In which a family cheers at the suffering and death of an animal...

Science is cold, emotionless.  It takes no moral positions, it has no fears, it's just a method for rooting out incorrect ideas by challenging those ideas with logic and data.  This is a good thing: it's what makes science so successful at giving us relatively objective descriptions of reality and how it works.

But scientists aren't science.  They do hold moral position, and sometimes they give a damn about something. That means the things they care about - be it puppies, women's rights, great music, historical buildings, or hot shoes - these things evoke emotion, and dictate action. Personally, I'm rather partial to snakes, which is why my blood boils when I watch this video of a family cheering as passing traffic repeatedly hits and eventually kills an Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake...

Interestingly, I don't hate these people - I don't even dislike them (which I'll admit feels a bit odd - I feel like I should). Certainly, if I were in their shoes, I would have jumped out of the car and tried to saved the snake. But that's me - I know a fair bit about rattlesnakes, and through that knowledge I've developed a great deal of appreciation for them.

That's important, so I'll reiterate: my knowledge of snakes has brought me to appreciate them. Science may be cold and emotionless, but the factual details it provides can significantly shape our morality - our sense of good and bad, right and wrong - and I think this is generally true for nearly everyone.  I'll let Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris elaborate (although see Massimo Piggliucci's commentary for a critique of Harris's talk)...




So when I see videos like the first one above, I don't see an evil family of ruthless sadists raising sociopathic  children.  In fact, I'd be surprised if they weren't actually a rather likable and otherwise decent family.

What I do see is a family that doesn't live near a good nature center. That doesn't spend much time at high quality zoos. That lives where the schools have ineffective biology teachers. A family with no pet reptiles, maybe no pets at all. Mom and dad are almost certainly not biologists, probably don't get out into nature much, and the kids probably don't want to become doctors or social workers or biologists (yet!).

What I see is the target audience of every science and nature educator ever to speak to the public.

Ignorance is the problem, education the solution.  

Bed Bugs!

Don't forget to click the video and jump over to the youtube page to tell Cornell that you like their video by clicking the "Like" button. 

More info on bed bugs can be found here, here and of course here.

Raptors and Wind Farms

Note: I've been going through a backlog of draft posts and pulling out anything still worth posting.  This one, sharing video on the hazards posed by wind farms to resident and migrating raptors, was accidentally saved as a draft back in October 2009.

I recently saw this video when it was posted by a friend on facebook. He summed it up nicely:

[This is why] the placement of wind turbines needs to be very carefully considered.

Here's a more complete version of the story:

Unfortunately, wind farms often go up in prime airspace for locally breeders and migrating birds of prey, and can cause significant mortality from collisions like these.

The Cost of the Gulf Coast Oil Spill

This post will be updated regularly. There are links below to related articles, blog posts, and other resources on the flora and fauna affected by the gulf coast BP oil spill. If you know of other links or suggestions, please send them to me via email or in the comments below.

Bloggers, biologists, naturalists, science writers... I need your help. Life is about to get very bad for the inhabitants of the Gulf Coast, with the first waves of raw crude oil projected to reach shore in the coming days, if it hasn't already. While this will certainly have an impact on local economies and an even bigger impact on those who make their living from those waters, there will be a great many other living organisms and even entire ecosystems that will be utterly devastated by the spill.

So why don't more people seem to care?  While there is no single answer to that question , it is in part because pretty much every single person has absolutely no idea that most of the affected species even exist.  It's hard to fault someone for not caring about something they don't even know exists, and I'd bet most people would care if they only knew...  That, my friends, is where I need your help!

How you can help...

To help raise awareness of the environmental costs of the gulf coast oil spill, I'm asking others to take at least one of the follow actions to draw attention to particular species and ecosystems affected by the spill:

1. Share this post, and this request with others, and be creative about it -- encourage your local news paper's science writer to showcase the environmental costs of the spill, organize a public talk by local conservation groups, university or government researchers, and so on.  Check back now and then and share some of the posts below with your family, friends and coworkers.
2. If you have a blog, choose an organism -- plant, animal, or other -- and tell the rest of us about it. No blog? No problem... you can always write a guest-post for someone else's blog, or use other media outlets. You can make a video and post it on youtube, send some info you your local newscasters, do whatever you can think of!  Share pictures, natural history facts, economic value, whatever you can come up with to convey to the public why anyone should give a rat's tail about the demise of your chosen subject.  Once you've done that, if it's on the web, please send me the link and I'll include it below.
3. Stash some cash if you can, and consider donating to the recovery efforts.  I'll post more information below once I get the time to offer up suggestion.

Check back soon for updates!

 

Related Links...

Birds

• Bad Place, Bad Timing for and Oil Spill | Round Robin (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) 
• Gulf Coast Birds in Danger | Frank Gill, PhD. (CNN Opinion piece)

Mammals

• West Indian Manatee | The Obligate Scientist

General

• Impacts on Wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill | Ninjameys (Natural History Blog)
• Watching and Waiting | Living Alongside Wildlife
• Oil Spill Wildlife Rescue: Why Some Animals Receive Priority Care | Discovery News
• Pictures: Gulf Oil Spill Hits Land -- And Wildlife | National Geographic
• Photos related to the 2010 gulf coast oil spill | www.Flickr.com 
• Info on Methane Hydrates | The Obligate Scientist

News and Updates

• Gulf Oil Slick | Blog with great areal footage, environmental news
• NOAA's website on the Deep Water Horizon Spill, Gulf of Mexico | NOAA.gov
• USFWS wesbite on the oil spill response | FWS.gov
• EPA's website on the spill | EPA.gov
• Tracking the oil spill | CNN
• Cool Green Science | Nature Conservancy's Blogs

Other Links

• Gulf Coast Wildlife Workers Prepare For Worst | NPR's All Things Considered

What Caused All These Dead Birds in Tennessee?

Was it an outbreak of infectious disease? Did someone decide these birds were "agricultural pests" and deliberately poison them? Maybe they all were accidentally exposed to something toxic, or flew into traffic or power lines? Lots of folks down in Clarksville, Tennessee would love to know what actually killed a few hundred birds along a nearby road earlier this week...

Now, the birds shown are Red-winged Blackbirds and Common Grackles -- common species to find along side non-native European Starlings in big flocks of "blackbirds". From the condition and seemingly localized occurrence of the bird carcasses shown in the video, I'm pretty comfortable ruling out traffic or power-line collisions as the source of all these dead birds. I'd be much more included to put my money on poisoning... and probably deliberate poisoning.

Why? Well, this sort of thing actually isn't all that unheard of... Take, for example, a case from New Jersey which previously made the news when birds started actually falling from the sky.

[Source: WKRG.com News]

Oh, and if you wondered what was meant by "a permit" in the first video above, I should mention that the New Jersey incident (and this one from PA) were both part of control efforts. While hardly a pleasant sight, these large flocks of (mostly?) European Starlings were poisoned after consideration and approval by the USDA.

Getting back to the original question of "what happened?" we (fortunately) won't need to rely solely on speculation in this case! That said, we do still have to wait a bit and see what information comes back with those lab results...

(To be continued!)

Black Market Wildlife: Who Cares!?

Hopefully you do, and if you don't - let me explain why you should.

First, here is a press release from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation on a recent progress to stop the illegal trading of native reptiles and amphibians from New York state and nearby areas.

So why is the illegal trade of wild animals such a big concern? Not surprisingly, there are lots of reasons.

Lets begin with the most obvious reason: to ensure the health and persistence of existing wild populations. The demand for many wildlife species for food, pets, and/or for traditional "medicines" has lead to the drastic reduction in wild populations worldwide. There are countless examples of this happening all over the world. For example take the story of the Spix's Macaw (Wikipedia | birdlife.org) which went extinct in the wild in 2000.

For other examples, you can read more here from NPR and here at america.gov. To make a long story short - we humans do a pretty good job of wiping out wildlife unless we practice some restraint!

So what's our secret to being such efficient exterminators? Going back to the recent arrests in New York state, it's worth mentioning that these collectors endanger wild populations on a number of levels. The obvious harm comes from the removal of individuals from sensitive populations, which can lead to significant and long-lasting population declines. This is what we usually think of as the main problem. Additionally, however, the destruction of local habitat can also have a lasting negative impact on wild populations: see the results of this study for an example. Unfortunately, this fits a general pattern: overharvesting wild populations while at the same time reducing high quality habitat seems to be a great recipe for decimating a species.

Some people, perhaps you yourself, don't find this all that big of a problem - "so a few species go extinct - big deal!" Arguments against this sentiment can be found here and here, so I'll leave that issue alone for now. But even from this very extreme perspective, there is still more to be concerned about beyond species conservation alone!

Other big reasons to keep tabs on the trade of wildlife (reasons often overlooked in the public eye) are concerns about spreading disease and invasive species.

Wildlife can carry diseases that can be harmful to humans, livestock, and/or to the wildlife in other regions. Illegal trade in wildlife has a huge potential for the spread of costly diseases at a global scale - for example consider the recent worry about the global spread of bird flu, and the fact that SARS originated in bats or other wildlife before infecting humans. For more on wildlife and disease concerns, see this article and some of the other information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Invasive species can also cause a great deal of environmental, agricultural and economic damage, for examples see the impact of invasive species and check out the relatively new (2005) government website for the NISIC. For more on the invasive species side of the illegal trade in wildlife, check out the (more comical) hippos in Columbia, or the information available here.