Elephant tales

I received email alerts for two stories from CNN.com today that taken together present an almost paradoxical picture of humanity’s effect on the natural world as manifested through the biology and ecology of one of Earth’s most intelligent, most unique, and certainly its largest land animal. The first was an almost humorous account of an elephant in India that effectively robs motorists at tusk-point for food as they pass its stretch of highway (I say “almost” humorous because such regular and close encounters between large animals and people rarely end up well for one if not both). This situation really captures the continual encroachment of civilization upon the wildlife habitat, and the adaptations that animals must make if they are to survive that encroachment. However, the second story reported the discovery of an intact, isolated elephant population on an island in the swamps of southern Sudan, where they have avoided poaching and other disturbance during Sudan’s long civil war, reminding us that pockets of true wildness do still exist.

This pair of elephant stories reminded me of a superb article I’d read a few months ago in the New York Times magazine about the profound psychological and behavioral changes being induced in elephants by drastic disruption of the age structure, sex ratio, and social hierarchy of the herd. The article reveals shockingly complex capacity for teaching, learning and emotional responses in these amazing animals. And this raises an important point about the impacts we are having on the natural world: There is far more to animal conservation than simply population size and extinction risk. Elephants show us that beyond simple numbers of individuals, population structure and behavior are key determinants of success, and those are not the only key factors.

Australian researchers have recently shown that climate change is altering the fundamental demographic processes underlying the dynamics of marine fish populations (I had to get back to fishes somehow...), with deep-dwelling species exhibiting slower growth and species in shallower waters exhibiting faster growth. Neither fast growth nor slow growth is inherently better or worse, as growth is tied in with a wide array of other demographic traits (mortality rate, maturation, fecundity, spawning frequency, etc) and ecological factors to maximize the reproductive success of a species. Whether these alterations to the growth of fishes will compromise reproduction remains to be seen. But if these effects primarily represent a response to temperature, then they should not be permanent, or at least the species should retain the genetic resilience to adapt to changing conditions. That is, as long as we are not also draining the genetic gene pool. Sadly, it appears that we may be doing just that: Researchers at Stony Brook University have shown how fishing pressure can act as a remarkably strong agent of (non-)natural selection, potentially causing an irreversible loss of genes that reduce the adaptability of a population. Eroding the foundational genetic basis for the ecological success of a species is a truly frightening prospect.

Who needs outer space?

I've never understood the rush to explore the cosmos when so much of our own planet is still very much a mystery. Well, maybe I could be talked into a mission to Mars, but there remain some very alien and unexplored parts of Earth nonetheless. Most notable among these unknown realms is the deep sea. Two of my closest Aussie friends, John and Sam, recently had the good fortune to see a living coelacanth in Indonesia (their photo is above). This deep-dwelling fish is perhaps the epitome of a "living fossil", and might be one of the key evolutionary links between fishes and terrestrial animals. John and Sam shared news and images of this encounter during the same week that my favorite poet alerted me to a NY Times article on the bizarre beasts that reside in the deepest, darkest layers of the oceans. Of course, one need not descend to skull-crushing depths to find a mind-boggling array of undiscovered biodiversity. Dr. Craig Venter's institute has been sampling microbial DNA in near-surface waters of the world's oceans in the Sorcerer II expedition, and has learned just how little we know about the basic species composition, let alone the ecological functions, of microscopic marine life. For those romantics who are sad to have missed the voyages of Cook, Darwin, Burton, Magellan, Shackleton, and the other great pioneers of the bygone golden age of Earth exploration, rest assured that we still have plenty of secrets to unlock on this globe...

A Green Wave

I’ve had a bit of a lay-off from posting in this young blog, but while work and travel and such have kept me from writing, I have been stockpiling links. And those links will seed a series of new posts over the next week or two. But as I collect these articles, the number of environmental news stories appearing in a variety of media outlets recently has me thinking that we might be entering the next “green” revolution. As one sign that we might be entering this new era, consider the shift in attitudes toward hydropower dams in the Columbia River system that seems to be emerging. Replacing hydropower with wind farms and transporting agricultural products via rejuvenated railways rather than along artificially flattened rivers would largely eradicate the sea lions-salmon-fishermen tensions addressed in my last post. Another positive sign is the U.S.’s largest automaker joining the U.S. Climate Action Partnership.

If a transformative moment is upon us, it will have been several decades in the making. The last period of major environmental policy action in the United States took place in the 1960s and 1970s when Congress passed the Clean Air Act (1963, with a major amendment in 1970), Clean Water Act (1972), Endangered Species Act (ESA; 1973), and the Fisheries Conservation and Management Act (FCMA; 1976). Since that time, important environmental progress has been made, but there have arguably been no changes as sweeping as these. And their effects have generally been profound. The air is cleaner today than it was 20 years ago, water is cleaner in many places (though not all), and species protected under the ESA more often than not show dramatic improvements.

Of the four issues addressed by the acts listed above, fisheries have arguably experienced the least progress since passage of the landmark legislation. All of these laws (and, indeed, most environmental laws) strive to find some balance between economic and environmental needs (although the true revolution will come when we realize that this is a false dichotomy, but that is for another day…). However, the FCMA seems to tip the scales more toward economics than conservation relative to the other two, perhaps because its original mission had more to do with excluding foreign fleets and protecting the American fishing industry than it did with establishing sustainable fisheries. Compounding this imbalance, fisheries are assaulted by a range of impacts beyond simply fishing pressure. Two milestone reports, one from the independent Pew Oceans Commission and one from the federal U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy (now unified as the Joint Ocean Commission), addressed the full suite of threats, governance challenges and research needed to reverse the decline in ocean health. Implementation of those recommendations, coupled with major new policy initiatives on climate and energy, have the potential to spawn a new green revolution.