Conservation Ecology redux

Well, I'm going to be out of town for a few days so there will be no daily posts from me until the weekend. I'm not actually going away for Thanksgiving but I will be away over Thanksgiving (subtle difference I guess). In the spirit of television I bring you some Conservation Ecology classics from the archives. Oh, alright, they're repeats, but they are selected repeats. Have a happy and safe thanksgiving

• Unusual conservation tool  
• A World of Possum-bilities
• Megapark for elephants
• Overcollecting: plants 
• Contingent Valuation and the Exxon Valdez 
• "It was just about raining penguins,"
• Piglet squid  and Glass squid
• Giant critters

Land Trust for Santa Barbara County

The Conservation and Restoration Seminar tonight, Nov. 22nd, will be presented by

William Abbott of the Santa Barbara Land Trust on their experiences and lessons learned in the
implementation of the Carpinteria Salt Marsh Restoration.

-- 6pm, CCBER Classroom, Harder South.

The Land Trust for Santa Barbara County have a nice website with details of their various purchases and conservation easements. There are further details of the Capinteria Saltmarsh project. Other projects you may be familiar with include Fairview Gardens, the Coronado Butterfly Preserve, and the UCSB South Parcel (a conservation easement). For another example of conservation easements see the history of the Sedgewick Reserve, a UC Reserve, which some of you may have visited on field trips:

In the early 1990's, motivated by research scientists, artists and preservationists, the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County agreed to lead a "Save the Sedgwick" campaign to acquire the 782 acres from the heirs to the Sedgwick estate. In complex, several year effort, the Land Trust succeeded in raising $3.2 million from local, state and foundation grants, and a great many individual donations, to purchase the heir's parcel. We then negotiated convey it at no cost to UCSB, based on the agreement that the land would be placed under a conservation easement to permanently protect it from development and that it would become part of the UC Natural Reserve System (NRS). The NRS has managed the Sedgwick Reserve since 1997.

They broke it, you fix it

Maybe not the hottest game on the internets and maybe not really a game, but this little budget puzzle from the New York Times last week has attracted quite a bit of attention.

Today, you’re in charge of the nation’s finances. Some of your options have more short-term savings and some have more long-term savings. When you have closed the budget gaps for both 2015 and 2030, you are done. Make your own plan, then share it online.

It's an interesting learning exercise that is more relevant to conservation than you might think. Have a go. Then take a look at a summary of people's solutions.

My conclusion? It's surprisingly easy to balance the budget and even to generate a surplus to bring down the debt. However getting people to agree which plan to adopt is going to be very, very hard.

Oh yes, and for extra bonus points - which of the various policy choices would have conservation implications?

Tough turtle

I don't know if any of you received this e-mail that has apparently been doing the rounds recently:

Aha, maybe we have just discovered why the sea turtle is going extinct & it is not global warming. !!!!!!!....

Sending you an e-mail of the turtle poachers on the beaches of Costa Rica.
....
What have they they all gained for the future of Costa Rica's Marine Life protection? World Wide shame in COSTA RICA.

As you might expect, the situation is not quite this simple. Yes, these people are collecting turtle eggs for sale and consumption (the original e-mail contains seven more pictures) BUT the collection is legal and some conservation organizations support these actions. How can that be?

For 10 months of the year, usually around the third quarter of the moon, olive ridleys swim by the hundreds of thousands to a single mile of beach at Ostional in an ancient reproductive rite little understood by scientists. They scuttle onto the sand, dig a hole with their flippers, and drop in an average of 100 leathery, white eggs the size of ping pong balls. Over the course of a five-day "arribada," literally, an arrival, nesting females will leave as many as 10 million eggs in the black, volcanic sand. Mass nesting is nature's way of ensuring that after the turkey vultures, feral dogs and raccoons have eaten all the fresh eggs they want, there will be enough left over to produce a sustainable population of olive ridleys.

In the early 1980s, scientists learned that because of limited space on the beach, females arriving later destroy the first laid eggs. The researchers wondered: why not let poachers have the doomed eggs?

Under a law written especially for Ostional, the government allows an egg harvesting cooperative to collect all they can during the first 36 hours of every arribada. Coop members then truck the eggs around the country, selling them to bars and restaurants. In return, the community must protect the olive ridley. Coop members clean debris from the nesting areas and patrol the beach day and night for poachers. Forty days later, when the hatchlings emerge, children from the Ostional Primary school run to the beach. "We protect the tortugitas when they crawl to the ocean. If we don't, the vultures will get them and bite their heads off," says a local 8-year-old boy, breathlessly.



Read the full story: Costa Rican Villagers Sell Turtle Eggs to Save Sea Turtles, but Feud with Scientists. One interesting consequence of this 'legal poaching' is that it drives down the price of turtle eggs reducing the incentive for illegal poaching.  The final paragraphs provides food for thought:


Globally, few efforts to save sea turtles succeed. Moreover, it's hard to find a community development project in any field where a town has for 10 years been responsibly managing and protecting a valuable resource. Biologists say that is what sets Ostional apart from other more peaceful, but disappointing projects around the world.
....
Despite its problems, Ostional continues to serve as a model of sustainable development. Researchers from neighboring Nicaragua and Panama - which have their own, smaller arribadas of olive ridleys - will soon visit here to find out what they can learn from the successes of Ostional. 

Fear itself

Clothed in innocence, the treaty is in fact designed to radically transform Western Civilization into a society where wolves and other entities of nature have more rights than humans.
Biodiversity treaty more than senate willing to pay.
Sovereignty International Corporation

I've tried to look into this several times but it's just not easy for me to understand exactly why the US did not ratify the Convention on Biodiversity. In search of answers I've been doing some reading on websites written by those who opposed the Convention. This has proven more enlightening but the level of paranoia is scary.

The open letter to congress I mentioned in class (from 293 signers, representing four million American voters) only specifically mentions two issues - alien species and the transfer of technology. However the testimony given to congress focused on a third issue - private property rights and the threat of a massive property grab by the federal government if not the United Nations themselves. Here is testimony given by Senator Hutchison (Texas) from the Congressional Record S13790, Friday, September 30, 1994.

I am especially concerned about the effect of the treaty on private property rights in my State and throughout America. Private property is constitutionally protected, yet one of the draft protocols to this treaty proposes "an increase in the area and connectivity of habitat." It envisions buffer zones and corridors connecting habitat areas where human use will be severely limited. Are we going to agree to a treaty that will require the U.S. Government to condemn property for wildlife highways? Are we planning to pay for this property? One group, the Maine Conservation Rights Institute, has prepared maps of what this would mean. I do not know if they are accurate yet, but that is my point. Neither do the proponents of this treaty.

This is the map, presented on the Senate floor, that quite possibly convinced them to vote against the ratification of the Biodiversity Treaty. Note the heading - As mandated by the convention on biological diversity.

The areas you see in red represents "wilderness reserves" which will be off limits to humans. Areas in yellow represents highly regulated buffer zones where human existence will be greatly restricted. The areas in green represent zones for normal use of high density mixed use urban areas.

In the minds of some the UN Convention on Biodiversity has become associated with the Wildlands Project (now known as the Wildlands Network). This organization focuses on scientific and strategic support for creation of “networks of people protecting networks of connected wildlands.”  They identified existing protected areas and proposed wildlife corridors that would connect them as pathways for wide-ranging species in need of room to roam. Their ideas are not exactly radical and their maps are very general but it is these rather general maps that were apparently the inspiration for the scary map above.

Worst of all, the basis for protecting biodiversity and ecosystems was to be centered on what is known as the Wildlands Project. This draconian plan calls for setting aside vast areas (about 50 percent) of America into reserve wilderness areas, interconnecting corridors, and human buffer zones where human use would be eliminated or severely restricted. According to the June 25, 1993 issue of Science magazine, such a system of reserves and corridors would create "an archipelago of human-inhabited islands surrounded by natural areas."
Biodiversity treaty more than senate willing to pay.
Sovereignty International Corporation

The Rewilding Project is brought to us from the United Nations. A relevant tentacle of Agenda 21, the Rewilding Project is designed to restore a major portion of the planet to its 'original' state before man came along and messed it all up; however, it could not be happening if it were not being implemented by state and local legislation.

Suffice to say that when they want your property you WILL sell and at a price they set. Otherwise, they'll remove you forcefully. Private land is being taken all over America by local, state and federal governments under 'eminent domain'. ... In the case of Wildlands and their Corridors, it will be dedicated exclusively to plants, insects, bees, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and animals. Carnivores figure heavily in their plan.
From The Rewilding Project

This video tells the complete story (check out how the map changes at 3:34 to 'simulated map'). Wetland mitigation, critical habitat and conservation easements are all part of the same conspiracy....

Endangered species act in the news

There's an article about the Vandenberg monkeyflower in the Santa Barbara Independent this week. Note that this species has been added to the candidate list (ie the backlog), not the actual list.

Go Bonkers for Vandenberg Monkeyflower - Feds Put Recently Discovered Plant on Endangered Species Candidate List

 Despite its rarity and the fact that threats are considered imminent, being named as a candidate for the endangered species list won’t do much other than raise awareness. This annual list is put out by the Fish & Wildlife Service in hopes that knowledge of a species’ status will alert landowners and resource managers to be aware of its existence and work toward conservation. 


 Err, okay. How's that been working out for you?

In other news the agency responsible for listing marine species has moved further down the path to actually listing a new species -  the Hawaiian insular false killer whale. The current population is though to number less than 170 whales but only 46 breeding individuals.

In taking this action, NOAA’s Fisheries Service reviewed the extinction risk of this distinct population segment, the factors for decline and efforts being made to conserve the species. The analysis identified 29 threats to the species’ survival, such as their small numbers as well as hooking and entanglement of false killer whales in fisheries.
Given the identified threats to the population and the results of quantitative and qualitative risk analyses, NOAA’s Fisheries Service believes that Hawaiian insular false killer whales are at high risk of extinction as a result of either small scale incremental impacts over time or a single catastrophic event.

Hearing loss in stranded dolphins

New research into the cause of dolphin "strandings" - incidents in which weakened or dead dolphins are found near shore - has shown that in some species, many stranded creatures share the same problem.
They are nearly deaf, in a world where hearing can be as valuable as sight.
That understanding - gained from a study of dolphins' brain activity - could help explain why such intelligent animals do something so seemingly dumb. Unable to use sound to find food or family members, dolphins can wind up weak and disoriented.
Researchers are unsure what is causing the hearing loss: It might be old age, birth defects or a cacophony of man-made noise in the ocean, including Navy sonar, which has been associated with some marine mammal strandings in recent years. 

Press report from the Washington Post, original research is from a PLoS ONE paper out last week:  Hearing Loss in Stranded Odontocete Dolphins and Whales
Thanks to Josh for the tip.

Shagged by a rare parrot (again)

I try to make the vast majority of the blog postings topical, and therefore new, but sometimes there's just something too good not to repost. Here's a clip of the Kakapo I posted last year.



I mentioned the dangers of imprinting on humans briefly today. Sirocco suffered from a respiratory illness as a very young chick which meant he had to be hand reared and, unfortunately, he imprinted on humans. Although this means he is unlikely to be a successful breeder the viral success of the video clip above has led to Sirocco having his own Facebook page, Twitter account, and he is now an official spokesbird for conservation.

For more Kakapo fun, including more inappropriate mating attempts, check out this video of a video at the Te Papa museum in Wellington, NZ.

Monarchs

It's that time of the year when the Monarch's start arriving at the Elwood Grove to overwinter.

If you've never been to see them then you should. It's only a short bike ride from campus. Directions can be found at The Coronado Butterfly Preserve page.

The photograph was taken there yesterday morning and posted on edhat.

Become a Coal Oil Point Reserve Tour Leader

Coal Oil Point Reserve is a 170-acre nature reserve owned by UCSB, located just west of UCSB's West Campus.

Volunteer tour leaders provide two-hour tours to university and elementary school classes and community groups several times per month.

The time commitment for this volunteer job is around three hours per month.

Advanced training is provided on Coal Oil Point Reserve and local natural and cultural resources, research, resource management and conservation, as well as many other interesting and important environmental science topics.

This is an outstanding opportunity to practice and improve your public speech skills, and to make a significant contribution to our community and our environment in Santa Barbara.

And all this, in a beautiful natural reserve by the ocean, just a five minutes bike ride from UCSB.

For more information and to apply, contact me at: coprstaff@lifesci.ucsb.edu

Thanks!

Ofri Gabay

--
Ofri Gabay
Tour Program Coordinator
Coal Oil Point Reserve