naked capitalism

I saw this story yesterday on the BBC, which reports on the danger of collapse of bluefin tuna stocks, and didn’t cover it then because I thought it was the sort of thing that would get plenty of media attention. The fact that the not-terribly-environmentally-minded US is supporting a 3-5 year ban on tuna fishing in the North Atlantic says the situation is serious.

I am stunned to see today that when I put “tuna” into Google News, I got all of 5 articles on this issue (BBC, a New York Times editorial, Fish Update, the Telegraph, and the Edmunton Sun).

Readers may note that I have never advocated any particular pro-environment course of action, so I hope you will take this request seriously.

As much as I am a sushi-holic (and tuna is a prized offering), I have been avoiding tuna for some time, not so much for the stock collapse issue (I was unaware of that until recently) but because it is very high up the food chain. You consume a lot of ocean food energy when you eat tuna. And believe me, I am not as virtuous on the environmental front as I’d like to be, but for the vast majority of people, food is one area where it is relatively easy to implement changes (and I anticipate it will become more a focus of attention in the next few years).

A crude rule of thumb is that every time you go one step up the food chain, you get only 10% of the calories you’d get by consuming the next lower item (note I am not sure how this is measured, whether by weight or portion size. Carbohydrates and proteins have the same amount of calories per unit weight, but fats have more than two times as many calories per gram as carbs and protein). So say you eat corn-fed beef. It took ten times the amount of corn to produce that unit weight of beef (and that may not even allow for waste, like skeleton and hide).

Tuna is a top predator. I recall reading it can be as high as 10 levels up the food chain, and per the chart below, it is routinely 4-5 levels up. So tuna is one of the most environmentally costly foods. (Anyone who has better factoids on this matter is encouraged to contribute, but directionally, this depiction is accurate, even if the particulars are a bit off).

So please, no more tuna! And (nicely) encourage any restaurant you frequent to stop serving it.

From the New York Times, “The Bluefin Slaughter“:

The hunting of highly valued animals into oblivion is a symptom of human foolishness that many consign to the unenlightened past, like the 19th century, when bird species were wiped out for feathered hats and bison were decimated for sport. But the slaughter of the giant bluefin tuna is happening now.

An international conference that ends tomorrow in Turkey could help to rescue the bluefin, a noble, ocean-crossing predator, from the brink of collapse — or seal its doom through empty promises and inaction. The United States has gone to the meeting urging a ban on bluefin fishing in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean. The world should heed it.

Think of a giant bluefin as an 800-pound torpedo of sushi — some of the finest, fattiest, most expensive there is. Since the 1970s, when the sushi craze took off, purse-seine haulers and longline fishing boats and fish hunters in spotter planes have chased the giant bluefin across the world’s oceans. They have been ruthlessly efficient: The worldwide bluefin population has plunged more than 90 percent in the last 30 years.

There are bluefin tuna “farms” — large-scale ranching operations in the Mediterranean, but these are no less destructive than boats on the open seas. Farms catch their fish in the wild, young and small, exploiting a loophole in rules that set limits by weight. The tuna are fattened in pens, like foie-gras geese, using vast supplies of smaller fish whose plundering is its own ecological disaster.

Scientists of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas recommended last year that the annual catch in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean be lowered to 15,000 metric tons to let the fish recover. The commission instead set a quota that was practically twice that: 29,500 tons. The evidence so far suggests that the actual catch this year will be 40,000 to 50,000 tons, said William Hogarth, director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, who is at the commission’s meeting in Turkey to plead for the moratorium.

Blame for the crisis is global. The European Commission has promoted ruinously excessive fishing quotas. The United States is a major source of sushi demand, and must do much more to protect the bluefin in one of its important spawning grounds, the Gulf of Mexico. And a huge slab of raw guilt should be placed on Japan, the world’s most voracious fish consumer, whose appetite for the bluefin has done the most to make it disappear.

And from the BBC:

The US is calling for a ban on the fishing of bluefin tuna in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea.

A three-to-five-years ban is being proposed to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (Iccat).

The call comes amid deep concerns that the stock may collapse if the level of overfishing continues.

The European Commission recently closed its bluefin tuna fishery for this year after quota limits had been exceeded.

