Burning 15 tons of elephant tusks

"A ranger from the Kenya Wildlife Service walks past 15 tons of elephant tusks which were set on fire, during an anti-poaching ceremony at Nairobi National Park in Nairobi, Kenya Tuesday, March 3, 2015. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta set fire to the elephant ivory during World Wildlife Day to discourage poaching, saying that 25 years after the historic banning of the ivory trade, new demand from emerging markets is threatening Africa's elephants and rhinos."

Photo credit Khalil Senosi, Associated Press, via the StarTribune.

Read more ...

Where to find quiet

"Based on 1.5 million hours of acoustical monitoring from places as remote as Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and as urban as New York City, scientists have created a map of noise levels across the country on an average summer day. After feeding acoustic data into a computer algorithm, the researchers modeled sound levels across the country including variables such as air and street traffic."

Read more ...

Poop-sniffing dogs as conservation tools

Wired reports on dogs trained to detect and locate the scat of specific animals.

Since 1997, the [Conservation Canines program at the University of Washington's] team of handlers has been working with a motley crew of former strays and misfits-turned-dog detectives, training them on the center’s vast 4,300 acres to pick up on poo from specific species. Over 40 four-legged participants have been trained to sniff out up to 12 species each: wolverines, tapirs, iguanas, and even orcas.

To create these singularly driven dogs, the center uses training similar to that used for narcotic detection: Take one ball-obsessed pooch and teach him to track threatened and endangered species. How? Treats, of course.

Details and a photo gallery at the link.  A related story at Scientific American reports on the use of African "hamsters" to detect land mines:

APOPO – which stands for Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling in Dutch, or Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development in English – is an organisation that trains and deploys rats, named HeroRATS, for the detection of abandoned land mines and tuberculosis.

Since 2000, they’ve bred hundreds of trained and accredited rats that have so far found 1,500 buried land mines across an area of 240,000 metres squared in Tanzania, and 6,693 land mines, 26,934 small arms and ammunitions, and 1,087 bombs across 9,898,690 metres squared in Mozambique. They’re also operating in Thailand, Angola, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. And don’t panic – they’re too light to be setting off any buried explosives. 

Read more ...

This river in Manila eventually leads to the ocean

Photo credit: Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images, via The Guardian.

Read more ...

Massive die-off of Pacific seabirds

From National Geographic:

Last year, beginning about Halloween, thousands of juvenile auklets started washing ashore dead from California's Farallon Islands to Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) off central British Columbia. Since then the deaths haven't stopped. Researchers are wondering if the die-off might spread to other birds or even fish.

"This is just massive, massive, unprecedented," said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. "We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. So far." 

By comparison, not one of the five largest U.S. bird mortality events tracked by USGS since 1980 is estimated to have topped 11,000 deaths. In Europe, according to the U.K.-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the worst die-off on record occurred in 1983, when 57,000 guillemots, razorbills, puffins, and other seabirds perished in the North Sea and washed up on the British coast.

"You get some of this with seabirds every year," said David Nuzum, with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. "You get so many juveniles out there, and they've got this steep learning curve for feeding after being separated from their parents, so you always get a die-off in winter. But I've never seen anything like this, ever, and I've been here since 1985."

Read more ...

Milkweed fiber useful for oil spill cleanup

As reported by Canada's CBC News:

Franç​ois Simard, creator of Protec-Style, has a contract with Parks Canada to supply national parks with oil-spill kits. The kits come with various sizes of absorbent tubes filled with milkweed fibre. Simard says milkweed has a unique ability to repel water, which makes it perfect for oil spills on land or water.

"You can leave an absorbent [milkweed] sock in water and it will only absorb the oil..."

The white fibres that you can often see floating in the fall breeze are light and hollow and able to absorb four times more oil than polypropylene, the artificial product now used to clean up spills.

Simard has set up a co-operative of 20 farmers in Quebec to grow 325 hectares of milkweed. He says there are another 35 growers on a waiting list.

"It's less expensive to use milkweed to collect the oil that was spilled in nature because you have more capacity, you need less absorbent, therefore there is less of a cost of disposal," said Simard.  

