Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘living on earth’

Water Ranching in Mexico

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 28, 2022| 8 Comments »

Photo: Bobby Bascomb.
Gabions are baskets of rocks that Valer Clark places in stream beds to hold onto infrequent and precious rainfall at her ranch in Agua Prieta, Mexico.

Today I’m passing along some ideas for conserving water in dry areas. They come from a rancher in Mexico but could work elsewhere.

At the environmental radio show Living on Earth, “Bobby Bascomb visits acclaimed land preservationist Valer Clark at her ranch, Cahone Bonito, in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Valer has been a steward of dried-up lands in Mexico and the southwestern US since she purchased this property in the 1970’s, and she’s dedicated herself to finding ways to restore and maintain it. …

“BOBBY BASCOMB: For a couple months each year the region is awash with water from the seasonal monsoons. The normally dry river beds fill with flood water and swell to create habitat for all manner of water birds and amphibians. The watery paradise is short-lived though, and most of those streams dry up in a matter of weeks. But that wasn’t always the case. A network of streams, rivers and wetlands once crisscrossed the landscape. In fact, more than 150 years ago, around the time of the Civil War, people in the region struggled with malaria, a mosquito-born illness typically associated with tropical wet climates. Last year, I went to Mexico and I found a ranch owner that’s working on ways to keep some of that water on the land longer.

“My journey starts at the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona. … The opulence of the hotel hints at an earlier time of prosperity and wealth. Valer says the whole region, north and south of the border, was made rich more than 100 years ago by the same things.

“VALER CLARK: This was copper, cotton, and cattle. The three Cs, you know, all in the early 1900s.

“BASCOMB: Those three Cs made a lot of money but heavily degraded the land. Before the arrival of settlers the region didn’t have much water but there were some dense grasslands. Forests grew alongside rivers that meandered across the open landscape. And wetlands popped up every 20 or 30 miles along those rivers. But when Valer first visited back in the 70s, decades of mining and agriculture left the arid soil dry and cracked, few trees remained and the river beds were deeply eroded.

“Valer [and] her husband at the time were traveling in Mexico and fell in love with the austere land. The wildness of the open parched landscape drew them in.

“CLARK: We just came across this ranch, by accident. And he said, Well, why don’t we bid on it, and I bid so low, I didn’t think we’d ever get it. … When I got here and started seeing the lack of water and seeing the situation, what it looked like, and the hills were bare, and there was no grass. And I thought I wonder if you could make a change. …

“BASCOMB: Valer eventually bought and rehabilitated some 150,000 acres of land in northern Mexico and the Southwest US. [Her] work here has been transformative, says Ron Pulliam.

“RON PULLIUM: There are four great geological forces: there’s volcanism, plate tectonics, there’s erosion. And there’s Valer. …

“BASCOMB: Ron is an ecologist, formerly with the US Department of Interior, and founder of the nonprofit Borderlands Restoration Network. … I pile into a pickup truck with Ron. Valer, in her own truck, leads the way out of Douglas, Arizona and across the border to Agua Prieta, … We leave behind the maquiladora factories in the duty-free trade zone of Agua Prieta and drive an hour southeast to Valer’s ranch. Pavement and two-story buildings give way to dusty soil and brittle pale green grass. To me, as a New Englander, the landscape looks rather inhospitable, but Ron says this is prime cattle grazing territory.

“PULLIAM: Generally speaking now, the stocking ratios are on the order of one cow to one hundred or two hundred acres in this area. And then think of around the turn of the century, 100 times that number of cows. … If you put hundreds of cows out on a small area here you basically reduce all the ground cover. So, when the rain comes it just runs off the land rather than being caught up in the vegetation.

“BASCOMB: And keeping that rainwater on the land is the fundamental key to what Valer is doing to rehabilitate her property. More water will mean more grass and trees, habitat for the wildlife that was once common here. … She takes me on a walk around her property. …

“CLARK: This is what we call a gabion, which is a wire basket that is filled with rocks. …

“BASCOMB: They’re about 3 feet tall, some just 5 or 6 feet wide, others more than a hundred feet across. Valer and her crew have built more than 20,000 of them on her property. They all sit in riverbeds which are dry most of the year until the monsoon rains come. That’s when the gabions get to work. They slow down the water rushing through the river bed so silt can accumulate behind them, like a sponge.

“CLARK: And that sponge holds the water. And so the water, instead of just whipping through fast, when it rains, 30% of it’s held back and goes into the ground. And so it filters down very slowly. …

“BASCOMB: Those pools of water are home to insects, birds, rare frogs, and endangered fish species.

“CLARK: And trees, all these trees coming up, they’re a result of having water here. … Some of them grow 10 feet a year. … We’ve seen ocelot, we’ve seen bobcats and lions and bears and coatimundis and javelinas, ring tailed cats.”

More at Living on Earth, here.

Read Full Post »

Polar Bear Hybrid

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 26, 2021| 5 Comments »

Photo: Philippe Clement/Getty Images.
“Pizzly” bears have a physical appearance that is a mix of grizzly and polar bears.

I love the environmental radio show Living on Earth, and I’m grateful that they post transcripts of programs even though natural speech requires a lot of editing. One thing I try to edit out is every “So” at the start of a sentence. When did we start doing that? I first noticed the verbal tic in 2005 at a new job. When did you?

From Living on Earth …

“HOST BOBBY BASCOMB: The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on earth, it actually rained on the Greenland ice sheet in August for the first time ever. And sea ice recently reached its minimum extent for 2021. It was the 12th lowest amount of ice since scientists began keeping records. And for the endangered polar bear, a warming Arctic is bad news. With their habitat melting, polar bears are having trouble finding food. At the same time grizzly bears are moving north and, in some cases, mating with polar bears, creating a hybrid animal known as a pizzly bear. Larisa DeSantis is a paleontologist and associate professor of biology who studies pizzly bears at Vanderbilt University. …

“How do these hybrids compare with the parent species of grizzly and polar bears?

