This blog has moved (again)

We've been invited to join the bloggers over at Scientopia, so from today on, all posts will be over there. I've also reconsolidated all material back to TVG (I know, waffling is so cool), but I'll have more on that over there.

New links:

http://scientopia.org/blogs/voltagegate/

http://scientopia.org/blogs/voltagegate/feed/rss/

See you all over there! Summer hiatus is just about over...

The red squirrel and 20 more endangered UK species

via guardian.co.uk

The red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) is native to England and was widespread here until about 70 years ago. In the last quarter of the 19th century, the grey squirrel was introduced to various parts of the UK from North America. It has had a devastating impact, replacing the native species whenever the two come into contact and causing significant damage to forestry through its bark-stripping activities. The red squirrel is now confined to the Isle of Wight and the Poole Harbour islands, where there are no grey squirrels, and an area of northern England, mainly in Cumbria and Northumberland, into which grey squirrels are continuing to expand

The Guardian had a slideshow of 21 endangered UK species on their website yesterday, including some of the more cosmopolitan species, like bluefin tuna and the leatherback turtle that get around quite a bit. It's a special set of picutres, illustrated by Sandra Pond, who's work strikes me as very old-fashioned, drawn with the care and love (and anthropomorphism) of illustrators from another time. As I said on Twitter yesterday, it reminds me of the FWS and NPS posters my grandfather tacked to the wall of his hunting cabin in Pennsylvania. Those posters came down long ago, and I wish I had had the sense to as my parents to save them.
Beautiful work.

Over 700 entries submitted so far to change BP's logo

via thisblogrules.com

LogoMyWay is giving away $200 to the winner, and The Blog Rules has a number of submissions, some of them really great.
From the contest page:

Help Redesign BP's logo! They need a NEW Brand.
I cant tell you how frustrated and upset we are about BP and how they are handling this oil disaster. Before this eruption of oil they had 17 violations. It's obvious this could have been prevented.
This is the biggest environmental disaster we have ever faced in this country.
I think the (6000) creative logo designers at LogoMyWay should update the BP logo with a more suitable design and brand.
The design community and the general public will vote on the winner of the redesign of the NEW BP LOGO.

Mapping the response and recovery efforts in the gulf

Found this site just a little bit ago, from the same folks that created the Conservation Registry, a database of conservation projects where users can sign up and add new details and pin the location of the project on a customizable Google Map. The same concept is applied for the Gulf Oil Spill Response and Recovery site; users can add and date pins to the map for efforts/observations that are currently or have been made, and then overlay additional information such as spill forecasts, locations of nesting sites and oyster beds, NASA satellite images, the explosion itself and dozens of other contextual layers.
More from the blog:

Users can search the map for impacts and recovery projects by activity type, species and habitats. Impacts and recovery efforts can be viewed in relation to sea turtle nesting sites, manatee locations, high priority federal lands and other relevant map layers. To report an impact or observation, or contribute a new project, users create an account through a simple one-step signup which requires a name and email address.

The types of notices that can be mapped include:

Observations: Oil slicks or sheen, oiled plants and wildlife, wildlife mortality, oiled beaches. Recovery and mitigation projects: Oil contamination management, boom and barrier placement, beach clean-up, wildlife rescue. Request assistance or search for volunteer opportunities. Post project needs for volunteers, special equipment or funding. Reach out to projects that need help.

Here are a couple of examples that have already been pinned:

Power of the Mighty Mississippi used to beat back oil spill
Six diversions have been set up along the Mississippi river to divert the river water to act as a flushing system for the coast. While there are fears that the flow of freshwater will upset salinity levels along the coast, affecting fisheries and estuaries; however, these damages are considered far less than the alternative. Officials are considering adding the Bohemia Spillway, originally designed for flood control, to these efforts as well. 

Plume spotted, leaking toward Mobile
Marine scientists have discovered a massive new plume of what they believe to be oil deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, stretching 22 miles (35 kilometers) from the leaking wellhead northeast toward Mobile Bay, Alabama. The discovery by researchers on the University of South Florida College of Marine Science's Weatherbird II vessel is the second significant undersea plume recorded since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20. 

UD Fish and Wildlife Services
Two rehabilitated birds that were rescued from the oil spill area are set to be released into the wild this afternoon, far from the massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries will release the birds in the Sherburne Wildlife Management Area in Iberville Parish.
If the site becomes prevalent enough, it should prove to be an invaluable way to keep track of what is actually happening at ground zero in this effort.

The Little People of Flores

While we're on the topic, here's a nice review of the Homo floresiensis story: "Little People of Flores" from NOVA (auto-plays, below the fold).

A hobbit's contemporaries: Biogeography and insular evolution on Flores

Painters create networks. The subject of the piece, even if it’s a simple splotch of color, garners the most attention, but without a descriptive background or other kinds of supporting elements to contextualize the portion of the painting where the artist wants you to look, the intended focus is lost. The subject loses a certain clarity of interpretation in the absence of those elements.
Hanneke Meijer and her colleagues are trying to provide that sort of context to Homo floresiensis in this paper from the Journal of Biogeography, noting the importance of the natural history and evolutionary development of other vertebrates on the island of Flores and how this might inform and contextualize the life history of this tiny mystery.
Digging on Flores began in the 1950’s with an archeologist named Theodoor Verhoeven, a Dutch Catholic priest and missionary on the island. He found stone artifacts with the remains of a Stegodon and a “large murid” in those early digs, leading him to conclude that Homo erectus had arrived in the southeast islands of the Sunda archipelago by the early Pleistocene, across Wallace’s Line, which marks a transitional zone between Asia and Australia where organisms from both continents are thought to have mixed and created an area with high levels of endemism. Verhoeven, in his published report of Liang Bua (pictured above), a different site where he began digging in 1965 and found some neolithic remains and artifacts, said, “This cave is extra important.” He was right. It was in this limestone cave that the curious story of Homo floresiensis, the so-called hobbit, began many years later.
As excavations of Liang Bua and other sites progressed, a more complete picture of Flores faunal evolution, ecology and biogeography started to emerge. Though these data span almost a million years of history, there are commonalities, beginning with some of the more typical of other insular environments, a relatively poor diversity of taxa. The oldest records date to over 900,000 years ago, and thus far reveal a very few vertebrates: a tortoise of the Geochalone genus, now extinct, the Komodo dragon and the smallest known species of pygmy Stegodon, S. sondaari, which weighed in around 300 kg (just the tusks of a full grown African elephant can weigh up to 80 kg). Somewhere during the transition of the early to middle Pleistocene the tortoise went extinct, as did S. sondaari, but as the Pleistocene progressed, the proboscidean was replaced by another of the same genus, the larger S. florensis florensis, another immigrant to the island that probably evolved into the contemporary of H. floresiensis, S. florensis insularis. The giant rat Hooijeromys nusatenggera appears in the fossil record of this time as well as another monitor besides the Komodo, Varanus hooijeri, both of which the authors speculate were probably present in earlier time periods, but have smaller more delicate bones resistant to preservation. Alongside these remains stone artifacts from hominins have been found and of course, the very skeletal remains of H. floresiensis.
Based on this history, particularly evidence from the middle to late Pleistocene, the authors are trying to illustrate a Flores where the inhabitants are part of a highly endemic, phylogenetic continuum of species that underlines just how normal this kind of situation is for an isolated island community. S. florensis florensis was a rare vertebrate immigrant, but was filling a vacant niche and evolved into S. florensis insularis. This is supported by the general trend of island proboscideans displaying high levels of endemism and the fact that an entirely different species lived on Timor at the time. H. nusatenggera is very closely related to the extant giant rats on the island, and is probably ancestral to most of them.
As an island system, Flores certainly conforms to the so-called island rule (if such a thing can be said) home to giants rats and dwarf ungulates, adaptive responses to resource limitations, unique niche availability, absence of predators and the dynamics of decreased competition. Changes in body size are observed with other phenomena, such as the reduction of length and fusion of bones in the distal limbs for stability, increased hypsodonty in teeth for a changing diet or an often extreme reduction in brain size (the energetic requirements of nervous tissue is elevated).
But the first founding structure was determined by the geography of the island. Wilson and MacArthur’s Theory of Island Biogeography links the extremity of isolation with the relative richness of species, and the “impoverished” state of Flores historically fits this notion. The oceanic barrier to dispersal is crossed by only the most capable: birds, bats, tortoises, proboscideans, humans, lizards and rodents, which accurately describes what the fossil record shows. Until recently, with the habits of Homo sapiens acting as a mass transit system of dispersal, immigration to the island was a rarity. The composition of insular communities like Flores are described as “disharmonious” because of the structural differences between island and mainland ecosystems, which maintain larger populations and top level, typically mammalian predators. It's important to note (and integral to the authors' argument) that while it's interesting to highlight the oddities of island ecology, Flores is a very normal island community considering its biogeography.
All of this leads up to the subject, the focus of the entire picture: that H. floresiensis, as a part of this community, was the result of the “insular dwarfing of Homo erectus”:

Homo erectus is the prime candidate for the role of ancestor of H. floresiensis, as it was the only hominin present in Southeast Asia in the Pleistocene. Having reached Java by the Early Pleistocene (Swisher et al., 1994; van den Bergh et al., 1996), H. erectus was almost certainly present on Flores by the Middle Pleistocene (Sondaar et al., 1994; Morwood et al., 1998), as evidenced by the artefacts from the site of Mata Menge. Bromham & Cardillo (2007) showed that insular primates conform to the island rule and undergo shifts towards smaller body size in an insular environment. We therefore suggest that after its arrival on Flores, H. erectus followed the evolutionary path towards dwarfism and decreased in body size as a response to the absence of mammalian carnivores and the limited energy resources, as might any large-bodied mammal in an insular setting. Moreover, the observed size decrease in H. floresiensis when compared to H. erectus (c. 52% of H. erectus) falls within the range of other insular primates (Bromham & Cardillo, 2007).

This is largely in response to the cladistic analysis performed by Argue et al. in 2009, who...

...refuted the insular dwarfing hypothesis. However, the loss of derived features in insular evolution introduces a number of homoplasies, which in a cladistic analysis can easily be misconstrued for synplesiomorphies. This would lead to a more primitive position of the island form, exactly as was found by Argue et al. (2009). Given the small difference in tree length between the most parsimonious solution and the one in which H. floresiensis is derived from H. erectus, we find the cladistic analysis unconvincing. A careful evaluation of the characters, to see whether any homoplasies can indeed be attributed to typical insular developments, is needed to resolve this.

In case you’re not up on your plasies, what Meijer et al. are saying is that some of the characteristics of H. floresiensis acquired through insular evolution (homoplasies), such as the “robustness” of their limbs, could be mistaken for more primitive features associated with earlier hominins (synplesiomorphies) and need to be better accounted for in future studies.
In Liang Bua, there are very distinct layers of volcanic ash between the Holocene and Pleistocene layers of sediment, and across that boundary, very different assemblages of organisms. Stegodon and H. floresiensis are thought to have gone extinct around the time of that eruption ~19,000 years ago and as all islands in the area, were eventually replaced by Homo sapiens and their selected companion/invader organisms.
Image by Rosino
Meijer, H., Van Den Hoek Ostende, L., Van Den Bergh, G., & De Vos, J. (2010). The fellowship of the hobbit: the fauna surrounding Homo floresiensis Journal of Biogeography, 37 (6), 995-1006 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2699.2010.02308.x

Gulf Oil Blog, by UGA scientist Samantha Joye & colleagues

via gulfblog.uga.edu

Dr. Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia testified at a congressional hearing yesterday, reporting her findings after a two week trip to the Gulf. Joye's team also recorded much of what they found, journal-style on a blog called the Gulf Oil Blog, which is a great resource, obviously. She's even answering questions (most more complicated and relevant than "when will it stop").
Joye is focusing research on the plume - yes, the one that doesn't exist - and reports that the respiration rates in the plume, based on preliminary findings, are "at least 5-10 times higher" than control sites, which means more oxygen is being used up by bioremediating microorganisms in a specific area, which could potentially create a very large dead (hypoxic) zone where very little marine life will be able to live for quite a long time.
More on the plume from Joye:

At present, oxygen concentrations exceed 2 mg/L but if concentrations drop below that, it would spell problems for any oxygen requiring organisms. The Southwest Plume is, at a minimum, 15 miles long x 2 miles long and the plume is about 600 feet thick. Temperatures in the plume are about 8-12ºC. We do not know the absolute oil content at this time.
The plume is largely water. This is not thick oil like you see on the surface in some places, it’s diluted oil and it’s most concentrated closest to the leaking riser pipe. Unlike a natural oil seep, which is most intense on the bottom and whose signal decreases with depth above the seafloor, the plume we are studying starts 200m above the seafloor and its intensity decreases horizontally with distance away from the leaking wellhead.
The specific gravity of oil is irrelevant to this discussion. This is not oil like you buy at the auto supply store. Think of it as gas-saturated oil that has been shot out of a deep sea cannon under intense pressure – it’s like putting olive oil in a spray can, pressurizing it and pushing the spray button. What comes out when you push that button? A mist of olive oil. This well is leaking a mist of oil that is settling out in the deep sea.

Dr. Joye also spoke at UGA earlier this week:

Southeast Asia in the Pleistocene, from grassland to rain forest

I’ve been trying to keep up with the Gulf situation, so most of my reading of late has been dominated by those details, and the unread numbers in my RSS folders were a little intimidating, but I finally found some time to read some of the papers I’ve earmarked in the past month or so.

This study from the Journal of Biogeography attempts a new method to assemble the paleoecology and paleoenvironment of Southeast Asia in the late Pleistocene and runs a lengthy comparison against the results of previous studies, corroborating the evidences. The interest in reconstructing these environments is largely generated from more recent discoveries of hominins that lived there in the Pleistocene. Data regarding hominin-mammal interactions is important and can be used to determine evolutionary nuances. If the environments in which these hominins lived can be interpreted, it can give us more details about how they lived, how they continued to disperse and even give scientists better clues as to where remains and artifacts can be found.

