Recently in Biodiversity Category

From the Howard Hughes Medical Institute:

At first glance, the research of Bonnie Bassler and Baldomero "Toto" Olivera might not appear to be medical at all. Dr. Bassler works on marine bacteria that glow in the dark, while Dr. Olivera studies venomous snails that hunt by harpooning fish. Yet their findings show what science has revealed time and again--knowledge that can be used to unlock medical secrets is often hidden in unlikely places. Nature has much to teach us, as long as we know where to look and what to look for. Join us for a four-lecture series as Bonnie and Toto guide us through intriguing slices of the natural world revealing how a deeper understanding of nature and biodiversity informs their research into new medicines.

Click here to view lecture summaries of the 2009 Holiday Lectures

I can think of no one else whose filmmaking has done more to illuminate the wonders of the natural world than Sir David Attenborough. From grand vistas to tiny insects, he and his film crews have been everywhere and filmed everything. The images are gorgeous, and the narrations are packed with information. I don't know if they'd fit into Randy Olson's scheme for films that reach a mass audience. But for biologists, they have no equal.

Now the BBC is making many clips from the films available at the BBC Wildlife Finder. I've only had time to poke around a little, but it looks like a fabulous resource.

From Andy Revkin:

The Pacific island nation of  Palau has declared all of its waters a sanctuary for sharks. The archipelago, famed among biologists and divers for its rich marine life, has seen increases in illegal shark fishing, driven by the high prices paid for shark fins in China.

...

Given that, for the moment, Palau has only one enforcement vessel to patrol an ocean zone a bit smaller than Texas, the challenge of turning a ban from rhetoric to reality remains. But Palau is getting significant support from private groups, particularly the Pew Charitable Trusts, which worked with groups and government officials in Palau to create the sanctuary plan.

Granted, a single boat to patrol an area the size of Texas isn't much, but I am delighted to see a government step forward to declare protection of sharks as a goal. They probably won't stop the harvest, but at least they've made it illegal, and maybe they'll reduce it.

Speaking of lower organs, I just learned that Isabella Rosselini has a series of shorts for the Sundance Channel called Green Porno. The promo for season 3 features fried calamari (Sorry, you'll have to click through -- there doesn't seem to be a way to embed the video here).

Gonzo Scientist has more about the project at www.sciencemag.org, but here's a little background:

"Green Porno began as an experiment," says Rossellini. Fellow film icon Robert Redford challenged her to create a series of online shorts for the Sundance Channel. The constraints: "It had to work on a small screen, it had to be brief, and it had to be cheap," she says, because she was given a tiny budget. "It also had to be about the natural environment in some way." Her solution: Green Porno, a series of cartoonlike vignettes about the sex life of animals. "I want to give people a sense of wonder about the natural world," she says, "to make them fall in love with it and want to protect it." The first season's episodes were all about backyard invertebrates. For the second season, she teamed up with conservation biologist Claudio Campagna and focused on marine creatures.

"I want to give people a sense of wonder about the natural world, to make them fall in love with it and want to protect it."

I'm too much of a nerd to know how to create that sense of wonder, whether about the natural world or about science, but I'm delighted that there are people who can.

From the New York Times

As Nicholas Godley, a fashion designer living in Madagascar put it, "If we were doing all of this to make money, I could think of much, much easier ways to do it." The fabric illustrated above is 11 feet long, and it's made from the silk of golden orb spiders from Madagascar. Collecting the silk to weave the fabric was an enormous challenge. Godley and Simon Peers, a British art historian who also lives in Madagascar, hired local people to collect spiders (about 3000 a day) and set up a system where workers drew the silk from the spinnerets.

And what became of the spiders, without whose very personal contributions the textile would not have been possible? While some died in its production, Mr. Godley and Mr. Peers said they set up a system in which the spiders being used were released daily, and detailed spreadsheets were kept to chart the number of spiders used, their yield and the casualty rate.

"We have become sort of the defenders of these spiders, something we never thought we'd be," said Mr. Godley, who calls himself a committed arachnophobe, but added, "They really are very regal-looking creatures." (source)

Peers and Godley estimate that the piece of cloth pictured above cost about half a million dollars to produce. Clearly, it's not likely that making cloth from these spiders will build a big industry in Madagascar, but it is a reminder of the incredible beauty to be found in nature -- and the incredible strength. Its tensile strength is five to six times greater than that of steel by weight.

I just read about a new restaurant¹ I'll have to try the next time I'm in Washington, DC. Here's how Hook describes itself on its website:

Hook Restaurant is committed to providing an exceptional dining experience, but also to educating the community about our mission. The menu changes daily to reflect whatever sustainable fish are in season and available. We also use locally grown produce, and humane meat and dairy products. The essential characteristic of sustainability is flexibility, so as we learn more we change our behavior. Our eco-friendly practices are merely a reflection of a deeper ideology: the two things than link every human on the planet are food and environment and we cannot live with out either.

Hook works with the Blue Ocean Insitute, the Seafood Choices Alliance, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium to ensure that the fish it serves are harvested sustainably. And to the extent possible, the fish is also obtained from local sources. Here are a few paragraphs from Kate Frazer describing a recent meal:

Lucky for me, my search for the full picture starts with a plate lined with oysters: a small, crisp California Kumamoto; a soft, briny New York Blue Point; and a sweet, deep-cupped Rappahannock from here in Virginia.

Perhaps more than any other food, oysters reflect their habitats. Each one has a flavor defined by geography, ocean currents and the water's characteristics.

They're all delicious, but the Rappahannock is my favorite -- buttery with a clean finish tasting of the sea. These oysters are grown in one of the region's most pristine tidal freshwater systems, downstream from where [The Nature] Conservancy has worked with local, state and federal partners to protect thousands of acres.

The next dish, Manos de Leon, features unspeakably tender scallops from Baja named "lion's paw" for their size and golden color. Chef serves them with coconut foam, blood oranges and subtle citrus oil that let the sweetness of the tiny pillows shine. They're hand-picked from turquoise lagoons by divers who leave the undersea flora intact, and I imagine them propelling through strands of eelgrass, waving their shells like butterfly wings.

From my e-mail inbox this morning:

Dear Colleagues,

The multistakeholder on-line consultation on IPBES co-hosted by IUCN, ICSU and DIVERSITAS will close this Sunday 13 September. Many thanks to the 120 individuals who have completed the questionnaire. We hope to receive even more input!
Background information can be found on the official IPBES site now open, and also here.

DIVERSITAS, the international programme of biodiversity science, is working together with its parent organisation, ICSU, the International Council for Science, and IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, to collect the views of the scientific community and other important stakeholders on a proposal for a new Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES is a mechanism proposed to strengthen the science-policy interface on biodiversity and ecosystem services, with broad similarities to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

IPBES has gathered considerable political support and the current timetable is that a decision on its establishment will take place by late 2010.

You are kindly invited to submit your views on IPBES by completing an online questionnaire, which can be found at IPBES consultation.

In addition, I would ask you to help circulate this link to any potentially interested scientists and institutions that you are aware of. The deadline for submissions is 13 September.

All submissions will be jointly analysed by ICSU, DIVERSITAS and IUCN at a meeting on 22 September, in order to provide input to a key intergovernmental meeting convened by UNEP (5-9 October 2009, Nairobi, Kenya), which will discuss plans for IPBES, and its establishment.

This is an important opportunity for all of us to influence the future mechanisms that will structure the science and policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Thanking you in advance for your contribution,

Yours sincerely,

Anne Larigauderie

 

Dr. Anne Larigauderie
Executive Director
DIVERSITAS
Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN)
57, Rue Cuvier- CP 41 75231 Paris Cedex 05
France
Tel: 33 1 40 79 80 41 (direct)
Tel: 33 1 40 79 80 40 (secretariat)
e-mail: anne@diversitas-international.org
www.diversitas-international.org
 

From Environment News Service:

A new coalition of organizations, the Amphibian Survival Alliance, is being established in an attempt to conserve the world's vanishing frogs, toads and salamanders. Threats to these species are numerous - a deadly fungus, habitat loss, pollution, pesticides and climate change.

The alliance came together at the first Amphibian Mini Summit at the Zoological Society of London last week. The group includes amphibian specialists working in the wild as well as those in zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens.

"If we want to stop the amphibian extinction crisis, we have to protect the areas where amphibians are threatened by habitat destruction," says Claude Gascon, co-chair of the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group. "One of the reasons amphibians are in such dire straits is because many species are only found in single sites and are therefore much more susceptible to habitat loss."

In today's Nature, Jeff Tollefson describes an ambitious plan in Brazil to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD). Farmers in Pará who agree to put rainforest land into conservation rather than clearing it will receive monthly payments from the Brazilian government -- and the funds to support those payments come from international donors. Brazil will receive about $114 million this year to support the project in Pará and others like it through its Amazon Fund. Norway pledged up to $1 billion until 2015.

Getting REDD right in Brazil and beyond is "totally possible and essential", says Lars Løvold, director of the Rainforest Foundation Norway in Oslo, which, along with Friends of the Earth Norway, proposed to the Norwegian government that it invest in a big forest conservation initiative. "But you need some projects to show that it works."

Sounds pretty promising, if it works. Last December, WWF was skeptical:

WWF criticized Brazil's plan to reduce Amazon deforestation to 5,740 square kilometers per year as being "short on ambition and detail".

In a statement issued Wednesday, WWF said that Brazil's proposed fund for conserving the Amazon would still result in the annual loss of an area forest the size of Rhode Island.

In 2007, more than 1,500 research scientists from more than 50 countries, including 71 from Quebec, signed a letter to Canadian government leaders seeking the conservation of the Boreal forest protection through land-use planning prior to industrial development, and in accordance with the principles of sustainable development.

This letter also asked governments to support the implementation of the Boreal Forest Conservation Framework drafted and signed by the Canadian Boreal Initiative, Canadian conservation organizations, First Nations and industry partners.

Since then, two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, have announced plans for the Boreal forest that include the essential notion of the agreement - stated simply, 50-50 zoning of the region (protection of at least 50% of the region, with sustainable industrial activity in the other half).

We believe that these commitments merit a letter to the government supporting these announcements, while also reiterating our vision that any development must be truly sustainable, based on scientific conservation principles and a sound data acquisition system.

To this end, we have drafted the attached letter. Please read it carefully and add your signature if you agree with its contents. We invite you to circulate this letter to your colleagues, who may sign here: http://interboreal.org/scientifiquesQC/index.php?lng=eng

Sincerely yours,

Marcel Darveau, Ph.D., Ducks Unlimited Canada and Laval University

Nigel Roulet, Ph.D., McGill University

Jeff Wells, Ph.D., International Boreal Conservation Campaign

When I checked the list yesterday about 1:00pm, there were 420 signatures on the letter. If you haven't already done so, please add yours.