“LARISA DESANTIS: A pizzly bear is essentially an intermediate between these two. It’s a hybrid species, and it’s actually fertile. … Polar bears tend to have really elongated skulls. And this is because they’re really well suited for being able to hunt seals in sea ice. [They] get into those holes and effectively hunt those seals. The grizzlies have much shorter skulls, and they’re able to exude really high bite forces to be able to eat really hard foods when needed. And so essentially, this pizzly is intermediate between those two, you can also see that their coloration is sort of intermediate. [They’re] a bit lighter in coloration than a grizzly, but darker in coloration than a polar bear. … They’re better swimmers than grizzlies, not as good as polar bears. [As] we’re dealing with a warming Arctic, we really don’t know how these pizzlies will do in the future, and they may be better suited for the warming Arctic than the polar bear.

“BASCOMB: Now, many hybrid species, like ligers, or mules, are sterile and can’t produce offspring themselves. But I think you just said that pizzly bears actually can reproduce. Does that make them their own species? …

“DESANTIS: The polar bear and the grizzly bear are really sort of a unique situation. They diverged roughly around 500,000 or 600,000 years ago. They’re pretty closely related to one another in the grand scheme of things. And they also look quite different from one another, right? These are different bears, we know they’re different species. They do completely different things in their ecosystems. They’re of different ecological niches, for example. … But you’re absolutely right, you know, they can produce these fertile hybrids, that’s really interesting. And we know that it’s actually able to persist. …

“BASCOMB: So then would you say pizzly bears are their own species?

“DESANTIS: I wouldn’t go that far. They are a hybrid. And hybrids occur pretty frequently in nature. And typically we see hybridization occurring, you know, over and over and over in particular regions where two different species are coming together. And so it’s not surprising that we see hybrids of these two bears, especially since they’re closely related. And this is because essentially, the brown bears, the grizzly bears, are moving north due to Arctic warming. The polar bears are actually having to retreat from the sea ice, the lack of sea ice, and they’re having to come further inland and often travel further south or look for other food resources. [New studies show] that they’re trying to eat [seabird] eggs. …

“This elongated skull [is] not well suited to eating just sort of any type of food source, right? It actually has biomechanical constraints that prevent it from, you know, eating really hard things. And so it’s sort of having to scavenge potentially, to find different food resources. It’ll find these bowhead whale carcass sites, that’s where the grizzly bears can also be as well. And they’re coming into increased contact and occasionally mating. …

“BASCOMB: With polar bear populations declining so dramatically with the loss of sea ice, and with climate change, as you were just saying, how likely is it that they will ultimately be replaced by pizzly bears or even grizzly bears if it gets much, much warmer? And for that matter, how would a different apex predator in the Arctic affect the whole ecosystem?

“DESANTIS: [We] really don’t know the answer to that. But what we need to do is actually monitor the polar bears, continue to monitor grizzlies, and also monitor these pizzlies, and see how they do. So as I mentioned, hybrids normally aren’t better suited than either parent species, right? But in this case, with the environment changing, they may be our hope for an Arctic bear. And what we do know about predators across the globe, and through time is that apex predators especially are really key to the functioning of ecosystems, right. This is why wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, because the elk populations were sort of out of control, wreaking havoc on the vegetation, things were out of balance. [The pizzly] may give us hope for an Arctic bear in a world in which we have Arctic warming.”

More at Living on Earth, here.

Read Full Post »

Barcoding Species

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 22, 2021| 7 Comments »

Photo: Natasha de Vere & Col Ford, Barcode Wales, Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
Samples of an organism’s genome are obtained in the field, before being brought back to the lab for the barcoding process.

Some years ago, I learned that students at High Tech High, which involves kids in real-world projects (click here), were helping rangers in Africa to identify poached meat with a DNA test they had developed. Turns out, using DNA that way was just the beginning of its possibilities for the environment.

According to the radio show Living on Earth, the 1.3 million species that have been identified and recorded on Planet Earth are just a small fraction of what exists. So host Steve Curwood decided to look at how DNA is helping to catalog many more.

“CURWOOD: To make it easier to identify species, the International Barcode of Life Consortium is using a technique known as DNA barcoding. It can give a quick readout that tells whether a sampled organism is known to modern science, and if not, provide a marker to register it as a newly discovered life form. Paul Hebert is the molecular biologist who developed DNA barcoding.

“Paul, welcome to Living on Earth. Take us through the process of DNA barcoding. You find an organism you want to identify, and then?

Photo: LarissaFruehe, Wikimedia Commons.

“HEBERT: [You] might just touch it … and pick up enough of its DNA. [But] in the case of smaller organisms, where we may be prepared to sacrifice them, and where we want to have a voucher specimen in a collection that we can look at and photograph and analyze in other ways, we might remove a tiny piece of tissue. If it were an insect, six legs, remove one of those legs and extract the DNA from that. That’s a fairly simple process. When you do that DNA extraction, of course, you get all of the DNA in the genome. … In the case of an insect, it might be 500 million base pairs. And we just want to read 500 of them. And you can think of the whole genome as sort of a book of life. And we want to read just one of those pages. So to do that, we use the polymerase chain reaction, which basically Xerox copies a selected page in that much larger book of life. And that prepares [for] sequencing the DNA. …

“CURWOOD: Where can that information go from there? And what can it do? …

“HEBERT: It was important to develop an informatics platform that’s now been adopted by the global community. It’s a platform called the Barcode of Life Data System, acronym ‘BOLD’. And basically, all of the data from each individual specimen go into that database, together with an image of the specimen and where it was collected, and by whom; all of the details. And so, let’s say you begin by sequencing an American Robin, next time you were to encounter a feather on your lawn that happened to derive from that bird species, you would get a connection to that reference sequence in the bar code library, in BOLD. …

The idea is to build up this reference library, so it has representative sequences for every species on our planet. And that’s what we’re in the process of doing now.