Climate change pushing vegetation "toward the poles and up mountain slopes"

via berkeley.edu

Tweeted about this article the other day, how, according to a recent meta-analysis, mean temperatures have increased on 76 percent of land from 1901 to 2002, with the highest increases occurring in boreal regions. These differences have caused vegetation to decrease in some areas and increase in others, what the authors are calling whole biome shifts, not just a few ecosystems, and as usual there is a human way of life at risk, not just an ecological system:

Some examples of biome shifts that occurred include woodlands giving way to grasslands in the African Sahel, and shrublands encroaching onto tundra in the Arctic.
"The dieback of trees and shrubs in the Sahel leaves less wood for houses and cooking, while the contraction of Arctic tundra reduces habitat for caribou and other wildlife," said Gonzalez, who has served as a lead author on reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "Globally, vegetation shifts are disrupting ecosystems, reducing habitat for endangered species, and altering the forests that supply water and other services to many people."

Another graphic in the release depicts the most vulnerable areas to biome shifts based on IPCC data.

Congratulations in order, and a look at how scientific ideas can inspire art

Yesterday, Heather received word that one of her recent drawings, Remediation I would be included in the Metro Montage at the Marietta-Cobb Museum of Art. Obviously, big congrats are in order. I’m incredibly proud of her and her work and thankful every day that she chooses to share her talent and her life with me.
The piece is the first of a series of similar compositions that picture animals on floating islands of habitats yanked from the earth that are connected to one another via human structures. Despite its name, however, Remediation I had a predecessor at TVG.
Back in February, as Tai Shan and Mei Lan were being rounded up to be shipped back to China, I found a paper reviewing experimental mapping of the giant panda’s fragmented habitat along certain mountain ranges and explored the possibility of creating corridors between forest patches in order to increase gene flow and keep the patch populations from becoming so small that recovery is impossible. I asked Heather if she could illustrate the post after we chatted about fragmentation concepts for a while and this is what she drew:

Remediation I is pictured below. It’s far too big to scan, so please excuse the relatively poor quality; we need a better camera.

It’s a perfect example of how scientific ideas can become artistic ones and how the ideas that enter our heads can be stripped of context and completely refigured. We start with a research paper, the summation of years of rigorous study that constructs (or represents, however you want to look at it) a system of interlocking parts that can be transposed to a different framework completely and be thematically represented in an image. The image inspires other, more complicated images that comprise a series and the series inspires a whole new set of images that constitute another theme, but were obviously informed by their predecessors. It’s not a closed system, however. Running concurrently is the constant stream of daily information that can add context and nuance. Four months later, Heather is crafting the last of the Remediation series and putting the final conceptual touches on its child, a completely new take on a multi-faceted theme.
It started with a paper, moved through a review and an illustrated blog post and ended up on framed paper which will ultimately sit on a wall in a gallery for the summer. It’s not often that I actually break down process on this site, but this was far too good of an example to pass up.
My love of science has directly informed my own creativity. Scientific concepts challenge your perspective, force you to be more analytical, to take apart and reassemble, to focus on pieces and segments and then to pull back as you line them up into something more formidable. The process of transposing that I described above, which Heather implements in these works, is all about moving frameworks that can be applied in very different situations. As I've said numerous times before, it fascinates me, these tenuous threads between conceptual paths, different in application and purpose, but not so different with the context removed.
Don't walk away with the impression that I'm trying to relay some sort of silly equivalence like "science is art and art is science"; it's more of a matter of attempting to refute the impulse to elevate one above another, or to comfortably lean, to one side or the other, of that often brightly drawn academic line between disciplines.

Oil spill animations just released

via www2.ucar.edu

Here's a series of models from the NCAR/UCAR website in addition to a news release of how the oil could spread in the following four months.
Description of the video above:

This animation shows one scenario of how oil released at the location of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico may move in the upper 65 feet of the ocean. This is not a forecast, but rather, it illustrates a likely dispersal pathway of the oil for roughly four months following the spill. It assumes oil spilling continuously from April 20 to June 20. The colors represent a dilution factor ranging from red (most concentrated) to beige (most diluted). The dilution factor does not attempt to estimate the actual barrels of oil at any spot; rather, it depicts how much of the total oil from the source that will be carried elsewhere by ocean currents. For example, areas showing a dilution factor of 0.01 would have one-hundredth the concentration of oil present at the spill site.
The animation is based on a computer model simulation, using a virtual dye, that assumes weather and current conditions similar to those that occur in a typical year. It is one of a set of six scenarios released today that simulate possible pathways the oil might take under a variety of oceanic conditions. Each of the six scenarios shows the same overall movement of oil through the Gulf to the Atlantic and up the East Coast. However, the timing and fine-scale details differ, depending on the details of the ocean currents in the Gulf. (Visualization by Tim Scheitlin and Mary Haley, NCAR; based on model simulations.)

Continuing misinformation from BP, but on the bright side...

via sfgate.com

We should just start assuming that BP is not going to give us the facts and be thankful that there are independent researchers and relief workers in the gulf trying to find out what's really going on and formulate plans to mitigate the damage based on actual measurements, not freshly spun talking points.
Chris Pulaski of the NWF says that instead of just 30 acres (BP's estimate) it could be thousands of acres of affected marshland from what they've seen. Salt marshes seem to be one of the places where pollutants like oil persist, so having an accurate estimate is essential for cleanup.
The Gulf Coast Spill Coalition is also trying to get "citizen scientists" involved by plugging an Oil Reporter app (for iPhone and Android), which allows users to upload photos and text to a specific RSS feed for compilation and review.

Lot

The asphalt was cracked down the long center and spottily filled with tar, a jagged black line through the parking lot. She walked that line as a child, arms straight out to her sides, swaying, tentatively stepping one foot over another. It was the only repair the city had done in fifteen years, that tar patch; the lot was rife with similar damage, splintered and cragged in places, chunks of pebbly asphalt turned up and over. She ran her fingers over the tar, and looking closely as she did, saw fractures throughout, felt them rough against the grain of her fingerprints. It was an illusion, the rich smoothness of the tar, like cooled – once molten – rock. When she was a child it was a hot vein through a barren waste. She could feel the heat through her jellies with each lingering step, careful not to fall to one side or another, an inflated concern that evaporated, along with the unspoken rules, as soon as she stumbled.
A year ago Pam’s sister found her sitting in the lot, alone and in the dark, lit by the streetlamp above. Her sister spoke sharply and Pam complied, shuffling back to the apartment, taking what she needed and playacting regret. That was the last time Pam left by herself. Tonight would be the last time in another year.
But not for another hour or so. The sun crowned the sparse treetops yet, and it was too early to dread her sister’s long walk to the lot. The night would be cold and whisper chill before long, but she was dressed nice and warm, and tucked herself inward, hugging her legs tightly against her chest. As the light waned, she would watch the long black tar line slowly fade until the lamp above her clicked, preserving a segment of the crack in a circle of fluorescence.

Australia heads to court over whaling dispute with Japan

via cnn.com

Clearly, the acceptance of other cultures' dietary practices and the promotion of cultural diversity is as important as saving endangered species and the promotion of biological diversity. If the consumption of whale meat does not endanger whale species, those who find the practice unacceptable for themselves should not try to impose their view on others.

Actually, that's not so clear. I think Japan's fisheries agency needs a bit more than a blanket cultural fallback on this one, especially considering this excuse is a potentially empty one:

Japan's whale-eating culture was also very limited in scope and, according to Morikawa, is "an invented tradition, only lasting 20 years from the end of WWII to the early 1960s." During the U.S. occupation, whale meat became part of the national school lunch program, explaining why Japan's aging baby boomers evince a nostalgic nationalism over the issue.

Decades later, how has the ecology of coastal Saudi Arabia recovered from the largest oil spill in history?

As the Deepwater Horizon spill progresses, I've been tracking down the science that has been done as a result of other large spills, particularly the monitoring of ecosystem damage and recovery. It's a mixed bag, apples and oranges in some cases, largely dependent on the communities affected, the extent of the spill, the cleanup effort and the environmental/species composition of the affected area.

I went straight to the biggest first, the Gulf War oil spill, which started in January of 1991 and ended up leaking 11 million barrels of oil (one barrel = 42 gallons) into the Persian Gulf, which eventually washed up on to the shorelines of the area, invading the beaches, salt marshes and mangrove forests. In 2001 and then again in 2008, Dr. Hans-Jörg Barth of the University of Regensburg reported on the ecological effects of the spill, which are apparent to this day.

Clips

"But as long as our forests stand, as long as trees march down to the sea or climb the wind-swept ridges of the Alleghenies, its dark plumy crown, its grand, rugged trunks, the strong, sweet, pitchy odor of its groves, and the heavy chant of the wind in them will stand for something that is wild and untamable and disdains even to be useful to man."

-Donald Culross Peattie, regarding the defiant pitch pine.

There is such a thing as too much news on a Sunday morning

I have to say, I'm very impressed with the rhetorical acrobatics, the marvelous mid-air twists and turns of Bp's spin doctors. I particularly like the claim that they successfully injected mud into the well, but were not successful in stopping the flow of oil. Really, they're trying very hard folks... to make it sound like they're trying very hard.

As John pointed out this morning, this is important: This is not the only spill happening right now, and it's certainly not the only one in the past month.

I think I need a nice long walk to clear my head. I've been stockpiling info for the past couple of weeks, really trying to piece this mess together. I'd like to share some of it when I have the time.

Here's a good summary of what's happening right now with the spill, including this bit:

At least two more oil spill cleanup workers have been hospitalized after feeling ill on the job, according to local shrimpers who are assisting in the recovery effort along the Gulf Coast. The workers complained of nausea, headaches and dizziness after low-flying planes applied chemical dispersants within one mile of operating cleanup vessels.

I have a feeling we'll be hearing more health concerns during the continuing cleanup.

Turtle transplant

Found a box turtle in the parking lot of the community today and drove him out to the Chattahoochee River Natty Rec Area. Hoping he doesn't find his way back to the asphalt anytime soon.

Dispersing agent

The King will reply, I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me. And the King will say, I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me! And the King will answer them, Truly, nine crew members on the platform floor and two engineers died during the explosion. The King will answer and say to them, Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me. The king will answer them, I tell you with certainty, The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume. The king will answer them, I can guarantee this truth: Whatever you did for one of my brothers or sisters, no matter how unimportant [they seemed], you did for me. And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, oil penetrates up the structure of the plumage of birds, reducing its insulating ability, and so making the birds more vulnerable to temperature fluctuations and much less buoyant in the water. It also impairs birds' flight abilities to forage and escape from predators. As they attempt to preen, birds typically ingest oil that covers their feathers, causing kidney damage, altered liver function, and digestive tract irritation. This and the limited foraging ability quickly causes dehydration and metabolic imbalances. Hormonal balance alteration including changes in luteinizing protein can also result in some birds exposed to petroleum. Most birds affected by an oil spill die. And the King shall answer and say to them, Truly I say to you, Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me. And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as dispersed oil droplets infiltrate into deeper water and can lethally contaminate coral. Recent research indicates that some dispersant are toxic to corals. And the King will make answer and say to them, Truly I say to you, Because you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me. And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, 189 dead sea turtles have been found along Gulf of Mexico coastlines. And the King will say, will reply, will answer: “Truly, verily, in truth – Amen! I say to you. Whatever ye have done to the least of these, the humblest of my brothers, my sisters, my brethren, no matter how unimportant they seem(ed), ye have done.” And the King answering shall say to them, Verily, I say to you, Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it to me. And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me. And the king will answer and say to them, Verily I say to you, it could take the ecosystem years and possibly decades to recover from such an infusion of oil and gas. The King will answer them, 'Most certainly I tell you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me. And the king answering, shall say to them, Verily I say to you, on Tuesday May 18, 2010, BP chief executive Tony Hayward insisted the environmental impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will be very, very modest. But the King will answer them, In solemn truth I tell you that in so far as you rendered such services to one of the humblest of these my brethren, you rendered them to myself.

A letter to my conservative friend

In light of the very real and very dangerous anthropogenic environmental disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico, I’m writing in hopes of engaging you in a conversation regarding some previous generalizations you’ve made about environmentalists and the environmental movement in general, if we can even still call it a singular philosophical effort.

You’ve decried environmentalism for the arrogance of its proponents and echoed the claim of many others that the planet can take care of itself. If Michael Crichton could be indicted for one crime against fiction it should be for the idiot words of his idiot self-manifestation as a genius, Ian Malcolm, and punished by being forced to hear the phrase repeated by everyone who ever has. Of course the planet will go on. Of course life finds a way. That’s not really the question. The question that most environmentalists are interested in answering is who or what is responsible for how the earth and its systems, biological and otherwise, are changing. This is the first time in the history of the earth that changes to the extent at which they’re being recorded can, in most cases, be directly attributed to an inhabitant of the planet.

You underestimate our power as a species. We’re not just another primate in a long line. We’re the pinnacle of animal intelligence with a thirst for knowledge and dominance, and why not sate that impulse, who or what could possibly stop us? We have reshaped the very face of earth with massive tools, bending the forests and waters to our every whim, constantly reinventing and refining our perceptions with each passing age gaining more and more freedom for the individual. We are no longer beholden to any god if we so choose. Call arrogance by its proper name; call it humanity.

Drill, baby, drill!

One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting on the white sands of the Alabama Gulf coast building a sand castle with my little brother. We jumped in and out of the surf, stood in the waves until the sand washed away from under our feet, chased crabs, and dug clams. We played outside until our noses and shoulders were a shocking pink and our mother made us go indoors. Some nights my father would buy fresh seafood from a local fisherman and we’d eat until our pants were too tight. The other nights we’d go to a local family restaurant and eat even more.

Every year since that vacation, I've gone to the Gulf coast at least once every year for the past 35 years. It’s one of my favorite places in the world. I get up early and walk on the beach at sunrise, watching the horizon over the water gradually turn a vivid pink. I sit out by the surf for hours, listening to the dull roar of the waves meeting the sand. I walk barefoot on sand that looks like sugar, watching birds flit in and out of the water. I visit nature preserves, wetlands, and barrier islands to hunt for unique plants, animals, and shells. During my long years as a pretty strict vegetarian, I always made an exception on my Gulf trips to gorge on shrimp and scallops. After all, as Bubba in Forrest Gump said, "shrimp are fruit of the sea" so maybe I wasn't cheating too much.

Many years ago while staying at a small cottage on a barrier island, I got up early, poured a cup of coffee, and headed down to the beach to watch the sun rise. I saw a woman rooting around in the plants in between the buildings and she frantically gestured to me as I walked by. She was holding a tiny loggerhead sea turtle hatchling; it had become confused by the hotel lights and instead making a beeline straight for the water after clawing its way out of its shell, it had headed towards the bright streetlights that are only supposed to guide people. I picked it up and held it, a tiny creature that fit comfortably in the palm of my hand. It seemed so fragile. Yet, the species has been around for 150 million years and survived the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs. That moment, holding a sea turtle in my hand, contemplating the link between me and this ancient seafaring creature, was the beginning of my true interest in biology and the interaction between all living things.

Because I love the coast, its creatures, and the seafood so much, I have watched in growing horror as oil spills out of the deep sea well in the Gulf and towards the fragile coast. I wish I had time to visit just once more before oil coats my favorite spots, kills the wildlife, and ruins the seafood industry. Now, instead of planning for my next trip to loaf on the beach, eat, and relax, I'm now planning a trip to clean up oil. Just before starting to write this post I read an article about how some experts are expecting the oil to not only impact the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and western Florida, they're now mentioning a much wider impact. Some are saying the oil is creeping near the Gulf Stream, which will whisk the oil all along the entire Florida Gulf coast, then around the peninsula to the eastern seaboard.

I don't understand the technical issues involved in the oil industry, but I do know that no amount of oil we get from wells in the Gulf will ever make up for the environmental and economic disaster unfolding before our eyes. This spill has the potential to decimate the fishing and tourism industries for years, not to mention the impact on the critical wetland estuaries and coastal ecosystems. Is drilling offshore, with the potential for more disasters in other coastal areas that rely on seafood and tourism, really worth it? Before this accident I was fairly ambivalent about offshore drilling. After all, we need oil, and getting it domestically is better than buying it from the Middle East. But this accident has pushed me from ambivalence to fervent opposition to an industry that has shown so little foresight and planning to deal with this accident. No plan B. No plan C. No plan D. The corporations responsible for this are flailing wildly in the dark. Their lack of planning and disdain of regulations designed to prevent accidents like this will be in my mind for years.

In the end, BP, TransOcean, Halliburton, and other oil contractors aren't going to pay the price for this disaster. We will.

Just tell the damn story

In general, I hate writing bios. I'm not a big fan of reading them either, unless they're succinct and humorless, unless the writer actually has some notion of wit, which is rare. I've written bios for myself in the past and as I read those three or four sentences over and over, each time it becomes more and more of a labor until I'm so thoroughly sick of it I delete it. I write about ecology here and sometimes I write about other stuff that I like. I'm a writer who writes about things that I enjoy. I have a job where I'm paid to write, then I come home and write things that appear on the internet and other things that do not.

Defining edge effects by resource and sensitivity

In 2004 Leslie Ries and Thomas D. Sisk published a study in Ecology asking a simple and surprisingly unaddressed question: Considering the number of studies published describing habitat fragmentation and edge effects, why has the pattern and framework of these effects on ecosystems not been described? Ries and Sisk proposed a conceptual model in that paper that can account and predict, to some extent, the variability of an organism’s responses to different edges, usually indicated through an increase or decrease of abundance at the edge, or no change at all. The model is based on resources, predicting how organisms will be distributed across the edge between patches by the quality and quantity of resources available in the three zones (patch1 – edge – patch2).

Our throwaway society

How much do you recycle? I will admit that I don't recycle nearly as much as I should. I live in a rural area, there are no recycling centers near my home, and it's a huge pain to take paper, glass, and plastic to the nearest recycling center 45 minutes away. I try to offset my limited recycling by using cloth shopping bags, never buying bottled water, and by buying items with minimal packaging. But I still throw away an awful lot.

I was poking around on the TED network (a fabulous resource for information about pretty much anything) and watched a short video about all of the trash that makes its way into our oceans. The impact of floating plastic affects a range of ecosystems in ways that aren't immediately obvious. Sea birds, turtles, and other animals are impacted by the huge amount of floating bits of plastic that look like food. Plastic that stays in the ocean for years never biodegrades, it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that fish and other aquatic life then eat. There is no way to get rid of the huge amounts of plastic now bobbing around in the oceans--the only thing we can do is limit future plastic accumulation. But in our world of throwaway convenience, I think the problem with huge amounts of trash slowing creeping into the environment will only get worse. Today, we can buy "green" products for every want and need. We can buy "green" cleaning supplies endorsed by environmental groups in pretty plastic bottles. We can buy organic vegetables individually wrapped in delicate sheets of plastic. We can buy entire organic dinners, including pasture-raised, grass-fed meat, in shrink wrapped plastic bowls. You can buy reusable plastic bottles emblazoned with a message encouraging you to Save the Planet! But how many people who buy these products to help save the planet then make sure the plastic containers are recycled, if the plastic can even be recycled at all? I often wonder if the green movement is really helping solve some of the core problems facing our world or if we're really just participants in greenwashing... buy green and feel good! It doesn't matter if we're actually addressing and solving real problems, as long as we can say "we're Green!"

I often think back to my grandparent's time and wonder if it's possible to replicate the way they lived without all of the throwaway products our modern society uses (and abuses). Is there a way to have a comfortable, modern society without the mindset of disposable convenience? I don't know if there is, and I certainly haven't found a way to live without disposable products, but videos like this make me want to try harder.

Left at the intersection

There's an intersection on the other side of that forest, one that you might miss if you kept the sedan in neutral and let it glide down the slope like water from a flume. It's a canal of tall pines until the sky opens up at the edge of a steep dip in the road, sagging into a four way crossroads of gray, gravely asphalt. No stop sign if you come through the woods on that side, the only side we did; the three millionth time passed was the first time I saw anything stopped there, to the left. It was an old red tractor with an old farmer on its back, squeaking the metal seat, big wad of tobacco in his lip. He waved as we passed at lightning speed. They all wave up there, the phantom residents of the eastern mountains.

For Earth Day: The impact of the smallest of changes

It's interesting how we spend entire years of our lives mucked in by expectations formulated by nothing but personal history, a nod to past trends, past relationships. Of course there's analysis - there's always analysis - but the mind can impose restraints, keeping potentially tangible elements of thought from polluting the standard by keeping them lovely and safe in a little glass vial, capped off and fuming. The moment of change interests me, where those bottled ideas, the shoulds and should nots or lines drawn or open doors are expressed, finally accepted and implemented in a very real sense. Does it happen all at once and are we playing an active role in expression? Does the vial shatter, dropped by mistake, or do we yank the stopper? Or does the fume seep through imperfections in the barrier, becoming incorporated slowly over time?

Over the past five years we've all been watching the "green" trend, and based on the ubiquity of the term itself to describe, in particular, the attributes of certain products, I'd say the marketing scheme has succeeded in selling the Western world an attractive interpretation of environmentalism. As several have noted, on this Earth Day and others, it's a holiday, a lifestyle, commodified for better or worse that's produced its own often self-proclaimed entrepreneurs, self-help nonsense and self-repentant framework for doling out shame and guilt to its faithful. It is one way that has produced some results and brought the idea of planetary stewardship to the masses in a well-packaged product complete with subcultural cred.

Feedburner not updating

I've noticed that my feed hasn't been updating with the past couple of posts and I'm not the only one using Feedburner that's having the problem. Last thing I want to do at this point is move the feed, but if I do I'll post a heads up before it happens.

Sorry for the inconvenience. If anyone knows a solution to the problem, I'd be happy to hear it.

UPDATE: Got it fixed. Too much data in the feed, had to set a post limit, might end up increasing the post limit and just having previews in the feed, but I won't if there are objections to that.

UPDATE #2: Made some visual changes to the site, including slimming the Twitter posts. I think it's a bit easier to read now. Also have a new icon to apply to flash fiction/poetry on the site, the "vignettes":

Standard Application

Tony had walked into the restaurant the day before after smashing a brand new Oldsmobile into the side of the automatic car wash outside of the detailing station at the Good Olds Dealership across town. His manager wanted Tony's paycheck to help pay for the damages and Tony wanted a new job anyway, so he stripped out of his coveralls and walked to his own car in his boxer briefs, which he had also rammed into the automatic carwash earlier in the year. It was a brief sojourn into the world of suits, ties and sales, a multi-tiered social system of puppetry, mealy mouthed businessmen and gruff drones in garages, churning out repairs and eking by on the wage they earned in the dungeon below the suited white men. They made deals.

Goodall's fight, US demands symmetry and monitoring right whales

E.O. Wilson's first novel, orangutan bridges and tripling the IUCN Red List

History of land use determines threat and rarity in mangrove tree species

A new study from PLoS ONE was published last week assessing the threat to mangrove tree species around the world based on IUCN Red List data. At first glance the paper might seem to be just another bleak walk through the anthropogenic dismantling of a fragile biome, but there are some excellent issues presented regarding our relationship between the land and its inhabitants and the interconnectedness of rarity and threat level.

The major transition of land use to land management (with a cons bio or ecological base) is a shift in public perception driven by the shift in the perceived, publicized and tangible wants and needs of Western culture molded and implemented by government officials, politicians, philosophers and activists. When you juxtapose historical procedure and law regarding resource acquisition with our modern standards, the inescapable constant is Western prerogative, which definitely gives environmentalists a steep rhetorical hill to climb when trying to rationalize proposed protections, especially those that would effectively rope off or reign in particular resources from public access in foreign countries. One of the largest factors in the decline of mangroves worldwide is the proliferation of aquaculture, which is established by local (or not so local) business people to feed the Western-inspired globalized desire for seafood of particular types. It must be delightfully contradictory for locals to simultaneously receive pleas for the environment and orders for product from the same countries.

Portugal found value in the mangroves going as far back as the early 1700’s, when a law was established in Brazil making it illegal to fell a tree without also using the bark. This wasn’t an indicator of some kind of European protoenvironmentalism, however; it protected the tanneries’ interests in the trees, essentially granting exclusive rights to the tanneries for logging. Tannin was big business until more recently, evidenced by chemical evaluations like this:

That passage comes from the second volume on “the tannins”, preceded by historical data on the English interest in mangrove tannin in the early 19th century, so the commercial interest in these areas has been constant even if the primary interests have changed.

There are 70 species of tree that can be classified as “true” mangrove species, though not all of them are closely related. Mangrove trees have two main environmental stressors: an overabundance of salt from the water and a deficiency of oxygen from the soil. These plants have developed root structures like pneumatophores or above-ground, “aerial” roots to absorb oxygen , poking through the largely hypoxic mud. In some mangrove trees, the roots contain high levels of waxy suberin to mitigate the level of salt entering cells; in others, like the white or grey mangrove, the organism is able to secrete excess salts.

But perhaps the most unique adaptation to the high level of salts in the water and soil is the way some mangrove trees nurture and disperse their seeds. Unlike most plants, mangrove trees such as Aegialitis or Rhizophora are viviparous – the seeds germinate while still attached to the tree, forming a buoyant propagule, a protective vessel highly resistant to the desiccating waters encompassing the forest. Blair Niles, Mary Blair Beebe and William Beebe describe these structures in their 1910 book Our Search for Wilderness:

Far out on the tip of a lofty branch a mangrove seed will germinate before it falls assuming the appearance of a loaded club from eight to fifteen inches in length One day it lets go and drops like a plummet into the soft mud where it sticks upright Soon the tide rises and if there is too strong a current the young plant is swept away to perish far out at sea but if it can maintain its hold roots soon spring out and the ideal of the mangrove is realized the purpose for which all this interesting phenomena is intended the forest has gained a few yards and mud and leaves will soon choke out the intervening water.

This mangrove forest in eastern Venezuela, the Orinoco delta, is one of the areas of least concern for this biome. The forests are relatively protected in the area, and many of the species are replicated in other areas of the world, as far away as Africa. This is not the case, however, in other places of the world.

Mangrove Distribution

Just north, the mangrove forests along the Pacific and Atlantic narrows of Central America contain the highest proportional number of threatened mangrove tree species in the world, about 25 to 40 percent depending on the area, according to the authors of the new PLoSOne paper I mentioned, Polidoro et al. There are approximately 10 species of trees in the area, a stark contrast to the Indo Malay Philippine Archipelago, which harbors 36 – 46 species out of the 70 known of which less than 15 percent are threatened.

Percent of Mangroves threatened per area

That number can be deceiving however; the habitat has been reduced by 30 percent in the past 30 years due mainly to the establishment of fish and shrimp farms, and the protections on paper are not always translating into enforced policies. Two species in particular are of chief concern due to an 80 percent reduction in their already patchy habitats of late, Sonneratia griffithii and Bruguiera lainesii, of which there are only about 500 and 250 individuals left in the wild respectively.

The authors briefly mention an interesting statistic regarding rarity: Nine out of 11 of the most threatened mangrove trees are considered rare or uncommon, but five out of the rest are also considered uncommon, bringing up an important distinction. There is definitely a tendency for the two factors – rarity and threat level – to be tied for obvious reasons, but it’s not a necessary linkage. In the case of uncommon, least concern organisms, their rarity can be explained by physiological, reproduction or ecological factors like dispersal or certain competitive pressures that are normal for the organism. An uncommon organism might be rarer because of its distribution relative to other, comparable species or it might very well be under certain immediate threats, but is able to reproduce and disperse with greater efficiency than its peers.

This paper was also covered over at Conservation Bytes, where Corey details some of the essential services mangrove forests provide.

Polidoro, B., Carpenter, K., Collins, L., Duke, N., Ellison, A., Ellison, J., Farnsworth, E., Fernando, E., Kathiresan, K., Koedam, N., Livingstone, S., Miyagi, T., Moore, G., Ngoc Nam, V., Ong, J., Primavera, J., Salmo, S., Sanciangco, J., Sukardjo, S., Wang, Y., & Yong, J. (2010). The Loss of Species: Mangrove Extinction Risk and Geographic Areas of Global Concern PLoS ONE, 5 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010095

National Poetry Month, corporate greenwashing and thawing wetlands

Oprah's Life, Goodall's interview and Palin's Alaska

Caves, bats, and a newly emerging disease

I've explored caves for practically my entire life. At least a couple times a month for over 25 years, I've ventured into the dark world beneath the earth's surface to explore a world that most people will never see. The reasons I like to explore caves are as complex as the caves I visit. I love the effort required to hike to and locate small cave entrances tucked away on the side of a hill. I enjoy the technical aspects of climbing up tight canyons, crawling through low puddles of mud, and using ropes and harnesses to rappel down to areas otherwise inaccessible. I love finding delicate formations and emerald green pools hidden among cathedrals of solid rock. I have also always loved seeing the strange animals that live in one of the world's most unusual (and totally dark!) environments. My favorite underground animal to observe has long been the bat.

Now, bats across the eastern US are in serious trouble, and over the past two years my love of caving and my love of bats have collided as I've watched in horror as a new, fatal disease has swept through the bat population. In 2006, a cave explorer in New York noticed a few bats with an odd white fungus on their noses, as well as several dead bats on the cave floor. He took some pictures. The next winter, New York biologists found disturbing signs that something was seriously wrong with the bat colonies. Bat were found roosting unusually close to cave entrances, bats were seen flying around outside in the dead of winter when they should have been hibernating, and many of the bats had the strange white fungus on their noses. By the spring of 2007, thousands of dead bats were found in New York caves, and bats that were still alive had white noses. What was going on?

As researchers continued to monitor caves in the northeast, they found more and more caves with white-nosed bats. So far, over a million bats have died, and there are no signs that the syndome is getting better or going away. Unfortunately, each winter, the fungus spread to more caves farther away from the epicenter in New York. Each winter got worse. Mortality rates are often 100% in affected caves. Some reports say that the northeast now has almost no bats left. Last winter, WNS spread from the northeast to the Virginias. This winter, it spread to Tennessee. The last reported case of WNS in Dunbar Cave, TN is 100 miles from my house. Only 150 miles from Dunbar, in northeast Alabama, is the largest gray bat hibernaculum in the country. Researchers names this affliction White Nose Syndome, or WNS.

To understand why this syndrome is spreading throughout the country, it might help to understand a bit about bat ecology and migration. Several different species of bats are currently affected by this syndrome, and they all have different habitats as far as where they live during the summer and winter. Many bats live in the forest during the warm summer months or in warmer caves where they can give birth and raise their young. In the winter, most bats migrate at least a short distance to cold caves that are ideal for dropping their body temperature to near freezing, allowing them to enter a torpor for winter hibernation. As a result, bats fly all over wide ranges, come into contact with other species of bats, and probably encounter a variety of habitats during the year.

So what do we know so far about WNS? Researchers succeeded in identifying the fungus, appropriately naming it Geomyces destructans. The researchers found that WNS is "characterized by the presence of profuse yet delicate hyphae and conidia on bat muzzles, wing membranes, and/or pinnae, although these surface signs are readily removed. Histological examination of infected bats shows that fungal hyphae pervade the bat tissue filling hair follicles and sebaceous glands, yet the fungus does not typically lead to inflammation or immune response in the tissue of hibernating bats (Meteyer et al. 2009)." The species thrives in cold conditions. Gene sequencing showed that the fungus is in the genus Geomyces, but the asymmetrically curved conidia are unlike any described species. Interestingly, the new, deadly fungus is closely related to Geomyces pannorum, which causes skin infections in humans. The fungus is new to science.

Even though researchers were able to identify and name the new fungus, there are many more questions than answers. Bats seem to be affected only during hibernation when they roost in cold locations and their bodies go into torpor. It's currently unknown if the fungus itself is what's killing the bats or if the fungus is just a symptom of an underlying and yet unidentified condition (although some researchers now say they believe the fungus is to blame). Affected bats are emaciated and seem to arouse during hibernation to look for food, but we don't know if bats enter hibernation in an emaciated state or become emaciated during the winter. Nobody knows if there is any way to help bats fight off this fungus, remove the fungus from the environment, or generally help stop the bat deaths. Many studies are looking at these kinds of questions, but the real question is will answer arrive in time? Research has shown that bats can be exposed to WNS both through the environment (soil in affected caves) or by contact with other bats. Research has also discovered that soil in caves where numerous bats have died from WNS contains spores of the fungus responsible for WNS. The big fear now is that as WNS moves farther south, it will start to impact huge bat colonies with more than a million individuals in a single cave. One sick bat could potentially spread this illness to an entire colony, wiping out huge numbers of bats. A cave I've worked with for many years in north Alabama has an estimated 1.5 million hibernating bats in the winter. If and when WNS impacts the cave, I don't know how I'll deal with the loss of such a huge number of bats I've come to love.

Many theories have surfaced to explain the sudden appearance of such a deadly affliction. Some suggested an association with pesticides or environmental contaminants, others suggested an invasive species. Many have noted the similarities to bee colony collapse disorder. Although nobody has an answer to why WNS suddenly appeared, one interesting study has shown a link to a fungus in France. When researchers first learned of this new fungus, scientists in Europe started to look around to see if any bats there had unusual fungal growth. French researchers found a bat with white fungal growth on its nose, sequenced the fungus, and it's a genetic match to Geomyces destructans. But, the bats since found in Europe with this fungus appear to be healthy and are experiencing no ill-effects from exposure to the fungus. The mystery deepens.

As researchers in the US spent more time studying affected bats, they also noted that not only does the fungus show up on bat noses, it also affects their wings. The damage isn't simply fungus growing on wings, rather infected bats have holes in their wing membranes, flaking skin, and even necrotic tissue. This means that even if a bat manages to survive a season after being exposed to WNS, the bat may have serious problems flying and hunting.

So what does all of this mean to us? Well, bats are essential components of our ecology and help control insects across the country. There are over 1,000 species of bats worldwide, and 40 species in the US. One bat eats half its body weight in insects every single night. One little brown bat can catch and eat up to 600 mosquitoes in one hour! A small bat colony will often eat up to a ton of insects nightly. If WNS continues to sweep across the country, not only will that mean we will lose many individual animals that are fascinating and useful, but our ecological balance will change. Without insects to help control insect populations, will another species fill the void?

