Environment Forum

from Tales from the Trail:

Panda diplomacy: the remix

The latest chapter in the long story of panda diplomacy was written at Washington's National Zoo, where the Chinese government agreed to lengthen the "loan" of popular panda pair Mei Xiang and Tian Tian for another five years. Actually, the loan is conditioned on whether they produce a new heir or heiress to the cuteness of panda-dom in the next two years;  one or both could be exchanged for more fecund substitutes.

They have a good track record: Washington native Tai Shan, born in 2005, headed back to China last year.

This was a big enough deal for President Barack Obama to mention it at an elaborate state dinner at the White House for Chinese President Hu Jintao.

“Today, we’ve shown that our governments can work together, as well, for our mutual benefit,” Obama told the glittering gathering. "And that includes this bit of news: Under a new agreement, our National Zoo will continue to dazzle children and visitors with the beloved giant pandas."

In the United States, panda diplomacy started soon after President Richard Nixon's 1972 trip to China. But the idea that China might be able to export, or at least loan, this cuddly symbol to further diplomatic ends may date back to the Tang Dynasty, when 7th century Chinese Empress Wu Zetian sent a pair of pandas to Japan.

For some reason, Washington has gone disproportionately gaga over pandas. In 2004, the PandaMania exhibition put fancifully painted panda sculptures around town; there's still one near the hotel where the Chinese government set up its press operations for President Hu Jintao's visit. Asked why people in the United States are so smitten, Chinese conservation official Zhang Shanming told reporters it just might be that, when pandas sit on their hind quarters, eating, they look like human babies.

To be honest, Tian Tian and Mei Xiang didn't look so much like babies in that distinctive pose; they looked more like furry beanbags as the big deal was unveiled. But pandas are pandas and Washingtonians are likely to continue the love affair with them.

Tiger among fluffy toys shows extreme smuggling tricks

The drugged tiger cub (left) hidden among cuddly toys in a bag at Bangkok airport  ranks as one of the most bizarre smuggling tricks.

Imagine the shock of X-raying the bag — as airport workers checking luggage did — and finding a live tiger among the fluffy tiger toys. Maybe it moved, or they spotted the outline of its skeleton among the other toys?

For a story about the two-month-old cub (photo courtesy of wildlife trade monitoring group Traffic) click here. A 31-year-old Thai woman was about to board a flight to Iran when they found the cub in her oversized bag.

It highlights how smugglers find extreme ways of packing away live creatures.

In July, officers at Mexico City’s airport arrested a man trying to smuggle 18 small monkeys from Lima wrapped inside his socks.

Women smugglers have several times been caught with endangered bird eggs hidden in their bras — an aid to incubation and far easier to hide on an international flight than a flapping, squawking parrot.

But Traffic says it’s no joke: smuggling is pushing species of some animals and plants towards extinction. And while it’s hard to pin down the scale of wildlife smuggling, some estimates are between $10 and $20 billion a year, it says.

Crustaceans rule!

Ever wondered what kinds of wildlife dominate the world’s seas and oceans? Now there’s an answer, at least in terms of the number of species in different categories. It’s not fish. It’s not mammals. It’s crustaceans!

A mammoth Census of Marine Life has revealed that nearly one-fifth, or 19 percent, of all the marine species known to humans are crustaceans — crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill, barnacles and others far too numerous to mention here. The census didn’t count the actual numbers of animals beneath the waves — that would have been impossible — but it did count up the number of species in 25 marine areas. The aim is to set down a biodiversity baseline for future use.

It took 360 scientists to figure this out. Their findings were posted on Monday in PLoS ONE, an open-source peer-reviewed online scientific journal. An even more fulsome list will be out in October.

For now, there’s plenty of data to chew on: of the 25 marine areas around the world that were examined, Australian and Japanese waters were the most biodiverse, with nearly 33,000 species in each of these locations. The oceans off China, the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico round out the top five most biodiverse marine regions.