“CURWOOD: Now, of course, this is a very handy approach in academia with nice big laboratories. What about somebody who’s in the field? How useful is this? …

“HEBERT: In Kruger National Park, [the rangers who] normally are involved in suppressing poaching of rhinoceroses joined in a massive collection program that gathered up about a million specimens from that largest national park in South Africa … and we then translated those specimens into barcode records and built a DNA barcode reference library for Kruger National Park. … In the future, [you’re] going to be able to take a walk through the woods with your kids or your grandkids and see an organism and simply touch it and from its DNA barcode sequence, gain its identity. …

“CURWOOD: What’s your biggest surprise now, in this project? …

“HEBERT: For a very long time, it has been argued that beetles were the most diverse group of insects, the most diverse order of insects. … But it turns out that’s wrong. Barcoding revealed that flies are by far the most diverse group of insects. And [one] particular group of flies, gall midges, are hugely diverse, more diverse than all of the beetles on our planet. [And] one of the earliest studies that we did in Costa Rica involved a beautiful iridescent blue butterfly that for the last 200 years has been regarded as a single species. [When] we barcoded that species, we found that in fact, it was 10 species, not one. There’s a lot of hidden diversity, even within the large species that we share on this planet, when you move down to the small stuff, it’s massive discovery.

“CURWOOD: Now, the International Barcode of Life Consortium has this mission of identifying each and every species on Earth using barcoding. What is the ultimate goal of the project? …

“HEBERT: Creating that reference sequence library for all species on the planet is going to place us in a position where it’s going to be possible for us to set up global bio surveillance system. So we can track what humanity is doing to the other life forms. … I see detailed information on the shifts in biodiversity that are happening on our planet motivating humanity to take the action needed to do better. …

“CURWOOD: Paul Hebert is a molecular biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, and science director of the International Barcode of Life Consortium. Thank you so much, Paul, for taking the time with us today.”

More at Living on Earth, here.

Read Full Post »

A Civilian Climate Corps

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 2, 2021| 2 Comments »

Photo: Kevin Bacher / NPS, Flickr CC BY 2.0.
A Student Conservation Association crew is all smiles as they work to restore a trail in the popular Paradise area of Mount Rainier National Park.

I love the way the radio show Living on Earth zeroes right in on whatever environmental issue is most important at any given time. In this episode, it discusses federal plans to tap civilians concerned about climate change — kind of the way FDR tapped civilian energy during the New Deal.

Host Steve Curwood talks to Washington Governor Jay Inslee about how a climate corps could aid conservation, combat climate disaster, and help save energy.

“CURWOOD: The modern CCC harkens back to the Civilian Conservation Corps created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s. FDR’s CCC put some 3 million men to work in conservation efforts. … Today a Civilian Climate Corps could put people to work reducing the risk of forest fires, restoring wetlands, planting trees, and weatherizing homes both in the United States and abroad. During the Democratic primary, several of President Biden’s opponents also proposed a climate corps. Among them was Washington state Governor Jay Inslee. … Welcome back to Living on Earth, Governor!

“Let’s say that you were to take a look at your own state of Washington for some examples of the kind of work that the CCC would do. You’ve had horrendous wildfires, so I imagine you’re very interested in thinning the forests, the fuel that can add to those. Where else might it be especially useful?

“GOV. JAY INSLEE: Everywhere. This is a ubiquitous opportunity, because anywhere there’s a house, there is an opportunity to reduce energy wastage. And that’s the first place you get clean fuel, the very cheapest, first, most productive fuel, clean energy … stop wasting it. So helping people rehab their houses, get more insulation into their homes, starting with those who are in low-income homes, who frequently are living in places that just waste humongous amounts of energy, so these poor folks are trying to make huge energy payments to the utility company. … Then a part that I think hopefully is more focused on vocational skill development … to really focus on a long-term career, not just in the climate corps. That might be as exotic as, you know, learning how to maintain electric vehicles, because that’s we’re going to be driving. …

“CURWOOD: Many young people I speak to are desperate to do something to deal with the climate emergency, which they see as this humongous freight train barreling at them out of the future, and no way to jump out of the way. …

“INSLEE: I hear this as well, how do I plug in? What do I do? Where do I go, you know, what, you know? And this is just perfect to capture that huge energy that’s out there. [We] want that energy to be released. And I think this climate corps is a way to do that. It will help as well build, you know, public support, political support. …

“CURWOOD: The original Civilian Conservation Corps under FDR reinforced some social injustices, and even segregated black and white corps members into different camps, and there weren’t a whole lot of women that were involved in this. How can this new CCC help progress towards greater equity in our society?

“INSLEE: You’ve put your finger on a very important point. One is the most obvious one, which is economically to give people more economic opportunities. And I’m convinced it will do that big time. [Also] we have so many children, urban children particularly, who’ve never had experiences in the natural world. And giving them these experiences in a vocational setting is life changing for people. …

“My dad and mom used to re-vegetate alpine meadows on the slopes of Mount Rainier during the summer. They ran a group called the Student Conservation Association. [They] were kids, mostly from the East Coast, who came out to Mount Rainier National Park. [Once] they got that shovel in their hands, and once they spent a night in the tent, they were conservationists for their whole lives.”

More here.

Read Full Post »

Urban Farming

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 9, 2020| 4 Comments »

Photo: Jay Feinstein
Shawn Cooney and his wife Connie own Corner Stalk Farm, a container farm in East Boston, Massachusetts.

Do you get the radio show Living on Earth where you live? I find it fascinating no matter what topics they cover. Here is a recent episode on urban farming.

“HOST STEVE CURWOOD: Industrial agriculture today is a resource-intensive endeavor, requiring big machines, plenty of land, water, and energy to produce much of the food on a typical American dinner table. And as the public trends more toward plant-based foods, some are thinking outside the box by bringing farms inside the box. By retrofitting old shipping containers with grow lights and hydroponic gear, what would take about an acre of land to grow vegetables such as lettuce can be fit into just 8 by 40 feet. Living on Earth‘s Jay Feinstein and Aynsley O’Neill took a trip to Corner Stalk Farms in East Boston, Massachusetts to find out more. …

“O’NEILL: I see these shipping containers. I mean, right in the middle of these houses and behind the auto body shop … here we are!

“FEINSTEIN: You know, the funny thing is a farm like this would not have even been legal until 2013, when Boston revamped its zoning code. …

“COONEY: My name is Shawn Cooney. And I’m the partner and owner of Corner Stalk farm in East Boston, Massachusetts, and we started in 2014. So this is it. … Basically you’ve seen the whole of the farm by walking the 120 feet or so. …

“O’NEILL: Are those the plants in those columns all up and down?

“COONEY: Right. You really need just an industrial area [where] you can basically bring as many plants as possible into as little amount of square footage as possible. … In a real farm, you’re talking about square footage and acreage. Here, it’s really cubic feet. We’ve got so many feet on the floor, but we plant plants up to ten feet high. …

“We’ve got a climate control system, and a lot of fans keep the air moving so that everything’s happy. And the plants get a little bit of stress. If you just leave them without any movement, the plants actually get weak. …

“They do need to be moved around for them to have a good texture to them, so that the cell walls are thick enough, so that it’s not just eating a piece of water. …

“You can log into it from the outside world. If you want to fiddle around with settings, or just check on everything, you can do that from home, you can do it from from vacation. …

“FEINSTEIN: So how did you get into this?

“COONEY: I started three software companies and sold them. … My wife and I myself funded it, and we have loans [from] the US Department of Agriculture. …

“Mainly we grow lettuce. That’s our business. And we’ve grown tomatoes, we’ve grown lots of flowers, we’ve grown all kinds of herbs, and God knows what else. But [what] people buy every day is our greens, even our restaurants, that’s what they want. …

“FEINSTEIN: What type of environmental cost are you saving? …

“COONEY: One of the things we definitely don’t do is waste any water. No matter how good you are at growing outside, you could never grow with the kind of water use we have. We use, say 1000 plants we can grow in one unit, we probably use 25 gallons of water a week. So you couldn’t water your patio plants for a week with 25 gallons and keep them alive. …

“We adhere to the organic principles. Generally, the way we control any kind of a pest in here is kind of preemptive. We basically use ladybugs. We ship them in once a month or so, and sprinkle them around, and they pretty much do the policing of any kind of bugs in here. And when we have had to use something it’s called chrysanthemum oil. …

‘You guys want to try something a little, little further on the edge? This is called wasabi arugula. And I grow it for a couple of restaurants. And they use it instead of wasabi on their crudo and their raw fish and their raw meats. So here, take a leaf of that and be prepared. …

“FEINSTEIN: It does taste like wasabi. But it it’s a little milder, but I love it.”

More at Living on Earth, here.

Read Full Post »

Arizona’s Petrified Forest

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 9, 2019| 7 Comments »

natlpark_landscape

Photo: Woody Hibbard, Flickr
Petrified Forest National Park reaches into the Painted Desert in Arizona, which boasts a colorful badlands ecosystem.

A former colleague of mine, a naturalized citizen originally from northern China, has a goal to visit all the national parks. He puts me to shame. I have visited so few. But after listening to this story from the environmental radio show Living on Earth, I know I would really like to see one national park — Arizona’s Petrified Forest.

“BOBBY BASCOMB: We continue our series on US public lands now with a trip to one of our more unusual National Parks. Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park is full of wildlife, and the beautiful hiking trails that we’ve come to expect in our public lands.

“But what really sets it apart are the trees that died there. … The fossilized remains of those trees, logs more than 6 feet in diameter, are still there today, cast in stone. Here to explain more about the unique geological process that preserved the ancient trees is Sarah Herve, the acting chief of interpretation for the park. …

“SARAH HERVE: Petrified wood is a fossil. A lot of times people think that it’s something different than you know, any other kind of fossil … the remains of gigantic forests that were here during the Late Triassic. The logs … have been turned to stone by rapid burial.

“There’s silica in the materials that the trees were buried in and the cellular structure has been replaced by silica. There’s other minerals present, but the glassy mineral silica is really, really good at exchanging places with cellular material. …

“BASCOMB: The end result then, is you have these logs lying around that look exactly like trees, you can see the rings in them, the bark, the whole thing, but it’s stone. …

“HERVE: That wood is oftentimes what we call rainbow wood, because it’s very, very colorful. [When] you look on the inside, there’s all kinds of pinks and purples and blue colors, blacks, and it’s really just amazing. … If you can picture these logs when they were trees, they would be comparable to like the giant sequoias of California. …

“BASCOMB: What are scientists able to learn about the geology of the area and the trees themselves from studying this petrified wood? …

“HERVE: This part of northern Arizona was a much more tropical kind of environment. We were closer to the equator at that time, the continents were together to form Pangaea, there was quite a bit more water through this region. [That’s] based on looking at the different fossils that are found within these rocks and the rocks themselves. It’s thought that there was a tremendous river system that was running through this area. … Something on the same magnitude as like the Mississippi or the Amazon River. …

“It’s really hard to imagine [a] place so full of trees and crocodile-like animals running around and lots of amphibians, right. Those are some of the different fossils that we find. … Then we have, you know, incredible badland topography. So that’s what a lot of people, you know, call the Painted Desert. And it is very, very colorful, that’s why it gets that name. But those deposits are the remains of those ancient rivers. … The dinosaurs that we find at Petrified Forest, they’re generally pretty small. So we’re at a time way before all the big dinosaurs happened. …

“BASCOMB: I understand that you also have petroglyphs there, left over from early inhabitants of the area. …

“HERVE:  There’s a lot of petroglyphs or what we call rock art in the park. There’s [sometimes] animistic forms. So you’ll see things that look like different kinds of birds or things that look really obviously like deer, you know, or elk or pronghorn antelope, which are animals that still live in the park today. And then some of the forms are very, very strange, and really hard to interpret. Some of the petroglyphs are also considered what we call solstice markers, or solar calendars. And so they have light interactions with the sun during different times of the year. …

“BASCOMB: We have a lot of national parks in our country; we’re very lucky that way. Why should somebody visit this park as opposed to any other?

“HERVE: You know, what I hear from a lot of park visitors is, ‘Wow, we’re so glad we came here, we like this better than Grand Canyon!’ And that’s not a dig on Grand Canyon. But it’s always interesting to me to hear that because I think a lot of times people don’t realize right when they get off the interstate what they’re in for.”

More at Living on Earth, here.

