On August 25th this year, the United States National Park Service will turn 100 years old, and this week, from April 16th to the 24th, it’s National Park Week, when the US celebrates its natural and cultural heritage with special events and free admission to any national park.
Author: Organikos
The Sound of Silence
Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause has spent 40 years recording over 15,000 species in many of the world’s pristine habitats. Photograph: Courtesy of Hachette Book Group
For many of us, part of the joy of a walk in the woods is the range of senses engaged. The wind rustling through the trees is enhanced by the diversity of the creatures that call that ecosystem home. But with habitat loss due to either changing climate or other human impact. many of the sounds heard for millennia are falling silent.
Bernie Krause has spent his life archiving these sounds. They’re worth more than just a listen. They’re a call to action.
When musician and naturalist Bernie Krause drops his microphones into the pristine coral reef waters of Fiji, he picks up a raucous mix of sighs, beats, glissandos, cries, groans, tones, grunts, beats and clicks.
The water pulsates with the sound of creatures vying for acoustic bandwidth. He hears crustaceans, parrot fish, anemones, wrasses, sharks, shrimps, puffers and surgeonfish. Some gnash their teeth, others use their bladders or tails to make sound. Sea anemones grunt and belch. Every creature on the reef makes its own sound.
But half a mile away, where the same reef is badly damaged, he can only pick up the sound of waves and a few snapping shrimp. It is, he says, the desolate sound of extinction. Continue reading
Respecting, And Loving, Wild Places
Click above to watch the video an click here for the written story:
The wild, romantic side of Britain
The Lake District is now considered a beautiful part of the country – but it was once an unloved wilderness. Alastair Sooke describes the moment this changed. Continue reading
Reusing Plastic Bottles in a New Way
Plastic bottle cutter by Pavel & Ian, via Kickstarter
We’d never thought of bottles being used in this fashion, but from the video on this Kickstarter project by two French guys, it looks like a pretty cool idea: turn bottles into plastic rope! Any way to reuse or recycle is a great thing in our book. From Pavel & Ian:
The absolutely astonishing amount of plastic bottles that everyone uses and throws into the garbage can every day is truly impressive. This represents an economic waste, since the plastic of bottles is a commodity that is worth money and can be reused. Also, from an ecological perspective, this poses several problems. Even when sent for recycling, the volume of plastic bottles makes it challenging to transport and accommodate them efficiently.
Mysterious Sea-Floor Activity
Thousands of red crabs swarmed the ocean floor off the coast of Panama. By JESUS PINEDA, CHIEF SCIENTIST AT WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION on Publish Date April 14, 2016. Photo by Jesus G. Pineda/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Watch the video above as an introduction to a fascinating story from the Science section of the New York Times:
Uncovering a Deep-Sea Swarm of Zombie Crabs
The team stumbled upon the horror movie moment last April while exploring the aptly named Hannibal Bank Seamount, an underwater mountain home to a plethora of sea life. Continue reading
Orchids in the Citizen Science Arena
Burnt orchid (Neotinea ustulata) at Mount Caburn. Photo © Keith Wilson / Flickr through a Creative Commons license, via Cool Green Science for TNC
We’re always learning about new groups of organisms or cultural/scientific projects that are receiving more attention from groups welcoming citizen-provided data to promote increased study and focused conservation efforts: lichens, birds, trees, reptiles and amphibians, pollinators, birds, fish, and a number of Internet-based projects on stars and literature, including birds. In the United Kingdom (why not Costa Rica?), there’s a movement to document the strange flowers that make up the orchid family. Read our post about the same project last year, or check out what Lisa Feldkamp writes about Orchid Observer for the TNC citizen science blog this week:
Frail, exotic, delicate, alluring; orchids call to mind stories of romance, intrigue and obsession. Indeed from the time when “orchid fever” first swept Victorian England people have been driven to steal and even risk their lives in the quest for these gorgeous plants.
Orchids are also notoriously difficult to grow. Though modern technology and growing techniques have made it easier to have an orchid in your home, wild orchids are often adapted to specific climactic requirements and depend on symbiotic relationships to survive.
Drones Shed Light on New Perspective
Aerial night photograph by Reuben Wu, via ThisIsColossal
Photographer Reuben Wu has been practicing a new form of his trade using drones–which many people are, nowadays, but none that we know of so far have used this recent technology to create dramatic scenes at night with lighting from above. On his website, Wu writes of this project, titled Lux Noxtis, that it is:
a series of photographs depicting landscapes of North America within the framework of traditional landscape photography but influenced by ideas of planetary exploration,19th century sublime romantic painting, and science fiction.
