Good news for Neoceratodus

About 2½ years ago, I highlighted the environmental threats to the Australian lungfish, in particular the planned construction of a dam that would destroy their habitat.

To my surprise, Australian environmentalists won this battle!

The proposed $1.8 billion Traveston Dam in Queensland has been quashed to protect endangered species, including Mary River turtle and cod, after a landmark decision by the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett.

In explaining his decision yesterday Mr Garrett said the dam would have ”serious and irreversible effects” on threatened species – which also include the Australian lungfish and the southern barred frog – and he had no option but to reject it.

It’s a little discombobulating—they actually made a good decision to protect some unique biology? The cynic in me says there has to be some other reason, too, but I’ll take it.

How much plastic did you throw away today?

There is a gigantic pile of plastic garbage accumulating in the Pacific. It’s concentrate by currents into one floating mass of bottle caps and detergent bottles and nylon debris, all slowly breaking apart into broken bits of polymer bobbing in the waves. It’s not good for marine life.

One of the most vivid demonstrations of the effects is this series of photos of dead sea birds on remote Midway Island — all completely undisturbed and photographed as found. Finding decayed bird corpses reduced to bones and feathers isn’t at all surprising, but some of these remains look more like the remains of some colorful cyborg, half biological and half industrial byproduct.

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Recycle, and buy food that doesn’t use plastic packaging. That stuff is a poison pill for the environment.

How to save the California Condor

We just have to make the practice of sky burial popular! Maybe this photo set of a Tibetan funeral will help. (WARNING! Those photos show a large flock of vultures stripping a human body of flesh, with the assistance of some helpful Tibetans who break up the larger bones with hatchets. Don’t click on the link if you are at all squeamish.)

Boy, those are some happy vultures. I think I’d like to bring a little joy into the life a few carrion-feeders after I die, too.

Ooops, another warning: I’d looked at it with an adblocker, so I hadn’t noticed the very in-your-face porn ads on the page, so my apologies. I wouldn’t have thought it worth worrying over if it were just pictures of naked people, but ads that treat women like pieces of meat are far more revolting than corpses getting eaten by big birds.

Pope says it’s all our fault

The Pope has become an environmentalist, and he has figured out who is causing all our ecological difficulties: the atheists.

Is it not true that inconsiderate use of creation begins where God is marginalized or also where his existence is denied? If the human creature’s relationship with the Creator weakens, matter is reduced to egoistic possession, man becomes the ‘final authority,’ and the objective of existence is reduced to a feverish race to possess the most possible.

Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society, has a pithy reply.

This is rich coming from the leader of an organisation that has plundered the world to enrich itself. As he sits in his golden palaces, surrounded by unimaginable luxury and material wealth, he lectures the rest of us about restraint and greed. We have nothing to learn about environmentalism from this hypocrite.

I think I’d have a few questions for this pope. Like, “What about over-population, Ratzi dear? What’s the devout Catholic plan for dealing with that rather serious environmental issue?” and “Hey, have you noticed all those hell-holes of destruction in Africa? How does catholicism help people achieve economic and individual autonomy, huh?”

Friday Cephalopod: Survivor: Cephalopod!

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Tips for flourishing after a mass extinction. Ceratites nodosus (MCZ-7232) (A), from the Triassic of Germany, was similar to the ceratitid ammonoid species that thrived in the water column in the Early Triassic (1), while bottom-dwelling species languished. Key to the ceratitids’ rapid success after the end-Permian mass extinction were their ecological tolerances, which may be inferred by reference to their closest living relatives, the coleoids (squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish), including the low-oxygen specialist Vampyroteuthis infernalis (B).
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This picture has a little story behind it. Over 250 million years ago, our world experienced the most massive extinction event known, with over 99% of all individuals on the planet dying out abruptly, and diversity was greatly limited for a few million years after that. One possible explanation for the Permian extinction is a correlated series of massive volcanic eruptions that burned through thick coal deposits and drowned the earth in CO2 — global warming on a massive scale. Even cephalopods suffered. The ceratatid ammonoids had been in decline for a long time, but the extinction nearly wiped them out, reducing them to only a few struggling genera.

But then something interesting happened. After the great extinction, the ammonoids exploded in diversity, radiating rapidly. Something about them had made some of them capable of riding out the disaster, and then exploiting the changed world afterwards.

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(Click for larger image)
Total generic richness [Sobs; black bold line,
all ammonoids; gray lines, major ammonoid groups;
Permian dotted line, alternate data from Ammon
(16)] and mean Chao2 estimate of the overall generic
richness with its 95% confidence interval (large circles
with vertical bars) (table S1). PTB, Permian-Triassic
boundary; 1, Kasimovian; 2, Gzhelian; 3, Asselian; 4,
Sakmarian; 5, Artinskian; 6, Kungurian; 7, Roadian; 8,
Wordian; 9, Capitanian; 10, Wuchiapingian; unlabeled
successive intervals, Changhsingian, Griesbachian,
Dienerian, Smithian; 15, Spathian; 16, Early Anisian;
17, Middle Anisian; 18, Late Anisian; 19, Ladinian; 20,
Early Carnian; 21, Late Carnian; 22, Early Norian; 23,
Middle Norian; 24, Late Norian; 25, Rhaetian.

One speculative explanation for the secret of their success is the ability of some members of the cephalopod clade to survive in cold, nearly anoxic conditions, like Vampyroteuthis infernalis. They were able to rebound quickly because of their dismal metabolism and the general fecundity of cephalopods. They restored some ecological webs faster than previously thought and provided an environment for further growth of more severely crippled clades.

It just goes to show you that our current episode of global warming is a relatively minor event. Life will go on. Fast-living organisms with high metabolic demands like, say, humans, might suffer and die from the environmental consequences of a high CO2 atmosphere, but don’t worry — the cephalopods will live on. They might even get a happy surge in numbers from the changes.

Brayard A, Escarguel G, Bucher H, Monnet C, Brühwiler T, Goudemand N, Galfetti T, Guex J (2009) Good Genes and Good Luck: Ammonoid Diversity and the End-Permian Mass Extinction. Science 325(5944):1118-1121.

Marshall CR, Jacobs DK (2009) Flourishing After the End-Permian Mass Extinction. Science 325(5944):1079-1080.

Watts gets swatted

That crank pseudoscience site, Watt’s Up With That, got thoroughly reamed out with the video below (just the fact that the chief crackpot, Anthony Watts, would show up on Glenn Beck’s show is indictment enough, though). Watt was not too happy with his public evisceration, however, and scurried off to get it taken down. Here it is, reposted. Enjoy — it’s a very good takedown of the climate denialist claims.

(via Deltoid)

Geologists get to suffer with the idiots, too

My most memorable encounter with the anti-animal research cadres was several years ago, when I was a graduate student, and the Animal Liberation Front snuck into our building one night and vandalized one of my colleague’s labs; they destroyed data, stole some irreplaceable mutant lines, and walked away with most of the research animals, things like white mice and quail and other small furry lab-bred animals. In their noble humanitarianism, they later released them all just off of I-5, where all the baffled, frightened little beasties made the local red-tailed hawks very, very happy. It’s the kind of event that convinced me that these people are freakin’ morons.

I’m not against ethical standards for the treatment of animals at all — I think that ought to be required and monitored. But these animal rightists seem to have largely formed their knowledge of biology from Disney movies

I thought they were a plague on biology, but guess what? Geologists have to strive against the ignorant, too! One proud “eco-warrior” is bragging online about his efforts to disrupt geological research in British Columbia. He dismantled a seismic shot, an explosive device which sends echoes bouncing through the earth, which was being used in a pure research project to examine deep granite basoliths, as part of a study of how mountains are formed.

His excuses were that it would frighten sandhill cranes nesting a few kilometers away, that it was probably secret surveying for the oil industry (yeah, right — I’m only a biologist, and even I know you don’t go drilling beneath mountain ranges for oil), and that it was all done without informing the community. For this, Ingmar Lee charges ahead and damages a simple research operation that, like most geology projects, was operating on a shoe-string already.

I think that Lee expects kudos and congratulations for his ignorance; perhaps you should politely inform him otherwise. Leave him a civil, informative comment at his site to correct him. The only part I’ll bother to reproduce from his posturing is part of his correspondence. He wrote to the PI of the research project to complain about the seismic shot, and John Hole wrote back, politely explaining what they were and were not doing, and how the public process was carried out. It’s an excellent example of good communication by a scientist, and is a model for how to address public concerns. It’s too bad the recipient was a committed ideologue who thought it would be heroic to smash up some science.

From: John Hole
Date: 2009/7/12
Subject: Re: Great Bear Rainforest Seismic Shot: Batholiths On Land Seismic Program mid-July, 2009
To: Ingmar
Cc: John Hole , George Spence

Mr. Lee,

I understand your distrust of government. We are not “them”. We are not the petroleum industry either. We are university scientists, who, for purely scientific reasons, submitted funding proposals to study mountain-building processes – to us this is a really cool part of nature. Our budgets are definitely not massive – to the point where our crew is mostly unpaid student volunteers. Our science will be student research projects, published in public online journals. Since the research is about the wrong type of rocks (granite), it will not be useful to petroleum companies.

Government employees working at the lowest local levels usually are not “them” either; these folks are more likely to be the whistle blowers. The government employee scientists who reviewed and approved the environmental-biological aspects of our proposal are based in Bella Coola (DFO and MinEnv) and Williams Lake (MinEnv). They seem pretty “green” to me – they sure asked a lot of questions and cancelled/shrunk a few of our proposed shots for good environmental reasons that only a local would know. We were happy to comply.

The marine Batholiths was not shut down due to the potential for marine damage. A permit was neither denied nor approved. We withdrew our application because the government permit process would take longer than the lifetime of our budgets.

When we withdrew our marine application in 2007, we informed all of the groups / organizations / agencies with whom we were in contact that we intended to propose a land project. We communicated about the marine and the land projects in the same manner, assuming the outreach would be equally effective – it worked for the marine. There was no attempt at secrecy.

It is unfortunate that the CCRD, Shearwater Resort, and Heiltsuk Nation did not inform your community about the land. We thought that they did. I can only guess that they were so unconcerned that they did not think they needed to.
Is there an alternate organization with whom we should be in contact?

Regarding monitoring, we are set up to quantitatively monitor ground shaking – that’s our expertise. Sound in the water comes from the ground shaking (not from the air “whump” noise), so we can calculate water noise. We would be pleased to cooperate with anybody who wishes to monitor biological reactions, but all relevant agencies and local organizations have said there was no need. This is not meant as an excuse, but context matters: routine local operations regularly cause more wildlife disturbance than us. Would you like to set up a scientific monitoring?

Thank-you for your communications – and your honest emotions. Unfortunately many of your impressions of us and the project are poorly informed. It is very unfortunate that the local organizations did not communicate with you.

Sincerely,
John

ps. I am a Canadian citizen, but I live and teach in Virginia. If you think your government is bad…

Destroying beauty because you can afford it

The bluefin tuna is being grossly overfished, and is on its way to extinction. The reason? Fishermen can sell a single bluefin for $173,000. At first thought, you might feel like blaming the greedy fishermen (and I think there is some fault there), but here’s an article that assigns the blame more appropriately: fault the rich assholes who regard paying an obscene price for a small bite to be part of the cachet of the fish.

“People believe in their hearts that a piece of raw fish is worth $600. And one of the main reasons that it’s worth $600 is because you can’t afford it and I can’t, but they can. That makes it very special, and it makes people who eat it special.

“Any kind of luxury goods largely come from that sort of statement: I can afford it, and you can’t. I’ll drive a Maserati, even if I can’t drive it faster than 65 miles per hour in most of the United States. I can afford a $280,000 car, and you’re stuck with a Dodge Neon. I can fly private jet, drive a Maserati, do anything I bloody well please, including having a $600 piece of fish. And you can’t.”

And this is the brutal truth: bluefin, which beyond their intrinsic value as living creatures happen to be one of the universe’s more majestic species, a Platonic ideal of oceanic speed and grace, aren’t being extinguished by our greed. They’re being sacrificed to our vanity, pretension, and ostentation — the most pathetic of our vices.

Keep that in mind, rich assholes of the world. When you throw down huge amounts of cash for luxury items, the rest of us aren’t watching you admiringly. We think you’re vain and pretentious and, well, revolting, in the most pathetic sense of the word.