Thinking about my friend who is visiting all the parks, I realize it’s not unusual for naturalized citizens to appreciate the wonder and variety of this great land more than some of us who are native born. Another former colleague, also originally from China, has been expressing his delight in America by running half-marathons around the country. He has already covered more than half the states and won’t stop until he has run in all 50.

Read Full Post »

Alaska’s Fat Bear Week

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 2, 2019| 11 Comments »

fatbears_chubbybear

Photos: N. Boak
Brown Bears at Katmai National Park and Preserve gain a lot of weight during the spring and summer to prepare for winter hibernation. Alaskans and friends around the world compete to vote on which bear looks the fattest.

I just learned about a funny competition that even the inventive, competition-loving Finns hadn’t thought up. The story was on the wonderful radio show Living on Earth.

“RADIO HOST STEVE CURWOOD: The rangers at Katmai National Park in southern Alaska are hosting a fishing derby, but in this case it’s not the biggest fish that wins, it’s the biggest one who catches fish.

“These contestants are very large bears, the eight and nine footers of Katmai, which is home to the largest concentration of brown bears in the world. These bruins can lose as much as one third of their weight while sleeping through the long cold Alaska winter, so summer and fall, they pack on extra pounds with sockeye salmon.

“And to let the public decide which bear appears to have caught and eaten the most fish, park rangers host a fat bear contest each year. People can watch the live stream of the bears snagging fish on the Brooks River in Katmai and then go to Facebook to vote for the ursine angler they think should be named the fattest. For details of the fat bear tournament Living on Earth’s Bobby Bascomb spoke with Katmai media ranger Naomi Boak.

“BOAK: It’s like March Madness for bears. We create brackets, and we have head to head matchups. And people from all over the world vote for who they think is the fattest bear this year at the Brooks River. And we have several bear cams here which stream live the activities of the bears all season. …

“BASCOMB: I was watching the live stream online and it’s really fun just to watch these bear stand so stoically, and try and catch the salmon coming upstream. And that’s how they’re fattening up right now. Right?

“BOAK: Yes, and they’ve been doing that all summer. We have one of the largest sockeye salmon runs here on the Brooks River. And it was a great salmon run; last year was record breaking. And the bears came back nice and healthy. And this year was another great year. The bears are really obese, and they’re working very hard to be as fat as they can for their winters hibernation. …

“When they go into hibernation in the winter, they’re not completely asleep. But they do not eat; they lose maybe 30 to 40% of their fat stores. So if they’re not fat enough, they’re going to have a hard time surviving the winter.

“And when they come out of hibernation in early spring, there’s not a lot of food around. So they’re eating grasses, it’s not very nutritional, they will continue to lose weight. And for sows, it’s important for them to get fat because they won’t get pregnant unless they’re fat. With bears, there’s what’s called delayed implantation. So the bears mate early in the season. Spring and early summer, mostly. But the eggs don’t implant in the uterus until the sow is fat enough. …

“BASCOMB: You have some before and after photos on your website of some of these bears, and I gotta say they’re pretty shocking. I mean, you can see the same bear when it comes out of hibernation in June, as you mentioned, and again in September, they hardly look like the same animal. …

“BOAK: No, they don’t, which is why we want to celebrate what they’ve done all summer. And to really let the public know. And it’s hard for us to identify the bears from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, they look so different. They change colors, they shed their coats, and the coats are different. …

“BASCOMB: Last year’s winner, Beadnose I think her name was, looks more like a furry hippo or something than a bear. Her belly is practically dragging on the ground. Does she have some kind of special technique to get so big, you know, how is she catching her fish better than the other bears?

“BOAK: Well, yes, she was very successful. But bears have different fishing techniques. They can be on the lip of a falls, which is a delicate balancing act, but it’s a very great position to be in. Beadnose liked to do that. Another technique that the really big guys like is to fish in the jacuzzi, which is the eddy right below the falls. It’s where the fish wait to make the jump up the falls. And these bears are big enough. So they can sit down on their haunches and with their front paws, fish. And so they don’t have to move. They just have to fish with their front paws. … Bears don’t like to get their ears wet so they will snorkel. …

“Bear 747 is certainly a fan favorite. He is humongous. He looked like he was ready to hibernate back in July. Bear 435, Holly, who is a very famous female here. She has had several litters, and she actually adopted a lone yearling a few years ago. So it’s made her a fan favorite. She is also gi-normous. She does look like a hippo. …

“CURWOOD: For links to the live stream of the fat bears of Katmai go to our website LOE.org.”

fatbear_bracket

Read Full Post »

Guinea Fowl, Tick-Eating Machines

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 4, 2019| 6 Comments »

guineas-big_group_of_guineas202

Photo: Scott Hess/Flickr
Guinea fowl, which like to forage for ticks, mosquitoes, fleas, beetles, spiders, and more, can help protect your family from Lyme Disease.

In our family we have had reason to worry about deer ticks. Nearly everyone has had Lyme Disease at some point or at least found a tick attached and taken Doxycycline just in case. We’re always on the alert for stories about the latest vaccine research or new preventive sprays. I myself wear long pants and socks all summer.

What is the long-term solution? Some people promote expanded deer hunting or experimenting with ways to keep deer from reproducing. I like this idea from New Hampshire: guinea fowl.

A great radio show called Living on Earth has the story.

“Some homeowners in the thick of tick country are turning to guinea fowl to control ticks. Living on Earth’s Jenni Doering reports from Exeter, New Hampshire, about one family’s experience with these tick-eating machines. …

“More than 40,000 new cases of Lyme were reported in 2017, and climate change could make it even more common. A recent study found that a temperature increase of just 2 degrees Celsius could result in a 20 percent increase in Lyme disease cases in the U.S. Luckily, there are proven ways to reduce your risk of getting Lyme disease: wear long sleeved clothing, use repellents, and do a thorough tick check after you’ve been in the woods. …

“JENNI DOERING: Suzy and Hazel Koff live an enchanted childhood.
On a warm July day the 6 and 3 year olds run through the sun-dappled forest in their New Hampshire backyard. … Their mother, Sarah, says this is how they spend their summer.