Bill Hogarth, the US delegate and Iccat chairman, said: “We need a determined international effort to save this truly magnificent fish”.

The US Senate has backed Mr Hogath’s calls for a moratorium on bluefin tuna fishing at the Iccat, which is currently meeting in Turkey…

Speaking from Turkey, Dr Sergi Tudela, the head of Fisheries Programme at WWF Mediterranean said:

“The so-called recovery plan that was adopted by Iccat last year, is not a recovery plan – it is a collapse plan, even according to the scientific committee of Iccat,” he told BBC News.

In 2006, to stop stock decline, Iccat scientists advised that the total catches on eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin stock should not exceed 15,000 tonnes.

The adopted plan, however, set the quota at 29,000 metric tonnes for 2007, nearly twice the scientifically recommended level.

These unsustainable management measures, along with violations of catch limits, illegal fishing and misreporting mean the US and WWF believe a moratorium is the only option to save blue fin tuna stocks from collapse.

The fourth and final installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth, summary report is to be released later today. As with earlier versions, certain elements have already been passed on to the press, but there seems to be far less anticipatory chatter than with the previous installments. I hope this isn’t a sign of reduced interest, since this report is considerably more urgent in tone and content than its predecessors.

Having the IPCC share in the Nobel Peace Prize has apparently strengthened the hand of the scientists versus the politicians, leading to more forceful and forthright portrayal of climate change risks. In addition, a tougher stand by developing nations who stand to lose the most from climate change also helped shift the consensus towards more emphasis of the potential dangers.

A preview on the BBC stressed the firm tone of the report:

Among the report’s top-line conclusions are that climate change is “unequivocal”, that humankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases are more than 90% likely to be the main cause, and that impacts can be reduced at reasonable cost.

The synthesis summary finalised late on Friday strengthens the language of those earlier reports with a warning that climate change may bring “abrupt and irreversible” impacts.

Such impacts could include the fast melting of glaciers and species extinctions.

“Approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed 1.5-2.5C (relative to the 1980-1999 average),” the summary concludes.

Other potential impacts highlighted in the text include:

between 75m and 250m people projected to have scarcer fresh water supplies than at present
yields from rain-fed agriculture could be halved
food security likely to be further compromised in Africa
widespread impacts on coral reefs

However, an article in the New York Times, while confirming that this release presents a more dire picture than the earlier reports, also makes clear that it nevertheless understates the speed of change:

Even though the synthesis report is more alarming than its predecessors, some researchers believe that it still understates the trajectory of global warming and its impact. The I.P.C.C.’s scientific process, which takes five years of study and writing from start to finish, cannot take into account the very latest data on climate change or economic trends, which show larger than predicted development and energy use in China.

“The world is already at or above the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions,” said Gernot Klepper, of the Kiel Institute for World Economy in Kiel, Germany. “In terms of emissions, we are moving past the most pessimistic estimates of the I.P.C.C., and by some estimates we are above that red line.”

The panel presents several scenarios for the trajectory of emissions and climate change. In 2006, 8.4 gigatons of carbon were put into the atmosphere from fossil fuels, according to a study in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which was co-written by Dr. Klepper. That is almost identical to the panel’s worst case prediction for that year.

Likewise, a recent International Energy Agency report looking at the unexpectedly rapid emissions growth in China and India estimated that if current policies were not changed the world would warm six degrees by 2030, a disastrous increase far higher than the panel’s estimates of one to four degrees by the end of the century…..

One novel aspect of the report is a specific list of “Reasons for Concern.” It includes items that are thought to be very likely outgrowths of climate change that had been mentioned in previous reports, like an increase in extreme weather events.

But it for the first time includes less likely but more alarming possibilities, like the relatively rapid melting of polar ice. Previous reports focused more on changes the scientists felt were “highly likely.”

“This time, they take a step back and look at the totality,” Dr. Verolme said. “Saying it is less likely to occur, but if it does we are fried.”

One such area is the future melting of ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica….While scientists are certain that the sheets will melt over millennia, producing sea-level rises, there is now evidence to suggest that it could happen much faster than this, perhaps over centuries.

“In my view that would make it not just difficult, but impossible to adapt successfully, some of my colleagues would say catastrophic,” said Dr. Oppenheimer. “If they say that it’s possible that melting could occur in centuries leading to meters of change, that’s a headline.”

This final report also puts more emphasis on the ripple effect of small degrees of temperature change, some of which are already being seen, such as species extinctions and loss of biodiversity.

“A relatively modest degree of warming — one to three degrees — spells a lot of trouble and I think that was not clear in the previous report,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. He said part of the reason for the lack of clarity was that governments had “messed around” with the language and structure of the report during the approval process.

This blog generally features less than cheery news on the environment/species loss/global warming front, mainly because there isn’t a hell of a lot positive to report.

So we wanted to pass along a wee positive development about wee creatures, namely frogs. As readers may know, frog populations have been falling, and one of the culprits appeared to be a nasty fungus.

It turns out a surprisingly inexpensive and effective treatment has been found. From the BBC:

New Zealand scientists have found what appears to be a cure for the disease that is responsible for wiping out many of the world’s frog populations.

Chloramphenicol, currently used as an eye ointment for humans, may be a lifesaver for the amphibians, they say.

The researchers found frogs bathed in the solution became resistant to the killer disease, chytridiomycosis.

The fungal disease has been blamed for the extinction of one-third of the 120 species lost since 1980.

Fearful that chytridiomycosis might wipe out New Zealand’s critically endangered Archey’s frog (Leiopelma archeyi), the researchers have been hunting for a compound that would kill off the disease’s trigger, the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.

They tested the chloramphenicol candidate on two species introduced to New Zealand from Australia: the brown tree frog (Litoria ewingii) and the southern bell frog (L. raniformis).

“We found that we could cure them completely of chytrids,” said Phil Bishop from the University of Otago.

“And even when they were really sick in the control group, we managed to bring them back almost from the dead.”

“You could put them on their back and they just wouldn’t right themselves, they would just lie there. You could then treat them with chloramphenicol and they would come right,” Dr Bishop explained.

The researchers tried using chloramphenicol as both an ointment, applied to the frogs’ backs, and as a solution.

They found that placing the animals in the solution delivered the best results. The team has admitted it was surprised by the outcome.

“You don’t usually expect antibiotics to do anything to fungi at all. And it does. We don’t understand why it does, but it does,” said Russell Poulter.

Professor Poulter, the molecular biologist who hunted down chloramphenicol, added: “It’s also got the great advantage that it’s incredibly cheap.”

The scientists are now making their research widely known ahead of formal publication in a science journal because of the pressing need for a safe and effective treatment for the chytrid disease.

The blow that chytrid has dealt to the frog population is already immense.

The disease has probably accounted for one-third of all the losses in amphibian species to date, says Professor Rick Speare, an expert in amphibian diseases who works with the University of Otago’s frog research group.

These losses are huge – and this is in addition to other threats such as habitat destruction, climate change, pollution and hunting.

Since 1980, more than 120 amphibian species have disappeared; and according to the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums, in the near future many more species are in danger of vanishing.

“We are losing an awful lot of these creatures now and if we don’t do something intelligent, then we’re going to lose an awful lot more,” said Professor Poulter.

But a hopeful finding is that the introduced frogs that have been infected with chytrids are now more resistant to further infections.

“We haven’t quite understood how that could happen,” said Dr Bishop. “It might be a natural thing; if a frog survives a chytrid infection then it is resistant when it gets attacked again.”

The researchers believe that zoos now will have more options, either to be able to control an outbreak or to rescue infected frogs from the wild, knowing that they can be cured.

The next challenge the research team has set itself is to find a treatment that will work in the wild.

“I would really feel quite satisfied if we could say, 10 years from now, that you have to be careful walking around [Australia's] Kosiuszko National Park or you might tread on a corroboree frog because they’re all over the place,” said Professor Poulter. “I would take real satisfaction from that.”

I have a picture of science classes rounding up wild frogs, dipping them and releasing them……

A report by the World Conservation Society reports that one third of the world’s primates are under threat of extinction due to habitat loss and being hunted for food and use in medicines. Twenty-five species are particularly imperiled.

As the BBC tells us:

The report focuses on the fate of the world’s 25 most endangered primate species, which are threatened by a depressing list of problems.

The authors say all the surviving members of these species combined would fit in a single football stadium.

Of particular concern are the Hainan gibbon from China and Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey from Ivory Coast, both of which have only a few surviving creatures left in the wild.

The report says the threat to primates is worst in Asia where tropical forests are being destroyed and many monkeys are being hunted or traded as pets.

It also argues that climate change is making some species more vulnerable.

The New York Times elabaorates:

Poaching and deforestation in the tropics are imperiling dozens of humans’ primate relations, with nearly a third of the 394 known species of apes, monkeys, lemurs and other groups listed as threatened with extinction in a new report from the World Conservation Union.

The report focuses on the plight of the 25 most endangered species, which live scattered around the tropics, mainly in areas of Asia and Africa. “You could fit all the surviving members of these 25 species in a single football stadium, that’s how few of them remain on earth today,” said Russell A. Mittermeier, the chairman of the panel of primate experts who wrote the report and the president of Conservation International.

There have been improvements in a few areas. Brazil dropped from the list of places with the most imperiled primates for the first time since the periodic assessments began in 2000. But eight primates have been on all four reports issued since then, including the Sumatran orangutan and the Cross River gorilla of Cameroon and Nigeria.

The worst hot spots are in southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, and Madagascar, the report said.

The report was issued yesterday by biologists gathered on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, which is home to the most endangered primate of all, the Hainan gibbon. In a telephone interview from the island, Dr. Mittermeier said there were only 17 or 18 left, although that number rose slightly this year….

Dr. Mittermeier said that in Southeast Asia and some other regions, there was a growing interest among villages near primate habitat in protecting the colonies because they can draw environment-minded tourists, and income.

But without constant protection, which can cost as little as $200 a year in some places, poachers still find a way to hunt or trap animals, he said.

Human activity has led to a considerable loss of species, and more is in the offing. But what is particularly alarming is that the scientists quoted in the Associated Press and on the BBC today see it coming in mere decades.

The discovery is that hotter, wetter periods on this planet are associated with a lower biodiversity. And the British researchers who have studied ocean temperatures from fossil records have concluded we will reach temperatures high enough to trigger die-offs in 100 years unless we succeed in reducing carbon emissions. While the authors note that the relationship is a correlation, and does not establish causality by itself, they have come up with theories that point to a cause-and-effect relationship.

From the Associated Press:

Whenever the world’s tropical seas warm several degrees, Earth has experienced mass extinctions over millions of years, according to a first-of-its-kind statistical study of fossil records.

And scientists fear it may be about to happen again — but in a matter of several decades, not tens of millions of years.

Four of the five major extinctions over 520 million years of Earth history have been linked to warmer tropical seas, something that indicates a warmer world overall, according to the new study published Wednesday.

“We found that over the fossil record as a whole, the higher the temperatures have been, the higher the extinctions have been,” said University of York ecologist Peter Mayhew, the co-author of the peer-reviewed research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a British journal.

Earth is on track to hit that same level of extinction-connected warming in about 100 years, unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, according to top scientists.

A second study, to be presented at a scientific convention Sunday, links high carbon dioxide levels, the chief man-made gas responsible for global warming, to past extinctions.

In the British study, Mayhew and his colleagues looked at temperatures in 10 million-year chunks because fossil records aren’t that precise in time measurements. They then compared those to the number of species, the number of species families, and overall biodiversity. They found more biodiversity with lower temperatures and more species dying with higher temperatures.

The researchers examined tropical sea temperatures — the only ones that can be determined from fossil records and go back hundreds of millions of years. They indicate a natural 60 million-year climate cycle that moves from a warmer “greenhouse” to a cooler “icehouse.” The Earth is warming from its current colder period.

Every time the tropical sea temperatures were about 7 degrees warmer than they are now and stayed that way for millions of enough years, there was a die-off. How fast extinctions happen varies in length.

The study linked mass extinctions with higher temperatures, but did not try to establish a cause-and-effect. For example, the most recent mass extinction, the one 65 million years ago that included the die-off of dinosaurs, probably was caused by an asteroid collision as scientists theorize and Mayhew agrees.

But extinctions were likely happening anyway as temperatures were increasing, Mayhew said. Massive volcanic activity, which releases large amounts of carbon dioxide, have also been blamed for the dinosaur extinction.

The author of the second study, which focuses on carbon dioxide, said he does see a cause-and-effect between warmer seas and extinctions.

Peter Ward, a University of Washington biology and paleontology professor, said natural increases in carbon dioxide warmed the air and ocean. The warmer water had less oxygen and spawned more microbes, which in turn spewed toxic hydrogen sulfide into the air and water, killing species.

Ward examined 13 major and minor extinctions in the past and found a common link: rising carbon dioxide levels in the air and falling oxygen levels. Ward’s study will be presented Sunday at the Geological Society of America’s annual convention in Denver.

Mayhew also found increasing carbon dioxide levels in the air coinciding with die-offs, but concluded that temperatures better predicted biodiversity.

Those higher temperatures that coincided with mass extinctions are about the same level forecast for a century from now if the world continues its growing emissions of greenhouse gases, according to the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In April, the same climate panel of thousands of scientists warned that “20 to 30 percent of animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction” if temperatures increase by about 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Since we’re already seeing threshold changes in ecosystems with the relatively small amount of climate change already taking place, one could expect there’s going to be severe transformations,” said biologist Thomas Lovejoy, president of the H. John Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington.

University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan, who studies how existing species are changing with global warming but wasn’t part of either team, said she was “blown away” by the Mayhew study and called it “very convincing.”

“This will give scant comfort to anyone who says that the world has often been warmer than recently so we’re just going back to a better world,” Pennsylvania State University geological sciences professor Richard Alley said.

More disheartening news on the global warming front: Arctic walruses have moved from their customary ice sheet habitat to the rocky Alaskan Northwest coast, raising fears that their new foraging grounds won’t provide sufficient food.

From the Associated Press viaPnysOrg:

Thousands of walrus have appeared on Alaska’s northwest coast in what conservationists are calling a dramatic consequence of global warming melting the Arctic sea ice.
Alaska’s walrus, especially breeding females, in summer and fall are usually found on the Arctic ice pack. But the lowest summer ice cap on record put sea ice far north of the outer continental shelf, the shallow, life-rich shelf of ocean bottom in the Bering and Chukchi seas.

Walrus feed on clams, snails and other bottom dwellers. Given the choice between an ice platform over water beyond their 630-foot diving range or gathering spots on shore, thousands of walrus picked Alaska’s rocky beaches.

“It looks to me like animals are shifting their distribution to find prey,” said Tim Ragen, executive director of the federal Marine Mammal Commission. “The big question is whether they will be able to find sufficient prey in areas where they are looking.”

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, September sea ice was 39 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000. Sea ice cover is in a downward spiral and may have passed the point of no return, with a possible ice-free Arctic Ocean by summer 2030, senior scientist Mark Serreze said.

The immediate concern of new, massive walrus groups for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is danger to the animals from stampedes. Panic caused by a low-flying airplane, a boat or an approaching polar bear can send a herd rushing to the sea. Young animals can be crushed by adults weighing 2,000 pounds or more.

Longer term, biologists fear walrus will suffer nutritional stress if they are concentrated on shoreline rather than spread over thousands of miles of sea ice.

Walrus need either ice or land to rest. Unlike seals, they cannot swim indefinitely and must pause after foraging.

Historically, Ragen said, walrus have used the edge of the ice pack like a conveyor belt. As the ice edge melts and moves north in spring and summer, sea ice gives calves a platform on which to rest while females dive to feed.

There’s no conveyor belt for walrus on shore.

“If they’ve got to travel farther, it’s going to cost more energy. That’s less energy that’s available for other functions,” Ragen said.

Deborah Williams – who was an Interior Department special assistant for Alaska under former President Bill Clinton, and who is now president of the nonprofit Alaska Conservation Solutions – said melting of sea ice and its effects on wildlife were never even discussed during her federal service from 1995 to 2000.

“That’s what so breathtaking about this,” she said. “This has all happened faster than anyone could have predicted. That’s why it’s so urgent action must be taken.”

Walrus observers on the Russian side of the Chukchi Sea have also reported more walrus at haulouts and alerted Alaska wildlife officials to the problems with the animals being spooked and stampeded.

If lack of sea ice is at the heart of upcoming problems for walrus, Ragen said, there’s no solution likely available other than prevention.

“The primary problem of maintaining ice habitat, that’s something way, way, way beyond us,” he said. “To reverse things will require an effort on virtually everyone’s part.”

In case you haven’t been following this story, the Tasmanian Devil population has been ravaged by a contagious tumor. As a BBC report earlier this year explained:

Devil facial tumor disease (DFTDA) was first documented by a wildlife photographer in 1996. The animals have powerful jaws able to crunch through the bones of much larger animals and are known to bite each other’s faces during fights and courtship behaviour.

The devils usually have a life expectancy of about five years, but it is now unusual to see an animal over the age of three. Researchers estimate the wild population has fallen from 140,000 in the 1990s to 80,000.

A severely diseased devil is a grotesque sight: large tumours protrude from the face and neck, sometimes pushing out teeth and invading eye sockets.

As the tumours interfere with feeding, the animals become emaciated and usually die within six months of showing lesions.

But while many scientists had suspected a virus, Anne-Marie Pearse, a researcher for the state of Tasmania who co-wrote the article in Nature, found abnormalities in the chromosomes of the cancer cells were the same in every tumor.

Pearse and her colleague Kate Swift discovered that, while the normal complement of chromosomes in the devil is 14, the tumours contained 13, which were grossly abnormal. These chromosomal rearrangements were identical in tumours from all 11 animals studied by the scientists.

This offers support for the idea that the disease apparently began with a single sick devil, probably in the mid-1990s, that directly spread the cancer cells by biting other animals. The authors propose that cancer cells are dislodged from one animal and essentially transplanted to another as a result of bites inflicted around the mouth.

“Devils jaw wrestle and bite each other a lot, usually in the face and around the mouth, and bits of tumor break off one devil and stick in the wounds of another,” said Ms Pearse.

“We’ve found out how the disease is transmitted, which is a breakthrough in how we manage the wildlife population.

She added: “Finding a vaccine would be the ultimate goal.”

While that report offered some hope, more recent findings suggest that the devil is likely to be severely afflicted by other infections due to a lack of genetic diversity, which in turn means its prospects for long-term survival are poor. From PhysOrg:

Australian scientists say the ongoing fight to save Tasmanian devils from extinction may be doomed.
Researchers have been battling to find a cure for a deadly facial tumor disease that has decimated the numbers of the rare animals — found only in Australia’s island state of Tasmania.

But now scientists at Sydney University have suggested a lack of genetic diversity because of inbreeding will doom the devils in any case.

Geneticist Kathy Belov, leader of the university scientific team, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. the devils had been found to have “very low levels of genetic diversity in really key immune genes.”

“What this means is that they are going to be susceptible, not only to this horrible cancer that is decimating them at the moment, but potentially to all sorts of other diseases, because they simply don’t have the genetic diversity in their genes, which will enable them to respond to any new diseases that are thrown at them,” she said.

A deadly facial cancer already has killed half of the devil population because the animals have no resistance to the disease which they catch from biting each other — fighting over food or mates at breeding time.

Belov said even though scientists hoped to save the Tasmanian devil from extinction through breeding a captive “insurance” population, it would be hard to protect them from any epidemic in the future.

The BBC and Reuters (via the New York Times) have stories on the latest report by the World Conservation Union, which is believed to be the largest, most comprehensive assessment of plants and animals. The BBC article adopts a tone of concern, while the Reuters version is anodyne.

According to the World Conservation Union, nearly 16,300 species are in trouble, an increase of 200 in the past year, and lowland gorillas, orangutans, and Galapagos coral have moved on to the so-called Red List, which highlights “critically endangered” species.

As the Reuters story noted:

“It’s a very bad news story,” Jane Smart, head of the conservation group’s species program, said at a briefing. “Our lives are inextricably linked with biodiversity and ultimately its protection is essential for our very survival.”

Extinction rates are now about 100 to 1,000 times higher than normal, and climate change is already affecting biodiversity, endangered species experts at the briefing said

The BBC story is unusually long; below are key sections:

Gorillas, orangutans, and corals are among the plants and animals which are sliding closer to extinction….

