VOTE

It's election day tomorrow. In case you are an undecided voter (?) here is some guidance on environmental issues that might be useful for some of the less publicized races. As always, make up your own mind.

From the Sierra Club for California's initiatives and State Assembly and State Senate.

Sierra Club endorsements for the President, Senate and House.

From California League of Conservation voters for pretty much everything you get to vote on.

A little alarming is what they miss out here - Prop 38.

As you may have heard Prop 30 is pretty important for the University of California and your tuition fees, if it doesn't pass then the UC system will see a $375 million cut, but less publicized is Prop 38 which is a competing proposition. If BOTH pass then whichever gets the most votes will go into effect. So Prop 30 could pass and still lose if Prop 38 gets more votes. Prop 38 directs ALL of its increased revenue to K-12 and early childhood education leaving the Universities out to dry.

Here's the Green Party on Prop 38.

Being an alien I don't get to vote. Fortunately that means I don't have to pay any taxes due to the whole 'no taxation without representation' thing. Wait, what...

Two-pronged strategy

The prioritization strategies I presented on Thursday represent different options and hopefully some food for thought. How should we best allocate our limited resources? Even those advocating specific options do not always do so at the expense of other options. Mittermeier's Wilderness paper, cited and quoted below, is advocating for the preservation of wilderness as well as biodoversity hotspots rather than a sole focus on biodiversity hotspots.

Wilderness and biodiversity conservation by Mittermeier et al. PNAS, 100, 10309 (2003)
(T)he low cost and great value to humanity of the world's remaining wildernesses better justify their conservation than does their biodiversity. However, efficient global biodiversity conservation should focus on a two-pronged strategy targeting the 6.1% of the land's surface covered by the five high-biodiversity wilderness areas as well as the 1.4% covered by the hotspots. Such a strategy could conserve more than one-sixth of species as endemic to the high-biodiversity wildernesses and more than one-third to the hotspots, and the biodiversity conservation community would be wise to allocate their scarce resources accordingly.

Reasons to conserve biodiversity

From National Geographic's Photo of the Day: A flock of red-billed queleas coming to drink at the same time as an African elephant.

I want to live in  a world where events like this happen. Even if I never see something this awesome I'm still prepared to pay more for my gas, more for my food, to make sure that there are wild places where wild things happen. I do require National geographic to provide me with the occasional picture though...

Koala populations suffer the effects of low genetic diversity

Koalas, Phascolarctos cinereus, are a marsupial native to Australia. They are habitat specialists, feeding almost solely on eucalyptus leaves. Observations over recent years have shown that koala populations are diminishing at an alarming rate. Many factors endanger the continued existence of the koala, such as habitat loss, climate change, and hunting. Koalas have an extra burden to bear in that they are extremely susceptible to disease, in particular chlamydia. Once infected, a chlamydia carrying koala may develop blindness, infertility, and other disorders that are a barrier to successful reproduction.

Research suggests that the high chlamydia susceptibility seen among koalas is due to a particular virus, which is transmitted at birth and possibly during mating or fighting. This virus acts to lower a koala's immune system.

Recent research using mRNA comparisons confirm that current koala populations have an extremely low genetic diversity. Koalas populations were drastically reduced in the mid 1800s, when European settlers generated a demand for their fur. While it would seem reasonable to assume that current genetic diversity is a remnant of this hunting period, researchers now believe that koalas are still feeling the effects of some event during the pleistocene, when the only other species of koala went extinct.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121023204636.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/science/queensland-koalas-hit-by-chlamydia-infections.html?_r=0

Ecotourium

The UCSB brown-bag forum on spatial thinking presents

Assisting Endangered Spaces: Protected Area Visitor Willingness to Participate in Site Enhancement Activities

David Weaver, School of Tourism, Leisure, Hotel and Sport Management, Griffith University

12:00 p.m. Tuesday, 6 November 2012 in Ellison 5824

Abstract. The ideal of conservation/tourism symbiosis may be achieved if protected area visitors are willing to engage in activities that directly or indirectly assist those sites, but little is known about these proclivities to assist endangered spaces. Survey responses from 804 visitors to national parks in the hinterland of Australia’s Gold Coast yielded distinctive segments ranging from the ‘enthused’ to the ‘disengaged’, and associations between willingness and proximity of residence, altruistic values, self-empowerment, ‘hard ecotourism’ affiliation, and age. Aspirationally, the results will inform the creation of the world’s first ‘ecotourium’, a protected area where visitor engagement is a core management consideration.


David Weaver is Professor of Tourism Research in the School of Tourism, Leisure, Hotel and Sport Management at Griffith University, on Australia’s Gold Coast. He has formerly held academic positions in Canada and the USA, and is the author or co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, chapters and books. He specializes in sustainable tourism, ecotourism, and destination evolution dynamics, and his introductory textbook Tourism Management is widely used around the world. David is a Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism and sits on the editorial boards of seven peer-reviewed international journals.

Axolotl: last chance to grow up?

The Axolotl is a neotenous and completely aquatic salamander native to Mexico. Though the Axolotl exhibits features that only juvenile salamanders usually possess -- gills that extend far into the external environment, for example – it grows larger than these counterparts and eventually develops reproductive viability even in its neotenous form. It also has a remarkable regenerative ability.

It is a species that was once the top predator in its natural range and habitat and was a food source for the Aztec. Today, while it is found only in Xochimilco waterways, it is still exploited by Mexican natives and it faces still greater threats from declining water quality and the introduction of non-native food fishes like Asian carp and tilapia into Mexico’s waterways. The problem here is multi-faceted; these introduced fish both compete for common prey items and destroy Axolotl nesting structure. And because Axolotls are restricted to aquatic environments, the species is perhaps more prone to these kinds of threats. As a consequence, the Axolotl is quickly moving toward extinction in the wild, having faced a sixty-fold decline between 1998 and 2008.

Persistence of the Axolotl seems to be sure thing, owing to the Salamander’s ability to thrive and reproduce in captivity; and there is hope, too, for its recovery in the wild. Since Axolotls can be easily reared in captivity, they can be reintroduced to endemic areas that have been cleared of and walled off to invasive species. Still, pollution is a clear roadblock to recovery, and it remains to be seen if this problem can be mitigated in a continually urbanizing world. 

NY TIMES

The Kihansi toad's wild ride: from the brink of extinction to human engineered habitat

Captive Kihansi spray toad at Bronx Zoo. Photo courtesy of Rhett A. Butler.

The Kihansi Spray Toad, a dwarf toad, from eastern Tanzania was first discovered by scientists in 1996. 17,000 individuals once occupied a two hectare region of the Kihansi Gorge; the smallest habitat of any vertebrate known to man. Spray from surrounding waterfalls provided a moist micro-habitat for them to grow and reproduce. Just eight years later, the toad had vanished. Construction of a hydroelectric dam, coupled with disease, decimated the Kihansi spray toad population. Luckily, before complete collapse, conservationists from the Bronx Zoo were able to facilitate a population of 499 toads in captivity. This week, researchers decided to release 2,500 Kihansi spray toads back into their natural habitat with the aid of an artificial misting system.

The misting system diverts water from above the Kihansi fall which
provides constant moisture for the frog's habitat. Photo courtesy of
Global Wildlife Conservation.

The conservation of this toad has moved at a miraculous rate and this may be the first time that an extinct species has been re-established in an ecosystem engineered by humans.

Claude Gascon, the co-chair of the IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist group remarks, "The success story of the small Kihansi Spray Toad can teach us big lessons for the future of biodiversity conservation. While amphibians and other species are incurring severe threats to survival, it is never too late to use the best science and conservation action to save a species and its habitat."

Read more at: mongabay.com

Some good news from the IUCN Red List update

According to the latest IUCN Red List update "the Grand Cayman Blue Iguana (Cyclura lewisi) has taken a formal step back from extinction this year." The Grand Cayman Blue Iguana, endemic to the island of Grand Cayman and Cayman Islands, had only 25 to 50 individuals left in the wild back in 2002. With the help from the Blue Iguana Recovery Program, the Grand Cayman Blue Iguana has risen to about 750 individuals. This increase in individuals shifted the Iguana from critically endangered to endangered. The Blue Iguana Recovery Program involved habitat protection; captive breeding and release; research and monitoring; and education and outreach.

However according to Fred Burton, member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) Iguana Specialist Group and Programme Director of the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme. “Human impacts on Grand Cayman are now so extensive that there just isn’t scope for these iguanas to regain numbers in the tens of thousands. However, we are confident that we will achieve our long term goal of restoring at least 1,000 Grand Cayman Blue Iguanas to the wild.” Thanks to human effort, the Grand Cayman Blue Iguana avoided the various situation that affect small populations that we learned in class such as genetic drift. This good news will give others who are working to save other species hope that it can be done.
Source: Grand Cayman Blue Iguana takes step back from extinction

New Discoveries in the Himalayas

The World Wildlife Fund has set up cameras in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan as a way to monitor snow leopards, however the pictures caught on their cameras bring forth a new discovery that they had never imagined. First in January, then again in February and April, the WWF team found photos of the fluffy Pallas’s cat, or manul, in the Wangchuck Centennial Park where other animals such as snow leopard, Tibetan wolf, leopard cat and red fox are also found.

The Pallas’s cat slightly resembles a Persion cat in size as well as facial features. It has hardly evolved over the last 5 million years but has many characteristics such as its thick coat and behavioral traits that make them suitable or the cold deserts of Central Asia. The cat has a unusually flat face with high-set eyes and low-set ears that help it to peer over rocky ledges when searching for prey.

The Pallas’s cat has never been documented here before and typically lives in  some parts of Central Asia, including the Caspian Sea region and Pakistan's Baluchistan province. However the International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed the cat as a near threatened species because it has started vanishing from these areas due to poachers who are after the cat’s fur, fat, and organs which conservationists believe are used in traditional medicines in Mongolia and China.

Looking for the point of view of the Anthropogenic Allee Effect, it seemed like the Pallas’s cat’s future was bleak until now. Maybe Bhutan can serve as a new home for the cats as a way of escaping the poachers. The country is covered in biodiversity hotspots and a quarter of its territory is preserved as national parks.

The discovery of the Pallas’s cat in Bhutan is giving many people courage for the future. Rinjan Shrestha, a conservation scientist with WWF, said in a statement about the new discovery, "This probably indicates a relatively undisturbed habitat, which gives us hope, not only for the Pallas's cat, but also the snow leopard, Tibetan wolf and other threatened species that inhabit the region."

Read more: LiveScience

           

Palms of Madagascar

In the news last month was a report from the IUCN on the status of Madagascar's palm trees. The news is not good with 83% of the 192 endemic species threatened with extinction.

Palms can provide a number of sustainable resources for local people, from building materials and utensils to craft goods and medicines but with increasing poverty on the island following the 2009 coup it is clear that many palms are being overharvested.

"Our perception is that palm utilization is now unsustainable for many species, and this is compounded by ongoing habitat loss due primarily to slash-and-burn agriculture. Whereas once palm exploitation must have been sustainable, the balance has now tipped as pressure increases on a decreasing area of habitat and remaining palms. So we are in a nasty feedback cycle of people threatening palms, and diminishing palms threatening livelihoods.'

From a report at AllAfrica.com.