“KOFF: We love going outside playing in the woods. We have this great big yard that they play in and we have a sandbox out here and slack line and all sorts of things; we like to make fairy houses, and we like to garden together. …

“DOERING: But in the Northeast, where there are woods, there are ticks. A lot of them.

“KOFF: I was so, just, overwhelmed by the ticks in our yard. … I’m such a big gardener, there’s no way I was willing to spray anything on the lawn or use any sort of chemicals at all, so I thought I would try this biological control. …

“DOERING:  Enter the guinea fowl. Native to Africa, guineas are rather awkward, football-shaped birds with a tiny head, and a voracious appetite for ticks. And unlike chickens, guinea fowl won’t peck at your garden greens. So Sarah decided to give them a try.

“KOFF: Yeah, I just went on Craigslist. … As soon as we started letting them out they were immediately interested in pecking, pecking and pecking. So yeah, they were just sort of tearing up all the bugs! … They’re not pets. They’re sort of wild animals that you just have. … I haven’t seen any ticks on the kids since we’ve let the guineas go roam around. …

“DOERING: A small 1992 study on Long Island backs up Sarah’s observation.
Researchers placed guinea fowl into tick-infested areas and found that they significantly reduced the adult tick population within the enclosures. But Howard Ginsberg, a research ecologist with the Department of Interior, points out a problem with timing.

“GINSBERG: Most people get Lyme disease during June and July when the nymphs are out, and the nymphs are in the woods. The adults, which are the stage that’s targeted by these birds, [are] out in the fall and spring, out in open areas like people’s lawn. …

“DOERING: A single female deer tick can lay as many as 2,000 eggs, so removing adult ticks does appear to reduce local Lyme disease risk overall. Fortunately, even if a tick latches on to you, Ginsberg says time is on your side.

“GINSBERG: Lyme disease, that bacterium requires something like 24 to 48 hours with tick attachment before it’s transmitted. So if you do a check every day when you get back from the woods and remove ticks, you have eliminated the possibility of Lyme disease fairly substantially. … The best way to remove a tick is to just take fine tweezers, just grab as close to the skin line as possible, and slowly pull it straight out.

“DOERING: Then, take some rubbing alcohol and clean the bite thoroughly.
And get that tick safely out of your life by flushing it down the toilet.”

Meanwhile, the search goes on for long-lasting solutions to the Lyme Disease problem.

More at Living on Earth, here., where you can also listen to the audio version.

Read Full Post »

How Starlings Use Aromatherapy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 8, 2019| 11 Comments »

BIRDNOTE_European-Starling-flowers-Josh-Levinson-C2A9

Photo: Josh Levinson
The European Starling is thought to adorn its nest with flowers to ward off pests.

One of my favorite shows is Living on Earth, an environmental program recorded in Greater Boston and produced by Public Radio International (PRI). One of the show’s regular features is called BirdNote, and you can learn a lot about individual species just from that.

The Living on Earth website recently posted this:

“STEVE CURWOOD: European Starlings can often be found scrounging through the grass of a backyard or a nearby park for tasty treats. But now and then, they’ll also pluck a marigold or other bright flower to bring back to the nest. These flowers aren’t just for decoration, as Michael Stein explains in this week’s BirdNote. It appears to bring health benefits to their young.

“It’s Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood.

curwood

“European Starlings famously travel in massive flocks, up to one hundred thousand birds strong at times. They can almost resemble a school of fish moving together in a squeaky symphony. And, BirdNote’s Michael Stein reports that when starlings are paired up and raising chicks they have an unusual way to keep their nest clean and healthy. …

“MICHAEL STEIN: Watch long enough, though, and you may see a starling pause in the hunt to neatly pluck a marigold or other bright flower – and then fly up to deposit the bloom in the nest.

“How romantic. But there’s more to it. Ornithologists have found that starlings regularly adorn their twig nests with fresh vegetation – the more fragrant the better. Marigolds, of course, but also elderberry flowers, yarrow leaves, and even willow bark.

“All of which – as your nose will tell you – are full of aromatic chemicals. The starlings are actually fumigating their nests. Why? The chemicals have been thought to help discourage pests and parasites. Scientists have discovered that the smelly plants may offer an even more direct benefit to nestlings – by stimulating their immune systems.
It turns out that starlings hatched in well-fumigated nests tend to weigh more and live longer than those raised without benefit of fragrant herbs.” More.

For another Living on Earth BirdNote, click here. This one is about a Laysan Albatross called Wisdom who was still producing chicks in 2018, despite the fact her 67 years made her quite old for her species. Who knew the Albatross could live so long?

This might be a good time to remind you how Coleridge used an Albatross in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to send a message — not just to the stunned and speechless wedding guest but to us all:

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

Photo: Kiah Walker, USFWS, CC
Wisdom the Laysan Albatross was still producing chicks at age 67. She doesn’t even look tired.
BIRNOTE_ALBTROSS_FLYING

Read Full Post »

China’s Sustainable Fish Farming

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 2, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Wouldn’t it be strange if China, the smog capital of the world, started assuming leadership on environmental causes like global warming, clean air, and … sustainable fish farming.

The PRI radio show Living on Earth recently explained how China was tackling the latter challenge.

“Consumer demand in both the U.S. and China for safe and healthy farmed fish is shaping aquaculture practices in the world’s most populous country. And fish farmers are using traditional Chinese medicine as well as high-tech monitoring systems as they strive to keep their fish healthy and their farming practices transparent. Jocelyn Ford reports from the Hainan Province. …

“HAN HAN: With such a huge population in China, if we didn’t have aquaculture, if we totally relied on the wild fishery. I guess we would already running out of all these wild fish, maybe 10 or 20 years ago.

“FORD: That’s Han Han, the founder of the China Blue Sustainability Institute, China’s first non-governmental, environmental organization focused on sustainable fishing and aquaculture. Today, aquaculture accounts for one of every two fish that land on the dinner table worldwide, and it’s growing faster than other sources of animal protein. China is the global aquaculture leader, and because of its expertise here, it wants to help other countries. …

“Aquaculture is expanding globally at about five percent a year, and that’s a plus for some of the Earth’s most pressing environmental issues. For example, compared to a pound of beef, a pound of fish has only about one-seventh of the carbon footprint. But large-scale aquaculture has created new problems. Naturally, farmed fish need to eat. And gone are the days when Chinese fish farms were all organic. Qi Genliu is a professor at Shanghai Ocean University.

“QI: Traditionally we used grass to culture grass carp.

“FORD: That changed with the growth of the fish feed industry and the need to feed carnivorous marine fish [and keep them disease free with antibiotics]. …

“The founder and president of The Fishin’ Company, Manish Kumar, started coming to Hainan to build a coalition for a safer, more environmentally sound and sustainable tilapia industry [using traditional herbal medicine instead of antibiotics]. His company is sponsoring trainings, and offering financial incentives to a few model farms that invest in improvements. The idea is, others will follow suit if they see it makes financial sense. …

“FORD: His ideas include increasing omega-3 levels in the tilapia, the fish oil that may help lower risk of heart disease, cancer and arthritis. To help reassure customers who are nervous about what their fish are eating, next year he’s planning a state of the art oversight system that involves cameras, QR codes, and consumer monitoring.

“KUMAR: We will now proceed to do something no one in the industry has done before. Put a camera system into the farm area. A customer buys a bag of fish. You have a QR code on the bag. Run your smartphone through our QR code on the bag, and you will have a chance to see the actual farm that raised this fish in your bag. And how it’s being raised.

“FORD: Customers can see the type of feed, and the plant where the feed was made, and the insomniacs can watch the fish grow 24/7. Manish Kumar says the extra cost will be negligible. As the largest supplier of tilapia, he expects to be able to take advantage of economies of scale.”

More at Living on Earth, here, where you can learn more about the use of Chinese herbal medicine to ensure the fish stay healthy.

Photo: Jocelyn Ford
Harvesting tilapia for export on an internationally certified farm in China.

Read Full Post »

A Very Important Pig in Haiti

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 31, 2017| 6 Comments »

How many times lately have I read “in these uncertain times” and “now more than ever”? Crises bring these phrases out.

So how do we inject the words with extra special urgency? I find myself thinking like Charlie Brown (or was it Lucy?) trying to fill up a book report: Now more than ever ever ever really and truly and I’m not kidding, programs about the environment such as Living on Earth are important.

Some of the Living on Earth shows — about melting ice and rising seas, for example — are crucial to our understanding of what we face. Others, like the one about a certain pig in Haiti, underline the interconnectedness of the environment and local economies. You can’t wipe out an animal people rely on and expect everything to be fine.

From Living on Earth: “In Haiti, the creole pig was a staple of the peasant economy, bringing families economic stability, devouring food waste and occasionally becoming an religious sacrifice. But as Allison Griner reports, disease killed many creole pigs and American efforts to control the swine flu took the rest. Efforts to replace the pig failed, but now peasant farmers are slowly rebuilding the creole pig herd.

“GRINER: To reverse the trend, [2015 presidential candidate Jean-Baptiste] Chavannes and his colleagues in the peasant movement decided to reintroduce the creole pig — or at least a hybrid that could fill its place.

“CHAVANNES: We want the return of the creole pig. So we led a fight, and over the years, the minister of agriculture finally started a program for the repopulation of the pigs. …

“GRINER: But just as the new pig herd was starting to grow, once again disease intervened. This time, the culprit was teschen, a virus that can kill a pig within days. Six years ago, it started to spread. And decades of work were lost. …

“Still, the fight is not yet over for the creole pig. Vaccines for teschen are already being tested in Haiti, and Chavannes hopes partnerships with international NGOs will help fight this latest disease. Part of Chavannes’ mission is to rebuild the peasant economy. But to reach that goal, bringing back the creole pig is a necessity, he says.

“CHAVANNES: We must. [Laughs] We must, and like I said, pig farming is indispensable for reestablishing the peasant economy. …

“GRINER: Already, the race to save Haiti’s pigs is well underway. This past spring, an official from the ministry of agriculture announced that the 500,000 doses of the teschen vaccine had been produced. The official says they are currently available for farmers to use.”

At Living on Earth, you can read what the pigs meant to the farmers, why they got killed off, why American pigs were a terrible replacement, and what kind of livestock peasants decided to raise while they are waiting for the creole pigs to come back.

Photo: Allison Griner
Pig in Delmas, Port au Prince, Haiti

Read Full Post »

The Horseshoe Crab

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 23, 2016| 2 Comments »

The humble horseshoe crab is a reminder of prehistoric times. Public Radio International’s Living on Earth recently devoted a segment to this curious character.

From the transcript of the show …

Steve Curwood: “For healthy oceans, it’s not enough to protect just the top of the food chain – the cod or halibut or swordfish we eat. The bottom of the food chain is vital too. That could be the plankton or the tiny forage fish eaten by many species – or it could be the extraordinary prehistoric-looking horseshoe crab.

“These helmet-shaped arthropods have been around for millions of years, and up and down the east coast of the US, volunteers come out to count them as the females come ashore to spawn. On Cape Cod, as Karen Zusi reports, scientists and volunteers are tagging and labeling the crabs to help conserve them.”

Karen Zusi: “There are a lot of reasons why someone might appreciate the lowly horseshoe crab. Eel and conch fishermen use them as bait, and medical companies draw blood from the animals. Horseshoe crab blood will clot in the presence of bacteria, so these companies can use the crab’s blood to make sure vaccines and medical implants are free of germs. Their blood is worth sixty thousand dollars a gallon.

“But horseshoe crab populations are dropping. To preserve them, scientists and volunteers on Cape Cod are wading into the water to count and tag the animals.

“Special labels help them keep track [says] Mark Faherty, the science coordinator at Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary. …

“The Massachusetts Audubon Society just recruited graduate student Michael Long to lead their newest horseshoe crab study. With researchers from the University of Massachusetts, he will be tagging the crabs this summer with a telemetry [label], glued onto the crab’s shell.”