The IUCN says there is a lack of political will to tackle the global erosion of nature.

Governments have pledged to stem the loss of species by 2010; but it does not appear to be happening.

“This year’s Red List shows that the invaluable efforts made so far to protect species are not enough,” said the organisation’s director-general, Julia Marton-Lefevre.

“The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing, and we need to act now to significantly reduce it and stave off this global extinction crisis.”

One in three amphibians, one in four mammals, one in eight birds and 70% of plants so far assessed are believed to be at risk of extinction, with human alteration of their habitat the single biggest cause.

The tone of this year’s Red List is depressingly familiar. Of 41,415 species assessed, 16,306 are threatened with extinction to a greater or lesser degree.

The main changes from previous assessments include some of the natural world’s iconic animals, such as the western lowland gorilla, which moves from the Endangered to the Critically Endangered category….

The Sumatran orangutan was already Critically Endangered before this assessment, with numbers having fallen by 80% in the last 75 years.

But IUCN has identified new threats to the 7,300 individuals that remain. Forests are being cleared for palm oil plantations, and habitat is being split up by the building of new roads.

In Borneo, home to the second orangutan species, palm oil plantations have expanded 10-fold in a decade, and now take up 27,000 sq km of the island. Illegal logging reduces habitat still further, while another threat comes from hunting for food and the illegal international pet trade.

So fragmented have some parts of the Bornean forest become that some isolated orangutan populations now number less than 50 individuals, which IUCN notes are “apparently not viable in the long term”.

The great apes are perhaps the most charismatic creatures on this year’s Red List, but the fact they are in trouble has been known for some years. Perhaps more surprising are some of the new additions.

“This is the first time we’ve assessed corals, and it’s a bit worrying because some of them moved straight from being not assessed to being possibly extinct,” said Jean-Christophe Vie, deputy head of IUCN’s species programme….

The most glaring example of a waterborne creature failed by conservation efforts is probably the baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin, which is categorised as Critically Endangered, Possibly Extinct.

This freshwater species appears to have failed in its bid for survival against the destructive tides of fishing, shipping, pollution, and habitat change in its one native river. Chinese media reported a possible sighting earlier this year, but the IUCN is not convinced; with no confirmed evidence of a living baiji since 2002, they believe its time on Earth may well be over….

Many African vultures are new entrants on this year’s list. But birds provide the only notable success, with the colourful Mauritius echo parakeet making it back from Critically Endangered to Endangered.

Intensive conservation work has brought numbers up from about 50 to above 300.

But the gharial, a crocodilian found in the major rivers of India and Nepal, provides a cautionary tale of what can happen when conservation money and effort dry up.

A decade ago, a programme of re-introduction to the wild brought the adult population up from about 180 to nearer 430. Deemed a success, the programme was stopped; numbers are again hovering around 180, and the gharial finds itself once more on the Critically Endangered list.

IUCN says that it is not too late for many of these species; that they can be brought back from the brink.

It is something that the world’s governments have committed to, vowing in the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity “to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level”.

“Governments know they are going to fail to reach that target,” said Jean-Christophe Vie, “and not just in terms of a few species – the failure is really massive.

“We know that it is possible to reverse the trend, but the causes are so huge and massive and global, and there is still a lack of attention to the crisis that biodiversity faces.”

Periodically, the Earth has experienced significant species die-offs. While the so-called K-T extinction, which marked the end of the dinosaur age, has been attributed to an asteroid crash, other declines remain something of a mystery.

An article in Science magazine, summarized on its website, recounts a study by researchers from the University of Kansas in Lawrence who argue that cosmic rays may be responsible. The Sun has an erratic orbit relative to the plane of our galaxy, and mass extinctions occur when the Sun moves furthest from that plane.

From ScienceNOW:

Researchers may have uncovered the reason why Earth’s biodiversity mysteriously plummets periodically. They have found that a rollercoaster-like wobble in the sun’s orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy regularly moves Earth closer to a source of dangerous intergalactic cosmic rays.
Over the last 500 million years or so, the number of species on Earth has tended to dip regularly about every 62 million years. The last time this happened, about 55 million years ago–or about 10 million years after the great K-T extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs–biodiversity sank by about 10%; around 115 million years ago, it dropped by a similar amount. So far, evolutionary biologists have only been able to establish that the phenomenon seems cyclical, but they haven’t isolated a cause.

