President Barack Obama has pledged to “restore science to its rightful place” and educate a new generation of scientists able to transform America into an environmentally sustainable “green economy.”

But with endowments and private donations falling and public funds under pressure, the recession is making it harder for zoos and aquariums to keep inspiring kids in science.

My colleague Claudia Parsons has done a report on this issue which you can read here.

A new report by the National Academy of Sciences said informal learning — such as visits to zoos or other outdoor activities such as fishing or gardening — is a powerful tool in science education.

What do you think? Do zoos play a vital inspirational role for budding young scientists? And should they receive public funds at a time of crisis when needs are many and funds are few?

(Photo Credit: San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park/Handout)

There’s more bad news on the fish front.

According to a new report the advocacy group California Trout, 65 percent of the state’s native salmon, steelhead and trout species may be extinct within the next century. To see the whole report click here. It was written by Dr. Peter Moyle of the University of California, Davis.

“The report’s findings indicate that the state’s native salmonids are in unprecedented decline and are teetering towards the brink of extinction - an alarm bell that signals the deteriorating health of the state’s rivers and streams that provide drinking water to millions of Californians. It’s also a sign that fish are likely to be struggling nationwide in this era of global warming, water diversions, and rapid development into previously uninhabited areas,” the organization said.

Salt and freshwater fisheries almost everywhere are in decline. Overharvesting, poor management of commercial fisheries, habitat destruction, climate change, dams – you name it, the inhabitants of our aquatic ecosystems are in trouble.

Anadromous fish such as salmon — which spawn in freshwater but spend most of their adult lives in the sea — have nowhere to run (well, swim). They get hammered by trawlers at sea and by pressure on their spawning grounds when they return to freshwater. The salmon’s life-cycle is one of the most arduous but compelling narratives in nature, from its birthplace in streams to the open sea and back again. It is a journey that is increasingly fraught with danger from California’s coast to the Baltic Sea.

But the report also highlights the success of restoration efforts which show that when blocked flows are reinstated and migration barriers removed, native fish stocks show signs of recovery.

                                             Native Alaskan artists visited New York this week with a message not so much about art, nor a species that’s struggling as rising temperatures melt its habitat from under its paws.

“With so much attention on polar bears, where’s the concern about the people? What about fellow Americans?” said Alvin Amason, an artist and member of the coastal Alutiiq people, who lives in Anchorage.

Amason and other Alaskan artists hit New York to celebrate the opening of the Alaska House , a nonprofit cultural center that aims to teach people about the challenges and opportunities the state faces.

Not only are temperatures rising faster in the Alaska and the Arctic than in southern parts of the world, but residents in remote regions the 49th U.S. state are facing food and fuel costs that are surging faster too.

And the melting of coastal ice means they can no longer hunt on shore for walrus and other animals that provide them with ivory and bones for carvings.

Now the artists have to hunt by boat, but surging fuel costs in those remote areas are making it harder. “If someone gets $5,000 for a carving from a western buyer, he’s not thinking of spending it on a vacation, he’s spending it on boat fuel and heating oil and food, ” said Amason.

Perry Eaton, a fellow Alutiiq artist, said residents in native communities in and around the Arctic Circle in Alaska are moving in droves to the cities in search of other types of work.

As they do, America stands to lose some of its oldest cultural inheritances.  Most of Alaska’s remote native peoples have have remained close culturally to what their ancestors were thousands of years earlier, despite some changes like motorized transport. “It’s the only place in America where there was no Indian removal,” said Eaton. He was referring to the forced movement of natives on the American continent to reservations and institutions by the U.S. government, where many were forced to give up their cultural traditions.

Eaton said Northern Alaska is a place where the languages shared by the 180 indigenous communities don’t have a word for “art” — it’s part of daily life, in the clothes they make, or the masks they craft to help usher loved ones who have died into the afterworld.

Alice Rogoff, the founder of the Alaska House, said she had hoped the Republican nomination of Sarah Palin, for vice-president would have helped shine a light on the plight of native Alaskans. Not yet.

Photo of artist Sylvester Ayek courtesy of the Alaska House. Photo of ice sculpture outside of Alaska House by tpg.

    In a country of more than one billion people, protecting critically endangered species isn’t always a top priority when it comes to making a living and growing enough food.

    In the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, though, a court has halted construction of a major water canal to save one of the world’s rarest birds.

    Only about 50 Jerdon’s coursers (Rhinoptilus bitorquatus) are believed to be left in the wild and are found in scrub-jungle habitat in the Sri Lankamalleswara Wildlife Sanctuary, which the Andhra Pradesh government created to protect the remaining birds.

     The Teluga Ganga Canal, being built to bring water to Chennai, India’s fourth-largest city, will now be diverted around the sanctuary, rather than running straight through as originally planned. The Supreme Court halted construction because of the threat to the birds and local authorities will compensate local villagers for the loss of extra land.

   Dr Panchapakesan Jeganathan, a scientist at the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), said: “This bird is more threatened than the tiger and very few people have ever seen it.

   “People thought the Jerdon’s courser was a block to progress but are now benefiting from the canal’s realignment because their compensation is generous and the only land they are losing is difficult to farm,” he said.

    Officials have agreed in principle to buy 3,000 acres of scrub forest between the new canal route and the sanctuary. The state’s forest department will manage that land to protect and enlarge the bird’s habitat.

      The BNHS and Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which both pressed the Supreme Court to order a halt to the canal, have also been involved in survey work to determine the bird’s true range. 

    “It is crucial we find other sites hosting Jerdon’s coursers and encourage both politicians and the people living nearby to support that work,” said Ian Barber, RSPB’s Asia officer.

    With many species being driven towards extinction by human activities, perhaps the world needs to see more examples such as this Indian bird?

   (Picture credit: Simon Wootton, RSPB)

It’s true — elephants never forget. And that may mean the difference between life and death for herds coping with climate change.

That is one of the findings of a recent study by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society and the Zoological Society of London, which suggests that old females may have long memories of distant sources of food and water.

This wisdom or memory can give a herd or family group an edge if confronted with drought or other kind of scarcity.

“Understanding how elephants and other animal populations react to droughts will be a central component of wildlife management and conservation,” said Wildlife Conservation Society researcher Dr. Charles Foley, lead author of the study.

“Our findings seem to support the hypothesis that older females with knowledge of distant resources become crucial to the survival of herds during periods of extreme climatic events.”

The study, recently published in The Royal Society’s Biology Letters, compared the calf mortality rates of three groups of calves during a severe drought in 1993 in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park.

In a nut shell, it found that the two groups that left the park had much  lower mortality rates than the one that stayed.

 And the two groups that left the park also had matriarchs that were 45 and 38 years of age, while the one that stayed had one aged 33. 

The researchers also noted that the old matriarchs had survived hard and prolonged droughts in the area as youngsters while the one aged 33 was not old enough to remember that distant event from 1958-1961. 

The data is hardly conclusive but if the hypothesis is true it does highlight among other things the need to protect elephants of all ages and the importance of family structures to herd survival.

A link to the study can be found here.

(Photo Credit: REUTERS/Claudia Daut, August 7, 2008, Cuba)

 Talk about occupational hazards.

Five Wildlife Conservation Society scientists studying the effects of global warming on shorebirds in Arctic Alaska had to be airlifted away from their remote camp late last month because of the appearance of another species whose life is changing as warming helps erode shores and melt sea ice.
 
The researchers said a polar bear stuck on land forced them to evacuate their camp north of the remote Teshekpuk Lake on the Beaufort Sea –leaving food and tents behind. 
 
The carnivorous bears would normally be out on sea ice this time of year. But with recent warming the ice is miles from shore and polar bears, which were recently listed as “threatened” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, are becoming increasingly trapped on land well away from their usual seal prey, said Dr. Steve Zack, who leads Arctic studies for WCS
 
“We had no idea how hungry they’d be and thus how ornery they’d be,” Zack, who made the decision for the researchers to evacuate even though they had been trained in bear safety, told me by his mobile phone from his current base near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
 
“Where there’s one polar bear there are usually more,” he said, adding that government scientists have seen 32 polar bears stuck on shore this year, up from only one or two in previous years.
 
In subsequent fly-overs over the abandoned camp, the team discovered that bears had eaten all of the food left by the researchers and destroyed two $500 tents.
 
“It was an ironic circumstance that studying climate change issues for our shorebirds put us in harm’s way with climate change effects on polar bears,” said Zack. 
 