Faherty: “My acoustic study is going to be putting on acoustic receivers out in the bay, and acoustic markers on the crabs. The receivers have about a 600-meter detection radius so anytime a crab that’s marked with an acoustic receiver comes within 600 meters of that receiver, it will mark where it is. So based on where each crab pings, you can kind of track its movements around the bay.”

Zusi: “None of this would be possible without the Audubon Society’s volunteers. They come from all walks of life.

“At an Audubon horseshoe crab conference, Long organizes new volunteers to help him count horseshoe crabs on the beach, and Faherty trains them in the basic survey procedures. …

“Once they got down to business, the volunteers were trained to divide the beach into small sections, count the horseshoe crabs, and record all of their information. The volunteers go out to survey when female crabs are coming to lay their eggs in the sand. Males follow to fertilize the eggs after they’re laid.”

Faherty: “The male crabs you quickly learn to recognize because they’re by themselves. They will mate with a model, if you make a model of a horseshoe crab — the males will congregate around it. They’ll spawn. They’ll spawn with your boot. These are just hormonally-charged animals that are ready to mate with anything. Females are not lonely for long in the horseshoe crab world.”

More here on the effort to study and protect horseshoe crabs.

Photo: Peter Massas, Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0
A horseshoe crab floats by the shore on Union Beach in New Jersey. The species is listed as Near Threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Read Full Post »

Strange Australian Birds

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2016| Leave a Comment »

There’s always something fun over at PRI’s environmental radio show Living on Earth. Here’s a story that ran in March about the unique bird species isolated in Northeastern Australian rainforests.

Bob Sundstrom wrote up the audio report of BirdNote‘s Mary McCann: “The Eastern Whipbird hangs out in the dense understory. It’s dark, crested … nearly a foot long and emerald-green with white spots. … The large, pigeon-like Wompoo Fruit-Dove … feathered in a stunning combination of green, purple, and yellow, [is] clearly named for its voice.

“Pig-like grunting on the forest floor tells us we’re in the company of the largest bird on the continent – the Southern Cassowary. On average, the female weighs 130 pounds and stands around 5 feet tall, looking like a giant, lush, black hairpiece on thick legs. A helmet called a casque makes it look as much like a dinosaur as any living bird.” Five feet tall? I think I know a one-year-old who would like to try riding it.

The bird sounds on the radio show were provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Hear them all here, where you can also enjoy the equally far-out pictures.

Photo: Jan Anne
Southern Cassowary

Read Full Post »

Solar Technology in Clothes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 10, 2016| 2 Comments »

Radio show Living on Earth did a segment in February on new technology to store and release solar heat. Here is host Steve Curwood on his outing to MIT to learn about the breakthrough.

“A team of researchers at MIT has come up with a chemical that would let windshield glass directly store solar energy and then release it on demand as heat to melt the ice. … The same chemical could be woven into clothing fibers to capture the sun’s energy and then give you some added warmth when you ask for it, even days later.

“I paid a visit to the lab where the MIT team has been working on this breakthrough and met up with researchers David Zhitomirsky and Eugene Cho, who work in the lab of professor Jeffrey Grossman.”

To Curwood’s question about the difference between the familiar electrical, battery-enabled solar technology and the MIT lab’s chemical version, Zhitomirsky replies,”We use these molecules that can absorb UV light and instead of generating charges, what they do is that they change shape, and by changing shape, they can store chemical energy …

“CURWOOD: OK, so sunlight hits this molecule, it changes shape and can storage its energy. And how do you get the energy out?

“ZHITOMIRSKY: So you can figure the material in several ways. One way is to add a small amount of heat, and the material will release more heat than you add in. The other methods are triggering it with light or you can apply an electrical field to the material. …

“The way we envision using it is to integrate into fibers that you then make clothing out of.” More here.

Release solar heat from my coat in a blizzard? Where do I sign up?

Photo: Helen Palmer
Living on Earth host Steve Curwood, right, in the MIT lab with Eugene Cho and David Zhitomirsky.

Read Full Post »

Good Bacteria Could Save the Frogs

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 19, 2016| 2 Comments »

I’m hearing more and more these days about “good bacteria,” including in a song by singer-composer Will McMillan on the friendly bacteria we humans carry around.

Now, it seems, bacteria found in soil may help to save amphibians from dangerous fungal epidemics. Public Radio International’s environmental news program, Living on Earth, has the story.

“Around the world, fungal diseases have been killing millions of frogs and bats and snakes. And a newly emerging disease in salamanders in Europe is scaring biologists here, so the US Fish and Wildlife Service has introduced a ban on their import to try to protect amphibians in the US.

“But now scientists see some hope in soil bacteria that get onto the salamanders and frogs and apparently protect them. Doug Woodhams is an assistant professor of biology at UMass Boston, who’s been working with amphibians in Panama – and he explained what his team has found to Living on Earth’s Helen Palmer.

“WOODHAMS: Some of the amphibians have beneficial bacteria that live on their skin and these have antifungal properties.

“PALMER: This is kind of like having good bacteria in your gut, for instance, that stop you from getting sick. … Is there any evidence that  good bacteria actually work against devastating funguses?

“WOODHAMS: Yeah, there’s quite a bit of evidence. Many of the bacteria that we can culture from some amphibian species are able to inhibit the fungus in culture. We also have some population-level data that shows populations that tend to have these antifungal bacteria can persist with Bd in the environment and survive. …

“Bd is the chytrid fungus that’s been spreading around the world and devastating amphibian populations. So salamanders, frogs, toads. Populations that tend to have more of these beneficial bacteria seem to be surviving, and populations that don’t have as many of the individuals that have these bacteria seem to disappear. …

“The next thing we want to try is adding some of these bacteria, not just to petri dishes, but to soil and see if infected amphibians can be cleared of their infection by being housed on soil that’s been inoculated with these bacteria. …

“There are other fungal pathogens, so it could be something that you could apply in a cave that could reduce White-nosed syndrome [in bats]. Also, rattlesnakes have been recently affected by fungal disease during hibernation, so it could be applied into a rattlesnake den.”

More on the science here.

Photo: Matt Becker
The Appalachian Mountains are home to this Cow Knob Salamander, Plethodon punctatus, from George Washington National Forest, Virginia.

 

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: