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Island Surprises

outreach@swpmedia.com — Fri, 18 May 2012 22:50:56 GMT

Islands have a history of providing profound ecological insight---just ask Charles Darwin who observed island creatures and uncovered evolution that controls all of biology. Islands continue to provide amazing surprises as a new study by Stanford ecologists shows.

Published in Nature Science Reports, the article From Wing to Wing documents a long chain of connections on a remote Pacific atoll where native trees and their roosting birds are ecologically linked all the way into the surrounding ocean supporting populations of winged manta rays.

Linking Forests to Manta Rays Pacific Manta Ray

(credit: Nature Science Reports) (credit: Nature Science Reports)

The Stanford researchers also showed how changes in the native tree composition from planted non-native palm species produced effects that cascaded down the ecological food chain from the land into the sea. Previously, the changes had been largely invisible. Analyzing mobile nitrogen isotopes, animal trackings, and field studies, the research showed that the palms hosted far fewer roosting birds than the native trees. It appears that the birds disliked the palms wind-flapping canopies which led to less guano fertilizing the ground below. Fewer nutrients would then be washed into surrounding waters to feed plankton and finally affecting the feed available to support fewer of the filter feeding manta rays.

Biologist Fiorenza Micheli of Stanford’s Woods Institute commented on the subtle but critical interrelationships: "Such connections do not leave any trace behind. Their loss largely goes unnoticed, limiting our understanding of and ability to protect natural ecosystems."

Her colleague Doug McCauley used a bit of a mechanical metaphor: "What we are doing in some ecosystems is akin to popping the hood on a car and disconnecting a few wires and rerouting a few hoses. All the parts are still there – the engine looks largely the same – but it's anyone's guess as to how or if the car will run."

Ecological webs are everywhere and studies such as From Wing to Wing provide useful approaches to analyzing an ecological situation but it takes keen insight to notice all the connections. The results also provide directions on how to restore a degraded ecosystem if we choose to do so.

Islands continue to surprise us with their embedded knowledge.

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Endangered Species Day

outreach@swpmedia.com — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:36:00 GMT

While attention may be focused on events elsewhere, it’s worth noting that today is Endangered Species Day.

Stopping extinctions should be something worth sharing with “friends” as Facebook becomes public on this day. From tigers to tuna, populations of rare species have declined 30% during the last forty years as the World Wildlife Fund has just reminded us in their discouraging Living Planet Report on biodiversity. The WWF director general discussed this situation in a video on their new report:

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WWF Living Planet Report, 2012 (credit: World Wildlife Fund)

The situation can be depressing but there is multiple good news on the US endangered species front and shows the effectiveness of the original Endangered Species Act signed into law by President Nixon in 1973. From severely reduced populations of whooping cranes, Atlantic green sea turtles, blue whales, the Bald Eagle, and the black-footed ferret these species, as well as many others, have been rescued from the brink of extinction. And not to be ignored, rare plants have been restored including the Hawaiian Alula or cabbage-on-a-stick (Brighamia insignis) and Blowout penstemon (Penstemon haydenii). The US Fish & Wildlife service maintains a list that includes every endangered species of plants and animals wherever they are located.

Brighamia insignis Penstemon haydenii

(credit: Native Hawaiian Flora.com) (credit: Wiki-commons)

So while you're celebrating along with your other one billion Facebook “friends”, it would be worth reminding them of Endangered Species Day. Saving biodiversity requires all the friends it can get.

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Tags: biodiverstiy,endangered species,Endangered Species Day,facebook,World Wildlife Fund,wildlife conservation

Olympic Gold to Everest, a status report

outreach@swpmedia.com — Fri, 18 May 2012 02:57:00 GMT

Riled Up previously posted about the efforts of alpinist Kenton Cool to carry an Olympic gold medal to the summit of Mount Everest in commemoration of the 1922 British Mount Everest expedition. The team that included George Mallory didn’t reach the summit but became a symbol for many mountaineers who followed. The medal is packed in a red handkerchief while Cool is making final preparations for his Everest summit bid. The status of his efforts were updated here: Returning the Ring to Mount Doom

Alpinist Kenton Cool

(credit: UK Telegraph)

A very symbolic Everest climb for sure.

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Tags: Kenton Cool,Mount Everest,George Mallory,Olympic gold medal,mountaineering,climbing history

Stuff, the Edited Life

outreach@swpmedia.com — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:43:00 GMT

Several years back, I attended a lecture by His Holiness the dalai lama at a local university. During the course of his inspiring conversation, the famously humorous Buddhist monk mentioned he enjoyed wearing a wrist watch. It wasn’t an expression of vanity he advised. His Holiness said it was perfectly OK if you like wearing a personal accessory like a gold ring on your hand. The issue was that nobody needed to wear rings on all 10 fingers. Moderation was the key metaphor. Graham Hill, the interior designer and founder of Treehugger, must have been in the same audience listening to what the dalai lama had to say about living rightly and lightly in the world.

Hill presented a TED talk recently on being mindful of the clutter in all our lives, on living efficiently, designing smartly, saving money, and enjoying less stress. His concept of an ‘edited life’ would also reduce waste and help us to move towards living a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle.

Check out his TED comments about stuff and start editing:

Graham Hill on an Edited Life (credit: TED Conferences)

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Tags: Graham Hill,Dalai Lama,TED conferences,energy efficiency,efficient living,efficient design,architecture

The Singing Tree

outreach@swpmedia.com — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:07:00 GMT

Here at Riled Up we like trees, particularly if they make music. A new artificial tree in the UK does just that.

The arboreal structure was constructed on a high hill in Lancashire and is visible from any direction. It appears and disappears as mists roll across the landscape. The “tree” is constructed of stacked pipes in varying lengths with the spiraling layers turned 15 degrees to respond to the shifting winds. As breezes blow through the tree tubes, it begins to sing and play different chords. See if you can catch the melody:

The Singing Tree (credit: Vimeo)

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Tags: singing tree,sculpture,landscape installations,art installation

Detailing Planet Earth

outreach@swpmedia.com — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:32:00 GMT

The Russian Space Agency has released a time-lapse animation developed using photos captured by their Electro-L satellite. Electro-L is positioned 25000 miles above the Earth and creates a 121 megapixel image every 30 minutes with sampling visible and infrared light wavelengths. Vegetation appears orange in the infrared.

Too bad we don’t see the entire planet from this geostationary satellite. It’s impressive.

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Earth’s Northern Hemisphere as seen by Electro-L (Russian Space Agency)

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Vesta Reimaged

outreach@swpmedia.com — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:13:00 GMT

Vesta is a massive asteroid now considered a “proto-planet”. The jumbled space rock didn’t receive enough mass from early collisions in the asteroid belt to become a full planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Animators took photographic images from NASA's Dawn mission now visiting Vesta to produce a virtual movie. The raw images were digitally harmonized to create a clear impression of the asteroid’s mooth plains, valleys, and a huge mountain over 3 miles high. The resulting animation is impressive:

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Proto-planet Vesta (credit: JPL)

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Tags: asteroids,Vesta,astronomy,space exploration,JPL,UCLA,animation

Micro to Macro

outreach@swpmedia.com — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:52:00 GMT

As a technology with myriad forms, photography can document reality from the micro to the macro. The uses are only limited by the imagination. The results can be very artistic as well.

Here are several recent examples of the art and science from the photographers eye:

Foraminifera Pink Crab Coral Symbiosis Yucatan Cenote Bather

(credit: UC Davis) (credit: NOAA) (credit: EGU)

Iceland Aurora Sunrise Solar Stom

(credit: ISS) (credit: NASA)

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Tags: art photography,macro photography

Adopt-a-Nene

outreach@swpmedia.com — Sun, 13 May 2012 20:43:00 GMT

Most people who go to Hawaii spend their time lounging on a beach sipping a tall, cold drink. While those pursuits are pleasurable, a great alternative has been suggested by the Hawaiian conservation and restoration organization, Friends of Haleakala. Named after the famous Haleakala National Park, the Adopt-a-Nene Program allows individuals to protect endangered species and important island habitats from destruction by feral animals and alien plants.

Nene Goose

(credit: Wiki-Commons)

The nene (Branta sandvicensis) is completely endemic to the Hawaiian Islands and is the world's rarest goose. It is descended from Canada geese who decided the balmy islands were a more pleasant landscape than the frigid, high Arctic when they arrived millennia ago. Once numbering in the thousands before Hawaii was visited by Captain Cook, hunting and introduced predators like mongoose, cats, and feral pigs reduced the population to 30 birds by 1952. Rescue efforts using captive birds has been successful and the nene has been restored to natural habitats where it once waddled.

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Nene Sanctuary on Hawaii (credit: YouTube)

It isn’t often that you can participate in a program to restore an endangered species. Adopting a Nene would also be a great way to start learning about biological diversity or island biology. It’s fun too.

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Tags: endangered species,nene goose,Hawaii,wildlife conservation,wildlife restoration

Bad News for Bees---Very Bad News

outreach@swpmedia.com — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:41:00 GMT

Recently, bees have been dying in huge numbers from unknown causes. This is super-serious as these beneficial pollinators are one of the lynch-pins for ecosystem stability and essential to agricultural, horticultural, and virtually all plant production worldwide. The culprit has finally been identified. It turns out to be a new class of pesticides that act systemically when applied to fields and is absorbed up into tissues throughout a plant. The active agent then becomes present in the flowers and pollen but not at an immediately lethal level. Bees gather up the pollen, become contaminated by the insecticide, and take it back to their hives, and transmit the pesticide to other bees. Entire beehive populations can collapse.

Known as neonicotinoids, the pesticides are chemically related to nicotine. They now comprise one of most widely used agricultural chemicals in the world. The neonicotinoids act on a bees neural receptors, binding to and activating them, causing paralysis and death in honeybees (Apis mellifera), bumblebees, and wild bees. Published research from France and the United Kingdom has shown that the chemicals also impair a bees navigation abilities, reduce the growth of bee colonies, and lower the number of queens produced by the hive. The beneficial insects have no biological defense against them.

A short video details some of the bee research results:

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Bees Death Linked to Common Pesticide (credit: YouTube

As one commentator noted:

“Since humans and other animals depend upon flowering plants and their fruits for our survival, the common and widespread use of these pesticides appears to threaten us all.”

A petition has been filed by the National Honey Bee Advisory Board sighting the Environmental Protection Agency for negligence in not protecting the insects. The agency has yet to respond but if they don’t act the activists will approach the US Congress and the President to alert them of the catastrophic environmental and economic consequences of collapsing honeybee populations.

It is hard to think of a biologically related economic issue that needs more immediate attention or one that could be so easily corrected. Replacing these toxic chemicals decimating bees should be a no-brainer. The pesticide killing them is bad news for the bees and potentially very bad news for us as well.

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Tags: bees,environmental pollution,pesticides,insect ecology,bee conservation,colony collapse disorder,agricultural chemicals