After crustaceans, mollusks (like squid, octopus, clams, snails and slugs) rank second in terms of the number of species found in these regions, with 17 percent. Fish, including sharks, make up 12 percent of species. After that, it’s one-celled micro-organisms at 10 percent; algae and other plant-like organisms at 10 percent; segmented worms at 7 percent; sea anemones, corals and jellyfish, 5 percent; flatworms, 3 percent; starfish, brittle stars, sea urchins, sand dollars and sea cucumbers, 3 percent; sponges, 3 percent; mat or “moss animals,” 2 percent; sea squirts, 1 percent.

The rest are lumped together as “other vertibrates” — including whales, sea lions, seals sea birds, turtles and walruses — at 5 percent, and “other invertibrates” at 2 percent. So some of the best-known of marine creatures make up only a tiny part of the seas’ biodiversity.

The Mediterranean has the most invasive species, creatures that aren’t native, most of which arrived through the Suez Canal from the Red Sea. Most “cosmopolitan” of species — those that appear in more than one marine region — are microscopic plants and animals at the tiny end, and seabirds and marine mammals at the large end of the scale.

BP, oil and seabirds — Baltic Sea ducks had worse luck

BP’s vast and spreading oil disaster is killing ever more birds and other wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico — but one of the worst spills for birds was a harmless-sounding 5 tonnes of oil in the Baltic Sea in 1976.

That spill from a ship killed more than 60,000 long-tailed ducks wintering in the area after they fatally mistook the slick for an attractive patch of calm water, according to Arne Jernelov, of the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, writing in today’s edition of the journal Nature.

By contrast, he writes that fewer than 1,200 birds have  so far been recorded killed after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which has led to a leak of a gigantic 250,000 to 400,000 tonnes of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  About 60,000 birds were killed off Alaska in 1989 by the accident usually known as the Exxon Valdez spill (…Exxon’s website calls it The Valdez Oil Spill ), previously the biggest spill off the United States at 37,000 tonnes.

By my maths, the Baltic Sea spill killed one bird for about every 80 grams of oil (…an amount easily spilt when filling up a car), the BP spill (so far) one per 200-330 tonnes. Even tiny amounts of oil can mean that birds’ feathers stick together and let chill water, like in the Baltic Sea, get to their bodies through what is normally a layer of insulation. They can then die of cold.

Jernelov gets backing from the Global Marine Oil Pollution Information Gateway, linked to the U.N. Environment Programme.

“There is no clear relationship between the amount of oil in the marine environment and the likely impact on wildlife. A smaller spill at the wrong time/wrong season and in a sensitive environment may prove much more harmful than a larger spill at another time of the year in another or even the same environment. Even small spills can have very large effects,” it says.

“In a cold climate an oil spot the size of 2-3 square centimetres can be enough to kill a bird,” it says.

Walruses in Louisiana? Eyebrow-raising details of BP’s spill response plan

Louisiana walruses? Seals swimming along the Gulf Coast?

These creatures normally live in the Arctic Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico, but they’re listed as “sensitive biological resources” that could be affected by an oil spill in the area in a document filed by BP last June with the U.S. Minerals Management Service. More than a month after BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew out and sank on April 20, the British oil giant’s regional spill response plan drew some severe criticism from the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

One problem with BP’s nearly 600-page spill response plan? “It was utterly useless in the event of a spill,” Jeff Ruch, PEER’s executive director, said by telephone. His group, which acts as a kind of safe haven for government whistle-blowers, detailed what it called “outright inanities”  in BP’s filing and the government’s approval of it.

PEER noted BP’s plan referred to “sea lions, seals, sea otters (and) walruses” as wildlife that might be affected in the Gulf of Mexico, and suggested this reference was taken from a previous plan for Arctic exploratory drilling, where these animals could be affected.

The BP plan lists a Japanese shopping and search website as a link to one of its “primary equipment providers” for rapid deployment in the event of a spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And it directs its media spokespeople never to make “promises that property, ecology or anything else will be restored to normal.”

Ruch said the plan contains no information about tracking sub-surface oil plumes from deepwater blowouts or preventing disease transmission to captured animals in rehab facilities, a serious risk after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

from Commentaries:

Stella Artois becomes real hedge fund investor

It seems like a gutsy time to be advertising a hedge fund in newspapers and across billboards in London.

Until you realise at second glance that the adverts are a spoof by InBev-owned lager brand Stella Artois which is trying to boost its green and recycling credentials with some whacky marketing.

With slogans such as "An Investor measures the growth of his hedge fund" and "Once upon a time a hedge fund was just that", the ads initially catch the eye of those of us interested in financial services.

The question is whether they'll get people buying and drinking more Stella Artois beer. The beermaker is hoping to boost its sales by promising to work with The Tree Council to plant hedgerows across Britain -- to help wildlife and soak up CO2 -- if you buy a special pack of its lager.

The marketing industry response so far looks promising.

But the real test of whether people are spurred into drinking more Stella Artois out of a sense of environmental responsibility will be in the British countryside.

Look out for miles of hedgerows with "Sponsored by Stella Artois" signs.

Have Defenders of Wildlife lost key fund raiser: Gov. Palin?

Sarah Palin’s looming departure from the governor’s office in Alaska may deprive at least one animal welfare group of a key source of green.

The moose-hunting and ultra-conservative hockey mom shot to national prominence last year as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate on the losing Republican ticket. Palin, who in a surprise move said on Friday that she would step down this month as Alaskan governor, remains a political lighting rod who is loved and loathed in equal measure.

 This polarizing profile has made her a major fund raising force for the Republican Party. It has also made her a focal point for groups staunchly opposed to her politics and policies.

Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund has been using Palin’s support of the aerial hunting of wolves in Alaska as a peg to bring attention to the issue – and also it seems to drum up some donations amid the recessionary crunch.

The home page on its web site says: “Help Stop Palin’s Wolf Slaughter: DONATE NOW”.

The seven press releases it has issued so far this year on its online newsroom have one main topic: Palin and wolf hunting.

Judd versus Palin on wolves

Sarah Palin still has environmentalists howling.

The Alaska governor and former Republican vice presidential hopeful is the target of a campaign by the Washington-based Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund which claims she is pushing for an expanded program for the shooting of wolves from the sky.

In a graphic video narrated by Hollywood star Ashley Judd, the group claims Palin even offered a $150 bounty for the left foreleg of each dead wolf collected. You can view the video here.

“When Sarah Palin came on the national scene last summer, few knew that she promotes the brutal aerial killing of wolves. Now, back in Alaska, Palin is again casting aside science and championing the slaughter of wildlife,” Judd says in the video, which features footage of a wolf howling in pain after apparently being shot from the sky.

(Photo: Palin works a crowd, Dec 1, 2008. REUTERS/Tami Chappell, USA)

On its web site, the group said in a statement that: “Governor Palin is expected shortly to introduce state legislation that would dramatically expand the aerial killing program by removing the few remaining scientific requirements from the program. ” Palin’s office was contacted by Reuters and was not immediately available for comment.

Spotting the difference in the spots

The Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has released some pictures from the first large-scale census of jaguars in the Amazon region of Ecuador—one of the most biologically rich regions on the planet.

One of the pictures, shown here, was taken with a  “camera trap” that photographs animals remotely when they trip a sensor that detects body heat.

“The ongoing census, which began in 2007, is working to establish baseline population numbers as oil exploration and subsequent development puts growing pressure on wildlife in Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park and adjacent Waorani Ethnic Reserve,” WCS said in a statement.   

“So far the team has taken 75 pictures of jaguars, which can be individually identified through their unique pattern of spots,” it said. The research is being carried out by a team led by WCS research fellow Santiago Espinosa and his work is funded by WCS, WWF and the University of Florida.

(Photo: Santiago Espinosa, courtesy of WCS)