Now, researchers from the University of Kansas in Lawrence think they have found a possible answer. Physicist and co-author Adrian Melott says that he began suspecting a galactic cause after noticing a 2005 paper that calculated that the drop in species diversity occurs regularly on a time scale of tens of millions of years, which—for a cyclical event–is too long for something happening within the solar system. So he and Kansas colleague Mikhail Medvedev began examining the possibilities. At about the same time as the drops in biodiversity, the researchers determined, the sun reaches the highest point in its orbit relative to the galactic plane, where most Milky Way stars reside. At that point, the scientists report in the 1 August Astrophysical Journal, the solar system is closest to an incoming source of potentially lethal cosmic rays created by interactions between the Milky Way’s magnetic field and radiation generated by a cluster of nearby galaxies.

These galaxies are located in the direction of the constellation Virgo, and the radiation consists of particles called muons, which are so powerful they can penetrate about 2.5 kilometers of sea water or 900 meters of rock–enough to reach just about every living thing on Earth and damage its DNA. Because the zenith of the Sun’s oscillations match almost exactly with the times of the dips in the fossil record, the researchers found, “we’ve noticed an incredible coincidence,” Melott says.

Physicist Richard Muller of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California calls the paper’s hypothesis “intriguing” and something that should be “of great interest” to both the astrophysics and evolutionary biology communities. The problem, says Muller, who co-wrote the 2005 paper in Nature that piqued Melott’s interest, is that killer cosmic rays may not have been the direct cause of the drops in biodiversity. There could be other candidates, such as significant climate change. “We’ve got to try to understand the mechanism better,” he says.

Researchers have found that spring is arriving in the polar regions considerably earlier, and they anticipate that the long-term effect will be that species from warmer climates will establish themselves further north, competing with and in some cases crowding out now-native flora and fauna. From the BBC:

Spring in the Arctic is arriving “weeks earlier” than a decade ago, a team of Danish researchers have reported.

Ice in north-east Greenland is melting an average of 14.6 days earlier than in the mid-1990s, bringing forward the date plants flower and birds lay eggs.

The team warned that the observed changes could disrupt the region’s ecosystems and food chain, affecting the long-term survival of some species.

The findings have been published in the journal Current Biology.

The scientists assessed how a range of species’ behaviour was affected by the changing climate in Zackenberg, north-east Greenland, between 1996 and 2005.

Observation of 21 species – six plants, 12 arthropods and three birds – revealed that the organisms had brought forward their flowering, emergence or egg-laying in line with the earlier ice melt.

“We were particularly surprised to see the trends were so strong when considering that the entire summer is very short in the High Arctic – just three or four months from snowmelt to freeze-up,” said co-author Toke Hoye, from the University of Aarhus.

“The real deciding factor is that each individual time series has a very close correlation, so it is not just that the average trend is very similar but each species is closely coupled (to the ice melt).”

Winner and losers

Dr Hoye suggested that the warming in the region, which was occurring at twice the rate of the global average, could affect the future stability of the region’s ecosystem.

“There could be positive consequences in the short term, and potentially negative consequences in the long term.

“At first, this could be regarded as a positive result because it is extending the summer season, which is probably a factor in terms of organisms getting through their development.

“Over the long term, it is most likely to be the case that species from southern latitudes will be able to establish themselves (in the region) and increase competition for food.”

Dr Hoye acknowledged that the 10-year period could be considered by some people as not long enough to reach these conclusions.

But he added the changes in behaviour had been observed in a large number of species, and that the findings were considered by independent reviewers who were satisfied by the consistency of the results.

“They had hoped for a longer time period, and we did too,” he told BBC News.

“But until we have managed to gather another 10 years of data, it is relevant to make this point now.”

He added that the findings, described as the first of their kind for the High Arctic, extended the global picture of changing behaviour among organisms.

In August, scientists from 17 nations examined 125,000 studies involving 561 species across Europe.

The researchers found a shift in the continent’s seasons, with spring arriving an average of six to eight days earlier than it did 30 years ago.