I'm spending a ridiculous amount of time these days keeping up to date on WNS information and I'm sure I'll share more in future weeks and months. In the meantime, if you see bats acting in an unusual way (flying around during the day, flying during the winter, or on the ground flopping around), don't touch it. Instead, contact your state's wildlife biologist and/or your local animal control and report the bat. Trying to contact a biologist first. Animal control may not necessarily be aware of WNS and just assume the bat has rabies.

For more information, here are some resources:

• http://www.fws.gov/northeast/white_nose.html
• http://caves.org/WNS/index.htm

And I need to include a cave picture so you can get an idea of why I like the underground world so much. My friend JV Van Swearingen IV took this picture many years ago.

Demonstrating synergy between functional groups: Burrowing mammals and megaherbivores

The black-tailed prairie dogs of the Chihuahuan grasslands have been under enormous pressures due to human activity, mostly from poor land management and overgrazing from cattle in the region. I blogged about a paper back in January from Gerardo Ceballos, Ana Davidson and their colleagues describing the level of colony disruption in the Janos region of Mexico and how the absence of the black-tailed prairie dog, this keystone species, was affecting the populations of other organisms and allowing the encroachment of scrubland to progress more rapidly.

Davidson et al. published another study a few weeks ago in Ecology further exploring the relationships between black-tailed prairie dogs and their much maligned neighbors, Bos taurus, cattle. Prairie dogs have been generally regarded as a danger to cattle by ranchers and removed through poisoning or other means. Overgrazing can lead to desertification, further threatening these animals. But that's a relatively new trend in a long and complex history of interaction between prairie dogs and megaherbivores like cattle.

Bison used to roam the Janos grasslands living side by side with burrowing mammals like the banner-tailed kangaroo rat and the black-tailed prairie dog, but across North American grasslands, free-roaming herds of bison have been replaced by cattle herds. There has been a recent push to reintroduce bison to Chihuahua, to reinstate their ecological status, but Davidson et al. are taking a more realistic approach in this study given the wide range of cattle distribution and the importance of these animals to local economies. A level of functional equivalence has been demonstrated between bison and cattle, and the authors seek to pin down the specifics of how cattle and prairie dogs affect their neighbors and the environment both in cohabitation and in isolation. This study addresses a much larger issue of demonstrating the synergy of organisms in different functional groups having a combined effect on the ecosystem.

The authors established and studied four types of plots to tease out individual effects from synergistic: Prairie dogs and cattle present (P+C+), prairie dogs present, no cattle (P+C-), no prairie dogs, cattle present (P-C+) and neither present (P-C-). Important environmental variables were analyzed for each of these plots, waypoints to illustrate discrepancies: "vegetation (plant height, cover, and biomass), animal activity (fecal counts of rabbits, and soil disturbance by prairie dogs, kangaroo rats, and gophers), mounds (of prairie dogs, kangaroo rats, and harvester ants) grasshopper abundance and prairie dog abundance."

First and foremost, prairie dog abundance doubled in the presence of cattle due to grazing and their combined efforts had a dramatic effect on the plant cover on the P+C+ plots, reducing vegetation height significantly. There was also two to three fold decline in the grasshopper population between the P-C- plots and the P+C+ plots.

The study demonstrated some interesting individual effects as well. In the absence of prairie dogs (P-C+), banner-tailed kangaroo rats activity increased. According to the authors it has been speculated in the past that these animals, who are also considered ecosystem engineers and a keystone species, actually compete with the black-tailed prairie dog. The results seem to favor that notion as well as demonstrate at least a short term boon for the kangaroo rats - another burrowing mammal - in the presence of a megaherbivore, particularly one that has been "responsible" for perpetrating the overgrazing leading to desertification that threatens the kangaroo rat.

The important concept here is combined effects; the individual effects on the environment and other organisms by prairie dogs and cattle were mostly not significant, but when they were combined and allowed to synergize, they apply broad controls to the ecosystem. From a land management standpoint, this natural inclination can be employed to help maintain biodiversity and protect threatened species in the Chihuahuan grasslands without pushing ranchers out.

Davidson, A., Ponce, E., Lightfoot, D., Fredrickson, E., Brown, J., Cruzado, J., Brantley, S., Sierra, R., List, R., Toledo, D., & Ceballos, G. (2010). RAPID RESPONSE OF A GRASSLAND ECOSYSTEM TO AN EXPERIMENTAL MANIPULATION OF A KEYSTONE RODENT AND DOMESTIC LIVESTOCK Ecology DOI: 10.1890/09-1277

Lorelol: Character specificity and the building blocks of interaction

Last post I think I could have been more clear with my terminology. In the title I claimed that WoW was societal escapism and not fantasy escapism, which is exactly what I mean, but the paragraph after the quote kind of gives the impression that I’m acknowledging the opposite by using the term “escapist fantasy”, which I also mean, but could be confusing. So, for the sake of clarity, fantasy escapism is escapism through a fantasy narrative while escapist fantasy is a general term for the medium through which a person could escape. I won’t be using the latter again in this series to avoid confusion.

Now that I’ve thoroughly stickied my fingers with semantics, more on WoW as societal fantasy.

This pretty accurately sums up the first post in the series:

People don’t play WoW to escape into a story, they play WoW to escape into another society that celebrates social awkwardness and in general, provides you with an immersive place to interact. If they wanted to escape into story, there are plenty of great console and PC games with no online, social components. Really, WoW is just a more complicated Gaia Online, or a multi-tiered chatroom with PvP combat. It’s a place for gamers to congregate or for new gamers to get a taste, like Bainbridge did. I don’t see it as any different from any other online community; people gravitate toward others that have the same interests, form tribal bonds and identify allies and opponents.

I will agree with Bainbridge that WoW poses alternatives to reality, but it’s not through the NPCs and the environments of the simulated world of Azeroth; that’s just window dressing, a necessary point of reference for the establishment of an integrative, alternative society of players.

Lorelol: World of Warcraft as societal escapism, not fantasy escapism

On CultureLab, one of the New Scientist blogs, there's an interview with William Sims Bainbridge, who has spent 2,300 hours studying World of Warcraft in game to write an upcoming book about his studies: The Warcraft Civilization: Social science in a virtual world (links to sample chapter).

He was asked:

You've spent 2300 hours in World of Warcraft (WoW). Is it more than a game?

Like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung, WoW isn't just escapist fantasy. It's posing alternatives to the world we actually have today. It raises questions about environmentalism and colonialism; it asks how people are going to be respectful of each other in a world in which there aren't enough resources.

Tolkien believed that all good people could come together on the same side. This is one of the biggest questions that humanity faces: can we have a world consensus by which we're all partners in finding a solution? Or, like the Hoarde [sic] vs Alliance situation in WoW, are we doomed to be in separate factions competing ultimately to the death? It touches on very serious issues but in a playful way.

With all due respect to Dr. Bainbridge, he's wrong about WoW; it is indeed just an escapist fantasy, just as Lord of the Rings was, just as Tolkien intended it to be. Of LotR, Tolkien has written: "It is neither allegorical nor topical... I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence."