samples like a single blubber biopsy, one or two fecal samples, or a few photographs scattered over years. An earwax plug is more like 200 samples in a row, taken from the same animal, every 6 months, for its whole life." They're like the ice cores that climate scientists use to peer back into the Earth's distant past.

The plugs are especially informative because whales are so long-lived. They can take a decade to mature, go for years between pregnancies, and spend much longer recovering from episodes of trauma. "We've never really had a way to track individual whale stress responses over those sorts of timescale before, and it's very exciting," says Hunt.

The team is now examining the wax for pregnancy hormones, chemical isotopes that reflect the whales' diet, and other telltale molecules. "We're getting tons and tons of data from these earplugs that we've only ever assumed," Trumble says. And he's not running out of material to work with. "The Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa has 4,000 ear plugs, and we had 100 shipped to us. We're getting quite deep into this."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The History of the Oceans Is Locked in Whale Earwax

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To an extent, that's not surprising: Of course, whales would be more stressed if their pod-mates are being harvested. Still, it's astonishing just how well the two data sets match. Trumble and Usenko could get a pretty good picture of global whaling efforts through the lived experiences of 20 whales.

# data[].attributes.headline
Is the Insect Apocalypse Really Upon Us? - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.subject
Is the Insect Apocalypse Really Upon Us? - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's as if "our global climate dataset only involved 73 weather stations, mostly in Europe and the United States, active over different historical time windows," explained Alex Wild from the University of Texas at Austin on Twitter. "Imagine that only some of those stations measured temperature. Others, only humidity. Others, only wind direction. Trying to cobble those sparse, disparate points into something resembling a picture of global trends is ambitious, to say the least."

For those reasons, it's hard to take the widely quoted numbers from Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys's review as gospel. They say that 41 percent of insect species are declining and that global numbers are falling by 2.5 percent a year, but "they're trying to quantify things that we really can't quantify at this point," says Michelle Trautwein from the California Academy of Sciences. "I understand the desire to put numbers to these things to facilitate the conversation, but I would say all of those are built on mountains of unknown facts."

Still, "our approach shouldn't be to downplay these findings to console ourselves," Trautwein adds. "I don't see real danger in overstating the possible severity of insect decline, but there is real danger in underestimating how bad things really are. These studies aren't perfect, but we'd be wise to heed this warning now instead of waiting for cleaner studies."

After all, the factors that are probably killing off insects in Europe and North America, such as the transformation of wild spaces into agricultural land, are global problems. "I don't see how those drivers would have a different outcome in a different area, whether we know the fauna there well or not," says Jennifer Zaspel from the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Insects, though diverse, are also particularly vulnerable to such changes because many of them are so specialized, says May Berenbaum from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "There's a fly that lives in the gills of a crab on one Caribbean island," she says. "So what happens if the island goes, or the crab goes? That's the kind of danger that insects face. Very few of them can opportunistically exploit a broad diversity of habitats and supplies." (That said, Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys concluded that several once-common generalist species are declining, too.)

The loss of even a small percent of insects might also be disproportionately consequential. They sit at the base of the food web; if they go down, so will many birds, bats, spiders, and other predators. They aerate soils, pollinate plants, and remove dung and cadavers; if they disappear, entire landscapes will change. Given these risks, "do we wait to have definitive evidence that species are disappearing before we do something?" Berenbaum asks.

Doing something is hard, though, because insect declines have so many factors, and most studies struggle to tease them apart. In their review, Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys point the finger at habitat loss above all else, followed by pesticides and other pollutants, introduced species, and climate change, in that order. "If it was one thing, we'd know what to do," says Moreau from Cornell. Instead, we are stuck trying to tend to 1 million smaller cuts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is the Insect Apocalypse Really Upon Us?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's as if "our global climate dataset only involved 73 weather stations, mostly in Europe and the United States, active over different historical time windows," explained Alex Wild from the University of Texas at Austin on Twitter. "Imagine that only some of those stations measured temperature. Others, only humidity.

# data[].attributes.headline
Climate Change Is Forcing Trees to Move Northwest - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.subject
Climate Change Is Forcing Trees to Move Northwest - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The results are fascinating in part because they don't immediately make sense. But the team has a hypothesis: While climate change has elevated temperatures across the eastern United States, it has significantly altered rainfall totals. The northeast has gotten a little more rain since 1980 than it did during the proceeding century, while the southeast has gotten much less rain. The Great Plains, especially in Oklahoma and Kansas, get much more than historically normal.

"Different species are responding to climate change differently. Most of the broad-leaf species-deciduous trees-are following moisture moving westward. The evergreen trees-the needle species-are primarily moving northward," said Songlin Fei, a professor of forestry at Purdue University and one of the authors of the study.

There are a patchwork of other forces which could cause tree populations to shift west, though. Changes in land use, wildfire frequency, and the arrival of pests and blights could be shifting the population. So might the success of conservation efforts. But Fei and his colleagues argue that at least 20 percent of the change in population area is driven by changes in precipitation, which are heavily influenced by human-caused climate change.

"This is a very cool study, with results that seem to raise more questions than they can provide answers for," said Loïc D'Orangeville, an ecologist at the Quebec Forest Research Center who was not connected to the study, in an email. "West is usually drier in the study region, so although it's been wetter in the recent decades, it's still drier than the East."

"I can't really make up [for] that moisture attractiveness for trees," he added.

The movement of conifers and other needle trees north makes much more sense. Conifers are already more vulnerable to temperature than flowering, deciduous trees. They also already populate the boreal forest of eastern North America, so they're well-adapted to the colder, drier conditions they will find as they expand north in the United States.

Fei and his colleagues don't know if the westward trend will continue. We may have already seen the peak of westward movement, and northward expansion may soon outrank it. "When the result came out that trees are moving westward, our eyeballs opened wide. Like, 'Wow, what's going on with this?' The results seem to show that moisture plays a much more significant role in the near-term, which is very intriguing," he told me.

The survey draws on the U.S. Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, a kind of continuously running census of the country's tree population. The program, which stepped up in 1978 but which has been conducted in some form since the 1930s, surveys the health, density, and species mix of forested areas across the country. It examines not only the majestic, landmark tracts of untrammeled forest (like George Washington National Forest) but the humbler woods, as well: stands of trees near the highway, at the edge of housing developments, and in the middle of city parks.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The results are fascinating in part because they don't immediately make sense. But the team has a hypothesis: While climate change has elevated temperatures across the eastern United States, it has significantly altered rainfall totals. The northeast has gotten a little more rain since 1980 than it did during the proceeding century, while the southeast has gotten much less rain.

# data[].attributes.headline
Opinion | A Chain of Species Destruction at Yellowstone - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Opinion | A Chain of Species Destruction at Yellowstone - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The havoc caused by stocking the park's lake for sport fishing ravaged ospreys, pelicans, bald eagles, grizzly bears and the lake's own native cutthroat trout.

Credit... Leonardo Santamaria

Recreational fishing is a pastime in which people have come to expect the fish they want in the places they happen to want them. That is, they want their fish stocked and ready to catch, even in places those fish never originally lived. This practice can seem harmless, or even beneficial. But the introduction of one "beneficial" species in Yellowstone National Park suggests how rejiggering the natural world for human convenience can cause ecological disaster for almost everything else.

All it took at Yellowstone Lake, the 136-square-mile centerpiece of the park, was the introduction of lake trout, a fish originally found mainly in the Northeast and Canada and beloved by anglers everywhere. The federal government had transplanted them to smaller lakes within the park in the 1890s, a time when planting fish in remote fishless lakes seemed like a smart way to spread around America's amazing abundance. But a century later, in 1994, the introduced species turned up in Yellowstone Lake, which was already celebrated for its own native Yellowstone cutthroat trout. Park managers theorized that an angler illegally introduced the fish, either by accident or in the misguided belief that it would improve a big lake with plenty of potential for further sportfishing. One result is that anglers now catch 20,000 lake trout a year there.

But the lake trout went on to gorge on the young of the cutthroat trout, and the population of the native subspecies plummeted. Because there were fewer cutthroat trout around to eat them, large water fleas soon proliferated. The water fleas in turn gobbled up the microscopic plants at the bottom of the food web, causing the lake water to become clearer and probably also warmer near the surface, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. When the cutthroat trout largely vanished from the shallow waters they prefer, the lake trout didn't take their place, because they like deeper waters. So the switch deprived ospreys, white pelicans, bald eagles and other fish-eating birds of their main food source. The osprey population around the lake soon dropped from 38 nesting pairs, with almost 60 percent of them successfully fledging young birds, to just three nests with zero success. Eagles likewise declined almost to a level last seen during the height of DDT use in the 1960s, again with zero reproductive success.

Because far fewer cutthroat trout were making their springtime spawning run up streams around the lake, grizzly and black bears that once lined the banks to feed on them had to go elsewhere in search of food. The density of river otters also fell to the lowest levels known for that species. To casual park visitors the lake no doubt still looked wild and beautiful (that clear water!). But it was like visiting a celebrated European city when all the locals have vanished and everybody you bump into is a tourist.

What happened at Yellowstone Lake is a familiar story for conservationists, because fish stocking has produced cascading ecological disasters pretty much everywhere. For this, Americans can thank Robert B. Roosevelt, a 19th century congressman, conservationist, and uncle of Theodore Roosevelt. He was the fishing world's version of the infamous New Yorker who set out to give his fellow Americans every bird mentioned in Shakespeare and instead bequeathed us a plague of starlings.

Roosevelt was a leading proponent of the post-Civil War "fish culture movement," which espoused hatchery-reared fish as a means of replenishing depleted stocks of native species. But Roosevelt also promoted hatcheries as a tool for swapping species willy-nilly across the continent and the globe, with fish eggs shipped "from one end of our country to the other with as little trouble or danger" as a letter dropped in the mail. "Rivers that are now deserted could be filled to repletion," Roosevelt gushed, "so that there would be abundance for netters, seiners, and fishermen of all kinds, whether they fished in season or out of season, early or late, and with murderous or legitimate implements. This is the object to be obtained."

In 1871, Congress established the United States Fish Commission, the first federal agency set up to address the depletion of a natural resource. Roosevelt ensured that the legislation included a mandate to move fish into new territories. "There is no reason why the waters of the West should be less prolific than those of the East," he argued, "provided the right species were introduced; and were trout, salmon, bass, shad and sturgeon to take the place of catfish, pickerel and suckers, the gain would be manifest."

Some anglers even now subscribe to this magical belief that introducing new species and replacing dull natives with flashy newcomers will make everything better. Until recently, many state fish and wildlife agencies - largely funded by hunting and fishing license fees - felt the same way, introducing new species as a matter of policy. But these introductions have had disaster built in from the start.

"Think about it," the University of Washington ecologist Julian D. Olden recently told Scientific American. "The fish that we stock are those that grow rapidly, are highly fecund, and are great on the end of the hook. It shouldn't be too surprising that the same attributes we love as anglers are also responsible for the high impacts we are witnessing on native species and ecosystems."

So what can we do about it now? The spectacle of a pristine ecosystem being wrecked almost overnight forced Yellowstone to undertake a major effort to remove lake trout, according to Todd Koel, who heads the park's native fish conservation program. As a result, the cutthroat trout population is slowly recovering and the spawning run in nearby streams is rebuilding. But the control program costs taxpayers and donors $2 million a year and will continue to do so, says Dr. Koel, "for the foreseeable future." A better plan is of course to prevent these introductions from happening in the first place. Some anglers now recognize the threat and work to educate other anglers about how doing things that may seem beneficial or even humane - dumping a bucket of live bait at the end of the day, or releasing unwanted fish from one lake into another - can wreck the fishing for everybody else. Some jurisdictions have also begun to enlist anglers in the control effort, by removing bag limits or banning catch-and-release for problem species. At Yellowstone Lake, the rules announce in bold face and italics that lake trout "must be killed - it is illegal to release them alive."

State and federal agencies have refrained in recent decades from stocking nonnative species into new territories. Some agencies have also begun to designate native species conservation areas, removing barriers to upstream spawning areas and maintaining barriers against downstream intruders. But the practice of stocking nonnative fish into water bodies where they already exist remains standard for now, because the people who pay fishing license fees want it and an entire recreational fishing industry depends on it. The theory, in any case, is that the damage is already done - though that may prove to be wishful thinking, as increased flooding causes introduced species to spread to new habitats, and to still other new habitats beyond that.

A Saturday morning spent fishing is at least still an opportunity to get outdoors and enjoy what nature remains to us - and maybe even forget for a little while the recent news about the extinction emergency now threatening a million or more species worldwide. But for an angler standing by a stream and casting out a line, the thought that rises helplessly to mind is that every species we lose, every habitat we compromise in the name of "human convenience," is one more piece of the American character and of our own souls inadvertently washed away into oblivion.

Richard Conniff (@RichardConniff) is the author of "The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth" and a contributing opinion writer.
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | A Chain of Species Destruction at Yellowstone

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The havoc caused by stocking the park's lake for sport fishing ravaged ospreys, pelicans, bald eagles, grizzly bears and the lake's own native cutthroat trout. Recreational fishing is a pastime in which people have come to expect the fish they want in the places they happen to want them.

# data[].attributes.headline
Specially Trained Dogs Help Conservationists Find Rare Iowa Turtles | Iowa Public Radio

# data[].attributes.subject
Specially Trained Dogs Help Conservationists Find Rare Iowa Turtles | Iowa Public Radio

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An eastern Iowa conservation group is taking an unconventional approach to tracking rare turtles on its land. Iowa Public Radio tagged along with a man who's trained his hunting dogs to find the reptiles for researchers. Counting the creatures will help conservationists manage the land better.

It's a cool morning on a nature preserve owned by Bur Oak Land Trust in Johnson County. I'm scouring a shady hillside with John Rucker and his four Boykin spaniels, looking for turtles.

"Find turtle, find turtle," Rucker calls to his dogs. He turns to me and says, "did I tell you I'm the only person in the world that does this?"

In fact, there are a number of conservationists and their canine companions doing similar work (though Rucker may be one of the few who lives out of tents and vans while he's working).

When he's not living off the grid in rural Montana, Rucker travels the country with his specially-trained hunting dogs, helping scientists and conservationists find turtles.

"This is Rooster," John says, introducing the dogs. "This is Jenny Wren. She's the one that gives me my litters. And that's Mink. No, that's Jaybird, and that's Mink."

We make our way through the undergrowth, checking in brush piles and under old logs. When the dogs find a turtle, they'll pick it up and bring it back to be counted.

"You will notice that as soon as they strike a scent trail their tails will start wagging furiously, and then their whole demeanor becomes extremely excitable," Rucker explains.

Citizen conservationist Judy Felder is one of the volunteers out hunting today.

"It's sort of like a religion for me," Felder says. "Nature is important and somebody has to defend it, protect it, preserve it."

Today we're looking for ornate box turtles - they're about four to five inches across with yellow markings.

"It's just wonderful to hold one. They're gorgeous, they're absolutely gorgeous," Felder said. "The feel of their shell is...I really hope we find one..."

Ornate box turtles are a remnant species of the country's vast prairies, where they co-evolved with wild bison. When European settlers plowed the grasslands, the turtles lost nearly all of their habitat. Now they're considered threated in Iowa.

"We try to manage our properties with the most vulnerable species in mind, and these turtles are the most vulnerable species," says Jason Taylor, a property stewardship specialist with the Bur Oak Land Trust.

Taylor hopes to restore this site to what it looked like pre- settlement - a sunny, open grassland dotted with oak trees, and periodically burned by prairie fires. How many ornate box turtles are found here will help Taylor decide how to manage the area.

"There are a number of things that we're going to do simply because we have known presence of these turtles. As opposed to on other properties, we'd be able to mow, we'd be able to burn during growing season, we'd be able to do all these additional things," Taylor said.

We don't have any luck finding turtles on our first day, due to the chilly temperatures. Later in the week, we go to a sunnier stretch of sand prairie in another part of Johnson County.

Again, Rucker lets his dogs off leash and they run through the prairie grasses, looking for turtles.

"Find turtle, find me a turtle," Rucker calls to the dogs.

It's a beautiful, clear day and the dogs are on a roll.

"Jason, we're watching this dog here, she's acting interested in something," Rucker calls to the Bur Oak Land Trust staffer.

After rooting through a thicket of trees in the middle of the prairie, one of the dogs emerges with a turtle grasped squarely in its mouth.

"Hey we got a turtle! That dog's got one!" Rucker calls. "Good girl, Mink! Come on girlie."

Volunteers scoop them up and identify them. Cornell College Biology Professor Andy McCollum and his students Lizzy Ott and Lily Ullenius are here to track the turtles and hold on to some for further research. Over the course of their time in the state, the dogs find a total of 137 turtles.

It may seem like a lot of effort for a couple of relatively small creatures. But Rucker says the loss of even a single species can upset the balance of an ecosystem.

"Ok, so it's like if you have a symphony orchestra and the richness and the beauty and the sound comes from many different types of instruments, the woodwinds, the strings, the percussion," Rucker said. "The natural world is just like that. For every species that winks out, not only is it less beautiful, it's all interdependent."

Seeing ecosystems regain that biodiversity is breathtaking, Rucker says. He tells me about looking out on a stretch of prairie after a summer rainstorm.

"The smell of the tallgrass prairie was overpoweringly beautiful. To see the turtle dogs catching ornate box turtles within sight of a wild bison herds after a summer rain storm was..." Rucker trailed off. "It almost makes you want to just weep to think of all that we have lost and what it would've been like 200 years ago."

With the help of Rucker and his turtle dogs, Bur Oak Land Trust is trying to bring back some of what we've lost.
Correction: This story has been changed to reflect the work of other conservation organizations that also rely on dogs to sniff out species of concern.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Specially Trained Dogs Help Conservationists Find Rare Iowa Turtles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An eastern Iowa conservation group is taking an unconventional approach to tracking rare turtles on its land. Iowa Public Radio tagged along with a man who's trained his hunting dogs to find the reptiles for researchers. Counting the creatures will help conservationists manage the land better.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Shorebirds of Delaware Bay Are Going Hungry - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
The Shorebirds of Delaware Bay Are Going Hungry - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image

Volunteers on Reeds Beach in Middle Township, N.J., sifted through nets that temporarily trapped shorebirds so that they could be counted, tagged, weighed and measured.

On their migrations north, famished birds stop to feast on eggs laid by horseshoe crabs. But the crabs were overfished, and conservationists say that some bird species may not recover.

Volunteers on Reeds Beach in Middle Township, N.J., sifted through nets that temporarily trapped shorebirds so that they could be counted, tagged, weighed and measured. Credit Credit

By Jon Hurdle

Photographs by Michelle Gustafson

REEDS BEACH, N.J. - On a recent spring day at this remote beach, hundreds of shorebirds flapped frantically beneath a net trapping them on the sand. Dozens of volunteers rushed to disentangle the birds and place them gently in covered crates.

On a nearby sand dune, teams of scientists and volunteers attached metal leg bands, plastic tags and tiny radio transmitters to birds of three species. They were weighed and measured, and then released.

The operation is part of an annual "catch" of migratory shorebirds that stop on the beaches of the Delaware Bay, a globally important bird habitat, to gorge on the eggs of spawning horseshoe crabs. The stopover strengthens the birds for the long-distance migration to the Canadian Arctic, their breeding grounds, from as far away as southern Chile.

With fresh information on the birds' weight and health, the scientists will be able to judge whether these species are getting enough food to reach their breeding grounds, and whether their populations are stable.

One of them, the red knot, has been listed as a threatened species. Since 2000, red knot numbers have plunged as low as 10,000 in some years, around one-ninth of the level in the 1980s. At the moment, the population hovers at about 30,000, still too low to be sustainable, conservationists claim.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Additional challenges like severe Arctic weather during breeding, or coastal development along the migration route, could lead to the bird's extinction. Populations of other migratory shorebirds, like semipalmated sandpipers and ruddy turnstones, have also declined.

The problem, conservationists say, is the overfishing of horseshoe crabs for commercial fishery bait and the harvesting of the animals for their blood, which contains an extract called L.A.L., used by the biomedical industry to detect certain bacteria.

Image

Volunteers, Charles Duncan, left, and Susan Taylor, preparing nets to trap shorebirds for examination.

Now, conservationists are renewing calls to halt the harvest for bait altogether, and to persuade the biomedical industry to switch to recombinant Factor C (rFC), a synthetic alternative to LAL, to ease pressure on the horseshoe crab population.

"The only responsible thing to do here is a moratorium," said Eric Stiles, president of New Jersey Audubon, an environmental group leading the initiative.

Recognizing the threat to the birds, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, an interstate regulator, banned the harvest of female horseshoe crabs for bait starting in 2013, in the hope that a recovering population of females would lay more eggs and allow the birds to rebound.

While the commission maintains there has been an increase in the number of crabs since the ban, neither the crabs nor the red knot has recovered to the levels seen before the fishing industry's unprecedented removal of the crabs from the bay in the 1990s.

The commission's critics blame poor enforcement of the ban and the continued harvest of thousands of crabs for bleeding, which is estimated to kill at least 15 percent of them and may prevent the survivors from reproducing.

Crabs taken for bleeding are not included in the commission's quotas, and their numbers and mortality rates are not published because the companies that collect the blood want the figures kept confidential.

Conservation groups are urging officials in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia - three bay states that use crab quotas - to ban the horseshoe crab harvest until there's a full recovery of both crabs and birds. (New Jersey, the other state bordering the bay, imposed a moratorium in 2008.)

Banning the harvest, advocates argue, would rebuild a crab population that is essential not only to the birds but also to depleted marine species, such as weakfish, that feed on the crabs and in turn support commercial and recreational fishing on the bay.

"It's not just about the birds," said David Mizrahi, vice president for research and monitoring at New Jersey Audubon. "It's about the whole ecosystem."

Within the knot population, the biggest decline has been seen in long-distance migrants that spend the northern winter in Tierra del Fuego, in southern Chile. That population numbered only 9,840 in 2018, down 25 percent in the last year and less than a fifth of the number in 2000.

Scientists say those birds are especially sensitive to a shortage of horseshoe crab eggs on Delaware Bay beaches, as they are emaciated when they arrive from South America.

In the biomedical industry, the switch to rFC is being led by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which began using the substance to test new products in 2016 and plans to have 90 percent of the changeover completed by the end of 2020, according to Jay Bolden, a senior consultant biologist for the company.

The synthetic alternative is comparable in cost and efficacy to LAL, he added.

For now, conservationists say a sharp decline in crab eggs shows that quotas have failed to restore the female crab population. Average egg densities on five New Jersey beaches dropped to between 2,000 and 7,000 eggs per square meter in 2017 from as much as 100,000 per square meter in 1991, according to New Jersey Audubon.

But the fisheries commission argues that its quotas for the crab bait harvest have stabilized the populations of red knots and other shorebirds, and are beginning to result in increasing numbers of female crabs in the bay.

The number of mature female crabs rose to 7.8 million in 2017 from 5.4 million in 2011 before the quota system began, according to commission data.

The tally isn't close to the 11.2 million females - or 80 percent of the bay's carrying capacity - that might lead the commission to permit the female crab harvest to resume. But officials say it shows the current quota is working.

"I'm not sure what more the commission could do in terms of restricting harvest beyond there being zero females" allowed under the quota, said Mike Schmidtke, the commission's fishery management plan coordinator. (This year, the commercial fishing industry is allowed to take 500,000 male crabs from the bay.)

The commission estimates the red knot population to have been in the 43,000 to 49,000 range since 2011, based on a statistical method that differs from one used by conservationists.

That number, too, is well below the 81,900 that would allow the commission to lift its ban on harvesting female crabs, but is at least broadly stable, Dr. Schmidtke said.

Larry Niles, an independent biologist who has led the annual shorebird catch on the New Jersey side of the bay for the last 23 years, dismissed as "utter nonsense" Dr. Schmidtke's assertion that there was nothing more the commission could do to boost the number of crab eggs on the beaches.

And the commission's claim that the number of female horseshoe crabs is increasing is not supported by the number of horseshoe crab eggs, he added.

"If there was an increase, it would show up in egg densities," Dr. Niles said.

Earlier reporting on red knots and horseshoe crabs

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: Delaware Bay Shorebirds Are Going Hungry. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Shorebirds of Delaware Bay Are Going Hungry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On their migrations north, famished birds stop to feast on eggs laid by horseshoe crabs. But the crabs were overfished, and conservationists say that some bird species may not recover. Volunteers on Reeds Beach in Middle Township, N.J., sifted through nets that temporarily trapped shorebirds so that they could be counted, tagged, weighed and measured.

# data[].attributes.headline
A new plant species that eats insects has been discovered in Maryland | WHP

# data[].attributes.subject
A new plant species that eats insects has been discovered in Maryland | WHP

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A new plant species that eats insects has been discovered in Maryland

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
WORCESTER COUNTY, Md. (WJLA) A new carnivorous plant has been discovered by botanists in Maryland, according to the Department of Natural Resources. Botanists recently confirmed the discovery of dwarf sundew (Drosera brevifolia) in Maryland, where it was reported growing in open areas with wet peaty sand near Nassawango Creek in Worcester County.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Ozark chestnut tree was thought to be extinct, but now it's making a comeback

# data[].attributes.subject
The Ozark chestnut tree was thought to be extinct, but now it's making a comeback

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Steve Bost will show you some Ozark chinquapin trees. "But I'd have to blindfold you before you get in the car," he jokes.

Deep in the rolling southeast Missouri Ozarks, Bost gets out of his car at the end of a remote dirt road. Somewhere nearby, carefully hidden from the public, is the Ozark chinquapin tree, once a keystone Ozark forest species. Decimated by chestnut blight in the mid-1900s, any viable trees were thought to be long gone-that is, until Bost found a few healthy hangers-on in the 2000s. Now he's trying to bring the tree back from the edge of blight in a non-traditional way. And he's succeeding.

Bost wipes his face with spicebush leaves, a natural repellent for a cloud of gnats. A short hike through the woods takes us to a rocky, sunbaked slope ringed by drought-killed trees. On this ridgetop is a test plot that Bost began nine years ago, home to 117 baby and adolescent Ozark chinquapins, some up to 30 feet tall, half the height of a full-grown tree. It's Bost's greatest secret and triumph: the genetic future of the Ozark chinquapin.

Not long after taxonomistsgranted the tree independence from the lookalike Allegheny chinkapin in the 1930s and '40s and christened it Castanea ozarkensis, the infamous chestnut blight crossed the Mississippi and the Ozark chinquapin went from being a vital Southern tree to nearly vanishing from cultural memory. The only apparent remnants were Sisyphean stump sprouts, functionally useless shoots that would grow for a few years, become infected with blight, die back to the roots before they could produce nuts, and start over again.

Bost, a 61-year-old Missouri State Parks naturalist, had never even heard of the Ozark chinquapin until about two decades ago. Quickly growing obsessed, he set out on a quest to find surviving chinquapins all around the Ozarks and beyond. Acting on tips, he would sometimes drive to Mississippi and Alabama on time off, hiking around the woods for days looking for one. He says tree field guide authors claimed the tree was gone.

It wasn't. With the help of other Ozarkers, Bost has located 45 large trees that have resisted chestnut blight, mostly in Missouri and Arkansas. With the support of private and state agencies, he's leading the effort to bring them back. The Ozark Chinquapin Foundation, which Bost founded, has 15 more test plots in addition to the one we visited-adding about 1,000 test seedlings and saplings to the 45 healthy wild trees. Still, the Ozark chinquapin's continued existence is so fragile that the foundation treats their locations as classified information, protecting the few remaining seed-producing trees from foragers.

"If you start asking people in conservation around here where these trees are, they'll start getting real quiet," he says. Until the species' survival is certain, conservationists won't tell anyone where they are.

Babying a tree back to life

Bost is going to great pains to keep the Ozark chinquapin line pure. The American chestnut, the chinquapin's more famous cousin that was also decimated by chestnut blight, is undergoing a genetic concession that Bost refuses to make. In hopes of muscling that tree through to survival, researchers create DNA hybrids that are 15/16 American chestnut and 1/16 blight-resistant Chinese chestnut.

That's cheating, according to Bost. A tree's role in an ecosystem is so complex and nuanced, he says, that if you reengineer a species even a little bit, it can have unintended consequences. He prefers the laborious process of collecting pollen from a healthy tree, drying it, jarring it, and driving it 20 hours to another healthy chinquapin to hand-pollinate it.

"The minute you hybridize, you invoke a lot of other influences, and maybe then you don't have that original species forevermore," says Meg Lowman, a forest canopy ecologist and director of TREE Foundation who is also a National Geographic grantee.

The hope is to develop a genetic line that can resist the blight enough to once again play a significant role in the Ozark ecosystem. Even with only 45 healthy adult trees, that might be realistic.

"I think they have every chance in the world," Lowman says. "More threatening situations are when we get down to two Galapagos tortoises or six of a certain species of endangered cat. That's where people start to have doubts."

What's more, Castanea ozarkensis has managed to cling to more genetic diversity than the devastated Castanea dentata, the American chestnut. A 1999 DNA study in the Journal of the American Society for Horticulture Science suggested that the Ozark chinquapin actually might be the American chestnut's evolutionary parent.

Still, the order is tall. Off the cuff, leaders at St. Louis' Missouri Botanical Gardens and Chicago's Morton Arboretum were unable to name a tree that had been bred back from near-extinction to once again play a vital role in its ecosystem. The Ozark Chinquapin Foundation is in uncharted territory.

A brief history

Among other names, the Ozark chinquapin was known to Cherokee Indians as the bread tree, and they ground the nuts into flour. Settlers in the 1800s used its rot-resistant wood to make fence posts and its bark to produce a purple dye. During Prohibition, moonshiners lit its clear-burning wood to avoid detection from revenuers. Daniel Moerman's 1998 book Native American Ethnobotany cites the chestnut, part of the same genus, as a treatment for whooping cough.

But the sweet-tasting nut, released from a small golden hedgehog of a burr, was the real prize. A protein jackpot, it attracted more wildlife any other Ozark forage. The Ozark Chinquapin Foundation's game cameras have captured turkeys, deer, bobcats, coyotes, and hogs foraging for the nuts.

"People would go out and get a whole sack, a half a bushel of them," says Hearold Adams, 99, of Deer, Arkansas. "That's how good they were. Then all of a sudden, they were gone. Most people don't even remember they ever existed."

In the late 1990s, Adams was the one who first taught Bost about the lost tree. Near Adams' home is a ridgeline once known as Bear Pen Ridge. Black bears were so attracted to the heavy concentration of ridgetop chinquapins that locals used the area for trapping.

Bost breaks down why his work with the Ozark chinquapin is significant beyond the species. He brings up the ash tree, which is facing near-complete die-off at the hands of the invasive emerald ash borer. "There's almost 100 percent fatality, and they're not waiting for the emerald ash borer to kill them," he says. "They're just cutting them down. If somebody cut down every single chinquapin to remove hosts for the chestnut blight, we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing today."

Citizen science at work

Saving the chinquapin isn't all field work. In a Missouri Botanical Garden laboratory in St. Louis, Leslie Bost, Steve's daughter, embraces citizen science using a technique to test for blight resistance that she learned from researchers at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Traditionally, it takes 10 years to grow a tree, inject it with blight, and monitor it to see if that tree's genes are resistant.

Now, by injecting a single leaf with cultured blight, she can find out in five days if a tree is fit to survive. In what's known as a detached leaf assay, she removes a single leaf from a tree, infects it with blight in the lab, and observes the blight's rate of spread to determine that plant's resistance level. The more slowly the disease spreads, the stronger the genes.

Since May, the results of 70 leaf assays have come in: some of the Ozark Chinquapin Foundation's test plot trees are even more genetically resistant than Chinese chestnut, which does not succumb to chestnut blight. The strongest chinquapins will be chosen for propagation. In other words, what has been theory for a decade is now empirical: Bost's attempts are working.

Back on the test plot, Bost examines the saplings as if they are his children. The details of the Ozark chinquapin are still coming into focus. Its historic range shifts from map to map; dates of its sudden disappearance in the Ozarks vary from account to account. Its unsettled history lends the tree an air of a mystery not yet solved. Bost is still following its echo back through time.

"What we're seeing is just a skeleton of what was once there," he says. "It makes you kind of sad. It's like seeing dinosaur bones. What did we have that we lost?"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A legendary Ozark chestnut tree, thought extinct, is rediscovered

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Steve Bost will show you some Ozark chinquapin trees. "But I'd have to blindfold you before you get in the car," he jokes. Deep in the rolling southeast Missouri Ozarks, Bost gets out of his car at the end of a remote dirt road.

# data[].attributes.headline
Where To Find The Most Unusual Trees In D.C. | DCist

# data[].attributes.subject
Where To Find The Most Unusual Trees In D.C. | DCist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Where To Find The Most Unusual Trees In D.C. | DCist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's a nearly 400-year-old bonsai, a tree planted by Frederick Douglass, and a few giant sequoias.

# data[].attributes.headline
Massive Forest Restoration Could Greatly Slow Global Warming - Scientific American

# data[].attributes.subject
Massive Forest Restoration Could Greatly Slow Global Warming - Scientific American

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We have heard for years that planting trees can help save the world from global warming. That mantra was mostly a statement of faith, however. Now the data finally exist to show that if the right species of trees are planted in the right soil types across the planet, the emerging forests could capture 205 gigatons of carbon dioxide in the next 40 to 100 years. That's two thirds of all the CO ₂humans have generated since the industrial revolution. "Forest restoration is by far our most powerful planetary solution today," says Tom Crowther, a professor of global ecosystem ecology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and an author of a study published Thursday in Science that generated the eye-opening number.

The study team analyzed almost 80,000 satellite photo measurements of tree cover worldwide and combined them with enormous global databases about soil and climate conditions, evaluating one hectare at a time. The exercise generated a detailed map of how many trees the earth could naturally support-where forests grow now and where they could grow, outside of areas such as deserts and savannahs that support very few or no trees. The team then subtracted existing forests and also urban areas and land used for agriculture. That left 0.9 billion hectares that could be forested but have not been. If those spaces were filled with trees that already flourish nearby, the new growth could store 205 gigatons of carbon by the time the forests mature.

After 40 to 100 years, of course, the storage rate would flatten as forest growth levels off-but the researchers say the 205 gigatons would be maintained as old trees die and new ones grow. There would be "a bank of excess carbon that is no longer in the atmosphere," Crowther says.

The team has also created a planning tool linked to the map that will be open to the public starting July 5. Individuals and organizations can zoom in to any location to see where new forests could be started.

Crowther has not studied other carbon sequestration techniques that have been discussed a lot lately, such as ocean fertilization (growing algae to soak up carbon) or direct air capture (machines that pull CO ₂ from the atmosphere), but he thinks they would be much more expensive than growing trees. He estimates it might cost the world $300 billion to plant the 0.9 billion hectares. And new forests provide another strong benefit: they restore biodiversity, which is crucial because so many plant and animal species are disappearing. Crowther says he began to study reforestation because he was really looking for ways to stop species loss. Tremendous benefits beyond carbon sequestration "come from biodiversity-providing food, medicines, clean water and all sorts of things for humans," he says.

Pulling all that carbon from the atmosphere could take longer than anticipated, however. Forests might need more like 70 to 100 years to reach full maturity, says Robin Chazdon, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut, who was not involved in the study. Yet she says any replanting should begin as soon as possible because climate change is likely to compromise forests' ability to grow. Higher temperatures increase tree respiration, which causes them stress. And drought will widen, reducing tree growth. Crowther adds that although climate change will allow more trees to grow in northern latitudes, it will also dry out tropical latitudes. Tree loss in the tropics, he says, will outpace gains in the high north.

Chazdon cautions that replanting may not be as simple as it sounds, and she wonders if 0.9 billion new hectares will ever be possible, given competing priorities. More trees consume more water, and this could threaten agriculture or other human activities in dry areas. And local people may not want forests if they need to generate income from the land, say from farming or herding. Some prominent reforestation programs, such as ones in the Philippines, have failed "because there was no local involvement," she says.

The best places to start reforestation are where multiple benefits can readily be gained. In a July 3 Science Advances paper, Chazdon and colleagues identify a series of locations in the tropics that have higher-than-average potential for benefits as well as ease of getting started.

All the new tree work, Chazdon says, signals that "we're entering into the practicality stage" of smart reforestation. "We can bring a lot of interdisciplinary science to bear. I hope there will be more interaction between scientists and politicians, realizing that the tools we now have can guide reforestation that is the most cost-effective, and has multiple benefits and fewer tradeoffs."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Massive Forest Restoration Could Greatly Slow Global Warming

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We have heard for years that planting trees can help save the world from global warming. That mantra was mostly a statement of faith, however. Now the data finally exist to show that if the right species of trees are planted in the right soil types across the planet, the emerging forests could capture 205 gigatons of carbon dioxide in the next 40 to 100 years.

# data[].attributes.headline
Study bolsters case that climate change is driving many California wildfires - AGU Newsroom

# data[].attributes.subject
Study bolsters case that climate change is driving many California wildfires - AGU Newsroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
15 July 2019

AGU press contact:
Nanci Bompey
+1 (202) 777-7524 (GMT-4) nbompey@agu.org

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Press Contact:
Kevin Krajick (GMT-4)
+1 (212) 854-9729
kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu

Contact information for the researchers:
Park Williams, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (GMT-4)
+1 (845) 365-8193 (office)
williams@ldeo.columbia.edu

WASHINGTON - Against a backdrop of long-term rises in temperature in recent decades, California has seen ever higher spikes in seasonal wildfires, and, in the last two years, a string of disastrous, record-setting blazes. This has led scientists, politicians and media to ponder: what role might warming climate be playing here? A new study in AGU's journal Earth's Future combs through the many factors that can promote wildfire, and concludes that in many, though not all, cases, warming climate is the decisive driver. The study finds in particular that the huge summer forest fires that have raked the North Coast and Sierra Nevada regions recently have a strong connection to arid ground conditions brought on by increasing heat. It suggests that wildfires could grow exponentially in the next 40 years, as temperatures continue to rise.

The study notes that average summer temperatures in the state have risen 1.80 degrees Celsius (3.25 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1896, with three-quarters of that increase occurring since the early 1970s. From 1972 to 2018, the area burned annually has shot up fivefold, fueled mainly by a more than eightfold spike in summer forest fires. The researchers say the summer forest-fire increases are driven by a simple mechanism: when air heats up even modestly, it causes more moisture to evaporate from soils and vegetation. The result: fires start more easily, and can spread faster and farther. During the fall, and in non-forested areas, different dynamics may be at work and the results are less clear; but the researchers project that climate-driven aridity is likely to play a growing role there as well.

"It's not a surprise to see that climate has this effect in forests, but California is so big and so variable, there is no one-size-fits-all explanation for how climate might affect wildfires across the board," said the study's lead author, Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "We have tried to provide one-stop shopping to show people how climate has or, in some cases, hasn't affected fire activity."

Williams and his colleagues have already shown in a 2016 study that heightened temperatures and resulting aridity on the ground has doubled the area burned in forest fires over wider areas of the U.S. West in past decades. The premise that warmer air draws moisture from the ground level - a phenomenon known as vapor pressure deficit - is already well established. However, many confounding factors can shift fire risk up or down, and so it is not always possible to measure the effects of vapor pressure deficit. In California, human infrastructure is sprawling into forests, introducing more chances for people to both cause fires and suffer from them. And a century of efforts to suppress virtually all fires has led to a buildup of flammable materials in many forests. On the other hand, fragmentation of forest landscapes by human intrusion may in some cases limit the spread of fires. Rainfall and snow can vary year to year, sometimes adding to fire risk, sometimes subtracting. And areas dominated by shrubs or grasses instead of trees may not react the same way.

The researchers combined data from many sources, some of it going back more than 100 years. They found that growing temperature-induced vapor pressure deficit accounted for nearly all the growth in forest fires from 1972-2018. In 2017, a modern state record was set for the largest individual wildfire (more than 285,000 acres) and the most destructive (5,636 structures burned, 22 people killed). 2018 saw a new record for total annual area burned (almost 1.7 million acres), and the 2017 records were broken for the biggest individual fire (the Mendocino Complex fire, which took out 464,500 acres) and the most destructive: the Camp Fire, which burned 18,804 structures and killed 85 people. The Camp Fire leveled almost the entire forest community of Paradise.

"The ability of dry fuels to promote large fires is non-linear, which has allowed warming to become increasingly impactful," says the study. "Human-caused warming has already significantly enhanced wildfire activity in California, particularly in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and the North Coast, and will likely continue to do so in the coming decades."

That said, the authors note that the effects of climate are highly seasonal, and can vary depending on vegetation type, topography and human settlement patterns across California's highly diverse landscape. In summer, they found that summer fires did not increase in many non-forested areas dominated by grasses or shrubs. This, they say, was probably due to a combination of intense firefighting and prevention efforts, and reduced vegetation due to drought. In fall, destructive fires have grown, but because the dynamics of this season are complex, the effects of warming climate are not as obvious - at least not yet. The researchers say fall fires are driven in large part by powerful winds sweeping from the highland interior, as well as the amount and timing of precipitation, which tends to pick up around this time of year. These factors wax and wane from year to year, perhaps masking the effect of overall warming. But that effect is indeed just starting to show up in fall, and is likely to become more evident in the future, says Williams.

###
Founded in 1919, is a not-for-profit scientific society dedicated to advancing Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity. We support 60,000 members, who reside in 135 countries, as well as our broader community, through high-quality scholarly publications, dynamic meetings, our dedication to science policy and science communications, and our commitment to building a diverse and inclusive workforce, as well as many other innovative programs. AGU is home to the award-winning news publication , the Thriving Earth Exchange, where scientists and community leaders work together to tackle local issues, and a headquarters building that represents Washington, D.C.'s first net zero energy commercial renovation. We are celebrating our Centennial in 2019. #AGU100
*****

Notes for Journalists
This paper open access. Journalists and public information officers (PIOs) can download a PDF copy of the article by clicking on this link:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2019EF001210

Journalists and PIOs may also request a copy of the final paper by emailing Nanci Bompey at nbompey@agu.org. Please provide your name, the name of your publication, and your phone number.

Neither this paper nor this press release is under embargo.

Paper Title
"Observed impacts of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire in California"

Park Williams: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA;
Pierre Gentine: Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA;
Max Moritz: Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA;
Dar Roberts: Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA;
John Abatzoglou: Department of Geography, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Study bolsters case that climate change is driving many California wildfires - AGU Newsroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
AGU press contact: Nanci Bompey +1 (202) 777-7524 (GMT-4) nbompey@agu.org Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Press Contact: Kevin Krajick (GMT-4) +1 (212) 854-9729 kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu Contact information for the researchers: Park Williams, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (GMT-4) +1 (845) 365-8193 (office) williams@ldeo.columbia.edu WASHINGTON - Against a backdrop of long-term rises in temperature in recent decades, California has seen ever higher spikes in seasonal wildfires, and, in the last two years, a string of disastrous, record-setting blazes.

# data[].attributes.headline
Giant parrot was nearly as big as a kindergartner, scientists say - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.subject
Giant parrot was nearly as big as a kindergartner, scientists say - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The remains of a parrot that stood more than half the height of an average human and roamed the earth 19 million years ago have been discovered in New Zealand. (Brian Choo/AFP/Getty Images)

A collection of bird bones sat in lab storage for more than a decade, believed to be the remains of an ancient eagle. Little did scientists know what was hiding in the fossils: "Squawkzilla."

Heracles inexpectatus was discovered by scientists in New Zealand, according to a study published Wednesday. At about three feet tall, the bird would probably have stood nearly as tall as the average American 4-year-old.

Scientists have been finding enormous prehistoric birds for years, but this one still shocked them. It's the largest parrot ever known to have walked the Earth. It might have even preyed on other birds.

At an estimated 15 pounds, the now extinct bird beats out all the other parrot competitors, at nearly double the weight of the endangered kakapo, New Zealand's reigning giant parrot.

The scientists approximated its size based on two leg bones, called tibiotarsi, under the assumption that they both came from the same bird.

The fossils were dug up in 2008 in St. Bathans, New Zealand, in a massive fossil deposit that was once a prehistoric lake, where a team of paleontologists go every year to collect bones.

"My guess is, at the best of times, you could barely see the lake for all the birds that were sitting on it," Michael Archer, a co-author of the research and paleontologist at the University of New South Wales, told The Washington Post.

The large bones, believed to be those of an ancient eagle, flew under the radar for a decade. It was during a research project in the lab of Flinders University paleontologist Trevor Worthy that a graduate student rediscovered the bones. The student wanted to look at old eagle bones and quickly realized these did not fit the bill. After that, a team of researchers began reanalyzing the findings earlier this year.

The researchers compared the drumstick-like bones to bird skeletons in the South Australian Museum collection and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's electronic collection. They wanted to see if the remains matched any earlier descriptions of an existing bird species.

"Then, by elimination, we concluded that there was nothing left, and it had all the features of a parrot," Worthy said. "And while no parrot had ever been found this big, it had to be a parrot."

The bird probably lived during the Early Miocene, which spanned from about 23 million to 16 million years ago.

Researchers concluded that the bird probably couldn't fly and consumed what was along the ground and easy to reach, like berries, nuts and seeds, Worthy said.

But that might not have been enough to satiate the giant parrot.

It's possible the bird had more carnivorous ways, like another New Zealand parrot, the kea, which has been known to attack and subsequently munch upon living sheep if they are stuck in the snow. They can also dig up sea birds from their burrows and eat the chicks, according to Worthy.

Heracles might have even been eating other parrots, Archer said, giving way to a nickname: "Squawkzilla."

Though researchers do not have the bird's beak, Archer said he suspects it was large and ferocious. If the bird's skull is found, scientists will be able to tell whether it had a beak for nuts and seeds, or one for chomping down on other, smaller birds.

Heracles won't be the final unforeseen fossil from the area. Archer said the team has also found evidence of long-extinct bats, crocodiles and other birds in New Zealand.

"One of the nice aspects of paleontology is how much of what happens depends on serendipity," Archer said.

There are probably thousands more fossils waiting to be discovered, which will offer clues into who and what used to roam the planet.

"The parrot is just the latest mystery," Archer said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Meet 'Squawkzilla,' the massive prehistoric parrot scientists say terrorized other birds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A collection of bird bones sat in lab storage for more than a decade, believed to be the remains of an ancient eagle. Little did scientists know what was hiding in the fossils: "Squawkzilla." Heracles inexpectatus was discovered by scientists in New Zealand, according to a study published Wednesday.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Amazon Fires Are More Dangerous Than WMDs - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.subject
The Amazon Fires Are More Dangerous Than WMDs - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If a country obtains chemical or biological weapons, the rest of the world tends to react with fury-or at least it did in the not-so-distant past. Sanctions rained down on the proliferators, who were then ostracized from the global community. And in rare ( sometimes disastrously misguided) cases, the world decided that the threat justified a military response. The destruction of the Amazon is arguably far more dangerous than the weapons of mass destruction that have triggered a robust response. The consequences of the unfolding disaster-which will extinguish species and hasten a worst-case climate crisis-extend for eternity. To lose a fifth of the Amazon to deforestation would trigger a process known as "dieback," releasing what The Intercept calls a "doomsday bomb of stored carbon."

It is commonplace to describe the Amazon as the "world's lungs." Embedded in the metaphor is the sense that inherited ideas about the sovereignty of states no longer hold in the face of climate change. If the smoke clouds drifted only so far as the skies of São Paulo, other nations might be able to shrug off the problem as belonging to someone else. But one person shouldn't have the power to set policies that doom the rest of humanity's shot at mitigating rising temperatures.

What makes Bolsonaro's behavior so galling is the pointlessness of it. Of course, he has ties to agribusiness, which would like to raze the forest for its cattle and crops. And he campaigned on the promise of damming the river and developing the region into the country's economic engine. But there are even baser motives driving Bolsonaro's gleeful policy of deforestation: The man has a demonstrable record of racism, and he's compared the indigenous people who live on protected lands to animals in a zoo. And like Donald Trump, he squeezes personal joy from his confrontations with foreign leaders and NGOs, posing as the manly enemy of the effete elites. In other words, he's letting the fires burn, at least in part, to troll his enemies. He's cutting out the world's lungs for the sake of owning the libs.

The situation isn't without hope. The world can treat Bolsonaro with, at least, the urgency it has shown Venezuela's dictator, Nicolás Maduro. To force him away from his policy of deforestation, and to prod him to intensely fight the fire, world leaders should threaten to cancel trade agreements and ban the import of timber and beef from companies that operate in the Amazon; they should sanction members of the Bolsonaro inner circle (who, in the grand tradition of the nation's political history, seem to have achieved an expertise in money laundering); they should turn Bolsonaro and his sons, who serve as their father's henchmen, into pariahs, forbidding their international travel.

Thus far, French President Emmanuel Macron is the lone world leader who seems appropriately terror-struck by the satellite pictures of the devastation. And when he proposed rolling back trade agreements with Brazil, he spurred Bolsonaro to at last mobilize his military to act against the flames.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
dismal state of international institutions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Amazon Fires Are More Dangerous Than WMDs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If a country obtains chemical or biological weapons, the rest of the world tends to react with fury-or at least it did in the not-so-distant past. Sanctions rained down on the proliferators, who were then ostracized from the global community. And in rare ( sometimes disastrously misguided) cases, the world decided that the threat justified a military response.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Long Before These Salmon Are Gone? ‘Maybe 20 Years’ - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
How Long Before These Salmon Are Gone? ‘Maybe 20 Years’ - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Chinook salmon at Dagger Falls near the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. There are 13 species of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River drainage that are endangered. Credit... William Mullins, via Alamy

Warming waters and a series of dams are making the grueling migration of the Chinook salmon even more deadly - and threatening dozens of other species.

A Chinook salmon at Dagger Falls near the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. There are 13 species of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River drainage that are endangered. Credit... Credit William Mullins, via Alamy

NORTH FORK, Idaho - The Middle Fork of the Salmon River, one of the wildest rivers in the contiguous United States, is prime fish habitat. Cold, clear waters from melting snow tumble out of the Salmon River Mountains and into the boulder-strewn river, which is federally protected.

The last of the spawning spring-summer Chinook salmon arrived here in June after a herculean 800-mile upstream swim. Now the big fish - which can weigh up to 30 pounds - are finishing their courtship rituals. Next year there will be a new generation of Chinook.

In spite of this pristine 112-mile-long mountain refuge, the fish that have returned here to reproduce and then die for countless generations are in deep trouble.

Some 45,000 to 50,000 spring-summer Chinook spawned here in the 1950s. These days, the average is about 1,500 fish, and declining. And not just here: Native fish are in free-fall throughout the Columbia River basin, a situation so dire that many groups are urging the removal of four large dams to keep the fish from being lost.

"The Columbia River was once the most productive wild Chinook habitat in the world," said Russ Thurow, a fisheries research scientist with the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station.

Standing alongside the Salmon River in Idaho, Mr. Thurow considered the prospect that the fish he had spent most of his life studying could disappear. "It's hard to say, but now these fish have maybe four generations left before they are gone," he said. "Maybe 20 years."

Thirteen species of salmon and steelhead trout are listed as threatened or endangered in the Columbia basin, an area that includes parts of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana and British Columbia. Salmon are a keystone species in this region, critical as a food source for animals from bears to eagles to insects.

That group of beneficiaries includes an endangered population of orcas, or killer whales, along the West Coast that survive by eating Chinook in the winter and spring, up to 30 a day.

Image

The Impassable Canyon of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. Credit... Leon Werdinger, via Alamy

[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Many experts believe the orcas are starving in large part because of the decline of wild salmon. This year alone, their number has dropped from 76 to 73, alarming conservationists and scientists. Last year, an orca mother carried a dead calf for 17 days on her back. She was presumed to be grieving.

"The best thing you could do to get more spring Chinook for the orcas is to remove those four lower dams," said Don Chapman, a retired fisheries scientist who worked as a consultant to the hydropower industry and defended the dams and mitigation efforts.

He has since changed his mind about the dams: "They kill too many juveniles going downstream and some adults going back."

Salmon are swimming in warming waters, with uncertain consequences, according to a recent study. Breaching the dams also would help keep water temperatures cooler as the climate changes, Dr. Chapman said.

Chinook, or king salmon, are huge, powerful fish, the largest member of the salmon family in North America. Spring-summer Chinook make an epic migration thousands of miles through the Columbia River to the waters surrounding Alaska's Aleutian Islands, and then back to the high elevations of the Rocky Mountains.

Before the 20th century, some 10 million to 16 million adult salmon and steelhead trout are thought to have returned annually to the Columbia River system. The current return of wild fish is 2 percent of that, by some estimates.

While farming, logging and especially the commercial harvest of salmon in the early 20th century all took a toll, the single greatest impact on wild fish comes from eight large dams - four on the Columbia and four on the Snake River, a major tributary.

The four Snake River dams are used primarily to create reservoirs for the barging of Idaho's wheat to ports. But the dams raise water temperatures and block travel migration routes, increasing fish mortality.

Climate change also has raised both river and ocean water temperatures, which can be deadly to fish. In 2015, for example, unusually warm water killed an estimated 250,000 sockeye salmon.

For decades, experts have tried to ameliorate the loss of the Columbia's wild fish by installing ladders that allow the fish to swim around the dams, and by placing them in barges and trucks for transport around the dams. The massive efforts have not stemmed the decline, despite the fact that more than $16 billion has been spent on recovery over the last several decades.

Now most scientists come down on the side of removing the dams. Last fall, orca researchers urged Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington and the Southern Resident Orca Task Force, a state government panel, to begin removing the four dams on the Snake River to aid the starving whales.

"Put simply, orca need more Chinook salmon available on a year-round basis, as quickly as possible," they wrote, calling the removals "vital to ensure orca survival."

The federal agencies responsible for managing fisheries on the Columbia, though, maintain that removing the Snake River dams is not critical to the survival of salmon and that hatchery-reared fish have made up for the loss of the river's wild fish for the orcas.

The southern resident killer whales "do not distinguish between hatchery and wild fish," the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a statement.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is considering a proposal to kill up to 1,100 sea lions annually along the Columbia River, because they eat salmon as they gather to spawn.

Those who want to keep the dams point to changing ocean conditions as a major factor in the decline of the salmon. Water temperatures have been unusually warm in recent years, which reduces salmon food sources. Federal officials just announced that the marine heat wave has returned this year.

But hatchery fish are not the same, said Deborah A. Giles, science and research director at Wild Orca, a group that studies and advocates for protection of the whales. Orcas evolved eating big wild fish, some 300 to 350 pounds a day.

"Wild fish are much bigger and more lipid-rich," she said. "Having to catch the equivalent of 350 pounds in hatchery fish, which are smaller and lower quality, expends significantly more energy. They have to work a lot harder for their meals."

Nutritional stress is part of the reason that the whales are in decline. About 70 percent of pregnancies among the southern resident orcas are lost before the calves are born, an alarmingly high figure, according to a recent paper.

Since 2001, federal courts have taken the agencies responsible for protecting the salmon, including NOAA and the Army Corps of Engineers, to task for not doing enough to ensure the survival of the fish. In 2016, Judge Michael H. Simon of the Federal District Court of Oregon ordered a new plan to restore the species, saying previous efforts had violated endangered species and environmental laws. The ruling cited the agencies' refusal to consider removing the lower Snake River dams. The plan is due in 2021.

Federal and state agencies have released untold numbers of hatchery-reared fish to replace wild fish in the Columbia basin. But some experts believe that hatchery fish could adversely affect the genome of the remaining wild fish.

In 2016, a study found that 723 genes were operating differently in the first generation of hatchery-reared fish than in wild fish, affecting such functions as the immune system and wound-healing, as hatchery-reared fish adapted to crowded conditions.

Traits that wild fish lose by mating with hatchery fish may one day be important for adaptation to climate change, Mr. Thurow said. The Middle Fork population, here in Idaho, is one of the few without genetic influences from hatchery-reared fish.

The extreme migration of the spring-summer Chinook salmon is one of the natural world's great journeys.

Before the dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, the fish born in the Middle Fork were swept by strong spring currents 800 miles to the sea. The rivers moved them rapidly along, from six to 10 miles per hour, and the young fish reached the brackish waters of the Columbia River estuary in a couple of weeks.

As they travel, the parrs, or young freshwater salmon, undergo a profound transformation called smoltification, becoming smolts able to thrive in saltwater. After leaving the river, the fish turn north and travel to the North Pacific, near the Aleutian Islands.

They spend up to four years feeding at sea, and then those that survive the seagoing journey return to the mouth of the Columbia. Their physiological changes are reversed as they move upstream, and they again become freshwater fish.

Picking up the scent of their natal stream, they fight the current, foregoing food on the grueling trip, gaining about 6,500 feet in elevation, and overcoming physical barriers in what biologists describe as a heroic journey.

"I've seen them jump an eight-foot waterfall, and they are known to jump 12 feet," said Mr. Thurow. "They are the definition of persistence."

Chinook are known as "high-fidelity" spawners, not only returning to the stream where they were born, but also often to the same shallows. Then the game is afoot: In their waning days, as males battle for dominance, females excavate a redd, a depression in the gravel riverbed.

The female releases clusters of eggs as the male sidles up, releasing its sperm at the same time. The current mixes them, resulting in fertilization. The eggs are adhesive and stick to the gravel after they fall. The female buries them in an egg pocket.

The mating is repeated multiple times; all told, some 5,000 eggs may be released by a single female. "By the times she finishes, she's within a day or two of dying," Mr. Thurow said. The next spring, the offspring emerge and make their own journey to the sea. Always a gauntlet, the migration now is far more deadly. The eight large dams along the Snake and Columbia rivers created 325 miles of slack water in reservoirs. The average speed of the water flowing downstream has dropped to less than 1.5 miles per hour, and it takes the fish far longer to reach the sea.

When the parrs reach a reservoir on the way, they must swim instead of being pushed by the current, and often become disoriented and are more susceptible to predators. Delayed, they may go through smoltification at the wrong time.

The young salmon eat plankton and insects. But the waters of the Pacific along the West Coast have experienced unusual warming - the so-called blob - which reduces the available food supply.

Before the Snake River dams were built, three to six of every 100 fish that left their natal streams returned home, a ratio called smolt-to-adult return. Today that number is just under one. Biologists say it must reach four to rebuild the fisheries.

It is not just orcas that are suffering because of the decline of salmon. An estimated 137 species rely on the surge of protein brought upriver by millions of fish each year. The salmon also provided phosphorous, nitrogen and other nutrients that nourish the great forests of the Northwest. Three-quarters of the nutrients in some trees in Alaska and British Columbia are derived from salmon.

The Middle Fork of Salmon River will be critical as the waters of the Columbia warm, Mr. Thurow said. High-altitude streams are expected to warm less, and the Chinook here will find a cold-water refuge - and if they adapt, a base for repopulating other streams.

"The outlook isn't good, but these fish are what give me hope," Mr. Thurow said. "Despite all of the obstacles, they are still here."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Long Before These Salmon Are Gone? 'Maybe 20 Years'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Warming waters and a series of dams are making the grueling migration of the Chinook salmon even more deadly - and threatening dozens of other species. A Chinook salmon at Dagger Falls near the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. There are 13 species of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River drainage that are endangered.

# data[].attributes.headline
Swarm of sea urchins wreaks destruction on US West Coast

# data[].attributes.subject
Swarm of sea urchins wreaks destruction on US West Coast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
NEWPORT, Ore. (AP) - Tens of millions of voracious purple sea urchins that have already chomped their way through towering underwater kelp forests in California are spreading north to Oregon, sending the delicate marine ecosystem off the shore into such disarray that other critical species are starving to death.

A recent count found 350 million purple sea urchins on one Oregon reef alone - more than a 10,000% increase since 2014. And in Northern California, 90% of the giant bull kelp forests have been devoured by the urchins, perhaps never to return.

Vast "urchin barrens" - stretches of denuded seafloor dotted with nothing but hundreds of the spiny orbs - have spread to coastal Oregon, where kelp forests were once so thick it was impossible to navigate some areas by boat.

The underwater annihilation is killing off important fisheries for red abalone and red sea urchins and creating such havoc that scientists in California are partnering with a private business to collect the over-abundant purple urchins and "ranch" them in a controlled environment for ultimate sale to a global seafood market.

"We're in uncharted territory," said Scott Groth, a shellfish scientist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. "You can't just go out and smash them. There's too many. I don't know what we can do."

The explosion of purple sea urchins is the latest symptom of a Pacific Northwest marine ecosystem that's out of whack.

Kelp has been struggling because of warmer-than-usual waters in the Pacific Ocean. And, in 2013, a mysterious disease began wiping out tens of millions of starfish, including a species called the sunflower sea star that is the only real predator of the ultra-hardy purple urchin. Around the same time, the purple urchins had two excellent breeding years - and with no predators, those gametes grew up and are now eating everything in sight.

"You can imagine all of these small urchins growing up, each one of them looking for food, desperate for food. They're literally starving out there," said Steven Rumrill, lead shellfish expert at Oregon's wildlife agency. "I've seen some big-scale fluctuations in the populations of sea stars and urchins, but never on this magnitude."

Scientists are not yet sure if climate change is responsible for the sea urchin explosion, but they suspect it plays a role in the cascade of events that allowed the purple urchins to boom. And kelp, already under siege from warming waters, is not as resilient as it once was, said Norah Eddy, an associate director at the Nature Conservancy California's oceans program.

"We're going to see climate change as a big driver of changes in kelp forest as we move forward, and we are already seeing that," said Eddy, who is leading an effort to use drones to map and monitor Northern California's last remaining kelp forests.

The devastation is also economic: Until now, red abalone and red sea urchins, a larger and meatier species of urchin, supported a thriving commercial fishery in both states. But 96% of red abalone have disappeared from California's northern coast as the number of purple sea urchins increased six fold, according to a study released this week by the University of California, Davis.

Last year, California closed its red abalone fishery, which poured an estimated $44 million into the coastal economy per year, and Oregon suspended permits for its 300 abalone divers for three years. The commercial harvest of red sea urchins in California and Oregon also has taken a massive hit.

"That's a huge economic loss for our small coastal communities," said Cynthia Catton, a research associate with the University of California, Davis Bodega Marine Lab. "In California, there were 30,000 to 40,000 participants in (the abalone) fishery every year for decades, and for the first time ever that fishery had to close."

And while the purple urchins have eaten themselves into starvation as well, unlike other kelp-dependent creatures, the species can go into a dormant state, stop reproducing and live for years with no food.

That means the only way to restore the kelp is to remove or destroy the purple urchins. Scientists estimate that in Oregon alone, it would take 15 to 20 years to remove all 100 million pounds (45 million kilograms) of purple urchins recently surveyed on just one large reef.

While urchins are in starvation mode, the edible part - known as roe - shrivels, making them commercially worthless.

Against this backdrop, conservationists, commercial urchin harvesters, scientists and private interests are coming together with an unusual plan: Pay underemployed red sea urchin divers to collect the shriveled, but living, purple sea urchins and transfer them to carefully tended urchin "ranches" to be fattened up for sale to seafood markets around the world.

One company, Urchinomics, is already working on urchin ranching projects in Japan, Canada and California and sees a future where the overwhelming demand for wild urchin roe is replaced by a taste for human-raised purple urchins collected from the seafloor, allowing kelp forests to rebound.

"We're turning an ecological problem into an ecological opportunity and an economic opportunity," said Brian Takeda, the Urchinomics CEO. "It's the first time we've ever had an economic incentive to get these destructive urchins out of the water."

In Oregon, red urchin divers are a tiny artisanal collective, but they are also exploring ways to try to turn the glut of destructive purple urchins to their advantage. Oregon's urchin fishery had a boom year last year, when red urchins were scarce in California but before their purple cousins had spread north. Now, they too are hurting.

Rumrill, the shellfish expert from Oregon, supports efforts to harvest excess urchins but strikes a less optimistic note when it comes to saving the kelp.

"That's a promising technique. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that we're going to solve this large-scale ecological problem, this literal perfect storm of events, by eating our way out," he said. "It's just too big a problem."

___

Chea reported from Mendocino County, California.

___

Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccus .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Swarm of sea urchins wreaks destruction on US West Coast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
NEWPORT, Ore. (AP) - Tens of millions of voracious purple sea urchins that have already chomped their way through towering underwater kelp forests in California are spreading north to Oregon, sending the delicate marine ecosystem off the shore into such disarray that other critical species are starving to death.

# data[].attributes.headline
How much is a whale worth? Millions to combat climate change

# data[].attributes.subject
How much is a whale worth? Millions to combat climate change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The world's largest whales are more than mere evolutionary marvels. By sequestering carbon in the ocean, they can help humanity fight climate change-an ecosystem service that may be worth millions of dollars per whale, according to a new analysis by economists with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Protecting large, charismatic animals like whales is often seen as a sort of charity work individuals and governments do on behalf of nature. A team of economists led by Ralph Chami, an assistant director of the IMF's Institute for Capacity Development, wanted to change the way we think about whales by quantifying the benefit they provide us in dollars and cents. Their new analysis, detailed in a recent article in the trade publication Finance & Development, is a first-of-its-kind attempt to do just that.

The analysis hasn't yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific paper, and there are still important scientific knowledge gaps in terms of how much carbon whales can capture. But based on the research that's been done so far, it's clear to the economists that if we protect great whales, it will reap major dividends for the planet.

Chami hopes this finding will "start a conversation with the policymakers who don't buy into saving animals for the sake of animals."

"We have to agree whales are an international public good," he says.

Great whales, including the filter feeding baleen and sperm whales, help sequester carbon in a few ways. They hoard it in their fat and protein-rich bodies, stockpiling tons of carbon apiece like giant, swimming trees. When a whale dies and its carcass descends to the bottom of the sea, that stored carbon is taken out of the atmospheric cycle for hundreds to thousands of years, a literal carbon sink.

A study published in 2010 estimated that eight types of baleen whales, including blue, humpback, and minke whales, collectively shuttle nearly 30,000 tons of carbon into the deep sea each year as their carcasses sink. If great whale populations rebounded to their pre-commercial whaling size, the authors estimate this carbon sink would increase by 160,000 tons a year.

While they are alive, whales might do even more to capture carbon, thanks to their jumbo-sized excrement. Great whales feed on tiny marine organisms like plankton and krill in the ocean's depths before surfacing to breathe, poop and pee-and the latter activities release enormous plume of nutrients, including nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron, into the water. So-called poo-namis stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, marine algae that pull carbon out of the air via photosynthesis.

When phytoplankton die, much of their carbon gets recycled at the ocean's surface. But some dead phytoplankton inevitably sink, sending more captured carbon to the bottom of the sea. Another study from 2010 found that the 12,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean draw 200,000 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere each year by stimulating phytoplankton growth and death through their iron-rich defecations.

Exactly how much whale poop boosts phytoplankton on a global scale isn't known, according to Joe Roman, a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont who's been studying the phenomenon for years. That's why the economists took what Chami describes as an "if, then" approach, asking how much carbon could be captured, hypothetically, if the world's current population of great whales enhanced marine phytoplankton by about 1 percent globally. To this, they added a literature-based estimate of how much carbon dioxide whales sequester when they die: about 33 tons per carcass, on average.

Using the current market price of carbon dioxide, the economists then worked out the total monetary value of this marine mammalian carbon capture, and added it to other economic benefits great whales provide through things like ecotourism.

Altogether, Chami and his colleagues estimated that each of these gentle giants is worth about $2 million over its lifetime. The entire global population of great whales? Possibly a one trillion dollar asset to humanity.

Not a silver bullet, but a new mindset

There are about 1.3 million great whales in Earth's oceans today. If we could restore them to their pre-commercial whaling numbers-estimated at between 4 and 5 million- the economists' calculations show that great whales could capture about 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. That's more than the annual carbon emissions of Brazil.

However, it's only a few percent of the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide humanity spews into the air each year. And even with aggressive global conservation efforts, it could be decades before great whales rebound to their pre-whaling numbers, assuming that's possible at all given how much we've degraded the oceans.

"We don't want to oversell the concept," said Steven Lutz, the Blue Carbon Program Leader at GRID-Arendal, a Norweigan foundation that works with the United Nations Environment Program. "It's not like we save the whales and we save the climate."

To Lutz, the exact numbers presented in the new analysis are less significant than the framework it introduces for thinking about wild animals in terms of their value when kept alive. He'd like to see this sort of approach applied to carbon-rich marine ecosystems like seagrass beds, and to other groups of marine organisms, like fish.

"We see whale carbon as potentially the tip of the iceberg as far as marine carbon goes," Lutz says.

Perhaps a financial benefits approach could be extended to land-based animals. For instance, a recent study in Nature Geoscience estimated that forest elephants in the Congo Basin help their rainforest homes sequester billions of tons of carbon.

Fabio Berzaghi, a researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environment Sciences in France and lead author on that study, said the IMF analysis raises an "extremely important" point about large animals: that their ecosystem services "benefit everybody."

"I think it's a very good first step to recognize they do provide services and these services are worth something," Berzaghi said. "Potentially, a lot of money. "

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The world's largest whales are more than mere evolutionary marvels. By sequestering carbon in the ocean, they can help humanity fight climate change-an ecosystem service that may be worth millions of dollars per whale, according to a new analysis by economists with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

# data[].attributes.headline
How Long Before These Salmon Are Gone? ‘Maybe 20 Years’ - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
How Long Before These Salmon Are Gone? ‘Maybe 20 Years’ - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Chinook salmon at Dagger Falls near the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. There are 13 species of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River drainage that are endangered. Credit... William Mullins, via Alamy

Warming waters and a series of dams are making the grueling migration of the Chinook salmon even more deadly - and threatening dozens of other species.

A Chinook salmon at Dagger Falls near the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. There are 13 species of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River drainage that are endangered. Credit... Credit William Mullins, via Alamy

NORTH FORK, Idaho - The Middle Fork of the Salmon River, one of the wildest rivers in the contiguous United States, is prime fish habitat. Cold, clear waters from melting snow tumble out of the Salmon River Mountains and into the boulder-strewn river, which is federally protected.

The last of the spawning spring-summer Chinook salmon arrived here in June after a herculean 800-mile upstream swim. Now the big fish - which can weigh up to 30 pounds - are finishing their courtship rituals. Next year there will be a new generation of Chinook.

In spite of this pristine 112-mile-long mountain refuge, the fish that have returned here to reproduce and then die for countless generations are in deep trouble.

Some 45,000 to 50,000 spring-summer Chinook spawned here in the 1950s. These days, the average is about 1,500 fish, and declining. And not just here: Native fish are in free-fall throughout the Columbia River basin, a situation so dire that many groups are urging the removal of four large dams to keep the fish from being lost.

"The Columbia River was once the most productive wild Chinook habitat in the world," said Russ Thurow, a fisheries research scientist with the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station.

Standing alongside the Salmon River in Idaho, Mr. Thurow considered the prospect that the fish he had spent most of his life studying could disappear. "It's hard to say, but now these fish have maybe four generations left before they are gone," he said. "Maybe 20 years."

Thirteen species of salmon and steelhead trout are listed as threatened or endangered in the Columbia basin, an area that includes parts of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana and British Columbia. Salmon are a keystone species in this region, critical as a food source for animals from bears to eagles to insects.

That group of beneficiaries includes an endangered population of orcas, or killer whales, along the West Coast that survive by eating Chinook in the winter and spring, up to 30 a day.

Image

The Impassable Canyon of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. Credit... Leon Werdinger, via Alamy

[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Many experts believe the orcas are starving in large part because of the decline of wild salmon. This year alone, their number has dropped from 76 to 73, alarming conservationists and scientists. Last year, an orca mother carried a dead calf for 17 days on her back. She was presumed to be grieving.

"The best thing you could do to get more spring Chinook for the orcas is to remove those four lower dams," said Don Chapman, a retired fisheries scientist who worked as a consultant to the hydropower industry and defended the dams and mitigation efforts.

He has since changed his mind about the dams: "They kill too many juveniles going downstream and some adults going back."

Salmon are swimming in warming waters, with uncertain consequences, according to a recent study. Breaching the dams also would help keep water temperatures cooler as the climate changes, Dr. Chapman said.

Chinook, or king salmon, are huge, powerful fish, the largest member of the salmon family in North America. Spring-summer Chinook make an epic migration thousands of miles through the Columbia River to the waters surrounding Alaska's Aleutian Islands, and then back to the high elevations of the Rocky Mountains.

Before the 20th century, some 10 million to 16 million adult salmon and steelhead trout are thought to have returned annually to the Columbia River system. The current return of wild fish is 2 percent of that, by some estimates.

While farming, logging and especially the commercial harvest of salmon in the early 20th century all took a toll, the single greatest impact on wild fish comes from eight large dams - four on the Columbia and four on the Snake River, a major tributary.

The four Snake River dams are used primarily to create reservoirs for the barging of Idaho's wheat to ports. But the dams raise water temperatures and block travel migration routes, increasing fish mortality.

Climate change also has raised both river and ocean water temperatures, which can be deadly to fish. In 2015, for example, unusually warm water killed an estimated 250,000 sockeye salmon.

For decades, experts have tried to ameliorate the loss of the Columbia's wild fish by installing ladders that allow the fish to swim around the dams, and by placing them in barges and trucks for transport around the dams. The massive efforts have not stemmed the decline, despite the fact that more than $16 billion has been spent on recovery over the last several decades.

Now most scientists come down on the side of removing the dams. Last fall, orca researchers urged Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington and the Southern Resident Orca Task Force, a state government panel, to begin removing the four dams on the Snake River to aid the starving whales.

"Put simply, orca need more Chinook salmon available on a year-round basis, as quickly as possible," they wrote, calling the removals "vital to ensure orca survival."

The federal agencies responsible for managing fisheries on the Columbia, though, maintain that removing the Snake River dams is not critical to the survival of salmon and that hatchery-reared fish have made up for the loss of the river's wild fish for the orcas.

The southern resident killer whales "do not distinguish between hatchery and wild fish," the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a statement.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is considering a proposal to kill up to 1,100 sea lions annually along the Columbia River, because they eat salmon as they gather to spawn.

Those who want to keep the dams point to changing ocean conditions as a major factor in the decline of the salmon. Water temperatures have been unusually warm in recent years, which reduces salmon food sources. Federal officials just announced that the marine heat wave has returned this year.

But hatchery fish are not the same, said Deborah A. Giles, science and research director at Wild Orca, a group that studies and advocates for protection of the whales. Orcas evolved eating big wild fish, some 300 to 350 pounds a day.

"Wild fish are much bigger and more lipid-rich," she said. "Having to catch the equivalent of 350 pounds in hatchery fish, which are smaller and lower quality, expends significantly more energy. They have to work a lot harder for their meals."

Nutritional stress is part of the reason that the whales are in decline. About 70 percent of pregnancies among the southern resident orcas are lost before the calves are born, an alarmingly high figure, according to a recent paper.

Since 2001, federal courts have taken the agencies responsible for protecting the salmon, including NOAA and the Army Corps of Engineers, to task for not doing enough to ensure the survival of the fish. In 2016, Judge Michael H. Simon of the Federal District Court of Oregon ordered a new plan to restore the species, saying previous efforts had violated endangered species and environmental laws. The ruling cited the agencies' refusal to consider removing the lower Snake River dams. The plan is due in 2021.

Federal and state agencies have released untold numbers of hatchery-reared fish to replace wild fish in the Columbia basin. But some experts believe that hatchery fish could adversely affect the genome of the remaining wild fish.

In 2016, a study found that 723 genes were operating differently in the first generation of hatchery-reared fish than in wild fish, affecting such functions as the immune system and wound-healing, as hatchery-reared fish adapted to crowded conditions.

Traits that wild fish lose by mating with hatchery fish may one day be important for adaptation to climate change, Mr. Thurow said. The Middle Fork population, here in Idaho, is one of the few without genetic influences from hatchery-reared fish.

The extreme migration of the spring-summer Chinook salmon is one of the natural world's great journeys.

Before the dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, the fish born in the Middle Fork were swept by strong spring currents 800 miles to the sea. The rivers moved them rapidly along, from six to 10 miles per hour, and the young fish reached the brackish waters of the Columbia River estuary in a couple of weeks.

As they travel, the parrs, or young freshwater salmon, undergo a profound transformation called smoltification, becoming smolts able to thrive in saltwater. After leaving the river, the fish turn north and travel to the North Pacific, near the Aleutian Islands.

They spend up to four years feeding at sea, and then those that survive the seagoing journey return to the mouth of the Columbia. Their physiological changes are reversed as they move upstream, and they again become freshwater fish.

Picking up the scent of their natal stream, they fight the current, foregoing food on the grueling trip, gaining about 6,500 feet in elevation, and overcoming physical barriers in what biologists describe as a heroic journey.

"I've seen them jump an eight-foot waterfall, and they are known to jump 12 feet," said Mr. Thurow. "They are the definition of persistence."

Chinook are known as "high-fidelity" spawners, not only returning to the stream where they were born, but also often to the same shallows. Then the game is afoot: In their waning days, as males battle for dominance, females excavate a redd, a depression in the gravel riverbed.

The female releases clusters of eggs as the male sidles up, releasing its sperm at the same time. The current mixes them, resulting in fertilization. The eggs are adhesive and stick to the gravel after they fall. The female buries them in an egg pocket.

The mating is repeated multiple times; all told, some 5,000 eggs may be released by a single female. "By the times she finishes, she's within a day or two of dying," Mr. Thurow said. The next spring, the offspring emerge and make their own journey to the sea. Always a gauntlet, the migration now is far more deadly. The eight large dams along the Snake and Columbia rivers created 325 miles of slack water in reservoirs. The average speed of the water flowing downstream has dropped to less than 1.5 miles per hour, and it takes the fish far longer to reach the sea.

When the parrs reach a reservoir on the way, they must swim instead of being pushed by the current, and often become disoriented and are more susceptible to predators. Delayed, they may go through smoltification at the wrong time.

The young salmon eat plankton and insects. But the waters of the Pacific along the West Coast have experienced unusual warming - the so-called blob - which reduces the available food supply.

Before the Snake River dams were built, three to six of every 100 fish that left their natal streams returned home, a ratio called smolt-to-adult return. Today that number is just under one. Biologists say it must reach four to rebuild the fisheries.

It is not just orcas that are suffering because of the decline of salmon. An estimated 137 species rely on the surge of protein brought upriver by millions of fish each year. The salmon also provided phosphorous, nitrogen and other nutrients that nourish the great forests of the Northwest. Three-quarters of the nutrients in some trees in Alaska and British Columbia are derived from salmon.

The Middle Fork of Salmon River will be critical as the waters of the Columbia warm, Mr. Thurow said. High-altitude streams are expected to warm less, and the Chinook here will find a cold-water refuge - and if they adapt, a base for repopulating other streams.

"The outlook isn't good, but these fish are what give me hope," Mr. Thurow said. "Despite all of the obstacles, they are still here."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Long Before These Salmon Are Gone? 'Maybe 20 Years'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Warming waters and a series of dams are making the grueling migration of the Chinook salmon even more deadly - and threatening dozens of other species. A Chinook salmon at Dagger Falls near the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. There are 13 species of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River drainage that are endangered.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Shorebirds of Delaware Bay Are Going Hungry - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
The Shorebirds of Delaware Bay Are Going Hungry - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image

Volunteers on Reeds Beach in Middle Township, N.J., sifted through nets that temporarily trapped shorebirds so that they could be counted, tagged, weighed and measured.

On their migrations north, famished birds stop to feast on eggs laid by horseshoe crabs. But the crabs were overfished, and conservationists say that some bird species may not recover.

Volunteers on Reeds Beach in Middle Township, N.J., sifted through nets that temporarily trapped shorebirds so that they could be counted, tagged, weighed and measured. Credit Credit

By Jon Hurdle

Photographs by Michelle Gustafson

REEDS BEACH, N.J. - On a recent spring day at this remote beach, hundreds of shorebirds flapped frantically beneath a net trapping them on the sand. Dozens of volunteers rushed to disentangle the birds and place them gently in covered crates.

On a nearby sand dune, teams of scientists and volunteers attached metal leg bands, plastic tags and tiny radio transmitters to birds of three species. They were weighed and measured, and then released.

The operation is part of an annual "catch" of migratory shorebirds that stop on the beaches of the Delaware Bay, a globally important bird habitat, to gorge on the eggs of spawning horseshoe crabs. The stopover strengthens the birds for the long-distance migration to the Canadian Arctic, their breeding grounds, from as far away as southern Chile.

With fresh information on the birds' weight and health, the scientists will be able to judge whether these species are getting enough food to reach their breeding grounds, and whether their populations are stable.

One of them, the red knot, has been listed as a threatened species. Since 2000, red knot numbers have plunged as low as 10,000 in some years, around one-ninth of the level in the 1980s. At the moment, the population hovers at about 30,000, still too low to be sustainable, conservationists claim.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Additional challenges like severe Arctic weather during breeding, or coastal development along the migration route, could lead to the bird's extinction. Populations of other migratory shorebirds, like semipalmated sandpipers and ruddy turnstones, have also declined.

The problem, conservationists say, is the overfishing of horseshoe crabs for commercial fishery bait and the harvesting of the animals for their blood, which contains an extract called L.A.L., used by the biomedical industry to detect certain bacteria.

Image

Volunteers, Charles Duncan, left, and Susan Taylor, preparing nets to trap shorebirds for examination.

Now, conservationists are renewing calls to halt the harvest for bait altogether, and to persuade the biomedical industry to switch to recombinant Factor C (rFC), a synthetic alternative to LAL, to ease pressure on the horseshoe crab population.

"The only responsible thing to do here is a moratorium," said Eric Stiles, president of New Jersey Audubon, an environmental group leading the initiative.

Recognizing the threat to the birds, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, an interstate regulator, banned the harvest of female horseshoe crabs for bait starting in 2013, in the hope that a recovering population of females would lay more eggs and allow the birds to rebound.

While the commission maintains there has been an increase in the number of crabs since the ban, neither the crabs nor the red knot has recovered to the levels seen before the fishing industry's unprecedented removal of the crabs from the bay in the 1990s.

The commission's critics blame poor enforcement of the ban and the continued harvest of thousands of crabs for bleeding, which is estimated to kill at least 15 percent of them and may prevent the survivors from reproducing.

Crabs taken for bleeding are not included in the commission's quotas, and their numbers and mortality rates are not published because the companies that collect the blood want the figures kept confidential.

Conservation groups are urging officials in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia - three bay states that use crab quotas - to ban the horseshoe crab harvest until there's a full recovery of both crabs and birds. (New Jersey, the other state bordering the bay, imposed a moratorium in 2008.)

Banning the harvest, advocates argue, would rebuild a crab population that is essential not only to the birds but also to depleted marine species, such as weakfish, that feed on the crabs and in turn support commercial and recreational fishing on the bay.

"It's not just about the birds," said David Mizrahi, vice president for research and monitoring at New Jersey Audubon. "It's about the whole ecosystem."

Within the knot population, the biggest decline has been seen in long-distance migrants that spend the northern winter in Tierra del Fuego, in southern Chile. That population numbered only 9,840 in 2018, down 25 percent in the last year and less than a fifth of the number in 2000.

Scientists say those birds are especially sensitive to a shortage of horseshoe crab eggs on Delaware Bay beaches, as they are emaciated when they arrive from South America.

In the biomedical industry, the switch to rFC is being led by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which began using the substance to test new products in 2016 and plans to have 90 percent of the changeover completed by the end of 2020, according to Jay Bolden, a senior consultant biologist for the company.

The synthetic alternative is comparable in cost and efficacy to LAL, he added.

For now, conservationists say a sharp decline in crab eggs shows that quotas have failed to restore the female crab population. Average egg densities on five New Jersey beaches dropped to between 2,000 and 7,000 eggs per square meter in 2017 from as much as 100,000 per square meter in 1991, according to New Jersey Audubon.

But the fisheries commission argues that its quotas for the crab bait harvest have stabilized the populations of red knots and other shorebirds, and are beginning to result in increasing numbers of female crabs in the bay.

The number of mature female crabs rose to 7.8 million in 2017 from 5.4 million in 2011 before the quota system began, according to commission data.

The tally isn't close to the 11.2 million females - or 80 percent of the bay's carrying capacity - that might lead the commission to permit the female crab harvest to resume. But officials say it shows the current quota is working.

"I'm not sure what more the commission could do in terms of restricting harvest beyond there being zero females" allowed under the quota, said Mike Schmidtke, the commission's fishery management plan coordinator. (This year, the commercial fishing industry is allowed to take 500,000 male crabs from the bay.)

The commission estimates the red knot population to have been in the 43,000 to 49,000 range since 2011, based on a statistical method that differs from one used by conservationists.

That number, too, is well below the 81,900 that would allow the commission to lift its ban on harvesting female crabs, but is at least broadly stable, Dr. Schmidtke said.

Larry Niles, an independent biologist who has led the annual shorebird catch on the New Jersey side of the bay for the last 23 years, dismissed as "utter nonsense" Dr. Schmidtke's assertion that there was nothing more the commission could do to boost the number of crab eggs on the beaches.

And the commission's claim that the number of female horseshoe crabs is increasing is not supported by the number of horseshoe crab eggs, he added.

"If there was an increase, it would show up in egg densities," Dr. Niles said.

Earlier reporting on red knots and horseshoe crabs

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: Delaware Bay Shorebirds Are Going Hungry. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Shorebirds of Delaware Bay Are Going Hungry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On their migrations north, famished birds stop to feast on eggs laid by horseshoe crabs. But the crabs were overfished, and conservationists say that some bird species may not recover. Volunteers on Reeds Beach in Middle Township, N.J., sifted through nets that temporarily trapped shorebirds so that they could be counted, tagged, weighed and measured.

# data[].attributes.headline
On a Coastline With 1,200 Dead Dolphins, Fishermen and Conservationists Clash - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
On a Coastline With 1,200 Dead Dolphins, Fishermen and Conservationists Clash - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Credit Credit Video by Elian Peltier

LA ROCHELLE, France - At dawn on a recent Saturday, the crew of the fishing trawler L'Arlequin II pulled their cone-shaped net up from the Bay of Biscay, and found the usual catch crammed into the bottom: hundreds of bass.

And the bodies of two dead dolphins.

Such scenes have become far too common: A record 1,200 dolphins have washed up on France's Atlantic coast since January, most of them with wounds suggesting that the mammals had died after being trapped in fishing nets.

For every carcass that ends up on a beach, several more decay at sea, wildlife biologists say, which suggests that as many as 6,000 of the 200,000 common dolphins living in the bay may have perished in less than four months because of fishing.

So a disturbing question hangs over the port cities that dot the coastline from Brittany to the Basque Country, and their hundreds of fishing vessels, with no clear answer.

Why are so many dolphins dying now?

Most people agree that fishing is responsible, but the consensus stops there. Fishermen claim that the unintentional captures, also known as bycatch, remain unusual, if not exceptional, while scientists warn that fishing vessels now represent a major threat to dolphins.

Activists from an environmental group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, have just completed a two-month effort to document the deaths and which vessels cause them.

"It's an undocumented reality that has been unfolding far out to sea, and far from the public eye," Justin Barbati, a 27-year-old volunteer with the group, said as he drove an inflatable boat closer to L'Arlequin II, where fishermen were dragging the dolphins' bodies aboard.

That new presence leaves local fishermen feeling unfairly targeted.

Image

"That Sea Shepherd fights against whale hunters in Japan, fine, but that they follow us while we are working and harass us, the small and decent fishermen, because some of us sometimes catch some dolphins? It's out of proportion," said Jean Lagarde, 75, known as La Rochelle's oldest fisherman, as he cleaned black cuttlefish ink from his vessel on a recent afternoon.

The Bay of Biscay, the vast gulf west of France and north of Spain, has long been a haven for dolphins, brimming with shoals of sardines, herring and other fish that they eat.

Fishermen have historically cohabited with dolphins. Lately, they say, they have seen so many more that most of them don't have to go back far in the photo libraries in their smartphone to play videos of dolphins swirling around their vessels.

Biologists at the government-funded Pelagis Observatory in La Rochelle first noticed a spike in dolphins washing up on beaches in 2017, when 1,200 of them were found dead on the French coast, followed by 900 more in 2018.

In the first four months of this year, the number already exceeds annual totals that were among the highest in 40 years, said Olivier Van Canneyt, who runs the observatory.

Autopsies carried out by Mr. Van Canneyt's team have attributed 90 percent of dolphins' deaths to fishing activities. They found that most had died of asphyxia, often with their stomachs full, indicating that they were feeding when they became trapped under water.

Many had abrasions or cuts inflicted by fishing nets, said Willy Dabin, who monitors dolphin strandings for the observatory.

"Some fishermen also damage the bodies quite badly so as to avoid damaging their nets," he said in the institute's cold storage room, showing a dead dolphin whose tail flukes had been cut off.

Because the common dolphin is a protected species, fishermen cannot bring the bodies ashore, so they throw the carcasses into the sea and most bycatch remains unseen, Mr. Dabin added.

Fishermen's representatives argue that the number of vessels in the Bay, up to 600 in the winter and spring, hasn't changed in recent years. The vessels are the same, too, and so are the amounts of fish they catch, according to Julien Lamothe, the head of a fishermen's organization in La Rochelle.

"Every fisherman has had to deal with a bycatch, one day or another," Mr. Lamothe said. "Those are shocking events that they are trying to avoid. Catching dolphins isn't their job."

But as a result of recent restrictions on catching sole, a bottom-dwelling fish, some fishing boats have been using higher nets to catch other species, which might have resulted in more dolphin bycatch, scientists say. Some have nets tens of kilometers long.

From porpoises in Mexico to dolphins in China's Yangtze River, bycatch is "the greatest threat to marine mammals around the world," according to the Marine Mammal Commission, a United States government agency. Most are long-lived species that breed slowly: The common dolphins of the Bay of Biscay become sexually mature at age 8 and can live up to 25 years, and females give birth every three years on average.

"The day our studies show that the dolphin population has dwindled in the bay, it will be too late," Mr. Van Canneyt said.

Sea Shepherd's activists, most of them volunteers, patrol the bay aboard the group's own vessel, the MV Sam Simon, looking for fishing trawlers and dead dolphins. A New York Times reporter and a photographer joined them for a day.

"This campaign is about long-term observation; we are doing what the French government should be doing," said Mr. Barbati, a biologist who assesses salmon stocks for the Canadian government.

Lamya Essemlali, head of the French branch of Sea Shepherd, has advocated for more independent observers and cameras aboard fishing vessels to prevent bycatch.

"Bycatch is the first threat to marine mammals, and fishermen cast their nets right in the middle of their natural habitat," Ms. Essemlali said aboard the MV Sam Simon. "How can we call those accidental catch?"

The only long-term solution, she said, would be a ban in the area on fishing methods that indiscriminately scoop up whatever creatures are present. But that would threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of fishermen, and economies of their towns.

The French government has raised a possible short-term compromise.

The ecology minister, François de Rugy, said he would support research on acoustic devices that attach to fishing nets and make sounds that drive dolphins away. One study found that on vessels using the devices, bycatch has decreased by 65 percent.

But scientists and Ms. Essemlali object that the acoustic repellents, known as "pingers," threaten to deny dolphins an important and usually safe habitat.

And they don't always work; the trawler L'Arlequin II uses pingers. Two days before the vessel trapped the dolphins in its net, its captain, Charles Le Moyec, said that since he had started using the devices, he no longer caught dolphins.

"We don't like it either when we kill dolphins, but so far the pingers have worked well," he said in his cabin, as his crew unloaded dozens of cases of frozen hake on the dock at La Rochelle.

Two days later, two dead dolphins lay in his net, close to the acoustic repellents. Afterward, Mr. Le Moyec, 35, insisted that it was the first time he had caught a dolphin this year - adding that he felt harried by Sea Shepherd, whose volunteers had followed him around the bay for hours at a time.

Along the dozens of blue, yellow and red fishing cabins and garages in the port of La Rochelle, many fishermen echoed Mr. Le Moyec's frustration, saying that Sea Shepherd wanted to treat fishing as a crime.

"We've never seen so many dolphins in the waters, and Sea Shepherd accuses us of being murderers," said Mr. Lagarde. "What about the massive vessels from the Netherlands or Spain that empty our ocean far away in the bay?"

Those, too, have been on Sea Shepherd's radar. As the group ended its campaign last month, Ms. Essemlali said it would be back in the bay next winter.

"In the Bay of Biscay, dolphins are predators and the fishing industry is turning them into prey," she said. "We can discuss what needs to be done, but that must stop, period."

Elian Peltier, a reporter in the Paris bureau covering France, has been writing for The Times since 2015. @ElianPeltier

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: In a Haven for Dolphins, Deaths in Fishing Nets Skyrocket. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
On a Coastline With 1,200 Dead Dolphins, Fishermen and Conservationists Clash

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LA ROCHELLE, France - At dawn on a recent Saturday, the crew of the fishing trawler L'Arlequin II pulled their cone-shaped net up from the Bay of Biscay, and found the usual catch crammed into the bottom: hundreds of bass. And the bodies of two dead dolphins.

# data[].attributes.headline
Australia Is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Australia Is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image

A member of the Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia with a cat he shot. Credit Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

Feature

Feral felines are driving the country's native species to extinction. Now a massive culling is underway to preserve what's left of the wild.

A member of the Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia with a cat he shot. Credit Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

By Jessica Camille Aguirre

I n the deep winter weeks of last July, Shane Morse and Kevin Figliomeni nearly always got up before the sun rose. They awoke next to the remains of a campfire or, occasionally, in a roadside motel, and in the darkness before dawn they began unloading poisoned sausage from their refrigerated truck. The sausage was for killing cats. One morning near the end of the season, Morse and Figliomeni left the Kalbarri Motor Hotel on the remote western coast of Australia, where they dined on steak and shellfish the night before, and drove along the squally coastline. They kept their eyes fixed to the sky. If it rained, there would be no baiting that day.

Morse and Figliomeni unpacked their boxes, filled with thousands of frozen sausages they produced at a factory south of Perth, according to a recipe developed by a man they jokingly called Dr. Death. It called for kangaroo meat, chicken fat and a mix of herbs and spices, along with a poison - called 1080 - derived from gastrolobium plants and highly lethal to animals, like cats, whose evolutionary paths did not require them to develop a tolerance to it. (The baits would also be lethal to other nonnative species, like foxes.) As the sun brightened the brume, the baits began to defrost. By midmorning, when Morse helped load them into a wooden crate inside a light twin-engine propeller Beechcraft Baron, they were burnished with a sheen of oil and emitted a stomach-turning fetor. The airplane shot down the runway and lifted over the gently undulating hills of the sand plains that abut the Indian Ocean.

Rising over the mantle of ghostlike smoke bushes that carpeted the ground to the treeless horizon, the plane traced a route over the landscape, its bombardier dropping 50 poisoned sausages every square kilometer. It banked over the deep cinnamon sandstone gorges carved by the Murchison River, which extends to the coastal delta, surveying the edge of one of earth's driest, hottest continents, where two to six million feral cats roam. As it flew, it charted the kind of path it had done dozens of times before, carpeting thousands of hectares of land with soft fingers of meat, laying down nearly half a million baits in the course of one month. Dr. Death, whose real name is Dr. Dave Algar and who is the principal research scientist in the Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions for the state of Western Australia, told me that he began developing the recipe for the poisoned sausages by examining cat food in supermarkets and observing which flavors most thrilled his own two cats. As Morse said: "They've got to taste good. They are the cat's last meal."

These fatal airdrops owed their existence to Australia's national government, which decided in 2015 to try to kill two million feral cats by 2020, out of grave concern for the nation's indigenous wildlife - in particular, groups of small, threatened rodent and marsupial species for which cats have become a deadly predator. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology estimated that 211,560 cats were killed during the first 12 months after the plan was announced. Dropping lethal sausages from the sky is only part of the country's efforts to eradicate feral cats, which also include trapping, shooting and devising all manner of poison-delivery vessels.

When the policy was announced, it was met in some quarters with apoplexy. More than 160,000 signatures appeared on half a dozen online petitions entreating Australia to spare the cats. Brigitte Bardot wrote a letter - in English, but with an unmistakably French cadence - beseeching the environment minister to stop what she called animal genocide. The singer Morrissey, formerly of the Smiths, lamented that "idiots rule the earth" and said the plan was akin to killing two million miniature Cecil the Lions. Despite anger from some animal rights groups and worries about the potential effects on pet cats, Australia went ahead with its plan, and the threatened-species commissioner replied by mail to both Bardot and Morrissey, politely describing the "delightful creatures" already lost to the world.

After that, Morse and Figliomeni spent much of each baiting season behind the wheel of their rig, hauling boxes to the most remote corners of one of the least populated places in the world, to beat back what Australia has deemed an invasive pest. As is the case on islands around the world, the direction of life in Australia took a distinctly different route than that on the larger continents, and unlike places like North America, the country has no native cat species. Over millions of years of isolation, Australia's native beasts became accustomed to a different predatory order, so while cats aren't necessarily more prevalent there than anywhere else, their presence is more ruinous. They have also become nearly ubiquitous: According to the estimates of local conservationists, feral cats have established a permanent foothold across 99.8 percent of the country, with their density reaching up to 100 per square kilometer in some areas. Even places nearly devoid of human settlement, like the remote and craggy Kimberley region, have been found to harbor cats that hunt native animals. The control effort, to which Western Australia's baiting program belongs, was meant to ease the predation pressure that cats exerted in every corner of the country where they had settled. Faced with a choice between a species regarded as a precious pet and the many small creatures of their unique land, Australians seemed to have decided that guarding the remaining wild might mean they would have to spill some blood.

Cats appeared in human lives seemingly unbidden, sauntering in at the dawn of agricultural settlement but maintaining their distance from total domestication. Archaeological remains from the Fertile Crescent in modern-day Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories point to the presence of Felis silvestris, the wildcat predecessor of Felis catus, but in the beginning they were most likely scavengers attracted to human encampments. Their usefulness around the stores of grains that attracted small rodents probably endeared them to people, and the first evidence of their domestication is a set of remains on Cyprus - where they must have been transported intentionally - dating to around 7500 B.C. A few thousand years later, in nearby Egypt and Greece, they became associated with goddesses and elevated to symbolic objects of veneration. Unlike other animals, bred specifically for consumption or to help with tasks, cats never underwent a targeted taming process as much as they fashioned themselves to fit, however obliquely, into human lives.

Image

As for how Felis catus first arrived in Australia, no one really knows. For a long time, natural historians conjectured that the first cats may have been survivors of Dutch shipwrecks or stowaways with Indonesian trepangers in the 17th century. But genetic tests have now shown that Australia's mainland cats descended from more recent European progenitors. One researcher, after combing through the records of early European settlements, traced the cats' arrival to the area around Sydney, the landing site in 1788 of the First Fleet - the flotilla of vessels carrying the convicts and marines who would begin the colonization of Australia by the English. Having been brought to manage rats on the ships, cats made landfall and, by the 1820s, established themselves on the southeastern seaboard. From there, they spread with astonishing speed. "It is a very remarkable fact that the domestic cat is to be found everywhere throughout the dry back country," one pastoralist reported in 1885. "I have met with cats, some of enormous size, at least 50 miles from water."

The cats preyed on small animals that interfered with food production or storage. Creatures like the burrowing bettong, or boodie, a rabbit-size cousin of the kangaroo that has clasped forepaws and a bouncing hop, were so plentiful in the 19th century that they were sold by the dozen for nine pence a head. Recipes for curries made with native animals like bandicoots, another small marsupial, appeared in local newspapers. Boodies were, in the words of the naturalist John Gilbert, "one of the most destructive animals to the garden of the settler that occurs in Western Australia," because of their practice of building interconnected underground warrens. Found throughout central Australia down to the southern tip of the Eyre Peninsula and stretching nearly to the western coast, boodies were one of the most widespread of the continent's many Lilliputian mammals. Their prodigious digging nearly destabilized railroad tracks in 1908. Then cats were unleashed and, already suffering from disease and fox predation, boodies started to disappear. By the mid-20th century, they were declared extinct in mainland Australia.

It wasn't just the boodies. If anything, they were lucky - some small groups of burrowing bettongs clung on at a few islands that were relatively sheltered from the ravages visited on the mainland. Since the First Fleet's arrival, 34 mammal species have gone extinct in Australia. All of them existed nowhere else on earth; they're gone. More than 100 mammal species in Australia are listed as between "near threatened" and "critical" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The continent has the highest mammal extinction rate in the world. Cats are considered to have been a leading threat for 22 of the extinct species, including the broad-faced potoroo, the crescent nailtail wallaby and the big-eared hopping mouse. "Recent extinction rates in Australia are unparalleled," John Woinarski, one of Australia's foremost conservation researchers, told me. "It's calamitous."

What's unusual about Australia's mammal extinctions is that, in contrast to nearly everywhere else, the smaller animals are the ones hit hardest. After the Pleistocene's wave of species disappearances carried off enormous creatures like saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths, large mammals all over the world have continued to face pressure, mostly from humans. Globally, it's rhinos, elephants and gorillas that are among the most threatened. Not in Australia. There, it's the desert bandicoot, the Christmas Island pipistrelle and the Nullarbor dwarf bettong that have disappeared. They belong to the category of creatures that, Woinarski noted in his seminal 2015 paper documenting the decline, are "meal-sized."

He meant meal-sized for cats. Ever since he realized, while he was doing fieldwork in the Kakadu National Park in northern Australia, that there were ever fewer native mammals to observe - precipitating what some have called the second wave of extinctions, after the initial impact of the First Fleet's arrival - Woinarski has published a series of research papers looking at the effects of cats on wildlife. His findings have been disquieting. In addition to mammals, cats kill an estimated 377 million birds and 649 million reptiles every year in Australia. (In the United States, the numbers are even more striking: Scientists estimate that free-roaming cats kill 1.3 to 4 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals every year.) On the evolutionarily sheltered continent of Australia, their presence represents one of the greatest threats to the continued existence of certain small mammals. "Feral cats are a real menace and a very significant threat to the health of our ecosystem," Australia's former environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, told me.

That understanding among Australians helps explain why the most ardent opponents of the nation's cat policy were, in the main, foreigners. Before the strategy was even announced, Australian newspapers were cheering the "bold plan to rescue our little emblems." One newspaper in the Northern Territory argued for the incorporation of cat stew into the national diet. After Greg Hunt, the environment minister at the time, announced the plan at a zoo, editorials and letters almost universally welcomed it. The issue was framed as a grand scheme to protect Australia's wildlife, as a war against cats - and, as with any war, it was couched in language about mission and values. Part of something uniquely Australian was under threat, and this is what it would take to save it. Patriots rallied to the cause.

"Even in my industry, I didn't appreciate the severity of the problem until they started to publicize it," a Queensland veterinarian named Katria Lovell told me. "Australians have a huge appreciation for our natural fauna. It's sort of what we're known for." She added: "Most people have empathy with the fact that there is all this wildlife being killed and it is taking its toll on the environment, so I think there is a general feeling that something has to be done." PETA Australia had its reservations, but in principle recognized that feral cats hunted wildlife to a point at which species can no longer survive. Petitions protesting the cull, organized in the United States and Europe, were met with scorn. "Why has someone started a petition to save the feral cats?" one newspaper reader texted to an editor in Queensland. "Pure stupidity as more and more native animals are killed by cats."

When I asked Frydenberg why Australian politicians didn't encounter the kind of fallout that has thwarted any similar, albeit local, efforts in the United States, he told me the debate has focused on the impact to wildlife and remained less emotional. "You can have a love for a domestic pet and still recognize the threat they pose to your native environment," he told me. Alley Cat Allies and other organizations that adhere to a no-kill credo have wielded broad influence in the United States, but they don't have the same kind of presence in Australia. The country's threatened-species commissioner pointed out that cats weren't the first animal to be considered so disruptive that they needed to be eliminated, and Australia has already begun efforts to control other introduced animals like rabbits and foxes.

"I think in Australia, it might be that they've seen the ravages of invasive species before," Peter Marra, co-author of "Cat Wars," a 2016 book about the consequences of cats' proliferation around the globe, told me. "They've seen what cats can do, or rabbits; they've seen what foxes do, and they've lost lots of species already in a short time frame - 50, 60, 70 years. And they're done with it."

In June, I met the ecologist Katherine Moseby in Adelaide, and we drove up to Roxby Downs together in her dusty Toyota pickup truck. We were going to visit the Arid Recovery Reserve, a wildlife sanctuary she helped found in the red-sand deserts at the southern edge of central Australia, where she would gather data to finish up some cat studies. As we drove, the landscape transformed from managed green agricultural hills to a dry shrub land dotted with bluebush; the horizon evaporated into distant salt lakes. Moseby and her husband, John Read, have come up with an array of ways to do away with the continent's cats. They have invented a robot that can recognize a passing cat and eject poison that the cat will later ingest when it grooms itself. They have helped develop a poison polymer strand that is injected into prey species to make them lethal to their predators. (The strands, which look like deflated Good & Plenty candies, are designed to remain inert just under the skin of the prey and activate at the lower pH level found in a predator's stomach.) Moseby doesn't relish killing. But in her moral calculus, she has accepted that some cats have to go in order to keep other animals in existence.

Even though Australia's cat plan didn't kindle the kind of organized resistance that would put it in peril, many of the country's cat owners weren't happy about it. Moseby has tried to emphasize the conservation aspect of the plan, appearing in the country's newspapers to champion efforts to reintroduce native species to areas from which they have long been absent. But her work eliminating their predators has still rankled people who she says have a stronger connection to cats than to the dwindling pockets of unfamiliar wild creatures.

"Cats really trigger people's emotions," Moseby told me, sitting behind the wheel of her truck, littered with the detritus of a peripatetic life. Her house is four hours away from the sanctuary, and as we drove, she told me about the challenge of persuading people to care when they have never heard a bettong emitting its grunting snuffle or seen it hopping through the dunes. "People don't know what a bandicoot is, because they don't spend time with native animals," she said. "They really love and care about their cats, which is understandable. Most people are sitting on their phones, in cities. They don't really go out and have a wildlife experience. But they look at their cat every day and think: Isn't it gorgeous? Isn't it beautiful? A lot of people don't even know what native animals are. They could go extinct, and people wouldn't even know."

We arrived at the sanctuary a few hours before dusk. Moseby thinks forensic analysis should be applied to figure out cat habits; in her academic work, she has suggested using predator profiling - usually employed to identify polar bears or tigers that have developed a willingness to target humans - to narrow in on individual cats that are especially good at hunting native wildlife. Moseby took some dead cats out of a freezer to defrost for stomach-content analysis and went into the laboratory to swab the remains of a quoll to be sent out for DNA tests. Quolls, a slinky, spotted carnivorous native marsupial, had recently been released at the sanctuary. One had escaped, and its remains were found by one of the resident ecologists. "It was a very uneventful crime scene," the ecologist, Georgina Neave, told Moseby as they pulled on gloves.

"It wasn't the tussle site then, was it?" Moseby said. "If it was under a bush, it was likely a cat; they tend to pull them under the bushes." She took a swab and ran it around a bloodied tracking collar that had been attached to the quoll. "It's a bit sad, isn't it?"

A few years earlier, when Moseby was coordinating the reintroduction of quolls to the Flinders Ranges, a belt of peaks about a hundred miles southeast of the sanctuary, there was a moment when she thought the cats simply couldn't be defeated. She transported dozens of quolls from Western Australia, equipped them with radio collars and released them, and then watched as they were lost to cats and other vagaries. Over months, she built a profile of the cats that learned to hunt quolls by dissecting the cats' stomachs, observing field cameras set up through the forests and conducting DNA analysis. She called in some volunteer shooters, and she published research on what she called "catastrophic cats," usually large males that master the art of hunting animals like quolls and go on profligate sprees.

One such cat, a five-kilogram tabby that the scientists named Strauss (after the "Blue Danube" composer), made his way into part of the desert sanctuary and developed the habit of lying in wait outside the bettong warrens. Ecologists at the sanctuary were doing research on whether native species could adapt to some cat predation under controlled circumstances, so they let a few cats into a paddock with bettongs and bilbies, a type of small bandicoot. The cats established territories in the paddock, home ranges that they would scout regularly, loping out on forays to the farthest edges while keeping their hunting grounds to small areas that would periodically change. Strauss quickly became known as an exceptionally effective hunter. "He was one of our most successful bettong killers," Moseby said. After just three months of watching Strauss wreak havoc on the bettongs, the scientists decided his presence exerted too much pressure on the animals. They dug him out of a bettong tunnel and killed him.

By putting GPS and VHF collars on cats, scientists all over Australia have realized how little they understand about the creatures they are trying to control. Pat Hodgens, an ecologist on Kangaroo Island, tracked dozens of cats, including one orange cat named Vladimir (after the Russian president) that learned how to hunt for wallabies equal to him in weight. Hodgens's cats carved out home ranges that he mapped by plotting their movements, but occasionally one of the cats would embark on a long journey to a remote area, only to turn around and come back. Moseby's cats would occasionally do the same. Neither scientist could figure out exactly what was prompting the quests or how the cats knew their destination - often dozens of miles away. They speculated that the cats might be going to mate or to look for other hunting grounds. But the cats would often undertake the journeys only once, never to conduct an expedition to the site again after returning to their established territories. Perhaps the cats were using their advanced sense of smell, which is powered by a large olfactory bulb in their brain and something called a vomeronasal organ, to detect messages left in the traces deposited by other cats - a system described by the animal-behavior expert John Bradshaw in his 2013 book, "Cat Sense," as allowing the solitary animals to communicate.

Mostly, though, cats don't stray beyond their territory for much other than mating. After the first six months of their lives, which they spend first nursing and then learning how to hunt with other kittens in their litter, they usually remain alone. They are wary of new things and have extreme environmental awareness that extends beyond their home range. The size of their territories depends on their hunting prowess, the area they need to acquire enough food and the number of other cats competing for space nearby. They hunt no matter what. Even if they don't need to eat, they are programmed to stalk available prey. If they kill when they aren't hungry, they will either eat the most attractive part of the prey animal, usually the soft tissue, try to cache it for later or abandon the carcass altogether. A pristine snout or severed feet missing their corresponding body is a telltale sign of cat predation.

People who hunt and trap cats are convinced that they learn immediately. Once trapped, they are nearly impossible to capture again. Once shot at, they elude the hunter's tricks. One of Hodgens's cats, named Barnaby (after the former deputy prime minister of Australia), managed to evade recapture for months after he was collared. "I have the utmost respect for that cat," Hodgens told me during a scouting mission on Kangaroo Island to locate Barnaby using a radio antenna. At one point, on a seaside crest as dusk fell, we heard Barnaby's collar beeping. He was just over the beach dunes. "He's like my nemesis!" Hodgens said. "I know him inside out, and I've got enormous amounts of respect for him. He's smarter than I am."

One night in the desert, I went with a team of ecologists who were checking traps inside the Arid Recovery sanctuary to collar bettongs for the predation study. In the spectral beam of the truck's lights against the dark, the canted succulents and bowed branches of hakea trees looked like the waving spindles of a deep-sea reef. Moseby and her colleague had their radio tuned to the frequency of Quoll No.9, which had been missing for a few days. They kept their windows open to the sharp air to observe what was out in the dark. At one point, Moseby stopped the truck and peered out into the middle distance. She had seen a pair of glowing eyes. "You sure it's a cat?" her colleague asked. She wasn't sure. It had just been a flash against the silhouette of a shadowy hummock. "You look for so long," Moseby said, "you start to doubt they're there."

A few months after Australia unveiled its plan, a bowhunter named Zach Williams shot four feral cats at the request of a property owner. They were the first feral cats he had ever killed, and when he took photos to commemorate the event, which he later posted on Instagram, he posed just as he did with his other hunting trophies: gripping his compound bow on one side, holding up the dead cats by their tails and grinning into the camera. The pictures caught the eye of a producer from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which is how Williams wound up taking a television camera crew with him when he and his friend Aaron Wilksch went out hunting on Kangaroo Island, one of the five islands selected by the national government to be made feral-cat-free. Sheep and lambs are the most important agricultural commodity for the island, and cats are the sole carriers of a parasite, called toxoplasma gondii, that causes miscarriages in sheep. (The parasite infects humans, too, but the effects of it are less clear.) Cats also carry a sarcocyst parasite, which causes sheep to develop white cysts that bring down their value at the slaughterhouse. The bowhunters aren't formally part of the government program, but support for getting rid of cats on the island is high, and they usually get permission to hunt on private property.

During the ABC segment, a tortoiseshell cat bolted out of a clutch of stubby grasstrees, and Wilksch took aim, hitting the cat in the head. The wounded cat streaked across a clearing, the arrow trailing after it, and became entangled in a fence. Wilksch took another shot. Pierced twice, the cat still freed itself from the fence and ran away.

The program aired on the nightly news and prompted an unprecedented degree of viewer feedback. There had always been pockets of cat lovers who reacted with vitriol to efforts targeting the animals - Dr. Death once had a machete brandished at him while he was canvassing for information on domestic cats; Woinarski, who based his research on databases of stomach contents from dead cats' innards, has received email from people saying they would like to cut him up - but outrage at the television segment was far more widespread. Even scientists supporting the cull balked at the bowhunters' methods. Williams, who did most of the talking in front of the television cameras and acted as the face of the hunt, was doxxed by the internet hacktivist group Anonymous, and thousands of people, by his estimate, sent him hate messages and death threats. Killing cats to save endangered species was a simple - if sad - calculation in the abstract. But killing a single cat, and watching it struggle against the assault, seemed like a spectacle of human cruelty.

Even though large-scale baiting, like the sausages dropped from airplanes, has proved effective at reducing the number of cats, often by half or more, it has been individual farmers and shooters who have contributed most to the cause: The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's data showed that shooters were responsible for 83 percent of feral-cat deaths nationally in the first year of Australia's efforts. Most of the shooters carry guns, not bows, but most are, like Williams and Wilksch, hobbyists who devote their free time to the pursuit of wild animals. Williams makes a point of cooking the meat of most of the game he kills, and shooting cats can even imperil the hunters' aims, if the sounds of pursuit scare away other, usually larger animals. But the feline campaign has sparked a sense of duty within the hunting community - "releasing an arrow never felt so good," one bowhunter wrote on Facebook next to a photo of a dead cat alongside the brilliant rainbow lorikeet it was in the midst of consuming.

I met Williams on a storm-roiled ferry en route to Kangaroo Island, where he was headed to hunt again with Wilksch. A shy young man with the oval face of a Modigliani painting, Williams had a demeanor in person that ran counter to his provocative social-media presence. The next morning, I asked Wilksch what he thought in retrospect about the shot caught by the television crew. "That first shot was about as good as a shot gets," he told me. "But on television and for the purposes of trying to demonstrate hunting, it wasn't ideal." It was a blue-sky Saturday, and I was sitting in the back seat of a pickup truck's cab as Wilksch eased down the muddy lane of a sheep farm. Williams sat in the passenger seat. They were dressed in fatigues, and two green cans of energy drinks were stowed in the door pocket. The men were scouting for cats. They were very serious. The problem, Wilksch told me, is that contemporary society has tucked all its animal killing safely out of sight, to the point that nonhunters are now unreasonably shocked when they're forced to see it. "The common misconception is that hunters don't like animals, which is just completely false," Williams said. "If we're shooting something, we want it to be as humane and as quick as possible."

Nevertheless, most scientists I spoke with said the bowhunters' methods bothered them, not least because they worried it gave fuel to opponents of the plan - including those who opposed the entire cull approach on principle. A small group of ecologists have questioned the underlying logic of Australia's cat-eradication plan altogether by criticizing what they see as a bias toward native species. Daniel Ramp, the director of the Center for Compassionate Conservation in Sydney, told me that the country's cat program is based on unexamined stigmas toward introduced species. "I can't help but use terms like 'xenophobia,' " Ramp said. "It's gobsmacking how much hatred there is." Adherents to compassionate conservation say that Australia should embrace cats as an element of its environment, rather than trying to restore ecosystems to an arbitrary point in history whose selection is dependent on the whims of those doing the choosing. They invert commonly held scientific findings: Native animals like boodies are easy targets for cats not because they evolved without such a predator, Ramp and his colleagues contend; they are more vulnerable to the strongest predators because of the attempts to save them. Compassionate conservationists argue, especially, for the recognition that each individual life is inherently valuable, whether it belongs to a toad or a cat.

But Moseby and Read, like most scientists, believe that they're already taking the complicated balance of things into account. Inertia on the issue of cats will lead to further extinctions. If the choice is between cherishing the lives of individual animals and fighting to keep entire species from being toppled - to keep the synergistic elements of a chaotic and incomprehensible clockwork together - then the unfortunate letting of some blood is, in their view, unavoidable. Compassionate-conservation proponents have a lot of public support "because people don't like killing things," Moseby told me one evening. She was at the house she built, surrounded by mallee trees and filled with prints of her own wildlife photographs: grizzly bears from a trip to Alaska, a small chameleon on an electric-green leaf. "I'm not prepared to sit back and let endangered species go extinct because I don't want to kill any cats," she said. "If you follow their line, you'll end up just with cats and cockroaches."

Wild Australia stirs after dusk. Once all color has drained from the deserts and forests, the night comes alive. Hunters say they know when they see a cat in the dark by its eyes, which glint green. After weeks spent walking through starlit stands of pine trees and riding through the desert in pickup trucks, I had not seen the telltale flash until I went out one night with some members of the Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia, one of the country's most influential gun organizations. The association has a conservation division whose volunteers monitor, trap and shoot unwanted animals. In rural Queensland, I met up with Mark W., Mark M. and Damien F. (The three men asked me not to use their last names for fear of reprisal.) A few hours after arriving at a farm in the flat country west of Brisbane, they pulled on extra layers against the cold and loaded up the truck. They departed in the dark of night; the wind smelled of dry leaves.

To sight in their rifle scopes, they put a piece of cardboard on a tree and fired shots that produced a reverberating roar and a diaphanous orange cloud, ephemeral against the night. Then one of the shooters got back in the driver's seat, and the truck jounced along the edge of sorghum fields populated with kangaroos. It wasn't long before a dark creature crept across the road and into some trees. The men stopped the truck and shined their spotlight over the field. It was a fox.

Half a mile farther down the road, skirting the fields alongside a stand of prickly pear and acacia trees, Mark W. spotted something out to the right. "Just drive slowly, please, and we can look down the rows," he said softly. They backed the truck up and steered toward the area, inching forward. Out of the shades of gray cast by the spotlight, a pair of neon-green orbs shone out - cat eyes. The bang from the rifle seemed to flatten out all the other sounds of the night, creating a void in space. The men went still for a moment. The shot had hit the cat, but not fatally. Damien looked through a thermal monocular. "It's still flicking around out there," he said. Mark W. got out of the truck and went stomping through the sorghum fields. When he found the cat, he shot it at close range and carried it by the tail back to the truck.

The cat was a tabby with fine black lines descending from its spine like the furrows of tree bark. It was a light gray; a healthy, muscled animal in its hunting prime. The force of the impact from the second shot had blown off the cat's entire head, and there was little trace of it save the strands of tissue trailing from its body.

During the hours that followed, the men got in only instantly fatal head shots or else missed altogether. Mark W. cut a slit in a hind leg of each dead cat and hung it on a hook attached to his truck frame, in order to slice open their stomachs and see what they had been eating. Long after midnight, as the truck turned back toward the farmhouses, and the men shot their fifth or sixth cat, Mark W. opened one up to find that it had been carrying five kittens that were close to term. Their skin was translucent and velvety, and when he took them out of the cat, they made their first noises.

"Five little killers," he said, and, so they wouldn't suffer alone in the cold night, he used a knife to cut their heads off.

This article was researched with support from New York University's Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award.

Jessica Camille Aguirre is a writer from California. This is her first article for the magazine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Australia Is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Feature Feral felines are driving the country's native species to extinction. Now a massive culling is underway to preserve what's left of the wild. A member of the Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia with a cat he shot.

# data[].attributes.headline
Finally, We Know What Killed Sea Life in The Deadliest Mass Extinction in History

# data[].attributes.subject
Finally, We Know What Killed Sea Life in The Deadliest Mass Extinction in History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Around 252 million years ago, Earth experienced catastrophic devastation - an extinction event so severe that it wiped out almost all of the life on Earth.

Up to 70 percent of all land vertebrate species were killed off, and a massive 96 percent of all marine species, including the famous trilobite that had previously survived two other mass extinction events.

It's called the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, also known as the Great Dying, and as far as we know, it was the most calamitous event in Earth's history.

It's widely accepted that climate change is to blame - more specifically, that long-term volcanic activity in Siberia spewed so much material into the atmosphere that it wrapped the world in a shroud of ash for a million years, simultaneously blocking sunlight, thinning the ozone, dropping acid rain, and raising temperatures.

Now scientists have demonstrated what obliterated the marine life: rising temperatures accelerated the metabolisms of ocean creatures, which increases their oxygen requirements, while simultaneously depleting the oceans of oxygen.

The animals literally suffocated.

And we're experiencing similar atmospheric warming again today - only much faster than the Great Dying, which showed warning signs for 700,000 years before the event itself.

"This is the first time," said oceanographer Justin Penn of the University of Washington, "that we have made a mechanistic prediction about what caused the extinction that can be directly tested with the fossil record, which then allows us to make predictions about the causes of extinction in the future."

The team conducted a computer simulation of the changes Earth underwent during the Great Dying. Prior to the Siberian volcanic eruptions, the temperatures and oxygen levels were similar to what they are today, so that gave them a good baseline to work from.

Then they elevated greenhouse gases in the model's atmosphere to mimic the conditions following the eruption, which raised sea surface temperatures by around 11 degrees Celsius (by 20 degrees Fahrenheit).

Sure enough, this resulted in an oxygen depletion of around 76 percent - and about 40 percent of the seafloor, mostly at greater depths, was entirely depleted of oxygen.

To observe how this would affect marine life, the team plugged oxygen requirement data from 61 modern species into the simulation. It was a disaster.

"Very few marine organisms stayed in the same habitats they were living in - it was either flee or perish," said oceanographer Curtis Deutsch of the University of Washington.

The hardest hit were creatures most sensitive to oxygen, with the most pronounced devastation at high latitudes far from the equator. When the team compared their result with the fossil record, it confirmed their findings.

This is because animals living in the warmer waters around the equator can migrate to higher latitudes, where they will find habitats similar to the ones they just left. But animals already living in higher latitudes have nowhere left to go.

In all, the researchers found, this accounted for over 50 percent of the Great Dying's marine diversity loss. The rest was likely caused by other factors such as acidification by the CO ₂ from the Siberian traps, and a sharp decline in plant life caused by the thinning ozone.

We should be sitting up and paying attention to this, the researchers said. That temperature increase of 11 degrees Celsius took a few thousand years, give or take.

Since 1880, Earth's average temperature has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 Fahrenheit) - and two-thirds of that increase has occurred since 1975. And the warming of Earth's oceans is accelerating.

"Under a business-as-usual emissions scenarios, by 2100 warming in the upper ocean will have approached 20 percent of warming in the late Permian, and by the year 2300 it will reach between 35 and 50 percent," Penn said.

"This study highlights the potential for a mass extinction arising from a similar mechanism under anthropogenic climate change."

Remember that.

The team's research has been published in the journal .
This story was first published in December 2018.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Finally, We Know What Killed Sea Life in The Deadliest Mass Extinction in History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Around 252 million years ago, Earth experienced catastrophic devastation - an extinction event so severe that it wiped out almost all of the life on Earth. Up to 70 percent of all land vertebrate species were killed off, and a massive 96 percent of all marine species, including the famous trilobite that had previously survived two other mass extinction events.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A male Indian peafowl. Credit... Kenji Aoki for The New York Times

Feature

The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can't be explained by natural selection alone - so how did it come to be?

A male Indian peafowl. Credit... Kenji Aoki for The New York Times

A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor or hut. They decorate their bowers with scores of colorful objects, like flowers, berries, snail shells or, if they are near an urban area, bottle caps and plastic cutlery. Some bowerbirds even arrange the items in their collection from smallest to largest, forming a walkway that makes themselves and their trinkets all the more striking to a female - an optical illusion known as forced perspective that humans did not perfect until the 15th century.

The bowerbird defies traditional assumptions about animal behavior. Here is a creature that spends hours meticulously curating a cabinet of wonder, grouping his treasures by color and likeness. Here is a creature that single-beakedly builds something far more sophisticated than many celebrated examples of animal toolmaking; the stripped twigs that chimpanzees use to fish termites from their mounds pale in comparison. The bowerbird's bower, as at least one scientist has argued, is nothing less than art. When you consider every element of his courtship - the costumes, dance and sculpture - it evokes a concept beloved by the German composer Richard Wagner: Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, one that blends many different forms and stimulates all the senses.

Image

A male plum-throated cotinga. Credit... Kenji Aoki for The New York Times

Perhaps no living scientist is as enthusiastic - or doctrinaire - a champion of Darwinian sexual selection as Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University. In May 2017, he published a book, "The Evolution of Beauty," that lucidly and passionately explains his personal theory of aesthetic evolution. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, but within the scientific community, Prum's ideas have not been as warmly received. Again and again, he told me, he has asked other researchers for feedback and received either excuses of busyness or no reply at all. Some have been openly critical. In an academic review of Prum's book, Gerald Borgia, one of the world's foremost experts on bowerbirds, and the ethologist Gregory Ball described the historical sections as "revisionist" and said Prum failed to advance a credible case for his thesis. Once, over a lunch of burritos, Prum explained his theory to a visiting colleague, who pronounced it "nihilism."

In the early 1980s, while researching the history of sexual selection, Prum read a seminal 1915 paper and a 1930 book on the subject by the English biologist and statistician Ronald Fisher, who buttressed Darwin's original idea with a more sophisticated understanding of heredity. At first, Fisher argued, females might evolve preferences for certain valueless traits, like bright plumage, that just happened to correspond with health and vigor. Their children would tend to inherit the genes underlying both their mother's preference and their father's trait. Over time, this genetic correlation would reach a tipping point, creating a runaway cycle that would greatly exaggerate both preference and trait, glorifying beauty at the expense of the male's survival. In the early 1980s, the American evolutionary biologists Russell Lande and Mark Kirkpatrick gave Fisher's theory a formal mathematical girding, demonstrating quantitatively that runaway sexual selection could happen in nature and that the ornaments involved could be completely arbitrary, conveying no useful information whatsoever.

Prum's indifference to the ultimate source of aesthetic taste leaves a conspicuous gap in his grand theory. Even if we were to accept that most beauty blooms from arbitrary preferences, we would still need to explain why such preferences exist at all. It's entirely conceivable that an animal might be inherently partial to, say, a warbling mating call or bright yellow feathers, and that these predilections would have nothing to do with advantageous genes. Yet such inclinations are inarguably the product of an animal's neurobiology, which is itself the result of a long evolutionary history that has adapted the animal's brain and sensory organs to specific environmental conditions. In the past two decades, a cohort of biologists have dedicated themselves to studying how an animal's "sensory bias" - its ecological niche and its particular way of experiencing the world - sculpts its appearance, behavior and desires. Like Prum, they don't think beauty has to be adaptive. But where Prum celebrates caprice, they seek causality.

Michael Ryan, a professor of zoology whose lab and office are just a few floors below Cummings', has spent more than 30 years investigating how the quirks of an animal's anatomy determine its aesthetic preferences - a career he details in his recent book, "A Taste for the Beautiful." Since 1978, Ryan has been traveling to Panama to study a mud-colored frog called the túngara. Like the club-winged manakin, the túngara has a unique form of beauty that is not visual but aural. At dusk, male túngara frogs gather at the edges of puddles and sing to seduce females. Their mating call has two elements: The main part, dubbed the whine, sounds precisely like a miniaturized laser gun; sometimes this is followed by one or more brief barks, known as chucks. A long and complex mating call is risky: It attracts frog-eating bats. Yet there is a high payoff. Ryan has shown that whines followed by chucks are up to five times as appealing to females as whines alone. But why?

On my last day in Austin, while walking through a park, I encountered a common grackle hunting for insects in the grass. His plumage appeared black as charcoal at first, but as he moved, it shimmered with all the colors of an oil slick. Every now and then, he stopped in place, inflated his chest and made a sound like a rusty swing set. Perhaps dissatisfied with the local fare, or uncomfortable with my presence, he flew off.

Why are flowers beautiful? Or, more precisely: Why are flowers beautiful to us? The more I thought about this question, the more it seemed to speak to the nature of beauty itself. Philosophers, scientists and writers have tried to define the essence of beauty for thousands of years. The plurality of their efforts illustrates the immense difficulty of this task. Beauty, they have said, is: harmony; goodness; a manifestation of divine perfection; a type of pleasure; that which causes love and longing; and M = O/C (where M is aesthetic value, O is order and C is complexity).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Feature The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can't be explained by natural selection alone - so how did it come to be? A male Indian peafowl. Credit... Kenji Aoki for The New York Times A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty.

# data[].attributes.headline
Opinion | To Help Prevent the Next Big Wildfire, Let the Forest Burn - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Opinion | To Help Prevent the Next Big Wildfire, Let the Forest Burn - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The photograph below shows the Yosemite Valley in 1899 on the left, with open meadows and a patchwork of large conifers.

On the right is the same view in 2011. The valley floor has many more trees.

Which forest do you think is healthier?

If you picked the sparser forest from 1899, you're on the right track.

Much of California's forestland is overgrown, partly because of federal regulations implemented in 1910, which mandated stamping out wildfires as soon as possible. These policies were revised around the 1970s to allow some fires to naturally burn their course, but much of the West has struggled to do so.

At the height of the most recent blazes, President Trump tweeted that there was "no reason" for the fires besides "gross mismanagement" by the state. Critics took issue with the timing and simplistic logic of the statement, but the comment drew attention to the way forest management affects the frequency and intensity of wildfires. Ecologists and forest experts attribute California's destructive wildfires to decades of aggressive fire suppression, in addition to the increased population of fire-prone areas and hotter, drier conditions due to climate change.

The solution needs to address all these things, but one critical step is shifting our understanding of fire's role in forest ecology. Policymakers and citizens alike must abandon the idea that trees are always worth saving and that fire is always a threat. Instead, they should permit modest, ecologically necessary wildfires to burn.

"For a long time, we were mistaken about what was going on in the forest," said Malcolm North, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. "People believed that you needed to put fires out because it was burning the forest up. That has proven to be wrong."

California is now collecting itself at the tail end of its most destructive and deadliest wildfire season on record. But recovery is not just about donating to relief efforts and rebuilding burned homes. It's also about creating a new culture for forest and fire management in the state, one that respects the role that carefully planned fires play in preventing disasters.

In May, Gov. Jerry Brown took a step towards this future, dedicating $96 million to reducing wildfire risk in the state. He directed state offices to double the number of acres being managed with prescribed burns and vegetation thinning to 500,000 acres from 250,000 acres, among other directives like educating landowners about effective forest management.

"If California can begin to change, that will be a huge example for the rest of the country, certainly throughout the West," Dr. Pyne said.

Ash Ngu and Sahil Chinoy are graphics editors for The New York Times.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | To Help Prevent the Next Big Wildfire, Let the Forest Burn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The photograph below shows the Yosemite Valley in 1899 on the left, with open meadows and a patchwork of large conifers. On the right is the same view in 2011. The valley floor has many more trees. Which forest do you think is healthier?

# data[].attributes.headline
Palm oil is destroying rainforests. But try going a day without it.

# data[].attributes.subject
Palm oil is destroying rainforests. But try going a day without it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On a snowy December morning, I crawled from my bed in the dark. In the bathroom, I washed my hands, brushed my teeth, and slathered some moisturizer on my face. Before the waking sun had painted the mountains out my window a pale pink, before I'd even made it into the kitchen, I already had palm oil on my hands, face, and tongue.

I coaxed my sleepy son into a warm shower. And there it was again, in his soap, shampoo, conditioner, and the lotion I rubbed on him afterward: more palm oil. He was barely awake, and yet my five-year-old was already coated in the stuff.

To see just how ubiquitous palm oil had become in our lives, I decided to track my every encounter with it throughout the day.

As I write in the December issue, palm oil is the world's most popular edible oil, making up a third of all vegetable oil consumed across the planet. Oil palm trees are a highly efficient crop, but they've been grown at the expense of vast stretches of thriving forests, and their spread has resulted in human rights abuses, species declines, and dangerous emissions of carbon dioxide.

You might be thinking, 'Wait a minute. I've never seen "palm oil" listed as an ingredient in any of my skin-care products.' That's probably true, but it's there nonetheless. Palm oil is an ingredient in other ingredients.

Take decyl glucoside, for example, which is listed amid the otherwise easy-to-pronounce contents of the strawberry-scented body wash my family likes. Decyl glucoside is a cleansing agent used in many baby shampoos and sensitive-skin products. It's made, in part, from decanol-a fatty alcohol molecule often derived from palm oil.

Lauryl glucoside, too, is a surfactant made from coconut or palm oil, and it is another component of that same body wash. Surfactants help to combine otherwise impossible-to-mix materials, like oil and water. This surfactant is also in my toothpaste, along with sodium lauryl sulfate, another ingredient derived from palm oil and used to make the toothpaste foam.

Even our conditioner contains palm oil in the form of glycerin as well as cetearyl alcohol-a common ingredient used to thicken many conditioners.

Of course, just because a product contains palm oil doesn't mean it's contributing to ecological destruction. Take Alaffia, a socially conscious company that makes our body wash and conditioner. Alaffia's Facebook page specifically addresses its use of palm oil: "Our natural West African palm oil is grown and harvested by small-scale farmers in the Maritime region of Togo, from the town of Tsevie to Kpalime. The oil is extracted by our Fair Trade cooperative in Sokodé using traditional methods." According to Tom's of Maine, which makes my peppermint fluoride toothpaste, all its ingredients are made using only palm oil that's certified sustainable by the Rainforest Alliance or the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

But it's difficult to even determine whether your products contain palm oil-let alone whether it might be sustainably sourced. I spent hours later that day squinting at the fine-print ingredient lists on all the products my family had used and trying to determine which chemical compounds were produced from palm oil. My Trader Joe's face moisturizer, it turned out, was an oil palm grower's dream: Ascorbyl palmitate, retinyl palmitate, ethylhexylglycerin, glyceryl stearate, and so on, all made in some fashion with palm. ( Trader Joe's product FAQs contain information about their coconut and olive oils, but nothing about palm oil; the company is not a member of the RSPO.)

A funny thing happened, though, as I continued to track my palm oil consumption. Once I stepped into my kitchen, I barely found the stuff anywhere. Yes, there was a jar of Justin's almond butter that contained it, to help keep the nut butter spreadable. (Justin's uses certified sustainable palm oil.) A box of Kind bars drizzled in chocolate; as with so many energy bars, palm oil is used to give the chocolate a creamy texture for coatings. (Kind LLC is a member of the RSPO.) And a box of Nabisco saltine crackers, bought when my husband was sick a few weeks earlier, where again, the palm oil lends a vaguely creamy quality. (Nabisco is a subsidiary of Mondelēz, which received a score of 9 out of 10 on the WWF2016 Palm Oil Buyers Scorecard.)

But that was it. For breakfast, my son ate a bowl of plain yogurt with fresh apples and frozen berries, and an egg fried in olive oil. I had toast (from bakery bread, which contains fewer and simpler ingredients than packaged sandwich bread) with avocado and Marmite. My husband ate leftover rice with a fried egg and spinach. No palm oil anywhere.

That's because most of the things we ate that morning were whole foods-apples, berries, avocados, eggs-or those with a very short list of ingredients. And most of the edible products that contain palm oil are not whole foods but processed ones.

"Processed" food generally refers to all those packages of things with long ingredient lists that line supermarket shelves and populate fast-food menus. Products that are, as food writer Melanie Warner puts it, "far from the source," meaning many steps removed from their natural starting point.

Most processed foods, says Warner, author of Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal, have "had healthy, naturally occurring things taken away and lots of stuff added to them that in large quantities isn't good for us-salt, sugar, fat, artificial additives."

Many heavily processed foods are bad for us, and most are at the very least not providing us much that's beneficial. And, as it turns out, it's in these items that much of the food-based palm oil resides. Think Oreos, Halloween candy, frozen pizza. If you want to consume less palm oil, there's a simple way to do it: Eat less processed food. You'll end up healthier in the process.

There are also skin care products that don't contain palm oil, such as limited-ingredient soaps made from olive oil. But it's not necessary to completely eliminate palm oil from your life. In fact, boycotting it could have ramifications that are even worse for the environment. Producing the same amount of another vegetable oil-soybean, say-would take up even more land.

And eliminating support for the companies trying to make palm oil production less ecologically damaging would give a competitive advantage to the ones that care only about turning a profit, everything else be damned. Supporting the companies that are moving away from destructive practices will help make the whole industry more sustainable.

Since its formation in 2004, many critics have argued that the RSPO-an industry-NGO partnership-does not set high enough standards. The RSPO's Malaysian CEO, Darrel Webber, argues that it's crucial to create a tent big enough to let more companies in-and in the process teach more of them about the importance of protecting ecosystems and treating workers fairly.

"I would love to drive a Ferrari," he says, using a favorite analogy, "and go very fast, impress my friends. But it would just be me and another person because it's a two-seater. The reality is, I have to drive a bus if I want to make a change. We have to find a way to bring on board the whole group."

Several NGOs, including WWF, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, issue guides to help consumers make smart decisions about palm oil. It just requires a little time and research-which, when you think about it, makes sense for products you are eating, bathing in, and rubbing on your children's skin.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Palm oil is destroying rainforests. But try going a day without it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On a snowy December morning, I crawled from my bed in the dark. In the bathroom, I washed my hands, brushed my teeth, and slathered some moisturizer on my face. Before the waking sun had painted the mountains out my window a pale pink, before I'd even made it into the kitchen, I already had palm oil on my hands, face, and tongue.

# data[].attributes.body
Endangered species

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A number of biologists have recently made the argument that extinction is part of evolution and that saving species need not be a conservation priority. But this revisionist thinking shows a lack of understanding of evolution and an ignorance of the natural world.

A few years ago, I helped lead a ship-based expedition along south Alaska during which several scientists and noted artists documented and made art from the voluminous plastic trash that washes ashore even there. At Katmai National Park, we packed off several tons of trash from as distant as South Asia. But what made Katmai most memorable was: huge brown bears. Mothers and cubs were out on the flats digging clams. Others were snoozing on dunes. Others were patrolling.

During a rest, several of us were sitting on an enormous drift-log, watching one mother who'd been clamming with three cubs. As the tide flooded the flat, we watched in disbelief as she brought her cubs up to where we were sitting - and stepped up on the log we were on. There was no aggression, no tension; she was relaxed. We gave her some room as she paused on the log, and then she took her cubs past us into a sedge meadow. Because she was so calm, I felt no fear. I felt the gift.

In this protected refuge, bears could afford a generous view of humans. Whoever protected this land certainly had my gratitude.

In the early 20th century, a botanist named Robert F. Griggs discovered Katmai's volcanic "Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes." In love with the area, he spearheaded efforts to preserve the region's wonders and wildlife. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson established Katmai National Monument (now Katmai National Park and Preserve), protecting 1,700 square miles, thus ensuring a home for bear cubs born a century later, and making possible my indelible experience that day. As a legacy for Griggs' proclivity to share his love of living things, George Washington University later established the Robert F. Griggs Chair in Biology.

That chair is now occupied by a young professor whose recent writing probably has Griggs spinning in his grave. He is R. Alexander Pyron. A few months ago, The Washington Post published a " Perspective" piece by Pyron that is an extreme example of a growing minority opinion in the conservation community, one that might be summarized as, "Humans are profoundly altering the planet, so let's just make peace with the degradation of the natural world."

No biologist is entitled to butcher the scientific fundamentals on which they hang their opinions.

Pyron's essay - with lines such as, "The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings" and "[T]he impulse to conserve for conservation's sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency" - left the impression that it was written in a conservative think tank, perhaps by one of the anti-regulatory zealots now filling posts throughout the Trump administration. Pyron's sentiments weren't merely oddly out of keeping with the legacy of the man whose name graces his job title. Much of what Pyron wrote is scientifically inaccurate. And where he stepped out of his field into ethics, what he wrote was conceptually confused.

Pyron has since posted, on his website and Facebook page, 1,100 words of frantic backpedaling that land somewhere between apology and retraction, including mea culpas that he "sensationalized" parts of his own argument and "cavalierly glossed over several complex issues." But Pyron's original essay and his muddled apology do not change the fact that the beliefs he expressed reflect a disturbing trend that has taken hold among segments of the conservation community. And his article comes at a time when conservation is being assailed from other quarters, with a half-century of federal protections of land being rolled back, the Endangered Species Act now more endangered than ever, and the relationship between extinction and evolution being subjected to confused, book-length mistreatment.

Pyron's original opinion piece, so clear and unequivocal in its assertions, is a good place to unpack and disentangle accelerating misconceptions about the "desirability" of extinction that are starting to pop up like hallucinogenic mushrooms.

In recent years, some biologists and writers have been distancing themselves from conservation's bedrock idea that in an increasingly human-dominated world we must find ways to protect and perpetuate natural beauty, wild places, and the living endowment of the planet. In their stead, we are offered visions of human-dominated landscapes in which the stresses of destruction and fragmentation spur evolution.

Conservation International ditched its exuberant tropical forest graphic for a new corporate logo whose circle and line were designed to suggest a human head and outstretched arms. A few years ago, Peter Kareiva, then chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, said, "conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness," for "a more optimistic, human-friendly vision." Human annihilation of the passenger pigeon, he wrote, caused "no catastrophic or even measurable effects," characterizing the total extinction of the hemisphere's most abundant bird - whose population went from billions to zero inside a century (certainly a "measurable effect" in itself) - as an example of nature's "resilience."

Habitat on the Edges: Making room for wildlife in an urbanized world. Read more.

British ecologist Chris Thomas's recent book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, argues that the destruction of nature creates opportunities for evolution of new lifeforms that counterbalance any losses we create, an idea that is certainly optimistic considering the burgeoning lists of endangered species. Are we really ready to consider that disappearing rhinos are somehow counterbalanced by a new subspecies of daisy in a railroad track? Maybe it would be simpler if Thomas and his comrades just said, "We don't care about nature.''

Enter Pyron, who - at least in his initial essay - basically said he doesn't. He's entitled to his apathy, but no biologist is entitled to butcher the scientific fundamentals on which they hang their opinions.

Pyron began with a resonant story about his nocturnal rediscovery of a South American frog that had been thought recently extinct. He and colleagues collected several that, he reassured us, "are now breeding safely in captivity." As we breathed a sigh of relief, Pyron added, "But they will go extinct one day, and the world will be none the poorer for it."

The conviction that today's slides toward mass extinction are not inevitable spurred the founding of the conservation movement.

I happen to be writing this in the Peruvian Amazon, having just returned from a night walk to a light-trap where I helped a biologist collect moths. No one yet knows how many species live here. Moths are important pollinators. Knowing them helps detangle a little bit of how this rainforest works. So it's a good night to mention that the number of species in an area carries the technical term "species richness." More is richer, and fewer is, indeed, poorer. Pyron's view lies outside scientific consensus and societal values.

What is causing the sharp decline in insects, and why it matters. Read more.

Pyron wasn't concerned about his frogs going extinct, because, "Eventually, they will be replaced by a dozen or a hundred new species that evolve later." But the timescale would be millennia at best - meaningless in human terms - and perhaps never; hundreds of amphibians worldwide are suffering declines and extinctions, raising the possibility that major lineages and whole groups of species will vanish. Pyron seemed to have no concerns about that possibility, writing, "Mass extinctions periodically wipe out up to 95 percent of all species in one fell swoop; these come every 50 million to 100 million years."

But that's misleading. "Periodically" implies regularity. There's no regularity to mass extinctions. Not in their timing, nor in their causes. The mass extinctions are not related. Three causes of mass extinctions - prolonged worldwide atmosphere-altering volcanic eruptions; a dinosaur-snuffing asteroid hit; and the spreading agriculture, settlement, and sheer human appetite driving extinctions today - are unrelated.

The conviction that today's slides toward mass extinction are not inevitable, and could be lessened or avoided, spurred the founding of the conservation movement and created the discipline of conservation biology.

But Pyron seems unmoved. "Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish," he declared. "Species constantly go extinct, and every species that is alive today will one day follow suit. There is no such thing as an 'endangered species,' except for all species."

Let us unpack. Extinction is not evolution's driver; survival is. The engine of evolution is survival amidst competition. It's a little like what drives innovation in business. To see this, let's simply compare the species diversity of the Northern Hemisphere, where periodic ice sheets largely wiped the slate clean, with those of the tropics, where the evolutionary time clock continued running throughout. A couple of acres in eastern temperate North America might have a dozen tree species or fewer. In the Amazon a similar area can have 300 tree species. All of North American has 1,400 species of trees; Brazil has 8,800. All of North America has just over 900 birds; Colombia has 1,900 species. All of North America has 722 butterfly species. Where I am right now, along the Tambopata River in Peru, biologists have tallied around 1,200 butterfly species.

Competition among living species drives proliferation into diversified specialties. Specialists increasingly exploit narrowing niches. We can think of this as a marketplace of life, where little competition necessitates little specialization, thus little proliferation. An area with many types of trees, for instance, directly causes the evolution of many types of highly specialized pollinating insects, hummingbirds, and pollinating bats, who visit only the "right" trees. Many flowering plants are pollinated by just one specialized species.

Pyron muddles several kinds of extinctions, then serves up further misunderstanding of how evolution works. So let's clarify. Mass extinctions are global; they involve the whole planet. There have been five mass extinctions and we've created a sixth. Past mass extinctions happened when the entire planet became more hostile. Regional wipeouts, as occurred during the ice ages, are not considered mass extinctions, even though many species can go extinct. Even without these major upheavals there are always a few species blinking out due to environmental changes or new competitors. And there are pseudo-extinctions where old forms no longer exist, but only because their descendants have changed through time.

New species do not suddenly "arise," nor are they really new. They evolve from existing species, as population gene pools change.

Crucially for understanding the relationship between extinction and evolution is this: New species do not suddenly "arise," nor are they really new. New species evolve from existing species, as population gene pools change. Many "extinct" species never really died out; they just changed into what lives now. Not all the dinosaurs went extinct; theropod dinosaurs survived. They no longer exist because they evolved into what we call birds. Australopithecines no longer exist, but they did not all go extinct. Their children morphed into the genus Homo, and the tool- and fire-making Homo erectus may well have survived to become us. If they indeed are our direct ancestor - as some species was - they are gone now, but no more "extinct" than our own childhood. All species come from ancestors, in lineages that have survived.

Pyron's contention that the "hardiest" flourish is a common misconception. A sloth needs to be slow; a faster sloth is going to wind up as dinner in a harpy eagle nest. A white bear is not "hardier" than a brown one; the same white fur that provides camouflage in a snowy place will scare away prey in green meadow. Bears with genes for white fur flourished in the Arctic, while brown bears did well amidst tundra and forests. Polar bears evolved from brown bears of the tundra; they got so specialized that they separated, then specialized further. Becoming a species is a process, not an event. "New" species are simply specialized descendants of old species.

True extinctions beget nothing. Humans have recently sped the extinction rate by about a thousand times compared to the fossil record. The fact that the extinction of dinosaurs was followed, over tens of millions of years, by a proliferation of mammals, is irrelevant to present-day decisions about rhinos, elephant populations, or monarch butterflies. Pyron's statement, "There is no such thing as an 'endangered species,' except for all species," is like saying there are no endangered children except for all children. It's like answering "Black lives matter" with "All lives matter." It's a way of intentionally missing the point.

Here's the point: All life today represents non-extinctions; each species, every living individual, is part of a lineage that has not gone extinct in a billion years.

Pyron also expressed the opinion that "the only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves ..." I don't know of another biologist who shares this opinion. Pyron's statement makes little practical sense, because reducing the diversity and abundance of the living world will rob human generations of choices, as values change. Save the passenger pigeon? Too late for that. Whales? A few people acted in time to keep most of them. Elephants? Our descendants will either revile or revere us for what we do while we have the planet's reins in our hands for a few minutes. We are each newly arrived and temporary tourists on this planet, yet we find ourselves custodians of the world for all people yet unborn. A little humility, and forbearance, might comport.

Thus Pyron's most jarring assertion: "Extinction does not carry moral significance, even when we have caused it." That statement is a stranger to thousands of years of philosophy on moral agency and reveals an ignorance of human moral thinking. Moral agency issues from an ability to consider consequences. Humans are the species most capable of such consideration. Thus many philosophers consider humans the only creatures capable of acting as moral agents. An asteroid strike, despite its consequences, has no moral significance. Protecting bears by declaring Katmai National Monument, or un-protecting Bears Ears National Monument, are acts of moral agency. Ending genetic lineages millions of years old, either actively or by the willful neglect that Pyron advocates, certainly qualifies as morally significant.

Do we really wish a world with only what we "rely on for food and shelter?" Do animals have no value if we don't eat them?

How can we even decide which species we "directly depend'' upon? We don't directly depend on peacocks or housecats, leopards or leopard frogs, humpback whales or hummingbirds or chestnut-sided warblers or millions of others. Do we really wish a world with only what we "rely on for food and shelter," as Pyron seemed to advocate? Do animals have no value if we don't eat them? I happen not to view my dogs as food, for instance. Things we "rely on" make life possible, sure, but the things we don't need make life worthwhile.

When Pyron wrote, "Conservation is needed for ourselves and only ourselves... If this means fewer dazzling species, fewer unspoiled forests, less untamed wilderness, so be it," he expressed a dereliction of the love, fascination, and perspective that motivates the practice of biology.

Here is a real biologist, Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection:

I thought of the long ages of the past during which the successive generations of these things of beauty had run their course ... with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness, to all appearances such a wanton waste of beauty... . This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man... . Their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone. -The Malay Archipelago, 1869

At the opposite pole of Wallace's human insight and wonder, Pyron asked us to become complicit in extinction. "The goals of species conservation have to be aligned with the acceptance that large numbers of animals will go extinct," he asserted. "Thirty to 40 percent of species may be threatened with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species ... The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in - and rely on - areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin."

Right now, in the Amazon as I type, listening to nocturnal birds and bugs and frogs in this towering emerald cathedral of life, thinking such as Pyron's strikes me as failing to grasp both the living world and the human spirit.

Beyond Biodiversity: A new way of looking at how species interconnect. Read more.

The massive destruction that Pyron seems to so cavalierly accept isn't necessary. When I was a kid, there were no ospreys, no bald eagles, no peregrine falcons left around New York City and Long Island where I lived. DDT and other hard pesticides were erasing them from the world. A small handful of passionate people sued to get those pesticides banned, others began breeding captive falcons for later release, and one biologist brought osprey eggs to nests of toxically infertile parents to keep faltering populations on life support. These projects succeeded. All three of these species have recovered spectacularly and now again nest near my Long Island home. Extinction wasn't a cost of progress; it was an unnecessary cost of carelessness. Humans could work around the needs of these birds, and these creatures could exist around development. But it took some thinking, some hard work, and some tinkering.

It's not that anyone thinks humans have not greatly changed the world, or will stop changing it. Rather, as the great wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote in his 1949 classic A Sand County Almanac, "To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering."

Carl Safina, a marine ecologist and environmental writer, is the author of seven books, including the award-winning Song for the Blue Ocean and Eye of the Albatross. Safina is the founding president of The Safina Center at Stony Brook University, where he is also a professor of nature and humanity. He is a winner of the 2012 Orion Award and a MacArthur Prize, among others. More →

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In Defense of Biodiversity: Why Protecting Species from Extinction Matters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A number of biologists have recently made the argument that extinction is part of evolution and that saving species need not be a conservation priority. But this revisionist thinking shows a lack of understanding of evolution and an ignorance of the natural world.

# data[].attributes.headline
Saving the Bats, One Cave at a Time - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Saving the Bats, One Cave at a Time - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image

A Western small-footed bat being wrested from its torpor and collected for study in an abandoned mining cave near Ely, Nev. Credit Credit Kim Raff for The New York Times

Biologists are searching caves and abandoned mines in the West, hoping to spare many species of the winged creatures from the devastating fungus, white-nose syndrome.

A Western small-footed bat being wrested from its torpor and collected for study in an abandoned mining cave near Ely, Nev. Credit Credit Kim Raff for The New York Times

ELY, Nev. - A crew of five wildlife biologists wearing overalls, helmets and headlamps walked up the flanks of a juniper-studded mountain and climbed through stout steel bars to enter an abandoned mine that serves as a bat hibernaculum.

The swinging white light of the headlamps probed cracks and crevices in the walls of the long dark and narrow tunnel, as the team walked half a mile into the earth. When they spied a bat, they gently plucked the mouse-sized, chestnut brown mammal - Townsend's long eared and Western small footed are the two most abundant species here - off the walls and deposited them in white cloth bags. A lone big brown bat was also gathered.

At one point a bat, disturbed by the scientific ruckus, fluttered by, the headlamps illuminating its membranous, négligée-thin wings.

During the survey in November, the bats were in their pre-hibernation phase, clinging to the gray rock wall with tiny grappling hook-like feet, gently breathing. They are in full hibernation mode now.

"They are biologically interesting," said Catherine G. Haase, a postdoctoral researcher from Montana State University, as she affectionately handled a docile bat. "And they are really cute."
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Cute, interesting and facing a deeply uncertain future. This foray is part of a continentwide effort, from Canada to Oklahoma, to plumb mines and caves in hopes of figuring out how a virulent and rapidly spreading invasive fungal bat disease called white-nose syndrome, which is bearing down on the West, will behave when it hits the native populations here.

"White-nose syndrome represents one of the most consequential wildlife diseases of modern times," wrote the authors of one recent paper published in mSphere, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Since 2006, "the disease has killed millions of bats and threatens several formerly abundant species with extirpation or extinction."

White-nose syndrome, caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd), is named for the fuzzy spots that appear on bats' noses and wings.

Over the last decade state, federal and tribal agencies, along with nonprofit organizations, have been working around the country to try to get ahead of the disease and find a remedy to save the 47 species of bats in North America. So far the syndrome has defied the efforts.

Image

After some 30 animals were gathered from the mine walls, the researchers hiked back out of the tunnel, disrobed and put their clothes into plastic bags to launder, and washed their helmets and other equipment with alcohol to avoid inadvertently spreading the fungus, should it be present.

Then they took the bags with their tiny quarry into a small, white windowless trailer stuffed with an animal MRI and a respirometer with a tangle of dozens of clear plastic tubes, to weigh and measure the bats in several different ways.

"This research will inform us which bats will be susceptible and which will be resistant, which will inform a conservation and intervention strategy," said Sarah H. Olson, associate director of wildlife health for the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The disease was discovered in a cave in Schoharie County outside of Albany in 2006, most likely introduced inadvertently from Eurasia. Since then, the pathogen has spread to at least 36 states and seven provinces of Canada, killing whole colonies of bats. Researchers have described finding cave floors littered with bat carcasses, sometimes many thousands in a single cave. So far more than six million bats have died in Canada and the United States.

Their loss could be consequential: Bats play a critical ecological role, pollinating plants in some places and controlling mosquitoes and other insects.

Having ravaged much of the East Coast and infecting an isolated, outlier region near Seattle, white-nose syndrome is heading deep into the West at the rate of about a state per year, and has appeared on the eastern edge of the region, killing bats in South Dakota, Oklahoma and eastern Wyoming.

That means in the next few years it could reach the thousands of caves and abandoned mines of the Rocky Mountains, the redoubts of overwintering bats. "Hibernating bats are most likely to be affected," said Jonathan Reichard, assistant coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service's program on white-nose syndrome.

Biologists have just begun searching caves in the West to see where new infections may have occurred during this winter.

A great deal about white-nose syndrome is unknown, as is a good deal of the behavior and attributes of bats. The arid west has a different bat ecology than the more humid regions of the East. Scientists believe the key to devising a strategy to combat the disease may involve a better understanding of the bats' hibernation physiology.

But as decimating as the disease is, there are experts who think efforts to treat or even research the disease is wrongheaded, a waste of money that could do more harm than good.

The National Speleological Society, a group of cave explorers who also study and work for the conservation of caves, opposes these kinds of efforts, especially the blanket closing of caves to the public to keep the disease from spreading. We "deplore current actions," they wrote in a letter to then Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, last year.

Merlin Tuttle, a bat expert in Texas, also thinks these multiagency efforts to stem the disease are foolhardy and may harm the bats. "Disrupting them during hibernation is adding stress at a time they can least afford it," he said.

"There's no practical way at all to slow or stop this, to get rid of it in the wild, it's already in thousands and thousands of roosts," he said. "It should be allowed to run its course. We're just wasting money when we try to find a cure. We should be spending our money on getting the maximum protection for the bats that have survived and helping them recover and rebuild populations."

When they fall into their big sleep, from November to April, bats are in torpor, a state where they dial down their physiology - heart rate, respiration and the like - for three weeks at a time. A waking heart rate of 750 beats per minute drops to 150 during torpor. Then, for two days, they rouse themselves to drink water, mate and take care of other business before they sink into slumber again.

Instead of rousing every three weeks, though, infected bats wake every seven days, because white-nose illness causes dehydration and they need to drink. While the roused period is small, it is physiologically expensive.

"During torpor they burn almost no energy," said Nathan W. Fuller, a postdoctoral biologist from Texas Tech who is part of the team, as he prepared to place bats in jars with plastic tubing to measure their inhalations and exhalations. "During arousal they burn a lot. Even though it's only five percent of their time, it's 95 percent of their energy. It really comes down to how often they arouse."

Expending more energy depletes the fat they store to make it through hibernation, and they become emaciated during dormancy. They can die in the cave, or starving, leave the cave early to search for food only to find the world snow-covered, locked in a winter they can't survive.

That's why this team has spent so much time and money on high-end, highly-sensitive equipment to fathom the secrets of bat hibernation. "We can get respirometry from a single fruit fly," said Dr. Fuller proudly as he stood before the stack of equipment that makes up the respirometer.

In addition, the little mammals are placed in a long, clear plexiglass tube and slid into an M.R.I. machine. In just a few minutes their muscle mass, fat and water levels are measured.

Once the baseline data are established, "in areas like this where it's not yet arrived, we can form a predictive model based on ecology, physiology, genetics and skin chemistry," Dr. Reichard said.

Biologists have considered putting food in caves, or feeding bats probiotics or electrolytes or applying chemical skin treatments to kill the fungus. They have talked about dehumidifiers. In some places they have fogged the caves with antifungal agents such as B-23, which is made from the stems of wild pineapples.

Exposing infected bats to ultra violet light shows promise and is being tested. "UV light can kill the fungus in the lab but we don't have a feasible deployment scheme," Dr. Reichard said.

Dr. Tuttle cautions that such experiments could go awry. "Using something to kill the fungus is going to kill other fungi or microorganisms in the cave that will cause other chain reactions and problems that are far greater than what we started with," he said. Treated bats may also get reinfected.

While researchers are focused on the here and now, a warming world is expected to play a role in the future of bats, and perhaps this disease, though it's too early to say how.

"The temperature of a cave is the same as the mean outside temperature," Dr. Fuller said. "So bats will use more energy while they are in torpor as it warms. Climate change will play a role."

Credit Kim Raff for The New York Times

Earlier reporting on bats and white-nose syndrome

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Racing to Save Hibernating Bats From Extinction. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Biologists are searching caves and abandoned mines in the West, hoping to spare many species of the winged creatures from the devastating fungus, white-nose syndrome. A Western small-footed bat being wrested from its torpor and collected for study in an abandoned mining cave near Ely, Nev.

# data[].attributes.headline
'Code red' for the Chesapeake Bay - Baltimore Sun

# data[].attributes.subject
'Code red' for the Chesapeake Bay - Baltimore Sun

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Recent alarming news about the Chesapeake Bay signals a code red for immediate action. Efforts must be ramped up to greatly reduce agricultural and urban runoff pollution. These are the inconvenient truths compelling such action:

The legal-sized Maryland bay oyster population declined by half since 1999. Oysters are below 1 percent of historic levels. This is despite the expenditure of more than $100 million. The oyster is a keystone species filtering and cleansing the bay's waters. The bay states failed miserably to meet their pledge to increase oyster biomass by ten-fold by 2010. Overfishing occurred in more than half of the bay.

The 2018 blue crab survey showed a 42 percent decline in mature female crabs, well below the goal. There was a 23 percent decline in the population of all adult crabs.

The shad fishery is so depleted it was closed and, 25 years later, has not recovered. The soft clam fishery is depleted, both species of sturgeon are listed as endangered, and the eel fishery is in trouble.

The large dead zone in the bay persisted last year and reached near-record size by late June. This oxygen depleted zone stretches for hundreds of square miles.

Flesh-eating diseases threatening life and limb have become more prevalent in the bay because of excess nutrients fueling growth of toxic organisms. Bacterial infections are common, especially after rainfall when health departments warn people to avoid water contact.

The states - including Maryland - have failed again in meeting their legally binding nitrogen caps. Only one-half of the required 60 percent reduction was achieved in 2017. Nitrogen is the key nutrient causing bay water quality problems.

While some celebrated an increase in bay grasses in 2017 to 104,843 acres, the highest since surveys began in 1984, this was just a 5 percent increase from 2016 and it represents only 57 percent of the goal of 185,000 acres we were supposed to have met by 2010. Bay grasses once covered at least 220,000 acres.

Despite 35 years of efforts under the formal Bay Program, 58 percent of the bay's waters do not meet minimum EPA Clean Water Act standards.

There is a grave concern that even though reductions for phosphorus and sediment were met for the bay, the pollution reductions mandated by 2025 (after two decades of failed voluntary efforts) will not be achieved, and there is wide acknowledgment that nitrogen reductions will not be met.

This code red scenario is exacerbated by the fact that the greatest nutrient reductions have come from costly upgrades to large wastewater treatment plants, most of which are complete. This easy target, therefore, has been exhausted. Further, the Trump administration has acted to defund the Bay Program, cripple enforcement and repeal key restrictions on nitrogen emissions from coal burning and motor vehicles fuel economy standards.

The EPA failure to take any actions to enforce the pollution diet against laggard states also impedes progress. The increase in large chicken farms, more nitrogen-intensive corn and soybean farming, and more development of forests with increased stormwater runoff all add to the problem.

In December 1983, 35 years ago, the bay states and EPA solemnly pledged to restore the bay in signing the first Bay Agreement. President Ronald Reagan budgeted $40 million for the new Bay Program over four years and said in his 1984 State of the Union that: "We will begin the long, necessary effort to clean up a productive recreational area and a special national resource - the Chesapeake Bay."

These lofty expectations may be crushed unless:

1. The EPA takes actions against laggard states, compelling them to meet pollution limits;

2. Maryland and other states better regulate farm pollutants, particularly animal manure, which should be regulated the same as cleansed biosolids from advanced human wastewater treatment plants;

3. Funding and tighter discharge permits are implemented to reduce pollutants from existing urban stormwater runoff;

4. Stormwater laws are adopted prohibiting any increase in rate, volume or pollutant loads from new development;

5. Existing forests are protected and buffers increased;

6. And wild oyster harvests are phased out with a shift to aquaculture, and crab harvests are reduced, especially of females.

The future of the Chesapeake Bay is at stake - now more than ever.
Gerald Winegrad (gwwabc@comcast.net) chaired the Senate Environment and Chesapeake Bay Subcommittee and taught graduate courses in bay restoration. Fred Tutman (fred@paxriverkeeper.org) is a former journalist covering the White House, an adjunct professor who's taught courses on the bay and the Patuxent Riverkeeper. Kathy Phillips (coastkeeper@actforbays.org) is the Assateague Coastkeeper and executive director of the Assateague Coastal Trust.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Gerald Winegrad, Fred Tutman, Kathy Phillips

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Recent alarming news about the Chesapeake Bay signals a code red for immediate action. Efforts must be ramped up to greatly reduce agricultural and urban runoff pollution. These are the inconvenient truths compelling such action: The legal-sized Maryland bay oyster population declined by half since 1999. Oysters are below 1 percent of historic levels.

# data[].attributes.headline
Did a Comet Hit Earth 12,000 Years Ago? - Scientific American

# data[].attributes.subject
Did a Comet Hit Earth 12,000 Years Ago? - Scientific American

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Advertisement

Roughly 12,900 years ago, massive global cooling kicked in abruptly, along with the end of the line for some 35 different mammal species, including the mammoth, as well as the so-called Clovis culture of prehistoric North Americans. Various theories have been proposed for the die-off, ranging from abrupt climate change to overhunting once humans were let loose on the wilds of North America. But now nanodiamonds found in the sediments from this time period point to an alternative: a massive explosion or explosions by a fragmentary comet, similar to but even larger than the Tunguska event of 1908 in Siberia.

Sediments from six sites across North America-Murray Springs, Ariz.; Bull Creek, Okla.; Gainey, Mich.; Topper, S.C.; Lake Hind, Manitoba; and Chobot, Alberta-yielded such teensy diamonds, which only occur in sediment exposed to extreme temperatures and pressures, such as those from an explosion or impact, according to new research published today in Science.

The discovery lends support to a theory first advanced last year in that some type of cosmic impact or impacts-a fragmented comet bursting in the atmosphere or raining down on the oceans-set off the more than 1,300-year cooling period in the Northern Hemisphere known as the Younger Dryas for the abundance of an alpine flower's pollen found during the interval.

The cooling period interrupted an extended warming out of an ice age predicted by slight changes in Earth's orbit (known as Milankovitch cycles) that continues today. And it remains an unexplained anomaly in the climate record.

But a series of cometary fragments exploding over North America might explain a layer of soil immediately prior to the cooling containing unusually high levels of iridium-an element more common in cosmic wanderers like meteoroids than in Earth's crust. Paired with the fact that this layer occurs directly before the extinction of at least 35 genera of large mammals, including mammoths, it is strong circumstantial evidence for a cosmic event.

"Very strong impact indicators are found in the sediments directly above, and often shrouding in the case of Murray Springs, the remains of these animals and the people who were hunting them," says archaeologist and study co-author Doug Kennett of the University of Oregon in Eugene, the son in the father-son team helping to advance the new impact theory. "Is it a comet? Is it a carbonaceous chondrite? Was it fragmented? Was it focused? Based on the distribution of the diamonds, it was certainly large scale."

Preliminary searches further afield-Europe, Asia and South America-have turned up similar minerals and elements in sediments of the same age, Kennett says, and his own work on California's Channel Islands tells a tale of a massive burn-off, followed by erosion and a total change in the flora of the region.

"It's consistent with a fragmentary body breaking up with air shocks and possible surface impacts in various parts of North America. It could be above the ice sheet or offshore in the ocean," he says, explaining why no impact crater(s) has been found to date. "Immediate effects on the ground include high temperatures and pressures triggering major transformations of the vegetation, knocking trees over but also burning."

And that would make the climate shift of the Younger Dryas a closer cousin to the massive asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. "This is an event that happened on one day," Kennett notes. "We're going to need high-resolution climate records, archaeological records, paleontological records to try to explore the effects."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

David Biello

David Biello is a contributing editor at Scientific American.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Roughly 12,900 years ago, massive global cooling kicked in abruptly, along with the end of the line for some 35 different mammal species, including the mammoth, as well as the so-called Clovis culture of prehistoric North Americans. Various theories have been proposed for the die-off, ranging from abrupt climate change to overhunting once humans were let loose on the wilds of North America.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Insect Apocalypse Is Here - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
The Insect Apocalypse Is Here - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images.

Feature

What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images.

S une Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss. Specifically, something was missing.

It was summer. He was out in the country, moving fast. But strangely, he wasn't eating any bugs.

For a moment, Riis was transported to his childhood on the Danish island of Lolland, in the Baltic Sea. Back then, summer bike rides meant closing his mouth to cruise through thick clouds of insects, but inevitably he swallowed some anyway. When his parents took him driving, he remembered, the car's windshield was frequently so smeared with insect carcasses that you almost couldn't see through it. But all that seemed distant now. He couldn't recall the last time he needed to wash bugs from his windshield; he even wondered, vaguely, whether car manufacturers had invented some fancy new coating to keep off insects. But this absence, he now realized with some alarm, seemed to be all around him. Where had all those insects gone? And when? And why hadn't he noticed?

Riis watched his son, flying through the beautiful day, not eating bugs, and was struck by the melancholy thought that his son's childhood would lack this particular bug-eating experience of his own. It was, he granted, an odd thing to feel nostalgic about. But he couldn't shake a feeling of loss. "I guess it's pretty human to think that everything was better when you were a kid," he said. "Maybe I didn't like it when I was on my bike and I ate all the bugs, but looking back on it, I think it's something everybody should experience."

I met Riis, a lanky high school science and math teacher, on a hot day in June. He was anxious about not having yet written his address for the school's graduation ceremony that evening, but first, he had a job to do. From his garage, he retrieved a large insect net, drove to a nearby intersection and stopped to strap the net to the car's roof. Made of white mesh, the net ran the length of his car and was held up by a tent pole at the front, tapering to a small, removable bag in back. Drivers whizzing past twisted their heads to stare. Riis eyed his parking spot nervously as he adjusted the straps of the contraption. "This is not 100 percent legal," he said, "but I guess, for the sake of science."

Riis had not been able to stop thinking about the missing bugs. The more he learned, the more his nostalgia gave way to worry. Insects are the vital pollinators and recyclers of ecosystems and the base of food webs everywhere. Riis was not alone in noticing their decline. In the United States, scientists recently found the population of monarch butterflies fell by 90 percent in the last 20 years, a loss of 900 million individuals; the rusty-patched bumblebee, which once lived in 28 states, dropped by 87 percent over the same period. With other, less-studied insect species, one butterfly researcher told me, "all we can do is wave our arms and say, 'It's not here anymore!' " Still, the most disquieting thing wasn't the disappearance of certain species of insects; it was the deeper worry, shared by Riis and many others, that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing, a loss of abundance that could alter the planet in unknowable ways. "We notice the losses," says David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut. "It's the diminishment that we don't see."

Because insects are legion, inconspicuous and hard to meaningfully track, the fear that there might be far fewer than before was more felt than documented. People noticed it by canals or in backyards or under streetlights at night - familiar places that had become unfamiliarly empty. The feeling was so common that entomologists developed a shorthand for it, named for the way many people first began to notice that they weren't seeing as many bugs. They called it the windshield phenomenon.

To test what had been primarily a loose suspicion of wrongness, Riis and 200 other Danes were spending the month of June roaming their country's back roads in their outfitted cars. They were part of a study conducted by the Natural History Museum of Denmark, a joint effort of the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University and North Carolina State University. The nets would stand in for windshields as Riis and the other volunteers drove through various habitats - urban areas, forests, agricultural tracts, uncultivated open land and wetlands - hoping to quantify the disorienting sense that, as one of the study's designers put it, "something from the past is missing from the present."

When the investigators began planning the study in 2016, they weren't sure if anyone would sign up. But by the time the nets were ready, a paper by an obscure German entomological society had brought the problem of insect decline into sharp focus. The German study found that, measured simply by weight, the overall abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years. If you looked at midsummer population peaks, the drop was 82 percent.

Riis learned about the study from a group of his students in one of their class projects. They must have made some kind of mistake in their citation, he thought. But they hadn't. The study would quickly become, according to the website Altmetric, the sixth-most-discussed scientific paper of 2017. Headlines around the world warned of an "insect Armageddon."

Within days of announcing the insect-collection project, the Natural History Museum of Denmark was turning away eager volunteers by the dozens. It seemed there were people like Riis everywhere, people who had noticed a change but didn't know what to make of it. How could something as fundamental as the bugs in the sky just disappear? And what would become of the world without them?

Anyone who has returned to a childhood haunt to find that everything somehow got smaller knows that humans are not great at remembering the past accurately. This is especially true when it comes to changes to the natural world. It is impossible to maintain a fixed perspective, as Heraclitus observed 2,500 years ago: It is not the same river, but we are also not the same people.

A 1995 study, by Peter H. Kahn and Batya Friedman, of the way some children in Houston experienced pollution summed up our blindness this way: "With each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm." In decades of photos of fishermen holding up their catch in the Florida Keys, the marine biologist Loren McClenachan found a perfect illustration of this phenomenon, which is often called "shifting baseline syndrome." The fish got smaller and smaller, to the point where the prize catches were dwarfed by fish that in years past were piled up and ignored. But the smiles on the fishermen's faces stayed the same size. The world never feels fallen, because we grow accustomed to the fall.

By one measure, bugs are the wildlife we know best, the nondomesticated animals whose lives intersect most intimately with our own: spiders in the shower, ants at the picnic, ticks buried in the skin. We sometimes feel that we know them rather too well. In another sense, though, they are one of our planet's greatest mysteries, a reminder of how little we know about what's happening in the world around us.

We've named and described a million species of insects, a stupefying array of thrips and firebrats and antlions and caddis flies and froghoppers and other enormous families of bugs that most of us can't even name. (Technically, the word "bug" applies only to the order Hemiptera, also known as true bugs, species that have tubelike mouths for piercing and sucking - and there are as many as 80,000 named varieties of those.) The ones we think we do know well, we don't: There are 12,000 types of ants, nearly 20,000 varieties of bees, almost 400,000 species of beetles, so many that the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane reportedly quipped that God must have an inordinate fondness for them. A bit of healthy soil a foot square and two inches deep might easily be home to 200 unique species of mites, each, presumably, with a subtly different job to do. And yet entomologists estimate that all this amazing, absurd and understudied variety represents perhaps only 20 percent of the actual diversity of insects on our planet - that there are millions and millions of species that are entirely unknown to science.

With so much abundance, it very likely never occurred to most entomologists of the past that their multitudinous subjects might dwindle away. As they poured themselves into studies of the life cycles and taxonomies of the species that fascinated them, few thought to measure or record something as boring as their number. Besides, tracking quantity is slow, tedious and unglamorous work: setting and checking traps, waiting years or decades for your data to be meaningful, grappling with blunt baseline questions instead of more sophisticated ones. And who would pay for it? Most academic funding is short-term, but when what you're interested in is invisible, generational change, says Dave Goulson, an entomologist at the University of Sussex, "a three-year monitoring program is no good to anybody." This is especially true of insect populations, which are naturally variable, with wide, trend-obscuring fluctuations from one year to the next.

When entomologists began noticing and investigating insect declines, they lamented the absence of solid information from the past in which to ground their experiences of the present. "We see a hundred of something, and we think we're fine," Wagner says, "but what if there were 100,000 two generations ago?" Rob Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University who helped design the net experiment in Denmark, recently searched for studies showing the effect of pesticide spraying on the quantity of insects living in nearby forests. He was surprised to find that no such studies existed. "We ignored really basic questions," he said. "It feels like we've dropped the ball in some giant collective way."

Image

If entomologists lacked data, what they did have were some very worrying clues. Along with the impression that they were seeing fewer bugs in their own jars and nets while out doing experiments - a windshield phenomenon specific to the sorts of people who have bug jars and nets - there were documented downward slides of well-studied bugs, including various kinds of bees, moths, butterflies and beetles. In Britain, as many as 30 to 60 percent of species were found to have diminishing ranges. Larger trends were harder to pin down, though a 2014 review in Science tried to quantify these declines by synthesizing the findings of existing studies and found that a majority of monitored species were declining, on average by 45 percent.

Entomologists also knew that climate change and the overall degradation of global habitat are bad news for biodiversity in general, and that insects are dealing with the particular challenges posed by herbicides and pesticides, along with the effects of losing meadows, forests and even weedy patches to the relentless expansion of human spaces. There were studies of other, better-understood species that suggested that the insects associated with them might be declining, too. People who studied fish found that the fish had fewer mayflies to eat. Ornithologists kept finding that birds that rely on insects for food were in trouble: eight in 10 partridges gone from French farmlands; 50 and 80 percent drops, respectively, for nightingales and turtledoves. Half of all farmland birds in Europe disappeared in just three decades. At first, many scientists assumed the familiar culprit of habitat destruction was at work, but then they began to wonder if the birds might simply be starving. In Denmark, an ornithologist named Anders Tottrup was the one who came up with the idea of turning cars into insect trackers for the windshield-effect study after he noticed that rollers, little owls, Eurasian hobbies and bee-eaters - all birds that subsist on large insects such as beetles and dragonflies - had abruptly disappeared from the landscape.

The signs were certainly alarming, but they were also just signs, not enough to justify grand pronouncements about the health of insects as a whole or about what might be driving a widespread, cross-species decline. "There are no quantitative data on insects, so this is just a hypothesis," Hans de Kroon, an ecologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, explained to me - not the sort of language that sends people to the barricades.

Then came the German study. Scientists are still cautious about what the findings might imply about other regions of the world. But the study brought forth exactly the kind of longitudinal data they had been seeking, and it wasn't specific to just one type of insect. The numbers were stark, indicating a vast impoverishment of an entire insect universe, even in protected areas where insects ought to be under less stress. The speed and scale of the drop were shocking even to entomologists who were already anxious about bees or fireflies or the cleanliness of car windshields.

The results were surprising in another way too. The long-term details about insect abundance, the kind that no one really thought existed, hadn't appeared in a particularly prestigious journal and didn't come from university-affiliated scientists, but from a small society of insect enthusiasts based in the modest German city Krefeld.

Krefeld sits a half-hour drive outside Düsseldorf, near the western bank of the Rhine. It's a city of brick houses and bright flower gardens and a stadtwald - a municipal forest and park - where paddle boats float on a lake, umbrellas shade a beer garden and (I couldn't help noticing) the afternoon light through the trees illuminates small swarms of dancing insects.

Near the center of the old city, a paper sign, not much larger than a business card, identifies the stolid headquarters of the society whose research caused so much commotion. When it was founded, in 1905, the society operated out of another building, one that was destroyed when Britain bombed the city during World War II. (By the time the bombs fell, members had moved their precious records and collections of insects, some of which dated back to the 1860s, to an underground bunker.) Nowadays, the society uses more than 6,000 square feet of an old three-story school as storage space. Ask for a tour of the collections, and you will hear such sentences as "This whole room is Lepidoptera," referring to a former classroom stuffed with what I at first took to be shelves of books but which are in fact innumerable wooden frames containing pinned butterflies and moths; and, in an even larger room, "every bumblebee here was collected before the Second World War, 1880 to 1930"; and, upon opening a drawer full of sweat bees, "It's a new collection, 30 years only."

On the shelves that do hold books, I counted 31 clearly well-loved volumes in the series "Beetles of Middle Europe." A 395-page book that cataloged specimens of spider wasps - where they were collected; where they were stored - of the western Palearctic said "1948-2008" on the cover. I asked my guide, a society member named Martin Sorg, who was one of the lead authors of the paper, whether those dates reflected when the specimens were collected. "No," Sorg replied, "that was the time the author needed for this work."

Sorg, who rolls his own cigarettes and wears John Lennon glasses and whose gray hair grows long past his shoulders, is not a freewheeling type when it comes to his insect work. And his insect work is really all he wants to talk about. "We think details about nature and biodiversity declines are important, not details about life histories of entomologists," Sorg explained after he and Werner Stenmans, a society member whose name appeared alongside Sorg's on the 2017 paper, dismissed my questions about their day jobs. Leery of an article that focused on him as a person, Sorg also didn't want to talk about what drew him to entomology as a child or even what it was about certain types of wasps that had made him want to devote so much of his life to studying them. "We normally give life histories when someone is dead," he said.

There was a reason for the wariness. Society members dislike seeing themselves described, over and over in news stories, as "amateurs." It's a framing that reflects, they believe, a too-narrow understanding of what it means to be an expert or even a scientist - what it means to be a student of the natural world.

Amateurs have long provided much of the patchy knowledge we have about nature. Those bee and butterfly studies? Most depend on mass mobilizations of volunteers willing to walk transects and count insects, every two weeks or every year, year after year. The scary numbers about bird declines were gathered this way, too, though because birds can be hard to spot, volunteers often must learn to identify them by their sounds. Britain, which has a particularly strong tradition of amateur naturalism, has the best-studied bugs in the world. As technologically advanced as we are, the natural world is still a very big and complex place, and the best way to learn what's going on is for a lot of people to spend a lot of time observing it. The Latin root of the word "amateur" is, after all, the word "lover."

Some of these citizen-scientists are true beginners clutching field guides; others, driven by their own passion and following in a long tradition of "amateur" naturalism, are far from novices. Think of Victorians with their butterfly nets and curiosity cabinets; of Vladimir Nabokov, whose theories about the evolution of Polyommatus blue butterflies were ignored until proved correct by DNA testing more than 30 years after his death; of young Charles Darwin, cutting his classes at Cambridge to collect beetles at Wicken Fen and once putting a live beetle in his mouth because his hands were already full of other bugs.

The Krefeld society is volunteer-run, and many members have other jobs in unrelated fields, but they also have an enormous depth of knowledge about insects, accumulated through years of what other people might consider obsessive attention. Some study the ecology or evolutionary taxonomy of their favorite species or map their populations or breed them to study their life histories. All hone their identification skills across species by amassing their own collections of carefully pinned and labeled insects like those that fill the society's storage rooms. Sorg estimated that of the society's 63 members, a third are university-trained in subjects such as biology or earth science. Another third, he said, are "highly specialized and highly qualified but they never visited the university," while the remaining third are actual amateurs who are still in the process of becoming "real" entomologists: "Some of them may also have a degree from the university, but in our view, they are beginners."

The society members' projects often involved setting up what are called malaise traps, nets that look like tents and drive insects flying by into bottles of ethanol. Because of the scientific standards of the society, members followed certain procedures: They always employed identical traps, sewn from a template they first used in 1982. (Sorg showed me the original rolled-up craft paper with great solemnity.) They always put them in the same places. (Before GPS, that meant a painstaking process of triangulating with surveying equipment. "We are not sure about a few centimeters," Sorg granted.) They saved everything they caught, regardless of what the main purpose of the experiment was. (The society bought so much ethanol that it attracted the attention of a narcotics unit.)

Those bottles of insects were gathered into thousands of boxes, which are now crammed into what were once offices in the upper reaches of the school. When the society members, like entomologists elsewhere, began to notice that they were seeing fewer insects, they had something against which to measure their worries.

"We don't throw away anything, we store everything," Sorg explained. "That gives us today the possibility to go back in time."

In 2013, Krefeld entomologists confirmed that the total number of insects caught in one nature reserve was nearly 80 percent lower than the same spot in 1989. They had sampled other sites, analyzed old data sets and found similar declines: Where 30 years earlier, they often needed a liter bottle for a week of trapping, now a half-liter bottle usually sufficed. But it would have taken even highly trained entomologists years of painstaking work to identify all the insects in the bottles. So the society used a standardized method for weighing insects in alcohol, which told a powerful story simply by showing how much the overall mass of insects dropped over time. "A decline of this mixture," Sorg said, "is a very different thing than the decline of only a few species."

The society collaborated with de Kroon and other scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands, who did a trend analysis of the data that Krefeld provided, controlling for things like the effects of nearby plants, weather and forest cover on fluctuations in insect populations. The final study looked at 63 nature preserves, representing almost 17,000 sampling days, and found consistent declines in every kind of habitat they sampled. This suggested, the authors wrote, "that it is not only the vulnerable species but the flying-insect community as a whole that has been decimated over the last few decades."

For some scientists, the study created a moment of reckoning. "Scientists thought this data was too boring," Dunn says. "But these people found it beautiful, and they loved it. They were the ones paying attention to Earth for all the rest of us."

The current worldwide loss of biodiversity is popularly known as the sixth extinction: the sixth time in world history that a large number of species have disappeared in unusually rapid succession, caused this time not by asteroids or ice ages but by humans. When we think about losing biodiversity, we tend to think of the last northern white rhinos protected by armed guards, of polar bears on dwindling ice floes. Extinction is a visceral tragedy, universally understood: There is no coming back from it. The guilt of letting a unique species vanish is eternal.

But extinction is not the only tragedy through which we're living. What about the species that still exist, but as a shadow of what they once were? In "The Once and Future World," the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: "In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in midocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship's captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. ... Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes." There were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that's there now. "These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice," MacKinnon writes. "We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory."

What we're losing is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part: life in sheer quantity. While I was writing this article, scientists learned that the world's largest king penguin colony shrank by 88 percent in 35 years, that more than 97 percent of the bluefin tuna that once lived in the ocean are gone. The number of Sophie the Giraffe toys sold in France in a single year is nine times the number of all the giraffes that still live in Africa.

Finding reassurance in the survival of a few symbolic standard-bearers ignores the value of abundance, of a natural world that thrives on richness and complexity and interaction. Tigers still exist, for example, but that doesn't change the fact that 93 percent of the land where they used to live is now tigerless. This matters for more than romantic reasons: Large animals, especially top predators like tigers, connect ecosystems to one another and move energy and resources among them simply by walking and eating and defecating and dying. (In the deep ocean, sunken whale carcasses form the basis of entire ecosystems in nutrient-poor places.) One result of their loss is what's known as trophic cascade, the unraveling of an ecosystem's fabric as prey populations boom and crash and the various levels of the food web no longer keep each other in check. These places are emptier, impoverished in a thousand subtle ways.

Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. Some phrase this as the extinction not of a species but of all its former interactions with its environment - an extinction of seed dispersal and predation and pollination and all the other ecological functions an animal once had, which can be devastating even if some individuals still persist. The more interactions are lost, the more disordered the ecosystem becomes. A 2013 paper in Nature, which modeled both natural and computer-generated food webs, suggested that a loss of even 30 percent of a species' abundance can be so destabilizing that other species start going fully, numerically extinct - in fact, 80 percent of the time it was a secondarily affected creature that was the first to disappear. A famous real-world example of this type of cascade concerns sea otters. When they were nearly wiped out in the northern Pacific, their prey, sea urchins, ballooned in number and decimated kelp forests, turning a rich environment into a barren one and also possibly contributing to numerical extinctions, notably of the Steller's sea cow.

Conservationists tend to focus on rare and endangered species, but it is common ones, because of their abundance, that power the living systems of our planet. Most species are not common, but within many animal groups most individuals - some 80 percent of them - belong to common species. Like the slow approach of twilight, their declines can be hard to see. White-rumped vultures were nearly gone from India before there was widespread awareness of their disappearance. Describing this phenomenon in the journal BioScience, Kevin Gaston, a professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote: "Humans seem innately better able to detect the complete loss of an environmental feature than its progressive change."

In addition to extinction (the complete loss of a species) and extirpation (a localized extinction), scientists now speak of defaunation: the loss of individuals, the loss of abundance, the loss of a place's absolute animalness. In a 2014 article in Science, researchers argued that the word should become as familiar, and influential, as the concept of deforestation. In 2017 another paper reported that major population and range losses extended even to species considered to be at low risk for extinction. They predicted "negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization" and the authors offered another term for the widespread loss of the world's wild fauna: "biological annihilation."

It is estimated that, since 1970, Earth's various populations of wild land animals have lost, on average, 60 percent of their members. Zeroing in on the category we most relate to, mammals, scientists believe that for every six wild creatures that once ate and burrowed and raised young, only one remains. What we have instead is ourselves. A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you look at the world's mammals by weight, 96 percent of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.

We've begun to talk about living in the Anthropocene, a world shaped by humans. But E.O. Wilson, the naturalist and prophet of environmental degradation, has suggested another name: the Eremocine, the age of loneliness.

Wilson began his career as a taxonomic entomologist, studying ants. Insects - about as far as you can get from charismatic megafauna - are not what we're usually imagining when we talk about biodiversity. Yet they are, in Wilson's words, "the little things that run the natural world." He means it literally. Insects are a case study in the invisible importance of the common.

Scientists have tried to calculate the benefits that insects provide simply by going about their business in large numbers. Trillions of bugs flitting from flower to flower pollinate some three-quarters of our food crops, a service worth as much as $500 billion every year. (This doesn't count the 80 percent of wild flowering plants, the foundation blocks of life everywhere, that rely on insects for pollination.) If monetary calculations like that sound strange, consider the Maoxian Valley in China, where shortages of insect pollinators have led farmers to hire human workers, at a cost of up to $19 per worker per day, to replace bees. Each person covers five to 10 trees a day, pollinating apple blossoms by hand.

By eating and being eaten, insects turn plants into protein and power the growth of all the uncountable species - including freshwater fish and a majority of birds - that rely on them for food, not to mention all the creatures that eat those creatures. We worry about saving the grizzly bear, says the insect ecologist Scott Hoffman Black, but where is the grizzly without the bee that pollinates the berries it eats or the flies that sustain baby salmon? Where, for that matter, are we?

Bugs are vital to the decomposition that keeps nutrients cycling, soil healthy, plants growing and ecosystems running. This role is mostly invisible, until suddenly it's not. After introducing cattle to Australia at the turn of the 19th century, settlers soon found themselves overwhelmed by the problem of their feces: For some reason, cow pies there were taking months or even years to decompose. Cows refused to eat near the stink, requiring more and more land for grazing, and so many flies bred in the piles that the country became famous for the funny hats that stockmen wore to keep them at bay. It wasn't until 1951 that a visiting entomologist realized what was wrong: The local insects, evolved to eat the more fibrous waste of marsupials, couldn't handle cow excrement. For the next 25 years, the importation, quarantine and release of dozens of species of dung beetles became a national priority. And that was just one unfilled niche. (In the United States, dung beetles save ranchers an estimated $380 million a year.) We simply don't know everything that insects do. Only about 2 percent of invertebrate species have been studied enough for us to estimate whether they are in danger of extinction, never mind what dangers that extinction might pose.

When asked to imagine what would happen if insects were to disappear completely, scientists find words like chaos, collapse, Armageddon. Wagner, the University of Connecticut entomologist, describes a flowerless world with silent forests, a world of dung and old leaves and rotting carcasses accumulating in cities and roadsides, a world of "collapse or decay and erosion and loss that would spread through ecosystems" - spiraling from predators to plants. E.O. Wilson has written of an insect-free world, a place where most plants and land animals become extinct; where fungi explodes, for a while, thriving on death and rot; and where "the human species survives, able to fall back on wind-pollinated grains and marine fishing" despite mass starvation and resource wars. "Clinging to survival in a devastated world, and trapped in an ecological dark age," he adds, "the survivors would offer prayers for the return of weeds and bugs."

But the crux of the windshield phenomenon, the reason that the creeping suspicion of change is so creepy, is that insects wouldn't have to disappear altogether for us to find ourselves missing them for reasons far beyond nostalgia. In October, an entomologist sent me an email with the subject line, "Holy [expletive]!" and an attachment: a study just out from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he labeled, "Krefeld comes to Puerto Rico." The study included data from the 1970s and from the early 2010s, when a tropical ecologist named Brad Lister returned to the rain forest where he had studied lizards - and, crucially, their prey - 40 years earlier. Lister set out sticky traps and swept nets across foliage in the same places he had in the 1970s, but this time he and his co-author, Andres Garcia, caught much, much less: 10 to 60 times less arthropod biomass than before. (It's easy to read that number as 60 percent less, but it's sixtyfold less: Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams.) "It was, you know, devastating," Lister told me. But even scarier were the ways the losses were already moving through the ecosystem, with serious declines in the numbers of lizards, birds and frogs. The paper reported "a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web." Lister's inbox quickly filled with messages from other scientists, especially people who study soil invertebrates, telling him they were seeing similarly frightening declines. Even after his dire findings, Lister found the losses shocking: "I didn't even know about the earthworm crisis!"

The strange thing, Lister said, is that, as staggering as they are, all the declines he documented would still be basically invisible to the average person walking through the Luquillo rain forest. On his last visit, the forest still felt "timeless" and "phantasmagorical," with "cascading waterfalls and carpets of flowers." You would have to be an expert to notice what was missing. But he expects the losses to push the forest toward a tipping point, after which "there is a sudden and dramatic loss of the rain-forest system," and the changes will become obvious to anyone. The place he loves will become unrecognizable.

The insects in the forest that Lister studied haven't been contending with pesticides or habitat loss, the two problems to which the Krefeld paper pointed. Instead, Lister chalks up their decline to climate change, which has already increased temperatures in Luquillo by two degrees Celsius since Lister first sampled there. Previous research suggested that tropical bugs will be unusually sensitive to temperature changes; in November, scientists who subjected laboratory beetles to a heat wave reported that the increased temperatures made them significantly less fertile. Other scientists wonder if it might be climate-induced drought or possibly invasive rats or simply "death by a thousand cuts" - a confluence of many kinds of changes to the places where insects once thrived.

Like other species, insects are responding to what Chris Thomas, an insect ecologist at the University of York, has called "the transformation of the world": not just a changing climate but also the widespread conversion, via urbanization, agricultural intensification and so on, of natural spaces into human ones, with fewer and fewer resources "left over" for nonhuman creatures to live on. What resources remain are often contaminated. Hans de Kroon characterizes the life of many modern insects as trying to survive from one dwindling oasis to the next but with "a desert in between, and at worst it's a poisonous desert." Of particular concern are neonicotinoids, neurotoxins that were thought to affect only treated crops but turned out to accumulate in the landscape and to be consumed by all kinds of nontargeted bugs. People talk about the "loss" of bees to colony collapse disorder, and that appears to be the right word: Affected hives aren't full of dead bees, but simply mysteriously empty. A leading theory is that exposure to neurotoxins leaves bees unable to find their way home. Even hives exposed to low levels of neonicotinoids have been shown to collect less pollen and produce fewer eggs and far fewer queens. Some recent studies found bees doing better in cities than in the supposed countryside.

The diversity of insects means that some will manage to make do in new environments, some will thrive (abundance cuts both ways: agricultural monocultures, places where only one kind of plant grows, allow some pests to reach population levels they would never achieve in nature) and some, searching for food and shelter in a world nothing like the one they were meant for, will fail. While we need much more data to better understand the reasons or mechanisms behind the ups and downs, Thomas says, "the average across all species is still a decline."

Since the Krefeld study came out, researchers have begun searching for other forgotten repositories of information that might offer windows into the past. Some of the Radboud researchers have analyzed long-term data, belonging to Dutch entomological societies, about beetles and moths in certain reserves; they found significant drops (72 percent, 54 percent) that mirrored the Krefeld ones. Roel van Klink, a researcher at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, told me that before Krefeld, he, like most entomologists, had never been interested in biomass. Now he is looking for historical data sets - many of which began as studies of agricultural pests, like a decades-long study of grasshoppers in Kansas - that could help create a more thorough picture of what's happening to creatures that are at once abundant and imperiled. So far he has found forgotten data from 140 old data sets for 1,500 locations that could be resampled.

In the United States, one of the few long-term data sets about insect abundance comes from the work of Arthur Shapiro, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. In 1972, he began walking transects in the Central Valley and the Sierras, counting butterflies. He planned to do a study on how short-term weather variations affected butterfly populations. But the longer he sampled, the more valuable his data became, offering a signal through the noise of seasonal ups and downs. "And so here I am in Year 46," he said, nearly half a century of spending five days a week, from late spring to the end of autumn, observing butterflies. In that time he has watched overall numbers decline and seen some species that used to be everywhere - even species that "everyone regarded as a junk species" only a few decades ago - all but disappear. Shapiro believes that Krefeld-level declines are likely to be happening all over the globe. "But, of course, I don't cover the entire globe," he added. "I cover I-80."

There are also new efforts to set up more of the kind of insect-monitoring schemes researchers wish had existed decades ago, so that our current level of fallenness, at least, is captured. One is a pilot project in Germany similar to the Danish car study. To analyze what is caught, the researchers turned to volunteer naturalists, hobbyists similar to the ones in Krefeld, with the necessary breadth of knowledge to know what they're looking at. "These are not easy species to identify," says Aletta Bonn, of the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, who is overseeing the project. (The skills required for such work "are really extreme," Dunn says. "These people train for decades with other amateurs to be able to identify beetles based on their genitalia.") Bond would like to pay the volunteers for their expertise, she says, but funding hasn't caught up to the crisis. That didn't stop the "amateurs" from being willing to help: "They said, 'We're just curious what's in there, we would like to have samples.' "

Goulson says that Europe's tradition of amateur naturalism may account for why so many of the clues to the falloff in insect biodiversity originate there. (Tottrup's design for the car net in Denmark, for example, was itself adapted from the invention of a dedicated beetle-collecting hobbyist.) As little as we know about the status of European bugs, we know significantly less about other parts of the world. "We wouldn't know anything if it weren't for them," the so-called amateurs, Goulson told me. "We'd be entirely relying on the fact that there's no bugs on the windshield."

Thomas believes that this naturalist tradition is also why Europe is acting much faster than other places - for example, the United States - to address the decline of insects: Interest leads to tracking, which leads to awareness, which leads to concern, which leads to action. Since the Krefeld data emerged, there have been hearings about protecting insect biodiversity in the German Bundestag and the European Parliament. European Union member states voted to extend a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides and have begun to put money toward further studies of how abundance is changing, what is causing those changes and what can be done. When I knocked on the door of de Kroon's office, at Radboud University in the Dutch city Nijmegen, he was looking at some photos from another meeting he had that day: Willem-Alexander, the king of the Netherlands, had taken a tour of the city's efforts to make its riverside a friendlier habitat for bugs.

Stemming insect declines will require much more than this, however. The European Union already had some measures in place to help pollinators - including more strictly regulating pesticides than the United States does and paying farmers to create insect habitats by leaving fields fallow and allowing for wild edges alongside cultivation - but insect populations dropped anyway. New reports call for national governments to collaborate; for more creative approaches such as integrating insect habitats into the design of roads, power lines, railroads and other infrastructure; and, as always, for more studies. The necessary changes, like the causes, may be profound. "It's just another indication that we're destroying the life-support system of the planet," Lister says of the Puerto Rico study. "Nature's resilient, but we're pushing her to such extremes that eventually it will cause a collapse of the system."

Scientists hope that insects will have a chance to embody that resilience. While tigers tend to give birth to three or four cubs at a time, a ghost moth in Australia was once recorded laying 29,100 eggs, and she still had 15,000 in her ovaries. The fecund abundance that is insects' singular trait should enable them to recover, but only if they are given the space and the opportunity to do so.

"It's a debate we need to have urgently," Goulson says. "If we lose insects, life on earth will. ..." He trailed off, pausing for what felt like a long time.

In Denmark, Sune Boye Riis's transect with his car net took him past a bit of woods, some suburban lawns, some hedges, a Christmas-tree farm. The closest thing to a meadow that we passed was a large military property, on which the grass had been allowed to grow tall and golden. Riis had received instructions not to drive too fast, so traffic backed up behind us, and some people began to honk. "Well," Riis said, "so much for science." After three miles, he turned around and drove back toward the start. His windshield stayed mockingly clean.

Riis had four friends who were also participating in the study. They had a bet going among them: Who would net the biggest bug? "I'm way behind," Riis said. "A bumblebee is in the lead." His biggest catch? "A fly. Not even a big one."

At the end of the transect, Riis stopped at another parlous roadside spot, unfastened the net and removed the small bag at its tip. Some volunteers, captivated by what the study revealed about the world around them, asked the organizers for extra specimen bags, so they could do more sampling on their own. Some even asked if they could buy the entire car-net apparatus. Riis, though, was content to peer through the mesh, inside of which he could make out a number of black specks of varying tininess.

There was also a single butterfly, white-winged and delicate. Riis thought of the bet with his friends, for which the meaning of bigness had not been defined. He wondered how it might be reckoned. What gave a creature value?

"Is it weight?" he asked, staring down at the butterfly. In the big bag, it looked small and sad and alone. "Or is it grace?"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Insect Apocalypse Is Here (Published 2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Feature What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth? Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images. S une Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss.

# data[].attributes.headline
Take a Look at How Quickly a Forest Can Recover From Fire - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Take a Look at How Quickly a Forest Can Recover From Fire - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Though it appears destructive, fire in the New Jersey Pinelands is a force of renewal.

Image

On April 22, a spring wildfire roared through Penn State Forest in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, sending 100-foot flames shooting from the crowns of the pitch pines. The fire consumed half a square mile in 40 minutes and could be seen from space. By the time the New Jersey Forest Fire Service got it under control, it had burned 843 acres, an area the size of Central Park.

A week later, even as ash still swirled through air heavy with the creosote scent of burned resin and a cedar log smoldered at the edge of a swamp, the forest was being reborn. Pine cones that open only under extreme heat had released their seeds. Though the trees themselves were charred, almost all survived the fire. Where chest-high blueberry and huckleberry had burned down to pointy stubs, tufts of grass were sprouting.

Destructive fires in the West dominated the news this summer, but for eons fire has been not just an inevitable feature of the landscape, but essential to the forest's health and continuity. In the vast wilderness of the Pine Barrens, the forest regenerates so fast that scientists studying the physics of fire use it as a laboratory.

Eleven weeks after the fire in Penn State Forest, at the height of summer's greening, new blueberry bushes were already shin high. A grass that flowers only after fire had put forth purple-brown seeds. And scattered all through the fire site, bursts of bright-green pitch-pine needles grew straight out of scorched trunks.

"Fire and pines go together like peas and carrots," said Bernie Isaacson, an assistant regional forester with the New Jersey Forest Service. "We joke that pitch pines don't know when to die."

The Pine Barrens are a million-acre natural reserve at the heart of the nation's most densely populated state. Endless sand roads course though stands of pitch pine, a scraggly, decidedly unmajestic evergreen.

There are about 600 wildfires a year in the Pine Barrens, though only a few of this size, thanks to the efforts of the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. The fire service itself also burns about 20,000 acres a year in carefully managed chunks, creating breaks in the treescape and clearing understory to prevent bigger fires from engulfing towns and blueberry and cranberry farms that push against the forest edge.

The fire in Penn State Forest, about 90 miles southwest of New York City, started near the intersection of two sand roads marked with hand-painted wooden signs reading Lost Lane and Penn Place.

Like most fires in the pines, the Breeches Branch Fire, as it is officially known, is thought to have been caused by humans.

Investigators pinpointed its origin, marked with a ribbon of pink tape, by scrutinizing burn patterns on individual sticks and stones. "We get it right down to the size of a bottle cap," said Shawn Judy, an assistant division forest fire warden with the fire service.

The fire's source remains unsolved.

Part of the forest that burned in the fire had been burned just two years before by the New Jersey fire service and had already grown back.

This comes as little surprise to federal researchers up the road at Silas Little Experimental Forest, who have been developing tools to remotely measure the amount of "fuel," or burnable material, in a forest, and measuring plant growth after a fire by how much carbon dioxide is being absorbed.

"By the following year, the system is taking up CO₂ at the same rate as before the burn," said Ken Clark, a research forester with the federal forest service. "So it recovers basically within a year. I thought that was pretty amazing."

Pitch pines have a whole repertoire of adaptations to fire. Some of their cones are sealed shut with wax and open like unclenching fists when the wax melts.

The tree's armor-plate bark can be an inch thick, insulating buds that send out needles after fire strips off upper branches to free up nutrients and let in sunlight. Even after a fire hot enough to boil the liquids inside the bark and kill the main stem, a pitch pine can resprout at the base from buds in the roots.

When fire burns off the layer of dead leaves and needles on the ground, it exposes bare sandy soil that looks inhospitable but is exactly what pitch-pine seedlings need. "Because the soil is tight and compacted there's no airspace, so the roots don't dry out," said Greg McLaughlin, state fire warden for the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. "The fire prepares the seedbed."

The Pine Barrens are also home to an uncommon grass called the pine barren sandreed that needs fire to provide it open space. "Most of it is in Fort Dix" - the nearby Army base - "because they're always firing bullets and flares," said Andy Windisch, a fire ecologist for the state Forest Service.

But there is also a mini-savanna of reedgrass in Penn State Forest, and, triggered by this year's fire, it flowered. There are several rare butterflies that in turn depend on the reedgrass, including the state-endangered arogos skipper. "These rare insects are expected to recolonize the burn site over time," Mr. Windisch said.

It will not be long, said Mr. Judy, the assistant fire warden, before Penn State Forest is ready for another fire.

"Two years from now, three years from now," he said, "you'll have another day with nice dry air, another beautiful bluebird day, low humidity. A spark will get in there, and there it goes."

Andy Newman has covered New York City and vicinity for The Times since 1997. He was the founding reporter of the Pet City and New York Today columns and ran The Times's City Room blog. @andylocal * Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: After a Fire, Pine Barrens Regenerate In a Flash. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Take a Look at How Quickly a Forest Can Recover From Fire

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Though it appears destructive, fire in the New Jersey Pinelands is a force of renewal. On April 22, a spring wildfire roared through Penn State Forest in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, sending 100-foot flames shooting from the crowns of the pitch pines.

# data[].attributes.headline
California's Devastating Fires Are Man-Caused -- But Not In The Way They Tell Us

# data[].attributes.subject
California's Devastating Fires Are Man-Caused -- But Not In The Way They Tell Us

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
California is once again on fire. Northern California's Carr Fire has killed six people, two of them firefighters, and continues to burn out of control, claiming more than 700 homes and about 100,000 acres.

As a citizen-soldier in the California Army National Guard for two decades, I often heard the gallows humor quip that California's four seasons were: flood, fire, earthquake and riot.

But, what was once an expected part of living in the Golden State is now blamed on larger forces. A crisis, we are told, should never go to waste.

In that vein, the Sacramento Bee editorial board blamed the Carr Fire foursquare on a man-caused buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In an editorial headlined, " The Carr Fire is a terrifying glimpse into California's future," they write, "This is climate change, for real and in real time. We were warned that the atmospheric buildup of man-made greenhouse gas would eventually be an existential threat."

The Bee editorial board goes on to attack President Trump for proposing to end California's exceptional waiver from federal law regarding auto emissions-in this case, California's push to curtail tailpipe carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when the Clean Air Act was debated in 1970. At the time, the concern was pollution that directly harmed health rather than carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring gas exhaled by every living animal.

The problem with the Bee's editorial is that making a passionate argument is no substitute for the truth.

In 2005 while a freshman California Assemblyman, I had the chance to visit Northern California and meet with the forest product industry professionals who grew, managed, and harvested trees on private and public lands. They told me of a worrisome trend started years earlier where both federal and state regulators were making it more and more difficult for them to do their jobs. As a result, timber industry employment gradually collapsed, falling in 2017 to half of what it was 20 years earlier, with imports from Canada, China, and other nations filling domestic need.

As timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work. The combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees.

But, fire suppression efforts continued. The result was accurately forecast by my forest management industry hosts in Siskiyou County in 2005: larger, more devastating fires-fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape. More importantly, fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control.

In 2001, George E. Gruell, a wildlife biologist with five decades of experience in California and other Western states, authored the book, " Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849." Gruell's remarkable effort compared hundreds of landscape photographs from the dawn of photography with photos taken from the same location 100 years later or more. The difference was striking. In the 1850s and 1860s, the typical Sierra landscape was of open fields of grass punctuated by isolated pine stands and a few scattered oak trees. The first branches on the pine trees started about 20 feet up-lower branches having been burned off by low-intensity grassfires. California's Native American population had for years shaped this landscape with fire to encourage the grasslands and boost the game animal population.

As the Gold Rush remade modern California, timber was harvested and replanted. Fires were suppressed because they threatened homes as well as burned up a valuable resource. The landscape filled in with trees, but the trees were harvested every 30 to 50 years. In the 1990s, however, that cycle began to be disrupted with increasingly burdensome regulations. The timber harvest cycle slowed, and, in some areas, stopped completely, especially on the almost 60% of California forest land owned by the federal government. Federal lands have not been managed for decades, threatening adjacent private forests, while federal funds designated for forest maintenance have been "borrowed" for fire suppression expenses. The policies frequently reduce the economic value of the forest to zero. And, with no intrinsic worth remaining, interest in maintaining the forest declined, and with it, resources to reduce the fuel load.

Some two decades ago, California produced so much wood waste from its timber operations, including brush and small trees from thinning efforts, that the resulting renewable biomass powered electric generating plants across the length of the state. But cheap, subsidized solar power, combined with air quality concerns (wood doesn't burn as cleanly as natural gas) and a lack of fuel due to cutbacks in logging, led to the closure of many biomass generators. What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires. Including the growing capture and use of landfill methane as a fuel, California's biomass energy generation last year was than it was 25 years before.

The issue was summarized by the Western Governors' Association in their 2006 Biomass Task Force Report which noted:

...over time the fire-prone forests that were not thinned, burn in uncharacteristically destructive wildfires, and the resulting loss of forest carbon is much greater than would occur if the forest had been thinned before fire moved through. ...failing to thin leads to a greater greenhouse gas burden than the thinning created in the first place, and that doesn't even account for the avoided fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions due to the production of energy from the forest thinnings. In the long term, leaving forests overgrown and prone to unnaturally destructive wildfires means there will be significantly less biomass on the ground, and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The Sacramento Bee editorial concludes with a stark warning: "California must plan now for these and other aspects of global warming, as more of the state becomes too hot, too dry, or too fire- or flood-prone to safely live in, and as more of the world braces for the era of climate refugees."

Whether global climate change is a problem that can be solved by California is a dubious proposition-one year's worth of emission growth in China is greater than California's total emissions. But the action needed to reduce the state's growing forest fire threat would be the same regardless of one's belief in any problems posed by climate change: start managing our forests again.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
California's Devastating Fires Are Man-Caused -- But Not In The Way They Tell Us

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
California is once again on fire. Northern California's Carr Fire has killed six people, two of them firefighters, and continues to burn out of control, claiming more than 700 homes and about 100,000 acres. (To) reduce the state's growing forest fire threat... start managing our forests again.

# data[].attributes.headline
Trump’s Misleading Claims About California’s Fire ‘Mismanagement’ - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Trump’s Misleading Claims About California’s Fire ‘Mismanagement’ - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Fact Check

On Twitter, the president claimed that the state's wildfire woes are a result of poor forest management. The truth is more complicated.

Image

Firefighters battling the Woolsey fire in Malibu, Calif., on Friday. Credit Credit Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated Press

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
As Californians were fleeing the huge wildfires that have left both ends of the state ablaze, President Trump took to Twitter over the weekend, blaming the infernos on forest management and threatening to withhold federal payments from the state.

His statements, which drew outrage from local leaders and firefighters, oversimplified the causes of California's wildfires.

There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2018

What Trump said

There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.

Mr. Trump is suggesting that forest management played a role, but California's current wildfires aren't forest fires.

"These fires aren't even in forests," said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Rather, the Camp and Woolsey fires, which are ripping through Northern and Southern California, began in areas known as the wildland-urban interface: places where communities are close to undeveloped areas, making it easier for fire to move from forests or grasslands into neighborhoods.
[Why does California have so many wildfires? There are four key ingredients.]
A 2015 report by the United States Department of Agriculture found that between 2000 and 2010 (the last year for which data was available), the number of people moving into the wildland-urban interface had increased by 5 percent. According to the report, 44 million houses, equivalent to one in every three houses in the country, are in the wildland-urban interface. The highest concentrations are in Florida, Texas and, yes, California.

It is true that California wildfires are getting larger and that most of the state's largest wildfires have happened this century. The Mendocino Complex Fire, earlier this year, was the biggest California fire on record, as measured by acres burned. The Camp Fire is already the most destructive in state history, having razed more than 6,000 homes.

The fires aren't just getting bigger; they're becoming more unpredictable, too. They are often burning hot through the night (when they used to cool), racing faster up hillsides and torching neighborhoods that were once relatively safe.

Researchers are attributing at least part of the difference to climate change, because in a warming world vegetation dries out faster and burns more easily.

And the most "deadly and costly" fires happen at the wildland-urban interface, because they damage houses, towns and lives. The Camp Fire has already matched the deadliest fire in state history, killing at least 29 people, and the death toll may rise.

"We have vulnerable housing stock already out there on the landscape. These are structures that were often built to building codes from earlier decades and they're not as fire resistant as they could be," Dr. Moritz said. "This issue of where and how we built our homes has left us very exposed to home losses and fatalities like these."

Image

Smoke rising above Malibu, Calif. The fire began at the wildland-urban interface, where communities are close to undeveloped areas. Credit Ben Watkins, via Associated Press

What Trump said

Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!

The statement suggests that California's forest-management problems are at fault. But the majority of California's forests are federally held.

Of the state's 33 million acres of forest, federal agencies, including the Forest Service and the Interior Department, own and manage 57 percent. Forty percent are owned by families, Native American tribes or companies, including industrial timber companies; just 3 percent are owned and managed by state and local agencies.

The president did not specify which federal payments might be withheld. But California itself allocated $256 million this year toward lowering wildfire risk.

In recent years the Forest Service has tried to rectify its past forest-management practices by conducting more prescribed or "controlled" burns to get rid of dead vegetation that could fuel future wildfires. But its budget has been overwhelmed by firefighting costs.

Congress passed a budget this year designed to fix some of those problems (and create a dedicated firefighting fund), but it will not take effect until next year.

Mr. Trump may also be referencing a debate put forward by logging interests, which argue that selective cutting would reduce California's wildfire problem. A century of fire suppression allowed flammable material - twigs and brush - to build up in forests nationwide.

As fires have gotten bigger and more destructive, the administration and Republicans in Congress have supported calls by the timber industry to clear out potential fuel by letting the land be logged.

In an opinion piece published this year in USA Today, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blamed California's wildfires on environmentalists who oppose logging. He wrote:

Every year we watch our forests burn, and every year there is a call for action. Yet, when action comes, and we try to thin forests of dead and dying timber, or we try to sustainably harvest timber from dense and fire-prone areas, we are attacked with frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods.

It is true that California has a lot of dead timber - 129 million trees spread across 8.9 million acres, according to a Forest Service estimate.

But the dead trees themselves do not catch fire easily, because they are too big, said Chad T. Hanson, the principal ecologist at the John Muir Project of the nonprofit Earth Island Institute.

"It's like starting a campfire," he said. "You don't put a big log on the fire and put a match to it and expect it to burn - it's not going to happen. Fires are driven by kindle."

Logging gets rid of trees, but it does not get rid of the kindling - brush, bushes and twigs. Logging does, however, enable the spread of cheatgrass, a highly combustible weed, which makes a forest more likely to burn.

In fact, the wooded land that abuts Paradise, Calif., the community so badly damaged by the Camp Fire, underwent the kind of post-fire logging that Mr. Trump's tweet and Mr. Zinke's article suggested. That was just under a decade ago, Dr. Hanson said, but the city is now in ashes.

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

Kendra Pierre-Louis is a reporter on the climate team. Before joining The Times in 2017, she covered science and the environment for Popular Science. @kendrawrites

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump's Claims Distort What Led to Fires. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Trump's Misleading Claims About California's Fire 'Mismanagement'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fact Check On Twitter, the president claimed that the state's wildfire woes are a result of poor forest management. The truth is more complicated. Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter.

# data[].attributes.headline
Inside the Race to Save the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow, North America’s Most Endangered Bird | Audubon

# data[].attributes.subject
Inside the Race to Save the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow, North America’s Most Endangered Bird | Audubon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
North America's most endangered bird hardly qualifies as "charismatic megafauna." It is not a big sexy animal, not the kind you'd see on a state flag. It's a tiny bird that lives on something in central Florida called the dry prairie, which feels vast when you're standing in the middle of it but which today covers maybe a tenth of its historic extent. The dry prairie is also home to spotted skunks, and snakes, and red imported fire ants. And sometimes cows. And an unknown but presumably growing number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and parasites and other pathogens. All of which are bad for the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow. When you're just a few inches long and you live for maybe four years and you're the potato chip of the food chain and everybody's out to eat you, you've got troubles.

Which explains why, in January 2014, a dozen members of the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow Working Group came together to collectively gnaw at the question of whether, under what circumstances, and in what specific ways to commence a captive-breeding program for what was (and is) generally recognized to be the continent's most endangered bird. The assembled biologists, land managers, conservationists, and researchers at the Archbold Biological Station in Venus, Florida, were the very people who had been-and would continue to be-heroically dedicated to doing whatever could be done to save the sparrow in the wild. But now the bird's plunging numbers were forcing them to consider the possibility that something more urgent needed to happen.

Let's stipulate this: There is something fundamentally wrong-feeling and queasy-making about attempting to save a bird from extinction by capturing a small but significant number of its last remaining healthy wild specimens and putting them in what is, no matter how roomy or well-festooned with appropriate vegetation, a prison. It's the sort of Sophie's Choice that leaves biologists and all lovers of wildlife feeling gutted. As one participant declared at some point during the two-day workshop, "I would rather have this species go extinct than to see it in a cage."

But others in the room weren't willing to adopt that absolutist position. The members of the working group were, after all, acutely mindful of-and in some cases had experienced firsthand-the most recent previous extinction of a North American bird 30 years ago, when the Dusky Seaside Sparrow blinked off the landscape right here in Florida. In that case, by the time the decision was made to deploy the last resort-to bring some sparrows in for captive breeding-the last resort had left the station: The only wild Dusky Seaside Sparrows to be found were five unpaired males, and soon the Dusky Seaside Sparrow was no more. The Florida Grasshopper Sparrow Working Group was determined not to repeat the mistake.

"These are wild birds; we want them in the wild," says Reed Bowman, who is the director of avian ecology at Archbold and who was at the 2014 workshop. "There's a huge amount of uncertainty [with captive breeding]. But one thing I can tell you is certain is that if they go extinct in the wild and we don't have a captive-breeding program, they will be extinct."

And so, in the face of a loudly ticking clock, the group came to a decision, though hardly an easy one. The official report from the workshop captured the painful ambivalence well, citing one member who framed the dilemma this way: "If we set the wrong course now . . . can we live with knowing that captivity caused extinction? Or . . . can we live with thinking that captivity could have saved the species if we had tried it?" The report continued: "In reality, given the population projections constructed by panelists, it seems the options before the [working group] have very similar likelihoods of success and failure. The [group] will be rewarded if they select an option that succeeds and never know if there even was an option for success if they fail."

The option they selected was to proceed, carefully, with captive breeding. And for the subsequent breeding seasons, the actions taken were careful indeed. Most collections were made on a rescue basis, largely from nests under imminent threat of flooding, and in that fashion two captive-breeding colonies were established. But those specimens were mostly eggs and hatchlings, only rarely the adult birds needed to ensure successful breeding and to school their progeny in wild-bird behaviors. Heading into this year's breeding season it was again uncertain whether the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) would bring in the sparrows needed to properly seed a breeding program. But then the season's first count of wild birds came in, and it was dire. And finally it was clear to everyone that there was no case left to be made that captive breeding was more likely to "cause" an extinction than prevent one.

"We're looking at imminent extinction of the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow in the wild in a year or two," says Paul Reillo, the founder and president of the Rare Species Conservatory Foundation (RSCF), whose Jurassic Park about 15 miles straight west of the current U.S. president's winter White House is home to several dozen critically endangered mountain bongo antelope, more than 80 endangered Red-browed Amazon parrots, and one of the two sparrow captive-breeding efforts now underway. "This might be the last opportunity to build a platform for the future. This season we're going to grab onto whatever is left on the table. We should save everything that has a chance of living, because this is the last gasp for this species."

Audubon Florida science coordinator Paul Gray has been working on the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow since he arrived 22 years ago in a role that included managing a 7,000-acre dry-prairie sanctuary that the organization had bought in 1980. Two years after his arrival, and after a lobbying campaign spearheaded by Audubon, the state bought an adjacent 48,000-acre ranch and established the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park. (Audubon sold the sanctuary to the state in 2001 to be folded into the park.) "When the state bought the preserve, they had hundreds of sparrows out there," Gray says. "And there were also three other subpopulations on three different conservation holdings. I thought, 'Great, we've saved the grasshopper sparrow! It's going to have enough places to live into the future.' "

Then the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow subpopulation crashed at one of the other holdings, the Avon Park Air Force Range just across the Kissimmee River to the west of the park-apparently plummeting from roughly 130 singing males in 1999 down to just 13 in 2003. "We had endless meetings and discussions and couldn't figure out what had happened," Gray says. "And then over the years the Kissimmee Prairie population just dwindled and dwindled."

By now, the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow has been functionally extirpated at Kissimmee Prairie; not a single breeding pair was found there this year. At Avon Park the tiniest of subpopulations somehow persists, with five males this year (two of which remained bachelors). A private ranch (which the USFWS requests not be identified) hosts a comparably puny subpopulation; the field techs who monitor the place counted five mated pairs this summer, plus a dozen unpaired males. Which leaves Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area, a 63,487-acre expanse of pristine habitat intensively and beautifully managed on the sparrows' behalf by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). But Three Lakes is bottoming out, too: This season it looks like it will have been home to no more than 16 sparrow pairs.

It's even more of a head-scratcher when you consider that Florida Grasshopper Sparrows do not have any issues with reproducing. In fact, they make babies in bulk.

The kind of population decline Gray describes is not the way things typically work out there in the natural world, at least absent some obvious and calamitous cause. And it's even more of a head-scratcher when you consider that Florida Grasshopper Sparrows do not have any issues with reproducing. In fact, they make babies in bulk. From the time they build their first nest of the season in, say, mid-April to their final effort at outlasting the rain sometime in August, a single breeding pair can produce as many as five clutches of eggs, three to five eggs in a clutch. That's potentially 25 offspring a year; in order for the population to increase, just three of them-12 percent-need to successfully incubate, hatch, fledge, and survive the winter. Even so, the population continues its inexorable fall.

Over the years, and recently with ever-greater urgency and ingenuity, USFWS field biologists and their land-manager partners have responded to the dizzying array of predatory and climatic perils the sparrows face by developing an equally dizzying armamentarium of interventions, up to and including transforming each newly discovered nest into a little fenced compound on the prairie.

The constant state of high alert, combined with the all-too-frequent incidence of nests failing anyway, can lead to heartbreak and burnout. Just listen to USFWS recovery biologist Sandra Sneckenberger, who has been engaged in the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow work out of the Service's Vero Beach office since 2008, describe the 2016 breeding season: "Last year the birds started nesting, and we got this huge deluge of rain, so we lost all those. Pretty much every bird's first clutch: gone. They start again right away, make a new nest, lay eggs. Second rainstorm: gone. That happened three times last year. After the first time, we put in monitoring wells so we knew where the water table was on the landscape. We lifted nests-figured out how to use shovels and a little dirt to lift nests up just enough so the birds wouldn't know we'd done anything. Everybody had a portable incubator for eggs. One time I'm with the crew grabbing eggs and there's lightning striking all around us. At the ranch we'd install fences against mammal predators and snakes, and an electrical fence around that because of cows. Still-with all that-as soon as the eggs hatch and there's a nice fleshy body, fire ants eat it. Out of 20 nests at the ranch last year there was one nest that made it. Every other one, it got predated at the egg stage or the crew came upon it after it got mauled by ants. You go through all that work and see that carnage repetitively-it gets to you. My dentist knows that it's sparrow season because my gums bleed so bad because I'm stressed out so much. You're always on call and you're doing a bunch of work and trying so hard, and you can't help but get attached to these birds. The birds are trying so hard to make it happen. The birds won't give up."

Paul Reillo is a tall, wiry guy, all angles and elbows; he lopes across the Rare Species compound shifting from one urgent task to the next, tattered off-white Rare Species Conservatory Foundation T-shirt swinging loosely from his coat-hanger shoulders. (It's hard to tell whether his wardrobe features just one RSCF shirt that he wears every day, or multiple clones, each dotted with a similar smattering of dirt and sweat.) Today is June 27, deep into the breeding season, and Reillo is beginning, finally, the process of building sparrow enclosures.

If you're going to bring in wild, critically endangered birds, you need to have specially made enclosures-big enough to give them some semblance of wilderness and sufficient room for foraging; situated outside for acclimation purposes yet protected against incursions from predatory snake and pathogen-carrying insect alike; planted with appropriate grassland ground cover so that fledglings feel at home. Also they can't cost too much. And of course now that time is getting short, they need to be simple enough that they can be built quickly under serious time constraint.

The simple schematic Reillo has designed is a 6 x 6 x 12-foot frame with a staple-gun-secured floor of galvanized quarter-inch wire mesh and five other sides wrapped in a stretchy superscreen guaranteed (as long as you get the fairings right) to keep out the critters you want kept out. Take three of those frames and arrange them at right angles out on the lawn behind the open carport bays where we're making these things, slap a prefab steel screen door on each and connect the three via a foyer that functions as an airlock against escape and unnecessary human contact, carpet the enclosures with soil and greenery, and voilà!-you've got a sparrow collection/breeding pod. Make two of those, to accommodate the six family units slated (weather and predators permitting) to be brought in, and do all of this with a cobbled-together crew of USFWS rogues, local artists, a journalist, and a couple of field techs from Kissimmee Prairie-who don't really have any sparrows to look after anyway-each of whom shows up whenever they manage to carve out the time to do so.

He opened one of the two incubators parked in the closet that spanned one wall and proceeded to manually nudge-turn a dozen or so jelly-bean-size eggs that looked so fragile they could have been spun from sugar.

Meanwhile, the insanely focused and iterative breeding work itself must go on. When I met Reillo for the first time, after he and his wife, Karen, had welcomed me to their house on the Rare Species compound, he took me into a small side room-in a more normal home, it might have been an office-where he had an important twice-daily task to perform. He opened one of the two incubators parked in the closet that spanned one wall and proceeded to manually nudge-turn a dozen or so jelly-bean-size eggs that looked so fragile they could have been spun from sugar. These were "day one" eggs, Reillo explained: eggs that had been brought in to this mechanical simulacrum of a nest-with its metal rollers that rotate the eggs on a precise but perhaps overly regular schedule and its temperature that can be calibrated down to the hundredth of the Celsius degree-within hours of being laid, before they could benefit for even a day from the far more nuanced knowledge of a mother sparrow sitting and jostling and creating the optimal conditions for incubation in an actual nest.

Reillo and his colleagues have gotten the incubation protocols refined up to a point: Give them an egg that's been in a nest under a female sparrow for three days and they'll take it through the remainder of the 11-day incubation period and successfully hatch it pretty much every time. But they had yet to hatch a day-one egg. Reillo had been obsessively tweaking the various factors he can control-temperature, rotation, air circulation, humidity-trying to figure out just what it takes, what that magical set of nest-approximating conditions might be that will cultivate, not kill, the sparrow embryos within. But success had eluded him so far.

The reason this maddening stumble toward replicating nature's methods is even necessary in this particular instance is that these eggs were the progeny of last season's hand-reared captives, not of the experienced, proven wild adult breeding pairs that are the optimal founders of a captive-breeding colony. (The unschooled first-time mothers had laid the eggs and then dumped them outside the nest and never bothered with them again.) But this is the fundamental nature of embarking on such an effort with a species that has never been bred in captivity before. Nothing is known in advance; everything must get figured out along the way.

A week after I was introduced to the day-one eggs, Reillo managed to get one to hatch. Two days later, he hatched another: He'd cracked the nut. (Ultimately a dozen of the eggs hatched.) The temperature they already knew works to incubate eggs from day four onward is 37.65°C; the temperature that gets them from day one to day four turns out to be 37.68°C. Point-oh-three degrees Celsius: That's the tiny gradation that makes all the difference.

Of course, what you get when you hatch a day-one egg is a day-one chick-a chick that must be hand-fed by humans straight out of the egg, a special formula the consistency of thick pancake batter administered every half-hour, syringe into gaping beak. This isn't the first time Rare Species has dealt with day-one chicks, and unfortunately they've found them to be almost as challenging as day-one eggs. Last year when May flooding threatened for the second time to drown every clutch on the prairie, the field techs conducted an emergency egg harvest, rushing more than three dozen of them to Reillo's safe harbor. After candling them, he determined that 23 were still viable (the fact that he could tell the state of their embryos meant they'd been in the nest for at least three days). Those went into the incubator, and all but two successfully hatched.

"That just began the difficulty, of course," Reillo says. The diet that works so well in chicks that are just a few days older seemed to go right through these hatchlings. Despite heroic round-the-clock, all-hands efforts and ongoing adjustments to the protocol, they just withered away; of the 21 chicks successfully hatched, 11 didn't make it. "If the parents are successful in feeding them for a few days, they stimulate the immune system somehow, seeding the gut with gastric juices that have the full complement of gut flora," Reillo says. "And the result is that we have had 100 percent success, every single nestling brought to us that is at least three days of age lives-a hundred percent. Doesn't seem to matter how sickly the damn thing is. As long as it's not dead and the parents have fed it, we'll raise it fine. That's remarkable." But if the parents haven't fed it, the success rate plummets.

And the problems with day-one chicks seem to compound dramatically when the chick is hatching from a day-one egg. For one thing, these chicks were weighing in at as much as 40 percent lighter than the roughly 1.5 grams of a normal tiny Florida Grasshopper Sparrow hatchling. That historic first-ever chick hatched from a day-one egg died within days-as did the next, and the next. In all, of the dozen chicks that Reillo miraculously managed to hatch from day-one eggs, only one has survived. Captive breeding is not for the faint-hearted.

I suspect that a common misperception exists among that subset of people who are even aware of the Endangered Species Act (ESA): the belief that, once a species is listed as endangered, the federal government-the Fish and Wildlife Service in particular, if your awareness runs that deep-has some sort of absolute responsibility to do (and fund the doing of) everything possible to keep said species from going extinct. It's what I thought, anyway.

Apparently, that is not the case. Early this year, word came down that the USFWS, which over the past four years had disbursed more than a million dollars in Florida Grasshopper Sparrow-recovery funds, would not commit to further financial support for the program. "When I heard the bad news that this program wasn't going to get supported, the sparrows weren't going to get any funding, it was like getting shot in the chest," says Sandra Sneckenberger, who, don't forget, works for the USFWS. "This is what we do, what the Fish and Wildlife Service does: We protect endangered species. If we don't-isn't the public going to wonder, 'If you don't do this, who is going to do it?' "

But here's the thing: The USFWS Southeast Region office, out of Atlanta, oversees the agency's work in 10 states plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. That territory is home to about 400 animal and plant species that have been declared endangered under the ESA. (The regional office is also obligated to evaluate roughly 400 additional at-risk species to determine whether they're candidates to be listed.) The total annual budget for this work is $14 million. "That's about $35,000 per species," says Leopoldo Miranda, the USFWS assistant regional director. (And that's if you're counting only the 400 currently listed species.)

And, quite reasonably and sometimes unreasonably, not all species are created equal from a USFWS-funding standpoint. For instance, captive-breeding programs for just two of them, the red wolf and the Puerto Rican Parrot, eat up a relatively hefty $1.2 million and $900,000 a year respectively. "It's a really tough decision, because we all want to keep funding all the species at the right levels, but definitely we don't have that capacity," Miranda says. "In terms of programs like the red wolves and parrots, it's mostly a historical thing. We made that decision 'way back when' to have captive-breeding populations and we're fully committed to those and now we are where we are."

All of which is to say, while Fish and Wildlife, from a rhetorical standpoint, declares its undying commitment to the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow ("I want to be able to go back and tell everybody, my kids, that we did everything we could to save that species," as Miranda puts it), from a financial standpoint it's stepping aside. "There are reasons to be optimistic" about the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow's chances of overcoming extinction, says Larry Williams, the USFWS's Florida state supervisor for ecological services. "But I think it's appropriate for the Service to say, 'How much can we continue to invest in this species given all the other species we need to give attention to?' "

In mid-May, at the urgent behest of other members of the working group, Williams issued a formal letter on USFWS stationery declaring that "our previous funding sources are no longer available in amounts that would fully fund the program"-a declaration that Reillo and others argued was essential if they were to somehow attract outside funding to make up the difference. As Reillo puts it, "It's almost impossible to garner independent support for anything that's seen as a federal program."

Since that letter was issued, a web page has been set up under the auspices of the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida to receive tax-deductible donations to directly fund Florida Grasshopper Sparrow recovery work. But, so far at least, no coordinated fundraising effort has coalesced-mainly because, who has the time? As Reed Bowman, Archbold's avian ecology director, who oversees the sparrow monitoring and recovery work on the ranch, concedes: "I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to go out seeking foundation grants for money that the Fish and Wildlife Service used to spend."

So as the Service's field biologists prepared to collect from the prairie the birds that were needed to give the long-shot captive-breeding program its best chance to succeed, they did so without knowing where the money to keep the program going-hundreds of thousands a year-would come from.

On a Friday in early July, the USFWS convened another working-group session, something of a coda to the 2014 meeting, this time less about whether to collect the birds and more about how many and from where. Reillo attended reluctantly; his enclosures were nowhere near complete, and he felt the time would be far better spent holding a drill and a staple gun than relitigating a decision that as far as he was concerned had been made long ago. But in the end he drove the two hours north to Vero Beach. And maybe it was a good thing that he made the trip. "There was actually a point after five-plus hours of deliberation where somebody said, 'I want to backtrack a little bit and question the whole idea of the urgency of collection,' " he said afterward, his voice still carrying evidence of the dismay he must have felt in the moment. "That's when I said, 'People, do not kick this thing down the road. This is the last year. I do not think they'll be able to collect even six pairs. And if the collection isn't done now, then really you have to say it's never going to happen.' "

Ultimately, the decision was made to bring in six pairs. At that point, two nests at the ranch had already hatched; the nestlings were expected to fledge by the following Thursday, so the plan was to capture the birds on Wednesday-five days hence. Then, over the weekend, first one nest and then the other were swarmed with fire ants, the nestlings killed, the parents escaping to establish another nest somewhere nearby and start the cycle anew.

The techs were monitoring two other nests at the ranch, and Sneckenberger decided to bring those in as early as possible. Then the storms began. "At lunch we started getting worried about the family we were about to collect," Sneckenberger says. "We had the techs go out there, and the nest was flooded big time. Totally flooded. And it had a just-hatched chick. And one pipping egg with its little beak sticking out, and one other egg." They raced to rescue those just-hatching birds and rush them over to the Avon Park Air Force Range, to place them in another nest that was also just hatching. One of the techs at Avon Park fed the day-one chick overnight, and he and another tech took turns standing vigil over the nest. "They kept running out there to check whether it was flooding, and ended up lifting that nest three times," Sneckenberger says. "We'd have calls, and they'd be like, 'It's still really wet, we can lift it again. We'd totally be breaking all the protocols.' But what's the alternative?"

The next day, the mist nets were strung at the ranch and the techs managed to capture the female parent and bring it to Reillo's enclosures; a bachelor male was later brought in to join her. Against all odds, every one of the eggs that had been taken to Avon Park hatched and successfully fledged. With luck, one or two will survive through winter. That Friday, another breeding pair was captured from the other monitored nest at the ranch and successfully transported to Rare Species.

And then, for nearly a month, the collection efforts stalled: one wild breeding pair captured, another male and a female collected separately and cobbled together to form a second pair, four enclosures still empty. This pause was basically a function of the natural rhythms of the prairie; as Sneckenberger explained, "The landscape had to dry out so birds would nest. You can't find a pair if they're not nesting." But even so, Reillo was having a hard time containing his impatience. "We've got four empty spaces that I'm either going to fill or set on fire," he said, ever sardonic, on August 3. "I'm going to put pygmy marmosets or butterflies in them just to make a statement."

And then, suddenly: Six new nests were discovered. In relatively quick succession the field biologists collected a family of seven, then a pair, then a family of five. Finally, on Friday, August 18, Sneckenberger and her crew netted a solo male from Three Lakes-the final sparrow to be captured this season, possibly ever-and delivered it to Rare Species to be paired with a female sparrow that had been rescued from Avon Park in June. All of the cages had been filled. They weren't all proven pairs, ongoing funding is yet to be secured, and there is certainly no telling whether captive breeding will ultimately succeed. But at least, finally, the USFWS, the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow Working Group, and all the rest of us will have the chance to find out whether captive breeding can save the most endangered bird in North America.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Inside the Race to Save the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow, North America's Most Endangered Bird

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The only hope to prevent extinction may be to remove some of the last birds from the wild for captive breeding. This summer scientists scrambled to collect enough sparrows before the breeding season's end.

# data[].attributes.headline
‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.subject
‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
October 15 at 3:00 PM
Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, and the forest's insect-eating animals have gone missing, too.

In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees had decreased by 45 percent. In places where long-term insect data are available, mainly in Europe, insect numbers are plummeting. A study last year showed a 76 percent decrease in flying insects in the past few decades in German nature preserves.

The latest report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that this startling loss of insect abundance extends to the Americas. The study's authors implicate climate change in the loss of tropical invertebrates.

"This study in PNAS is a real wake-up call - a clarion call - that the phenomenon could be much, much bigger, and across many more ecosystems," said David Wagner, an expert in invertebrate conservation at the University of Connecticut who was not involved with this research. He added: "This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read."

Bradford Lister, a biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, has been studying rain forest insects in Puerto Rico since the 1970s. If Puerto Rico is the island of enchantment - "la isla del encanto" - then its rain forest is "the enchanted forest on the enchanted isle," he said. Birds and coqui frogs trill beneath a 50-foot-tall emerald canopy. The forest, named El Yunque, is well-protected. Spanish King Alfonso XII claimed the jungle as a 19th-century royal preserve. Decades later, Theodore Roosevelt made it a national reserve, and El Yunque remains the only tropical rain forest in the National Forest system.

"We went down in '76, '77 expressly to measure the resources: the insects and the insectivores in the rain forest, the birds, the frogs, the lizards," Lister said.

He came back nearly 40 years later, with his colleague Andrés García, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What the scientists did not see on their return troubled them. "Boy, it was immediately obvious when we went into that forest," Lister said. Fewer birds flitted overhead. The butterflies, once abundant, had all but vanished.

García and Lister once again measured the forest's insects and other invertebrates, a group called arthropods that includes spiders and centipedes. The researchers trapped arthropods on the ground in plates covered in a sticky glue, and raised several more plates about three feet into the canopy. The researchers also swept nets over the brush hundreds of times, collecting the critters that crawled through the vegetation.

Each technique revealed the biomass (the dry weight of all the captured invertebrates) had significantly decreased from 1976 to the present day. The sweep sample biomass decreased to a fourth or an eighth of what it had been. Between January 1977 and January 2013, the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold.

"Everything is dropping," Lister said. The most common invertebrates in the rain forest - the moths, the butterflies, the grasshoppers, the spiders and others - are all far less abundant.

"Holy crap," Wagner said of the 60-fold loss.

Louisiana State University entomologist Timothy Schowalter, who is not an author of this recent report, has studied this forest since the 1990s. This research is consistent with his data, as well as the European biomass studies. "It takes these long-term sites, with consistent sampling across a long period of time, to document these trends," he said. "I find their data pretty compelling."

The study authors also trapped anole lizards, which eat arthropods, in the rain forest. They compared these numbers with counts from the 1970s. Anole biomass dropped by more than 30 percent. Some anole species have altogether disappeared from the interior forest.

Insect-eating frogs and birds plummeted, too. Another research team used mist nets to capture birds in 1990, and again in 2005. Captures fell by about 50 percent. Garcia and Lister analyzed the data with an eye on the insectivores. The ruddy quail dove, which eats fruits and seeds, had no population change. A brilliant green bird called the Puerto Rican tody, which eats bugs almost exclusively, diminished by 90 percent.

The food web appears to have been obliterated from the bottom. It's credible that the authors link the cascade to arthropod loss, Schowalter said, because "you have all these different taxa showing the same trends - the insectivorous birds, frogs and lizards - but you don't see those among seed-feeding birds."

Lister and Garcia attribute this crash to climate. In the same 40-year period as the arthropod crash, the average high temperature in the rain forest increased by 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures in the tropics stick to a narrow band. The invertebrates that live there, likewise, are adapted to these temperatures and fare poorly outside them; bugs cannot regulate their internal heat.

A recent analysis of climate change and insects, published in August in the journal Science, predicts a decrease in tropical insect populations, according to an author of that study, Scott Merrill, who studies crop pests at the University of Vermont. In temperate regions farther from the equator, where insects can survive a wider range of temperatures, agricultural pests will devour more food as their metabolism increases, Merrill and his co-authors warned. But after a certain thermal threshold, insects will no longer lay eggs, he said, and their internal chemistry breaks down.

The authors of a 2017 study of vanished flying insects in Germany suggested other possible culprits, including pesticides and habitat loss. Arthropods around the globe also have to contend with pathogens and invasive species.

"It's bewildering, and I'm scared to death that it's actually death by a thousand cuts," Wagner said. "One of the scariest parts about it is that we don't have an obvious smoking gun here." A particular danger to these arthropods, in his view, was not temperature but droughts and lack of rainfall.

Lister pointed out that, since 1969, pesticide use has fallen more than 80 percent in Puerto Rico. He does not know what else could be to blame. The study authors used a recent analytic method, invented by a professor of economics at Fordham University, to assess the role of heat. "It allows you to place a likelihood on variable X causing variable Y," Lister said. "So we did that and then five out of our six populations we got the strongest possible support for heat causing those decreases in abundance of frogs and insects."

The authors sorted out the effects of weather like hurricanes and still saw a consistent trend, Schowalter said, which makes a convincing case for climate.

"If anything, I think their results and caveats are understated. The gravity of their findings and ramifications for other animals, especially vertebrates, is hyperalarming," Wagner said. But he is not convinced that climate change is the global driver of insect loss. "The decline of insects in northern Europe precedes that of climate change there," he said. "Likewise, in New England, some tangible declines began in the 1950s."

No matter the cause, all of the scientists agreed that more people should pay attention to the bugpocalypse.

"It's a very scary thing," Merrill said, that comes on the heels of a "gloomy, gloomy" U.N. report that estimated the world has a decade left to wrangle climate change under control. But "we can all step up," he said, by using more fuel-efficient cars and turning off unused electronics. The Portland, Ore.-based Xerces Society, a nonprofit environmental group that promotes insect conservation, recommends planting a garden with native plants that flower throughout the year.

"Unfortunately, we have deaf ears in Washington," Schowalter said. But those ears will listen at some point, he said, because our food supply will be in jeopardy.

Thirty-five percent of the world's plant crops requires pollination by bees, wasps and other animals. And arthropods are more than just pollinators. They're the planet's wee custodians, toiling away in unnoticed or avoided corners. They chew up rotting wood and eat carrion. "And none of us want to have more carcasses around," Schowalter said. Wild insects provide $57 billion worth of six-legged labor in the United States each year, according to a 2006 estimate.

The loss of insects and arthropods could further rend the rain forest's food web, Lister warned, causing plant species to go extinct without pollinators. "If the tropical forests go it will be yet another catastrophic failure of the whole Earth system," he said, "that will feed back on human beings in an almost unimaginable way."
Read more: 'This is very alarming!': Flying insects vanish from nature preserves Watch these bizarre flies dive underwater using bubbles like scuba suits This bug is real, and now so are your nightmares

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Hyperalarming' study shows massive insect loss

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
October 15 at 3:00 PM Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A frenzy for sea cucumbers, driven by demand in Asia, has brought their populations near collapse in the waters off the Yucatán Peninsula.

Image

Local fishermen hang out and wait for a turn for their boats to be serviced in front of one of the fishing cooperatives in Rio Lagartos during a break from the rain. Credit Credit Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

RÍO LAGARTOS, Mexico - It is not a glamorous creature.

The sea cucumber, a relative of the starfish and sea urchin, isn't much more than a blob creeping across the ocean floor on tentacle-feet, munching on algae and plankton. The most interesting thing about the animal may be that some species defend themselves by ejecting respiratory tissues through the anus in the direction of the attacker.

But here on the Yucatán Peninsula, the un-charismatic sea cucumber has become so sought-after that the local populations of two species - Isostichopus badionotus and Holothuria floridana - have collapsed.

In the two-week fishing season last April, divers in this town hauled in 14 metric tons of sea cucumber - a sharp drop from the 260 metric tons harvested four years ago.

The decline is largely the result of overfishing driven by high demand in Asia, where dried sea cucumbers are eaten as a delicacy and can sell for more than $300 a pound. Sea cucumbers are said to deter muscle aging, boost the immune system, and treat fatigue and arthritis.

At least 16 species of sea cucumber worldwide are now threatened with extinction because of intense harvesting, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Another seven are endangered, and nine are vulnerable.

Image

Fishermen hold a bundle of frozen sea cucumbers in Río Lagartos. Once common, two species are now difficult to find. Credit Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

Researchers say reduced numbers of sea cucumbers may lead to decreased nutrient recycling and biodiversity on the seafloor, and may interrupt the food chain.

But while sea cucumber fisheries throughout the world have long been troubled, the Yucatán offers one of the most vivid examples of the challenges facing the animal.

"This creature went from being just a worm on the seafloor that these divers totally ignored to being something that they called 'black gold' within the span of a couple of years," said Abigail Bennett, an assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife at Michigan State University and co-author of an article about the sea cucumber trade in the journal World Development.

[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
She and others trace sea cucumber exploitation in the Yucatán to around 2012, when hundreds of fishermen realized the value of the catch in Asia. With air compressors made from six-horsepower motors and beer kegs, divers began scouring the ocean floor for sea cucumbers.

The divers used the sudden income to pay off debts, build new houses and fix up boats. But to keep the money flowing, they also took bigger risks. At least 40 divers from coastal communities in the Yucatán have died after ascending to the surface too quickly or staying on the seafloor too long while harvesting sea cucumbers.

Hundreds of others have been treated for decompression sickness - "the bends" - and other injuries related to the sea cucumber harvest.

"I attended to one and then another and another," said Dr. Juan Tec, who works at the public hospital in Tizimín.

Dr. Juan Tec with a hyperbaric chamber used to treat injured divers at the public hospital in Tizimín. Credit Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

Some days, he recalled, patients sprawled on the floor as they waited for their turn in a three-bed hyperbaric chamber. Others were rushed in immediately for life-threatening injuries.

"You lose track of time," said Angel Gamboa, a diving fisherman who suffered spinal cord decompression after spending about three hours gathering sea cucumbers off the Yucatán coast. "This never passed through my mind."

But even as the fishing frenzy was proving hazardous to divers, it was becoming equally threatening to the resource itself.

In recent years, government regulations limited the sea cucumber harvesting period to 14 days, setting catch quotas at 250 kilograms per fishing boat.

With limited oversight and enforcement, though, populations were given no time to grow and reproduce, leading to their near-total decline within just five years of authorized fishing.

"We could see that it was happening because of the fishing behavior, but we couldn't completely stop it," said Alicia Poot-Salazar, an investigator who recommends catch quotas to Mexico's National Commission on Aquaculture and Fisheries. "It developed so fast you couldn't control everything."

Angel Gamboa at his home in Río Lagartos. Mr. Gamboa suffered a spinal cord injury while diving for sea cucumbers three years ago and can no longer work. Credit Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

A mural on the wall of a building in Río Largartos depicts a diver hunting on the seafloor. Credit Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

Fishing for sea cucumbers had been a boon to the local economy. Credit Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

In retrospect, monitoring and enforcement systems should have been better, she said. The commission also issued too few harvesting permits, leaving unlicensed fishing crews with little incentive to follow the rules and limit catches.

In April, Ms. Salazar said 594 boats were issued permits to collect sea cucumbers - among a population of roughly 10,000 Yucatán fishermen.

Others suggested that local fishing cooperatives themselves should be given a greater role in policies aimed at improving governance of the resource.

To some experts, though, the lowly sea cucumber provides yet another example of the frequent obstacles to sustainable harvesting.

"It's exemplary of the ways we kind of outrun ourselves and are left with a tragic situation," said Michael Schoon, an associate professor of sustainability at Arizona State University.

Often, these loops are thought about in the context of enormous trends, such as climate change, he said. But the plight of the sea cucumber shows that even seemingly insignificant shifts can have a profound effect.

In the town of Río Lagartos, there were hardly any sea cucumbers left to collect this year. According to Dr. Tec, no divers were killed, either.

Fausto Alcocer, a local fisherman, on the docks in Río Lagartos. Credit Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How a Seafloor Blob Became Mexico's 'Black Gold'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A frenzy for sea cucumbers, driven by demand in Asia, has brought their populations near collapse in the waters off the Yucatán Peninsula. RÍO LAGARTOS, Mexico - It is not a glamorous creature. The sea cucumber, a relative of the starfish and sea urchin, isn't much more than a blob creeping across the ocean floor on tentacle-feet, munching on algae and plankton.

# data[].attributes.headline
Hidden Kingdoms of the Ancient Maya Revealed in a 3-D Laser Map - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Hidden Kingdoms of the Ancient Maya Revealed in a 3-D Laser Map - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Trilobites

Using technology known as lidar, a team of archaeologists found evidence beneath the jungle canopy in Guatemala of how the Mesoamerican civilization altered its landscape.

Image

Images made using lidar technology reveal previously unknown ancient Maya settlements with houses, temples, forts, ditches, moats and roads. Credit Credit Francisco Estrada-Belli/PACUNAM

Hidden pyramids and massive fortresses in the jungle. Farms and canals scattered across swamplands. Highways traversing thickets of rain forest. These are among more than 61,000 ancient Mayan structures swallowed by overgrowth in the tropical lowlands of Guatemala that archaeologists have finally uncovered using a laser mapping technology called lidar.

The discoveries, published Thursday in Science, provide a snapshot of how the ancient Maya altered the landscape around them for more than 2,500 years from about 1000 B.C. to 1500 A.D., and may change what archaeologists thought they knew about aspects of the ancient society's population size, agricultural practices and conflicts between warring dynasties.

The ancient Maya flourished in what is today southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and western Honduras. They left behind a rich written history painted and inscribed on wood, stone and ceramics. Detailed in their intricate hieroglyphics were tales of kings, queens and war.

"You're looking at a series of kingdoms all involved in this 'Game of Thrones' political story where they are marrying, fighting, killing each other and backstabbing," said Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at Ithaca College and an author of the paper. "Lidar reveals the stage in which these dramas recorded in texts played out."

Lidar is similar to sonar or radar, but it uses bursts of laser light to map an area.

The Tikal region of Guatemala, as well as a virtual view without vegetation using lidar. Published On Credit Credit Image by Francisco Estrada-Belli/PACUNAM

In 2016, Juan Fernández-Díaz, a senior researcher at the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston, and his team flew over more than 800 square miles of forest in northern Guatemala in an airplane equipped with lidar. The plane was about 2,000 feet above the jungle canopy, and for every second they flew the lidar sent about half a million laser pulses.

"It's basically like mowing the lawn. It's going back and forth, flying very parallel lines along the jungle," said Dr. Fernández-Díaz.

The 3-D map they made revealed new settlements with houses and temples, defensive fortifications like ditches and moats, as well as agricultural terraces and roads.

"My jaw dropped many times as I opened these images," said Francisco Estrada-Belli, an archaeologist from Tulane University in New Orleans.

For him, the biggest surprise was uncovering vast areas of wetlands filled with channels and canals. "All of these hundreds of square kilometers of what we thought were unusable swamp were actually some of the most productive farmland."

He said when the Maya were there, their farms probably resembled what we see in present-day Southeast Asia.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
The team, whose work was funded by PACUNAM, a foundation that works to preserve Maya cultural heritage, had announced their discoveries in February through National Geographic that they had found the ruins, and have now completed their analysis.

"This is the largest survey of its kind in Mesoamerica to date," said Marcello Canuto, an archaeologist also from Tulane University.

From the data, the team estimates there may have been about 7 to 11 million people living in the central Maya Lowlands during what was known as the Late Classic Period, which lasted from about 650 A.D. to about 800 A.D.

Image

A lidar image of the Maya settlement Naachtun, where yellow dots and red patches represent buildings and causeways are marked in gray. Credit Luke Auld-Thomas and Marcello A. Canuto/PACUNAM

"When you're talking about three to four times more people than you previously thought, you have to reconsider how they fed themselves, how they got along and how they handled being overcrowded," Dr. Garrison said.

After constructing their map, members of the team revisited parts of the jungle that they had previously studied in order to verify that the structures they identified with lidar actually existed. Dr. Canuto discovered a road that he said he couldn't believe he had missed previously.

"I went there immediately and was like 'Oh my God, there it is!' '' he said, "And then I walked on it."

For Dr. Garrison, using the lidar map revealed that only about a hundred feet from where he had once toiled in the jungle doing research there was a fortress concealed by the foliage.

"The power of lidar first hit me in the imagery," he said. "But taking it into the normal world of fieldwork was mind-blowing."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Under the Overgrowth: Archaeologists Use Laser Vision to Unveil Ancient Mayan Kingdom. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hidden Kingdoms of the Ancient Maya Revealed in a 3-D Laser Map

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Trilobites Using technology known as lidar, a team of archaeologists found evidence beneath the jungle canopy in Guatemala of how the Mesoamerican civilization altered its landscape. Hidden pyramids and massive fortresses in the jungle. Farms and canals scattered across swamplands. Highways traversing thickets of rain forest.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to Stop Poaching and Protect Endangered Species? Forget the ‘Kingpins’ - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
How to Stop Poaching and Protect Endangered Species? Forget the ‘Kingpins’ - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Authorities keep arresting people said to be bosses of wildlife trafficking, but that isn't making a dent in the problem.

Image

Chumlong Lemtongthai, a Thai citizen convicted in South Africa in a rhino-hunting scheme. The horns were sold on the black market, authorities said. He was released earlier this month. Credit Credit via Julian Rademeyer

In 2003, enterprising criminals in Southeast Asia realized that they could exploit a loophole in South Africa's hunting laws to move rhino horns legally across international borders. Normally, North Americans and Europeans account for the bulk of South Africa's rhino hunting permits. But that year, 10 Vietnamese "hunters" quietly applied as well.

Hunters are allowed to transport legally obtained trophies across borders under various international and domestic laws. The Vietnamese hunters each returned home with the mounted horn, head or even whole body of a rhino.

Word spread. Though Vietnam and other Asian countries have no history of big-game sport hunting, South Africa was soon inundated with applicants from Asia, who sometimes paid $85,000 or more to shoot a single white rhino.

That represented the beginning of an illicit industry referred to as pseudo-hunting - a first step toward the rhino poaching crisis that rages today. And the story of one of its chief practitioners shows the lengths to which criminals will go to move wildlife contraband.

No one knows just how many rhino horns were actually sent back to Asia as purported hunting trophies. South Africa has records of more than 650 rhino trophies leaving the country for Vietnam from 2003 to 2010 - goods worth some $200 million to $300 million on the black market. Vietnam, however, has corresponding paperwork for only a fraction.

Image

By 2012, South African investigators had identified at least five separate Vietnamese-run criminal syndicates exploiting the pseudo-hunting loophole. Chumlong Lemtongthai, a Thai citizen, and his band of gun-toting prostitutes were surely the most remarkable of those gangs.

To acquire more hunting permits, Mr. Chumlong hired more than two dozen women to pose as hunters. The women received around $550 just to hand over copies of their passports and to take a brief "holiday" with Mr. Chumlong and his men in South Africa.

Mr. Chumlong likely would have gotten away with the scheme were it not for Johnny Olivier, a fixer and interpreter in South Africa. Mr. Olivier worked for Mr. Chumlong, but after fifty or so rhino kills, his conscience began to nag at him.

"This is not trophies or whatever," Mr. Olivier told me he recollected thinking. "This is now getting into slaughtering, purely for money. These rhinos are my nation's inheritance."

Mr. Olivier discussed Mr. Chumlong's dealings with a private investigator, who began digging. The investigator eventually compiled 222 pages of evidence.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
When the case went to court in 2012, South African prosecutors described Mr. Chumlong as the mastermind behind "one of the biggest swindles in environmental crime history." To Mr. Chumlong's shock, and that of many observers, he was sentenced to forty years in prison.

It was a punishment unheard-of in its severity, especially in a country with notoriously low rates of conviction for alleged wildlife crimes. Of 317 arrests related to rhino poaching in 2015, for example, just 15 percent resulted in guilty verdicts.

But Mr. Chumlong served nowhere near 40 years. In 2014, Mr. Chumlong's sentence was reduced to 13 years in prison, plus a fine of about $78,000.

This month, South Africa granted Mr. Chumlong early release after serving six years. Amid an uproar of criticism from conservation groups and government officials, he was swiftly deported to Thailand.

It's not often you get to talk to a man convicted of systematic rhino slaughter. I interviewed Mr. Chumlong at the Pretoria Central Correction Center on a sunny Sunday morning in October 2016.

The guards led me into a spartan office where I found Mr. Chumlong seated on a bench near the wall, wearing an orange jumpsuit with "Corrections" written in circular patterns all over it. Wire-rimmed glasses framed his dark eyes, and his hair, once dyed black, was shaved short and gray, matching the stubble around his chin and upper lip.

I introduced myself, turned on my tape recorder and told him that I was there to hear his story. After some hesitation - he didn't appreciate how the press had depicted him in the past, without even speaking to him, he said - he agreed to talk.

"Can you tell me about your involvement with rhino hunting?" I began.

In a gush of broken English, Mr. Chumlong told me that he was a legitimate businessman who recruited Asian tourists to hunt in South Africa. "I get tourists to shoot, I get commission," he said. "I'm never poaching. I go legal way."

He described having what he thought were legitimate hunting permits, only to be arrested by the South African police for fraud and railroaded into jail after signing what he believed was an agreement to pay a fine.

Soon enough, he was practically shaking, his eyes wide, his voice high.

"He said lie to me, my lawyer! Rhino farmer go home, me go to jail 40 years!"

The way he told it, it did sound possible that Mr. Chumlong had been a scapegoat for savvier criminals who took advantage of his ignorance to help get rhino horns out of the country.

According to South African and Thai authorities and conservationists, Mr. Chumlong's boss was Vixay Keosavang, a Lao citizen once called the Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking. He has denied involvement in trafficking, and Mr. Chumlong told me he had not had any contact with Vixay Keosavang after his arrest.

"Vixay never talk. Only me, 'kingpin,'" Mr. Chumlong scoffed. "Company, friend, family - never talk to me."

Mr. Chumlong's case illustrates one of the most profound obstacles to disrupting the international trade in illegal wildlife: the decentralized, constantly morphing networks along which poached goods are transported.

South Africa tightened its sport hunting rules after Mr. Chumlong was arrested, and in the overall story of the illegal wildlife trade, pseudo-hunting proved a "temporary sideshow," as Ronald Orenstein, a conservationist, put it in his book "Ivory, Horn and Blood."

Straight-up poaching and trafficking now dominate. Yet many of the players are still the same.

Again and again, associates of Mr. Chumlong and Vixay Keosavangfrom a decade ago, or longer, have turned up in wildlife trafficking cases, among them Bach "Boonchai" Mai, arrested by the Thai police earlier this year.

But because of the way the poaching and trafficking networks work, taking down any one of these supposed kingpins will not stop the illegal trade.

To get their prize, rhino poachers - who are often desperately poor local men living on the fringes of parks and reserves - tend to sneak in under cover of darkness, sometimes during the full "poacher's moon," as it's often called.

Once in the park, they usually wait until first light to kill a rhino. Afterward, they may await well-organized pickups, or they may bury the horn for later retrieval. Others simply run home with the horn as quickly as they can.

After a horn - or a tusk, bag of bones, box of scales or other animal contraband - is smuggled out of a park, the goods are usually transferred along a chain of "runners" who take them to larger and larger cities. At some point, Asian businessmen based in Africa are likely to get involved - generally Vietnamese bosses for rhino horn, Chinese bosses for ivory.

Once the contraband begins its trafficking journey, the route often isn't direct. A China-bound ivory shipment may be sent first to Spain from Togo; a passenger carrying rhino horn may fly to Dubai before heading to Kuala Lumpur and then to Hong Kong.

This roundabout travel obscures the goods' true origin and destination, and the route often reflects the placement of compromised officials who allow for a smooth journey.

"People who operate in the legal field - in government or in the transportation or wildlife industry - play a vital role in ensuring that rhino horn or any other wildlife contraband passes along the supply chain," said Annette Hübschle-Finch, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cape Town's Center for Criminology.

"They are the gatekeepers and intermediaries. They provide the link between the bush and the market."

Trafficking bosses themselves are often also involved in legitimate and even well-known local businesses.

In the West, "organized criminals live in a somewhat parallel society," said Tim Wittig, a conservation scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. But among wildlife traffickers, "the big criminals are typically also big business people."

"Usually, they're involved in logistics-type businesses - trading or shipping companies, for example - or in commodity-based ones, which is why it's easy for them to move things around," he added.

These individuals are sometimes referred to as kingpins, a term that experts say is overused.

"In some ways, chasing after a Mr. Big behind it all is a bit of a myth," said Julian Rademeyer, a project leader with Traffic, a conservation group, and author of "Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade."

One of the most important characteristics of poaching and smuggling networks is their diversity, according to Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on international crime at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

While some networks are highly organized, others are completely dispersed. A dealer smuggling ivory out of an African port may not know the local boss overseeing poaching or the trader who eventually sells the contraband in Asia.

In the cartels run by just one or a few individuals, vacuums left by arrests are quickly filled.

That is why these convictions, even high-profile ones like Mr. Chumlong's, usually have little effect on shutting down illegal trade - in wildlife, drugs or any other kind of contraband, Dr. Felbab-Brown pointed out.

Three recent arrests for illegal wildlife trafficking have received wide attention among conservationists: Feisal Mohamed Ali, charged with trafficking in ivory in Kenya; Abdurahman Mohammed Sheikh, another alleged ivory trafficker in Kenya; and Yang Fenglan, Tanzania's so-called queen of ivory. All have denied the charges and await trial.

But even if they were all eventually found guilty, Dr. Wittig noted, their trade would account only for a meager 10.9 tons of ivory over the past decade, or the equivalent of 1,500 elephants. By Dr. Wittig's estimate, the total amount they may have trafficked accounted for just 10 percent of African ivory smuggled over that period. Nor has poaching declined since those individuals were arrested.

"Arresting a few alleged wildlife-trafficking 'kingpins' may be a useful symbolic tool for promoting the importance and feasibility of strong enforcement to the general public," Dr. Wittig said. But "it is not likely to be effective in actually saving protected wildlife, especially if done in isolation."

Changing this largely depends on changing the way the world addresses illegal wildlife trade.

John Sellar, formerly chief of enforcement for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, has argued that we should instead just think of wildlife trafficking more simply as a crime, not a conservation issue.

But most of those tasked with fighting this type of crime are conservationists, rangers and wildlife managers. Mr. Sellar and other experts argue this job should instead be assigned to police, detectives, money-laundering experts and the courts.

That criminal groups dealing in wildlife tend to include multinational players further complicates investigations. Governments often do not share information or effectively collaborate across borders.

After decades of work, for example, Samuel Wasser, chair of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington, has developed a game-changing forensic method that allows experts to use DNA to determine the geographic origins of seized tusks, and thus to map poaching hot spots in Africa.

Dr. Wasser could produce a map showing officials and law enforcement exactly where they need to go to shut down the ivory trade in its current form. Yet most countries don't get around to sending him samples of poached ivory for a year or more after a seizure. Some refuse to share any samples at all.

"That's the hardest part for me, seeing how powerful a tool we have. Yet countries are so reluctant to let us use it," Dr. Wasser said.

Even officials within a country plagued by poachers may not cooperate. Police officers don't talk to customs officials who don't talk to rangers. Rangers don't have access to policymakers who don't consult conservation groups.

"The intelligence environment is like spy-versus-spy," said Ken Maggs, head ranger at Kruger National Park in South Africa.

Breaking up the decentralized criminal networks of poachers, experts say, will require the building of new networks among those who oppose the decimation of animal species. Arresting a few "kingpins" here and there will never be a substitute.

"If the genie in the bottle were to grant me just one wish to combat international wildlife crime, I would ask that everyone work more collaboratively," Mr. Sellar has written. "I remain convinced, utterly convinced, that we would make major inroads into combating international wildlife crime if we could only get our act together."
Rachel Nuwer is a regular contributor to Science Times and the author of "Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking," published on Sept. 25, from which this article is adapted.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Stop Poaching and Protect Endangered Species? Forget the 'Kingpins'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Authorities keep arresting people said to be bosses of wildlife trafficking, but that isn't making a dent in the problem. In 2003, enterprising criminals in Southeast Asia realized that they could exploit a loophole in South Africa's hunting laws to move rhino horns legally across international borders.

# data[].attributes.headline
Scenes From a Charred Forest, Bursting With New Life - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Scenes From a Charred Forest, Bursting With New Life - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Though it appears destructive, fire in the New Jersey Pinelands is a force of renewal.

Image

On April 22, a spring wildfire roared through Penn State Forest in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, sending 100-foot flames shooting from the crowns of the pitch pines. The fire consumed half a square mile in 40 minutes and could be seen from space. By the time the New Jersey Forest Fire Service got it under control, it had burned 843 acres, an area the size of Central Park.

A week later, even as ash still swirled through air heavy with the creosote scent of burned resin and a cedar log smoldered at the edge of a swamp, the forest was being reborn. Pine cones that open only under extreme heat had released their seeds. Though the trees themselves were charred, almost all survived the fire. Where chest-high blueberry and huckleberry had burned down to pointy stubs, tufts of grass were sprouting.

Destructive fires in the West dominated the news this summer, but for eons fire has been not just an inevitable feature of the landscape, but essential to the forest's health and continuity. In the vast wilderness of the Pine Barrens, the forest regenerates so fast that scientists studying the physics of fire use it as a laboratory.

Eleven weeks after the fire in Penn State Forest, at the height of summer's greening, new blueberry bushes were already shin high. A grass that flowers only after fire had put forth purple-brown seeds. And scattered all through the fire site, bursts of bright-green pitch-pine needles grew straight out of scorched trunks.

"Fire and pines go together like peas and carrots," said Bernie Isaacson, an assistant regional forester with the New Jersey Forest Service. "We joke that pitch pines don't know when to die."

The Pine Barrens are a million-acre natural reserve at the heart of the nation's most densely populated state. Endless sand roads course though stands of pitch pine, a scraggly, decidedly unmajestic evergreen.

There are about 600 wildfires a year in the Pine Barrens, though only a few of this size, thanks to the efforts of the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. The fire service itself also burns about 20,000 acres a year in carefully managed chunks, creating breaks in the treescape and clearing understory to prevent bigger fires from engulfing towns and blueberry and cranberry farms that push against the forest edge.

The fire in Penn State Forest, about 90 miles southwest of New York City, started near the intersection of two sand roads marked with hand-painted wooden signs reading Lost Lane and Penn Place.

Like most fires in the pines, the Breeches Branch Fire, as it is officially known, is thought to have been caused by humans.

Investigators pinpointed its origin, marked with a ribbon of pink tape, by scrutinizing burn patterns on individual sticks and stones. "We get it right down to the size of a bottle cap," said Shawn Judy, an assistant division forest fire warden with the fire service.

The fire's source remains unsolved.

Part of the forest that burned in the fire had been burned just two years before by the New Jersey fire service and had already grown back.

This comes as little surprise to federal researchers up the road at Silas Little Experimental Forest, who have been developing tools to remotely measure the amount of "fuel," or burnable material, in a forest, and measuring plant growth after a fire by how much carbon dioxide is being absorbed.

"By the following year, the system is taking up CO₂ at the same rate as before the burn," said Ken Clark, a research forester with the federal forest service. "So it recovers basically within a year. I thought that was pretty amazing."

Pitch pines have a whole repertoire of adaptations to fire. Some of their cones are sealed shut with wax and open like unclenching fists when the wax melts.

The tree's armor-plate bark can be an inch thick, insulating buds that send out needles after fire strips off upper branches to free up nutrients and let in sunlight. Even after a fire hot enough to boil the liquids inside the bark and kill the main stem, a pitch pine can resprout at the base from buds in the roots.

When fire burns off the layer of dead leaves and needles on the ground, it exposes bare sandy soil that looks inhospitable but is exactly what pitch-pine seedlings need. "Because the soil is tight and compacted there's no airspace, so the roots don't dry out," said Greg McLaughlin, state fire warden for the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. "The fire prepares the seedbed."

The Pine Barrens are also home to an uncommon grass called the pine barren sandreed that needs fire to provide it open space. "Most of it is in Fort Dix" - the nearby Army base - "because they're always firing bullets and flares," said Andy Windisch, a fire ecologist for the state Forest Service.

But there is also a mini-savanna of reedgrass in Penn State Forest, and, triggered by this year's fire, it flowered. There are several rare butterflies that in turn depend on the reedgrass, including the state-endangered arogos skipper. "These rare insects are expected to recolonize the burn site over time," Mr. Windisch said.

It will not be long, said Mr. Judy, the assistant fire warden, before Penn State Forest is ready for another fire.

"Two years from now, three years from now," he said, "you'll have another day with nice dry air, another beautiful bluebird day, low humidity. A spark will get in there, and there it goes."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scenes From a Charred Forest, Bursting With New Life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Though it appears destructive, fire in the New Jersey Pinelands is a force of renewal. On April 22, a spring wildfire roared through Penn State Forest in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, sending 100-foot flames shooting from the crowns of the pitch pines.

# data[].attributes.headline
Saltmarsh Sparrows Fight to Keep Their Heads Above Water - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Saltmarsh Sparrows Fight to Keep Their Heads Above Water - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Rising sea levels are bringing more nest-flooding tides that threaten to push the birds that breed in coastal marshes along the Atlantic Coast to extinction.

Image

A saltmarsh sparrow chick at Hammonasset Beach State Park. Credit Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

HAMMONASSET BEACH STATE PARK, Conn. - The newly hatched saltmarsh sparrows are helpless, all but featherless, with reddish skin, barely visible in the evening light.

Mosquitoes buzz as Samantha Apgar holds aside a tangle of marsh grass, or salt hay, to show me the hidden nest. It's the size of half a baseball, tucked in under a tangle of grass. The incoming tide is rising over the soles of our boots and the hatchlings won't stay dry long.

Ms. Apgar, a graduate student at the University of Connecticut, is working with Christopher Elphick, an ornithologist there, to record what happens when high tides flood the nests of marsh birds. She has automatic video cameras and is also collaborating with videographers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, one of whom has his camera trained on this nest and had recorded the hatching of these babies a couple of hours before.

She warns me that the outlook for these fragile hatchlings is grim. If they last through the night, they still have five days of increasingly high tides ahead of them until the new moon. "I don't think they're going to make it," Ms. Apgar says.

The species, which breeds in coastal marshes from Maine to Virginia, and lives only on the Atlantic Coast, has always been at the mercy of time and tide, nesting between the highest spring tides. But now a sea level rise of a fraction of an inch a year caused by climate change is pushing tides higher and higher, threatening the birds' survival. Their population has been declining about nine percent a year since the late 1990s. They now number somewhere from 40,000 to 80,000, although overall population estimates are tentative because the birds are not always easy to find.

Dr. Elphick and his colleagues recently predicted that they will reach a threshold, when the highest spring tides come too often to allow the birds time to raise their young. "After that threshold is crossed," he says, "these birds have maybe six years before they're extinct."

Image

The turning point may arrive sometime between 2030 and 2060, potentially giving the saltmarsh sparrow the distinction of becoming the first bird to go extinct as a direct result of rising sea levels.

Over just a few years, he said, the situation could change "from most birds in the population having a moderate chance of successfully breeding, to most birds having a poor chance of breeding."

[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
The birds' precarious existence is one example of the threat to the coastal marshes of the Eastern Seaboard and all the species that depend on them. The end may not come gradually for the species living on the edge.

"We could suddenly lose a lot of stuff very quickly," Dr. Elphick says. "I think that's what's scary to those of us who study this stuff. The recognition of how rapidly things can change."

In the morning, the newly hatched sparrows are gone, drowned in the night's high tide and the mother sparrow is already looking for fathers for her second brood. She can't waste time; the tides won't wait.

Those hatchlings drowned on the night of June 10, near the beginning of a nesting season that runs from May through August. Ms. Apgar followed nests at the Connecticut site throughout the season. Of 59 nests found, 40 failed. She knows that 16 were flooded and failed. The others may have, but she doesn't have the evidence. Four nests produced young that survived at least long enough to leave the nest, and she doesn't know what happened to the hatchlings in the other 15.

This is not research for the faint of heart. "They get out of the egg and pretty soon after are inundated with cold water and either drown or make it through and fledge," Ms. Apgar said. "It's a hard way to be born I think."

Dr. Elphick said it is common to come out and find "little baby chicks drowned everywhere." But, he said, "that's part of their life history. That has happened ever since they've been living in marshes, to some extent."

It is certainly hard to watch the videos that document chicks drowning when the water rises.

Rising waters at Hammonasset State Beach Park in Connecticut end the short lives of five-to-six-days-old saltmarsh sparrow chicks. Published On Credit Credit Image by Samantha Apgar

If the scientists are used to the fragility of sparrow life, some of their friends are not. Ms. Apgar recalled posting a picture of nestlings on Facebook and a friend said, "'Are they going to make it Sammie?' And I said, 'Oh Brookie, I don't think so.' And she said, 'Don't "Oh Brookie" me!'"

The birds do have what seem to be adaptations to their hard lives. The eggs can go underwater for 90 minutes at a time, surviving the temperature drop and loss of oxygen absorption through the air.

A sped-up video shows how saltmarsh sparrow eggs can survive rising tides. Published On Credit Credit Image by Samantha Apgar

When the chicks are old enough, they can climb up the marsh grass to get away from the rising water, even if they are not fully ready to leave the nest.

A sped-up video shows six-to-seven-day-old chicks escaping from rising tides Published On Credit Credit Image by Samantha Apgar

Also, the females nest and lay eggs as many times as they can, generally about five to a nest. They are seriously promiscuous. "In a quarter of nests," Dr. Elphick said, "every single chick has a different father. And in pretty much every nest, there's at least two fathers and often three or four."

Dr. Elphick says it's very difficult to pin down an evolutionary cause for a behavior, but for the female sparrows, promiscuity seems to make good sense. Mating quickly is of utmost importance so you can't be too choosy, and if you're not being picky about prospective fathers, "you may be better off mating with multiple males."

Unfortunately, none of these apparent adaptations will help if the birds don't have around 23 days between nest-flooding tides to lay eggs, incubate them and raise the chicks to the stage when they're able to leave the nest.

That's where lunar cycles and tides come in. The highest spring tides, very likely to flood the nests, occur roughly every 28 days. Whether the highest tide is at the new or full moon depends on multiyear cycles. Now, new moon tides are the highest. No matter, there is always a secondary peak midway between the highest tides. Right now those secondary peaks don't cause nest flooding as predictably as the new moon tides do.

"It is disconcerting to come to the realization that the species you're studying that doesn't seem that rare could go extinct within your lifetime," said Chris Elphick, an ornithologist at the University of Connecticut. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

"They get out of the egg and pretty soon after are inundated with cold water and either drown or make it through," said Samantha Apgar, a graduate student. "It's a hard way to be born, I think." Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

But Dr. Elphick and his colleagues predict that the nest flooding tides will start to occur every two weeks from 2030 to 2060, despite any global changes in carbon emissions. With that timetable, the nests will flood every two weeks, which is not enough time for eggs to hatch and chicks to fledge.

The gradual increase of average sea level is only part of this story. In a 2017 paper, Christopher Field, Dr. Elphick and others included local sea level rise, daily variations in tide height and a number of other factors. They also included rates of failure from hundreds of nests at study sites in Connecticut from 2002 to 2009.

Their computer models, designed to accommodate the complexity of a reality that is far messier than a tide table, produced the prediction of the sparrow's dire future. And their conclusion showed that gradual change cannot be counted on. You can approach a cliff gradually, but the last step is pretty abrupt.

As we squished through the marsh after examining the doomed nestlings, I asked if his work felt like a deathwatch.

"It is disconcerting," he said, "to come to the realization that the species you're studying that doesn't seem that rare could go extinct within your lifetime." Then he laughed, "Yeah, for sure."

The end, though near, is not absolutely certain. The birds have moved to new habitats in the past, in the sense that the marshes of the Eastern Seaboard were not where they are now when the species appeared thousand years ago. The Hammonasset marshes were under glaciers. And the marshes were miles east.

The sparrows traveled with the marshes as the plants shifted along the changing location of the shore. Building now limits that movement, although a recent paper suggests there is more room than previously thought for coastal changes.

And the sea is rising fast. The pressure's on to come up with other approaches.

"The conservation of this species right now - and not just this species but the whole suite of things that live in salt marshes - centers around where are the places where it's possible for there to be marshes 30 years, 50 years, 80 years from now," Dr. Elphick said.

The Saltmarsh Sparrow Initiative, of which he is a part, has a plan to try to stop the population from going below 10,000 and then bringing it back up to around 25,000, by protecting both current marsh areas and potential future habitat.

One stopgap measure might be drainage ditches. Many Eastern coastal marshes like Hammonasset already have such ditches, dug in the 1920s and 30s for mosquito control. Or earlier to keep the marsh dry enough for cattle to graze on salt hay, the very plant that the saltmarsh sparrow nests in. More ditches might be dug or old ones widened or deepened.

Inevitably a sort of gallows humor evolves in studying a species that seems destined for extinction. Enter the ghost cameras.

Ms. Apgar and Dr. Elphick are making video recordings of nests during high spring tides so they can see what actually happens. At what age can the chicks climb up the grass to survive? Do they live after being inundated? What do the mothers do?

And they do this in the dark. "Most of the chicks were dying at night in the years we had been studying the birds," Dr. Elphick said. So they needed cameras that could record video at night.

Most small video cameras have infrared filters to improve colors, with one notable exception. "I wound up buying these cameras," Ms. Apgar said, holding one up for inspection, "that are actually from a paranormal activities shop."

Apparently ghost hunters also need to see in the dark. Ms. Apgar paired the cameras with lights in the infrared spectrum, which neither birds nor humans can see so the mothers and nestlings are not disturbed. It seems to be working.

But, as the sun went down and the waters rose, Ms. Apgar said that their team sometimes jokes that the cameras may also "pick up the ghosts of chicks past."

For the record, that hasn't happened yet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Saltmarsh Sparrows Fight to Keep Their Heads Above Water

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rising sea levels are bringing more nest-flooding tides that threaten to push the birds that breed in coastal marshes along the Atlantic Coast to extinction. HAMMONASSET BEACH STATE PARK, Conn. - The newly hatched saltmarsh sparrows are helpless, all but featherless, with reddish skin, barely visible in the evening light.

# data[].attributes.headline
Scientists thought they had created the perfect tree. But it became a nightmare. - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.subject
Scientists thought they had created the perfect tree. But it became a nightmare. - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
September 17 at 7:00 AM
Carole Bergmann pulls her small parks department SUV into an aging 1980s subdivision in Germantown, Md., and takes me to the edge of an expansive meadow. A dense screen of charcoal-gray trees stands between the open ground and the backyards of several houses. The trees are callery pears, the escaped offspring of landscape specimens and street trees from the neighborhood. With no gardener to guide them, the spindly wildlings form an impenetrable thicket of dark twigs with three-inch thorns.

Bergmann, a field botanist for the Montgomery County Parks Department, extricates herself from the thicket and in the meadow shows me that what I take to be blades of grass are actually shoots of trees, mowed to a few inches high. There are countless thousands, hiding in plain sight in Great Seneca Stream Valley Park. If it were not cut back once a year, the meadow would become like the adjacent screen, wall upon wall, acre upon acre of black-limbed, armored trees worthy of Sleeping Beauty's castle.

"You can't mow this once and walk away," said Bergmann, who began her 25-year career in the department as a forest ecologist but has been consumed by an ever-pressing need to address the escape of the Bradford pear and other variants of callery pear, a species that originated in China, along with other invasive exotics.
[Revered, then reviled: Tracking the rise and fall of ivy]
The U.S. Agriculture Department scientists who gave us the Bradford pear thought they were improving our world. Instead, they left an environmental time bomb that has now exploded.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the callery pear was the urban planner's gift from above. A seedling selection named Bradford was cloned by the gazillion to become the ubiquitous street tree of America's postwar suburban expansion.

The Bradford pear seemed to leap from an architect's idealized rendering. But in this case, reality outshone the artist's vision. It was upright and symmetric in silhouette. It exploded with white flowers when we most needed it, in early spring. Its glossy green leaves shimmered coolly in the summer heat, and in the fall, its foliage turned crimson, maroon and orange - a perfect New England study in autumnal color almost everywhere it grew. And it grew everywhere. It flourished in poor soil, wet or dry, acidic or alkaline. It shrugged off pests and diseases, it didn't drop messy fruit like mulberries or crab apples. Millions of Bradford pears would be planted from California to Massachusetts and would come to signal the dream and aspirations of postwar suburbia. Like the cookie-cutter suburbs themselves, the Bradford pear would embody that quintessentially American idea of the goodness of mass-produced uniformity.

But like a comic book supervillain who had started off good, the Bradford pear crossed over to something darker. It turned from thornless to spiky, limber to brittle, chaste to promiscuous, tame to feral. Most of all, it became invasive. It is now an ecological marauder destined to continue its spread for decades, long after those suburban tract houses have faded away. Generations yet to be born will come to know this tree and learn to hate it.

It is at its most conspicuous in early spring, when it bursts into flower. Suddenly whole rural landscapes - meadows, old pastures, woodland edges, ditches, the sides of highways and railroads - are lit up by its blossoms. From early March to mid-April, you can now track the arrival and progression of spring in the United States not as amber waves of grain but as a frothing tide of Bradford pear.

You might even enjoy its beauty, until you realize that it is squeezing out native flora and reducing biodiversity. As eye-catching as the flowers are, they are simply the start of the seasonal march of this invader. Six months after the blooms appear, clusters of seedy berries invite birds to fatten up for winter. In the bird's droppings, the seeds will germinate and advance, becoming ever more genetically diverse in the process and making the pear ever more adapted to its own spread.

Its invasive tendencies became widely noticed by the late 1990s, and by the mid-2000s, it had become a weed in the District and 19 states, from Texas to New York. "While callery pear was introduced with the best of intentions, it now seems that a plague is truly upon us," botanist Michael Vincent wrote at the time. It has now spread to 29 states.

The roots of the Bradford pear fiasco go back more than a century, and had nothing to do with decorating suburbia. By the turn of the 20th century, Northern California and southern Oregon had become the centers of pear production in the United States. The common or European pear was a high-value fruit; in one Oregon county alone, Jackson, the pear industry in 1916 was worth a mind-boggling $10 million.

But the orchards were threatened by a new disease called fire blight. George Roeding, a nurseryman in Fresno, Calif., wrote in 1916 that "in the San Joaquin Valley, which sixteen years ago was one of the great pear producing sections of California, the pear has been absolutely wiped out of existence."

In Talent, Ore., a plant scientist named Frank Reimer was using a test orchard to work on fire-blight control and found that the callery pear, first brought to the States in 1908, was highly resistant to fire blight and might be used as a rootstock onto which varieties of the European pear could be grafted. The much smaller callery fruit is used to make tea in China but is considered inedible.
[There are hundreds of recorded types of some fruits. You wouldn't know it from stores.]
But to take his research further, Reimer needed lots of genetically rich wild seed from China. He turned to David Fairchild, a dynamic young botanist in Washington. Fairchild is best remembered as the guy who helped bring the Japanese cherry blossoms to the capital, by first growing 125 imported trees on his estate in Chevy Chase, Md.

Fairchild headed the Agriculture Department's Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction. He traveled far during his career in search of new plants, but he relied on another explorer, Frank Meyer, in the quest for a super-pear. Meyer, an emigre from the Netherlands, had already explored extensively in northern and central China when Fairchild tapped him, in 1916, to go to southern China. (Meyer is best known for giving Americans the lemon variety named after him.)

In an age before passenger jets and digital communication, the quest for the callery pear would be no quick or easy excursion. A century ago, plant explorers needed an extraordinary set of skills to complete their missions and survive a range of perils.

A haunting image of Meyer in China is captured in a 1908 photo. With a big black beard, sheepskin leggings and a staff, he is seen gazing into the distance from a mountainous, arid landscape. All about him, burlapped cuttings rest like tablets brought down from Mount Sinai. He is in his early 30s but seems older.

Meyer left Washington in mid-August of 1916, traveling west to see Reimer's pear trials in Oregon and finally departing Seattle bound for Japan on the last day of summer. Within a couple of months, he had sent six large shipments of seed from Beijing containing pine nuts, walnuts and chestnuts, but no callery pear. Fairchild, exasperated that Meyer was hanging around Beijing, urged him to make his way up the Yangtze River to look for the callery. "You must not leave any stone unturned to secure it," he wrote. The correspondence between Meyer and Fairchild form part of an archive of the Chinese expedition in the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Md.

Meyer eventually made his way to Yichang, a four-day boat ride from Hankou (now Wuhan) up the Yangtze, and he soon found wild-growing callery pears, if not in the extravagant amounts Reimer was seeking. "Altho' not rare in the hills around here, the trees are very widely scattered, they are often quite small and as such produce individually but little fruit," he wrote.

Many of the trees were stunted in dry, poor sites, but one remarkable aspect of this species soon became apparent. It could grow virtually anywhere. Meyer recorded pear trees on sterile mountain slopes, on the edge of a pond in wet soil, on screes, in bamboo stands and even in running water.

Having made arrangements for locals to collect and process the seed the following fall, he set out to southern China in search of other plants but got only as far as Hankou, where he took to his bed with "nervous prostration."

After several weeks of rest and therapy he was back on his feet, and by late summer, he had made his way to the area around Jingmen, today a large city in Hubei province.

He sent his first shipment of callery pear seed to Fairchild in September, and the following month he teamed up with Reimer and gathered another 25 pounds of seed - enough to grow a small forest of callery pears. Reimer also collected on his own, before the two men went to Yichang in early November.

Another calamity was about to overtake Meyer, however, as China had become gripped by spreading internal strife. Factional warlords fought for dominance. This kept him confined to Yichang while seeds and notes were isolated in Jingmen. "As I am writing," he wrote in February 1918, "we hear the rickety noise of rifle fire."

That spring, he made his way to Jingmen to retrieve his pear seeds and baggage, and then took a steamer down the Yangtze back to Hankou.

On the evening of May 31, 1918, Meyer boarded another ship sailing downriver to Shanghai, where he planned to stay a month to escape the heat of Hankou and to ship his pear seeds to Fairchild.

Meyer had been suffering from a stomach ailment but appeared to be getting better the next day, a Saturday. His mental state may have been getting worse. Meyer told his servant Yao Feng T'ing that his father and some old friends had come to him in a dream, and that he considered this an omen.

That Saturday night, when the boat was about 30 miles upriver from the city of Wuhu, Meyer was seen by a cabin boy making for the deck. The lad thought Meyer was going to the toilet, but he was never seen alive again. His body was fished out of the Yangtze four days later near a settlement named Ti Keng.

Samuel Sokobin, the American vice consul in Shanghai, conducted an investigation and reported that although it seemed Meyer had not been killed, it was "impossible to state" whether Meyer's death was an accident or suicide. Signs point to the latter. After talking to the explorer's servant and fellow passengers, Sokobin wrote: "It appears certain that Mr. Meyer had been depressed for some time." He was 42. Sokobin had Meyer's body moved to the Protestant Cemetery in Shanghai and his seed collections sent to Washington.

Reimer, in his time with Meyer in Jingmen, had come to see just how low he was. "He told me of his life's struggles," he later wrote. "Few people ever realized the tremendous battle that was raging in his soul."

The seed that Meyer and others would collect ended up in Reimer's test orchard in Oregon and the U.S. Plant Introduction Station in Glenn Dale, then a rural enclave in Prince George's County.

In the early 1950s, a horticulturist at Glenn Dale named John L. Creech began to see the callery pears there not as a rootstock for the common pear but as an extraordinarily handsome and tough street tree in its own right. He latched on to a single specimen that had been grown from seed that was not part of Meyer's shipment but acquired soon afterward in Nanjing as part of Fairchild's same feverish search for callery pear seed.

The tree was 30 years old when Creech first evaluated it, and judging from his later writings, he was besotted by this specimen. He was struck by its vigor, its handsome, mature spread and its evident ornamental qualities. But a plant's value lies too in what it is not. This one tree did not have the thorns of other callery pears; it was free of diseases and pests and held together in storms. In selecting this individual to mass-produce, Creech named it Bradford after the station's former head, F.C. Bradford. This specimen's resilience in storms belied what would become a major problem with its mass-produced Bradford clones: Tight branch-to-trunk angles and congested branching invited the limbs to break apart.

Before releasing the Bradford ornamental pear to the nursery trade, Creech decided to trial it in the nearby Washington suburb of University Park, which was then treeless and had difficult soil - perfect for putting this wondertree to the test. He planted 180 saplings in 1954. He pruned them to keep lower branches out of the way of pedestrians and cars, but also to give each tree a handsome profile. This undoubtedly produced more attractive and useful trees but further hid the Bradford's weak-wooded Achilles' heel.

Happy with its performance in University Park - some of the original Bradfords are still there, as lanky, open shade trees - he officially released the Bradford pear to the nursery trade in January 1960 and invited growers to obtain shoots for grafting onto callery pear seedlings. Each Bradford scion would be genetically identical, but the rootstocks each had their own DNA. This would come back to bite us.

For a few innocent years, the only thing working against the Bradford pear was its ubiquity. It was so golden that every nursery grower wanted to propagate it and every home builder and highway department wanted to plant it.

In 1966, Creech and his colleague William Ackerman wrote that the University Park plantings had displayed very little fruit, in contrast to the situation back at Glenn Dale, where the whole zoo of callery pears - 2,500 seedlings - had produced "abundant fruit development" on similarly aged Bradfords. Their point was that if you kept Bradfords away from other pears, messy fruiting wouldn't be a problem. But they clearly missed the ecological repercussions. And in the University Park planting, they noticed something else that should have raised alarms. On a few grafted trees where the scion had failed, the rootstock had produced suckers that then bloomed. These flowers, with the help of bees, caused the "sterile" street trees to set viable fruit. Creech and Ackerman minimized the problem, saying it was highly localized.

Clues to the callery pear's invasiveness are buried in a journal paper written by Ackerman in 1977, when he announced the introduction of another variety named Whitehouse, chosen because it was more upright than Bradford and better suited to small gardens. But this selection was a fugitive from Glenn Dale, growing as a seed deposited by a bird on a neighboring property; Bradford was one of its parents. The callery pear had escaped the reservation.

Four years later, the National Arboretum introduced an even more columnar variety named Capital. Meanwhile, commercial plant breeders were bringing to market other varieties of the callery pear, and by the mid-1980s, a dozen or so were available for planting. Many of these were introduced to get around the Bradford's poor branch structure and propensity to break. Sterile by themselves, any two of these varieties together would produce a heavy fruit set for winter bird dispersal. The stage was set for the callery pear's quiet occupation of the countryside.

Since 2012, Bergmann has led efforts to contain the callery pear on 232 acres, though it has been mapped on 425 acres within the Montgomery park system and may occupy countless more areas, she said. Crews have employed a number of tactics, including felling trees with chain saws, girdling their trunks with a blade and spraying the wound with a systemic herbicide. But the trees are mostly beaten back with an annual cutting by a Bush Hog mower or in woodier areas a beefier machine called a forestry mulcher.

"It's not a fix like building a bridge or putting down a road," she said. "Once you cut down a field of Bradford pears, they're going to try to come back."

It seems that the callery pear has been a curse to those who tried to master it. Wild trees of Pyrus calleryana in China are not invasive or particularly common. It's what we did to the pear that has turned it against us: We brought it to an alien environment, selected one for unnatural propagation and then fused genetically different individuals together. We planted it intensively across the entire continental United States, seeding its eventual spread. Today it is a roving, free-range freak.

In Mary Shelley's epic tale, Victor Frankenstein laments the monster he created. "I must pursue and destroy the being to whom I gave existence," he tells Captain Walton.

If Creech had regrets about introducing the Bradford pear, he kept them to himself. In economic terms for nursery growers, the tree was manna from heaven. By the 1990s, he knew of its structural ailments and the problem with self-seeding. But when these were raised, his response was always the same. "He would say, 'Yes, the tree has had its problems, but it put a lot of kids through college,' " said Lynn Batdorf, the arboretum's retired boxwood expert, who was a young horticulturist under Creech in the 1970s.

A decorated World War II Army veteran who ended the war in a German POW camp, Creech was beloved by the horticulturists who worked for him. He organized scientifically important plant-collecting trips to Japan and presided over a golden period of ornamental tree and shrub development at Glenn Dale and later at the National Arboretum, where he was director from 1973 to 1980. He leveraged his contacts in Japan to establish the world-famous bonsai collection at the arboretum.

I sat down with the current arboretum director, Richard T. Olsen, and asked him to explain how Creech could have gotten the Bradford pear so wrong. Olsen says you can't judge what happened without understanding the historical context. The mission of scientists like Creech and Fairchild was to find and manipulate plants in a way that solved a problem, met an unmet need or simply offered an attractive new plant for the American nursery industry and consumers.

Olsen recites Thomas Jefferson's line: "The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture."

For Creech and his peers working in the 1950s, the potential environmental effects were not part of the decision-making. "These people were pretty smart," Olsen said. "Our values have changed."

In addition, he said, invasive plants have been enabled in their spread by centuries of environmental disturbance. "If we think in our forests we are dealing with a pristine habitat, we are deluding ourselves," he said. Peter Del Tredici, a retired senior research scientist at Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, said the concept of exotic invasive species didn't emerge until 30 years ago, even though European settlers recorded escaped plants as early as 1672.

Only a fraction of nonnative ornamental plants become invasive, but those that do have the capacity to completely transform natural areas. Bergmann has established an army of weed-control volunteers to work in county parks, but the idea of eradicating almost 40 species of key invasives is unrealistic.
[The horticulture industry's age problem is bigger than you think]
"Without thinking much about it, we have globalized our environment in much the same way we have globalized our economy," Del Tredici has written. He lives in the Boston suburb of Watertown, where he is seeing the first wave of callery pear invasion, young plants "in highly disturbed habitats where no maintenance has occurred," he told me.

In the South, the march of the callery is much more evident. "It's definitely starting to really become a prominent invasive in Alabama," said Nancy Loewenstein, an extension specialist at Auburn University. She sees it in disturbed industrialized areas, in the understory of pine plantations and along the banks of the Alabama River and other riparian areas. "There are some areas that are just white in the spring," she said.

Bergmann, who is 67 and looking at the end of her career, says she owes it to future generations to try to contain the Bradford pear and other invasives in the hope that one day scientists can find a way to eradicate them.

It is a problem that Fairchild could not have envisioned a century ago, but the Bradford pear persists as a case study in how even the brightest scientific minds can be blind to what they might be creating long after they have gone. In November 1917, Fairchild wrote to Meyer thanking him for the first batch of callery pear seed. "I believe," he predicted, "these will hardly fail to have in them something of extreme value for this country."
[Higgins will host a live Q&A on the Bradford pear - and all things gardening - Sept. 24 at 12 p.m. Submit your questions now.] @adrian_higgins on Twitter More from Lifestyle: How an uninvited pest doomed the ash tree 5 toxic plants you should know - and avoid At 37 feet tall, Jeff Koons's flower-draped 'Split-Rocker' demands a whole lotta love Considering trimming or getting rid of an old tree? Not so fast.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scientists thought they had created the perfect tree. But it became a nightmare.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
September 17 at 7:00 AM Carole Bergmann pulls her small parks department SUV into an aging 1980s subdivision in Germantown, Md., and takes me to the edge of an expansive meadow. A dense screen of charcoal-gray trees stands between the open ground and the backyards of several houses.

# data[].attributes.headline
DNA study shows Everglades pythons could grow hardier | Miami Herald

# data[].attributes.subject
DNA study shows Everglades pythons could grow hardier | Miami Herald

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What started out as a straightforward genetic study of Florida's invasive python population has turned up a surprising plot twist: a small number of crossbred Burmese and Indian pythons with the potential to become a kind of Everglades super snake.

For the study, published Sunday in the journal Ecology and Evolution, U.S. Geological Survey researchers examined the tail tissue of 400 snakes captured in South Florida, from the Big Cypress Swamp to the Everglades. While the vast majority appeared to be closely related Burmese pythons - imagine a family reunion packed with first and second cousins - 13 had genetic markers from Indian pythons, a different species that unlike the swamp-loving Burmese snake prefers high, dry ground.

The number is clearly small, but it raises the risk that over time some Everglades snakes could become better suited to a more varied landscape. Scientists call it hybrid vigor.

"If the Indian pythons have a wider range, perhaps these Everglades snakes now have that capability," said lead author and USGS geneticist Margaret Hunter. "It's quite interesting and quite surprising, but we don't know the extent it's in the population."

Because evolution seems to abhor certainty, there's also the possibility the opposite happens through another process, she said, euphemistically referred to as 'outbreeding depression.'

The study originally intended to look at the genetic make-up of South Florida snakes to better understand how they spread and how to help control them. Pythons started turning up in the 1980s, likely escapees from a South Dade breeding facility or released pets. By 2000, they were declared official residents in Everglades National Park and have since continued to expand north into the state's expansive water conservation areas and west into Big Cypress. In 2016, they were found breeding in the Keys for the first time.

If snakes in different areas had different DNA, that might tell wildlife managers something about how they've been able to reproduce and spread so quickly.

"We were initially looking for the population structure to get some information to shed some light on the invasion dynamics, or the core areas where the population may be breeding and then sending off migrants," Hunter said.

No surprise, they found low diversity among the snakes that likely are the descendants of the handful of freed snakes, called the founder effect. In small populations, a shrinking gene pool can signal a population headed toward extinction: There is a good Florida example of that. By the 1990s, the number of Florida panthers had dwindled so low that the animals started suffering from the effects of in-breeding, including heart murmurs, reproductive problems and oddly kinked tails. Texas cougars, very close cousins, were imported to add to the gene pool.

But the python population is so large - researchers believe they number in the many thousands based on the steep drop in nearly all small mammals in their range - that low diversity is not impeding the snake's ability to adapt, Hunter said.

"Such a large population allows them to rapidly adapt," she said. "If some animals die out because of climatic issues, there are other animals that may not die out."

But in 13, they found that Indian marker.

"That was unexpected," Hunter said. "I kept looking at the data to make sure what I was seeing was correct."

It's not clear where the species got crossed, she said. In their native ranges, Burmese and Indian pythons have remained mostly distinct either because of the prey they eat or barriers in habitat. But they could breed in the wild. Breeders also frequently cross species to produce more desirable colors and patterns for the pet trade. The snakes may also have hooked up in the Everglades, but Hunter said that seems less likely since the markers she detected, which are only passed down through female snakes, were historical.

Because Hunter and her colleagues focused on genetics, it's not yet clear how climate will play into the snake's evolution. Scientists suspect that a warming planet will allow them to roam further north. An upcoming study looking at how the snake has adapted should shed some light, she said. In the meantime, the rapid expansion has provided researchers with a rare window into evolution dynamics.

"All species do this," Hunter said. "But we're watching evolutionary progress right in front of us."

An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the Indian python as a subspecies of the Burmese python. It is a separate species.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
DNA study shows Everglades pythons could grow hardier | Miami Herald

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A new genetic study of Florida's invasive pythons found most are closely related and easily adapting to their new home. But a small number also show signs of crossbreeding between Burmese and Indian pythons that could make them able to live on a wider landscape.

# data[].attributes.headline
Eight bird species are first confirmed avian extinctions this decade | Environment | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.subject
Eight bird species are first confirmed avian extinctions this decade | Environment | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Spix's macaw, a brilliant blue species of Brazilian parrot that starred in the children's animation Rio, has become extinct this century, according to a new assessment of endangered birds.

The macaw is one of eight species, including the poo-uli, the Pernambuco pygmy-owl and the cryptic treehunter, that can be added to the growing list of confirmed or highly likely extinctions, according to a new statistical analysis by BirdLife International.

Historically, most bird extinctions have been small-island species vulnerable to hunting or invasive species but five of these new extinctions have occurred in South America and are attributed by scientists to deforestation.

Stuart Butchart, BirdLife International's chief scientist, said the new study highlighted that an extinction crisis was now unfolding on large continents, driven by human habitat destruction.

"People think of extinctions and think of the dodo but our analysis shows that extinctions are continuing and accelerating today," he said. "Historically 90% of bird extinctions have been small populations on remote islands. Our evidence shows there is a growing wave of extinctions washing over the continent driven by habitat loss from unsustainable agriculture, drainage and logging."

More than 26,000 of the world's species are now threatened, according to the latest "red list" assessment, with scientists warning that humans are driving a sixth great extinction event.

Four of the eight newly identified bird extinctions took place in Brazil, once home to Spix's macaw. The attractive parrot was caged and traded for 150 years before any wild populations were discovered but in 1985, three birds were found in a Brazilian forest. Two were illegally captured for the pet trade, and attempts to breed the final male were unsuccessful. A 2016 sighting in the wild is now thought to have been an escaped caged bird, leaving the last known sighting in 2000.

While captive populations of Spix's macaw are being bred for reintroduction into restored woodland habitat there is no second chance for the poo-uli, the cryptic treehunter and the Alagoas foliage-gleaner: they have disappeared from the skies forever.

According to the new analysis, published in Biological Conservation, the Alagoas foliage-gleaner, a small gingery forest bird which picks invertebrates from leaves, became extinct in 2011, disappearing from a heavily logged patch of Brazil.

The cryptic treehunter was only discovered in two patches of forest of Murici in north-eastern Brazil in 2002 but has not been seen since 2007 after these small forests were felled and replaced with sugar cane plantations and pasture.

The poo-uli, or black-faced honeycreeper, was found on the island of Maui in Hawaii but was last sighted in 2004. Attempts to breed the bird in captivity failed.

The study by BirdLife International assessed 51 species judged "critically endangered" on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) red list using a new statistical method to analyse and assess search efforts and the validity of sightings of species on the brink of extinction.

It found just one species that was less endangered than feared, and recommended removing the "possibly extinct" classification from the Moorea reed warbler of New Caledonia. Of the eight species to be reclassified as extinct, four are "critically endangered (possibly extinct)".

They include the glaucous macaw, once found in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil before the clearing of its palm grove habitat for farming saw it dwindle to one population in Paraguay. Another is the Pernambuco pygmy-owl, a 15cm-tall owl that eats insects and hasn't been seen in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco since 2002, with much of its habitat destroyed by illegal logging.

Accurate assessments of the moment of extinction are difficult to make with many elusive species but according to Butchart, the "possibly extinct" classification is an extremely cautious judgment which almost certainly means that the species has vanished.

Butchart said it was important not to prematurely declare a bird extinct because abandoning conservation efforts could hasten its demise but accurate assessments of extinction were vital for efficient conservation work. "We've got limited conservation resources so we need to spend these wisely and effectively. If some of these species have gone we need to redirect these resources to those that remain."

"Obviously it's too late to help some of these iconic species but because we know birds better than any other taxonomic class we know which other species are most at risk. We hope this study will inspire a redoubling of efforts to prevent other extinctions."
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Eight bird species are first confirmed avian extinctions this decade

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Spix's macaw, a brilliant blue species of Brazilian parrot that starred in the children's animation Rio, has become extinct this century, according to a new assessment of endangered birds. The macaw is one of eight species, including the poo-uli, the Pernambuco pygmy-owl and the cryptic treehunter, that can be added to the growing list of confirmed or highly likely extinctions, according to a new statistical analysis by BirdLife International.

# data[].attributes.body
...eating all the birds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's a sweaty morning last June on the outskirts of Tampa, and droves of reptile enthusiasts are streaming into an air-conditioned expo center. Some have woken early to trek out to the Florida State Fairgrounds to get first crack at the animals of Repticon, a weekend-long extravaganza that's similar to a baseball card convention, except instead of mint-condition Mickey Mantles and Pete Roses there are green anacondas and meat-eating lizards. One vendor's table is covered in flimsy plastic catering trays that are filled with ball pythons. Others are selling Asian water monitors, gargoyle geckos, yellow rat snakes, and bearded dragons. A guy strolls by wearing a "Snakes Lives Matter" t-shirt. Another man, who has a three-foot-long lizard slung across his chest like a bandolier, is at a nearby booth admiring a young boa constrictor that's twirling around his girlfriend's fingers. Price? $100. Sold.

Roughly 60 Repticons take place each year, from Phoenix to Oklahoma City to Baltimore, attracting an estimated 200,000 visitors. These shows represent but a tiny sliver of the live-reptile trade, a loosely regulated industry that spans the globe and generates an estimated $1.2 billion in revenue annually, according to the United States Association of Reptile Keepers. In much of the continental United States, these cold-blooded creatures aren't likely to fare well outdoors should they escape or be set free. But the sub-tropics of South Florida are different, and the best adapted have not only survived in the wild, they have thrived. To date the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, or FWC, has identified 50 types of non-native lizards, turtles, crocodilians, and snakes within state limits, more than anywhere else in the world.

For the birds of Florida, this blitz of exotic predators poses an existential-scale threat. The Burmese pythons, which stalk wading birds in the Everglades, have become so menacing that the state has hosted derby-style competitions to catch them. Farther north, Nile monitors-the largest lizard in Africa-have been terrorizing a population of Burrowing Owls in the city of Cape Coral. And on the outskirts of Florida City, just outside Everglades National Park, egg-eating Argentine tegus could soon raid the nesting grounds of one of the last remaining populations of the endangered Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow. Each of these reptiles found their way to Florida via the pet trade-but while most people acknowledge that's a leaky pipeline, few agree on whether and how to plug it.

Take Ed Poelsma, who's wandering Repticon with Pugsly, a five-and-a-half-foot-long black-throated monitor that's a close relative of the Komodo dragon. Pugsly is a stunning creature that looks to be from prehistoric times, with claws like steak knives, camouflaged skin, and a muscular tail. What does Pugsly eat? "Meat," Poelsma says. "He would eat anything you put in his cage that's meat. Literally anything." No, Pugsly has never bitten Poelsma, and yes, he considers the giant lizard to be part of his family. He takes Pugsly for walks in his neighborhood, maintains an Instagram page for the animal, and happily answers questions from curious onlookers. You don't need a permit to buy a Pugsly of your own, and that's how Poelsma thinks it should be. "If you want to look at invasive animals in the wild, the very worst thing in the world is a domestic cat," he tells me. "Go to the local ASPCA or local pound and look at all the dogs and cats . . . But everybody wants to blame the reptile owners for being an irresponsible pet owner."

It's a sentiment that almost everyone I meet at Repticon echoes, including Greg Graziani, who has starred on National Geographic's The Python Hunters and now runs a reptile-breeding facility and serves as an amnesty point for FWC. If someone wants to get rid of a reptile they shouldn't have or can no longer control, Graziani can arrange a no-questions-asked drop off. Of course invasive reptiles are a problem, he says, but so are invasive plants, trees, and mammals. And as for the risks Argentine tegus, Burmese pythons, and Nile monitors pose to the menagerie of birds that depend on Florida's lush landscapes, Graziani is empathetic but unconvinced. "The bird people are worried," he says. "I understand their concern. But I haven't seen the science."

Truth is, scientists have never seen anything quite like this.

t's the Monday morning after Repticon and I'm in a vacant lot in Cape Coral watching Bob Mondgock smack a package of frozen chicken with the claw end of a hammer. He pries free a hunk of raw poultry and tosses it to the back of a spring-plated trap in hopes of luring in one of the invasive Nile monitors that haunt this Gulf Coast city.

Over the years Mondgock has tangled with more monitors than he can remember. He works for the Cape Coral Environmental Resources Division, a six-person unit that might very well have been the inspiration for Parks and Recreation. Mondgock is the Ron Swanson of the group: a mustachioed Libertarian who will under no circumstances let me turn on my tape recorder. Before getting back into the truck, he clips an armful of fronds from a nearby bush and piles it around the trap. It's less about camouflage than it is about making sure there's enough shade to keep curious cats and raccoons from baking to death if they get stuck.

Nile monitors have no business in this hemisphere. As their name implies, they should be basking along the shores of Africa's Nile Delta, but they got popular in the pet trade and rumor has it that the owner of a now defunct pet store, scheming a source of free inventory, let some loose behind his shop so they would breed in the wild. Unsurprisingly, the lizards quickly fanned out across Cape Coral's extensive canal system. The first sighting likely dates back to before 1990, though it wasn't until the early 2000s that they began regularly popping up in people's backyards. If you're not accustomed to large lizards, an adult Nile monitor dashing across your lawn might be terrifying. They can top seven feet, swim like Michael Phelps, and eat rodents, birds, rabbits, wasp nests, venomous rattlesnakes, poisonous cane toads, and, according to some residents, cats and dogs.

There's no telling how many Nile monitors are out here. Since 2000, the city has logged more than 2,500 sightings and trapped 564 of the animals. Over all those years, though, no one has uncovered a monitor nest, an unsettling tidbit given that the lizards can lay up to 60 eggs at a time. Conservative estimates put their population at 1,000, a lowball number in Mondgock's eyes. The city usually sets traps in response to residents calling in sightings, he explains, and many residents are so accustomed to the animals that they don't bother calling one in. Today Mondgock will bait 11 traps, all within view of nice homes with pools, screened-in porches, and garages.

As we drive from site to site, we pass a handful of dusty lots where Burrowing Owls perch on wooden stakes and look like adorable stuffed animals. That the city is home to one of the world's largest populations of Burrowing Owls is a point of pride among some residents, not to mention a good tourism draw. The owls are staring down a long list of threats, including significant habitat loss, and FWC declared them a threatened species in November 2016.

Owls aren't the only birds in monitors' crosshairs.

It's known that Nile monitors eat Burrowing Owls-after all, the lizards are expert burrowers and ground hunters. What's unknown is the number of owls they have devoured. One of the first confirmed cases dates to May 2005, when a woman saw a large monitor in her yard with one of the tiny tawny owls clenched in its jaws. Unfazed, she grabbed a flowerpot and threw it at the lizard. It dropped the owl and bolted away, but the bird did not survive. At least two other instances of monitors eating owls have been reported, and it seems certain that other attacks have gone unseen and undocumented.

Owls aren't the only birds in monitors' crosshairs. The lizards hunt cooperatively and are known to team up to lure birds off their nests so they can pillage the eggs, according to a report by Todd Campbell, a biologist at the University of Tampa and a leading expert on Nile monitors. "Many of Florida's wading birds would be an easy target while foraging in mangroves and along tidal creeks and artificial canals," the 2008 report warns, "and Nile monitors are excellent tree-climbers, so the nests of wading birds are also at risk."

Back at Repticon, I saw at least five different types of monitors for sale. It's a family of lizards that has roughly 70 species and only two-the Komodo dragon and the Nile monitor-are now tightly regulated here. FWC classifies the Nile monitor as a Conditional Species, along with only seven other reptiles, including the Burmese python and reticulated python (at nearly 30 feet, one of the largest snakes in the world).These species can't be sold as pets, but with the right permits you can have them for commercial, research, and exhibition purposes. Dozens of other monitor species-crocodile monitors, Argus monitors, tree monitors-can be brought and sold no problem.

It's a situation that draws criticism from both sides. Those who would like to see more control over the reptile trade consider it a gaping regulatory hole that could allow new invasive species to flourish. Those in the pet trade see it as evidence of how arbitrary and inconsistent the rules are. When I met Ed Poelsma and Pugsly at Repticon we were standing a few feet away from a female Asian water monitor that had a $1,000 price tag. Under the right conditions, it could grow up to 8 feet long, weigh 100 pounds, live for 15 years, and is every bit as capable of surviving in a South Florida suburb as a Nile monitor. The two animals have similar diets, reproductive habits, and hunting tactics. "A Nile monitor is basically the African version of an Asian water monitor," Poelsma told me, pointing at the one for sale. Yet one is regulated and one is not.

Mondgock, the city employee, isn't keen on discussing whether or how the pet trade should be controlled other than saying that Nile monitors "ARE. NOT. PETS." He's been bitten, scratched, peed on, and pooped on enough times (he was chasing them, not the other way around, he says) to know that these animals never play nice.

Two days after we part ways, one of the 11 traps we set nabs a three-foot Nile monitor that was first spotted climbing a resident's front door. Like nearly all the monitors Mondgock traps, it was placed into a sealed plastic tube and exposed to a lethal dose of chloroform. Death by asphyxiation-a grisly fate, but what other options are there?

iological invasions aren't necessarily blitzkriegs. It doesn't matter if a pet store releases a few dozen lizards or a hurricane damages a breeding facility and sets free hundreds of snakes, as has happened. Some of the invaders die off, scooped up by predators or unable to adjust to their new environs. Others find food, find a mate, and survive. It's in those early days of their arrival, before generations of the species are hatched, that there's a chance at eradication. But with each new egg that's fertilized and each animal that reaches sexual maturity, the monetary and ecological costs of the problem goes up. Biologists call this the invasion curve, and right now Nile monitors fall somewhere in the middle. Any hope of eradication in Florida faded long ago, but it may be possible to keep them contained to a few small pockets around the state-one is in Cape Coral, another is in Palm Beach County, where President Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort is located.

Keep following the invasion curve upward, past the point of containment, past the Nile monitor, all the way to the top, and you will find the Burmese python. This apex predator can grow more than 18 feet long and was for a long time one of the most popular snakes in the pet trade. Now, there are estimated tens or hundreds of thousands of Burmese pythons in South Florida and they're eating everything-rabbits, rats, bobcats, deer, even alligators. On the invasion curve, they fall in the "resource protection and long-term management" section. In other words, they're taking over, and our only hope is to safeguard what they have not yet destroyed.

"Pythons are definitely eating birds," says Brian Smith, a biologist who works for Cherokee Nation Technologies, a company contracted by the United States Geological Survey to help manage the invasive Burmese python population. A few years ago, Smith went to capture a python in Everglades National Park. The snake was in a shallow marsh and Smith noticed a bulge in its stomach. He moved in and grabbed the python near the base of its head. Suddenly two bird feet popped out of the snake's mouth. A moment later, another two feet shot out. The snake writhed and in one fell swoop regurgitated a pair of full-grown Great Blue Herons. Smith couldn't believe his eyes as the corpses poured out and flopped to the ground. Both birds' heads were missing; other than that the animals were intact and easy to identify.

Smith's gruesome anecdote raises an important question: Could Burmese pythons devour resident birds of the Everglades the same way they did the small mammals? In 2012, a team of researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that marsh rabbits, raccoons, and opossums had all but vanished from sight in Everglades National Park. One of the culprits, they suggested, was the arrival of the Burmese python, which records show was established in the park around 2000. If that's the case, it took the snakes just a decade to eat their way through that section of the ecological menu. Knowing whether they have completely shifted their diet to wading birds for their next course is difficult to determine, though.

"I think that it is possible," says Christina Romagosa, an assistant research professor at the University of Florida, "but I am having a hard time showing it because we really don't know what's out there for them to eat." Some evidence sits on Romagosa's desk: several plastic bags containing the remains of a Roseate Spoonbill. One is filled with bones; another has the bird's feet. The biggest bag holds dozens of soft pink feathers, some still in sheath. A few days earlier, the remains of the spoonbill were found in the gut of a Burmese python that had been run over by a motorist. "It looks like maybe this bird was molting," Romagosa speculates.

It is anyone's guess as to what one heap of python poop might reveal.

As a graduate student, Romagosa began amassing one of the largest running known data sets of wildlife imports and exports, which she used to show that buying, selling, and transporting exotic animals around the world is one of the root causes of the invasive species epidemic. Her current work, however, isn't as neat and tidy as building databases of import-export records and involves analyzing a fair amount of snake poop. Teams at Everglades National Park and The Conservancy of Southwest Florida collect dead Burmese pythons, perform a necropsy, and freeze whatever fecal matter happens to be inside. Then Romagosa's technicians-Eric Suarez and Diego Juarez-Sanchez-perform the odoriferous task of washing the waste in a sieve and analyzing the remains to determine the snake's last meals.

It is anyone's guess as to what one heap of python poop might reveal. There can be tufts of mammal fur, fragments of bird feathers, crushed bones, disembodied beaks, and occasionally flecks of eggshell, and accurately identifying what species trace evidence originated from is tedious. Sometimes the bird parts are so degraded that Romagosa cannot identify the species, so she ships them off to Carla Dove, head of the Smithsonian Institution's Feather Identification Laboratory. Dove is very concerned by the variety of birds eaten by pythons. "It's crazy," she tells me. "These birds didn't evolve with this kind of predator."

To date, at least 39 different bird species have been found in python remains. They include the federally threatened Wood Stork; Magnificent Frigatebird; Great Blue Heron; Little Blue Heron; Red-whiskered Bulbul; Snowy Egret; and Pied-billed Grebe. Rails and White Ibis are common finds, and entire Limpkin and guinea fowl eggs have been removed from the belly of these beasts. Despite the dozens of bird species extracted from python stomachs, not to mention documented sightings of a python in a Wood Stork nesting colony, Romagosa doesn't know that the snakes are developing a taste for birds, just that they're eating them. Maybe pythons are selecting certain prey or maybe they're snacking on whatever is nearby. "We get a lot of ibis in the diet, but that's just maybe because there are a lot of ibis out there," she says.

The Roseate Spoonbill is the newest species to be added to the pythons' hit list, and it is setting off alarm bells among some scientists. "It's a really bad thing," says Jerry Lorenz, director of research at Audubon Florida's Everglades Science Center. Spoonbills, he explains, are a key indicator species for measuring the success of Everglades restoration efforts. Fewer nesting spoonbills could mean inadequate habitat-or a voracious predator. "From a statistical perspective, that is a variable that should be entered into any model; but if you can't quantify it, you can't control for it," Lorenz says. "The question becomes: How many spoonbills are being eaten by pythons? And of course that's an impossible question to answer."

ile monitors and Burmese pythons are similar in that they came, they destroyed, and they got regulated. They are cautionary tales, but legislators have been slow to heed the warnings. Case in point: the Argentine tegu, a squat lizard with a taste for eggs that isn't hard to find on the outskirts of Miami. To get a glimpse of these beasts I'm in the back seat of a White Ford F-150, sitting next to a large plastic container labeled "Dangerous Reptiles." At the wheel is Brittany Mason and riding shotgun is Sarah Cooke, both of whom are trapping Argentine tegus on behalf of the University of Florida's Croc Docs lab. The truck lurches along dirt service roads in southern Miami-Dade County, stopping every few minutes so the women can check one of the 150 different traps that are nestled in the bushes.

Tegus are bizarre-looking lizards with enormous jaw muscles that resemble jowls. They are omnivorous eating machines that have in the past decade rocketed up the invasion curve and are now so ubiquitous in this stretch of Florida that some grad students refer to it as Tegulandia. There are even tales of a local fast food joint that became renowned for tegus that burrowed under the drive-thru box and scared the hell out of unsuspecting customers.

In their native South America, tegus have a fondness for eggs. They raid caiman nests and eat tinamou, a ground-dwelling bird. But as I'm learning today, they seem equally enticed by store-bought chicken eggs. An hour into the trip, Cooke walks down a pile of rocks holding the first trapped tegu of the day, a juvenile that's 16 inches long, give or take. She shakes the lizard into a canvas bag, tags it with a pink piece of tape, and tosses it into the Dangerous Reptiles bin. About an hour later, the team bags the second tegu of the day, and then the third, which is taken on the grounds of a firing range. They secure the fourth only after Mason throws the truck in park, jumps out of the driver seat, and, like a reptile-fighting ninja, kicks the trap closed. Minutes later, they trap tegus five and six only a few hundred yards from a busy highway. With ruthless efficiency, the young women clear and re-bait the entire trap line and haul out a bin full tegus.

Just like Burmese pythons and Nile monitors, tegus got a toehold in South Florida through the pet trade, where they are beloved as docile, intelligent, and affectionate companions. The fight against them is now at an inflection point. "We're out of the eradication part of the invasion curve and we're heading up through containment," says professor Frank Mazzotti, who leads the Croc Docs lab. "The question is: Are our efforts going to be enough?"

It's a loaded question with dramatic implications. The lizards have already raided alligator and turtle nests in Florida, and the area where we bagged six is mere miles from one of the last populations of the Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow,afederally endangered species that builds its nest inches off the ground. Since 2014, Mazzotti's team has trapped 1,418 tegus. The good news is that the gut contents of a few hundred tegus that were trapped, killed, and necropsied didn't have any sparrows or sparrow eggs. The bad news is that there could be thousands of tegus out there-a female lays about 30 eggs per clutch-and they appear to be slowly making their way north, south to the Florida Keys, and west toward the edges of Everglades National Park. There are additional populations on the Gulf coast, farther north in Tampa, and near Orlando.
A mapping tool called EDDMapS tracks observations of invasive species, including black and white tegus. You can view individual reports by zooming in on the map above and clicking the pins. Interact with maps of other reptiles and submit your own sightings at the EDDMapS website.
________________

Making matter worse is that tegus slip into a hibernation-like state for several of the coldest months each year and are better equipped to handle cooler temperatures than the Burmese python. Given their hardiness, these animals could potentially establish themselves far beyond South Florida and have already been spotted across the panhandle.

Yet for all the trouble they are causing and all the risks they pose, tegu sales aren't regulated in Florida. Unlike the Nile monitor and Burmese python, FWC does not classify tegus as a Conditional Species. Head to a Repticon, drive to a pet shop, or jump on Google and you can buy one for a few hundred bucks. It seems counterintuitive that federal and state resources are being allocated to trap and kill tegus, while at the same time there is minimal oversight of the trade. I asked FWC if tegus should be listed as a Conditional Species and what steps the agency is taking, if any, to limit the trade. In response, an agency spokesperson wrote that they are "considering many approaches to minimizing the impact this species may have in Florida" and that the agency is "putting resources towards assessing the risk of species and making any further changes if warranted."

I posed the same question to Phil Goss, president of the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers, a trade organization that advocates on behalf of reptile owners and breeders. "FWC has been talking about doing something for four or five years and nothing has come to fruition," he says. "There's so much red tape." But given what we know about tegus' ability to survive cooler temperatures and the fact that there are several established populations, should a pet store in Florida be able to sell one to anyone who walks in? Goss pauses, then laughs: "It's really hard to answer that question," he says. "You hate to see responsible people punished because of the actions of irresponsible people."

For Mazzotti, there is no question that the tegu trade should be more tightly regulated, and the fact that it's not is indicative of a much bigger problem. When it comes to exotic species, whether it's a fish a snake or a plant, the United States has a wait-and-see mentality in which the species first needs to become established and damage the environment before anything is done. "Once you can see the impact that a species is having," he says, "it's too late."

any of the people at Repticon agree with Mazzotti's assessment that it's often too little too late when it comes to invasive species. "There are so many different invasive species here in Florida that it's a crapshoot," says Scott Galusha, who is cradling his pet tegu, named Zero, as we speak.

Galusha is quick to concede that the bad actors in the pet trade are responsible for the pythons, monitors, and tegus, but insists the industry has cleaned up its act in recent times. The best way to stop the introduction of new invasive species isn't more regulations, he says, it's educating pet owners and making sure buyers know what they're getting themselves into when they decide to take on a giant lizard or snake. As for the future of tegus, Galusha doesn't expect the state to crack down on them anytime soon. "We have never had to worry about licensing or chipping [tegus]," he says. "I don't see it happening. If it does they are going to have to grandfather quite of a few of them in because so many people have these guys as pets."

Scientists, state regulators, and land managers are already stretched thin in the battle against invasive reptiles, and the challenges are only growing. A recent federal court ruling rolled back enforcement of the Lacey Act, which for nearly three decades has largely prevented the importation of brown tree snakes, yellow anacondas, and other "injurious wildlife" species. Now anyone can transport them across state lines, leaving FWC scrambling to find a stopgap while simultaneously dealing with the dozens of destructive reptiles already in play.

In the absence of a regulatory fix, scientists have turned to more creative solutions for fighting reptiles in the wild. Romagosa has worked with dogs trained to sniff out pythons, and others are using a tool called environmental DNA, or eDNA-which analyzes water samples for genetic material left behind by animals-to look for the presence of pythons in bird rookeries. Last year Mazzotti even teamed up with FWC to bring two Irula tribesmen, who are world-renowned for their snake-tracking skills, to Florida from India. Over a couple of months, they snatched nearly 30 pythons, including a 16-foot-long female, an impressive haul when compared with locals' efforts.

All of these undertakings are aimed at bolstering early detection and rapid response, which Mazzotti says is key to staying one step ahead. To that end, one of the most helpful tactics could be as simple as having birders report invasive species they come across while out in the field. Florida has set up a toll-free hotline to call in sightings-1-888-IVEGOT1-and the University of Georgia's Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health has developed smartphone apps that allow users to report potential sightings and upload pictures of the animal in question. It's the old "see something say something" approach, and it helps biologists respond faster to invasions and better target their trapping efforts.

Before leaving Florida I stop at Audubon's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, where I am greeted by a symphony of woodpeckers and croaking amphibians. It's a welcomed respite, a swampy enclave seemingly free of invasive pythons, monitors, and tegus-at least for now.

"We see them as a serious threat," says Shawn Clem, research manager for the Audubon Florida Western Everglades Research Center, located in Corkscrew.Rather than wait for the worst and then act, Clem and her team are busy sharpening their front-line defenses. Recently they have increased their efforts to survey mammal populations; a drop in the numbers could be an indicator that pythons are near. She also formed a rapid response team with Mazzotti's lab, and most of Corkscrew's back-country staff are now trained to safely capture and remove pythons.

Clem knows that Corkscrew will not remain impervious to these invasive species forever. In recent years a handful of live tegus and dead pythons have been found along the nearby roads, just a few miles outside the sanctuary. She is worried about what these exotic predators might mean for Wood Stork, turkeys, bobwhite quail, and all the other species of birds that call Corkscrew home. "We are being vigilant," she says. "We're ready."
*** Audubon is a nonprofit, and stories like this are made possible by readers like you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Invasive Reptiles Are Taking Over Florida-and Devouring Its Birds Along the Way

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's a sweaty morning last June on the outskirts of Tampa, and droves of reptile enthusiasts are streaming into an air-conditioned expo center. Some have woken early to trek out to the Florida State Fairgrounds to get first crack at the animals of Repticon, a weekend-long extravaganza that's similar to a baseball card convention, except instead of mint-condition Mickey Mantles and Pete Roses there are green anacondas and meat-eating lizards.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Before whales dive into the darkness of the deep ocean they often come to the surface and release a huge plume of fecal matter-which can be the color of over-steeped green tea or a bright orange sunset. When Joe Roman, a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont, saw one of these spectacular dumps in the mid-1990s, he got to wondering: "Is it ecologically important? Or is it a fart in a hurricane?"

Roman and other researchers have since shown whale excrement provides key nutrients that fuel the marine food chain, and that it also contributes to the ocean carbon cycle. These important roles are now influencing scientific and economic arguments for protecting whales, at a time when calls for a resumption of whaling are growing. "The scientific community is coming to understand a new value of whales: their role in maintaining healthy and productive oceans," says Sue Fisher, a marine wildlife consultant at the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute. "We are beginning to see governments use this rationale to justify measures to protect whales." But as the International Whaling Commission (IWC) prepares for its biennial meeting next month, the ecological services whales provide are set to split the gathered countries-with an unknown outcome for the whales.

Whale poop's importance is nothing to sniff at. In a 2010 study Roman's team found whale defecation brings 23,000 metric tons of nitrogen to the surface each year in the Gulf of Maine-more than all the rivers that empty into the gulf combined. This nitrogen fertilizes the sea by sustaining microscopic plants that feed animal plankton, which in turn feeds fish and other animals including the whales themselves. Studies have found similar effects elsewhere, and with other nutrients found in whale feces. And when they migrate, whales also redistribute nutrients around the globe. By moving them from higher latitudes, Roman says, the giant mammals could be increasing productivity in some tropical waters by 15 percent.

By stimulating the growth of microscopic plants called phytoplankton, whale scat may also help limit climate change. These tiny aquatic plants remove carbon from the atmosphere and carry it deep into the ocean when they die. Research in the Southern Ocean showed the iron defecated each year by some 12,000 resident sperm whales feeds phytoplankton that store 240,000 more metric tons of carbon in the deep ocean than the whales exhale. This means that, on balance, whales help lock carbon away.

But today's benefits are a fraction of what these animals provided prior to the era of commercial whaling, which devastated whale populations during the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2016 ecologist Chris Doughty of the University of Oxford and his colleagues estimated ocean animals' capacity to move nutrients around has decreased to just 5 percent of historic values. The IWC-the global body with greatest say over the fate of these animals-is beginning to take note.

The IWC was set up in 1946 not to conserve whales but rather to ensure populations remained healthy enough for continued economic exploitation of their blubber and meat. It ultimately presided over decades of overexploitation, which saw the world's whale numbers fall by 85 percent over the second half of the 20th century. In 1986 an IWC moratorium on commercial whaling entered into force, allowing many species to begin to recover. For the next 30 years the IWC focused on whether there were enough whales to sustain resumed hunting. But in 2016 it passed a paradigm-shifting resolution that recognized for the first time the central role whales and dolphins play in ocean ecosystems, specifically because their poop boosts productivity and could help limit climate change.

As a result, the IWC Scientific Committee is now tasked with considering the broader environmental effects of allowing whales to continue to recover. It is planning an expert workshop to review knowledge of the ecological functions whales and dolphins serve, and to develop a list of research priorities. "The 2016 resolution put the IWC at the center of an opportunity to reconsider whales; not just for their economic or social value-to be consumed or watched-but their global ecological contributions," Fisher says. "In the future, when policy makers can factor in the value of the ecological services of the whales affected, they will be able to make a much more informed and holistic decision."

The subject will be on the agenda again when the IWC meets in September in Brazil. Representatives of the 88 member nations will consider adopting a new resolution, proposed by Chile, that would encourage governments to integrate the ecological value of whales and dolphins into local, regional and global decision-making on the environment-including climate change and conservation policies. Under another draft resolution, submitted by Brazil, the IWC would agree its mandate includes a responsibility to ensure whale numbers increase to precommercial hunting levels so that they may "fulfil their ecological and nutrient cycling roles."

But Japan, which has led the push to resume commercial whaling, opposes these resolutions. Hideki Moronuki, a senior negotiator with Japan's fisheries agency, says Chile's proposal "is outside the competence of the IWC" and Brazil's "is inconsistent with the objectives of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling," the multilateral agreement under which the IWC was created.

The resolutions will face votes at the September meeting and will pass if a majority of IWC members agree. But some countries have not yet paid their annual membership dues and will lose the right to vote if the fees remain unpaid. With nearly half of the IWC members siding with Japan in recent years, the votes could be tight. The U.S. has not yet decided whether to support either resolution but "will seek to advance key conservation initiatives" and will "continue to support the moratorium on commercial whaling and will continue to oppose lethal research whaling," says Scott Smullen, a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Some conservationists are excited that the resolutions are even being considered. "Seeing this move forward at the IWC is heartening," says Astrid Fuchs, who heads the program to end whale hunting at Whale and Dolphin Conservation, a U.K.-based nongovernmental organization. "The fact that whales play a significant role to maintain healthy oceans as 'the oceans' gardeners-as they sustain fish stocks and help combat climate change-is a powerful argument for their strict protection." For Roman's part, he says he is "thrilled" the IWC is giving weight to his and others' findings. "I hope," he says, "this work will lead to better, more informed conservation efforts."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Whale Poop Could Counter Calls to Resume Commercial Hunting

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Before whales dive into the darkness of the deep ocean they often come to the surface and release a huge plume of fecal matter-which can be the color of over-steeped green tea or a bright orange sunset.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why Are Puffins Vanishing? The Hunt for Clues Goes Deep (Into Their Burrows) - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Why Are Puffins Vanishing? The Hunt for Clues Goes Deep (Into Their Burrows) - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Overfishing, hunting and pollution are putting pressure on the birds, but climate change may prove to be the biggest challenge.

GRIMSEY ISLAND, Iceland - Puffins are in trouble.

The birds have been in precipitous decline, especially since the 2000s, both in Iceland and across many of their Atlantic habitats. The potential culprits are many: fickle prey, overfishing, pollution. Scientists say that climate change is another underlying factor that is diminishing food supplies and is likely to become more important over time. And the fact that puffins are tasty, and thus hunted as game here, hardly helps.

Annette Fayet is trying to solve the mystery of the dwindling Atlantic puffins, and that is why she was reaching shoulder deep into a burrow here last month. She gently drew a puffin out, having snagged its leg with a thick wire she had curved into a shepherd's crook. As she brought the croaking seabird into the light, it defecated copiously on her pants, which were, thanks to her long experience with birds, waterproof.

"Wow, science!" she said, and smiled. Ideally, this bird, with its tuxedo-like black-and-white plumage and clownish orange beak, would have voided its bowels into a stainless steel bowl she calls the "puffin toilet." She took a flat wooden spoon out of its wrapper, scraped the mess up and placed it in a vial for analysis; she wants to know what these birds have been eating.

Though some puffin colonies are prospering, in Iceland, where the largest population of Atlantic puffins is found, their numbers have dropped from roughly seven million individuals to about 5.4 million. Since 2015, the birds have been listed as "vulnerable" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, meaning they face a high risk of extinction in the wild.

The birds are cherished by Icelanders as part of their history, culture and tourist trade - and, for some, their cuisine. "The puffin is the most common bird in Iceland," said Erpur Snaer Hansen, acting director of the South Iceland Nature Research Center. "It's also the most hunted one."
[Read more: In Iceland, Vikings razed the forests long ago. Can the country regrow them?]
Hunters with long nets can be seen tooling around Grimsey Island in the summer, leaving behind piles of bird carcasses, the breast meat stripped away. Iceland has restricted the annual harvest, but hunting "is accelerating the decline," Dr. Hansen said.

Dr. Hansen is working with Dr. Fayet, a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford who is from France, on her project to monitor the activities of four puffin colonies, two in Iceland and others in Wales and Norway. Since 2010, he also has conducted a census, a twice-yearly "puffin rally" in which he travels more than 3,100 miles around Iceland, visiting some 700 marked burrows in 12 colonies, counting eggs and chicks.

During a recent stop at Lundey Island, Iceland, Dr. Hansen encountered jovial hunters who had killed hundreds of the birds and were carrying them toward their boats to be sold to restaurants that mainly serve the meat to curious tourists.

Dr. Hansen maintains an amicable relationship with hunters and uses data from 138 years of hunting club records in his research. He convinced these hunters to let his assistant photograph the head of every puffin; the bands on their beaks can be counted to determine the birds' age.

On Grimsey, a northern island that pokes above the Arctic Circle, gulls and arctic terns swirled in the cloudy sky and the wind at the cliffs blew at 40 miles per hour or more as Dr. Fayet and Dr. Hansen did their work. Dr. Fayet wears contact lenses, and the grit was a torment. There were ticks, so many ticks. Wow, science.

There were also counterbalancing pleasures; Dr. Hansen, a gifted cook, roasted a leg of lamb for dinner with garlic and thyme, and he brought along a couple of bottles of excellent single-malt whiskey, one of his non-avian fascinations.

After dinner, the two scientists worked into the bright Arctic night, ultimately catching, examining and releasing a dozen birds in their two-day stay on this island. Between captures, Dr. Fayet leaned on a rock, staring intently at a cliff face. Suddenly she leapt up and ran at startling speed across the uneven soil some 150 feet to the cliff, crouching in front of the one hole among many that she saw a bird jet into.

Dr. Hansen moved from burrow to burrow, looking a little like a spaceman with his white visor clamped over his eyes. He snaked a camera on a flexible stalk inside for a look around. "Oh, yeah," he said, having spotted a live, downy chick.

After extracting a bird, they slid it into a plastic tube that oddly enough kept it calm, and weighed it. Dr. Hansen attached a steel identifying band to the bird's leg. Then they removed it from the tube and attached a tiny GPS tracker to its back, between the wings, with marine tape.

In the week until the lightweight devices drop off, they show how far the birds fly for their food and how deep they dive for it. Each tracker costs more than $800, which means the case containing them was worth more than the battered truck the researchers were driving.

Dr. Fayet plucked five feathers for later DNA analysis to determine the bird's sex. For identification from afar, she used a marker to put a stroke of blue on its breast and white correction fluid to put a dot atop the black feathers on its head. "Sorry, baby," she said softly, and returned the puffin to its burrow, where it will no doubt retell the story for years to come about its abduction by aliens during the summer of the tags and tape.

Around Iceland, the puffins have suffered because of the decline of their favorite food, silvery sand eels, which dangle from the parents' beaks as they bring them to their young. That collapse correlates to a rise in sea surface temperatures that Dr. Hansen has been monitoring for years.

The temperature of waters around the country is governed by long-term cycles of what is known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, with periods of colder water alternating with warmer. Between the 1965-1995 cold cycle and the current warm cycle, Dr. Hansen said, winter temperature records show about one degree Celsius of additional warming - a seemingly small amount, but disastrous for the sand eels. His theory, he said, is this: "If you increase temperatures one degree, you're changing their growth rates and their ability to survive the winter," he said.

Aevar Petersen, an Icelandic ornithologist not involved with the project, said an increase in sea temperature brought about by climate change was "the key environmental factor" behind the sand eels' decline.

The picture is complicated; the natural cycles make it difficult to disentangle the influence of climate change. That influence is "much weaker in the subpolar North Atlantic, especially near Iceland," said Rong Zhang, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Still, climate change's imprint is increasingly evident, said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. "There will come a time when climate change is vastly greater than internal variability," he said.

Without as many sand eels in the water, the birds have to fly farther to find food for themselves and their chicks. So the data from the GPS loggers, however briefly transmitted, is of great interest. As Dr. Fayet sat at her computer on Grimsey, her colleagues in Norway sent the first data from their work the week before, and her screen filled with looping paths of foraging birds. "Because this is the first time this is being done, we have no expectations," she said. "Everything we get is exciting."

Even thrilling data can contain a sad message. "Everywhere, they are going further than we thought," she said. The colonies' decline suggests these birds are working too hard for their supper. "Flying, for puffins, is very demanding," she said. "It is a big energy cost for them."

Dr. Hansen's puffin rallies show that 40 percent of the population of Icelandic puffin chicks is losing body mass over time, another bad sign.

When the adults can't catch enough to feed themselves and the chicks, they make an instinctive Malthusian choice; the chicks starve. Dr. Fayet called her quest "heartbreaking": "You put your hand in the burrow and feel with your hand a little ball on the floor, but then you realize it's cold, and not moving."

There are still millions of Atlantic puffins, but their plentiful colonies are deceiving, Dr. Hansen said. "These birds are long lived, so you don't just see them plummeting down," he said. In the long run, he warned, "It's not sustainable."

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Are Puffins Vanishing? The Hunt for Clues Goes Deep (Into Their Burrows)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Overfishing, hunting and pollution are putting pressure on the birds, but climate change may prove to be the biggest challenge. GRIMSEY ISLAND, Iceland - Puffins are in trouble. The birds have been in precipitous decline, especially since the 2000s, both in Iceland and across many of their Atlantic habitats.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The world's rarest great ape, discovered only in 2017, will not survive the building of a $1.6 billion hydroelectric power plant and dam in the middle of its remaining habitat in Sumatra, Indonesia, wildlife experts warn.

Only 800 of the newly identified Tapanuli orangutans remain in the wild, all in northern Sumatra's Batang Toru Forest. It's one of the most biodiverse spots in Indonesia, home to such rare species as Sumatran tigers and the critically endangered Sunda pangolin.

In this same area, forest clearing has already begun for the hydro project, which is being financed and built by state-controlled Chinese companies under China's Belt and Road. This multi-trillion-dollar initiative involves more than 7,000 infrastructure projects around the world.

It was less than a year ago when the world learned that a new great ape species had been discovered. Although researchers have studied it since 2005, it took them that long to definitely identify the Tapanuli orangutan as genetically and physically distinct from the Bornean ( Pongo pygmaeus) and Sumatran orangutans ( Pongo abelii), the other two species. ( See: New species of orangutan Is rarest great ape on Earth)

There is no way this project should be built where these tree-dwelling apes live, says Bill Laurance of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at Australia's James Cook University. The dam and power plant-and all the associated roads, electrical lines, an eight-mile-long tunnel, and other infrastructure-will permanently fragment the animal's habitat, Laurance says.

"They're a critically endangered species and could rapidly go extinct with any further fragmentation of the primary forest," says Laurance, a world expert on the impacts of habitat fragmentation. "The science is solid on this. It's lunacy to go ahead with this project."

A road is the same as an impassible wall to an exclusively arboreal, or tree-dwelling, species, Laurance says. Over the course of more than 3,000 hours of observations, scientists have never observed the Tapanuli orangutan ( Pongo tapanuliensis) touching a foot to ground-likely because of the presence of the endangered Sumatran tiger.

It took years to habituate a few Tapanuli orangutans to observers' presence in the forest, says Gabriella Fredriksson, a wildlife biologist with the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme. Normally this takes a few weeks, but the orangutans are extremely wary, she says, likely because local people have hunted them. It also took a long time to find a full skeleton to measure. That revealed significant differences compared to the other two species, such as a smaller skull.

The estimated 800 apes are already split into three populations over a 420-square-mile area. Only one of these, with 500 individuals, is considered large enough to remain viable.

One problem for maintaining a population is that orangutans are extremely slow breeders. Females have their first offspring at around 15 years of age, giving birth to one or, more rarely, two individuals every eight to nine years. That's one reason, Fredriksson says, why researchers have been trying for years to reconnect the three populations.

And now a hydropower dam is being built in the orangutans' most critical habitat, an area with the highest densities of individuals. The state-owned area has no conservation or other protections. The dam will bring roads and other infrastructure permanently fragmenting the habitat of the one viable population of 500, and pushing the species towards extinction, Fredriksson says.

North Sumatera Hydro Energy, the Indonesian company behind the project, has told Indonesian media that the hydro power plant won't be in primary forest and that much of the 650 hectares of land disrupted will be returned to a near-original state. "These claims are ridiculous, and the company should be castigated for trying to confuse the public about the rock-solid scientific conclusions," says Laurance. Both the World Bank's International Finance Corporation and the Asian Development Bank refused to support the same project, largely on environmental grounds, he says.

The Batang Toru dam is scheduled to be operational in 2022, generating 510 megawatts of electricity. It involves blasting a tunnel eight miles long and more than 30 feet wide through a rugged region of primary forest. The dam is also unusual in that it will store water for 18 hours and then release this deluge for six-hour spans during peak periods to generate electricity. These sudden pulses of water will have big impacts on the Batang Toru river and downstream communities, such as flooding and halting migration of the highly valued " Jurung fish," Fredriksson says.

Experts question the need for such a project. Not only does Sumatra currently have excess electricity production, there is a geothermal electricity project nearby that could be expanded without impacting orangutans, she says. Moreover, the dam is being built in a region prone to dangerous earthquakes, such as the 2016 Aceh temblor that killed 100 people.

Last July 25, scientists appealed directly in a hand-delivered letter to Indonesian President Joko Widodo to halt the hydropower project and protect the Tapanuli orangutan habitat. Avaaz, a global activist organization, has more than 1.2 million signatures on an online petition asking President Widodo to cancel the project in order to protect the orangutans.

"The fate of this entire species rests in your hands," the message reads in part. Avaaz plans to do more to alert the world to what is happening in Sumatra, an organizer from the group says.

" I think the government is starting to wake up to the issue," Fredriksson says.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hydroelectric Dam Threatens to Wipe Out World's Rarest Ape

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The world's rarest great ape, discovered only in 2017, will not survive the building of a $1.6 billion hydroelectric power plant and dam in the middle of its remaining habitat in Sumatra, Indonesia, wildlife experts warn. Only 800 of the newly identified Tapanuli orangutans remain in the wild, all in northern Sumatra's Batang Toru Forest.

# data[].attributes.body
Oh goody...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Global Health

By Donald G. McNeil Jr.

For the first time in 50 years, a new tick species has arrived in the United States - one that in its Asian home range carries fearsome diseases.

The Asian long-horned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, is spreading rapidly along the Eastern Seaboard. It has been found in seven states and in the heavily populated suburbs of New York City.

At the moment, public health experts say they are concerned, but not alarmed.

Although domestic American ticks are a growing menace and transmit a dozen pathogens, no long-horned ticks found here have yet been found with any human diseases. In Asia, however, the species carries a virus that kills 15 percent of its victims.

For now, the new arrivals are considered a greater threat to livestock.

Known in Australia as bush ticks and in New Zealand as cattle ticks, long-horned ticks can multiply rapidly and suck so much blood from a young animal that it dies. The ticks bloat up like fat raisins until their tiny legs are barely able to support them.

After a blood meal, females can lay hundreds of fertile eggs without mating.

"One tick can crank out females in fairly large numbers," said Thomas Yuill, a retired pathobiologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was one of the first to raise alarms about the invaders.

The first long-horned tick was found last summer in western New Jersey. This summer they were collected in public parks and a golf course in Bergen, Essex and Middlesex counties in New Jersey, and in wooded and grassy areas of New York's Westchester County.

They were reported in Pennsylvania for the first time last week, and have been sighted in Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.

They were found feeding on horses, dogs, deer, a calf, a sheep and an opossum. They do bite humans, but it is not clear how often.

People should use the same precautions they do against domestic ticks, experts said, such as using repellents and checking for ticks after walking through woods or tall grass.

Image

The ear of a sheep in New Jersey covered with long-horned ticks. This infestation was the first confirmed appearance of the new tick species in the U.S. Credit Tadhgh Rainey

Tadhgh Rainey, an entomologist at the public health department of Hunterdon County, N.J., found the first long-horned ticks in the country last August, when a woman who had been shearing her pet Icelandic sheep came to his department with ticks on her hands and wrists.

"I thought she'd have a few," Mr. Rainey said in an interview. "But she was covered in them, easily over 1,000 on her pants alone."

Most were young nymphs about the size of dust specks. "She had a change of clothes in her car, so we put her clothes in the freezer to kill them," Mr. Rainey recalled.

The ticks didn't match any North American pests, and initially he could not identify them. The woman's 12-year-old sheep was penned alone and had never traveled, so where they came from remained a mystery.

A month later the woman called again to see if he had figured out what they were, and Mr. Rainey drove out to see the animal for himself. "A minute after we entered the paddock, even before I touched the sheep, I was covered in ticks," he said.

The sheep was weak from blood loss, so he gave the owner some insecticidal livestock wash. The grass around the paddock was later cut and the area sprayed in an effort to eliminate the outbreak.

Andrea Egizi, an entomologist at Rutgers University, finally identified the longhorns by DNA analysis. Her lab has now tested more than 100 specimens found in New York and New Jersey.

Thus far, Dr. Egizi said, none have any of the pathogens causing the six diseases she screens for: Lyme disease, relapsing fever, babesiosis, anaplasmosis and two varieties of erlichiosis.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab in Fort Collins, Colo., has screened about 100 long-horned ticks for three dangerous viruses - Powassan, Heartland and Bourbon - and all came up negative, said Ben Beard, the agency's deputy director of vector-borne diseases.

The lab now has 10 live longhorns and is feeding them to create a colony, Dr. Beard said. That will take about a year, and then researchers can determine whether they can transmit Rocky Mountain spotted fever and other diseases.

In East Asia, long-horned ticks do carry pathogens related to Lyme and others found in North America. But the biggest threat is a phlebovirus that causes S.F.T.S., for severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome. (Thrombocytopenia means abnormally low levels of platelets, which help the blood clot; a severe drop triggers internal bleeding and organ failure.)

An engorged long-horned tick on a farm in New Zealand, where the species is called the cattle tick. Credit Ruth Renner

However, the syndrome is not found in Australia or New Zealand, earlier stops for the long-horned ticks as they spread from Asia. In those countries, they cause babesiosis and theileriosis in cattle but are mostly "of nuisance value" to humans, said Dr. David Thomson, a veterinarian in Queensland, Australia.

It's not clear that the S.F.T.S. virus, which is related to the Heartland virus found in a number of American states, could get established in this country, because its transmission cycle is unknown - it may need more than one host.

(Although West Nile virus, for example, is transmitted to humans by mosquitoes, they first get it from birds, because humans do not build up enough of the virus to pass on.)

It's not known when or how long-horned ticks reached the United States, nor why the species is spreading so fast now.

They bite birds, but Mr. Rainey said he suspected they originally arrived on a large animal. As far back as 1960, he said, the ticks were found on a horse held in quarantine.

One collected in 2013, Dr. Beard said, was misidentified until recently as a rabbit tick, which is also in the Haemaphysalis genus.

In theory, just one female could have produced all the long-horned ticks spreading in the country through asexual reproduction. But Dr. Egizi said she has found three mitochondrial DNA lineages, meaning at least three females arrived.

Although experts said having a new invader is unsettling, they worry more about deer ticks, lone star ticks and other established species whose ranges are growing as winters get warmer.

Cases of the illnesses they transmit - everything from Lyme disease to alpha-gal, an allergy to red meat - are increasing rapidly. Even in Asia, only about 1 percent of long-horned ticks have the S.F.T.S. virus; in parts of this country, 25 percent of deer ticks carry Lyme disease.

"The jury's still out on how big a threat this is," Dr. Beard said. "But we think it's a very important question to address."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Invasive New Tick Is Spreading in the U.S.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Global Health By Donald G. McNeil Jr. For the first time in 50 years, a new tick species has arrived in the United States - one that in its Asian home range carries fearsome diseases. The Asian long-horned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, is spreading rapidly along the Eastern Seaboard.

# data[].attributes.headline
The World’s Wilderness: Going, Going and Soon Gone? | Outside Online

# data[].attributes.subject
The World’s Wilderness: Going, Going and Soon Gone? | Outside Online

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you've ever topped out on a peak in Alaska's Brooks Range, or floated through Idaho's Frank Church/River of No Return Wilderness, you've perhaps had the sensation that the surrounding wild country rolls on forever.

It's a pleasant feeling. It's also a feeling that has never been more misguided.

Studies published in the last few years have arrived at the same blunt conclusion: the world's last, big wildlands are disappearing, even faster than researchers expected.

"We are running out of wilderness," James Watson, director of the science and research initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told fellow scientists last summer at the International Congress for Conservation Biology in Cartagena, Colombia. Watson, an associate professor fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia, pointed to a 2016 study in which he and colleagues described "catastrophic declines" worldwide in the extent of terrestrial areas that remain mostly free of human disturbance and retain their ecological and biological integrity.

"Our calculation is that there will be no globally significant wilderness in 50 years time," Watson told Outside recently. "There will be patches of green, but there will be nothing big, anymore."

In the series of studies starting in 2016, Watson and colleagues found that nearly 10 percent of the world's terrestrial wilderness has been lost in about 25 years. That's an area half the size of Australia. Much of the land that remains nearly untouched is desert, tundra, boreal forest "and the most remote moist tropical forests of the Amazon and Congo Basins"-in short, land that doesn't yield easily to agriculture.

One bright spot: More than 80 percent of this wilderness still lies in large, contiguous chunks of at least 6,200 square miles, the authors found. (It's an arbitrary number, they acknowledge, but of a size they consider globally significant for the functions it can perform.) Even so, the authors found "substantial erosion" of these big areas over the past two decades. Seventy-four percent of the blocks had shrunk. Many of the earth's terrestrial biomes, or natural communities of flora and fauna, have little to no globally significant wilderness remaining, they wrote.

These 2016 studies aren't the only ones to record such grim losses. Not long ago, Peter Potapov wondered how some of the planet's least-touched forests were faring. Potapov, a research associate professor at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues used satellite images to compare how these intact forests had changed between 2000 and 2013.

What they found was sobering. The extent of these landscapes worldwide shrank by more than seven percent in just 13 years. That's a loss of 571,000 square miles-or more than twice the size of Texas-according to their 2017 study, "The Last Frontiers of Wilderness." These large, intact forests are still found around the world. About half of what remains lies in the world's tropical regions, the authors said. Most of the losses occurred there-mostly in Brazil, though also in Africa. But the Northern Hemisphere lost forest, too. More than one-third of the world's remaining large intact forest acreage lies in the boreal forests of the far north, mainly in Canada and Russia. Canada lost 88,000 square miles during that period, while Northern Eurasia lost 70,000 square miles, the study found. Elsewhere, Romania lost all of its large intact forest. Paraguay lost almost 80 percent. At the current rate, about 20 countries-including Bolivia, Congo, and Myanmar-will lose all of their large forests in the next 60 years, the authors predicted.

The culprits, of course, are humans, with our unprecedented reach and our ever-increasing appetite for land, whether to access timber, food, minerals, or energy. Loss of large wilderness typically follows a pattern. First, industrial logging opens up the land. The plow then follows the axe. "In the Brazilian Amazon, 16 percent of logged areas are cleared for agriculture in the first year following logging, with further losses of more than 5 percent per year for the next four years," Watson and his colleagues noted in their work. Roads appear-frequently built for mining and energy exploration-that further fragment the landscape. By one estimate, more than 15 million miles of new roads will be built globally by 2050. Invasive species hitch a ride.

This cascade alters the land and its ability to function forever. Restoration can help, even a lot. But protection efforts are failing to keep pace: loss of wilderness worldwide is nearly double the rate of conservation, Watson and his co-authors found.

The research suggests that the land will never be the same, at least not in human lifetimes. And the implications we face because of this loss include effects on climate change, extinction of species, and the spread of disease. "The continued loss of wilderness areas is a globally significant problem with largely irreversible outcomes for both humans and nature," Watson and his co-authors wrote.

For one, there's growing evidence that big pieces of nearly unaltered land, and intact forests in particular, mitigate climate change. More than one-quarter of all the CO2 that humans have contributed to the atmosphere since 1870 has come from deforestation and degradation of forests. "Intact forests store more carbon than logged, degraded or planted forests in ecologically comparable locations," Watson and his colleagues reported in a new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Intact forests function as major "net carbon sinks," sequestering carbon in trees, plants and soil. If the world wants to hit the goals of the Paris Agreement, it needs these forests, the authors wrote.

These areas also regulate the weather. Air that passes over intact tropical forests "produces at least twice as much rain as air that passes over degraded or non-forest areas," scientists have found. In Australia, some research found that the degradation and loss of intact forest increased the number of dry and hot days, decreased daily rainfall intensity, and increased drought duration during El Niño years.

Wildlife depends on intact forests. Watson called these places "arks" and "strongholds," and said they provide refuge and genetic diversity-key as areas elsewhere are squeezed. And we depend on them, too. "At least 250 million people live in forests," he his co-authors said in the new paper, "and for many of them, their cultural identities are deeply rooted in the plant and animal species found there." Forests continue to be the source of new medicines for humanity. And several infectious diseases associated with forests, including Ebola, dengue fever, and Zika "are undergoing changes in risk to humans due to deforestation, forest degradation and human encroachment," the authors wrote.

Which is not to say no progress is being made. Potapov's study found that 12 percent of intact forest landscapes were protected to international standards. And, encouragingly, in some places, erosion of forests was up to four times higher outside of protected areas than within them.

But protections were more successful at stopping timber harvesting than agriculture, Potapov's study found. And protections are only as good as the enforcement. In Indonesia, for instance, there are "paper parks" that exist mostly in name, Potapov told Outside. Russia built major facilities in Sochi National Park so it could hold events for the Sochi Winter Olympics-an intrusion that introduced a bark beetle that's now decimating the region's trees, he said.

What should be done?

The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity calls for at least 17 percent of the world's land and inland waters to be conserved by the year 2020. The same convention calls for halving the rate of loss "of all natural habitats, including forests"-and where possible, reducing the loss to near zero. Only a handful of countries are on track to meeting the ambitious so-called "Aichi target" of 17 percent, however.

Preservation advocates say that international policies and incentives often emphasize the extent of forest protected, rather than the quality of the forest protected. What's more, most countries don't set goals for wilderness protection. "We're arguing that not all forests are equal," said Watson, and that intact forests are worth prioritizing for conservation. Policies and incentives need to shift to take into account the value of these last wild places, he and others argue.

Enforcement of recent anti-deforestation efforts needs to be bolstered, so it's clear that trees from intact forests aren't entering the world's supply chain, they say.

In the past, the U.S. has been progressive in protecting large tracts of land. Take the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 2001 Roadless Rule, the latter of which prohibits road-building and timber harvesting on nearly 60 million acres of inventoried roadless public lands. However, those who advocate for large areas of wilderness suggested the country has backslid of late, pointing to recent actions such as Congress' vote to drill on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski's attempts to open up the old-growth forests of Alaska's Tongass National Forest to timber harvesting.

There are some, though, who see a problem with this clarion call to protect the world's wilderness. Robin Chazdon, a research professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, doesn't argue that the world needs to conserve its last big, wild places. But the traditional Western scientific approach is to put nature first, then figure out how people can accommodate nature, says Chazdon, who is also the executive director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. "That kind of scientific approach to policy making has failed," she says. If you want to have areas that are off-limits to larger-scale development or exploitation, she says, "You have to provide these countries other ways of meeting their needs." Otherwise, the call for conservation just looks like a bunch of white men from rich countries-however well-intentioned they may be-telling poorer countries what to do, she says.

One promising path with wide support is giving indigenous communities title and management over their traditional lands. "For instance, the creation and management of indigenous territories has reduced (although, as with protected areas, not halted) deforestation across the Amazon Basin," Watson and his colleagues wrote. Similar management is underway with First Nations governments in the Peel Watershed of Canada's Yukon. It helps that, in February, the government of Justin Trudeau marked $1 billion in its 2018 budget to protect land and water over the next five years to help the country reach its Aichi targets.

Asked if he was optimistic about the future, Watson said technology, such as satellite imagery, now gives politicians and scientists more information about wilderness, so they could do the right thing and save it. He was less optimistic they would do so, however. "The good news is that we still have time," Watson says. "Quite frankly, the next 20 years count." We still have time, he says, but it's running out.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The World's Wilderness: Going, Going and Soon Gone?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you've ever topped out on a peak in Alaska's Brooks Range, or floated through Idaho's Frank Church/River of No Return Wilderness, you've perhaps had the sensation that the surrounding wild country rolls on forever. It's a pleasant feeling. It's also a feeling that has never been more misguided.

# data[].attributes.headline
Hippos Poop So Much That Sometimes All the Fish Die - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.subject
Hippos Poop So Much That Sometimes All the Fish Die - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
During heavy rains, extra water floods into the hippo pools, churning up the putrefying muck and sending it off downstream. For good reason, these events are called "flushing flows." To study them, Dutton and Subalusky used an oxygen-logger-an arm-long cylindrical device that, to the untrained eye, looks rather like a pipe bomb. "We always get stopped at airports," Dutton says. Once dangled off the side of a bridge, the logger revealed that flushing flows dramatically reduce the oxygen levels of the downstream river, often to levels that are lethal for many aquatic animals. That, says Dutton and Subalusky, suffocates the fish.

The duo went out of their way to confirm this idea. They added hippo poop to bottles of water and demonstrated that oxygen levels fall. They added poopy water to "experimental streams"-long trays designed to simulate a flowing river. But they still craved a more realistic experiment. "We were talking about ways of how we could create a flood through a pool, and some other researchers said: Why don't you build a small dam?"

Inspired, the duo used sandbags to block off the water supply to a nearby pool that's in hippo territory but not frequented by the animals. A Maasai fixer connected them to a guy who had a large truck, another guy who owned two huge 4,000-liter tanks, and a third guy who owned a large wastewater pump. With all of that, the team transferred 16,000 liters of soiled hippo water into their artificial pool. And when they released the sandbags, they found that oxygen levels did indeed plummet in the water downstream.

Bizarrely, this is the second study to be published this week on how hippo poop affects river environments. Keenan Stears, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, did similar work in Tanzania's Great Ruaha River. Unlike the Mara, the Ruaha's waters have been heavily drained by upstream farms. During the dry season, it stops flowing altogether, and its hippos are confined to isolated pools. Stears found that pools with lots of hippos have much less oxygen than those where the beasts are rare. As such, they had half the diversity of fish and invertebrate species, and just 4 percent the numbers of fish. Only in the wet seasons, when water once again flowed between the pools, did the fish and invertebrates bounce back.

Stears estimates that around 94 percent of hippo populations in Africa live in rivers like the Ruaha that have either already started to dry up or will likely do so as the climate changes. "The results from our study are indicative of emerging issues relevant to the whole of Africa," he says.

This "reinforces the need to maintain flows in these river systems during the dry season," adds Frank Masese, from the University of Eldoret in Kenya.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hippos Poop So Much That Sometimes All the Fish Die

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During heavy rains, extra water floods into the hippo pools, churning up the putrefying muck and sending it off downstream. For good reason, these events are called "flushing flows." To study them, Dutton and Subalusky used an oxygen-logger-an arm-long cylindrical device that, to the untrained eye, looks rather like a pipe bomb.

# data[].attributes.headline
Coyotes Conquered North America. Now They’re Heading South. - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Coyotes Conquered North America. Now They’re Heading South. - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
New maps seek to update the historical range of our continent's toughest canids, which have thrived as other predators experienced decline.

Coyotes are excellent colonizers.

They breed fast, eat almost anything and live just about anywhere. You can find them in fields, forests, backyards, parks and even parking decks. They're living in cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. They've even made it to the Florida Keys and Long Island. In 2010, they crossed the Panama Canal. Now, the only thing keeping them from entering Colombia is a dense patch of forest called the Darien Gap. And camera traps have caught them heading that way.

"I don't think anyone's betting against the coyote getting to South America eventually," said Roland Kays, an ecologist at North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. "They have to be one of the most adaptable animals on the planet."

To understand how these wily wanderers roamed so far, Dr. Kays and James Hody, a graduate student, sifted through thousands of museum specimens, fossil records, peer-reviewed reports and records from wildlife agencies and traced the animals' paths back 10,000 years. Their resulting maps, published Tuesday in ZooKeys, show how wrong we've been about the historical range of our continent's toughest canids. The maps also provide a foundation for scientists to start asking questions about what happens when new predators enter a habitat, and how hybridization influenced coyote evolution.

From at least 10,000 years ago, coyotes lived in grasslands, prairies and deserts, as far east as the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and as far west as California. But after 1900, coyotes started moving out, in all directions, into forested habitats. By the 1920s, they had made their way into Alaska, and by the 1990s, to the East Coast. Even with wildlife managers working to get rid of coyotes,the animals have managed to expand their range since 1950 by at least twice that of any other North American carnivore during the same time.

[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
They thrived, in part, because of increasing forest fragmentation and agricultural lands along with the annihilation of predators like wolves, cougars and jaguars. And because some coyotes once mated with wolves or dogs, resulting hybrids developed traits to help them adapt in new environments. Dr. Kays thinks wolf genes that made some coyotes bigger (but not a separate, "fear-mongering hype" species some call a coywolf, he points out) likely allowed them to expand more rapidly into the Northeast. It's unclear what the dog genes have done for coyotes - other than making some look more German shepherd-like.

There are other mysteries. For example - how did coyotes expand so rapidly into Alaska and the Northwest, where forests are still relatively intact and full of wolves and mountain lions?

Image

A coyote crossing U.S. Highway 120 near Groveland, Calif. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Coyotes are not the only ones positioned to swap continents. South America's crab-eating fox is now in Panama too and headed north. If coyotes make it to South America, this will be the first time the continents have exchanged predators in three million years. There's no telling what will happen.

Still another question remains.

"Is this something we should view as a natural expansion, that's a good thing, or that we should view as an invasive species, that's a bad thing?" asks Dr. Kays. "In some ways that's a philosophical question, because in the end, there's nothing we can do about it."

Previous reporting on North American predators

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Snarling Travelers: Big in North America, Coyotes Look South. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coyotes Conquered North America. Now They're Heading South.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New maps seek to update the historical range of our continent's toughest canids, which have thrived as other predators experienced decline. Coyotes are excellent colonizers. They breed fast, eat almost anything and live just about anywhere. You can find them in fields, forests, backyards, parks and even parking decks.

# data[].attributes.headline
It's Time to Let Some Animals Go Extinct

# data[].attributes.subject
It's Time to Let Some Animals Go Extinct

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Hawaiian monk seal is a loveable creature. The 600-pound warm-water mammal spends most of its time flopping in the shore break, roughhousing with mates, and lazing about in the sun. Blogs like MonkSealMania are repositories of photos of the endangered animals sleeping in improbable positions. The creature's native Hawaiian name translates, endearingly, to "dog that runs in rough water."

All this makes the math even harder to swallow: we should let the Hawaiian monk seal go extinct.

"There's just no way to save them," says Leah Gerber, a professor at Arizona State University. Gerber's neither heartless nor immune to the seal's charms; she's an ecologist and marine biologist who's dedicated her career to protecting wildlife. She writes impassioned op-eds begging officials not to weaken the Endangered Species Act and calling for more funding. But her work's much broader than just the monk seal. Gerber is one of the country's leading proponents of what's called species triage, a practice where conservationists use data and models to figure out how to spend our limited endangered species dollars as efficiently and effectively as possible. The practice has been used by governments in Australia and New Zealand, but it's never made it to the United States. The goal is to save as many species as possible-even if it means calling it quits for creatures like the monk seal. "There's a level of discomfort with this, but we have to face hard choices," she says.

Gerber would never publicly prescribe extinction for any animal, but the Hawaiian monk seal is a prime example of how poorly we manage our endangered species spending, she says. Each year, the federal government spends about $5 million to protect the 1,400 seals left on earth. As significant as that sum sounds, it's nowhere near enough to give them a real shot at survival. The seal's habitat is spread across the 1,000-mile arc of the outer Hawaiian Islands; it is laborious and expensive to track them all, relocate juveniles to safe areas, and ensure dangerous garbage and debris stays out. To remove the seal from federally-funded life support would cost roughly $380 million and take over 50 years, researchers estimated in 2007.

Will the monk seal ever get that kind of funding? Not likely, if recent cuts to the seal program are any indication. And the monk seal is just one of thousands of endangered species whose rehabilitation we underfund. Protecting the 16,000 or so critically endangered species on Earth today would cost $76 billion, annually-about 52 times what the U.S. spends each year.

The Sisyphean job that conservationists are tasked with-to try to save every endangered species on Earth, without anything near adequate resources-has led Gerber and other proponents of species triage to raise questions that would have been heretical in the field a generation ago. Like: Could the money we spend on the monk seal be better spent on other endangered species? And, if so, should we let the monk seal-or the giant panda or the snow leopard or the California condor-go extinct?

"We're in the Anthropocene-the sixth mass extinction," Gerber says. "The approach we're taking right now is burying or heads in the sand and saying we're not going to choose, we're going to muddle through and see what things look like when we come up for air. And I'm saying 'No, no, let's shine a light on this because extinction is forever.'"

Controversial as species triage might be, Gerber may just get her wish. For the last two years, she's has been working closely with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help develop a "prioritization" plan that would create "transparent approaches to decision-making about the best allocation of funds" for the recovery of endangered species. The plan, which will be reviewed by the service this fall, aims to help FWS spend its dollars more efficiently.

The decision will likely be divisive. A large portion of conservationists-up to 40 percent, according to a 2011 Conservation Biology survey-remain uncomfortable with establishing triage guidelines. And for some, the concept is anathema. "Either fund it all properly or accept that you're the one who is playing God and driving something extinct by not helping," says David Lindenmayer, a professor of ecology at Australian National University, where triage has been implemented by state governments. "You're going to watch entire communities go extinct. Of the triaging bureaucrats in charge of selecting winners and losers, Lindenmayer says, "You can tell your God that's what you did."

Hugh Possingham is used to responses like that. "People's first reaction is they're appalled. Some people say, 'How can you "prioritize" any species?'" says Possingham, the Nature Conservancy's chief scientist. Possingham is one of the fathers of species triage (or, less controversially, "prioritizing") and worked closely with researchers to help the governments of New Zealand and Australia implement the practice. In conservation circles, Possingham says it's easy to accuse pro-triage folks of condemning species to extinction-"I'm not going to go and shoot them," he says-but the trained mathematician says we're already picking favorites by underfunding the majority of endangered species programs.

It turns out our endangered species dollars aren't divvied up evenly or even rationally-plenty of species don't get anywhere near what they need to recover. Gerber's research has shown that we spend endangered species dollars erratically: some species are dramatically overfunded-the wood stork and the bull trout, for example, each get more than ten times what they need-while the vast majority (like the ocelot, the monk seal, and the desert bighorn sheep) get far less. If we just redistributed the surplus spending on 50 "costly yet futile" species recovery efforts, from the Florida scrub jay to the razorback sucker, she found, we could adequately fund recovery efforts for 182 more plants and animals.

This kind of work has borne fruit in the wild, too. In New Zealand, which took up triage with gusto a few years ago, the Department of Conservation realized it could save 50 percent more species just by reallocating the current budget on species more likely to make a comeback. This was good news for many native plants, bad luck for the rockhopper penguin.

This hard-nosed, economically minded approach, Possingham says, appeals especially to conservative governments focused on keeping spending in check. "It's cost effectiveness. I've sold this as 'bang for your buck' to very right wing politicians," Possingham says. "For the first time, we have people able to say 'Here's what we did with the money you gave us, and here's what you can buy with more money.'"

But that's just what some prominent anti-triage conservationists are worried about. "Fish and Wildlife under the current administration is going to love triage," says Stuart Pimm, an eminent ecologist at Duke University. "It means you don't have to do things."

Pimm is a leading voice pushing back against triage. If we accepted triage years ago, conservationists would never have learned valuable lessons about endangered species management, Pimm says, citing the field's Herculean (and successful) effort to bring the California condor back from the brink. "Triage doesn't advance the field. It basically says we don't have to try any difficult tasks," he says. "It says, Let's write off the things that are inconvenient or difficult by saying we just don't have the capacity to do it."

Fish and Wildlife officials won't comment on the state of the prioritization plan, but acknowledged in a statement that the agency is working with Gerber on a framework. "With limited Endangered Species Act funds available, it is incumbent on us to make smart choices for the benefit of our nation's most imperiled species. To that end, we value all information that can help us in developing a more strategic approach to allocating these limited resources to the best effect."

In the meantime, out in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Charles Littnan doesn't feel like his work is in vain. Littnan is the head scientist on NOAA's Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program. Fish and Wildlife's decision on species triage won't financially impact his work-FWS is part of the Department of Interior; NOAA falls under Commerce-but he's familiar with the argument. He's not the budget guy or a politician, he says, he's the guy on the beach trying to figure out how to best help seals. And from where he's standing, things aren't looking too bad for the monk seal. NOAA has inked meaningful deals with private environmental groups to help cover budgetary shortfalls and, excitingly, seal numbers are actually increasing. "Contrary to what Dr. Gerber has said, we just announced that, for the first time in five decades, the population is relatively stable. It's been showing signs of growth for the last three years," Littnan says.

Littnan may be biased, but he thinks we humans have an obligation to the monk seal. They've been on this earth for 13 million years, he says, and their population didn't start nose-diving till we messed up their habitat. If the monk seal disappears, we have no idea what it could do the ecosystem at large. "Nature, in many ways, is a symphony. Every creature plays a role in making that music. If you start to eliminate things, things fall apart. What is a beautiful symphony turns to clanging noise and dysfunction."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
It's Time to Let Certain Animals Go Extinct

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Hawaiian monk seal is a loveable creature. The 600-pound warm-water mammal spends most of its time flopping in the shore break, roughhousing with mates, and lazing about in the sun. Blogs like MonkSealMania are repositories of photos of the endangered animals sleeping in improbable positions.

# data[].attributes.body
Some frogs aren't extinct

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 2013, two biologists named Jamie Voyles and Corinne L. Richards-Zawacki spent weeks slogging up and down mountainsides in Panama. "We were bug-bitten and beat up," recalled Dr. Voyles, now an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Near the end of their trek, they came to a stop. In front of them sat the object of their quest: a single gold-and-black frog.

"I can't tell you what that moment was like," Dr. Voyles said.

She had feared that variable harlequin frogs had disappeared entirely from Panama. As recently as the early 2000s, they had been easy to find in the country's high-altitude forests.

"They used to be so abundant that you could barely walk without stepping on them," Dr. Voyles said.

But in recent years, Dr. Voyles and her colleagues started to encounter sick frogs, and then dead ones. And then they couldn't find any variable harlequin frogs at all.

Many other species at Dr. Voyles's research sites in Panama suffered the same grim fate. As had frogs around the world. Dr. Voyles and other frog researchers found that many of the dead frogs were covered with the same aggressive skin fungus, known as Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or Bd.

As Bd spread from forest to forest, and continent to continent, researchers feared that amphibians might suffer mass extinctions. Today, many species of frogs and toads are still dwindling, and some have disappeared altogether.

But scientists like Dr. Voyles have also found a little cause for hope: a handful of species appear to be coming back. After discovering variable harlequin frogs again, she and her colleagues have returned to their Panama research sites and found a few other species that had previously vanished.

"They're not in large numbers - their abundances are low," Dr. Voyles said. "But we think that as more time goes by, we'll find more species that we thought were lost."

Now scientists are trying to figure out what accounts for these rebounds. On Thursday, Dr. Voyles and her colleagues published evidence suggesting that the frogs have gained potent defenses in their skin against the fungus.

But other experts are divided about whether the researchers found a cause of the rebound. It's possible that there are other causes at work. Even climate change - which is posing its own threats to many frog species - may be temporarily helping some frogs withstand the fungus.

When Dr. Voyles rediscovered a few vanished frog species, she initially suspected that the Bd fungus was becoming less deadly. In outbreaks of other pathogens, they have sometimes evolved into milder forms that no longer wipe out the hosts they depend on for their survival.

To test that idea, Dr. Voyles and her colleagues got hold of frozen Bd samples gathered in Panama in 2004, early in the epidemic. They infected frogs with the old fungus, and observed how it compared to new strains of Bd. "It's still pretty lethal over a decade later," Dr. Voyles said. "So I was wrong."

Dr. Voyles was left with the possibility that the frogs themselves had changed. At first she found this idea unlikely, because there hadn't been much time for the frogs to evolve. While Bd can multiply in a matter of days, it can take many months for a frog to develop into a sexually mature adult.

She tested the hypothesis anyway. Dr. Voyles and her colleagues knew that frogs fight infections with potent skin secretions containing pathogen-killing molecules. Dr. Voyles and other researchers have found that when they add skin secretions to lab-grown Bd, it slows down the fungus's growth.

Dr. Voyles wondered if frogs had acquired more potent skin secretions, allowing them to rebound. To test that possibility, she and her colleagues collected skin secretions from captive frogs in the Maryland Zoo. The frogs descend from ancestors that had been captured in Panama before the Bd epidemic.

The researchers added skin secretions from captive frogs to petri dishes of growing Bd. They then measured how much the frog's secretions slowed down the fungus's growth.

They then carried out the same treatment with skin secretions taken from rebounding populations of wild frogs. The researchers found a big difference between the two trials.

"We had multiple species that were between two and fivefold different in their effectiveness," said Dr. Voyles, "which is pretty striking."

Dr. Voyles speculated that some species of frogs included a few mutants with skin secretions that were effective against Bd. While many other frogs died off, the mutants survived and passed down their defensive genes.

James P. Collins, an evolutionary ecologist at Arizona State University, said he found Dr. Voyles's explanation compelling. "This would be the first candidate I'd put on the table," he said.

But Karen R. Lips of the University of Maryland wasn't persuaded that the researchers made a convincing case for skin secretions. "They don't actually provide data that really supports that," she said.

To determine how much good skin secretions do, Dr. Lips said, it would be necessary to infect frogs and see whether stronger skin secretions actually keep more frogs alive.

Dr. Lips's skepticism comes from her own research on frog defenses. In some of her studies, she focuses not on skin secretions, but on the genes involved in the frog immune system.

She and her colleagues have found that some frogs respond to infections by switching on many of these genes and using them to make lots of immune-related proteins. But those frogs all die, along with the frogs that have a weaker genetic response.

"Their genes are going crazy, but it doesn't matter," Dr. Lips said.

It's possible that the immune system of frogs will turn out to be a key to the rebound of some species, or their skin secretions - or both. It's also possible that other factors matter.

The Bd fungus can grow only in cool temperatures. If some frogs moved down to lower altitudes where it's warmer, they might be spared.

"You wind up selecting for animals that like to live in some spots as opposed to animals that live in cooler, shady spots," Dr. Collins said.

In some places, the frogs may not even have to move to gain this protection. In February, a team of Spanish researchers reported that three species of frogs in Spain are growing in numbers, even though Bd is present in the country and it can infect all the species there. They concluded that global warming is raising the temperature where the frogs live, keeping the fungus in check.

In these cases, the frogs may be getting only a temporary reprieve. Their habitats may eventually get too hot not only for the fungus, but for the frogs themselves.

"The skin secretion part of the story is probably not the only thing that's going on," Dr. Voyles acknowledged. "There's probably lots of different reasons why different species have survived and, in some cases, recovered."

Dr. Voyles also emphasized that the recovery of a few species was no reason to lean back and assume that nature would take care of the Bd crisis.

"I want to put out the message that this is still bad," she said. The rebound, she argues, "definitely is a glimmer of hope. But it does not mean by any means that everything is back and there is no problem."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Few Species of Frogs That Vanished May Be on the Rebound

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 2013, two biologists named Jamie Voyles and Corinne L. Richards-Zawacki spent weeks slogging up and down mountainsides in Panama. "We were bug-bitten and beat up," recalled Dr. Voyles, now an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Near the end of their trek, they came to a stop.

# data[].attributes.body
Musk Ox are Cool

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Pity the musk ox.

Joel Berger

The biologist Marci Johnson spent the daylight hours of Valentine's Day 2011 in a helicopter, high over the Alaskan coastline, searching for musk oxen.

It was part of her job. Through the winter, she regularly went to check in on animals that she and her fellow researchers had outfitted with radio collars the year before. On this particular flight, she quickly found what she was looking for: a pack of 55 musk oxen moseying along in the snow. From the helicopter, Johnston could detect all four radio collars chirping happily-the "alive" signal.

She returned home to Kotzebue, Alaska, where she lived and worked as a biologist with the U.S. National Park Service. Winter wore on. A blizzard roared in off the Arctic Ocean, bringing whiteout conditions and winds between 60 and 100 miles per hour. What had been most unusual, though, was the storm surge-she remembers meteorologists warning local residents not to tie up their dogs close to the beach.

A few weeks later, she flew out again to check in on the musk oxen. But when she and the pilot flew over the same lagoon, they didn't see the amiable shaggy dots-they didn't see anything.

"We looked down out of the plane, and all there was was white," she told me. "It was just ice. There was normally a group of 50-plus black dots." At the same time, the radio-collar detector began emitting a series of fast, angry beeps-a sign that the collar had either fallen off or that the animal had not moved in days. The mortality signal, as it's called. Johnson asked the pilot to descend.

"We got a little closer and realized there were little tufts of hair sticking out or a horn sticking out. We were looking at 52 on the ground that had been trapped in the ice," she said.

The animals had been entombed by what she and her colleagues call an ice tsunami in a new paper, published Thursday in Scientific Reports. During the storm, the musk oxen descended closer to the coast as water receded. But as the frigid tide quickly rose, they were trapped. The water soon rose above the heads of the animals, as wind and surge whipped enormous pans of sea ice ashore. (Later, Johnson would discover chunks of sea ice-five feet wide, eight inches thick-driven more than half a mile inland by the storm.) The musk oxen had no chance.

Pity the musk ox. It is a mysterious, majestic creature, ranging over vast swaths of the far north, from open tundra to pine-laden forest. It survived the last Ice Age, evaded ancient overhunting, and reigns as the Arctic's largest land mammal. Frankly, it looks like something out of Star Wars.

Yet even the most devoted Arctic biologists know little about them.

"They're the least-known large North American mammal. They roamed with mammoths. Mammoths didn't survive, and musk ox did," says Joel Berger, a professor of conservation biology at Colorado State University and an author of Thursday's paper.

"There is nothing else left that's like a musk ox," agreed Morgan Anderson, an Arctic conservation biologist who did not work on the paper, in an email. "They're often overlooked ... even in the North, people are usually more concerned with caribou issues."

It's a lousy fate. Polar bears are feted by conservation nonprofits and anchor the Greenlandic coat of arms. Arctic foxes are cute and they get a whole international research conference to themselves. Caribou are at the center of the fight over whether to drill in Alaska's wilderness.

Musk oxen, meanwhile, are not only mostly ignored; they're poorly named, and they only win their superlative on a technicality. Though "oxen" is in their name, musk oxen are more closely related to wild sheep and mountain goats than cattle. As such they prefer the hills to the open plains, and they think nothing of climbing a steep cliff to grab a tuffet of grass. And with adult males weighing in at 800 pounds, musk oxen are only the Arctic's largest land mammal because the roughly 1,000-pound polar bear is classified as a marine creature.

On top of all this human disrespect, it seems that human industry is already shaping the health of musk oxen at large. In addition to describing the 2011 ice tsunami, the Scientific Reports paper finds that climate change is harming musk oxen babies, impairing their health through their entire early lives.

"If we think about undernourished human babies, we're seeing the same effects in a land mammal now in the Arctic," Berger told me.

Over the course of seven years, Berger and his colleagues studied musk oxen herds on both Alaska's Seward Peninsula and on Wrangel Island, a nature preserve about the size of Yellowstone National Park in the Russian Arctic. In both places, they found that pregnant musk-oxen mothers who faced a specific kind of winter weather-a rain-on-snow event, when liquid rain falls on accumulated snow-gave birth to smaller and less healthy babies. That's because rain that falls on snow freezes, ultimately coating the snowpack in a top layer of ice. While a musk ox can normally nuzzle snow out of the way, a frozen snowpack effectively closes off all foliage to the musk oxen.

"When rain-on-snow events occur, then basically [a musk-ox mother] doesn't have access to her salad bowl for a long period of time because it's frozen," said Berger. "If you're an herbivore, and you're trying to get some salad, and it's frozen solid, you're not going to be eating that. And you can't eat it for weeks or months."

"When the mother is gestating, if she can't get food, then it has a long-term effect on the well-being of her growing fetus. Think about an undernourished kid-if you're born small, then you may be impacted for most of your life."

Joel Berger

Berger and his colleagues studied this effect without ever touching the animals. Instead, they took photos of musk oxen from about 150 feet away, a technique called "photogrammetry." By photographing animals from specific angles, they were able to create models of their heads; and by returning every spring, they could monitor the growth of broods over time.

They found that rain-on-snow events during gestation seemed to suppress the head size of musk oxen from birth until the onset of puberty at age four. At that point, other factors begin to override the rain-on-snow signal.

"These kinds of examples of what you could call sublethal effects of climate change-these more subtle effects-are starting to come out now," said Paul Smith, an Arctic conservation biologist who works for the Canadian federal government and who was not involved in the study.

"There's this subtle environmental effect that doesn't kill the individuals, but alters their structural size, and that handicap persists over time," he said. "The subtle effects are more important in the long term because they affect more of the population. They have been more difficult to describe, but they show just how pervasive the effects of changing climate are."

In the Canadian Arctic, the number of annual rain-on-snow events has tripled in recent years. Climate change seems to be transforming the entire region. In December, U.S. government scientists warned that the Arctic showed "no sign of returning to [the] reliably frozen region of recent past decades."

Rain-on-snow events can be one of the most damaging outcomes of that change, at least for wildlife. About 50 caribou in one of Canada's last Arctic refuges starved to death in 2016 after a rain-on-snow event deprived them of access to food. Some 20,000 musk oxen died after a rain-on-snow event struck a Canadian Arctic island in 2003.

Animals that hide in the snowpack to stay warm-like lemmings or seals-also suffer after these events, as frozen rain makes the snow denser and lowers its temperature. Sometimes their homes can even collapse. "This is suggested as a reason for why the regular up-and-down dynamics of lemming populations are going out of whack," Smith told me.

Anderson, the Arctic biologist, also praised the use of photography in the study. "The use of photogrammetry to get measurements from free-ranging musk oxen is exciting because it means you can collect data that would otherwise require handling-so you can get more data with less stress on the animals," she said.

The technique seems to work especially well with musk oxen, because the animals don't run away from people, but form protective herds. "In times past, we could do cowboy biology, which is with helicopters, dart guns, immobilizations. But the beauty of this approach is that we don't have to harass the animals that way," Berger told me.

The trickiest part of the study, said outside researchers, was actually identifying that rain-on-snow events occurred at all. While some scientists now prefer to analyze the density of snowpack through satellite observation, that technique is still new, and the new study used nearby weather-station data instead.

And while the ice tsunami wasn't as obviously triggered by climate change, it was certainly unusual. Storm surges so early in the year, with so much sea ice already on the Arctic Ocean, are little documented in the literature. And Freddie Goodhope, a local Inupiat leader who works with Berger's team, said that neither he, nor his parents, nor his grandparents ever remembered or described a frozen surge like the one that occurred in Alaska.

Related Stories

It's fitting that Berger is studying musk oxen, a creature straight out of the Ice Age, on Wrangel Island. Some of the world's last mammoths died on Wrangel Island, surviving until just 3,800 years ago. "As we had pyramids being built, we still had mammoths on Wrangel Island," he said. Next month, he'll make his regular trip up to that frozen land for his annual research trip. It's a flight that can only be made the long way-he'll fly from Denver to New York to Moscow; then to Pevek, Russia's northernmost city; before helicoptering for another two hours-but it's also poetic that the Russian government allows him to study there as an American, he said.

That's because Wrangel Island remains a refuge of sorts-and because Russia's musk oxen only exist because of international cooperation. Musk oxen had been extinct in Russia for centuries until 1975, when the Soviet Union asked the United States for help resettling musk oxen. The United States happily complied-shipping musk oxen from eastern Alaska to their current home on Wrangel Island.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 'Ice Tsunami' That Buried a Whole Herd of Weird Arctic Mammals

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pity the musk ox. The biologist Marci Johnson spent the daylight hours of Valentine's Day 2011 in a helicopter, high over the Alaskan coastline, searching for musk oxen. It was part of her job. Through the winter, she regularly went to check in on animals that she and her fellow researchers had outfitted with radio collars the year before.

# data[].attributes.headline
Pythons are invading Florida. Meet the scientists fighting back. | Popular Science

# data[].attributes.subject
Pythons are invading Florida. Meet the scientists fighting back. | Popular Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Burmese python mating season can be a cramped affair. In southwestern Florida, the snakes sometimes gather in burrows dug by gopher tortoises. For python-tracking scientists, this presents an opportunity. In 2015, Ian Bartoszek was searching for pythons amongst the scrub when he got a ping from one of his radio-tagged snakes, dubbed Kirkland. He and his team quickly located the burrow this snake had sought out-and realized that Kirkland was not alone. Another tagged male was in the hole, along with four other males and a 14-foot female.

"There were 240 pounds of python in one hole in the ground," says Bartoszek, a wildlife biologist at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida in Naples. "They just kept coming out, one after the other, and it just didn't stop."

The scientists gathered their scaly bounty, and rescued a gopher tortoise they discovered trapped at the back of the burrow. "He was forced to watch all of this snake behavior," Bartoszek says.

While the snake bonanza made for an intense extraction day, it was not the only time Kirkland has been extracted from a girlfriend's scaly embrace. The team is nabbing every female and stray male they can find on their patrols, and they're not the only ones. Every year, hundreds of pythons are dragged from the South Florida wilderness and roads. Scientists worry that that is nowhere near enough.

They're stepping up the fight against the invasive snakes that have been plaguing Florida for more than 15 years. Their weapons include "Judas snakes" like Kirkland that lead the way to their fellow pythons, sex pheromones, and volunteer python patrols. Year by year, they're learning more about the snakes and how to find them. They aren't likely to vanquish the Burmese python, but they might yet knock the population down to manageable levels.

Masters of disguise

There have been reports of pythons in Everglades National Park since the 1980s. The first pythons were likely escaped pets; a few pythons may have fled a breeding facility that was destroyed during Hurricane Andrew. In 2000, scientists realized that there was an established python population in the Everglades. Since then, the snakes have swept across southern Florida. A few stray pythons have been spied as far north as Jacksonville and the Florida Panhandle.

Scientists aren't sure how much the snakes could spread; they may be capable of living as far north as the Gulf Coast or coastal Southeast. "We went from finding just a couple a year up to hundreds a year being removed and spread over a pretty large area, so they're marching forward pretty quickly," says John Willson, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Pythons grow fast and can reach lengths of more than 17 feet. A single female can lay up to 87 eggs in the wild. "These snakes grow to very dangerous sizes and have voracious appetites-they'll basically eat whatever fits in their mouth and if it doesn't fit exactly they'll still try," says Rocky Parker, a reproductive physiologist at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. "They're almost built to be invaders."

Yet these giant snakes are almost invisible to people. Often, they will not break cover even if you walk on top of them. "A 15-foot-long, 150 pound python can absolutely vanish in a little patch of grass," Willson says. "It really severely limits our ability to even assess their populations, let alone control them." More than 2,000 pythons have been removed from Everglades National Park and the surrounding areas since 2002. However, scientists have no reliable estimate for how many lurk in the park's remote wilderness.

The main technique that volunteers and scientists use to spot pythons is simple. On warm, humid summer nights, people drive up and down the roads, hoping to find a python crossing the street. During the winter, the snakes are less active, but can sometimes be found basking in the sun along canals and levees. There are also state-sponsored snake hunts that draw people from around the country.

These efforts are likely doing little to quash the python population. "If we are dealing with in fact tens or hundreds of thousands of pythons, then removing 500 is not solving anybody's problem," says Brian Smith, a scientist for Cherokee Nation Technologies, a contractor for the United States Geological Survey. A handful of females can easily lay enough eggs to replace all the pythons removed by snake wranglers in a year.

To really control pythons, we must make them easier to find. So Auburn University researchers are calling in detector dogs. Meanwhile, Smith is using eDNA-genetic material shed in specimens like skin and poop-to detect whether pythons have colonized an area. When the snakes have not yet been seen, the DNA fragments could sound an early warning.

Smith would also like to learn more about when and where the snakes are most active. Being able to predict when pythons will be on the move would give snake wranglers an edge.

There's a chance that pythons are drawn to roads or waterways, or congregate on high ground during the breeding season. "If 99 percent of the landscape is inaccessible and that's where all the population is, we are nowhere near being able to control that," Smith says. "On the other hand, if they come to us at some time of year, there's hope that what people are doing right now is working."

Smith says he'd like to be wrong about how many snakes are packed into the Everglades and how densely they have colonized the landscape. But, he says, "When you go out and you're walking in the marsh and you can't find one that has a tag in it...and you're standing on it, it's hard to think that they're not everywhere."

Scaled betrayal

Scientists have another, more devious trick up their sleeves. During the breeding season, pythons become very sociable. Females are followed and courted by posses of lusty males; Smith and his crew have found groups of up to eight pythons intertwined. In recent years, they have begun to implant radio transmitters in a handful of males and follow them to their trysts.

During the breeding season, which spans December to April, the researchers fly over the Everglades in a small plane to pick up radiolocations for these Judas snakes. Then they trek in to see if the males have found a partner. The flat, grassy terrain is deceptive; it once took Smith eight hours to hike two miles off the road to pick up a python and return. "Every single step, your foot sinks into the muck a little bit, and so it's just like a suction cup," he says. "You're fighting through sawgrass and you're just beaten and bruised by the time you get back." When a snake is too remote to be reached on foot, they call in a helicopter.

Yet this labor-intensive approach to python gathering is worth it, Smith says. He and his team have calculated that catching snakes with the Judas technique costs about $30,000 per year. This is more expensive than searching for pythons by hitting the roads on a regular basis. However, the Judas technique yielded pythons during the winter months, when no snakes were out on the roads. "Not only are we catching animals at the time of the year with the Judas technique when road cruising doesn't work, but we're catching much larger animals," Smith says. "We're really getting at the reproductively mature animals in the population."

Bartoszek is also a master of the Judas technique, although he prefers to think of his snakes as sentinels that help him thwart the species' spread. "They're kind of defending a certain line for us, they're kind of standing guard," he says.

Bartoszek and his colleagues track about 20 radio-tagged pythons year-round, and stalk them most intensely during the breeding season. "Usually we're rewarded with a pretty big python that that animal was after," Bartoszek says. They nab the female and any hopeful nearby males and follow the sentinels to their next partner.

To date they've removed hundreds of breeding adult pythons-that together added up to about 4 tons-from a 20 square mile area of southwest Florida near Naples. Their largest catch was 185 pounds.

Each sentinel male has a number and name, "So we know them a little more personally," Bartoszek. One of his VIPs (very important pythons) is Johnny, who led them to 13 pythons this season. Another heavy hitter is Jaeger, who gave up three breeding females. "A male Burmese python is the best female python detector on the planet," he says.

Wrangling the snakes can be a chaotic venture. "When you see them, they generally see you and they're calculating their escape plan, so you have a few seconds usually before that animal's going to bolt," Bartoszek says.

They try to grab the animal behind its neck and wrestle it down-preferably out of water. Last year, the notorious Kirkland had just one lady-friend. "Damn if he didn't decide to hook up with her in the middle of a cattail marsh that was waist-deep," Bartoszek says. It took three people to hold onto the female while he pulled himself onto a floating matt of ferns and walked down her back. "If you don't get that neck right away, you're in for a rodeo," he says.

Once the snake is subdued, they put it in a bag so one of the team's wildlife technicians can hoist it onto his back and carry it back out. They then bring the snakes to the lab to be humanely euthanized. "We have a lot of respect for these animals, they're definitely beautiful creatures and we don't like having to put them down, but we know the toll that they're taking on the environment," Bartoszek says. "I've seen small pythons regurgitate deer and alligators and everything in between."

By focusing on a small area, the team hopes to make a dent in the snakes' numbers. "We've infiltrated the local population-we know our neighborhoods, we know the specific males, their home ranges," Bartoszek says. "We're watching them go further and further away to find mates. That tells me we're gaining ground."

The smell of sex

Each spring in Manitoba, Canada, garter snakes gather en masse to look for partners and form giant mating balls, in which dozens of males surround a single lucky female. Pheromones prompt the snakes to ball up, says Parker, who studies how reptiles use sexual odors to find mates. When he saw videos of pythons gathering in similar clumps, he realized that chemical signals must be important for bringing these large snakes together, too.

He's working to extract pheromones from shed python skins with funding from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. He and his colleagues are hoping that pheromones might be used as bait, and are building a library of different chemicals to figure out which ones lure males. Over the next few years, they will figure out which of the 30 to 50 chemicals most interest the snakes and test how they prompt the males to alter their behavior.

To remove the pheromones, the skins are left to soak overnight in a chemical called hexane. This pulls out the pheromones but leaves the rest of the skin behind intact. Once the hexane evaporates, a yellowish waxy coating remains in the flask. To the human nose, the pheromones have an almost floral note. "You might say it smells sort of like a sweet crayon," Parker says.

Meanwhile, Parker's teammate Michael Avery has been building simple mazes to put the pythons through their paces at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Wildlife Research Center in Gainesville, Florida. He and his colleagues encourage female pythons to slither through the Y-shaped maze, then bring in males and film their pursuit. They're studying how males change their behavior when they're on an actual female's trail, and whether female pheromones can elicit the same response.

This is not a high-speed chase. Male pythons sometimes pause for hours in the maze. "They are very hesitant, they don't act impulsively...like garter snakes do," Parker says. "Garter snakes get on a sex pheromone trail and they just go."

In perusing the videos, Parker's team has noticed that a male python's behavior actually gets more elaborate when he senses a female. He will raise his head off the ground, and sometimes backtrack and return later. "They also do these cute little head shakes, where the python just moves his head slightly from side to side," Parker says. This routine might be an attempt to make sure they have zeroed in on the female's trail.

A female python secretes pheromones along the ground where she slithers. Eventually, scientists might dupe males by sprinkling these chemicals in trails leading to traps. In the past, traps baited with food haven't been very effective-these snakes are ambush predators, and prefer to wait for their dinner to come to them. But using pheromones to trick the snakes into believing a female is nearby might make traps more successful during the breeding season, Parker hopes.

Pheromones may also turn Judas snakes into even better double agents. Parker has partnered with United States Geological Survey scientists Bryan Falk and Bob Reed to make radio-tagged males more obvious to their peers. He's already experimented with implanting crystalline estrogen into male garter snakes, which prompted the snakes to release chemicals that made them smell like females. "They're super attractive to all these other animals in the field," Parker says. "They start courting them like they're females." He repeated the experiment with brown tree snakes and saw similar success. So implanting estrogen into male pythons might draw out their well-hidden fellows.

High stakes

Burmese pythons are far from the only invasive species afflicting Florida. One worrying newcomer is the Argentine black and white tegu. These four-foot-long lizards are friendly pets-and ruthless predators with a powerful sex drive. They tolerate cold weather well, meaning they could potentially spread into other states.

Wild hogs, responsible for destroying fields and crops across the state, aren't Florida natives either. Nor are fire ants and lionfish. And the state spends $100 million each year just on combating invasive plants. But Burmese pythons are especially unnerving, Smith says. "The idea that this giant snake that doesn't belong here is here just really is in people's hearts and minds."

And the pythons are causing major problems. Willson and his colleagues have been tracking the python's impact on mammal populations. In the pythons' stronghold in Everglades National Park, the situation is dire. "Most of the mammals have disappeared, and this is everything from rabbits all the way up to declines in things like bobcats and white tailed deer," Willson says.

This spring, the team reported that fewer freshwater turtle eggs are being nabbed by raccoons and other mammals that pythons prey on. This might be good news for the turtles, but it concerns Willson. "They may be changing all sorts of aspects of the South Florida ecosystem, not just the species that they prey upon," he says.

The pythons have begun to infiltrate the Florida Keys, home to endangered species like the Key Largo woodrat. And in recent years, mosquitoes have started feasting more on rats as pythons have gobbled up larger mammals. The rats carry diseases that the mosquitoes can pass on to people. So controlling pythons will be a matter of public health.

"It's tempting to be very pessimistic about the situation," Willson says. "I still have hope that we will find at least ways to control them in small areas."

The best chance of wiping out any invasive species is to eradicate all the trespassers early on. It's decades too late for this tactic to work in southern Florida. "Are we ever going to get rid of the Burmese python? Probably not," Bartoszek says. "It's probably a permanent part of our Everglades ecosystem."

But we can fight back by honing our ability to detect and capture pythons, add new weapons like the Judas technique and pheromones to our arsenal, and prevent pythons from getting a foothold in fragile habitats like the Florida Keys. "We have to live with pythons now," Smith says. "But the more we understand them, the better chance we have of protecting the ecosystem we have left."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pythons are invading Florida. Meet the scientists fighting back.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Burmese python mating season can be a cramped affair. In southwestern Florida, the snakes sometimes gather in burrows dug by gopher tortoises. For python-tracking scientists, this presents an opportunity. In 2015, Ian Bartoszek was searching for pythons amongst the scrub when he got a ping from one of his radio-tagged snakes, dubbed Kirkland.

# data[].attributes.body
Urban Habitat

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Luisa Rivera / Yale e360

Efforts to protect biodiversity are now focusing less on preserving pristine areas and more on finding room for wildlife on the margins of human development. As urban areas keep expanding, it is increasingly the only way to allow species to survive.

One morning not long ago, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, I traveled with a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist on a switchback route up and over the high ridge of the Western Ghats. Our itinerary loosely followed the corridor connecting Bhadra Tiger Reserve with Kudremakh National Park 30 miles to the south.

In places, we passed beautiful shade coffee plantations, with an understory of coffee plants, and pepper vines - a second cash crop - twining up the trunks of the shade trees. Coffee plantations managed in this fashion, connected to surviving patches of natural forest, "provide continuous camouflage for the predators," - especially tigers moving through by night, my guide explained, and wildlife conflict was minimal. Elsewhere, though, the corridor narrowed to a thread winding past sprawling villages, and conservationists played a double game, part handholding to help people live with large predators on their doorsteps, part legal combat to keep economic interests from nibbling into the wildlife corridor from both sides. It was a microcosm of how wildlife hangs on these days, not just in India, but almost everywhere in the world.

For conservationists, protecting biodiversity has in recent years become much less about securing new protected areas in pristine habitat and more about making room for wildlife on the margins of our own urbanized existence. Conservation now often means modifying human landscapes to do double-duty as wildlife habitat - or, more accurately, to continue functioning for wildlife even as humans colonize them for their homes, highways, and farms. There is simply no place else for animals to live.

The ambition to create new protected areas still persists, of course. National parks, wildlife refuges, and other protected areas remain essential, especially for species that do not adapt well to human-dominated landscapes. The 168 signatory nations to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have acknowledged as much, at least on paper, committing to extend protected area coverage to 17 percent of their land area by 2020. But getting there has proved difficult. Coverage by national parks and other terrestrial protected areas has remained stuck for the past few years at about 15 percent worldwide, well short of CBD commitments, much less E.O. Wilson's grander vision of "half-Earth" set aside for nature.

Research has demonstrated substantial improvements in biodiversity from wildlife corridors as little as 25 yards in width.

Meanwhile, though, work to improve buffer zones around parks, and to establish corridors on the land between existing protected areas, has flourished. For instance:

Just since 2000, the area protected by land trusts in the United States has more than doubled, from 23 million to 56 million acres, according to the Land Trust Alliance. Easements are one increasingly common tool for conservation on private lands, though recent research indicates that those easements tend to impose fewer restrictions on landowners than in the past.

Corridor protection on the grand scale has achieved remarkable results, notably with the 2,000-mile long Yellowstone-to-Yukon Conservation Initiative. It aims to connect protected areas and to ensure safe passage for elk, grizzly bears, and other wildlife across 500,000 square miles of largely shared habitat, both public and privately owned. At the same time, research by Nick Haddad, a conservation biologist at the University of Michigan's W.K. Kellogg Biological Station, has demonstrated substantial improvements in biodiversity from corridors as little as 25 yards in width, well within the range, he says, of "what's reasonable in urban landscapes." Indeed, a new study from northern Botswana has found that elephants traveling from Chobe National Park to the nearby Chobe River will use corridors as small as 10 feet wide to traverse newly urbanized areas.

Urban areas now increasingly recognize that it's cheaper to protect clean water by buying up natural habitat both within their own borders and at the source, instead of installing expensive technology to purify it after the fact. It's not just about New York City purchasing huge chunks of the Catskills. North Carolina's Clean Water Management Trust Fund, for instance, has also protected 500,000 acres of watershed and riverside habitat over the past 20 years - with enormous incidental benefits for wildlife.

Cities have begun to recognize the value of protecting wildlife within their own borders. Singapore, for instance, has increased its natural cover to almost half its land area over the past 30 years, even as its human population has doubled. Its Central Catchment Nature Reserve has become one of the last refuges of the straw-headed bulbul, a bird once common across Southeast Asia. The government also recently announced plans to create new nature parks as habitat for the critically endangered banded leaf monkey.

Even in the absence of new parks and other habitat, city residents have rallied to their wildlife, sometimes in extraordinary fashion. In Mumbai, development-oriented politicians continue to encourage the destruction of natural habitat, particularly in the Aarey Milk Colony neighborhood abutting the city's Sanjay Gandhi National Park. But local conservationists, together with the park itself, have launched a pioneering campaign to help densely populated neighborhoods around the park cope with more than 30 free-ranging leopards in their midst. Likewise, Los Angeles has turned its mountain lions into urban folk heroes. (The Facebook bio of the lion known as P22 begins: "Hi! I'm LA's loneliest bachelor. I like to hang out under the Hollywood sign to try and pick up cougars. Likes: Deer, catnip, Los Feliz weekends. Dislikes: Traffic, coyotes, P-45.")

While gas and electric transmission lines commonly divide and destroy landscapes, some utility companies have found maintenance savings (and good press) by managing these corridors as habitat, especially for pollinators and migratory birds. California's Pacific Power & Gas, with 6,400 miles of gas transmission lines, is the latest U.S. utility to sign up with the Right of Way Stewardship Council.

Can a monarch highway help save a species under siege? Read more.

Highway departments have learned that they can save money, reduce their carbon footprint, please tourists, and also help wildlife by converting roadsides and medians from grass to wildflowers. The Federal Highway Administration recently published best management practices for using roadside margins as pollinator habitat - with Florida incidentally saving $1,000 per road mile in mowing costs and Oregon reducing pesticide use by more than 25 percent.

While restoration of abandoned rail lines as habitat and hiking trails is old news, British companies have recently begun restoring habitat along active rail lines. Network Rail, which controls most of the rail lines in the United Kingdom, works with conservation groups on species from the great crested newt to the natterjack toad.

The idea of making human landscapes more wildlife-friendly dates back at least to the anti-lawn movement of the 1970s.

The idea of making human-dominated landscapes more wildlife-friendly dates back at least to the 1970s, when the anti-lawn movement proselytized for turning backyards into habitat. But finding ways - large and small - for wildlife to live among us has come to seem dramatically more urgent in recent years. That may be partly because in this century Homo sapiens has become a predominately urban species for the first time in history, with huge projected growth in cities and megacities. It may also be due to a series of recent studies on the implications of that growth. These studies read, at times, as if the researchers are looking up from their data and describing the end of the natural world.

What's causing the sharp decline in insects, and why it matters. Read more.

Even scientists were stunned in October by the report of a mass insect die-off in Germany. That study, published in the journal PLOS One, found that over a 27-year period, from 1989 to 2016, the population of flying insects at nature reserves across Germany had collapsed, down by 76 percent overall, and 82 percent in the peak mid-summer flying season. Most of the likely causes - including habitat fragmentation, deforestation, monoculture farming, and overuse of pesticides - were factors outside the borders of these ostensibly protected areas. "We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life," one co-author grimly commented, "and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon."

That came on the heels of a July report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing a "biological annihilation" in which "as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone," with likely "cascading catastrophic effects on ecosystems," and on economic and social services "vital to sustaining civilization." In particular, global vertebrate populations - from elephants to amphibians - declined by 58 percent from 1970 to 2012, a 2016 report noted, with losses likely to reach 67 percent by 2020. That's two-thirds of all vertebrate animals on Earth vanished in the lifetime of a person not yet 50.

In the face of "annihilation" and "Armageddon," emphasis on tending the margins of our lives can seem, yes, marginal. "If the focus is on degraded landscapes - roadside edges, powerline rights of way - you can find examples where these habitats are important to particular species," says Josh Tewksbury, a conservation biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "But it would be hard to find any evidence that it's going to make a whit of difference to the big problem. It's not going to solve 95 percent of the problem."

Then, as a second thought, he added, "It could be the 95 percent solution for people and biodiversity," in the sense that routinely seeing birds in a city park, or a fox running across a field, can have "big implications for how people think about the value of nature." And changes in human attitudes about nature can have dramatic effects on the ability of wildlife to survive in human-dominated landscapes.

For instance, persistence of old cultural attitudes is the major reason wolf recovery has struggled in the U.S., despite an abundance of available land. Meanwhile, Europe, one of the most industrialized landscapes on earth, has welcomed the return of wolves even to the fringes of its largest cities - along with brown bears, lynx, bison, and other species. The surprisingly rapid recovery of such species in Europe has led to a call, as a recent commentary in the journal Conservation Letters put it, for rewilding to become "a primary component" of long-term biodiversity conservation on degraded landscapes elsewhere - even perhaps everywhere.

One danger is these landscapes may become places where excess individuals from undisturbed habitat can survive but not increase.

But caution about the potential of our cities and suburbs as wildlife habitat is probably still a good idea. One danger is that these landscapes may become "ecological sinks" - that is, places where excess individuals from undisturbed habitat can survive, but not ultimately increase. Having straw-headed bulbuls in central Singapore does not, for instance, ensure survival of the species. Success with some more visible species may also blind us to broader but less obvious declines in other species. European rewilding, for instance, has not been rewilding for its insect population.

Utilities are now managing power transmission lines as valuable corridors for threatened wildlife. Read more.

Finally, we know almost nothing about what ecologist Meredith Holgerson at Portland State University calls "these cryptic changes happening" as humans occupy and alter a landscape. For her doctoral research at Yale University, she looked at the effects of suburbanization on wood frogs in 18 ponds in the prosperous Connecticut suburb of Madison. The area around the ponds had developed largely with two-acre zoning, allowing for survival of "pretty good red maple swamps and vernal ponds," says David Skelly, a professor of ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies who oversaw the research. But chemical analysis of the ponds demonstrated that, along with other changes, the wood frog larvae were getting as much as 70 percent of their nutrients from materials leaching out of septic systems. "It suggests," says Holgerson, "that tadpoles and other pond organisms are made up of human waste."

The consequences of that remain unknown. But it also suggests that we may change the entire nutrient flow of an ecosystem, cause eutrophication, or introduce hormone-disrupting drugs or other chemicals in our waste - and still imagine that we live in a relatively intact habitat.

Richard Conniff is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications. His latest book is "House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth." He is a frequent contributor to Yale Environment 360. More →

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Habitat on the Edges: Making Room for Wildlife in an Urbanized World

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Efforts to protect biodiversity are now focusing less on preserving pristine areas and more on finding room for wildlife on the margins of human development. As urban areas keep expanding, it is increasingly the only way to allow species to survive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the far corner of Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, there is a depression, 5 feet deep and 70 feet in diameter, that is filled with more than 1,000 individual plants. There are sunflowers and oregano and geraniums-and bees. By the thousands. This sculpture, called Concave Room for Bees, is an earthen work of art designed to attract the insects by providing a rich and steady source of nutrition. Its creator, artist Meg Webster, hopes it will draw attention to the fact that bees are dying globally at an alarming rate.

Ask people on the street if they're aware of this great bee die-off, and if they're regular users of the internet, odds are they'll say yes. When the Broncos won the Super Bowl in 2015, a bee-collapse meme was born thanks to a tweeted video of Eli Manning captioned "when ur brother wins the super bowl but then u remember that bees are dying globally at an alarming rate"

By that summer, tweets that follow the formula "when you're [doing fun activity x], but then you remember that bees are dying globally at an alarming rate" were approaching ubiquity.

It may not be the Ice Bucket Challenge, but even minor environmental awareness is good, right? Actually, in this case, it may not be necessary. That's because honeybee populations are not in decline. They haven't been for a few years now. In fact, many experts believe that honeybees are not in any imminent danger of extinction.

So why do we think they are? Ten years ago, a man named Dave Hackenberg discovered that bees were disappearing. Not dying, just disappearing. Unlike previous plagues where whole colonies could be wiped out, leaving a pile of bee bodies on the floors of the hives, this new wave of affliction was rendering hives completely empty, with no bodies for pathologists to examine, leading some bloggers to dub the phenomenon " the bee rapture. "

In the past decade, research has found that a new class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, increases the honeybees' susceptibility to a specific parasite-the varroa mite (these mites have been around since the 1980s but weren't known to cause any serious problems until the bees started disappearing). Alone, neither factor poses a species-level threat to honeybees, but the combination of the two led to the catastrophe that ultimately came to be known as colony collapse disorder.

Many experts believe that honeybees are not in any imminent danger of extinction.

The strange thing is that no one knows exactly how the interaction of bad pesticides and this parasite caused bee colonies to collapse. Some researchers have argued that the pesticides make the queen more susceptible to varroa mite, which kills her reproductive capabilities and causes other members of the hive to give up and depart for greener pastures, so to speak. Others think it's that the neonicotinoids cause a disruption in the homing mechanisms of the honeybees that prevents them from navigating back home, though it's unclear how the mites play a role. In both cases, the result is the same: an empty hive.

"CCD was a real problem, probably six or seven years ago," says Jeff Pettis, an entomologist whose research played a major role in uncovering the causes of CCD. He adds that in the past three to five years, though, researchers in his field have as not seen much CCD and that globally honeybee populations are not in decline.

The reasons for this apparently miraculous departure from the fast-track toward extinction are not hard to understand, now that research has borne out the causes. First, both the U.S. and several European countries have passed regulations that restricts the use of pesticides and fungicides that are suspected to have played a role in CCD to begin with.

The second reason there's no longer an immediate threat of extinction is that bees aren't, say, giant pandas, an animal that is actually, seriously endangered. That is to say, bees can recover their population numbers reasonably quickly. Compared with the once-a-year ovulatory habits of pandas, queen honeybees regularly lay 1,500 eggs per day, and if the conditions call for it, can up that figure to as many as 2,000 eggs per day or more. Even if honeybee keepers report losing as much 30 to 45 percent of their bees in a single year, this doesn't actually mean the honeybee population will decline by that much. The beekeepers' response will be to simply leverage the queens' enormous reproductive abilities, which will quickly recoup those losses.

So even though bees were disappearing in alarming ways and at alarming rates, their population never actually saw a significant decline. The number of honeybee colonies peaked in 1989, at 3.5 million colonies; in 2008, two years after CCD was first characterized, that number dipped to 2.4 million, the worst year for honeybee populations in recorded history. Since their lowest point, honeybee populations in the U.S. have climbed at a modest pace and now stand at 2.7 million colonies.

So if the bees are all right, why don't we think they are? Why are we constantly lamenting their demise or building large-scale nature-based art in their honor? For one thing, the story of thousands of bees vanishing from the Earth was inherently more fascinating than, say, this one, which explains that reasonable and largely bureaucratic measurements helped stymie the decline.

And even though the bees are not doomed, leading honeybee health experts still say that continued improvement is necessary if we're going to maintain both the health of honeybees and the enjoyably diverse food palate our world currently enjoys thanks to their pollination skills. We need more pollination highways, where islands of bee-friendly flora are intentionally connected to create wider ranges for honeybee populations to mingle and thrive, without obstruction from parking lots or other obstacles. Pettis also encourages embracing more natural lawns, with flowers for bees rather than manicured grass. Willingness to buy imperfect produce also helps, too-the symmetrical stuff is largely the result of pesticide use.

The consequences a honeybee extinction would have held for human existence are severe. About one-third of all crops-including almost all fruits and nongrain vegetables- are pollinated by honeybees. "I would hate to live in a world without bees," said Pettis, emphasizing the diversity in diet that the insects afford us. "We'd still have oatmeal, but we wouldn't be able to have blueberries in our oatmeal."

That would be too bad, but it almost certainly won't come to pass. So the next time you're watching your brother win the Super Bowl, you'll need a better excuse for looking sour.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Actually, Honeybees Are Not Dying Globally at an Alarming Rate

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the far corner of Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, there is a depression, 5 feet deep and 70 feet in diameter, that is filled with more than 1,000 individual plants. There are sunflowers and oregano and geraniums-and bees. By the thousands.

# data[].attributes.headline
Biologists With Drones And Peanut Butter Pellets Are On A Mission To Help Ferrets | WBUR News

# data[].attributes.subject
Biologists With Drones And Peanut Butter Pellets Are On A Mission To Help Ferrets | WBUR News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Biologists With Drones And Peanut Butter Pellets Are On A Mission To Help Ferrets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To increase populations of the endangered black-footed ferret, scientists aim to save prairie dogs, a main food source. The biologists use drones and medicated peanut butter-flavored pellets to do it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Trees that once depended on animals like the wooly mammoth for survival have managed to adapt and survive in the modern world.
By Whit Bronaugh

Warning: Reading this article may cause a whiplash-inducing paradigm shift. You will no longer view wild areas the same way. Your concepts of "pristine wilderness" and "the balance of nature" will be forever compromised. You may even start to see ghosts.

Consider the fruit of the Osage-orange, named after the Osage Indians associated with its range. In the fall, Osage-orange trees hang heavy with bright green, bumpy spheres the size of softballs, full of seeds and an unpalatable milky latex. They soon fall to the ground, where they rot, unused, unless a child decides to test their ballistic properties.

Trees that make such fleshy fruits do so to entice animals to eat them, along with the seeds they contain. The seeds pass through the animal and are deposited, with natural fertilizer, away from the shade and roots of the parent tree where they are more likely to germinate. But no native animal eats Osage-orange fruits. So, what are they for? The same question could be asked of the large seed pods of the honeylocust and the Kentucky coffeetree.

To answer these questions and solve the "riddle of the rotting fruit," we first need to go to Costa Rica. That is where tropical ecologist Dan Janzen of the University of Pennsylvania noticed that the fruits of a mid-sized tree in the pea family called Cassia grandis were generally scorned by the native animals, but gobbled up by introduced horses and cattle. Janzen, who received the Crafoord Prize (ecology's version of the Nobel) for his work on the co-evolution of plants and animals, had the idea that the seeds of Cassia grandis, and about 40 other large-fruited Costa Rican trees, were adapted to be dispersed by large mammals that are now extinct. He teamed up with Paul Martin, a paleoecologist at the University of Arizona, to develop the concept of ecological anachronisms.

An anachronism is something that is chronologically out of place: a typewriter or floppy disc in a modern office. Leather helmets at the Super Bowl. Or, hopefully, the internal combustion engine in the near future. An ecological anachronism is an adaptation that is chronologically out of place, making its purpose more or less obsolete. A tree with big fruits to attract huge mammals as dispersers of its seeds is anachronistic in a world of relatively small mammals.

In the case of Cassia grandis, Janzen and Martin figured that the foot-long woody seed pods were eaten for their sweet pulp by giant ground sloths and elephant-like gomphotheres. These multi-ton animals had such big gullets that they didn't need to chew a lot, so most of the seeds passed through the animals unharmed and ready to propagate more Cassia grandis trees. However, the gomphotheres and giant groundsloths disappeared about 13,000 years ago, toward the end of the last Ice Age of the Pleistocene.

Gomphotheres and ground-sloths? The Ice Age? What, you may be wondering, do they have to do with Osage-oranges, honeylocusts, and coffeetrees today?

In terms of evolutionary time, the difference between 13,000 years ago and now is like the difference between Friday, December 31, 1999 and Saturday, January 1, 2000. We may assign those two days to different centuries or millennia, but they are still part of the same week. Likewise, all the animals and plants of 13,000 years ago belong just as much in the present. In fact, they still live in the present, with just one major exception: most of the big and fierce animals are now gone. This happened just a couple thousand years before we invented agriculture and planted the seeds of civilization. Woolly mammoths actually survived on some Arctic islands until after the Egyptian pyramids were built!

Today, if you searched all of North America north of Mexico, you would find only 17 species of land mammals that could be called megafauna, a term for animals that exceed 100 pounds. If you exclude the rare predators and arctic animals, you are left with just 10 species: pronghorn, mountain goat, bighorn sheep, bison, elk, moose, mule deer, white-tailed deer, black bear, and grizzly bear.

If not for the end-Pleistocene extinctions just 13,000 years ago, there would still be another 40 species of North American megafauna. They would include five species of deer or moose, two llamas, a camel, three horses, four ground-sloths ranging from 400 pounds to 3 tons, a 600-pound armadillo, a 2,000-pound turtle-like glyptodont, two ox-like species, a 5-ton mastodon, a 6-ton woolly mammoth, and a 9-ton Columbian mammoth. Did I mention the 400-pound beaver? Before you jump into your time machine for a true North American safari, be advised that there were also scimitar-cats, American lions, and sabertooths, each as big as or bigger than an African lion. There were three huge bears, including the 1,800-pound giant short-faced bear, the largest mammalian predator that ever walked the Earth.

Now let's return to the forlorn fruit of the Osage orange. Nothing today eats it. Once it drops from the tree, all of them on a given tree practically in unison, the only way it moves is to roll downhill or float in flood waters. Why would you evolve such an over-engineered, energetically expensive fruit if gravity and water are your only dispersers, and you like to grow on higher ground? You wouldn't. Unless you expected it to be eaten by mammoths or ground-sloths.

According to my field guide, Osage-orange has a limited natural range in the Red River region of east-central Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, and adjacent Arkansas. Indians used to travel hundreds of miles for the wood, prized as the finest for making bows. Then European settlers planted it widely as living fences, taking advantage of the tree's ability to spread via shoots from lateral roots. But Osage-orange persisted, and became widely naturalized long after the invention of barbed wire rendered them useless to farmers. The tree can now be found in 39 states and Ontario. If Osage-orange does so well elsewhere, why was it restricted to such a small area?

The answer likely lies in the disappearance of its primary disperser. Without mammoths, groundsloths, and other megafauna to transport its seeds uphill, the range of the species gradually shrank to the Red River region. In fact, fossils tell us that Osage-orange was much more widespread and diverse before the megafaunal extinctions. Back then, Osage-oranges could be found north up to Ontario, and there were seven, not just one, species in the Osage-orange genus, Maclura.

Another anachronistic tree is the Kentucky coffeetree, so named because early Kentucky settlers used its beans as a coffee substitute. Coffeetrees have tough, leathery pods with large, toxic seeds surrounded by a sweet pulp. Water cannot penetrate the thick seed coat to begin germination unless it is abraded or cut. Sounds like mammoth food to me. The natural range of coffeetrees is concentrated in the Midwest, but without its megafauna disperser, it is generally rare and mostly limited to floodplains.

Much the same can be said about the honeylocust, with its sweet seedpods up to 18 inches long. It is more common than coffeetrees, and is found in upland areas because cattle have filled in for the mastodons, camels, or some other dearly departed megamammal with a sweet tooth. The big-fruited pawpaws, persimmons, desert gourds, and wild squash may also have been dispersed more efficiently by recently extinct mammals.

Now when you see an Osage-orange, coffeetree, or honeylocust, you might sense the ghosts of megafauna munching on treats made just for them. (You may even see tropical ghosts in your local grocery store hungrily eyeing the avocados and papayas.) But you can also conjure megafaunal ghosts by considering the weapons designed by trees to discourage or slow their big mouths from eating the foliage.

Osage-orange, mesquite, and hawthorn all bear stiff thorns, spaced too widely apart to do much good against narrow deer muzzles, but they would be unavoidably painful in the wide mouths of groundsloths and mastodons. Wild honeylocusts have vicious, trident-like thorns several inches long covering the lower trunk and branches. Hollies have prickly leaves. Devil's walkingstick is festooned with wicked prickles. In all these heavily armored trees the thorns or prickles are present well above the reach of browsing deer, where they could still frustrate a mammoth's trunk or a giant ground-sloth's muzzle, but no higher. Cacti, Joshua trees, and other yuccas of the Southwest are particularly well armed in case the Shasta ground-sloths return.

If some trees have evolved big fruits so that huge mammals would disperse their seeds, why, now that those dispersers are gone, do they waste their efforts on big fruits that rot on the ground with seeds that will never germinate? If some trees have been in an evolutionary arms race with megafaunal browsers, why not disarm and save energy now that their enemies have been eliminated?

It's true that such adaptations are now anachronistic; they have lost their relevance. But the trees have been slow to catch on; a natural consequence of the pace of evolution. For a tree that lives, say, 250 years, 13,000 years represents only 52 generations. In an evolutionary sense, the trees don't yet realize that the megafauna are gone.

This would all be just another interesting natural history story if not for the very strong likelihood - many scientists would say fact - that humans, not climate change, caused the extinction of the megafauna, mainly by hunting. Humans first came to North America from Siberia just before the megafauna became extinct. That was also at the end of the last Ice Age, but all those species had been through over 20 previous ice-age cycles and come out just fine. The same two-step sequence occurred when humans first came to the West Indies about 6,000 years ago, Australia 50,000 years ago, Madagascar 2,000 years ago, and New Zealand less than 1000 years ago. Wherever humans first colonized the world, megafauna soon disappeared, an extinction pattern that is not correlated with climate change or anything else.

Today, the evidence of human impact is all around us, but now we know that even the most pristine of wilderness areas have many missing pieces. We've learned to see the ghosts of the lost megafauna in the rotting fruit, poor dispersal, and useless thorns of Osage-orange, Kentucky coffeetree, honeylocust, and others. But what are we still missing?

Imagine the Columbian mammoth, larger than an African elephant and sporting curved tusks up to 16 feet long, eating 300 pounds of vegetation every day in your neck of the woods; assuming you live anywhere in the southern half of North America (if you're in the north, just picture the smaller woolly mammoth). Now picture thousands of mammoth herds scattered across the continent. How did they affect trees and forests through their browsing, grazing, tromping, dispersing, and nutrient cycling?

Now add the mastodons, a bit more than half the size of Columbian mammoths, but still weighing 5 tons. Throw in the 3-ton giant ground-sloth and its three smaller but still big relatives. Remember the horses, camels, llamas, shrub-oxen, stag-moose, woodland muskox, and others. Don't forget to think in terms of herds, and don't think of them in the Ice Age. Rather, see their ghosts in the present, along your favorite forest hiking trail or peering over a fence along the interstate. How different would our forests and other habitats now be? What aspects of forest ecology do we not understand because of their absence? Is the coffeetree really a floodplain tree? Is an Osage-orange growing wild east of the Mississippi a naturalized alien, or a reintroduced native?

The first Americans could not have known they were causing extinctions, and they could not have understood the implications. But we no longer have such an excuse. As Aldo Leopold has advised, "The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." We have tinkered, lost some of the most important pieces, and tried to put many where they don't belong. That we will continue to tinker there is no doubt. Everything will depend on how intelligently we do it. And that will depend, in part, on our ability to see the ghosts that haunt our trees.
Whit Bronaugh writes from Eugene, Oregon. Look for his work on Big Trees in the Spring issue. This article was published in the Winter 2010 issue of American Forests magazine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Trees That Miss The Mammoths - American Forests

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Trees that once depended on animals like the wooly mammoth for survival have managed to adapt and survive in the modern world. By Whit Bronaugh Warning: Reading this article may cause a whiplash-inducing paradigm shift. You will no longer view wild areas the same way.

# data[].attributes.headline
Grizzly bear population rebounds, spreads in the west - Washington Post

# data[].attributes.subject
Grizzly bear population rebounds, spreads in the west - Washington Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dean Peterson, a rangy fourth-generation rancher with a handlebar mustache, is used to factoring in all sorts of challenges as he works his vast spread in the Big Hole Valley. Summer wildfires that can sweep down the pine-blanketed mountains to the west, harsh winters that can endanger his thousand-plus head of cattle.

Yet in the back of his mind these days is a threat most of his forefathers never faced: grizzly bears. Settlers pushing West had all but exterminated the hulking predators by the time Peterson's great-grandfather arrived here in the late 1800s.

A year ago, however, a trail camera in the nearby forest snapped a grainy photo of a grizzly crossing a stream, marking the first confirmed sighting in the valley in a century. Then in May, Peterson was stunned to see one lope across a snow-dusted road as he drove a four-wheeler a few miles from his property.

"It will happen," the 51-year-old rancher says of the looming presence of grizzlies. And he is equally matter of fact about what they'll mean for both him and his neighbors. "It will be more difficult to run cattle."

Biologists and their maps agree: The bears are coming to southwestern Montana. Since 1975, when this icon of the American West was listed as an endangered species, grizzlies in the Yellowstone National Park ecosystem to the south have more than quadrupled their range and population. Well to the north, grizzlies in the Glacier National Park region also are spreading out.

The bear pioneers are now migrating so far that they are viewed as the vanguard of a possible union between the two populations, a connection that could help ensure the bears' health and genetic diversity. At some point, conservationists hope, grizzlies might even set up shop in the Idaho wilderness, recolonizing a small portion of the vast territory they once occupied.

But as grizzlies fan out from the parks that have long been their refuges, they are encountering more people, roads and development - and more temptation in the form of trash and livestock. While their presence raises the risk to humans and makes activities like hunting and hiking more perilous, the reality is that bears tend to be on the losing end of interactions with humans. At least 58 died in 2016 and 51 as of mid-November this year, most killed by people who accidentally hit them with cars, crossed paths with them while hunting, or shot them for harming animals or property.

Americans have spent four decades and millions of dollars to rescue grizzlies from the brink of extinction. Now, experts say, one big question is whether people can live alongside them.

"They're big, they can be dangerous, and they compete with us for some food resources," said Steve Primm, a conservationist who has forged relationships with Peterson and other ranchers in the Big Hole Valley, trying to get them to see the animals as something with which they can coexist. "If we're living with grizzly bears, then that's showing that we've got quite a strong commitment to living with the natural world."

Conflicts with people helped to drive the Yellowstone grizzly population to as low as 136 in the 1970s, according to government figures. It has since officially rebounded to around 700, and federal biologists say the number could be as high as 1,000. Such progress prompted the Interior Department to delist that region's bears this summer, with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a Montana native, hailing the turnaround as proof that the Endangered Species Act works.

Lawsuits are now seeking to overturn the government's action, citing the Yellowstone population's genetic isolation and the spiritual importance of the species to Native American tribes. Some also point to the grizzlies' growing footprint and contend that climate change has caused natural food sources to dwindle, putting the bears in danger as they pursue elk gut piles that hunters leave in woods in the fall or calves born on ranches in the spring.

Frank van Manen, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist who leads the government's Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, said research does not support that argument. The Yellowstone ecosystem has reached its "carrying capacity," he said - forcing male grizzlies, in particular, to seek more space. Their movement is creating new challenges.

"Is it realistic to expect this population to expand beyond where it is now?" van Manen asked. "It becomes more of a society question. It has to do with tolerance, and it has to do with where do we want grizzly bears?"

Delisting could entail a new risk, given the possibility in all three states in the Yellowstone ecosystem - Montana, Wyoming and Idaho - of allowing grizzly trophy hunting at some point. While federal scientists say limited hunts would not necessarily harm the overall population, critics decry what they see as an unnecessary additional threat.

Of prime concern to some are the far-flung bears on the ecosystem's periphery in Montana, the ones that could meet up with their brethren to the north. The bear photographed ambling through the narrow lodgepole pines near Peterson's ranch last year is among those that scientists think could eventually help make a historic link.

The rancher does not see it in such sweeping terms. "I just look at it as another one of God's creations," he said, sitting in his living room, where a silky charcoal wolf pelt and the heads of other animals he has bagged adorn the walls. "It's just another species out there, and yeah, it's had a hard time. It got hunted near extinction, because it was hard for people to live around."

That doesn't have to be the case in the 21st century, conservationists say. A project in the Blackfoot River Valley, south of Glacier, has for years used electric fencing, carcass removal and range riders - people who sweep the land, monitoring for bear activity - to reduce conflicts. Property owners have employed similar techniques in an area just north of Yellowstone. One ranch there, its fields visible from a public road, has even become a prime grizzly viewing spot.

"I've seen a lot of bears," said van Manen, smiling in the late-afternoon light as he watched a female grizzly and two cubs romp down a hill on the ranch and then stand on their hind legs to scan the horizon. "But I get excited every time."

Beaverhead County, where Peterson's ranch sits, is a different scenario. The local dump consists of two fly-swarmed open containers that could be an accessible bear buffet. Bear-resistant garbage cans are not the norm. Elk hunters, who try to obscure their scent and walk quietly through the woods there, aren't as accustomed to carrying bear spray despite studies showing it is a powerful deterrent that can save human and bear lives.

And as the biggest beef-producing county in the state, Beaverhead has lots of cattle grazing on ranches and in nearby forests. Dead livestock is typically left to decompose or is buried; either way, the carcass can attract grizzlies.

The potential for problems worries Primm, who wants to see the bears "get off on the right foot" in the Big Hole Valley. He knows grizzlies that find one food source near humans will come back for more.

Primm, 49, is the conservation director of a small organization called People and Carnivores. Though a Missouri native, he has lived in rural Montana for two decades and fits in, with his wide-brimmed hat and dusty Ford pickup. It was wolves that first brought him to the Big Hole Valley - and into contact with Peterson.

The two men met at a gathering of an area conservation alliance. Tensions were high; the federal government had reintroduced gray wolves to Yellowstone in the mid-1990s, and within a decade they had begun thriving, spreading and sometimes killing livestock. Resentful ranchers blamed the government and conservationists for, as Primm recalls, "inflicting these wolves on them."

Peterson was one of those who had lost cattle. Even so, he agreed to approach a neighbor and ask her to let Primm's group build an electric fence, hung with a line of flags called fladry, to protect her calves. The effort would have been impractical on his own spread - not that he expected much on his neighbor's property.

"I actually laughed about it," Peterson said. But he said the fence worked. "I kind of thought, this guy's someone who's trying to make a difference. . . . He's darn sure working in my direction, so I'm willing to work in his direction."

Nowadays, Primm estimates that about half the area's ranchers will hear him out when he talks about livestock guard dogs, electric fencing or other ways to deter bears. He keeps his advice gentle, mindful of the wolf era. He might mention the occasional elk hunting he does, but not his personal opposition to the idea of grizzly hunting.

"We're never going to know a rancher's operation as well as that rancher," Primm said. "So, you know, they're going to be the ones figuring out what really works."

With support from People and Carnivores, that local alliance is distributing bear-resistant trash cans to area residents. It also recently set up a compost dump for livestock carcasses at the edge of a desolate state-owned property where snowplows are kept. Kim Bingen, a resident who was hired to collect carcasses, ended up with 47 dead animals from ranches this spring. Though the service was free, she said it wasn't always an easy pitch, in part because ranchers don't want others to know about the mortalities in their herds.

Peterson has started sending carcasses to the compost dump - some, anyway - and he thinks more of his neighbors will decide to do the same. "We've been leaving them to rot for years," he said. "But as we get more bears, we're going to change our habits."

That's what Primm said his job is about: changing habits. He's seen this in the forests just north of Yellowstone, where he has built hundreds of "bear poles" - one long log attached high up to two trees in an H-shape, where hunters can hang their catches out of bears' reach so the animals don't associate campsites with meat. In those areas, he said, bear-resistant food storage has become the norm, and more hunters, though not enough, carry bear spray.

Southeast of Peterson's property, in spots chosen by the U.S. Forest Service, Primm is erecting the same kind of 19-foot-tall structures. He said he hopes they will help bring hunters around. But he knows this will not happen overnight.

On a cool, overcast morning, in a quiet spot miles down an unpaved road, Primm and building partner Scott Lafevers took a break after finishing the ninth pole. They turned as a gray pickup rolled up to a small campsite of tents, campers and archery targets closer to the road.

In the truck bed lay a massive buck elk and a small deer. The camouflage-clad hunters inside, relatives who'd come from Oregon and North Dakota, spilled out and soon had the elk cinched up on a shorter pole to start skinning it.

Someone asked what the new, taller poles were for.

"So that bears can't reach it," Lafevers told them.

The hunters nodded. They said they were vaguely aware that grizzlies had been spotted in the area, though they weren't much concerned.

"As long as you're able to kill 'em and they're not protected like the wolves," one quipped. Primm stood at a distance, listening silently.

Another hunter, Duane Ryckman, jumped in. Sharing space with grizzlies was about having a "happy medium" - one that took both the animals' and people's needs into account, he explained. The group had bear spray at camp, he said, but he shook his head when asked whether he carried it while hunting.

"No," Ryckman said. "We carry a pistol."

Read more:

The true story of two fatal grizzly bear attacks that changed our relationship with wildlife

Here's what seeing bears at National Parks looked like 90 years ago

Graphics by Denise Lu. Design by Eddie Alvarez.

More stories

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dean Peterson, a rangy fourth-generation rancher with a handlebar mustache, is used to factoring in all sorts of challenges as he works his vast spread in the Big Hole Valley. Summer wildfires that can sweep down the pine-blanketed mountains to the west, harsh winters that can endanger his thousand-plus head of cattle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In western Germany, populations of flying insects have fallen by around 80 percent in the last three decades.

# data[].attributes.headline
Yes, the Florida Everglades protected us from Hurricane Irma | Miami Herald

# data[].attributes.subject
Yes, the Florida Everglades protected us from Hurricane Irma | Miami Herald

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since moving to Miami 15 years ago, I've heard the horror stories about Hurricane Andrew and hoped nothing like it would come to our coasts again. That was wishful thinking.

As we band together to rebuild our communities after Hurricane Irma, I can't help but think what effect this massive storm would have had in Florida if the Everglades weren't here to protect us.

Yes, the Florida Everglades.

The largest subtropical wetland ecosystem in North America and the largest mangrove ecosystem in the western hemisphere. They hug the Florida peninsula acting as South Florida's first line of defense against incoming storms.

More than ever, restoring the Everglades is what stands between our homes and the next Category 5 storm. Research shows that 2.7 miles of wetlands reduce storm surge by a foot, and one acre of wetlands holds up to 1.5 million gallons of floodwaters.

Looking at Hurricane Irma, the storm was a strong Category 4 when it reached the Florida Keys. Because the Everglades interacted with Irma before hitting Naples, the storm surge was far less than the 15 feet that were anticipated to affect the west coast.

These wetlands are our protection.

The amount of storm energy soaked up by wetlands can't be matched by either solid land or open water. They are nature's unmatched shock absorbers. Coastal wetlands protect us from hurricanes by diminishing the amount of open water to interact with wind to form waves, and by slowing down water motion which decreases the range of storm surge.

The more wetlands we preserve, the more sheltered our communities will be from feeling an unbuffered hit from a hurricane.

Coastal wetlands in the U.S. are estimated to provide $23.3 billion per year in storm protection, and because they are maintained by nature they are more cost-effective than constructed levees.

Further studies show that coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves ecosystems combined provide more protection services than any one individual habitat.

The Everglades is a collection of wetlands, mangroves, seagrasses and coral reefs. All critical components of our natural line of defense against hurricanes and rising seas.

This is why restoring the Everglades is so crucial for South Florida's future. Only 50% of this ecosystem remains and what little remains is in poor shape. Restoration efforts are well underway, but unless we move faster, the stressed Everglades won't be able to continue attenuating hurricane winds like the ecosystem does best.

Climate change is increasing the intensity of hurricanes. Today's policy discussions must not only focus on establishing stronger zoning and building codes. They must also center on the restoration and preservation of coastal wetlands and mangrove ecosystems in Florida.

More than ever, we must be intentional about Everglades restoration. We must invest in wetland and mangroves restoration. Storms won't stop coming our way. As we strengthen our building codes, we must also account for the restoration of our natural infrastructure as a key part of the equation.

After all, a healthy ecosystem is a resilient ecosystem. And a restored Everglades is a resilient South Florida.

Celeste De Palma is an Everglades Policy Associate for Audubon Florida.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Yes, the Everglades protected us from Hurricane Irma

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since moving to Miami 15 years ago, I've heard the horror stories about Hurricane Andrew and hoped nothing like it would come to our coasts again. That was wishful thinking. As we band together to rebuild our communities after Hurricane Irma, I can't help but think what effect this massive storm would have had in Florida if the Everglades weren't here to protect us.

# data[].attributes.headline
Building a Better Coral Reef - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Building a Better Coral Reef - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
And yet, on a three-day trip in July to harvest coral samples, he repeatedly found himself surprised. The Rib Reef, where he was diving, had been healthy and vibrant only a year ago. But during his return visit, large sections were dead, covered in algae that looked like soot.

The samples he collected - of the Pocillopora acuta species - were often the only healthy chunks of coral to be found among canyons of dead reefs.

Near the end of their research trip, he and two other scientists dove for nearly an hour before finding just three samples, which they removed with a hammer and chisel and placed in a metal supermarket dish rack for transport to the surface.

"This is probably a three-year-old coral," he said back on the boat, admiring a pinkish sample with a handful of healthy branches that made it look like a fist-size shrub. "We want to take the whole adult coral, collect its babies and then grow the larvae into adult coral."

Professor van Oppen, a senior scientist who oversees Dr. Cantin's research, said that part of what makes the Australian experiment stand out is the "sea simulator" at the Townsville marine institute. It is a complex high technology laboratory where corals live in tanks with water temperatures that can be calibrated to a tenth of a degree and simulate seasonal patterns of warming events. Lighting systems replicate the moon cycles that corals use to time their spawning.

Future generations of corals, the offspring of the those Dr. Cantin harvested, will be tested for resilience in this artificial environment, with warmer and more acidic water that mimics what scientists are predicting for the years 2050 and 2100.

The strongest corals will then become parents again, with some crossbreeding of the same species from different sections of the reef and also crossbreeding of different species to create genetic hybrids.

"If the speed of natural adaptation was fast enough to keep up with climate change, we wouldn't see the scale of loss we're seeing," Professor van Oppen said. "There's an urgent need to come up with ways to slow it down."

Professor van Oppen is collaborating with Dr. Gates, who heads the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology on a small island in Kaneohe Bay, off Oahu. Their joint project is partially funded by the family foundation of Mr. Allen, the billionaire philanthropist.

On a recent day at the lab, a manager, Jen Davidson, meticulously examined coral colonies growing in indoor tanks under artificial lights.

Starting with hardy coral polyps that survived past environmental assaults in Kaneohe Bay, the Gates lab is trying to make them even hardier, crossbreeding the corals and testing offspring in water treated to mimic the hotter, more acidic conditions likely to prevail in a future ocean.

Under normal conditions the animals grow and build their reefs only slowly, one of the factors that is stymying the effort to save them. "We can do all this work here, but can we scale it up enough to make an impact?" Ms. Davidson asked.

Researchers in Florida may be closest to answering that question. At the Mote laboratory in Sarasota, a researcher named David Vaughan has perfected a technique in which coral samples are broken into tiny fragments; the polyps grow much faster than normal as they attempt to re-establish a colony.

"It used to take us six years to produce 600 corals," Dr. Vaughan said in an interview. "Now we can produce 600 corals in an afternoon, and be ready in a few months to plant them."

Florida's reefs have been badly damaged over the years, not just by climate change but by more direct human assaults, like overfishing that disturbs the ecological balance. Yet the Mote lab and other centers have already replanted thousands of small coral colonies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
And yet, on a three-day trip in July to harvest coral samples, he repeatedly found himself surprised. The Rib Reef, where he was diving, had been healthy and vibrant only a year ago. But during his return visit, large sections were dead, covered in algae that looked like soot.

# data[].attributes.headline
Pandas Are No Longer Endangered. But Their Habitat Is in Trouble. - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Pandas Are No Longer Endangered. But Their Habitat Is in Trouble. - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One year after giant pandas graduated from endangered to " vulnerable," a welcome designation after 28 years, Chinese scientists have sobering news: The animal's natural habitat in China is in serious danger.

In a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution on Monday, researchers report that suitable panda habitats have significantly and steadily declined since 1990, the year the International Union for the Conservation of Nature first classified the animals as endangered. That could make any gain in China's wild panda population a short-lived conservation victory.

Logging, human encroachment, road construction and agriculture have conspired to divide panda habitats into tiny sections, a process known as fragmentation, the study said.

Ouyang Zhiyun, a professor of environmental science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues studied 40 years of satellite data to reach their conclusions, and are urging the Chinese government to take specific steps to restore panda-friendly environments.

Giant pandas are a national icon of China, the only place in the world where they live outside of captivity. Years of Chinese government efforts to reverse their dwindling numbers, such as the restoration of bamboo forests and establishment of national habitat reserves, helped bring the animals back from the brink. They were declared no longer endangered in September 2016 after population estimates reached 1,864 - not counting cubs. That's up from a low of about 1,200 in the 1980s.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pandas Are No Longer Endangered. But Their Habitat Is in Trouble.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One year after giant pandas graduated from endangered to " vulnerable," a welcome designation after 28 years, Chinese scientists have sobering news: The animal's natural habitat in China is in serious danger.

# data[].attributes.headline
Scientists: Ash tree species pushed to brink of extinction - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.subject
Scientists: Ash tree species pushed to brink of extinction - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.headline
In the Amazon, a Catastrophic Gold Rush Looms - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
In the Amazon, a Catastrophic Gold Rush Looms - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Like his counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, Mr. Temer treats environmental regulations like red tape. By opening roughly 30 percent of Renca to mining exploration, the decree sets a dangerous precedent by dissolving a longstanding federal barrier to development, leaving other protected areas within and beyond the reserve exposed to potential to research and exploration. Randolfe Rodrigues, an opposition senator from Amapá State, called the decree "the biggest attack on the Amazon of the last 50 years."

For decades, Brazilian policy makers have looked at the rain forest as a source of future mineral, timber, oil and agricultural wealth, and little in the country's history suggests that the government can steward sustainable development in the planet's largest forest and watershed.

In the 1970s, the Trans-Amazon ian Highway project cut a 2,500-mile-long road across the Amazon Basin, promising to open the unexplored interior to settlement. Thousands of indigenous people were killed or forced to move, few settlers heard the call, and generations later the route is a largely unpaved thread connecting small towns with few economic opportunities.

Another project from the twilight of the military regime, the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, was resurrected in this century as a solution to Brazil's energy woes. The megaproject redirected the flow of one of the Amazon's largest tributaries to generate energy for development and mining projects, displacing thousands of indigenous people and other residents in the path of the floodwaters. Tribes in the area protested vigorously for years, only to be pacified with emergency aid programs so poorly managed that a federal prosecutor charged the government with "ethnocide."

In the years since Renca was established, ranchers throughout the Amazon have slashed and burned their way deeper into the forest with impunity. The Amazon frontier has become a South American Wild West where land barons feud over property, extort judges and politicians with threats of violence, and abuse workers in conditions akin to slavery. Over time, a powerful lobby of ranchers, loggers, land speculators and mining companies has consolidated its political power, forming a pivotal congressional bloc - the ruralistas - who recently intervened to shield Mr. Temer from a federal corruption investigation.

Mr. Temer is asking Brazilians to forget that history and trust in assurances that mining in Renca won't harm the environment and indigenous people, but mine operators' records in places like Minas Gerais State do not inspire confidence. In 2015, Brazil suffered what is regarded as the worst environmental disaster in its history when an iron ore tailings dam in Minas Gerais failed, killing 17 people and poisoning the region's most important river with tons of toxic orange sludge that will take years to clean.

Large-scale mining efforts are even riskier in the Amazon where so-called greenfield projects require the construction of roads, railways and hydroelectric dams that worsen deforestation, pollute the water supply and destroy plant and animal life. According to data collected by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, a scientific organization working for the sustainable development of the Amazon, Renca is home to one of the highest concentrations of endangered mammals in the rain forest.

According to Mr. Temer, though, "It's no paradise." His administration is quick to point to the presence of illegal loggers and miners in the reserve who are "plundering the nation's wealth" and polluting the water supply with mercury. They claim that legal operations will push out prospectors, but history shows that prospectors will be drawn like mosquitoes to the allure of fresh veins.

The Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network, a group of Catholic clergy members in the region, calls the decree "a blasphemy of Brazilian democracy," warning against "increased land conflicts, uncontrolled aggression against cultures and lifestyles of indigenous and traditional communities, with large tax exemptions but minimum benefits for the people of the region."

Responding to worldwide outcry, the Temer administration tried to make its decree more palatable, but a federal judge suspended the opening of the reserve, saying the move would require congressional approval. Now the proposal is open for public comment. Unfortunately the decree is but one of many attacks on environmental regulations in Brazil.

Three current bills under consideration could open more than 12 million acres (five million hectares) of protected forest over the next eight years. Mr. Temer has proposed a new mining code that shifts the responsibility for monitoring environmental standards away from the government and toward the companies themselves. Another catastrophic proposal would open all land within Brazil's protected border zone - a territory the size of Alaska - to foreign mining investment, bringing bulldozers and new waves of prospectors to the refuge of some of the world's last isolated tribes.

The Amazon is a natural wonder enshrined in the Brazilian Constitution as part of the national patrimony. Its future is critical to Brazil, South America and the planet. It is also a region in chaos where local, state and federal governments struggle to deliver basic health and sanitation services, let alone regulate international mining operations.

If Mr. Temer wants to stimulate economic development in the region, he should solicit foreign investors to repair and expand its public infrastructure so that the Amazon and its people can live up to their remarkable potential in fields like biotechnology, health care and sustainable fishing and agriculture. To accelerate mining in the Amazon in 2017 would only refresh the cycle of pillage, boom and bust that has plagued the world's largest forest since the first marauders arrived in search of El Dorado.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | In the Amazon, a Catastrophic Gold Rush Looms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Like his counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, Mr. Temer treats environmental regulations like red tape. By opening roughly 30 percent of Renca to mining exploration, the decree sets a dangerous precedent by dissolving a longstanding federal barrier to development, leaving other protected areas within and beyond the reserve exposed to potential to research and exploration.

# data[].attributes.body
Another world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The gardener has a long, touchy-feely relationship with the soil. As every good cultivator knows, you assess the earth by holding it. Is it dark and crumbly, is there an earthworm or beetle in there, is it moist, and when you smell it, are you getting that pleasant earthy aroma?

All these signs are reassuring, and have been through the ages, but they are mere indicators of something much greater and infinitely mysterious: a hidden universe beneath our feet.

This cosmos is only now revealing itself as a result of scientific discoveries based on better microscopic imaging and DNA analysis. There is much still to learn, but it boils down to this: Plants nurture a whole world of creatures in the soil that in return feed and protect the plants, including and especially trees. It is a subterranean community that includes worms, insects, mites, other arthropods you've never heard of, amoebas, and fellow protozoa. The dominant organisms are bacteria and fungi. All these players work together, sometimes by eating one another.

[Are our gardens the monarch butterfly sanctuaries we think they are?]

The awareness of this biosphere should change the way gardeners think about cultivating plants and heighten everyone's understanding of the natural world. In other words, don't ever call it "dirt" again.

The sheer vitality of it is mind-bending: A teaspoon of good loam may contain a billion bacteria, yards of fungal strands, several thousand protozoas and a few dozen nematodes, according to Jeff Lowenfels, a garden writer based in Anchorage and co-author of " Teaming With Microbes."

This is, basically, how it works: Plants manufacture carbohydrates through photosynthesis, but not just for themselves. They release some of their carbon sugars into the soil, which causes the bacteria and fungi to show up to feed. The bacteria crowd around the root zone, and the fungi form vast networks of interlocking strands that often link one plant to another. The bacteria convert nitrogen and other nutrients into forms the plants can use, often by getting devoured by other microbes.

The fungal strands, the mycelium, effectively increase the root mass of its host plant by as much as a thousand times and transport a bevy of goodies to the host plants, including phosphorus, copper, calcium and zinc. There is also evidence that trees use this network to send signals to one another if, say, leaf-eating pests have arrived.

In his Ted Talk, mycologist Paul Stamets referred to mycelium as "Earth's natural Internet."

Although some plant (and human) diseases are caused by soil-borne fungi and bacteria, most of these microbes are beneficial and keep the bad ones in check. The organisms assist in other ways, by increasing the size of soil particles, which improves the ability of the soil to hold water and air.

Even in the middle of a city, the subterranean world is thriving.

Scientists took almost 600 soil samples from across New York's Central Park and discovered a surprising diversity and richness. They identified more than 120,000 types of bacteria and more than 40,000 species of fungi, protozoa and arthropods.

Among the unexpected findings: The microbial species were the same, more or less, as those found in parts of the world with dramatically different flora and climates from New York's, including Antarctic cold deserts, tropical forests and grasslands.

There was a strong association between the diverse organisms in each sample. "Unravelling these relationships will be critical to building a more integrated understanding of below-ground ecology," the researchers wrote in a paper published by the journal for the British Royal Society. "Our work highlights that most of the diversity found in soil remains undescribed."

Enough is known, however, to create a 21st-century subset of farming known as regenerative agriculture. The farmers have discovered that if you foster this biosphere, you don't need expensive fertilizers because the microbes repay the plants with nutrients. They also, for obvious reasons, avoid pesticides that would kill this soil life.

The farmers do as little soil digging as possible because traditional tillage destroys the fungal networks and the desirable soil structure. Cover crops keep the soil life happy between growing seasons.

Advocates of this low-impact farming say it can restore soil carbon lost by the historic conversion of forest and prairie to farmland and help to mitigate greenhouse gases. In the 1990s, an Agricultural Research Service scientist in Beltsville, Sara F. Wright, discovered a sticky coating to fungal threads named glomalin that, it turns out, is a major reservoir for carbon.

Lowenfels says it's also time for gardeners to adopt practices that nurture the soil biosphere. To say he thinks deeply about this subterranean world is an understatement. In addition to "Teaming With Microbes," he has written "Teaming With Nutrients." His latest title is " Teaming With Fungi," which dwells on the type of fungi that directly associate with plant roots. They are known as mycorrhizal fungi, and he's a big fan of adding them to his plants when they are installed, either as a spray or in powdered form available from the garden center. "It works. My tomato plants are bigger than the control, they've got more fruit on them, the plants are so healthy," he told me. "My carrots are unbelievable this year."

Some gardeners turn to compost tea to build soil microbes. This is made by aerating sugars, compost and humic acids in non-chlorinated water and then spraying the brew on plants and soil. Others are not convinced that this is needed, though everyone agrees that the way to foster the soil food web is to top-dress growing beds and lawns with organic matter such as shredded leaves or finished compost.

James Nardi, a biologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, offers this advice: "Work with your fellow non-human gardeners. I never use synthetic fertilizers, and I never use pesticides." Nardi's 2007 book, " Life in the Soil," remains an excellent introduction to the subject.

In the fall, he mixes horse manure with fallen leaves, shreds the mixture and applies it as a mulch to his growing beds. "In the spring, I have this lovely, spongy soil," he said. Lowenfels shreds autumn leaves on his lawn and lets the biosphere use them over the winter.

The organic gardener's mantra has never seemed more appropriate. Feed the soil, not the plant.

The players

● Earthworms: Earthworms (and other worms) play an important role in the hidden biosphere. Most worm species in the garden were imported by Old World settlers, and some worms in certain regions have caused a problem by processing organic matter too efficiently. The latest culprit is a creature called the Japanese crazy worm ( Amynthas agrestis), which multiplies like, er, crazy and damages the soil structure through mass feeding. It is long established in parts of the Southeast but has spread recently to Wisconsin and Illinois, where it is causing problems.

But the European earthworms familiar to most gardeners are helpful.

Worms provide critical assistance to smaller organisms by breaking down and incorporating leaves into the soil, so all may eat. Worm castings are rich in nutrients, including calcium, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

The most famous observer of earthworms, Charles Darwin, estimated that they could add as much as 40 tons of casts per acre annually.

● Insects: Thousands of insects (and spiders) live in a patch of soil. Some are considered pests by humans - Japanese beetle grubs, termites and weevils, for example - but others are beloved or at least beguiling and include the larvae of lightning bugs and cicadas. Dung beetles convert animal waste into humus, a service we take for granted. Ants are the most abundant soil insect. Although some species are pests or nurture pests such as aphids, ants with their highly organized colonies are essential members of the soil biosphere. They assist in the conversion of litter to humus, move and mix large quantities of soil, and spread the seed of bulbs and other desirable plants.

● Other arthropods: The more conspicuous of these include millipedes and centipedes, as well as woodlice. Millipedes feed on plant debris and microbes; centipedes eat other arthropods. Woodlice, or sowbugs, are crustaceans that like soft plant debris and make quick work of green plant material and newly fallen leaves.

One of the most abundant, but barely visible, arthropods in the soil are springtails. They are named for a tail-like structure that allows them to jump when threatened. As many as a billion or more can live in an acre of soil. Depending on species, they cycle plant debris or feed on fungi, algae or other springtails.

Mites are generally regarded by gardeners as pests, and some are - sucking sap from plants and spreading disease. But the soil houses an immense community of non-pest species that are essential to the cycle of life. Half the known species of mites live in the soil, where they feed on decaying plant litter. Nardi writes that they "set the stage for smaller decomposers like bacteria and fungi to free most of the energy and nutrients stored in those leaves."

Some mites are predatory and attack nematodes and other small creatures.

● Nematodes: Nematodes are tiny wormlike creatures that have traditionally been viewed in agriculture as serious pests that harm plants by feeding on their roots. More recently, the view of nematodes has become more nuanced because some species are now commonly used (and purchased) as predators of garden pests such as slugs, vine weevils and white grubs, to name a few. In truth, the world of nematodes is much greater and can only be imagined. Experts believe there may be close to a million species, of which only a fraction have been described scientifically.

Some nematodes eat soil bacteria and fungi, while others prefer to consume other soil arthropods and protozoa. Their value to the garden is in converting nitrogen into a form that plants can use.

● Protozoa: Protozoa are microscopic creatures that live in vast numbers in the film of water between soil particles. The most well known is the amoeba, but these microbes come in several forms, including species that move with a single flagellum or with hairlike cilia.

They are the major predator of bacteria, and in consuming them they release nitrogen and other nutrients to plants.

Protozoa, in turn, are eaten by nematodes and other small arthropods.

● Bacteria: Historically, bacteria have been associated with germs. Some of the nastiest human diseases - anthrax, typhoid, tuberculosis and syphilis, for example - are the result of bacterial infections. But we have come to know too that our guts are full of beneficial bacteria and essential to our health.

The soil is the same way - the bad actors are outnumbered and usually outwitted by the good ones. Healthy soil is loaded with bacteria, and because they're not very mobile, they tend to hang out in vast numbers on and around the roots of plants, a zone known as the rhizosphere. There can be as much as 100 times more bacteria around plant roots than elsewhere in the soil, and with good reason. The plants feed them carbon sugars. The microbes give back nitrogen.

● Fungi: Fungi break down organic matter, which is why you will see mycelium strands in compost piles and under leaf litter. Two basic forms of fungi form a symbiotic relationship with plants. One exists in proximity to root tips and associates with hardwood trees and conifers. The other penetrates the cell wall of the roots and is found in plants of the domestic landscape - flowers, shrubs, grasses and vegetables.

The fungi grow tiny, fragile strands called hyphae. They are a tenth the thickness of human hair, but there are so many of them that they form a vast network, effectively extending the reach and efficiency of plant roots. In her book " The Soil Will Save Us," science writer Kristin Ohlson says there can be as much as 320 miles of hyphae in a cubic foot of soil. At least 80 percent of the plants on Earth connect to these fungal partners.

"Gardeners need to know this stuff," Lowenfels said. "A thinking gardener is a better gardener."
@adrian_higgins on Twitter
More from Lifestyle:

How gardening can help build healthier, happier kids

How a small family nursery thrives in the big-box world

Blueberries are good for you. Don't be afraid to grow them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The zoo beneath our feet: We're only beginning to understand soil's hidden world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The gardener has a long, touchy-feely relationship with the soil. As every good cultivator knows, you assess the earth by holding it. Is it dark and crumbly, is there an earthworm or beetle in there, is it moist, and when you smell it, are you getting that pleasant earthy aroma?

# data[].attributes.body
Why learn to identify trees?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For several years, I've led tree walks in Washington, D.C. I start by asking participants who they are and why they want to spend precious hours looking at trees. My students are nearly all highly educated, successful people who work impressive jobs, speak multiple languages and effortlessly command sophisticated computers and phones. Yet most know barely the first thing about the trees around them. They want to change that.

There was a time when knowing your trees was a matter of life and death, because you needed to know which ones were strong enough to support a house and which ones would feed you through the winter. Now most of us walk around, to adapt a term devised by some botanists, tree blind.

But here's the good news: Tree blindness can be cured. A few years ago, I knew two types of native trees, oak and maple. I considered all conifers to be pines. Then in 2012, I took an ecology course in Wisconsin in which we learned to identify 14 tree species - which, in the chilly upper Midwest, actually gets you pretty far. Suddenly the largest, most conspicuous living beings in my environment were no longer strangers. The trees lining my street in Madison with the rough, saucer-size leaves were basswoods. The giant in my backyard with the diamond bark and opposing rows of leaflets neatly lined up like soldiers was an ash.

Now I live in the nation's capital, where the milder climate and people's propensity to plant species from elsewhere (Japanese cherries, anyone?) have given us more than 300 types of trees. Yet with just a few rules of thumb, it's easy to start making sense of them, too. By noticing that branches grow opposite each other, rather than alternating back and forth on either side of a limb, you can narrow a tree down to maple, ash, dogwood or a handful of introduced varieties. From there the leaf shape gives away at least the genus, if not the species.

Just naming trees might sound a bit like a parlor trick to impress your friends. But it's also a way to start paying attention. Then you notice more interesting things. Trees put on one of nature's great sex shows. Each spring they break their winter dormancy with a burst of genitalia, also known as flowers. Some, including the famous cherries, are insect-luring exhibitionists; others, such as the oaks, are more coy, relying on the wind to help consummate the mating act. Take a moment to watch and listen to a flowering redbud tree full of pollen-drunk bumblebees. I promise you won't be bored.

Tree death, like tree sex, can reveal deeper truths. You may have seen bare trunks with branches that fork over and over in perfect symmetry (that opposite branching again). These are ash trees, victims of the deadly emerald ash borer, which is thought to have arrived in shipping pallets from Asia. Beyond the aesthetic and ecological loss, and just plain tragedy, the ash carnage costs society a huge amount of money, as parks departments and homeowners must either treat ash trees or have them cut down.

The borer is a consequence of global trade, and it's only the latest iteration of this sad story; chestnuts, hemlocks and elms have already taken major hits from foreign pests.

Luckily, not everything in tree world is so dismal. The trees around us can uncover forgotten history. Sometimes a huge oak rises in a yard or in the midst of a much younger woods. These "witness trees" once marked the edges of farm fields. An oddly straight line of junipers or locusts likely signals an old fence row. Neighborhoods built in the 1960s might be lined with once-loved, now-hated Bradford pears; older ones may feature towering willow oaks with roots bulging out of undersized tree boxes. Parts of Paris, New York and, appropriately, London, are practically monocultures of London plane trees, once favored because they could survive these cities' fetid air.

Trees can also tell us how well we're managing our environment today. Many eastern forests, including Rock Creek Park, the wild green vein running down Washington's center, have an understory dominated by American beech. Beeches are slow to get going, but they're almost unmatched at growing in shade and being unappetizing to deer, which are wildly overpopulated in much of the country. Unless we find a way to manage our woods, using predators and periodic fires, we're probably on our way to species-poor forests dominated by beeches. As much as I love the tree's smooth, elephant-skin bark and brittle leaves shivering on their branches through the winter, I don't think an all-beech future is one I want to see.

Some may want more practical reasons for learning trees. If so, I offer that knowing your trees opens up an abundant and entirely free food source. Those in the know can gorge on juicy native mulberries and serviceberries in the spring, and persimmons and pawpaws in late summer. That's to say nothing of tree nuts, which carpet the forest floor in fall. Pecans, walnuts, hickory nuts, beech nuts; with proper preparation, they're all edible. For Native Americans living in California before European contact, acorns were a staple more important than corn. Yet today they're a specialty item, largely limited to the occasional D.I.Y. foraging workshop.

We're so used to eating domesticated plants that the idea of eating wild tree parts seems strange, primitive and possibly dangerous. As a result, we're letting billions of dollars' worth of free, high-quality food go to waste. This, reader, is madness! I'll admit, however, that I'm among the mad. Roadside tree fruit is just an occasional supplement to my diet, and I haven't yet found the patience to leach the bitter tannins out of acorns. For me, learning about trees is more about seeing, and knowing. It's about not being a stranger in my own country.

And it's about not letting the built environment make me too tame. When you engage with a tree, you momentarily leave the human-created world. Look at an American elm in winter, its limbs waving like Medusa's snaky hair. The elm may grow along streets and sidewalks, but there is nothing tame about that tree. In cities, where animals feast on human gardens or garbage and most landscape plants are domesticated cultivars, native trees are the last truly wild beings.

Yes, people may look curiously if you stop to study a tree. But so what? Let yourself go a little wild.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Cure Yourself of Tree Blindness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For several years, I've led tree walks in Washington, D.C. I start by asking participants who they are and why they want to spend precious hours looking at trees. My students are nearly all highly educated, successful people who work impressive jobs, speak multiple languages and effortlessly command sophisticated computers and phones.

# data[].attributes.headline
If industry paid for the natural capital they use

# data[].attributes.subject
If industry paid for the natural capital they use

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The notion of "externalities" has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs.

While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I've always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics - it makes them sound Serious - but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary.

To see what I mean, check out a recent report [PDF] done by environmental consultancy Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program. TEEB [Editor's note: TEEB is now known as the Natural Capital Coalition] asked Trucost to tally up the total "unpriced natural capital" consumed by the world's top industrial sectors. ("Natural capital" refers to ecological materials and services like, say, clean water or a stable atmosphere; "unpriced" means that businesses don't pay to consume them.)

It's a huge task; obviously, doing it required a specific methodology that built in a series of assumptions. (Plenty of details in the report.) But it serves as an important signpost pointing the way to the truth about externalities.

Here's how those costs break down:

The majority of unpriced natural capital costs are from greenhouse gas emissions (38%), followed by water use (25%), land use (24%), air pollution (7%), land and water pollution (5%), and waste (1%).

So how much is that costing us? Trucost's headline results are fairly stunning.

First, the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 "global primary production and primary processing region-sectors" amounts to $7.3 trillion a year - 13 percent of 2009 global GDP.

(A "region-sector" is a particular industry in a particular region - say, wheat farming in East Asia.)

Second, surprising no one, coal is the enemy of the human race. Trucost compiled rankings, both of the top environmental impacts and of the top industrial culprits.

Here are the top five biggest environmental impacts and the region-sectors responsible for them:

The biggest single environmental cost? Greenhouse gases from coal burning in China. The fifth biggest? Greenhouse gases from coal burning in North America. (This also shows what an unholy nightmare deforestation in South America is.)

Now, here are the top five industrial sectors ranked by total ecological damages imposed:

It's coal again! This time North American coal is up at number three.

Trucost's third big finding is the coup de grace. Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world's top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. Zero.

That amounts to an global industrial system built on sleight of hand. As Paul Hawken likes to put it, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.

This gets back to what I was saying at the top. The notion of "externalities" is so technical, such an economist's term. Got a few unfortunate side effects, so just move some numbers from Column A to Column B, right?

But the UNEP report makes clear that what's going on today is more than a few accounting oversights here and there. The distance between today's industrial systems and truly sustainable industrial systems - systems that do not spend down stored natural capital but instead integrate into current energy and material flows - is not one of degree, but one of kind. What's needed is not just better accounting but a new global industrial system, a new way of providing for human wellbeing, and fast. That means a revolution.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
None of the world's top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The notion of "externalities" has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab.

# data[].attributes.headline
This is how much of the world is currently on fire | Popular Science

# data[].attributes.subject
This is how much of the world is currently on fire | Popular Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You may have missed the memo (we get it, there's been a lot going on) but the world is currently on fire as massive blazes burn in the United States, Canada, and across Europe. To give you a sense of the scale of the inferno, we've included maps of the wildfires, as well as images from some of the fiery scenes. Here, is the lowdown.

Here in the United States the Forest Service is reporting that 2017 is shaping up to be a worse than average fire year based on acres of federal, private and state land burned. So far, 5.6 million acres of land has burned this year, or 1.8 million acres more than the ten year average of 3.8 million acres burned by this time. Some states like Nevada are saying that 2017 is the worst fire season in 15 years, while Montana has already used up much of its firefighting budget, even as much of the state remains in drought conditions according to the US Drought Monitor. The state may have to tap into reserve and federal funding but that isn't the only cost. Brent M. Witham, a 29-year-old firefighter from Mentone, California, was killed cutting down a tree while working on the Lolo Peak Fire.

Despite urgent conditions, funding for the nation's six Regional Climate Centers (RCCs) which provide data that we use to help control and prevent wildfires is on the chopping block. The President's proposed budget would slash the Centers' budgets by 82%, from $3.65 million to $650,000.

The Centers were originally developed in the 1980s with bipartisan support because of the service and expertise they provide as data collectors, analyzers and subject matter experts. If they're eliminated, "We'' would of a lot of fundamental climate services," Tim Brown Research Professor Climatology Director Western Regional Climate Center told PopSci. "That includes information for decision makers for drought, fires and floods, and impacts, on transportation and human health, water supplies, energy and disaster management planning, all of these areas the regional climate center program supports."

On a more concrete level this includes banal information, such as yesterday's temperature high and low-that's Regional Climate Center Data. More critically, if we're talking fires, this also means the loss of Western Based US Drought Monitoring Author which adds to the weekly drought map that government uses to allocate drought relief as well as an early drought warning system-i.e. the conditions which can precede wildfires.

Across the border from the United States, fires are also currently scorching Canada's British Columbia. This is the province's second worst fire season on record and NASA satellites have identified the conflagration from space. It's unsurprising that the smoke is billowing over the border into nearby Seattle in Washington state which is also under a heat advisory. On Thursday, the city hit a record breaking 94 degrees at the Seattle Tacoma airport. The regular high for the region at this time of year is 77 degrees. Between the heat and the fact that the region has been, according to US Drought Monitor is unnaturally dry that wildfires are knocking on their door is unsurprising.

On the other side of the globe, if you load up the European Commission's fire map, it looks like the end of the world, especially in Italy and Romania. So far, an area just slightly smaller than the state of Rhode Island has burned. The total is already roughly three times the normal amount of summer wildfires. Back in June, 60 people died over the course of one weekend in Portugal due to wildfires. Thirty people were killed when the fires reached roads on evacuation routes. And as the map makes clear, those fires don't seem to be abating.

Wildfires are also plaguing Sibera in Russia, an image NASA has managed to capture on satellite footage, along with large swathes of Brazil.

According to European news reports, researchers are saying that climate change is to blame, as warmer temperatures have extended the regions fire season, potentially making weather like this increasingly the region's new normal.

Back in the United States, some of the fires will continue to blaze until at least October, based on data in the Incident Information System.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This is how much of the world is currently on fire

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You may have missed the memo (we get it, there's been a lot going on) but the world is currently on fire as massive blazes burn in the United States, Canada, and across Europe. To give you a sense of the scale of the inferno, we've included maps of the wildfires, as well as images from some of the fiery scenes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel-and so biomedical companies are bleeding 500,000 every year. Can this creature that's been around since the dinosaurs be saved?

Meghan Owings plucks a horseshoe crab out of a tank and bends its helmet-shaped shell in half to reveal a soft white membrane. Owings inserts a needle and draws a bit of blood. "See how blue it is," she says, holding the syringe up to the light. It really is. The liquid shines cerulean in the tube.

When she's done with the show and tell, Owings squirts the contents of the syringe back into the tank. I gasp. "That's thousands of dollars!" I exclaim, and can't help but think of the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen is trying cocaine for the first time and accidentally sneezes, blowing the coke everywhere.

I'm not crazy for my concern. The cost of crab blood has been quoted as high as $14,000 per quart.

Their distinctive blue blood is used to detect dangerous Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli in injectable drugs such as insulin, implantable medical devices such as knee replacements, and hospital instruments such as scalpels and IVs. Components of this crab blood have a unique and invaluable talent for finding infection, and that has driven up an insatiable demand. Every year the medical testing industry catches a half-million horseshoe crabs to sample their blood.

"Every man, woman, and child and domestic animal on this planet that uses medical services is connected to the horseshoe crab."

But that demand cannot climb forever. There's a growing concern among scientists that the biomedical industry's bleeding of these crabs may be endangering a creature that's been around since dinosaur days. There are currently no quotas on how many crabs one can bleed because biomedical laboratories drain only a third of the crab's blood, then put them back into the water, alive. But no one really knows what happens to the crabs once they're slipped back into the sea. Do they survive? Are they ever the same?

Scientists like Owings and Win Watson, who teaches animal neurobiology and physiology at the University of New Hampshire, are trying to get to the bottom of it. They're worried about the toll on the creatures, from the amount of time crabs spend out of the water while in transit to the extreme temperatures they experience sitting on a hot boat deck or in a container in the back of a truck.

To that end, these two scientists are putting this strange catch to the test. The pair took 28 horseshoe crabs from the Great Bay Estuary behind their lab, left them out in the heat, then drove them around in a car for four hours and then left them in containers overnight to simulate what might happen in a bleeding facility. Then they bled half the crabs (so they'd have a control group that wasn't bled). All of the crabs remained in containers a second night, as would likely happen at a bleeding lab. The following day, Owings and Watson put $350 transmitters on their backs, attached them snugly with little zip ties, and put the crabs back into the bay to see if they could make their way. What they find might have a lot to say about the future of this odd routine.

The Potential

Horseshoe crab blood is an E. coli detective.

Scientists use the precious substance-specifically, the crab blood's clotting agent-to make a concoction called Limulus Amoebocyte Lysate (LAL). LAL is used to detect Gram-negative bacteria like Escherichia coli (" E. coli"), which can wreak havoc on humans.

Basically, you can divide the bacteria of the world into two groups based on a test developed by Christian Gram, a Danish physician of the late 1800s. The two classes differ physiologically, especially in the composition of their cell walls. Gram-negative bacteria like E. coli contain a type of sugar called an endotoxin in their cell walls, while Gram-positive types like Staphylococcus (of the Staph infection) do not. (The "positive" and "negative" refer to how the microorganisms reacts to a staining test Gram invented.)

Those endotoxins are harmful to human beings and can survive the high heat and harsh conditions under which drugs and medical devices are sterilized and tested. They persist like zombies. Endotoxins wreak havoc on the immune system and make humans susceptible to life-threatening conditions like sepsis. LAL detects these endotoxins by turning from a liquid to a clotted gel when they come in contact with those toxins.

While industry experts say the $14,000-a-quart estimate is high-the figure is more likely the price tag for the coveted amoebocytes that are extracted from the blood-it is testament to how precious LAL has become.

To make enough of it for LAL testing, the biomedical industry now bleeds about 500,000 crabs a year. Global pharmaceutical markets are expected to grow as much as 8 percent over the next year. The medical devices market in the Americas is expected to grow about 25 percent by 2020. The demand for crabs will only grow.

The Problem

When a species is impacted on land, it's easy to see the effects. When the adverse effects occur under water, we don't really know about it-or don't really care. It's why we used to dump garbage and toxic chemicals into the water. What happens under water stays under water.

As such, scientists don't know exactly what biomedical testing does to horseshoe crabs. But they know enough to be worried.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which sets global standards for species extinction, created a horseshoe crab subcommittee in 2012 to monitor the issue. The group decided last year that the American horseshoe crab is "vulnerable" to extinction-a higher level of danger compared to the last Red List assessment in 1996. "Vulnerable" is just one notch below "endangered," after all. Furthermore, the report said crab populations could fall 30 percent over the next 40 years. (This risk varies by region. While populations are increasing in the Southeast and stable in the Delaware Bay, spawning in the Gulf of Maine is no longer happening at some historic locations and the population continues to decline in New England, largely because of overharvesting.)

Get more great features in the PM newsletter

Please enter a valid email address.

Thank You!

You have chosen to receive our newsletter at . You will receive an email shortly confirming your subscription.

You have already subscribed.

The same story plays out across the Pacific Ocean. The horseshoe crab native to Asia, called Tachypleus, produces a different but equally useful version of LAL called Tachypleus Amoebocyte Lysate, or TAL. But horseshoe crabs are already disappearing from beaches in China, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, places where they once thrived. Some fear that if the pharmaceutical industry continues to grow and horseshoe crabs disappear in Asia, companies producing bacteria identifiers there will set their sights on crabs here, further depleting the U.S. population.

If the species were to dwindle, it wouldn't just be an issue for conservationists but for everyone, as LAL is currently the only substance able to detect gamma-negative bacteria in the health field. As one conservationist put it, "Every man, woman, and child and domestic animal on this planet that uses medical services is connected to the horseshoe crab."

"They're very hearty. But I think they pay a price for that."

The Pings

Owing's crab transmitters give off a series of acoustic pings every 45 seconds. When the crabs get within 300 to 400 meters of an underwater receiver, that gadget picks up and records the ping. Each ping is different-it indicates which crab was there, how deep it was, and how active it had been in the prior 45 seconds. Every week or two, Owings and Watson sail out in a boat to download the data, and move the receivers if they need to follow the crabs. I rode along on one of these voyages last fall.

The Great Bay Estuary is about 60 feet deep in the middle, though the crabs tend to hang out around the edges, foraging for food. As we drive around the waterway, the researchers gaze across the water looking for the moorings that hold the receivers. They nearly lost a receiver once when a boat ran over the rope that held it to the mooring. Nobody said science would be easy. Thankfully, a secondary rope had been attached that kept the device from dropping to the bottom of the bay.

About three minutes from the dock, we find the first one. Watson pulls a seaweed-covered rope out of the water with a hook and reels it in until he reaches the missile-shaped receiver. Owings takes it from him and inserts a key, enabling the Bluetooth device on her laptop to download the receiver data, a log of every time it detected a crab's ping.

"It's frozen," Owings says.

"The computer? Can you reboot?" Watson says.

"Trying," she says.

Nobody said technology would be easy, either.

The reboot works. As the data finishes downloading, Owings shouts, "19,000!", referring to the number of pings the receiver has picked up. She removes the key and drops the device back into the water to continue its task. The world needs that data.

The Catch

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), which manages the fishery resources along the Atlantic coast, has harvest quotas in place on bait fishermen who use horseshoe crabs to catch eels and conch. But not for biomedical laboratories. They can take as many crabs as they like, and that harvest continues to grow. The number of crabs harvested by the U.S. biomedical industry jumped from an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 in the 1990s to more than 610,000 crabs in 2012, according to the ASMFC's latest stock assessment report.

"We were successful in exempting ourselves from quotas," said Thomas Novitsky, a scientist and former CEO of Associates of Cape Cod, an LAL company in East Falmouth, Mass. "We lobbied the ASMFC, telling them we're not hurting the crabs. We're putting them back. We have a very important medical application here, so give us a break and don't put the regulations on us."

The LAL labs argued that after the crabs are bled, they go back into the water and recover. That assumption is now being questioned. The ASMFC's decision not to restrict the biomedical industry assumed that some crabs, about 15 percent, would die. Now, that threshold has been broken in the last nine years. And evidence is accumulating that the death rate of bled horseshoe crabs is much higher (more like 29 percent versus 15 percent), that females may have an impaired ability to spawn, and that bled crabs become disoriented and debilitated for various lengths of time, Novitsky said. In Pleasant Bay on Cape Cod, where horseshoe crabs are known to be bled for biomedical use, he says fewer females are spawning than in other regions.

"There's been a dramatic effect," Novitsky said. "The industry will unite and say these studies were done in a lab, and you can't compare that with what's done in nature, but that argument doesn't hold water."

Restricting the biomedical harvest is no easy task, and it starts with the red tape. According to Michael Schmidtke, the Fishery Management Plan Coordinator for ASMFC, the stock assessments (a measure of how many crabs are out there in the first place) have not taken the biomedical crab harvest into account. That's about to change. The commission voted to allow biomedical data to be used in its assessment due in 2018.

But getting a more accurate count is only part of the equation. Even if there were a quota, there's no guarantee that the organization could enforce it. First there's the question of authority. "ASMFC has no jurisdiction over the biomedical industry. It's not a fishery. It's like ASMFC trying to monitor the tobacco industry," said Jeff Brust, a research scientist with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

And then there's the pure damn necessity. While several companies have come up with synthetic alternatives for detecting the presence of endotoxins in vaccines, medicine, and medical instruments, LAL is still the only test that has received FDA approval.

The Stress

It's hard enough on a creature to lose a large quantity of blood and then survive in the wild. But that's only part of the problem for the crab. According to scientists like Owings and Watson, there's a growing body of evidence that factors related to the capture and transportation are hurting the crabs, too.

"I imagine when you put them back in the water, if you were to measure their breathing rate, it would be intense," Watson said, noting that their time spent out of the water has probably made them anaerobic for a while. "If I was put through a period where I couldn't breathe, and you put me back where you found me, I'd just sit there and breathe for a day."

Watson says the companies catch so many crabs at one time that they can't keep them in tanks. There's just too many. And so the catchers just pile crabs out on the deck of the boat.

"Name me another marine creature who breathes under water who can survive on land the way they can," Watson says. "You can't do that with a fish, or a lobster. They're very hearty. But I think they pay a price for that."

The firms involved in this fishing will say they use best management practices in their harvesting, but it's totally voluntary, open-ended, and vague, Novitsky says, which isn't surprising. The rules were put forward by representatives of the LAL labs, which sit on ASMFC's committees. ASMFC has best practices spelled out, but they have neither enforcement nor surveillance capabilities.

"It also made us realize we don't know what these guys do most of the year."

"I was getting directives from the ownership that we weren't profitable enough, and you know how that goes," said Novitsky, who was actually pushed out of Cape Cod Associates after it was acquired by a Japanese firm.

Owings and Watson say they don't want to stop biomedical companies from bleeding crabs. They just want them to do it in a less damaging way. For instance: Companies may not know that when the crabs are bled-or even just held in the laboratory for a long period of time-they have a hard time replenishing their blood supply because their hemocyanin levels remain low, Watson says. Hemocyanin is a protein similar to hemoglobin that transports oxygen through the body. It's as if the crabs become anemic, and it happens by just taking them out of the water, whether you bleed them or not, though the recovery is worse if they've been bled. Their studies have shown that just being in captivity had a negative effect, Owings said.

"Imagine if you had a cow, and every time you milked it, it took a month before it had more milk. That's the problem here," Watson said, noting that if you take a quart of blood from a human, they recover within days. "In terms of the things we've found? That, to me, is a red flag. It's something that is a clear target that we can start to address."

Watson also worries that the needle itself impairs something that acts like a pacemaker in the crab's heart. In the biomedical lab, the needle is inserted in a soft membrane that runs along a hinge in the crab's shell. But that membrane runs across the crab's heart. If the needle hits the crab's pacemaker, it could disrupt its heartbeat permanently. Companies may not even know about that-Watson only does because of his thesis on horseshoe crab neurobiology.

One other thing: Horseshoe crabs have a strong tidal rhythm. They know when high tide is coming, and they move to the edge of the water. Watson tested this several years ago with a colleague, by building a version of a hamster wheel out of two five-gallon buckets with the openings facing each other but leaving just enough space in between for the crab's tail. They then placed it inside the buckets and found it would run every 12.4 hours, about the same cycle as the tides.

"It made us realize that the tides were more important to these guys than we thought. I thought it was just during mating season," he said. It was an important discovery because it meant they would lose that rhythm pretty quickly if you take them out of water and bring them into a lab. "It also made us realize we don't know what these guys do most of the year. No one observes these guys except when they're mating."

He'd like to eventually take some of his discoveries to the medical labs with the hope that they can improve their bleeding practices. If we know the bleeding process reduces the crab's hemocyanin, which compromises their immune system, feeding them a diet of copper before they are returned to the water might help bring their hemocyanin levels back up. He'd like to sell the idea to the bleeding labs. But to date, his attempts to reach them, he says-even to simply confirm that their bleeding simulations are accurate -have gone unanswered.

"I'm not trying to shut the companies down. I just want to see if there's a better way to do it," he said.

Finding Their Way

There are about a dozen receivers in the water, and when the crabs move far out of range-and they can move several miles in a day-the researchers have to relocate them to make sure the pings continue to be read.

"We've used this method for tracking lobsters in the ocean. But sometimes, you'd have to drive around for hours looking for them. At least in here, you can drive down the middle of the bay and find them," Watson said.

We're sitting in the boat and Owings is holding one of the receivers. She's trying to get me to hear one of the pings coming from a nearby crab.

"There's one!" Owings says.

"I didn't hear it," I said.

"There!" she said, hearing another ping.

It reminded me of when our smoke alarm battery was dying, and it kept beeping, but my husband and I couldn't find the detector. For two weeks, the beep would sound but never long enough for us to locate the device. Our dog eventually found it for us.

Watson puts the boat in gear and gets ready to drive off.

"We have to put the (receiver) back!" Owings says.

"Good point, Meghan," Watson says.

As we drive off, Watson remarks on how the crabs have a mysterious understanding of where they are in the estuary and where they need to be at different times of year. Horseshoe crabs like the shallow mudflats in the spring, summer, and fall, because they can forage for snails and worms there during high tide. In the cold winter months, they don't eat much if at all, so it's hard to know where they go once they descend into deeper darker waters.

"They disperse. I don't know how they find their way," Watson said.

And yet they do. There are four hot spots for crabs in the estuary, he says, and you'll see the same crabs there at certain times of year. He knows this because researchers have tagged them. There are certain spots where the females lay their eggs, the males fertilize them, and the eggs hatch 30 days later, he says, pointing to one of those spots along the shore. And yet the larvae must be carried off by the current to a different location because the juvenile crabs aren't usually found in the spawning site but rather somewhere else in the estuary, he says. It leads him to believe there's a complex pattern to their life cycle that we don't fully understand yet.

"There's a whole connectivity going on, where you reproduce, where the eggs hatch, where the larvae get carried," even where the birds come to eat the eggs, he said. "When the biomedical labs take the crabs out to bleed them and put them back in a different spot, it could disrupt that connectivity thing."

When we get back to shore, Watson says he is going scuba diving with two other students. They need to log a certain amount of time in the water to maintain their diving credentials. As he puts on his wet suit, he tells me about a camera system he and a colleague once mounted on a lobster trap to see what happened when they were caught. What they found was that all but about a tenth of the lobsters were able to escape.

"We were dumbfounded by the results," he says.

He puts on his weight belt, tank, fins, and goggles and walks to the end of the dock and steps into the water. He walks for a while in the shallow water, and for a time, I can still see the top of his head. But as he swims off, his head begins to disappear under the surface of the water, and he gets one more glimpse of what goes on in the darkness below.

More from Popular Mechanics:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Meghan Owings plucks a horseshoe crab out of a tank and bends its helmet-shaped shell in half to reveal a soft white membrane. Owings inserts a needle and draws a bit of blood. "See how blue it is," she says, holding the syringe up to the light. It really is.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Moral Cost of Cats | Science | Smithsonian

# data[].attributes.subject
The Moral Cost of Cats | Science | Smithsonian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Pete Marra is haunted by cats. He sees them everywhere: slinking down alleys, crouched under porches, glaring at him out of wild, starved eyes.

People assume that Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and author of the recent book Cat Wars, hates cats. This is not the case. "I love cats," he says, calling them "fascinating, magnificent animals," that seem to have a "freakish love for me." He's even considered a pet cat, despite being mildly allergic. "This is the thing people don't realize," Marra told me recently at a café near his office in Washington, D.C. "I'm both a wild animal advocate and a domestic animal advocate. If my mother thought I wasn't supporting cats, she'd be flipping in her grave."

It's an understandable mistake. After all, Marra has made himself the public face of what sounds a lot like an anti-cat crusade. For years, the wildlife ecologist has been investigating the lethal implications of cats and urging that pet owners keep them indoors. Now, he argues in Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, co-authored with freelance writer Chris Santella, the time has come for more drastic action: a concerted, nationwide effort to rid the landscape of cats. (The book is based on Marra's personal and scientific research, and the views and conclusion are expressly his own and do not represent those of the Smithsonian Institution.)

That effort will require an ugly reality: the targeted killing of felines. "No one likes the idea of killing cats," Marra concludes in his book. "But sometimes, it is necessary."

Marra might like cats. But he also sees a bigger picture. In his day job, he and his team at the migratory bird center track the global movements of birds and tease apart threats to their existence. He knows that birds don't just twit around pointlessly. They pollinate plants, spread seeds, control insects and protect environments from the effects of climate change; they are the glue that binds healthy ecosystems together. "Birds are critical," he says. And outdoor cats, he and other ecologists have determined, are the leading human-influenced cause of dead birds.

In 1962, biologist Rachel Carson wrote that "in nature nothing exists alone." Marra couldn't agree more. Like Carson, he thinks of life on Earth as a complex tapestry in which each species represents a single thread. Outdoor cats threaten that tapestry. Their crimes include contributing to 33 extinctions around the world and counting, to say nothing of their potential to spread deadly diseases like rabies and Toxoplasmosis. They hold in tooth and claw the power to destroy that delicate web-like, well, a cat unraveling a ball of string.

Americans own about 86 million cats, or one cat for every three households. That makes cats more popular, petwise, than dogs, and we haven't even gotten to Internet memes yet. But not all pet cats are created equal. The majority of them-about two-thirds to three-fourths, surveys say-are your sweet, harmless, cuddly housecats, which seldom set foot outside. Marra takes no issue with these lap cats. Their instincts may be lethal, but they rarely get the chance to harm more than a house mouse.

The other one-quarter to one-third, though, aren't so harmless. These are outdoor pet cats, and they are murderers. Equipped with laser-quick paws and razor-tipped claws, these natural born killers are the stuff of every bird and small mammal's nightmare. Often we love them for just this quality; the hard-working barn cat has nipped many a country mouse infestation in the bud. But sometimes their deadly instincts spell trouble for animals and ecosystems we value-and often, Marra argues, desperately need.

Marra tells the story of Tibbles the cat, who traveled with her owner to an untouched island south of New Zealand in 1894. There, she single-pawedly caused the extinction of the Stephens Island wren, a small, flightless bird found only in that part of the world. Most cats aren't as deadly as Tibbles, but your average outdoor pet cat still kills around two animals per week, according to the Wildlife Society and the American Bird Conservancy. The solution for these cats is simple, says Marra: Bring them indoors. The Humane Society of the United States agrees.

So far, so good. Now comes the real problem: unowned cats, which include strays and ferals. Born in the wild or abandoned, feral cats spend almost no time with humans; they're basically wild animals. Stray cats, by contrast, often have a working relationship with humans. They might live in managed communities, where a human caretaker regular feeds and watches over them-"subsidizing" them, in Marra's words-meaning their numbers can soar to rates they wouldn't be able to otherwise. Whether stray or feral, these cats kill on average three times as many animals as owned cats, according to Marra.

No one knows exactly how many stray and feral cats stalk the U.S. They are, by nature, elusive and transient. In a 2012 study, Marra used an estimate of 30 to 80 million; the Humane Society estimates a more conservative 30 to 40 million. Adithya Sambamurthy from the Center for Investigative Reporting's The Reveal recently reported that unowned cats may rival the number of pet cats, placing them at about 80 million. That means, for every lap cat hunkering over his dish of Fancy Feast, there is another one prowling around for his dinner-like an evil twin, or a particle of antimatter.

For these cats, there is no easy solution. This is where Marra's unorthodox plan comes into play. As he writes:

In high-priority areas there must be zero tolerance for free-ranging cats. If the animals are trapped, they must be removed from the area and not returned. If homes cannot be found for the animals and no sanctuaries or shelters are available, there is no choice but to euthanize them. If the animals cannot be trapped, other means must be taken to remove them from the landscape-be it the use of select poisons or the retention of professional hunters.

Feral cat advocates and ecologists agree on very little. But one thing they both will say is this: There are too many cats outside. Feral cat advocates say these dense numbers threaten the welfare of cats themselves, which lead miserable lives colored by fights and starvation. Ecologists, meanwhile, worry about those cats' victims-as well whether the cats might be spreading disease to humans and other animals.

Management of these overabundant felines is where the two disagree. For many animal welfare advocates, the solution is TNR, or Trap-Neuter-Return. TNR is just what it sounds like: a policy that involves trapping stray and feral cats, sterilizing them and returning them to the urban wilds in the hopes that populations will decrease. In the past decade, TNR has gone mainstream in many cities, helped along by generous funding from pet food companies including Petco and PetSmart. The premise is simple: Cats live out their lives, but don't reproduce.

Becky Robinson, president of the advocacy group Alley Cat Allies and a major proponent of TNR, calls the method "effective, humane control." "This is a benefit directly to the cats," she told me over the phone. (Two communications staffers from Robinson's organization were listening in our conversation, to give you an idea of the delicateness of the topic.)

Some researchers have documented surprising successes with TNR. Dr. Julie Levy of the University of Florida in Gainesville and colleagues conducted one of the first long-term studies on the effectiveness of TNR, publishing their results in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association in 2003. They sought to quantify whether TNR could succeed in a specific population: stray cats colonies on the campus of the University of Central Florida.

The researchers expressed doubts at the outset, reporting that "virtually no information exists to support the contention that neutering is an effective long-term method for controlling free-roaming cat populations." Yet today, more than ten years after their study concluded, just five cats remain on campus-and these are so old and sickly they have to be given geriatric care. Even Levy was taken aback by the results. "We keep seeing better success in the field than the models ever predict," she says. However, much of the decrease can be attributed to the fact that volunteers often end up adopting cats-a phenomenon Levy considers an unofficial part of many TNR programs.

Despite these kinds of successes, many ecologists say flatly that TNR doesn't work. The problem is that, for TNR to succeed in large populations, at least 75 percent of cats in a colony must be sterilized. That rarely happens. The trouble is that negligent pet owners continue to abandon pet cats, which then join existing colonies; additionally, non-neutered stray cats can wander in. Like efforts at vaccinating schools against chickenpox, just a few stragglers can undermine an entire TNR program. Any short-term reduction in colony size is therefore quickly reversed, a group of researchers including Levy and ecologist Patrick Foley reported after studying nearly 15,000 stray and feral cats.

For Marra, TNR is a feel-good solution that is no solution at all-a Band-Aid that has done little to stem the flow of cats. By refusing to look at the reality, he says, we are letting our "misplaced compassion" for cats get the better of our reason. That is why he and some other ecologists call for a more draconian approach: widespread removal of feral and stray cats, including euthanasia.

The concept isn't as radical as it sounds. Australia aims to kill two million cats by 2020 using "robots, lasers, [and] poison." New Zealand, as I've reported previously, has long perpetrated mass warfare on possums, stoats and weasels in a bid to save its beloved birds. In America, too, we cull mammals- including gray wolves, which can prey on livestock and pets, and bison, our national mammal, which can spread bacterial infections to cattle. We even kill cats: American shelters put down more than 1.4 million cats a year, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

That doesn't mean we're comfortable with it. "That's the aspect that is most alarming about the animal welfare groups, is the fact that often the only reasonable solution of getting rid of invasive species is lethal control," says Stanley Temple, a wildlife ecologist who argued for the necessity of eradicating invasive species in a 1990 essay The Nasty Necessity. "And that is the single thing that they are so vehemently opposed to. Their hang-up, if you will, on death."

Given the unpopularity of eradication programs in the U.S., it would seem inadvisable for any researcher to make one part of his platform of action. But this, Marra says, is our only option. Now his challenge is to get others on his side. To do so he will need more than science-he will need to get people to empathize with birds, and to value species and ecosystems over individuals.

Marra likes to say that birds saved him, which isn't far off. He was raised mainly by his mother, who worked full-time to support him and his three siblings after his father left when he was an infant. As a result, he enjoyed a relatively feral childhood. By the time he was six, he found himself wandering alone in the woods near his house in Norwalk, Connecticut, swimming in lakes, climbing trees and digging in the dirt for star-nosed moles, frogs and salamanders. He loved catching animals of all kinds-"anything wild," he says now.

The Westport Nature Center, a half-mile walk down the hill from his house, became a refuge. With its living wild animals and displays of taxidermied ruffed grouse, the center got Marra asking questions about how his surroundings came to be. One day, a naturalist at the center caught a black-capped chickadee in a mist net, and placed it in his hands. He remembers cupping the bird delicately, "looking into its eyes, feeling its feathers, feeling its wildness," as he recalled at a Smithsonian event last June. Meeting the bird's black marble gaze, a switch flipped in his brain.

"It was a remarkable moment that I'll never forget," he said at the event. "The aura of the bird almost entered my body. It was really kind of a transformational experience for me."

Throughout a tumultuous childhood, birds provided an anchor. "Birds saved me, because they were always this constant thread that I could come back to," he says. "It was the one stable thing in my life." When he went to Southern Connecticut State University to study biology, he quickly realized that dusty specimens in libraries held little appeal. "I was less interested in understanding the subtleties between plumages," he says. "I was much more interested in watching live birds."

In 1999, Marra took a job as a wildlife ecologist at Smithsonian's Environmental Research Center to be on the front lines of human encroachment on the natural environment. When West Nile virus began leaving a trail of dead crows, he started looking into bird mortality. In 2011, he published a paper in the Journal of Ornithology that followed the fate of young gray catbirds in the Maryland suburbs. Soon after leaving the nest, 79 percent of birds were killed by predators, primarily cats, which leave the telltale sign of decapitated victims with just the bodies uneaten. (Ironically, this bird gets its name not because it commonly ends up in the jaws of cats, but from its vaguely catlike yowl).

The following year, Marra got more ambitious: He decided to tally up the national toll that outdoor cats take on wildlife. He and colleagues used mathematical models to analyze data from local cat predation studies going back more than 50 years. When they extrapolated the data to reflect national trends, they were stunned. According to their calculations, outdoor cats killed somewhere in the ballpark of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion small mammals in the U.S. per year-far exceeding any other human-influenced cause of avian death, such as pesticides or collisions with windows.

When Marra saw the number "2.4 billion," he knew that the claws were about to come out. He was right. On January 29, 2013, the same day the paper was published in the journal Nature Communications, the New York Times featured a front-page article highlighting his findings entitled "That Cuddly Killer Is Deadlier Than You Think." The piece became the newspaper's most-emailed article of the week. It garnered more than a thousand comments online, ranging from outraged ("I'm tired of everyone putting down cats and trying to justify their extermination") to pointed ("It's the large bipeds who are the problem, not their cats") to satirical ("Eat more cat!").

Marra read them all. Many were personal insults directed squarely at him. Some suggested that he should be predated or euthanized. Marra understands how emotional people can get about cats-he has entered into many a dinner table debate with his 15-year-old daughter, a long-time vegetarian and animal lover, over cat policy-so he tries to take these reactions with a grain of salt. Still, he admits, "it hurts." When I ask him how he deals with the constant backlash, he laughs. "Good question," he says. "It's actually because I believe in what I do. And if I don't do it-well, I've got one life. This is it. This is the now."

More bothersome than the personal attacks were the attacks on his research methodology. The most relentless was Peter Wolf, a vocal feral cat advocate who called Marra's paper "garbage," "junk science" and "an agenda-driven effort to undermine TNR" on his blog, Wolf took issue with the levels of uncertainty in Marra's paper, alleging that the numbers were "wildly inflated," came from biased sources, and drew upon just just a handful of studies. "When seen in context, these astronomical figures alone raise questions of credibility," Wolf wrote on his blog. "It doesn't seem like science to me," he told me recently.

It was, Marra admits, a wide range. He and his colleagues estimated that "free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3-4.0 billion birds and 6.3-22.3 billion mammals annually." The reason for the discrepancy was the woeful lack of data on feral cat populations and their lifestyles. Marra worked with the limited data he had, synthesizing the results from previous studies and augmenting them with predation numbers from Europe, Australia and New Zealand. By including both the lowest and highest possible estimates for cat predation, he thought he was covering all his bases.

In all the fighting and flying fur, Marra saw an opportunity. By the time his paper was published in Nature Communications, he was already thinking about writing a book. "I knew this had huge potential for creating a lot of controversy," he says. "But also conversation. To me, it's really about the conversation and trying to figure out: how do we come to some resolution on this thing?"

Cats kill; that much is clear. "The science is all pretty bloody obvious," as Michael Clinchy, a Canadian biologist focusing on predator-prey relationships at the University of Victoria, puts it. But cats also spread disease. Outdoor cats can transmit plague, rabies, feline leukemia and a mysterious parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii. The extinction of the Hawaiian crow, or ʻalalā, in 2002 is thought to have been caused in part by the spread of Toxoplasma via feral cats. "The diseases from cats is what's going to change this whole equation," Marra says.

Cat feces, 1.2 million tons of which are excreted a year, are known to contain Toxoplasma. The single-celled parasite enters the brain and changes the behavior of prey animals like rats, which can show a strange attraction to cat urine. About 10 to 20 percent of Americans also harbor the parasite, which can be absorbed through contact with litter boxes, drinking contaminated water or eating undercooked meat. Once believed to hang out harmlessly in the human brain, some scientists now believe that Toxoplasma may actively change the connections between our neurons-shifting dopamine levels, altering personalities and even triggering diseases like schizophrenia in genetically susceptible individuals.

Marra calls Toxoplasma a contaminant on the order of DDT, the broad-scale chemical pesticide used to control insects and combat infectious disease up until the 1960s. (DDT lingers in the environment for years, where it can threaten human and animal health, as Rachel Carson documented in her book Silent Spring.) In fact, Marra thinks of outdoor cats themselves as a DDT-like contaminant-wreaking widespread, unnatural havoc on their surroundings. The difference, to him, is that DDT has never been known to wipe out a species, while cats have been implicated in at least 33 extinctions thus far.

The Toxoplasma threat, Marra writes, makes outdoor cats nothing less than a public health issue. He recommends that the federal government take on the task of eradicating cats from the landscape, via the Centers for Disease Control. He imagines taxpayer-supported public education campaigns, billboards about disease dangers and the importance of keeping cats inside, and large-scale eradication programs in vulnerable areas like Hawaii. To Wolf and others, the idea of such a policy is "absurd" and "screams of desperation." But to Marra, it's simply a logical conclusion: "We need to minimize the impact humans have," he says. "Cats are one of the impacts."

Science might be able to tell us how many animals cats kill per year. But it can't tell us what that means-nor what we should do about it. It is us who attach moral weight to cats, by projecting our fear and fantasies upon them. Tibbles was "doing only what her instinct told her to do," Marra writes. We make cats into pets or pests; victims or villains; those who suffer or those who cause suffering.

At the heart of this debate is a question not of data, but of aesthetics, principles and philosophies. That is: In a world fundamentally shaped by humans, who is to say whether birds and native wildlife have any more right to the landscape than domestic cats do? Should the goal be to rewind the urban landscape back to before the arrival of Europeans-and is that even possible?

Conservation biologists have always called these kinds of shots themselves. "We've made a judgment that biodiversity is good," says Temple. For Marra, cats represent yet another destructive footprint man has made on the landscape. To rid the country of their presence is therefore to restore some pre-human balance of nature, some lost sense of grace. It is to protect those creatures that cannot save themselves. "It is essential," he says, "that we save these species."

In his closing chapter, Marra warns that Americans may soon awaken to dead birds and "muted birdsong, if any at all." It's another nod to Rachel Carson, whose defense of nature helped spark the modern environmental movement. Today we've come to recognize Carson as an environmental Cassandra; history has vindicated many of her inconvenient truths. But when Silent Spring first came out, her ideas were met with hostility from other scientists, who deemed her hysterical, alarmist and "probably a Communist."

For Marra, it is clear that outdoor cats represent the Silent Spring of our time. Not only are cats the single worst threat to birds caused directly by humans, but they are also the easiest problem to fix, as compared to many-leveled threats like climate change. For him, it is obvious what we must do. Yet he is also starting to understand the challenge of making others see the world as he does. "To me, this should be the low-hanging fruit," he says. "But as it turns out, it might be easier stopping climate change than stopping cats."

About Rachel E. Gross

Rachel is the Science Editor, covering stories behind new discoveries and the debates that shape our understanding of the world. Before coming to Smithsonian, she covered science for Slate, Wired, and The New York Times.

Read more from this author | Follow @rachelegross

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pete Marra is haunted by cats. He sees them everywhere: slinking down alleys, crouched under porches, glaring at him out of wild, starved eyes. People assume that Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and author of the recent book Cat Wars, hates cats. This is not the case.

# data[].attributes.headline
Rare White Wolf Killed in Yellowstone Park Was Shot Illegally - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Rare White Wolf Killed in Yellowstone Park Was Shot Illegally - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A rare white female wolf that hikers found as she lay dying last month on the north side of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming was shot illegally, officials have determined.

The wolf had to be euthanized by park officials because of the severity of her wound.

She was the only white wolf living in the park, though there had been two others before her. She was 12 years old when she was killed, twice the average age of wolves in Yellowstone.

She was the alpha female of the Canyon Pack, one of 10 packs in the park, and she had paired with the alpha male for nine years. Over that period, biologists say, she whelped 20 pups, 14 of which lived to be adults.

After she was euthanized, the white wolf's carcass was sent to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service forensics lab, and the preliminary results of the necropsy were released on Friday. Park officials are treating the shooting as a crime.

"Due to the serious nature of this incident, a reward of up to $5,000 is offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual(s) responsible for this criminal act," said Dan Wenk, Yellowstone National Park superintendent, in a statement.

The shooting comes as park officials say they are concerned about the renewed hunting of wolves in Wyoming, which will begin this fall. Wolf hunting is already allowed in Idaho and Montana, states that border the park, though in Montana it is limited in hopes of keeping the impact on park wolves to a minimum.

Hunting wolves, even outside the park, conflicts with Yellowstone's mission to protect the animals for study and for people to view. Wolves in the park have little fear of humans, and once they wander beyond the boundary can be easily taken by hunters.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rare White Wolf Killed in Yellowstone Park Was Shot Illegally

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A rare white female wolf that hikers found as she lay dying last month on the north side of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming was shot illegally, officials have determined. The wolf had to be euthanized by park officials because of the severity of her wound.

# data[].attributes.headline
The New Threat to Wolves in and Around Yellowstone - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
The New Threat to Wolves in and Around Yellowstone - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Group dynamics also change significantly, sometimes in mercurial ways, when membership shifts or a pack loses individuals. "Personalities matter," Dr. Smith said, noting that science doesn't have a good way to assess the effect. "It's really hard."

Then there is the role of the wise wolf to consider. During pack warfare, a deciding factor can be the presence of an elder, a single wolf older than five, that is even more important than the number of wolves, researchers found.

"It was a surprise," said Kira Cassidy, a Park Service biologist and an author of the study. "I attribute it to the fact that older wolves will only engage their neighbors if they feel they are likely to win."

Research here also leads Dr. Smith to believe that wolf packs are matrilineal. Males come and go, he said, but "Gramma, Mom and the daughter are the ones that stick around" and carry on the pack through generations.

There is some evidence that the increase in hunting could alter this research. When the alpha female in the Lamar Canyon pack left Yellowstone in 2012 and was shot, the pack split into two and the alpha male left because the new alpha female was his daughter. (Wolves avoid inbreeding.)

Of course, the life of a wolf is a high-risk occupation and natural deaths occur all the time, especially when a pack tries to kill animals with hooves and horns 20 times their size. In early April, an alpha female with "a belly full of pups" was killed either by an elk or a bison, Dr. Smith said. Because only the alpha female in a group reproduces, "that means the pack won't have pups this year," he said.

Outside the park, ranchers have been vocal in their support of expanding hunting, citing real threats to their livestock.

Jon Robinett of Dubois, Wyo., says he has lost hundreds of cattle, several horses and six dogs to wolves over the last 20 years. While there are 50 wolves in his part of the Dunoir Valley, allowing hunters to take out five won't accomplish much, he said.

"Killing is what wolves do," he said, adding that even with reduced numbers, "they aren't going to quit their home range." The state compensates him for lost cattle, he said, "but it doesn't make you whole."

Some biologists say there are legitimate reasons to allow hunting, perhaps most important to placate residents. "A little blood satisfies a lot of anger," said Ed Bangs, a retired Fish and Wildlife biologist who led the effort to restore wolves to the northern Rockies.

"The wolf most likely to get harvested by a hunter is one that is in open areas with road access," the interface between ranches and wild land, Dr. Bangs said. "So hunters are removing the animals with the highest probability of getting in trouble with livestock."

Dr. Smith says the wolf personality is not the only wild card in the Yellowstone frame - humans figure in as well.

Last year, the famed white wolf left the park and went into Montana for a few days. Dr. Smith said a hunter who hates wolves sought the 11-year-old female out as a prize trophy. But the animal returned to safety in the park.

Just last month, the wolf was found with severe injuries and was euthanized. Law enforcement is investigating her death. She was almost twice as old as most wolves here, but will be missed. "She was the most coveted wolf to see," Dr. Smith said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The New Threat to Wolves in and Around Yellowstone

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Group dynamics also change significantly, sometimes in mercurial ways, when membership shifts or a pack loses individuals. "Personalities matter," Dr. Smith said, noting that science doesn't have a good way to assess the effect. "It's really hard." Then there is the role of the wise wolf to consider.

# data[].attributes.headline
Just about everything you buy came at the expense of an endangered animal - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.subject
Just about everything you buy came at the expense of an endangered animal - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The cup of joe that helped you get through the morning, the must-have chair purchased at that trendy furniture store and the palm oil that's key to a favorite family recipe all have elements ripped from the habitat of a threatened or endangered animal somewhere in the world.

Goods that sit in stores across the United States had their origins in areas where monkeys, toads, sea cows and big cats live. Those elements, which animals in shrinking habitats need to survive, are used in products made by 15,000 industries worldwide and consumed in 187 countries, disproportionately in the United States and Europe. More than 6,500 species of wildlife suffer because of it.

[The world just agreed to the strongest protections ever for endangered animals]

This was first quantified in 2012, when scientists estimated that trade and exports accounted for a third of all threats to wildlife. But for the first time, a study by researchers in Japan and Norway pinpoints the affected habitats of all those species - in the hope of helping to focus the work of conservationists who track the effect of human trade.

The researchers, Daniel Moran of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Keiichiro Kanemoto of Shinshu University in Japan, laid relatively new global supply-chain databases over the habitats of endangered species listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and BirdLife International. That identified areas the scientists call threatened biodiversity hot spots. The research was published this week in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

"Biodiversity hot spots is a well studied topic, and it is known that the last reserves of biodiversity are harbored in a small number of places," Moran said Wednesday by email. "Economic pressure, even at the margin and in small increments, exerts pressure at these places. Almost any human pressure at the places, unless very well managed, will have a big impact on species there."

Logging in Brazil to create products that wind up in the United States, for example, cuts down trees used by red-face spider monkeys. Fishery trade and gold mined and bound for Japan affects mangroves off Papua New Guinea that are home to diverse plant species and an endangered sea cow. A hydroelectric dam that traps water to irrigate agriculture, including trees that produce palm oil exported to other parts of Europe and the United States, threatens the Iberian lynx.

[Scientists say 75 percent of the spotted leopard's habitat is gone]

Product demand in the United States also affects "marine hot spots off the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and Nicaragua at the mouth of the Orinoco around Trinidad and Tobago," the study says. "The European Union drives threats [in] hot spots outside Southeast Asia in the islands around Madagascar: Réunion, Mauritius, Seychelles.

"Despite much attention on the Amazon rain forest, the U.S. footprint in Brazil is actually greater in southern Brazil, the Brazilian Highlands, where agriculture and grazing are extensive, than inside the Amazon basin, although impacts along the Amazon river itself are high," the study notes.

Because human encroachment on animal habitats has pushed wildlife together, a small degree of impact resonates widely. "For threats driven by U.S. consumption, the 5 percent most intensively affected land area covers 23.6 percent of its total impact on species, and at sea the 5 percent most intensively impacted marine area affects 60.7 percent of threatened species habitats," according to the study.

"Almost all food and fiber is implicated," Moran said. Yet not every threat to animals can be attributed to industry. Disease kills multitudes of wildlife, and invasive species, another byproduct of international trade, kill native animals and compete with them for habitat. Individual products used by humans are a limited threat, but there are so many products that they amount to death by a thousand cuts.

"Together they add up," Moran said. "In general, it is very difficult to find a specific threat cause; species lose ground due to a combination of factors like habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, pollution, climate change."
Read more: This is the most adorable porpoise you'll probably never see. It's almost extinct. A malicious fungus is preying on the most diverse salamander population in the world. Humans kill tens of thousands of sharks each year. Sharks kill few humans. Guess which gets the bad rap.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Just about everything you buy came at the expense of an endangered animal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The cup of joe that helped you get through the morning, the must-have chair purchased at that trendy furniture store and the palm oil that's key to a favorite family recipe all have elements ripped from the habitat of a threatened or endangered animal somewhere in the world.

# data[].attributes.headline
3 Dams to Be Removed in American West to Restore Rivers

# data[].attributes.subject
3 Dams to Be Removed in American West to Restore Rivers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Within a decade, the Yakama people of south-central Washington State should be able to harvest salmon once again with spears, nets, and other traditional methods along tributaries of the Yakima River.

"We want to return to serving as stewards of the land," says Philip Rigdon, the deputy director of natural resources for the Yakama Nation.

To make that possible, the Nelson Dam needs to come down. The eight-foot-high irrigation diversion dam on the Naches River sits just upstream of the City of Yakima on the largest tributary of the Yakima River, which flows into the Columbia River. Built in the 1920s, the now unneeded dam blocks the movement of salmon through the area, choking off the ecosystem's lifeline.

But once the dam is taken out-by 2020, proponents of the removal hope-it will allow fish and nutrients to flow downstream. It will also reduce the risk of flooding in the area. ( Learn more about the rapid restoration of a river after dam removal.)

And perhaps surprisingly, removal of the dam will actually increase the water and climate resilience of the area, says Michael Scott, acting director of the environment program of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. That's because pooling water in a reservoir leads to more evaporation, while sending water downstream means it can recharge natural aquifers.

The Nelson Dam removal project, a joint effort by the Yakama Nation and local, state, and federal agencies, is one of three test cases the Hewlett Foundation is supporting as part of its new Open Rivers Fund. On November 29, Giving Tuesday, the foundation announced the creation of that program with a gift of $50 million, honoring the foundation's 50th anniversary and setting up the largest fund to date that's devoted to dam removal. The money will be administered by the independent Resources Legacy Fund.

"The idea is to build community, not just give money," says Scott. "We are not going to be funding advocacy efforts to try to take out dams, we are looking for places where the community has already come together and decided to remove a dam but they need a little extra help in getting it done."

Dam removal projects that will provide significant ecological benefits, such as the Nelson, are of the highest priority, says Scott. Another requirement is that the structure be a "deadbeat dam"-one that has outlived its useful life and has now become a hazard.

More than 14,000 such dams exist around the country already. By 2020, more than 70 percent of the United States' dams will be more than 50 years old, with many of those soon becoming candidates for removal. It's a growing movement, with dozens of dams coming down every year. The main obstacle is the often high price tag of removal, which can run tens of millions of dollars. Yet maintaining old dams and retrofitting them to meet newer standards also comes at a cost.

Just taking out a dam isn't the whole picture, adds Rigdon. To get the most benefits to the environment and community, a dam removal should be part of a wider restoration plan-like the Yakama Nation's 30-year plan for the Yakima Basin. The nation came to this decision after realizing that securing rights to half of the area's fish in the 1960s would actually amount to little if it ended up being "half of nothing," says Rigdon.

The Yakama Nation has already worked with government and nonprofit partners to dismantle the 125-foot, nearly hundred-year old Condit Dam. It finally came down in 2011. Within months, steelhead returned to the river.

The 'DamNation' Dam

Another deadbeat dam that will likely be demolished soon, thanks to the Open Rivers Fund, is the 168-foot-tall Matilija Dam in California's Ventura County, which was featured in the documentary DamNation with graffiti of scissors cutting it apart. Built in 1947 along a tributary to the Ventura River, the dam is so silted that it no longer can effectively store water for agriculture, its original purpose. ( Watch a haunting clip from the film.)

Patagonia, the Ventura-based outdoor clothing and gear company, is working with the other members of the Matilija Coalition-Surfrider and California Trout-to raise the remaining funds needed to take out the dam by 2020 (with new support from Open Rivers). It would be the largest dam removal in California history, eclipsing the recent San Clemente project.

"The Matilija is right in Patagonia's backyard and it needs to come down," says Lisa Pike Sheehy, vice president of environmental activism at the company. "We want rivers to be free." Free for fish and other organisms, she adds-but also for anglers, rafters, and paddlers.

The Rogue River

The third dam site the Hewlett Foundation's fund is targeting is actually a series of small dams and other impediments in the Rogue River Basin in southwestern Oregon. The river's mainstem flows free for 150 miles, earning the federal designation of Wild and Free. But other barriers in the drainage system block fish and movement of nutrients, while no longer serving useful functions.

The foundation is working with the Rogue Basin Partnership and the Rogue River Watershed Council to put together a plan to remove up to 50 dams and impediments over the next 10 years. It's an important contribution to a movement that is growing but which still has a long way to go, supporters say.

Dam removals tend to captivate the public because they are ultimately about water and restoring natural systems, says Scott. "And it doesn't hurt that they often involve explosions."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
3 Dams to Be Removed in American West to Restore Rivers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Within a decade, the Yakama people of south-central Washington State should be able to harvest salmon once again with spears, nets, and other traditional methods along tributaries of the Yakima River. "We want to return to serving as stewards of the land," says Philip Rigdon, the deputy director of natural resources for the Yakama Nation.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Freaky Food Chain Behind Your Lobster Dinner - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
The Freaky Food Chain Behind Your Lobster Dinner - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Most food chains, we learn in grade school, start with life-forms that make their own food using light. Through photosynthesis, plants, algae and some bacteria are able to convert carbon dioxide and water into organic carbon. This magical process ultimately sustains almost all life on Earth. But it's not the only way organisms make food from scratch.

Lucinid clams get nourishment from symbiotic bacteria living in their gills. These bacteria use an alternative food-producing strategy, called chemosynthesis. Instead of relying on sunlight for fuel, they use the energy released from decomposing leaf litter in sea grass beds to turn carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide - the rotten-egg-smelling ingredient in swamp gas - into organic carbon.

This "dark carbon," so named because it is produced in the absence of light, then makes its way up the food chain, from clams, to lobsters and then to predators like sharks, turtles and you and me as we tuck into our lobster dinner on a Saturday night.

This research fills in gaps from photosynthesis-based measurements of sea grass productivity, which fail to account for all the fisheries production that sea grass systems generate, said Brian R. Silliman, a professor of marine conservation biology at Duke University who was not involved in the research.

"There was some carbon missing from these measurements," he said. This study suggests "it's coming from a spot we hadn't suspected."

To deduce the diet of Caribbean spiny lobsters, Dr. Higgs's team compared the chemical makeup of muscle samples from 160 lobsters to samples of different items in their diet, including algae, sea grass, sponges, shrimp and lucinid clams.

In particular, the scientists looked at characteristic signatures of different elements, including sulfur. Lucinid clams specifically "have a very distinctive sulfur signature, because of the way they produce their food through sulfide-based chemosynthesis," Dr. Higgs said.

Researchers have known for decades that chemosynthesis abounds in the deep sea, where there is no light. But in recent years, studies like this one have shown that chemosynthesis may play an unexpectedly important role in shallower rivers, lakes and coastal ecosystems.

Scientists knew that in sea grass beds, organisms like clams and marine worms relied on chemosynthesis, but they believed the process accounted for a relatively small amount of energy production in these habitats.

Lucinid clams live 5 to 25 centimeters below the sediment, in a dense mat of tough sea grass roots. How spiny lobsters are able to dig them up remains a mystery.

"People thought they just lived and died down there," Dr. Higgs said. "Everyone assumed this was a dead end in the food chain."

Over all, this study is a big win for chemosynthesizers, underdogs among nature's food makers. Without them, the Caribbean spiny lobster fishery, which generates more than $450 million a year, would not be as robust as it is.

Next, Dr. Higgs wants to search for other species that feed on chemosynthesizers. He suspects chemosynthesis makes an underappreciated contribution to ecosystems around the world. "I think this is just the tip of the iceberg," he said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Freaky Food Chain Behind Your Lobster Dinner

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Most food chains, we learn in grade school, start with life-forms that make their own food using light. Through photosynthesis, plants, algae and some bacteria are able to convert carbon dioxide and water into organic carbon. This magical process ultimately sustains almost all life on Earth.

# data[].attributes.headline
These Are the Most Valuable Roadless Areas Left on Earth

# data[].attributes.subject
These Are the Most Valuable Roadless Areas Left on Earth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Wild lands void of roads are among the last relatively undisturbed parts of the planet. Although as much as 80 percent of Earth's land surface is still roadless, that territory has been fragmented into nearly 600,000 pieces, according to new research published today in Science.

These areas are often critical refuges of biodiversity and crucial for regulating the water cycle and the climate, the authors of the study argue. "With the length of roads projected to increase by >60% globally from 2010 to 2050," they write, "there is an urgent need for the development of a comprehensive global strategy for road development if continued biodiversity loss is to be abated."

Using OpenStreetMap's crowdsourced data for more than 36 million kilometers of roads, the international team of researchers-led by Pierre Ibisch of Germany's Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development -mapped all the roadless areas on Earth (above), excluding Greenland and Antarctica. Because the impact of roads extends well beyond their actual surface area-due to things like pollution, noise, transport of pests and invasive species, soil erosion, and increased human access-they included areas that are at least one kilometer away from a road. They calculated that around 105 million of the 132 million square kilometers of land on Earth remains roadless.

This number almost certainly overestimates the undisturbed territory, the researchers say, because the effects of some roads, particularly major highways, penetrate much farther than five kilometers. And, though OpenStreetMap is the most complete global data set of roads freely available, many tropical countries have not been thoroughly mapped. The rapid pace of road construction in some areas also means many new roads are not yet on the map.

Once the researchers had mapped the roadless areas, they determined an ecological value for the patches based on their size, biodiversity, and importance to the ecosystem (above). Most of the remaining roadless areas are small: Of the 600,000 patches, half are less than 1 square kilometer, 80 percent are less than 5 square kilometers, and just 7 percent of the areas are larger than 100 square kilometers. A quarter of the roadless areas are sparsely inhabited, treeless, and largely barren land. A third are rangelands. Some of the largest remaining patches are in lush, biologically rich areas like the Amazon and the boreal forests of North America.

Unfortunately, the researchers conclude, just 9.3 percent of the remaining roadless areas are currently protected by international conservation efforts. With scientific evidence of the negative impacts of roads piling up, they argue that the most ecologically valuable roadless areas on their map should be prioritized.

"Limiting road expansion into roadless areas," they write, "may prove to be the most cost effective and straightforward way of achieving strategically important global biodiversity and sustainability goals."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
These Are the Most Valuable Roadless Areas Left on Earth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wild lands void of roads are among the last relatively undisturbed parts of the planet. Although as much as 80 percent of Earth's land surface is still roadless, that territory has been fragmented into nearly 600,000 pieces, according to new research published today in Science.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest - The New Yorker

# data[].attributes.subject
The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest - The New Yorker

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.

When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan-that one was the third of the week-and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.

Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars' worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.

When Goldfinger looked at his watch, it was quarter to three. The conference was wrapping up for the day. He was thinking about sushi. The speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his talk. The earthquake was not particularly strong. Then it ticked past the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week. The shaking intensified. The seats in the conference room were small plastic desks with wheels. Goldfinger, who is tall and solidly built, thought, No way am I crouching under one of those for cover. At a minute and a half, everyone in the room got up and went outside.

It was March. There was a chill in the air, and snow flurries, but no snow on the ground. Nor, from the feel of it, was there ground on the ground. The earth snapped and popped and rippled. It was, Goldfinger thought, like driving through rocky terrain in a vehicle with no shocks, if both the vehicle and the terrain were also on a raft in high seas. The quake passed the two-minute mark. The trees, still hung with the previous autumn's dead leaves, were making a strange rattling sound. The flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just vacated was whipping through an arc of forty degrees. The building itself was base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body of a structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its foundation. Goldfinger lurched over to take a look. The base was lurching, too, back and forth a foot at a time, digging a trench in the yard. He thought better of it, and lurched away. His watch swept past the three-minute mark and kept going.

Oh, shit, Goldfinger thought, although not in dread, at first: in amazement. For decades, seismologists had believed that Japan could not experience an earthquake stronger than magnitude 8.4. In 2005, however, at a conference in Hokudan, a Japanese geologist named Yasutaka Ikeda had argued that the nation should expect a magnitude 9.0 in the near future-with catastrophic consequences, because Japan's famous earthquake-and-tsunami preparedness, including the height of its sea walls, was based on incorrect science. The presentation was met with polite applause and thereafter largely ignored. Now, Goldfinger realized as the shaking hit the four-minute mark, the planet was proving the Japanese Cassandra right.

For a moment, that was pretty cool: a real-time revolution in earthquake science. Almost immediately, though, it became extremely uncool, because Goldfinger and every other seismologist standing outside in Kashiwa knew what was coming. One of them pulled out a cell phone and started streaming videos from the Japanese broadcasting station NHK, shot by helicopters that had flown out to sea soon after the shaking started. Thirty minutes after Goldfinger first stepped outside, he watched the tsunami roll in, in real time, on a two-inch screen.

In the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast Japan, triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an estimated two hundred and twenty billion dollars. The shaking earlier in the week turned out to be the foreshocks of the largest earthquake in the nation's recorded history. But for Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and one of the world's leading experts on a little-known fault line, the main quake was itself a kind of foreshock: a preview of another earthquake still to come.

Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing "the big one." That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2-a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.

Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The "Cascadia" part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The "subduction zone" part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth's continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.

Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.

Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop-the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent-and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way-your first two fingers, say-the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That' s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That's the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west-losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA 's Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, "Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast."

In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. "This is one time that I'm hoping all the science is wrong, and it won't happen for another thousand years," Murphy says.

In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger-or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.

In May of 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, together with their Corps of Discovery, set off from St. Louis on America's first official cross-country expedition. Eighteen months later, they reached the Pacific Ocean and made camp near the present-day town of Astoria, Oregon. The United States was, at the time, twenty-nine years old. Canada was not yet a country. The continent's far expanses were so unknown to its white explorers that Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned the journey, thought that the men would come across woolly mammoths. Native Americans had lived in the Northwest for millennia, but they had no written language, and the many things to which the arriving Europeans subjected them did not include seismological inquiries. The newcomers took the land they encountered at face value, and at face value it was a find: vast, cheap, temperate, fertile, and, to all appearances, remarkably benign.

A century and a half elapsed before anyone had any inkling that the Pacific Northwest was not a quiet place but a place in a long period of quiet. It took another fifty years to uncover and interpret the region's seismic history. Geology, as even geologists will tell you, is not normally the sexiest of disciplines; it hunkers down with earthly stuff while the glory accrues to the human and the cosmic-to genetics, neuroscience, physics. But, sooner or later, every field has its field day, and the discovery of the Cascadia subduction zone stands as one of the greatest scientific detective stories of our time.

The first clue came from geography. Almost all of the world's most powerful earthquakes occur in the Ring of Fire, the volcanically and seismically volatile swath of the Pacific that runs from New Zealand up through Indonesia and Japan, across the ocean to Alaska, and down the west coast of the Americas to Chile. Japan, 2011, magnitude 9.0; Indonesia, 2004, magnitude 9.1; Alaska, 1964, magnitude 9.2; Chile, 1960, magnitude 9.5-not until the late nineteen-sixties, with the rise of the theory of plate tectonics, could geologists explain this pattern. The Ring of Fire, it turns out, is really a ring of subduction zones. Nearly all the earthquakes in the region are caused by continental plates getting stuck on oceanic plates-as North America is stuck on Juan de Fuca-and then getting abruptly unstuck. And nearly all the volcanoes are caused by the oceanic plates sliding deep beneath the continental ones, eventually reaching temperatures and pressures so extreme that they melt the rock above them.

The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, "all the right anatomical parts." Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a major earthquake-or, for that matter, any quake to speak of. By contrast, other subduction zones produce major earthquakes occasionally and minor ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude 4.0, magnitude why are the neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can scarcely spend a week in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You can spend a lifetime in many parts of the Northwest-several, in fact, if you had them to spend-and not feel so much as a quiver. The question facing geologists in the nineteen-seventies was whether the Cascadia subduction zone had ever broken its eerie silence.

In the late nineteen-eighties, Brian Atwater, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey, and a graduate student named David Yamaguchi found the answer, and another major clue in the Cascadia puzzle. Their discovery is best illustrated in a place called the ghost forest, a grove of western red cedars on the banks of the Copalis River, near the Washington coast. When I paddled out to it last summer, with Atwater and Yamaguchi, it was easy to see how it got its name. The cedars are spread out across a low salt marsh on a wide northern bend in the river, long dead but still standing. Leafless, branchless, barkless, they are reduced to their trunks and worn to a smooth silver-gray, as if they had always carried their own tombstones inside them.

What killed the trees in the ghost forest was saltwater. It had long been assumed that they died slowly, as the sea level around them gradually rose and submerged their roots. But, by 1987, Atwater, who had found in soil layers evidence of sudden land subsidence along the Washington coast, suspected that that was backward-that the trees had died quickly when the ground beneath them plummeted. To find out, he teamed up with Yamaguchi, a specialist in dendrochronology, the study of growth-ring patterns in trees. Yamaguchi took samples of the cedars and found that they had died simultaneously: in tree after tree, the final rings dated to the summer of 1699. Since trees do not grow in the winter, he and Atwater concluded that sometime between August of 1699 and May of 1700 an earthquake had caused the land to drop and killed the cedars. That time frame predated by more than a hundred years the written history of the Pacific Northwest-and so, by rights, the detective story should have ended there.

But it did not. If you travel five thousand miles due west from the ghost forest, you reach the northeast coast of Japan. As the events of 2011 made clear, that coast is vulnerable to tsunamis, and the Japanese have kept track of them since at least 599 A.D. In that fourteen-hundred-year history, one incident has long stood out for its strangeness. On the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of the Genroku era, a six-hundred-mile-long wave struck the coast, levelling homes, breaching a castle moat, and causing an accident at sea. The Japanese understood that tsunamis were the result of earthquakes, yet no one felt the ground shake before the Genroku event. The wave had no discernible origin. When scientists began studying it, they called it an orphan tsunami.

Finally, in a 1996 article in Nature, a seismologist named Kenji Satake and three colleagues, drawing on the work of Atwater and Yamaguchi, matched that orphan to its parent-and thereby filled in the blanks in the Cascadia story with uncanny specificity. At approximately nine o' clock at night on January 26, 1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the ocean. It reached Japan on January 27, 1700: by the local calendar, the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of Genroku.

Once scientists had reconstructed the 1700 earthquake, certain previously overlooked accounts also came to seem like clues. In 1964, Chief Louis Nookmis, of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, in British Columbia, told a story, passed down through seven generations, about the eradication of Vancouver Island's Pachena Bay people. "I think it was at nighttime that the land shook," Nookmis recalled. According to another tribal history, "They sank at once, were all drowned; not one survived." A hundred years earlier, Billy Balch, a leader of the Makah tribe, recounted a similar story. Before his own time, he said, all the water had receded from Washington State's Neah Bay, then suddenly poured back in, inundating the entire region. Those who survived later found canoes hanging from the trees. In a 2005 study, Ruth Ludwin, then a seismologist at the University of Washington, together with nine colleagues, collected and analyzed Native American reports of earthquakes and saltwater floods. Some of those reports contained enough information to estimate a date range for the events they described. On average, the midpoint of that range was 1701.

It does not speak well of European-Americans that such stories counted as evidence for a proposition only after that proposition had been proved. Still, the reconstruction of the Cascadia earthquake of 1700 is one of those rare natural puzzles whose pieces fit together as tectonic plates do not: perfectly. It is wonderful science. It was wonderful for science. And it was terrible news for the millions of inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest. As Goldfinger put it, "In the late eighties and early nineties, the paradigm shifted to 'uh-oh.' "

Goldfinger told me this in his lab at Oregon State, a low prefab building that a passing English major might reasonably mistake for the maintenance department. Inside the lab is a walk-in freezer. Inside the freezer are floor-to-ceiling racks filled with cryptically labelled tubes, four inches in diameter and five feet long. Each tube contains a core sample of the seafloor. Each sample contains the history, written in seafloorese, of the past ten thousand years. During subduction-zone earthquakes, torrents of land rush off the continental slope, leaving a permanent deposit on the bottom of the ocean. By counting the number and the size of deposits in each sample, then comparing their extent and consistency along the length of the Cascadia subduction zone, Goldfinger and his colleagues were able to determine how much of the zone has ruptured, how often, and how drastically.

Thanks to that work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia's recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long-long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent's worst fault line-and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.

It is possible to quibble with that number. Recurrence intervals are averages, and averages are tricky: ten is the average of nine and eleven, but also of eighteen and two. It is not possible, however, to dispute the scale of the problem. The devastation in Japan in 2011 was the result of a discrepancy between what the best science predicted and what the region was prepared to withstand. The same will hold true in the Pacific Northwest-but here the discrepancy is enormous. "The science part is fun," Goldfinger says. "And I love doing it. But the gap between what we know and what we should do about it is getting bigger and bigger, and the action really needs to turn to responding. Otherwise, we're going to be hammered. I've been through one of these massive earthquakes in the most seismically prepared nation on earth. If that was Portland"-Goldfinger finished the sentence with a shake of his head before he finished it with words. "Let's just say I would rather not be here."

The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors, alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the general public can take cover. The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest.

Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines. Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off-or, rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations, together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.

Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries ( DOGAMI), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings-more than three thousand of them schools-will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland's two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.

Certain disasters stem from many small problems conspiring to cause one very large problem. For want of a nail, the war was lost; for fifteen independently insignificant errors, the jetliner was lost. Subduction-zone earthquakes operate on the opposite principle: one enormous problem causes many other enormous problems. The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region-up to thirty thousand of them in Seattle alone, the city's emergency-management office estimates. It will also induce a process called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid ground starts behaving like a liquid, to the detriment of anything on top of it. Fifteen per cent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including seventeen day-care centers and the homes of some thirty-four thousand five hundred people. So is Oregon's critical energy-infrastructure hub, a six-mile stretch of Portland through which flows ninety per cent of the state's liquid fuel and which houses everything from electrical substations to natural-gas terminals. Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties-and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible. For the seventy-one thousand people who live in Cascadia's inundation zone, that will mean evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster ends and before another begins. They will be notified to do so only by the earthquake itself-"a vibrate-alert system," Kevin Cupples, the city planner for the town of Seaside, Oregon, jokes-and they are urged to leave on foot, since the earthquake will render roads impassable. Depending on location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to get out. That time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. "When that tsunami is coming, you run," Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission ( OSSPAC), says. "You protect yourself, you don't turn around, you don't go back to save anybody. You run for your life."

The time to save people from a tsunami is before it happens, but the region has not yet taken serious steps toward doing so. Hotels and businesses are not required to post evacuation routes or to provide employees with evacuation training. In Oregon, it has been illegal since 1995 to build hospitals, schools, firehouses, and police stations in the inundation zone, but those which are already in it can stay, and any other new construction is permissible: energy facilities, hotels, retirement homes. In those cases, builders are required only to consult with DOGAMI about evacuation plans. "So you come in and sit down," Ian Madin says. "And I say, 'That's a stupid idea.' And you say, 'Thanks. Now we've consulted.' "

These lax safety policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not get out. Twenty-two per cent of Oregon's coastal population is sixty-five or older. Twenty-nine per cent of the state's population is disabled, and that figure rises in many coastal counties. "We can't save them," Kevin Cupples says. "I'm not going to sugarcoat it and say, 'Oh, yeah, we'll go around and check on the elderly.' No. We won't." Nor will anyone save the tourists. Washington State Park properties within the inundation zone see an average of seventeen thousand and twenty-nine guests a day. Madin estimates that up to a hundred and fifty thousand people visit Oregon's beaches on summer weekends. "Most of them won't have a clue as to how to evacuate," he says. "And the beaches are the hardest place to evacuate from."

Those who cannot get out of the inundation zone under their own power will quickly be overtaken by a greater one. A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water-not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.

To see the full scale of the devastation when that tsunami recedes, you would need to be in the international space station. The inundation zone will be scoured of structures from California to Canada. The earthquake will have wrought its worst havoc west of the Cascades but caused damage as far away as Sacramento, California-as distant from the worst-hit areas as Fort Wayne, Indiana, is from New York. FEMA expects to coördinate search-and-rescue operations across a hundred thousand square miles and in the waters off four hundred and fifty-three miles of coastline. As for casualties: the figures I cited earlier-twenty-seven thousand injured, almost thirteen thousand dead-are based on the agency's official planning scenario, which has the earthquake striking at 9:41 A.M. on February 6th. If, instead, it strikes in the summer, when the beaches are full, those numbers could be off by a horrifying margin.

Wineglasses, antique vases, Humpty Dumpty, hip bones, hearts: what breaks quickly generally mends slowly, if at all. OSSPAC estimates that in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities. On the coast, those numbers go up. Whoever chooses or has no choice but to stay there will spend three to six months without electricity, one to three years without drinking water and sewage systems, and three or more years without hospitals. Those estimates do not apply to the tsunami-inundation zone, which will remain all but uninhabitable for years.

How much all this will cost is anyone's guess; FEMA puts every number on its relief-and-recovery plan except a price. But whatever the ultimate figure-and even though U.S. taxpayers will cover seventy-five to a hundred per cent of the damage, as happens in declared disasters-the economy of the Pacific Northwest will collapse. Crippled by a lack of basic services, businesses will fail or move away. Many residents will flee as well. OSSPAC predicts a mass-displacement event and a long-term population downturn. Chris Goldfinger didn't want to be there when it happened. But, by many metrics, it will be as bad or worse to be there afterward.

On the face of it, earthquakes seem to present us with problems of space: the way we live along fault lines, in brick buildings, in homes made valuable by their proximity to the sea. But, covertly, they also present us with problems of time. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism-an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.

This problem is bidirectional. The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton's "San Andreas," while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.

That problem is not specific to earthquakes, of course. The Cascadia situation, a calamity in its own right, is also a parable for this age of ecological reckoning, and the questions it raises are ones that we all now face. How should a society respond to a looming crisis of uncertain timing but of catastrophic proportions? How can it begin to right itself when its entire infrastructure and culture developed in a way that leaves it profoundly vulnerable to natural disaster?

The last person I met with in the Pacific Northwest was Doug Dougherty, the superintendent of schools for Seaside, which lies almost entirely within the tsunami-inundation zone. Of the four schools that Dougherty oversees, with a total student population of sixteen hundred, one is relatively safe. The others sit five to fifteen feet above sea level. When the tsunami comes, they will be as much as forty-five feet below it.

In 2009, Dougherty told me, he found some land for sale outside the inundation zone, and proposed building a new K-12 campus there. Four years later, to foot the hundred-and-twenty-eight-million-dollar bill, the district put up a bond measure. The tax increase for residents amounted to two dollars and sixteen cents per thousand dollars of property value. The measure failed by sixty-two per cent. Dougherty tried seeking help from Oregon's congressional delegation but came up empty. The state makes money available for seismic upgrades, but buildings within the inundation zone cannot apply. At present, all Dougherty can do is make sure that his students know how to evacuate.

Some of them, however, will not be able to do so. At an elementary school in the community of Gearhart, the children will be trapped. "They can't make it out from that school," Dougherty said. "They have no place to go." On one side lies the ocean; on the other, a wide, roadless bog. When the tsunami comes, the only place to go in Gearhart is a small ridge just behind the school. At its tallest, it is forty-five feet high-lower than the expected wave in a full-margin earthquake. For now, the route to the ridge is marked by signs that say "Temporary Tsunami Assembly Area." I asked Dougherty about the state's long-range plan. "There is no long-range plan," he said.

Dougherty's office is deep inside the inundation zone, a few blocks from the beach. All day long, just out of sight, the ocean rises up and collapses, spilling foamy overlapping ovals onto the shore. Eighty miles farther out, ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea, the hand of a geological clock is somewhere in its slow sweep. All across the region, seismologists are looking at their watches, wondering how long we have, and what we will do, before geological time catches up to our own. ♦

*An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the area of impact.

Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and a National Magazine Award for " The Really Big One," her story on the seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of " Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error."
Read more "

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan-that one was the third of the week-and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference.

# data[].attributes.headline
Most Primate Species Threatened With Extinction, Scientists Find - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Most Primate Species Threatened With Extinction, Scientists Find - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Matter

Clockwise from top left: a juvenile gorilla, Hainan gibbon; golden lion tamarin; Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, gorilla and 4-month-old baby and adult gorilla. Center left, a black-and-white ruffed lemur; center right, a crested black macaque ape. Credit... Russell A. Mittermeier/Conservation International; Yang Guanyu, via Xinhua, via Alamy Live News; Russell A. Mittermeier, via Conservation International; Paul. A. Garber; Russell A. Mittermeier, via Conservation International; Levi S. Norton; Sterling Zumbrunn, via Conservation International; Robin Moore

Our fellow primates are in trouble.

In a study of unprecedented scope, a team of 31 primatologists has analyzed every known species of primate to judge how they are faring. The news for man's closest animal relatives is not good.

Three-quarters of primate species are in decline, the researchers found, and about 60 percent are now threatened with extinction. From gorillas to gibbons, primates are in significantly worse shape now than in recent decades because of the devastation from agriculture, hunting and mining.

"I think we're going to get quite a number of extinctions within next 50 years if things go on the way they are," said Anthony B. Rylands, a senior research scientist at Conservation International and a co-author of the new study, which was published in Science Advances.

"It's a landmark paper," said Anne D. Yoder, the director of the Duke Lemur Center, who was not involved in the study. "It's alarming without being alarmist."

Taking stock of every primate species on Earth was a huge challenge, in part because scientists keep finding new ones. Since 2000, 85 new primate species have been identified, bringing the total to 505.

Just last week, a team of researchers described a new species of gibbon in China. Dr. Rylands said he knows of at least seven new primate species to be announced this year.

Scientists are finding so many new primate species in part because the destruction of forests is making it easier to reach populations that were once remote.

"There is a certain rush of people in a panic, realizing that if they don't find and describe them, they will be lost without us ever knowing them," said Dr. Rylands.

Another reason for the burst of discovery is that scientists have started investigating the DNA of primates, finding that some populations had unique mutations..

"There are distinct species that have been around for millions of years, even though they look to our eyes very similar," said Dr. Yoder. Unfortunately, she noted, new species revealed by DNA often turn out to exist in perilously low numbers.

The new research was not all bad news for primates.

"Some species are doing O.K.," said Katherine C. MacKinnon, an anthropologist at Saint Louis University and a co-author of the study. "The ones that are doing O.K. are the ones that aren't super-specialists, the ones that are most flexible."

But most species are not so flexible. Every species of ape (including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and 19 species of gibbons) is threatened, while 87 percent of lemur species are. Other species that are critically endangered include the brown-headed spider monkey of Ecuador, the Niger Delta red colobus, and the crested macaque, an Indonesian species famous for having taken a selfie with a photographer's camera.

"It's worse than we thought 10 years ago," Dr. MacKinnon said.

She and her colleagues identified a number of human activities pushing primates to the edge, such as hunting. In West Africa, for example, there is a strong demand in local markets for primate meat.

"The forests are still standing, but they've shot everything out of it," said Dr. Rylands.

The incentives to kill primates are not only local, though. A lot of primate meat is making its way to China, along with body parts falsely believed to have healing powers.

"They'll import enormous amounts from around Southeast Asia," said Dr. Rylands. "They're a driving force through the whole region."

Primates are also threatened by the wholesale destruction of forests to make way for agriculture. In the Amazon, the jungle is being converted to cattle ranches and soybean fields, while in Madagascar, rice paddies are taking the place of lemur forests.

Western countries are also helping push primates toward extinction. Palm oil can be found in everything from doughnuts to lipstick to biodiesel fuel. New palm oil plantations are completely replacing forests in Southeast Asia - one of the most primate-diverse parts of the world.

Even cellphones can add to the risks. In central Africa, miners go into rain forests to dig for an ore called coltan that ends up in phone circuits. Those miners hunt for their meals. "They live on primates," said Dr. Rylands.

Humans have already driven some primate species extinct, but it's hard to say exactly how many. Madagascar was once home to giant lemurs that could weigh as much as 350 pounds.

While Western scientists never laid eyes on these remarkable creatures, the fossil record shows that 17 lemur species became extinct after humans arrived there 2,000 years ago.

More recently, a monkey called Miss Waldron's red colobus has disappeared from its range in West Africa. It has not been spotted for over 25 years and is believed to be extinct. In China, a subspecies called the white-handed gibbon may have gone extinct as well.

Some of the most endangered primate species are down to just a few dozen survivors. Their prospects are grim, because many of them live in parts of the world where human populations are projected to grow the fastest.

In Madagascar, for example, humans may have to move deeper into lemur habitats for new farmland. "It's a pressure cooker, and there's no way to relieve the pressure," said Dr. Yoder.

The authors of the new study offer a number of reasons it is worth trying to halt the crisis.

Recent research has shown that primates are extremely important to the ecosystems in which they live. As they feed on leaves and fruit, for example, they move pollen between trees. They pass seeds in their droppings, allowing plants to spread across a healthy range.

"People used to think of primates as icing on the cake, as not being vital for ecosystems," said Dr. MacKinnon. "But now we know they are."

Primates have also been invaluable for understanding ourselves.

The first primates evolved roughly 80 million years ago, and then split into the living lineages over millions of years. By comparing our biology to those of other primates, we have learned about the evolution of our brains, our vision and our vulnerability to diseases.

If those species become extinct, we will lose the opportunity to learn more.

While the prospects are dire, Dr. Rylands said there were concrete steps that can be taken to help primates. "You have to stop hunting them and give them a place to live," he said.

That is easier said than done, he acknowledged, since the local communities where primates live are often struggling to feed their families. In some cases, it may be possible to take the pressure off primates by building fish farms as an alternate source of protein.

In other cases, communities may be able to make more money over the long term from tourist operations in intact forests than from slash-and-burn agriculture.

Dr. Rylands pointed to the golden lion tamarin as an example of how a primate species can be saved. It once lived in huge numbers in the Atlantic coastal forests of Brazil. After the forests were nearly wiped out to make way for sugar plantations and other forms of agriculture, the species nearly vanished.

In 1983, the U.S. National Zoo led an international effort to bring them back. Monkeys were bred in captivity, forests were conserved and hunting was banned.

Today, the species has a small but stable population of some 3,500 individuals in the wild.

"There are cases where you can bring them back from the brink," said Dr. Rylands. "But the immensity of the destruction of tropical forests makes it very difficult."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Most Primate Species Threatened With Extinction, Scientists Find

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Matter Our fellow primates are in trouble. In a study of unprecedented scope, a team of 31 primatologists has analyzed every known species of primate to judge how they are faring. The news for man's closest animal relatives is not good.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Far to the Next Forest? A New Way to Measure Deforestation - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
How Far to the Next Forest? A New Way to Measure Deforestation - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The difference in the magnitude of these two metrics has to do with the fact that forest attrition distance takes geographic distribution into account. Two forests can each lose 25 percent of their tree cover, but have very different forest attrition distances - and different ecological outcomes - depending on the pattern of tree removal. A high forest attrition distance means tree loss has occurred in complete swaths away from other trees. A low forest attrition distance means tree loss has occurred in patches dispersed among other trees.

Dr. Mountrakis says he believes that the new metric "goes beyond forest quantity," to give a glimpse into forest quality. He hopes it will inform conservation strategies.

"Isolated forest patches can have a very specific importance for biodiversity," he said. "As birds migrate from one location to another, for instance, they can use these isolated forests as pit stops. You can think of them as oases in a desert."

He and Mr. Yang also found that forest attrition seemed to be higher in the western United States, in rural areas and on public lands, but he noted that they needed to expand their research to better understand those trends.

Dr. Mountrakis's hope is that measuring forest attrition distance can help the public better grasp deforestation. But other forest ecologists think that a new way of presenting forest loss will add only so much and that there are broader issues at play.

"I don't think we need another metric," said Aaron Ellison, a researcher at the Harvard Forest, adding that measures of other processes like fragmentation - the breaking of large forests into smaller, disconnected forests - already provide a nuanced picture of deforestation.

Decades of scientific knowledge about forest management have not managed to halt clear-cutting and unsustainable development, Dr. Ellison said. To him, the challenge is much larger, and involves altering people's demands for short-term economic gains.

"No metric, no matter how opaque or how clear, has made a difference in that discussion during my lifetime," he said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Far to the Next Forest? A New Way to Measure Deforestation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The difference in the magnitude of these two metrics has to do with the fact that forest attrition distance takes geographic distribution into account. Two forests can each lose 25 percent of their tree cover, but have very different forest attrition distances - and different ecological outcomes - depending on the pattern of tree removal.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Endangered Species Act may be heading for the threatened list. This hearing confirmed it. - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.subject
The Endangered Species Act may be heading for the threatened list. This hearing confirmed it. - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Senate hearing to "modernize the Endangered Species Act" unfolded Wednesday just as supporters of the law had feared, with round after round of criticism from Republican lawmakers who said the federal effort to keep species from going extinct encroaches on states' rights, is unfair to landowners and stymies efforts by mining companies to extract resources and create jobs.

The two-hour meeting of the Environment and Public Works Committee was led by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who said last month that his focus in a bid to change the act would be "eliminating a lot of the red tape and the bureaucratic burdens that have been impacting our ability to create jobs," according to a report in Energy and Environment News.

In his opening remarks, Barrasso declared that the act "is not working today," adding that "states, counties, wildlife managers, home builders, construction companies, farmers, ranchers and other stakeholders" have made that clear in complaints about how it impedes land management plans, housing development and cattle grazing, particularly in western states, such as Wyoming.

Barrasso's view is in lockstep with the Trump administration, which wants to cut regulations that impede business, particularly energy cultivation. Last week, the Interior Department under President Trump delayed the start date of protections for the endangered rusty patched bumblebee, which has lost an estimated 90 percent of its population in the past two decades. The department said it is reviewing rules set by the Obama administration only weeks earlier, triggering a lawsuit from a nonprofit conservation group that called the delay and the review illegal.

At least one Republican has vowed to wage an effort to repeal the Endangered Species Act. "It has never been used for the rehabilitation of species," House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) said, according to an Associated Press report. "It's been used to control the land. We've missed the entire purpose of the Endangered Species Act. It has been hijacked."

The Endangered Species Act is a 43-year-old law enacted under the Nixon administration at a time when people were beginning to understand how dramatically chemical use and human development were devastating species. It has since saved the bald eagle, California condor, gray wolves, black-footed ferret, American alligator and Florida manatee from likely extinction.

But members of the hearing said its regulations prevented people from doing business and making a living. In a comment to a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director who testified at the hearing, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), repeated a point made by Barrasso that of more than 1,600 species listed as threatened or endangered since the act's inception, fewer than 50 have been removed.

That's about 3 percent of the total, the chairman said. "As a doctor, if I admit 100 patients to the hospital and only three recover enough to be discharged, I would deserve to lose my medical license," Inhofe said.

There was no discussion on the committee about the stability of species that were listed and recovered as a result of the act, and also no discussion of continued human expansion into the habitats of hundreds of species as their numbers dwindle.

Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) tried to make the point with a question to five members of a panel called to testify about the act: Former Wyoming governor David Freudenthal, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission Executive Director Gordon Myers, Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation President James Holte, Defenders of Wildlife chief executive Jamie Rappaport Clark and Association of Zoos and Aquariums chief executive Daniel Ashe.

Referring to research published in the journals Science and Conservation Biology that the rate of extinction across species is 1,000 times the rate before human expansion, Carper asked the panelists whether they believed the finding that Earth is on the verge of a sixth mass extinction.

Each panelist who testified the act should be significantly changed - Freudenthal, Myers and Holte - said they weren't qualified to answer such a question. Rappaport and Ashe, the most recent directors of Fish and Wildlife under presidents who are Democrats, emphatically answered yes.

Amid the din of criticism of the act, Carper asked why it was needed in the first place: Weren't states that manage their individual animal populations aware that some species were disappearing? Why didn't they act faster to save them before federal officials brought regulations?

Freudenthal took a stab at a reply. "Only in the last 15 years have state game agencies shifted to species management," he said. "Now agencies have a much broader mission."

In the years that states were less engaged, according Freudenthal, the total number of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, among others, have declined by half, Ashe said. He added that the act could use tweaking, but hardly needs an overhaul.

"The Endangered Species Act is the world's gold standard" for government conservation, Ashe said. "It's not perfect. It can be better. Your goal is to make it ... stronger and better."
More from Energy and Environment: Antarctic sea ice used to be the darling of climate change doubters. Not anymore. Hundreds of current, former EPA employees urge Senate to reject Trump's nominee for the agency The West's largest coal-fired power plant is closing. Not even Trump can save it. For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here and follow us on Twitter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Endangered Species Act may be heading for the threatened list. This hearing confirmed it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Senate hearing to "modernize the Endangered Species Act" unfolded Wednesday just as supporters of the law had feared, with round after round of criticism from Republican lawmakers who said the federal effort to keep species from going extinct encroaches on states' rights, is unfair to landowners and stymies efforts by mining companies to extract resources and create jobs.

# data[].attributes.headline
The New Threat to Wolves in and Around Yellowstone - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
The New Threat to Wolves in and Around Yellowstone - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Group dynamics also change significantly, sometimes in mercurial ways, when membership shifts or a pack loses individuals. "Personalities matter," Dr. Smith said, noting that science doesn't have a good way to assess the effect. "It's really hard."

Then there is the role of the wise wolf to consider. During pack warfare, a deciding factor can be the presence of an elder, a single wolf older than five, that is even more important than the number of wolves, researchers found.

"It was a surprise," said Kira Cassidy, a Park Service biologist and an author of the study. "I attribute it to the fact that older wolves will only engage their neighbors if they feel they are likely to win."

Research here also leads Dr. Smith to believe that wolf packs are matrilineal. Males come and go, he said, but "Gramma, Mom and the daughter are the ones that stick around" and carry on the pack through generations.

There is some evidence that the increase in hunting could alter this research. When the alpha female in the Lamar Canyon pack left Yellowstone in 2012 and was shot, the pack split into two and the alpha male left because the new alpha female was his daughter. (Wolves avoid inbreeding.)

Of course, the life of a wolf is a high-risk occupation and natural deaths occur all the time, especially when a pack tries to kill animals with hooves and horns 20 times their size. In early April, an alpha female with "a belly full of pups" was killed either by an elk or a bison, Dr. Smith said. Because only the alpha female in a group reproduces, "that means the pack won't have pups this year," he said.

Outside the park, ranchers have been vocal in their support of expanding hunting, citing real threats to their livestock.

Jon Robinett of Dubois, Wyo., says he has lost hundreds of cattle, several horses and six dogs to wolves over the last 20 years. While there are 50 wolves in his part of the Dunoir Valley, allowing hunters to take out five won't accomplish much, he said.

"Killing is what wolves do," he said, adding that even with reduced numbers, "they aren't going to quit their home range." The state compensates him for lost cattle, he said, "but it doesn't make you whole."

Some biologists say there are legitimate reasons to allow hunting, perhaps most important to placate residents. "A little blood satisfies a lot of anger," said Ed Bangs, a retired Fish and Wildlife biologist who led the effort to restore wolves to the northern Rockies.

"The wolf most likely to get harvested by a hunter is one that is in open areas with road access," the interface between ranches and wild land, Dr. Bangs said. "So hunters are removing the animals with the highest probability of getting in trouble with livestock."

Dr. Smith says the wolf personality is not the only wild card in the Yellowstone frame - humans figure in as well.

Last year, the famed white wolf left the park and went into Montana for a few days. Dr. Smith said a hunter who hates wolves sought the 11-year-old female out as a prize trophy. But the animal returned to safety in the park.

Just last month, the wolf was found with severe injuries and was euthanized. Law enforcement is investigating her death.

She was almost twice as old as most wolves here, but will be missed. "She was the most coveted wolf to see," Dr. Smith said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The New Threat to Wolves in and Around Yellowstone

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Group dynamics also change significantly, sometimes in mercurial ways, when membership shifts or a pack loses individuals. "Personalities matter," Dr. Smith said, noting that science doesn't have a good way to assess the effect. "It's really hard." Then there is the role of the wise wolf to consider.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"People are generally not accountable for their actions and full of crap," says Captain Ralph Wilkins, one of the stars of National Geographic Channel's Wicked Tuna. "What I wanted to do as a young boy was escape." His escape was the ocean. Growing up in Brooklyn, he'd ride his bike for miles until he reached the Rockaways. "Once I started with fishing, it was an obsession," he recalls. He'd spend his summers either on a boat or fishing off a pier. Wilkins doesn't eat much fish, but he developed a taste for the income it brought him. He started out catching bluefish, striped bass, and flounder - but once he graduated to a bigger boat, tuna became the prize catch.

Because his boats were small and his equipment barely up to the task, some of Wilkins's battles to reel in giant tuna took four or five hours. "Bluefin is the biggest challenge," Wilkins says. The biggest one he ever caught was 1,050 pounds. He was by himself out on the ocean. "You battle something like that for five hours and it becomes personal," he says. "It's tug of war with a fish of the sea."

From Moby-Dick to The Old Man and the Sea,fishing is often presented as a romantic, even noble, profession. It requires strength, independence, and a willingness to spend day after day with no land in sight. Over the years, the waves erode the bodies of those who spend their lives on the water. Just to stay upright, muscles must make countless contractions. Wilkins says the ocean has done its best to wear away at his skeleton. "If you look at old men getting off of boats, they're decrepit." After 30 years as a professional fisherman, he's trying to slow down - just enough to give his bones a break, but not so much that he has to stop fishing.

Today's commercial fishing vessels can catch with four employees what used to be the haul of 15 different family operations. The larger boats are nothing like the small skiff on which Hemingway's Santiago rowed out to sea, but while the industry has consolidated, the ocean still beckons. But if people keep capturing and eating bluefin tuna at current rates, the call could go unanswered.

Today, those who frequent high-end sushi restaurants may know bluefin by names like otoro or chutoro - two sought-after belly cuts so fatty that the tuna's otherwise dark-red flesh is pink, verging on white. You might have seen articles about absurdly expensive bluefin sold at Tokyo's famous Tsukiji fish market during the first sale of the new year. In 2017, a 466-pounder went for $632,000 - an astronomical price that was still a deep discount from the record-breaking $1.76 million someone paid for a 489-pound bluefin in 2013.

Until the 1970s, bluefin tuna was a literal trash fish. If it wasn't put into cat food, sport fishermen paid to have it hauled off to dumps (after taking a smiling photo next to their strung-up carcasses). Until the mid-1900s, tuna's reputation was so bad in Japan that it was referred to as neko-matagi, food too low for even a cat to eat.

Now, bluefin is the most expensive fish in the ocean. The Pacific bluefin population is at less than 3 percent of historic high levels, and last year, a number of environmental groups petitioned the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service to add the fish to its endangered-species list. Demand is so high that many upscale sushi restaurants have refused to take bluefin tuna off their menus, even amid growing concerns about the precipitously low numbers.

Compared to pandas or floppy-eared elephants, there's little public sympathy for the declining bluefin. After all, they're neither snuggly nor puppy-eyed. They're just fish. Fishermen like Wilkins who are worried about stocks collapsing keep catching the bluefin they can find because if they don't, someone else probably will. It's the Catch-22 of catching fish.

Even chefs who serve bluefin don't know how long they'll be able to continue. In 2014, Jiro Ono, the subject of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, told the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, "I can't imagine at all that sushi in the future will be made of the same materials we use today."

The world of bluefin tuna, while diminishing, is a lens into the culture and ethics of fishing; it also reflects a nation's history. Within all this, of course, are two questions: First, how did this fish go from being low-grade cat food to the most expensive fish in the world? And why can't we stop eating it?

Bluefin's rise to prominence as the ultimate sushi topping resembles the series of revitalizations that sushi itself went through to become Japan's most iconic food item. Its first iteration bears little resemblance to the fresh, light morsels on our plates today. Sushi was a way to store food. Fish were salted, covered, or stuffed with rice, and left in a barrel together for a year as the rice fermented into goop. When people were ready to eat the fish, the rice was scraped off and thrown away. Over time, the Japanese developed ways to expedite the process. They applied pressure or put vinegar in the rice to speed fermentation. None of this was a good application for bluefin, which had too high a fat content to preserve well using this method.

As the population of Japan and the new coastal capital of Edo (now Tokyo) rose, there was less of a need to preserve fish and even less time to wait for it to be ready. As Trevor Corson notes in his book The Story of Sushi, restaurants began putting fish fillets on top of vinegared rice and squeezing them in a box for just a few days, then a few hours.

Edo was ravaged by fires. Entire swaths of the city were leveled regularly, and in 1686, Corson writes, "authorities outlawed hot noodle stands during the busy dinner hours." Workers brought in to rebuild the city had little choice but to turn to sushi - a primeval fast food. Out of necessity, Japanese eaters expanded the types of fish they used to make the dish. Finally, Japan started to eat tuna, though more frequently other varieties like yellowfin, dousing it in soy sauce first to mask the taste.

Oddly, it was a love of beef that put bluefin on the dinner table. During the postwar era, American influence helped the Japanese develop a taste for fatty beef. But Japan has little room for cattle ranches and had to import its meat (based on import value, Japan is the largest meat-importing nation in the world), so the Japanese looked for similar flavors in the ocean. Bluefin is the beef of the sea - it's also the veal. A bite of otoro ( toro can be translated as "to melt") is so buttery that teeth hardly seem required.

Like beef, when a piece of bluefin tuna arrives as sashimi, diners give little thought to the giant animal it came from. The largest bluefin ever caught weighed nearly 1,500 pounds and was 13 feet long. A typical adult bluefin is only half that length (and only a third that weight), but is still an impressive sight. In underwater photos or video, divers swimming among a school of tuna are dwarfed by the big fish. But size isn't what makes bluefin meat so revered. For that, we have the fish's biodynamics to thank. The bluefin's particular way of torpedoing through the ocean is responsible for most of the flesh's nearly spreadable texture. Unlike a typical fish, which undulates using its entire body, this tuna's power comes from its crescent-shaped tail, which moves back and forth so fast that the human eye might see little more than a blur. (The U.S. Navy even modeled a spy vessel, the Robo-tuna, after the fish's peculiar swimming mechanics.) Despite having the ability to move at speeds of up to 50 mph, they seem strangely still while moving through the water. The tail is in perpetual motion, but the rest of the body shows little exertion. Less movement in the body, more fat.

Bluefin, like sharks, are passive breathers. Breathing consists of running water over their gills, which is why they have to stay in constant motion - moving at least one body length per second - to get enough oxygen in their blood. They swim across oceans this way. Bluefin sit between the world of fish and the world of mammals. They don't give birth to live young, but they're warm-blooded, unlike the majority of fish. If fishermen don't cool the tuna down after catching them, they can overheat enough to cook themselves. Bluefin aren't just the kings of fish - they're a marvel of engineering. Yet it's not until bluefin have been caught, gutted, and carved into small pieces of sashimi that we recognize their value.

By the time they get to us, they've been auctioned, portioned, shipped around the world, and artfully plated. Under restaurant lighting, they're served as pieces of otoro, chutoro, toro - all cuts of fatty tuna belly - or akami, the redder and least expensive part of the fish. The price of tuna oscillates constantly since most of the supply still comes from the wild; the price for a 400-pound fish can fluctuate from $15,000 to more than $1 million.

According to Sasha Issenberg, author of The Sushi Economy, bluefin tuna might still be swimming merrily along in record numbers if it weren't for air travel. More specifically, if it weren't for Japan Airlines (JAL). In the late 1960s, the airline was filling its cargo areas with consumer electronics to be sold to the American public, but on the way back to Japan, the giant planes were empty. An employee named Akira Okazaki was given the job of finding an American product that the Japanese prized enough to merit the higher cost of air travel. After seeing the prices bluefin tuna commanded at Tsukiji, Okazaki realized the giant fish was just what JAL was looking for.

Okazaki's idea of loading plane cargo areas with bluefin would change the global appetite for fish forever. For the first time, East Coast fishermen could reach the ravenous stomachs and pocketbooks of Japan's sushi lovers thousands of miles away. August 14, 1972, is known as "the day of the flying fish" among Japanese fish market regulars, Issenberg writes. It's the day when the first notable auction of bluefin tuna from America's Atlantic coast sold for $120,000 at Tsukiji. In short time, "flying fish" were being sent from fishermen to eaters all over the world. By 1974, 91 percent of JAL flights from Canada to Tokyo were filled with bluefin tuna. Seasonality was no longer an issue for sushi chefs; suddenly, instead of simply relying on fishing grounds close to home, migratory fish like the bluefin could be obtained as they roamed throughout their oceans-wide territories. The hunt was on. The process of capturing bluefin was expensive, but the rewards kept growing. By the 1990s, Tsukiji was selling Atlantic bluefin for $40 per pound on average. That's more than $20,000 for an average-size fish.

Fishermen who had once used little more than a boat and intuition to find bluefin soon turned to technology to reel in the diamonds of the ocean. Most boats today use GPS navigation as well as a form of sonar to help spot fish swimming beneath the surface. Bluefin can dive deeper than 3,000 feet, making them hard to locate unless they're feeding near the surface. As the population declined, an already elusive fish became even more difficult to find. In 1957, a school moving near the coast of Spain was found to occupy 7.2 million cubic meters. The Empire State Building holds only a little more than 1 million cubic meters. Even at stable population levels, it's unlikely bluefin will reach those numbers again.

A bluefin tuna usually lives from 15 to 30 years. Over just two decades, Issenberg writes, the price Atlantic fishermen could get for bluefin tuna rose 10,000 percent. And in a little more than one tuna generation, the trash fish that turned to gold became endangered.

The faction of top chefs who serve bluefin tuna is like Fight Club. No one talks about bluefin. Of the 20 top sushi restaurants around the world I contacted that serve bluefin tuna, only two offered to speak to me. There were polite responses from a few who were "unable to participate" and a lot of silence from the others.

I ask Kato, a chef at Tojo's restaurant in Vancouver, Canada, why people eat bluefin. He scoffs at the question. "Basically, it's very fatty with a nice texture," he says, as though it should be obvious. Bluefin tastes good because it tastes good, and chefs serve it because that's what belongs on the menu of a top sushi restaurant. Kato explains that the restaurant tries to be "ocean wise" in its choice of bluefin and buys only wild fish versus tunas fattened in Mediterranean fish ranches. Tojo's worries about where its fish comes from and how it's caught, and it composts instead of throws food in the garbage. For Tojo's, and many other restaurants, the act of worrying is enough.

Neal Covington, the "afishiando" for Sushi Nakazawa in New York, says that bluefin tuna is one of the restaurant's most popular items, yet far from the only type of fish it serves. Skipjack, albacore, bonito, blackfin tuna, bigeye tuna, and others are on the menu.

"With that said, bluefin will reign supreme in the diner's eyes for its range of different cuts as well as its oil content and texture," he writes in an email. "The buttery, oily, creamy texture puts it at a higher demand and into the coveted spotlight among sushi beginners and connoisseurs alike."

Most of Sushi Nakazawa's bluefin tuna comes from the East Coast. Occasionally it gets customers who request their omakase menu not include bluefin, "which we gladly accept and we take that chance to show the quality of other tunas we serve and that there are additional options," Covington says.

Though it helps that the East Coast is the nearest source of bluefin for Sushi Nakazawa, Covington says that the restaurant prefers staying domestic, considering the United States' strict adherence to fishery laws. "Great taste is any restaurant's goal," Covington writes. "With that said, if what the restaurant is using is disappearing at an alarming rate, they too will disappear at an alarming rate."

Kato takes a more macro view of the bluefin controversy. "If you destroy the planet you're not going to do any business from that point onward," he says. No planet, no ocean, no tuna. "Think about the countries getting their energy from burning coal and the deforestation of the Amazon," Kato says. "If you talk to Al Gore, he will tell you what's going to happen." When the entire planet is set up as a straw man, Kato's point is hard to refute: What good is it to save one fish while we're still destroying the ocean with pollution and acidification? Tojo's will continue to serve bluefin to its customers, but it won't broadcast that fact.

This seems odd. Is a sushi restaurant that serves bluefin under the table any better than an oil company that refuses to talk about climate change?

Tojo's is not the only one to take this approach. Nearly every high-end sushi restaurant that makes it onto a "best of" list serves some type of bluefin tuna. In the United States, the Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto has it on his menus, as do Nobu Matsuhisa and Masa Takayama. But when bluefin's precipitously declining numbers made it into the headlines in 2009, many of these chefs were attacked. A number of celebrities threatened to boycott Nobu after its menu was singled out in the documentary The End of the Line. "It's astounding lunacy to serve up endangered species for sushi," the actor and writer Stephen Fry tweeted in the midst of the debacle. "There's no justification for peddling extinction, yet that is exactly what Nobu is doing in restaurants around the world." A member of Greenpeace compared serving bluefin tuna to whipping up a "rhino burger" or "tiger steak." Greenpeace investigators later DNA-tested the fish at Nobu to confirm that it was selling bluefin. Nobu's sole response was to add an asterisk next to bluefin tuna on the menu, reminding customers that it was "environmentally challenged."

While chefs who have removed bluefin from their menus are outspoken on the subject, those who still slide a plate of delicious otoro to their customers are trying to do so discreetly. Chefs often include it in their omakase tasting menus but don't mention it on their websites or social media. It's hard not to interpret the silence as guilt.

Bluefin serves as a bastion of sushi culture and tradition; when a food item has that kind of significance, some chefs are willing to defend unsavory practices in the name of gustatory delight. When California passed a foie gras ban in 2004 (later overturned), chefs throughout the country spoke out in protest. Foie gras, lest anyone forget, commonly involves force-feeding ducks through a process called gavage, which enlarges their liver up to 10 times the normal volume. Chefs compared the rule to Prohibition and others eulogized foie gras's culinary and cultural importance in French cuisine. Every time the bluefin tuna population drops, environmentally savvy eaters rise up against the practice of serving it. Restaurants won't defend their actions yet they persevere in the shadows of "chef's choice" menus. Farm-to-table chefs that make their living off sustainability often feature foie gras on their menus, but won't serve wild-caught salmon, much less bluefin. In the restaurant world, it's one thing to entertain a spectre of cruelty in order to enjoy buttery foie gras, another to willfully serve an animal out of existence one sashimi at a time.

In general, Americans look askance at cultures where it's still acceptable to serve endangered pangolin (the world's most trafficked mammal), sea turtles, gorillas, or elephants. There are stiff penalties for violating the Endangered Species Act. The trouble is, it's not good enough for an animal to simply be endangered - it has to be added to the official list, and so far, no governing body has done so. Bluefin just isn't endangered in the right way.

It's easy to hide something in an ocean. These giant bodies of water cover 70 percent of the planet and yet, to date, humans have explored only 5 percent of them. There are shipwrecks, treasure, and undiscovered species lurking throughout the water, which ranges from wading level to more than 36,000 feet deep. One of the easiest things to lose in an ocean is a fish - even one as large as a bluefin tuna.

In this age of airplanes and satellites, mapping land animals is not a problem. As species creep closer to extinction, we can count their dwindling numbers with a fair amount of accuracy. Thanks to zoo breeding programs, even a handful of animals may be enough to repopulate a species. This is not the case for fish. We simply can't find them all. The vastness of the ocean means we will never know exactly how many of a given species occupy the deep sea. Which also means we have no idea where the line between endangered and commercially extinct is.

In 1992, Canada had to close its 500-year-old cod fishing industry because they'd fished cod to the point of near extinction. Even with the moratorium on fishing, it wasn't until 2006 that the cod fisheries were reopened and at a fraction of their earlier levels. Cod were apex predators, and when they were removed from the ecosystem, other fish stepped in, Game of Thrones -style, and took over. Cod may never be top fish again.

Pacific bluefin stocks are at only 2.6 percent of historic high levels, and no one knows whether 1 percent, 2, or even 2.5 is the magic number that will lead to commercial collapse, according to Jamie Gibbon, officer for global tuna conservation with Pew Charitable Trusts. Modern fishing requires a large investment in boats, technology, and other equipment, says Gibbon, not to mention general debt. "There's a large incentive to keep fishing even if that fishing is depleting the population," he says.

In wrestling, the term "catch as catch can" refers to a style where just about any hold on an opponent is permitted. But it could easily refer to bluefin tuna fishing. Talking about the migration patterns of the great fish, a paper in the journal Hydrobiologiasounded like it was setting up a middle school math problem: Two giant bluefin met in Ireland, then swam more than 3,000 miles apart, ending up on opposite ends of the Atlantic Ocean. Because tuna migrate so far, multiple countries fish from the same stocks. Bluefin tuna are a shared resource. Unfortunately, different nations aren't always so good at sharing.

It's a perfect example of the economic theory known as the "tragedy of the commons." Essentially, there's too much money to be made to stop one country from fishing for bluefin tuna if every other country is going to continue depleting the stock in their absence. Rather than acting in the common good - for tuna and sushi lovers - nations want to get what they can while they can.

Most bluefin tuna that aren't wild-caught are ranched in the Mediterranean. Juvenile fish are captured, brought into pens, and fattened. Fish farms are generally created in the name of sustainability (and profit), but bluefin ranches pose one of the biggest threats to the species. "In the Western Pacific, over 95 percent of the fish caught are less than three years old," Gibbon says. They're scooped up before they've had a chance to reproduce or add to the population. The ones who go free are caught by fishing boats a few years down the line. "Bluefin are caught at every stage of their life cycle," Gibbon says.

The world may have developed an appetite for sushi, but Japan still consumes roughly 80 percent of all bluefin. In 1970, before American bluefin found its way to Tokyo, Kindai University in Osaka Prefecture began researching how to breed the giant tuna in captivity. "Bluefin tuna are very delicate fish," says Syunichi Kanke of the university's Aquaculture Research Institute via email. Their method of breathing means that they need large areas to move in and their skin is sensitive and vulnerable to external damage. Mortality rates are high. Pens have to be at least 32 feet deep and 98 feet in diameter to house bluefin. Even so, young fish, which aren't as adept at steering, often fatally rammed into the walls of their pens. If self-inflicted wounds weren't the cause of death, stress-related diseases were.

"Our survival rate has gradually increased," Kanke says. It took them nine years to figure out how to raise juvenile bluefin to maturity and allow them to breed. "Today we raise the juvenile bluefin tuna from eggs, but the survival rate at 1.5 months in our hatchery is still only 3 percent on average."

Even if Kindai University succeeds in increasing the amount of farmed bluefin it can raise, there's no guarantee the Japanese public will want to buy them. To help with public perception, the university opened a restaurant in Tokyo that serves its farmed bluefin as well as other fish. The restaurant functions a bit like a focus group, allowing researchers to get direct customer feedback on the fish and what Kindai might be able to do to make them continue eating it.

Of course, farmed bluefin has its own environmental issues. Being at the top of the food chain, tuna need to eat lots of other, smaller fish. In a farm system, these lower-food-chain fish still come from the wild. While a natural ecosystem balances out the number of predators and feeder fish, farms and ranches can simply keep drawing from the ocean until small fish become endangered too. Farming bluefin tuna, while a valiant effort, may simply not provide enough benefit to the consumer or the environment to be worth it. But research will continue, because keeping bluefin around is a matter of maintaining a culture as much it is about maintaining ethical ground.

It's an outlandish idea, but what if people just stopped eating bluefin?

When Ryan Roadhouse, chef and owner of Nodoguro in Portland, Oregon, was a novice sushi chef, bluefin was an integral part of serving Japanese cuisine. "As a chef, it was important to understand it and have a palate for it and be able to identify the varying degrees of quality," Roadhouse says. The owner of the restaurant where he worked would buy it even though the fish frequently cost more than they got from customers. The chef thought it showed the restaurant's prestige. Last year, when Roadhouse went to visit that chef, whom he considers a mentor, he bragged about how he sold "the most bluefin in the [United States] right now." Roadhouse didn't know how to respond.

Ten years ago, Roadhouse was interviewed about bluefin tuna for a DiningOut magazine article, and he talked about how beautiful and delicious bluefin was. Looking back on it, he's a bit embarrassed. Only a year or two later, he stopped using bluefin.

The world of sushi is different today from when Roadhouse started, and the availability of fish has been the biggest catalyst. Rather than holding on to the past, he saw removing unsustainable fish from his menu as a chance for innovation. While Jiro Ono sees a future in which lack of availability forces sushi chefs to change the fish they put on their menus, Roadhouse and others are preemptively changing what "high-end" sushi can look like.

There's now a whole food movement devoted to "sustainable sushi." In San Francisco, patrons of Tataki restaurant will find one of Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch booklets in front of them, and a menu of only sustainable fish to match. Bamboo Sushi, with multiple locations in Portland, Oregon, and Denver, has gone so far as to put fish back into the ocean by purchasing marine reserves that function as "no-fishing zones" and safe havens for marine life. Miya's in New Haven, Connecticut, serves foods the world has too much of, devoting a section of its menu to foods made out of invasive species such as carp, lionfish, and catfish.

When Roadhouse met Kazunori Nozawa, the sushi chef of Sugarfish known as the "Sushi Nazi" for the etiquette he required of his guests, Nozawa told him that while many people believe the customers choose the restaurant or chef, the opposite is true. "The chef chooses their guests." For decades, Americans refused to eat raw fish despite Japanese chefs' attempts to serve it. The chefs persevered. Eventually the guests came.

By refusing to serve bluefin, Roadhouse is inviting a consumer base that is willing to go outside the traditional idea of high-end sushi. If someone really feels that they need bluefin, Roadhouse says, plenty of restaurants in Portland will likely serve it to them. Nodoguro is there for the diners who are ready for something different.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"People are generally not accountable for their actions and full of crap," says Captain Ralph Wilkins, one of the stars of National Geographic Channel's Wicked Tuna. "What I wanted to do as a young boy was escape." His escape was the ocean. Growing up in Brooklyn, he'd ride his bike for miles until he reached the Rockaways.