And of course the benefits to Monarch butterflies are obvious:

"There were so many butterflies in the field that people on the road … had to stop," he says. "They were wondering what was happening. It was just growing 20 hectares that made the whole difference."

More at the link.  Photo from my files.  Posted for my aunt, who in her childhood used to harvest milkweed seed pods for use in making life preservers for the armed forces.

Read more ...

Progress in lithium batteries

Just to give you an idea of how fast battery costs have declined, here is a chart (via futurist Ramez Naam) showing how the amount of energy that can be stored in lithium-ion batteries per $100 rose from 1991 to 2005.

That data is from a 2009 study by Duke University. Nor did storage efficiency stop after 2005; according to Naam, the cost of electric-car batteries declined by 40 percent from 2010 to 2013. The Tesla gigafactories are projected to drive costs down at an even faster rate.

These declines, unlike the recent 50 percent drop in oil prices, are not temporary. They are driven by increasing demand, which spurs technological progress -- not by reduced demand, which lowers the oil price.

More at Bloomberg View.

Read more ...

The most tired place on earth

Tires that have reached the end of their lifetime are usually recycled, but in Kuwait, they are dumped into one of the biggest landfills on earth in Sulaibiya area near Kuwait City. Every year gigantic holes are dug out in the desert and filled with old tyres. There are already seven million tires out there. The expanse of rubber is so vast that they are now visible from space.

From Amusing Planet (ground-level photos at the link).

Read more ...

BP fine for Gulf of Mexico spill is lowered

From The Guardian:

BP will face a maximum fine of $13.7bn under the Clean Water Act for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, several billion less than feared.

Federal magistrate Carl Barbier ruled on Thursday that the size of the spill from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the worst offshore spill in US history, was smaller than the government had claimed.

He said that it amounted to 3.19m barrels, well below the government’s estimate of 4.09m barrels, which could have led to penalties of up to $17.6bn...

The Clean Water Act penalties would come on top of more than $42bn the oil major has set aside or spent for clean-up, compensation and fines.

Somewhat ironic photo via imgur (though note the sign would have been put up by the franchisee, not the oil company).

Read more ...

Climate change numbers

As those of us in the Upper Midwest shiver through a deep freeze, it might be worth remembering these facts:

Consider that the 15 hottest years on record have all come since 1997. Or that this will be the third straight decade to break the mark for global temps. And that it’s been 358 months since the planet had a cooler-than-average month, and more than 100 years since we last had a record-cold month.

And this graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels is interesting:

Via Paul Douglas' On Weather blog.

Read more ...

"Please recycle this envelope"

This is the inside of a business envelope I received from a local business.  I admire the company's enthusiasm for recycling but can't help but wonder whether their strategy is effective. 

Are there people who normally do not recycle, but then change their lifestyle after encountering this on the inside of an envelope?  I wonder about the amount of ink expended to create these messages, and whether that material is deleterious if the envelope eventually does get pulped.  Plus, covering the paper with text prevents its reuse for grocery lists and scratch paper, which is one way other envelopes get recycled in our house.

Or maybe I'm just grumpy this morning. 

Read more ...

The plunging price of crude oil is NOT due to fracking

The graph above, from last month, is already outdated; CNBC is reporting this morning that the price of crude is now below $50 per barrel.

Certain special interest groups are attributing this fall to the shale oil production derived from fracking in the United States.  It's not that simple:

The cause of the fall, by $40 a barrel, in petroleum prices since last summer is almost completely on the demand side. Asian economies, especially China, are dramatically slowing, and won’t be requiring as much petroleum to fuel trucks, trains and cars to deliver people and goods around the country. Most petroleum is used to fuel transport...

US journalists seem to feel it obligatory to mention US shale oil production as a contributor to the price fall, since prices are a matter of supply and demand, and US supply has increased by a couple million barrels a day. But frankly that is a minor increase in world terms– global production is roughly 90 million barrels a day. Between Iran, Iraq (Kirkuk), Libya and Syria, enough oil has gone out of production to more than offset the additional American oil. It isn’t that there is more oil being pumped, it is that the world doesn’t want it as much because of cooling economies.

Read more ...

