Dirty Things Dominate

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The Carthaginian general Hannibal is remembered for his march across the Alps with thirty-seven elephants, but scholars have long disputed exactly which route he took over the mountains. ILLUSTRATION COURTESY UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE / UIG / GETTY

Nature appreciation in these pages frequently has to do with dirty things that are simply fascinating. Related topics we care about such as conservation, as often as not have to do with dirty things; as in, things that need to be cleaned up. Here is another slightly odd appreciation of dirty things that fits the dirty but fascinating and useful category:

Searching for Signs of Hannibal’s Route in DNA from Horse Manure

BY MARGUERITE HOLLOWAY

More than two thousand years ago, thirty-seven elephants from heat-shimmering latitudes ascended Europe’s highest mountain range, tramped though snow and across ice, and breathed the thin air of high altitudes. Those that survived the perilous journey met with a bitter winter and war, as the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who had urged them through the Alps, battled the emergent Roman Republic. Continue reading →

Waddler Utility

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Indian runner ducks have been used in Asia for thousands of years to control pests. Now they’re used in a South African vineyard to eat snails that damage the vines. Sarah Birnbaum for NPR

We are pleased to know that birds from India have such enormous value in places outside India:

For This Vineyard, It’s Duck, Duck, Booze

On Vergenoegd Wine Estate in Stellenbosch, South Africa, about a thousand Indian runner ducks parade twice a day into a vineyard to rid it of pests. It’s a remarkably orderly scene.

Unlike your typical waddling duck, these ducks don’t sway back and forth. They run quickly in a straight line.

Every morning at 9:45 a.m., they emerge from a gate and zip around the gleaming white manor house – even sticking to a manicured gravel path. They run in formation. Their beaks all point in the same direction, their bodies all turn at the same time — like they’ve worked on the choreography beforehand.

The previous owner of the wine estate, John Faure, is a bird lover and brought them over from Asia. They have been at the estate for at least 30 years. Continue reading →

Octopus Painted with Its Own Ancient Ink

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Image of the completed octopus ink drawing. Photo by Esther van Hulsen, via ThisIsColossal

Octopuses are impressive animals, given their incredible intelligence, impressive sight, and, of course, number of limbs. Now, we’re learning that the pigment in their ink, which has been known to preserve well when fossilized, can still be used today for illustrative purposes. In fact, an English paleontologist did it in the 19th century, and more recently by Esther van Hulsen! More from Kate Sierzputowski at This Is Colossal:

Dutch wildlife artist Esther van Hulsen was recently given an assignment unlike her typical drawings of birds and mammals from life—a chance to draw a prehistoric octopus 95 million years after its death. Paleontologist Jørn Hurum supplied Hulsen with ink extracted from a fossil found in Lebanon in 2009, received as a gift from the PalVenn Museum in 2014.

Continue reading →

Scientists Speak On Behalf Of Yellowstone Grizzly Bears

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Thank you, EcoWatch, for keeping us posted on Jane Goodall’s never-ending advocacy on behalf of various members of the animal kingdom we co-inhabit the earth with:

Dr. Jane Goodall is one of 58 prominent scientists and experts who have signed a letter asking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to retain Endangered Species Act protections for Yellowstone-area grizzly bears. Continue reading →

McKibben In The Guardian

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Global direct action began with hundreds of environmental activists invading the UK’s largest opencast coal mine in south Wales on Tuesday. Photograph: Kristian Buus for the Guardian

More McKibben, who we believe we will never tire of sharing here:

The time has come to turn up the heat on those who are wrecking planet Earth

An interesting question is, what are you waiting for?

Global warming is the biggest problem we’ve ever faced as a civilisation — certainly you want to act to slow it down, but perhaps you’ve been waiting for just the right moment. Continue reading →

Food Footprints

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Leonard Scinto, a researcher at Florida International University, standing beside a concrete post that measures the subsidence of soil in the Everglades Agricultural Area. In 1924, the top of the post was level with the ground surface. Dan Charles/NPR

Five minutes to listen to how your food greens, or does not green, our planet (thanks to National Public Radio, USA):

The Environmental Cost Of Growing Food

Let’s say you’re an environmentally motivated eater. You want your diet to do as little damage as possible to our planet’s forests and grasslands and wildlife.

But how do you decide which food is greener? Continue reading →

Exploration in Yellowstone Lake

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Yellowstone Lake at dawn by Wikimedia contributor Seglea

We like national parks, and are surprised to learn that the body of water pictured above hasn’t actually been explored much. The good news is that there are efforts underway to send an underwater drone down into the lake’s depths to better study this interesting site of thermal activity. Jeffrey Marlow reports for Discover Magazine’s blog:

2016 marks the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, a milestone that has set off a year of celebration for what historian Wallace Stegner called “the best idea we ever had.” The first park, Yellowstone, predates the Service itself, and despite its 4.1 million yearly visitors that are putting real stress on a highly interconnected ecosystem, certain portions of the park remain a nearly unadulterated wilderness.

One of these sites is the floor of Yellowstone Lake, a 350 square-kilometer body of water that reaches depths of 120 meters. And while much of Yellowstone’s thermal activity manifests on the surface – think rainbow-colored hot springs, gooey mudpots that smell of sulfur, and spurting geysers – the same forces create heated water and unique oases of microbial life at the lake bottom.

Continue reading →

Discovering Gold in the Greater Antilles (Part 3)

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Our (un)faithful jeep breaks down again. This time the rear axle snaps in half. Not good. Parque Valle Nuevo, Dominican Republic, 2012.

This is the final installment of the series; you can read Part 1 and Part 2.

As my vision begins to clear, I know all-too-well what I’ll hear next…
“Whoa, sounds like an adventure! So, tell me, what are your plans for a PhD?”
[My vision goes dark again…]

In 2014, I conducted my last full field season in the Dominican Republic (in other words, I had burnt up all of my NSF funding and the winds of change were blowing my wife and me from Ithaca down to Raleigh). That being said, I was (and still am) extremely passionate about Golden Swallows, and more and more so about aerial insectivores throughout the Caribbean (swifts and swallows of course; those flycatchers and nightjars will have to find other sponsors). I did, however, have the pleasure of sneaking in one more (big) Golden Swallow adventure before my master’s defense came around. I was asked by Gary Graves, the Curator of Birds at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, to finish the long-running census work he had been carrying out in Jamaica in search of the critically endangered Jamaican Golden Swallow (T. e. euchrysea) – the only other known race of Golden Swallow and one that hadn’t been reliably seen since the 1980’s. Gary had scoured the island except for two places the Cockpit Country in the northwest and the Blue Mountains in the southeast.

Adult female Golden Swallow incubating her clutch; Parque Valle Nuevo, Dominican Republic, 2013.

Continue reading →

Go, Phil, Go

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A worker near the Pebble Mine, in Alaska ’s Bristol Bay region, which is at the center of a long-running legal battle between a Canadian developer, native tribes, commercial fishermen, and environmentalists. PHOTOGRAPH BY AL GRILLO / AP

Thanks to Tim Sohn for bringing Phil North to our attention:

The E.P.A. Ecologist Who Became a Wanted Man

BY

When Phil North retired from the Environmental Protection Agency, after a mostly quiet twenty-three-year career in Alaska, his plan was to embark on an around-the-world sailing trip with his wife and two young children. But when it came time to weigh anchor, there was a problem: the aging boat that North had docked in South Carolina proved unsalvageable. A hunt for another suitable vessel in his price range yielded nothing. After a series of discussions and a vote, the family decided, in early 2014, to fly to New Zealand. “We were only going to go for three months, but we loved it and ended up buying a camper van and driving around for ten months,” North, who is fifty-nine, told me recently. “And then our visa ran out, and we thought, We’re so close to Australia, we can’t not go.” So they went, and toured the country for another year. Continue reading →

Another Call to Action from McKibben

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Photo of Bill McKibben by Corey Hendrickson/Polaris via The Guardian

We’ve been sharing pieces about or by Bill McKibben for many years now, like this interview from 2012, the news that he was stepping down from leading 350.org, a piece he wrote for the Guardian last year, and the story of his direct activism in New York a couple months ago. He’s now published an article, once again in the Guardian, about the need to take action around the world against fossil fuel companies. “The time has come to turn up the heat on those who are wrecking planet Earth,” McKibben writes, the question being, what are we all waiting for?

Global warming is the biggest problem we’ve ever faced as a civilisation — certainly you want to act to slow it down, but perhaps you’ve been waiting for just the right moment.

The moment when, oh, marine biologists across the Pacific begin weeping in their scuba masks as they dive on reefs bleached of life in a matter of days. The moment when drought in India gets deep enough that there are armed guards on dams to prevent the theft of water. The moment when we record the hottest month ever measured on the planet, and then smash that record the next month,and then smash that record the next month? The moment when scientists reassessing the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet have what one calls an ‘OMG moment’ and start talking about massive sea level rise in the next 30 years?

Continue reading →

Coffee Better Understood

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A competitor prepares coffee during the El Salvador National Barista Championship at a mall in San Salvador

STR New / Reuters

From the Atlantic, where some of (but not all) our favorite coffee stories have come from in the past, we have this new item to share:

Specialty Coffee’s Resident Scientist

A computational chemist is changing the way coffee makers think about water.

by Sarah Kollmorgen

Wherever he goes, Christopher H. Hendon brings a homemade supply of powdery white chemicals. Made from coral-reef care sets, the little bottles and plastic bags may raise some TSA eyebrows, but they serve a perfectly innocent purpose. The substances comprise his personal water filtration titration kit.

“Who travels with this much white powder?” Hendon says with a laugh. His duffel currently contains several compounds including calcium chloride, magnesium sulfate, and potassium bicarbonate. These mixtures help detect the invisible chemicals present in a glass of water, he explains. Using them, Hendon can determine how hard the water is in any geographical area, based on the minerals it contains. Continue reading →

Soaked Boots and River Squirms

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In the spirit of Earth Day, Xandari held a river clean-up last week along the Tacacorí River, which not only is the hotel’s primary supply for irrigation but also the local town’s. Similar to the community street clean-up we led last September and years prior, the purpose of this event was to remove any garbage along the river starting from the river spring and through the length of the property, which amounts to about 1km. Unlike the last clean-up, however, this one was of a smaller, and damper, scale. Continue reading →

Bad News for European Vultures

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Bird of the Day August 13, 2013: White-rumped Vulture in Ahmedabad, India photographed by Srinivasa Addepalli

Vultures are very important members of many ecosystems in the world as members of a waste-management team, but their role as carrion-feeders is putting them at risk, and has been since the California Condor was endangered in the US (though it’s recovering now). We’ve featured these birds in our daily photo posts quite a bit, even just a week ago, and now there’s news from Scientific American, covering research published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, that European vultures are more threatened than ever, this time by a veterinary drug given to cattle:

A veterinary drug blamed for driving vultures to the brink of extinction on the Indian subcontinent could cause thousands of bird deaths now that it is being used in Spain.

Researchers have expressed concern over use of the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac in cattle since it was approved for veterinary use in Spain in 2013, as the drug is toxic to vultures who may consume it via dead cows. Now, modelling by Rhys Green, a conservation scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues suggests that the drug could cause populations of that country’s Eurasian griffon vultures (Gyps fulvus) to decline by between 1–8% each year.

Continue reading →

Rainforest Alliance and Sustainable Agriculture Network

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Among the farms that the Rainforest Alliance certifies are those that produce bananas, coffee, tea, pineapples, cocoa, flowers and palm oil. Photo by Flickr user Sally Crossthwaite

The Rainforest Alliance and Sustainable Agriculture Network have been doing good work, mostly in developing countries, for over twenty years to improve agricultural practices and protect natural forests. The two groups published an Impacts Report not long ago that reviews their progress, and two executives wrote an article summarizing those impacts on GreenBiz.com:

Independent, third-party certification has grown phenomenally since 1993, when the Rainforest Alliance certified the first banana plantation to meet Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) standards.

The standards prohibit conversion of forests or other natural ecosystems to cropland, protect workers and wildlife, regulate the use of chemicals and other farming practices. Today they cover more than a million farmers on Rainforest Alliance Certified farms, most of them smallholders, cultivating 100 crops on a total of 7.4 million acres (about the size of Switzerland) across 42 countries.

Continue reading →