We are overwhelmed everyday by beautiful images of the familiar. I imagine these scenes transformed into undiscovered landscapes which renew our perceptions of our world.
Better For The Bees
A bee gathers pollen from a park in Kensington, Md. With bee health in mind, home and garden products giant Ortho has announced it will phase out neonics, a class of pesticides, from its outdoor products. Allison Aubrey/NPR
We never expected to be publicly thanking a company like this one for an action it has committed itself to, but credit where it is due:
Home And Garden Giant Ditches Class Of Pesticides That May Harm Bees
A leading brand of home and garden pest-control products says it will stop using a class of pesticides linked to the decline of bees.
Ortho, part of the Miracle-Gro family, says the decision to drop the use of the chemicals — called neonicotinoids, or neonics for short — comes after considering the range of possible threats to bees and other pollinators. Continue reading
Food Supply Change
Accor plans to plant 1,000 vegetable gardens at its hotels by 2020. Photograph: Alamy
Only by scaling up the farm-to-table concept will we see a change to the industrial food production processes that lead to waste and related problems. We cheer our colleagues at Accor for this initiative:
Major hotel chain to grow vegetables at 1000 properties to cut food waste
Accorhotels, which includes Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure and Ibis, will reduce number of main courses on offer and record all food thrown away
One of the world’s biggest hotel chains has announced it will plant vegetable gardens at many of its hotels as part of a plan to cut food waste by a third. Continue reading
Processed Views
Although a previous post that embraced the sculptural qualities of food had a far more lighthearted intent, the juxtaposition of Carleton Watkins’ classic photographs and Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman’s irreverent dioramas has to be viewed with a certain level of irony. The iconic photos of America’s great national parks brought a sense of the country’s vastness home.
The pioneering nineteenth-century landscape photographer Carleton Watkins visited Yosemite during a time of rapid industrialization in the American West, but you’d never know it from the majestic tranquility of the rivers, mountains, forests, and rock faces he depicted. In her book “River of Shadows,” Rebecca Solnit, chronicling the life of another influential photographer of the time, Eadweard Muybridge, whose studies of high-speed movement helped to pioneer motion-picture technology, wrote that Watkins’s landscapes “looked like the true world everyone sought but no one else could locate among the mining booms, railroad building, land grabs, mobs, and murders” of the period. And yet Watkins’s images—which provided many people back East their first views of Yosemite’s idyllic splendor—were, in some sense, an advertisement for the possibilities of the West, and the vast untapped resources that American corporations of the eighteen-sixties and seventies were rushing to exploit. Continue reading
The Endangered Yellow-eyed Penguin
A Yellow-eyed Penguin (Megadyptes antipodes) in the Curio Bay, New Zealand. Photo by Christian Mehlführer via WikiMedia Commons.
We all like penguins, probably since they’re such unique birds with an aptitude for cuteness. We’ve written about their protection before, even in the same country this post is concerned with, New Zealand. A species that numbers only in the few thousands, the Yellow-eyed Penguin, is clearly at risk of extinction due to habitat and food source loss. Marcel Haenen reports for the New York Times:
DUNEDIN, New Zealand — Only a keen-eyed observer can spot the rare yellow-eyed penguin in the impenetrable forest hills that hug New Zealand’s South Island beaches.
Native to this region, the birds mostly lurk under a canopy of thick shrubs, trees and branches, dashing for hiding places as soon as a human approaches.
Incredibly shy, the yellow-eyed penguin is truly odd. Measuring about 65 centimeters, or just over two feet tall, with striking yellow eyes and a yellow band across its head, it is the rarest species of penguin, nesting in the forest and returning to it. It is also severely endangered.
WWF Reports Half of World Heritage Sites Put at Risk by Development
Ambatotsondrona cliffs, in the Marojejy National Park of Madagascar. This park is one of several included in the UNESCO World Heritage Site named Rainforests of the Atsinanana, which has been declared In Danger. Photo by Jeff Gibbs via WikiMedia Commons
We deeply care about UNESCO World Heritage Sites anywhere on the globe, and believe they can be a great conservation tool, so reading that the World Wildlife Fund thinks almost three times more of the Sites are threatened than UNESCO lists as “In Danger” is worrisome, to say the least. Fiona Harvey reports for the Guardian:
Close to half of the sites around the world designated for special protection as areas of outstanding importance for nature are now being threatened by industrial development, a new survey has shown.
The sites, which include Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Grand Canyon in the US, and China’s giant panda sanctuaries in Szechuan, are all supposed to be protected under the United Nations’ designated world heritage status. But encroachments from industries, including fossil fuel exploration and illegal logging, are threatening to destroy the valuable habitats, the conservation charity WWF said on Wednesday.
Support Conservation In India!
A Royal Bengal Tiger at Kaziranga National Park in India in 2014. CreditAgence France-Presse — Getty Images
Some moderately good news from the home front here in India gets us back in the mood to shout out in the interest of conservation-focused tourism:
Number of Tigers in the Wild Is Rising, Wildlife Groups Say
There are now an estimated 3,890 wild tigers, mostly in Asia, up from a worldwide tiger population of 3,200 estimated in 2010, the World Wildlife Fund and Global Tiger Forum announced on Monday. Wild tigers are considered endangered and had seen shrinking numbers because of hunting, poaching and loss of habitat, such as deforestation, particularly in Sumatra, for palm oil, and paper and pulp industries, the groups said. The official count had declined every year since 1900, when tigers numbered an estimated 100,000. Continue reading
The Little Things In Life Provide New Perspective
This is a new and expanded view of the tree of life, with clusters of bacteria (left), uncultivable bacteria called ‘candidate phyla radiation’ (center, purple) and, at lower right, the Archaea and eukaryotes (green), including humans. Credit: Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
It has been years since we sourced our last story link from this source, but we chose the perfect day to go back snooping. Those of us who learned our trade in Costa Rica have long believed that there is a lot to be said for charismatica microfauna, and this news gets us thinking back on that topic with new perspective:
Wealth of unsuspected new microbes expands tree of life
The tree of life, which depicts how life has evolved and diversified on the planet, is getting a lot more complicated.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who have discovered more than 1,000 new types of bacteria and Archaea over the past 15 years lurking in Earth’s nooks and crannies, have dramatically rejiggered the tree to account for these microscopic new life forms.
“The tree of life is one of the most important organizing principles in biology,” said Jill Banfield, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science and environmental science, policy and management. “The new depiction will be of use not only to biologists who study microbial ecology, but also biochemists searching for novel genes and researchers studying evolution and earth history.”
Message In A Bottle, Future Perfect
Researchers are hoping to “assist” evolution in order to produce hardier corals and tougher trees. ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL
We are just browsing through the new edition of one of our favorite weekly sources of material–favored for its variety of topics, and its long form approach–and this Kolbert report hits the right spot for starting a new week with vim and vigor and creative spark:
Unnatural Selection
What will it take to save the world’s reefs and forests?
Ruth Gates fell in love with the ocean while watching TV. When she was in elementary school, she would sit in front of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” mesmerized. The colors, the shapes, the diversity of survival strategies—life beneath the surface of the water seemed to her more spectacular than life above it. Without knowing much beyond what she’d learned from the series, she decided that she would become a marine biologist.
“Even though Cousteau was coming through the television, he unveiled the oceans in a way that nobody else had been able to,” she told me. Continue reading
Journeys That Set Our Lives In Motion
You do not need to be an admirer of the works of this author to appreciate the value of the story told in this book review (thanks to National Public Radio, USA):
In 1913, the 21-year-old Ronald Tolkien should have been studying for his exams. He was halfway through his Classics degree — the subject all the best students did at Oxford in those days. Getting admitted to Oxford on a scholarship was a great opportunity for young Ronald, an orphan who had always struggled to stay out of poverty. A Classics degree would have set him up for almost any career he chose. But he wasn’t studying. Instead, he was trying to teach himself Finnish.
Why would a brilliant student with so much at stake let himself go astray at such a crucial time? There were two reasons: love and the Kalevala.
Tolkien’s twin obsessions at the time were his future wife, Edith Bratt, and the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland. This collection of poems, myths, spells and hero-tales had been collected and published in the early 19th century, but the poems themselves are thought to be far older. Its unique voice, resembling no other European mythology, thoroughly captured the mind and heart of young Tolkien. “The almost indefinable sense of newness and strangeness … will either perturb you or delight you,” he wrote at the time. Continue reading
Food For Thought
Author Michael Pollan speaks to a packed house at Radcliffe. Photograph by Tony Rinaldo
And to round out our links outward today on food-related themes, this one from Harvard Magazine seems a fitting complement to today’s two other news-feature items:
Michael Pollan’s Crooked Writing Path
WHETHER HE IS WRITING a book on big farming and the way Americans think about food, or interviewing terminal cancer patients who have had life-altering experiences through hallucinogenic drugs, author Michael Pollan’s career as a writer has been anything but traditional. Continue reading
Get Ready For New Foods
Edible insects are currently expensive, but bug farmers believe economies of scale will bring lower prices. Photograph: Proti-Farm
We cannot help but wonder which type of salt may be considered most appropriate for the new menu items coming soon to a table near you; but seriously, get ready:
The worm has turned: how British insect farms could spawn a food revolution
With meat prices expected to soar, agricultural entrepreneurs believe invertebrate livestock can provide the protein we need. But will the mainstream ever be ready to eat mealworms?
It could be the tumbledown, moss-covered drystone walls marking the boundaries of land that has been farmed since the arrival of the Norse settlers. Or the gentle meanderings of the river Eden through the shadows of the Cumbrian fells. Or the proximity of the Settle-Carlisle railway line. All in all, Thringill Farm seems an unlikely setting for a 21st-century food revolution. Continue reading
Know Your Salt
What once was a simple decision between iodized table salt or sea salt has become a sensory overload. Walk into Whole Foods to restock on salt and you’ll be confronted with a dazzling array of colors, textures and price points.
Thanks to EcoWatch for this primer on the various salt choices we face:
Salts have exploded with popularity. What once was a simple decision between iodized table salt or sea salt has become a sensory overload. Walk into Whole Foods to restock on salt and you’ll be confronted with a dazzling array of colors, textures and price points. But, what really differentiates specialty salts? Are expensive salts actually worth the money?
Here is a guide to nine different culinary salts that will help you decide what salt is best for your needs.
1. Table
Table salt is created by superheating natural salt to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, which destroys most beneficial compounds. Fortified with essential iodine, table salt is also bleached and devoid of trace elements, so it’s certainly not the healthiest salt you can shake. This type of salt can often contains additives to slow moisture absorption so it is easy to sprinkle in your salt shaker. Continue reading
Audubon Focuses on Corvids in Latest Issue
Corvid Behaviors poster by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
“Meet the Bird Braniacs,” reads the header for three stories in the March-April issue of Audubon Magazine, highlighting the American Crow, Eurasian Jay, and Common Raven as especially smart species of bird (the three of them are Corvids, or members of the Corvidae family). In the different research projects covered in the Audubon pieces, the idea of empathy in birds is explored by Nicky Clayton at Cambridge University with Eurasian Jays; the problem of deterring Common Ravens from predating upon desert tortoises is a challenge for Tim Shields in the Mojave desert; and the general intelligence of the American Crow is studied by John Marzluff at the University of Washington. All the articles are quite interesting and worth a read online if you have the time. Below, a brief excerpt from the three essays, by Michael Balter, Alisa Opar, and Kat McGowan, respectively:
“I love you!” says Nicky. “I love you!”
“I love you!” says Lisbon.Nicky Clayton has shoulder-length blonde hair and a posture that reflects her background in dancing. She is a scientist. She is very smart. Lisbon is a bird, a Eurasian Jay. He’s pretty smart, too. Like most Eurasian Jays, especially the males, Lisbon is also a good mimic. So it’s not clear whether he really loves Nicky, although he certainly likes it when she gives him a worm.
If he loves anyone, it’s probably Rome, his longtime mate. Lisbon and Rome, both eight years old, have been together since they were just two. They share a wired enclosure out here at the edge of Madingley, a peaceful, manicured English village a few miles west of Cambridge.
Clayton, 53, moved to Cambridge University about 16 years ago, around the time when she was becoming an international science superstar for her investigations into avian intelligence. As part of the deal, the university agreed to construct several aviaries at its Madingley annex according to Clayton’s specifications. They’re not fancy, but the birdcages include plenty of space for the captives to fly around, play, and mate, as well as special compartments where they collaborate with Clayton in state-of-the-art bird cognition experiments. Today the aviaries house about 70 birds, including Eurasian Jays, Western Scrub-Jays, and Rooks, all members of the corvid family. At night, the caws and kuks can be heard over much of the village.