Image by Mark Maftei, WCS 

There are two turtle tales brewing on the coast of Texas at the moment and they’re both good.

First the numbers tale. 

The dedicated folks at the South Padre Island conservation facility Sea Turtle, Inc, report record numbers of nests by endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles.

“We have had record numbers of ridley nests on the Texas coast this year. We have found over 170 so far in 2008 compared to the previous record of 128 for all of last year,” Sea Turtle, Inc, curator Jeff George told Reuters.

This is the fifth straight year that the numbers have increased.

The species still has a few weeks left to its nesting season in the area, so the recorded 2008 total could reach 200.

The other turtle tidbit? Biologists report that for the first time in at least 70 years they have identified a leatherback turtle nest on the Texas coast.

The 203 cm (over six-foot) wide track in the sand was the first clue to the identity of the leatherback which laid two eggs early in June on Big Shell Island on the Padre Island National Seashore.

The eggs are being kept in an incubation facility and should hopefully hatch sometime around early August.

The massive leatherbacks are the largest of all living turtles, making them a wildlife icon.

George said both tales are good signals which show that conservation efforts from less destructive fishing practices to beach preservation and public education are working.

“The hope is that there are more turtles in the Gulf of Mexico that will use Texas as their breeding ground,” said George.

(Photo credit: Tim Wimborne, Reuters, April 12, 2006)

Can credits traded in the world’s financial centers stop local farmers in Madagascar from burning up a rain forest filled with lemurs and other life found nowhere else in the world?    

The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society is working with the government of Madagascar to sell about 9.5 million tonnes of carbon credits to help save the Makira Forest, which contains 22 species of lemurs, hundreds of bird species and thousands of plants. Many of those species are found nowhere else on the planet. 

 ”We want to create incentives so people don’t deforest,” Ray Victurine, the finance expert at WCS, told me. 

The 9.5 million tonnes is the amount of carbon dioxide stored in existing trees WSC and Madagascar estimate can be saved over 30 years by stopping people from chopping them down.

Victurine said money raised by the credits could encourage farmers to stop slash and burn agriculture through investments in rice cultivation or in taking advantage of cloud formations in the forest to improve irrigation.

In Madagascar about 100,000 hectares (386 square miles) of forest are lost each year by agricultural burning, according to WCS.

The burning of forests by farmers accounts for 20 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. An agreement at a 190-nation UN conference last year agreed to work on ways to reward countries for slowing deforestation.

Credits in a global climate trade system could generate $2 billion to $14 billion for developing countries, according to a study by EcoSecurities and the University of British Colombia. 

The WCS and Madagascar are hoping to sell their credits in the rapidly developing voluntary credit market. Later, they could adapt them for any post-Kyoto global trading system if the world agrees such credits would save forests in a fair way.  

Victurine said they are working with the Voluntary Carbon Standard and the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance to ensure the credits would be high quality and would pay for actions to save the forest that would not have occurred otherwise.

The higher the perceived quality of the credits, the higher price they may fetch. In today’s prices at the EU’s compliance carbon market the 9.5 million tonnes would be worth about $291 million, though carbon prices are volatile. In voluntary, unregulated carbon markets the tonnes would be worth closer to $62 million. 

All of which leads to a question.  Are financial instruments the best way to change human behavior and save the planet?

The fate of a Chinese species may rest on whether the turtles in this photo mate.   

Biologists believe only four Yangtze giant softshell turtles are left on the planet.  So this month they shipped a more than 80-year-old female that had been living in China’s Changsha Zoo more than 600 miles to the only known male in China, who is more than 100 years old and lives at the Suzhou Zoo.

“I hate to call this a desperation move, but it really was,” said Rick Hudson, a conservation biologist at the Fort Worth, Texas Zoo who helped coordinate the move. “With only one female known worldwide, and given that we have lost three captive specimens over the past two years, what choice did we have?”

Biologists blame hunting, pollution and rampant development for leading to the dire situation.

The good news is the female still lays eggs, but not as many as the up to 100 that younger ones do.  And although in this picture she may appear to be ignoring the male, whose head can be seen emerging from the water in the bottom right, biologists say her journey went well and that the two are getting used to each other nicely. 

Photo by Gerald Kuchling/TSA