By Dreamdan (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, University of Kansas insect ecologist Orley R. “Chip” Taylor suggests that it’s likely that genetically engineered crops are largely to blame.

Monsanto first introduced Roundup-resistant soybeans in 1997, and Roundup-resistant corn a year later. By 2004, Taylor estimates that about 50% of commercial farms were using the modified seeds. About that same time the monarch population started to significantly decline.

Monarchs feed on milkweed plants, which grow wild in the Midwest alongside corn and soybean fields. Before genetically modified seed was introduced, milkweed and other weeds were controlled through tillage. Now that farmers have herbicide-resistant crops, they control weeds with herbicides.  According to Taylor, since 1997 the amount of herbicide used in agriculture has tripled. And the milkweed that the monarch butterflies depend on has all but disappeared.

The good news, if there is any here, is that the US Department of Agriculture announced May 10th that it’s ordered additional environmental impact statements herbicide-resistant crops that have been waiting for federal approval.  Monsanto has developed corn, soy, and cotton resistant to two additional pesticides, 2,4-D (produced by Dow) and dicamba (produced by Monsanto).

It’s worth noting that 2,4-D was an ingredient in Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant produced by Monsanto and Dow that was used extensively in the Vietnam War.  Agent Orange was later shown to cause cancer, birth defects, and other health problems in people on both sides who came into contact with it during the war.  Currently the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs lists prostate cancer, respiratory cancers, multiple myeloma, type II diabetes, Hodgkin’s disease, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, soft tissue sarcoma, chloracne, porphyria cutanea tarda, peripheral neuropathy, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, B cell leukemias, Parkinson’s disease, ischemic heart disease, and spina bifida in children of veterans exposed to Agent Orange as conditions associated with exposure to the herbicide.

According to Tom Philpott, writing in Mother Jones, “the move appears to be a result of the popular opposition caused by previous USDA announcements about its intention to approve the crops. In its press release, USDA noted that it had received “8,200 comments, including petitions signed by more than 400,000 people” in response to its proposal to approve 2,4-D corn.”

Good to know that signing petitions still makes a difference. Unfortunately, even if the USDA doesn’t ultimately approve Monsanto’s new herbicide-resistant products, that’s not going to help the monarch butterfly. Unless someone develops Roundup-resistant milkweed.

Monarch butterflies return to Santa Cruz, California, for the winter.
By Brocken Inaglory (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The post Monarch Butterflies: Collateral Damage appeared first on Animals.

Lucy King, a researcher working with Save the Elephants, has spent many years investigating the problems involved in crop protection. Her goal is to find long-term solutions that reduce the frequency of human-elephant conflicts—and that can be financed and managed by local farmers.

As Ms. King looked into the elephants’ habits for any clues to keeping them out of fields planted with crops, she noticed that they tended to avoid acacia trees with active nests of African bees. Elephants, it so happens, are afraid of the bees, and will move away from an area and warn other elephants if they hear bees buzzing nearby.

And so the beehive fence was invented. The fences are simple, inexpensive, and easy for the farmers to build and maintain. The thatched roof over the hives keeps the bees dry in the rain and keeps them from getting overheated in the sun (they get aggressive and eventually leave the hives if they get too hot). The hives are hung at chest height which makes it easy for the farmer to harvest the honey, while also making them highly visible to the elephants. Download the Beehive Fence Construction Manual.

Beehive Fence Schematic

The hives, connected by wires,  are hung every 10 meters around the perimeter of a field. The farmers leave wide pathways between their crops so elephants can move past the fences along their migratory routes. If an elephant makes contact with one of the hives or the connecting wires, the beehives all along the fence will swing and release the bees.

Lucy King and a beehive fence installation

This approach has proven to be extremely effective, reducing crop destruction and human-elephant conflicts by up to 85%. And, according to Lucy King, there’s an added bonus:

Elephant-friendly honey from beehive fences provides additional income for the farmers.

“Not only do low-income farmers benefit from higher yields through reduced damaging crop-raids, but they also benefit from honey production and sales. This diversifies both their income and their food production options as honey is financially valuable, nutritious and does not require refrigeration.”

This is the kind of solution we need more of: easy to implement and manage by local communities, with immediate and long-term benefits. And we’re not the only ones who think so: in February, Lucy King won a 2013 Future for Nature award, and it was just announced on May 3, 2013, that Ms. King and the Elephants and Bees project has been awarded the St. Andrews Prize for the Environment.

Graduate students/volunteers interested in helping the project should email lucy@savetheelephants.org with a CV and cover letter. Students must be physically fit, have good proven fieldwork experience and be comfortable working and living in the bush in basic conditions. Priority will be given to students already living in Kenya and able to come for interview but everyone is considered.

The post Farmers, Elephants, and Bees: A Winning Combination appeared first on Animals.

Plastic debris on the beach. Photo by LCDR Eric Johnson, NOAA Corps. (NOAA Photo Library: fish1968) [CC-BY-2.0 or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Because plastics are so cheap, most of the plastic containers we use are designed for a single use. And each year we use more; according to a 2010 report from KPMG International, plastic production during the past decade equals that of the entire twentieth century. Although we don’t give those single-use containers another thought once we dispose of them, we should; they are and will always be with us.

Undigested matter regurgitated by a Hawaiian albatross on Tern Island, Hawaii, includes several ingested flotsam items, including monofilament fishing line from fishing nets and a discarded toothbrush.

Plastic of all sorts is finding its way into our oceans, not only creating huge floating islands of trash at various gyre sites around the globe, but also, and more insidiously, as microparticles that are nearly invisible to the eye. Larger bits and pieces such as plastic juice-bottle caps and plastic bags are mistaken for food and eaten by seabirds, seals, sea turtles, and fish, which can and often does eventually kill them. They eat lots of plastic, as it turns out: in 2011, a small green sea turtle in Brazil was found to have 3400 pieces of plastic in its large intestine.

You are what you eat. (And what you launder.)

According to studies cited by Scientific American’s John Platt, a major source of plastic in our oceans is our laundry—polyester, acrylics, and other synthetic fabrics generate thousands of tiny microparticles of plastic every time they are washed and dried, and those particles end up in our oceans and on coastal beaches.

There are two big reasons to rethink your wardrobe choices:

First, these plastic microparticles are being ingested by filter feeders at the bottom of the food chain, creatures such as mussels and sea cucumbers. Unable to discriminate between ocean sediment and tiny particles of plastic, they eat both. And, as the mussels are consumed by other animals, and those animals are consumed, and so on, those plastic bits move right up the food chain.

Second, due to their relatively large surface area, microparticles of plastic absorb whatever is in the water. Think about it: when a piece of plastic is broken into fragments, the total volume remains the same, but the surface area is greatly increased. In particular, plastics act like sponges for persistent toxic compounds in water, and where there is more surface area available, more toxins are absorbed. Toxins in our oceans originate from many sources, including plastic additives and pesticides. In fact, a worldwide survey by the International Pellet Watch found that concentrations of toxic compounds in microplastics were orders of magnitude up to 1 million times greater than in the surrounding waters. And that’s what mussels are eating on their way to your dinner plate.

So what can you do about it? Minimize your use of single-use plastic food containers and packaging as much as you can. Reuse, repurpose, and recycle. Bring your own cloth bags to the grocery store. Buy clothes made of natural fibers like cotton, linen, and wool. And, if you’re a brilliant marine biologist, chemical engineer, and/or superhero, figure out how we can get—and keep—all of that plastic out of our oceans.

Don’t miss photographer Chris Jordan’s hauntingly beautiful photographs from Midway Island: seabirds that fell victim to the lure of brightly colored plastic.  

The post The Persistence of Plastic appeared first on Animals.

The post Software Tools for Conservation Biologists appeared first on Animals.

White Rhinos in Sabi Sand Reserve. Photo by By Flickr user James Temple [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The poisonous dye is injected into the horn of a tranquilized rhino by drilling a hole into the horn and using compressed air to inject the mixture. The technique was pioneered by veterinary surgeon Dr. Charles van Niekerk at the Rhino and Lion reserve at Kromdraai, northwest of Johannesburg. The results have proved to be non-harmful to the rhinos, cost-effective, and are considered an immediate and long-lasting solution for private game reserves, which are seen as easy targets for poachers.

The parasiticides that are being injected into the rhinos’ horns are used to control ticks on domesticated animals such as horses, cattle, and sheep, but it’s toxic to humans. The treated rhino horn won’t kill people who ingest it, but it will make them quite ill with severe nausea and various intestinal problems.

“We are sending a message through the supply chain that rhino horn from Sabi Sand will endanger the health of anyone who uses it as a medicine,” says Andrew Parker, 41, CEO of the Sabi Sand Wildreservaat Association.

According to Parker, the dye is not only clearly visible in the ground horn, it’s also detectable by airport scanners. That should help to cut down on the amount of illegal rhino horn that is currently getting to the Asian black market, where rhino horn sells for $65k per kilo.

Victims of poaching: an all-too-common sight at game reserves in South Africa.By Hein waschefort (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Parker says, “There is a limitless recruiting pool of poachers inside and outside our borders, and they enjoy a tactical advantage against the counter-measures we’ve employed so far. They dictate the time, the place and the scale of their engagements and they hide in plain sight amongst local communities.”

The pink horn approach isn’t widely accepted as a good solution to the problem of rhino poaching. There’s some concern that by creating a high profile for this practice in one area, the poachers will just intensify their activity in other areas. It’s not feasible to inject dye into the horns of all of the rhinos on the African continent. And black market dealers in rhino horn will no doubt figure out how to bleach the dyed horn to make it appear to be untainted—buyers beware!

Devaluing the rhino horns is only one of three phases of Sabi Sand’s strategy to protect and conserve the Sabi Sand wildlife in the long term. From the game reserve’s perspective, winning the war means building up and motivating a highly-skilled staff on the ground, developing an excellent intelligence network, and winning the hearts and minds of surrounding communities by increasing their involvement in the business of the tourism industry.

The post What do you call a rhino with a pink horn? Alive. appeared first on Animals.

One of the original Nutshell Handbooks

In the mid-1980s, O’Reilly (aka O’Reilly & Associates) was selling short books on Unix topics via mail order. These books, known as “Nutshell Handbooks,” were held together by staples, and had plain brown covers. Over time, Tim O’Reilly decided that he wanted to sell the books through brick-and-mortar bookstores, and hired a graphic designer to create new book covers. Those covers were used for the first two titles that were sold into bookstores, but Tim wasn’t satisfied with the design.

A neighbor of mine worked at O’Reilly as a technical writer and marketer. She showed me the covers they’d had designed, and wondered if I might have a better idea. At that point in my career, I was immersed in the VAX/VMS world of Digital Equipment Corporation as an executive producer of slides and video. I had heard of Unix, but I had a very hazy idea of what it was. I’d never met a Unix programmer or tried to edit a document using vi. Even the terms associated with Unix—vi, sed and awk, uucp, lex, yacc, curses, to name just a few—were weird. They sounded to me like words that might come out of Dungeons and Dragons, a game that was popular with a geeky (mostly male) subculture.

The slender lorises I used on the cover of one of our earliest animal books, sed & awk.

Sometimes when designing, things come together effortlessly—everything falls into place as if it were inevitable. It just flows. As I looked for images for the book covers, I came across some odd-looking animal engravings from the 19^th century. They seemed to be a good match for all those strange-sounding UNIX terms, and were esoteric enough that I figured they’d probably appeal to programmers. And, as I investigated the attributes of the real animals, I quickly discovered that there were intriguing correspondences between specific technologies and specific animals. That resonance grew and expanded as I learned more about both the technologies and the animals. I was so energized and inspired that I spent an entire weekend working on the covers without much sleep. At the end of the weekend, I gave several sketches to my neighbor to take into the office.

Some of the people at O’Reilly were taken aback: they thought the animals were weird, ugly, and a bit scary. But Tim got it immediately—he liked the quirkiness of the animals, thought it would help to make the books stand out from other publishers’ offerings—and it just felt right. And so it began. We’ve published hundreds of Animal books since then, and the brand is well known worldwide.

A few things we’ve learned over time:

Not a chimp.

Chimpanzees don’t have tails. I once misread the caption on an engraving and mistakenly identified a monkey as a chimp. We got an avalanche of mail from readers informing us that chimpanzees absolutely do not have tails (our readers are all over this stuff).

People will go to great lengths to avoid seeing certain animals. The husband of one reader complained about our use of a spider on—and in—Webmaster in a Nutshell. Spiders terrified his wife. He went through the entire book and put white tape over the graphic on the first page of every chapter so she wouldn’t have to confront the spider. Another customer sent angry email telling us he’d never go to one of the pages on our website because it had a snake on it. It was our “How to Order” page. We replaced the snake with a rather pleasant-looking rabbit.

People like animals with faces. The images we use on the Animal books are from the entire animal kingdom, from large land mammals like tigers and elephants to fishes, birds, insects, and invertebrates. We’ve discovered that people respond most positively to animals that 1) have recognizable faces; and 2) are looking directly at the audience.

Which one of these covers do you find most appealing?

The animals are in trouble.  Doing research on the animals as O’Reilly cover designer Karen Montgomery and I work with the engravings has made us hyper-aware of the plight of wild animals worldwide. Many of the animals that appear on our covers are critically endangered–the tarsier from Learning the vi & Vim Editors, the lorises from sed & awk, the Hawksbill turtle from Getting Started with CouchDB, and the tiger from Running Mac OS X Tiger, just to name a few. When most of the engravings were created in the 19^th century, these animals were plentiful. Today, between habitat destruction, hunting, poaching, human/animal conflicts, and the illegal wildlife trade, many species that were abundant 100 years ago are teetering on the brink of extinction.

We hope that by highlighting conservation projects large and small, from no-tech to high-tech, on the O’Reilly Animals website will not only raise awareness of what is already being done; perhaps it will also inspire smart, tech-savvy people like you to come up with new ways to save and protect the world’s wild animals. For us, that’s work that really matters.

The post A Short History of the O’Reilly Animals appeared first on Animals.

Species in the genus Phytelephas, native to South America, are the most important sources of vegetable ivory

“…the demand for polished ivory has pushed the world’s largest living land animal to the brink of extinction. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in a land that was once connected to the African continent, another kind of massacre is happening to the rain forest. In Central and South America this destruction amounts to about fifty acres per minute, an area roughly the size of West Virginia each year. Slash-and-burn agriculture is directly responsible for the extermination of hundreds of plant and animal species each year, largely for plantations of exportable products such as fast-growing pines, rubber, bananas, coffee, and cattle. However, there is a glimmer of hope in this modern day battlefield of people against nature: A lovely Amazonian palm might help to save its rain forest relatives and the African elephant.”

—Wayne P. Armstrong, Wayne’s Word: An Online Textbook of Natural History 

Most people are horrified by the elephant slaughter currently taking place in Africa, and would never purchase items made from black-market elephant tusks. We prefer our elephants live, tusks intact. As it happens, there are a number of inexpensive alternatives to ivory, some essentially indistinguishable from the real thing. A quick search on eBay (which no longer lists items made from real ivory) turns up a number of items, new and old, made of alternative, ivory-like materials.

Tagua nuts, aka Ivory Nut fruit

One of those alternatives is vegetable ivory from tagua nuts, the fruit of the Ivory Nut palm (Phytelephas marcocarpa), a tropical tree that grows wild in the Amazon Basin of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. The nuts contain hemicellulose, a substance that is extremely hard and dense when it is dried, which can be carved, stained, and polished just like elephant ivory.

There is one problem with using tagua nuts as an alternative source of ivory: their size. The nuts average two inches (5 cm) in length, which limits the size of articles that can easily be made from them. That’s not a deal-breaker, as it turns out—milled tagua nuts can be fused with modern bonding cements under heat and pressure into a larger, solid mass that can then be carved and polished.

Vegetable ivory from tagua nuts has been used for buttons, chess pieces, dice, sewing notions, umbrella handles, billiard balls, and scrimshaw arts since mid-19th century. In the 1950s, plastics replaced vegetable ivory in many products, although some clothing manufacturers continue to use tagua buttons today.

Vegetable ivory has been used for buttons, dice, and even carvings of elephants

On the Wayne’s Word website, Wayne Armstrong notes that Ivory Nut palms are a renewable resource: a single female tree may produce up to 50 pounds of nuts year after year, roughly the amount of ivory in an average African elephant tusk.

The bad news is that because there is little demand for vegetable ivory today, the rain forests where Ivory Nut palms thrive are endangered by ongoing commercial development and cattle ranching. So the trees that could help save Africa’s elephants might disappear entirely in the next few decades, just like the elephants themselves.

The post The Other Ivory appeared first on Animals.

Opportunity Knocks

Wildlife ACT, a non-profit conservation organization working in Zululand, is currently accepting applications for their volunteer program. Wildlife ACT monitors wildlife on reserves that don’t have the resources to do it themselves—and the volunteers actively participate in the work. The fees paid by the volunteers fund Wildlife ACT’s projects.

The minimum stay is 2 weeks; most wildlife volunteers join Wildlife ACT for 4 to 12 weeks. The cost per volunteer is ~$1275 for the first two weeks (and about $900 for subsequent 2-week periods), plus airfare and approximately $130 for ground transportation to and from the airport in Richards Bay, South Africa. You must be 18 or older to participate.

Volunteers work with researchers in small teams, tracking cheetahs, African wild dogs, rhinos, and leopards with telemetry, and using hand-held GPS devices to record their location data. Depending on the time of year, volunteers may also be involved in trapping and radio-collaring various species, relocating game, identity tagging, setting and checking camera traps, game counts, and invasive plant control.

Photograph of white rhinoceros by Coralie (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

“We spent nearly three days locating a white rhino…, helping the vet and other staff to get her on her feet after being darted and “walk” her into a huge moving van so she could be relocated to another reserve where breeding would be more successful for her. There isn’t more hands-on work than actually touching a beautiful animal like that.” 

The Wildlife ACT experience is not a vacation safari. There are a number of companies that offer ecotourism experiences in South African reserves, but Wildlife ACT sees volunteers as capable resources, and puts them to work.

“Due to the nature of our work, we often have to track one animal for a whole day, covering large distances without success – but it’s important we do it. This is not a safari operation and we don’t want to romanticize the work we do. It’s not always pretty or easy, but what we can tell you is that this is real Africa…”

For more information, visit the Wildlife ACT volunteer site.

P.S. And while you’re tracking black rhinos or uploading field data, you just might spot some opportunities to use your technical expertise to contribute in other ways. You never know.

The post Get your hands dirty appeared first on Animals.

An Arowana fish can sell for $20,000 on the black market. Photograph by User:Qwertzy2 [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

According to an article from the Guardian cited on the Havocscope website, wildlife trafficking is a $19 billion business, with up to 350 million specimens bought and sold on the black market every year. Havocsope has collected and analyzed data on the prices of animals that are being trafficked on the black market.

Here’s a partial price list (see the full list on Havocscope).

(Prices are in U.S. dollars)

• Abalone: $52 per kilogram
• Arowana Fish: $20,000
• Baby Elephant in Thailand: $7,000
• Baby Tiger in Iran: $3,200
• Bear Bile: $200,000 per pound
• Bear Paws: $50 for set of 4
• Black Cockatoo: $31,000 in Australia
• Butterfly (Queen Alexandra): $8,195
• Clouded Leopard: $5,700 in China
• Elephant: $28,200
• Elephant Tusk: $1,800 in Vietnam
• Full Dead Bear: $4,500 in Taiwan
• Gorillas: $40,000
• Iguanas: $10,600
• Ivory: $1,800 per kilo
• Komodo Dragon: $30,000
• Orangutan: $45,000
• Pangolin: $5 in Indonesia, $15 in Malaysia, $100 in China
• Ploughshare Tortoise: $4,000
• Polar Bear Skin:$7,760 to $9,930
• Rhino Horn Dagger: $14,000
• Rhino Horns: $97,000 per kilogram
• Rhino Horns (Crushed for medicine powder): $10 in Vietnam
• Shark Fins: $400 per pound
• Snake Venom: $215,175 per liter
• Snow Leopard Pelt: $1,000 in Afghanistan
• Tiger (Dead): $5,000
• Tiger (Live): $50,000
• Tiger Bone Wine: $88
• Tiger Penis: $1,300
• Tiger Remains: $70,000 in China
• Tiger Skin: $35,000
• Tortoises: $10,000 in Madagascar

As these animals become more scarce in the wild, prices and profits on the black market are bound to increase, further fueling trade. The good news is that last week the prime minister of Thailand pledged to end that country’s ivory trade. According to the New York Times, Thailand is believed to be second-biggest market for illegally obtained elephant tusks. International pressure is building on China, the biggest market for illicit ivory. When faced with the choice between African elephants and decorative carvings, too many people in China are opting for the latter.

The post Tracking the Black Market in Endangered Species appeared first on Animals.

Ginormous: Elephants actually can eat up to 900 pounds of food. A day.

What do JavaScript, Loxodonta, GPS, convergent evolution, SQL APIs, and 11-pound brains have to do with one another? In one mapping experiment involving African bull elephants, each of these elements is caught in a lovely conspiracy that points to the storytelling power of data.

As recently reported by Spaceforgiants.org, information transmitted by GPS collars fitted onto five bull elephants inhabiting the Laikipia County area of central Kenya captured their roaming habits, reflecting memory, education, spatial understanding—and mischief.

Green Zone: By day, the animals stay in designated areas. Night, however, is a different story.

Over the course of a year, some 35,000 GPS data points were gathered from SMS information sent from the collars to a server. Space for Giants asked the good folk at Wildermaps to take 365 days’ worth of Loxodontal travel and compress it into an understandable rhythm. The resulting 35k dots make for an antic map of diurnal and nocturnal movement.

Surrounded by the trappings of human civilization, particularly some alluringly planted croplands, the elephants-as-dots are swiftly animated on the map as they go about their daily rounds.

And they do keep a schedule. Elephants, after all, can happily consume up to 900 pounds of food each day; looking for it in a limited space is a fairly full time job. The animals restrict themselves to their own lands during the full light of day before making calculated dashes onto the cultivars as soon as it is safely dark enough. Use the map’s zoom feature to swoop down far enough to the earth and you can make out the animal’s forms and see their well-trod paths.

The visualization was built with CartoDB’s experimental new Torque JavaScript library. There you can see the ATM coverage around the Spanish city of Madrid and trace the Rolling Stones’ touring path for the last 50 years. It’s worth a moment to swing over to CartoDB as they offer a free map-making trial that you can use to upload your own data into graphic form.

Because you might decide to fit some of the largest mammals currently living on land with tracking tools and make a beautiful something out of it by using data to tell a revealing story.

The post Secret Lives of Elephants appeared first on Animals.