Retrieving munition barrels from Lake Superior

As reported by Wisconsin Public Radio in January:

The Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe has been working for more than a decade to remove some of the 1,400-plus munitions barrels from Lake Superior’s bottom. Using grants from the Department of Defense’s clean-up fund, Red Cliff officials has pinpointed that most of those drums dumped a few miles northeast of Duluth.

In August 2012, an expert recovery team pulled up 25 barrels. Three of the barrels had melted munitions parts, but the other 22 each contained up to 700 ejection cups used in cluster bombs -- about 15,000 small explosive devices...

The dump area is in the ceded territory of Lake Superior tribes, giving them the right -- and, the tribes say, duty -- to protect that sacred area.

Photo credit.

Read more ...

The "salmon cannon"

YouTube link.

This week John Oliver presented a rather funny send-up of the "salmon cannon."  I think the original deserves to be appreciated in its own right.

Read more ...

Minnesota considering ban on neonicotinoids

This summer the StarTribune carried a long feature article on the possible role of neonicotinoids in the delcine of bees.

A new class of insecticides first introduced in 1994 that is relatively harmless to people and animals — neonicotinoids. Now added routinely as a coating on seeds, neonicotinoids provide additional insurance against soil pests. And, like the genetic traits, they become an intrinsic part of the plant as it grows.

“It started in 2002,” said Chuck Benbrook, a professor who studies sustainable agricultural systems at Washington University. “By 2006 neonicotinoids had cornered the market.”..

When it comes time to buy seed, farmers have a dwindling number of alternatives. Three corporations control more than half of the world’s commercial seed market, and the top 10 control three-fourths...

But the amount of land devoted to those seeds has exploded. Today in Minnesota, about 24,000 square miles — a third of the state — are devoted to growing either corn or soybeans...

Dozens of studies have now found that low doses of neonicotinoids may not kill bees outright, but can cripple their highly sophisticated navigational and communication skills, and hamper a queen’s reproduction. Scientists have also warned that crops take up only a small portion of the insecticide, leaving the rest behind in the soil. If the toxins spread from fields into streams and wetlands, they may ripple through the food system...

But from where Ehrhardt sits, between the big seed companies and the end of their pipeline at the farm, it appears that the fate of pollinators in rural Minnesota will come down to demand, markets and economics. He sells all kinds of seeds to all kinds of farmers. He’s keenly aware of the market for organics and the rising demand among farmers for non-GMO seeds — the fastest growing segment of his seed business. Both of those types of crops command a considerably higher price at the local elevator than the genetically engineered crops.

Farmers, he said, would be happy to grow bee-friendly corn. “But there have to be consumers willing to pay for that.” 

This week they report that the state is considering a ban on neonicotinoids:

Minnesota regulators, for the first time, are considering banning or restricting a controversial class of insecticides that has been linked to honeybee deaths.

The possibility, disclosed this week by the state Department of Agriculture in a revised outline for a study of the chemicals, followed an outpouring of public concern over the dramatic decline in honeybee populations in recent years...

A revised outline published this week states that the range of state action could include “restrictions on or cancellation of products.”..

Horan said the backlash against neonicotinoids was heightened by a recent EPA finding that neonicotinoid seed treatments in soybeans provide little or no overall benefits to soybean production for most farmers.

Read more ...

Your children will eat jellyfish for dinner

From an article in Modern Farmer:

About five miles offshore a crewmate spots, floating near the surface, a mat of gyrating grapefruit-sized globs that stretch the length of five city blocks, a slick so thick it appears as if you could walk on it.

These are cannonball jellyfish. Locals call them “jellyballs.” And they will be dinner. “Jellyballs have been very, very good to me,” says King, who has worked as a state trooper for the last 20 years, and might be the only jelly-balling cop in the country. This past season was particularly robust: King and his men caught 
an estimated 5 million-plus pounds of cannonball jellyfish. At what King says is this year’s price (seven cents a pound), this equates to $350,000...

These brownish Cnidarians (from the Greek knide, or nettle, for their ability
to sting) are now the state of Georgia’s third biggest fishery by volume, behind crabs and shrimp. The first cannonball jellies were commercially harvested off the Gulf Coast of Florida in the early ’90s, and since then Darien, Georgia, has become the epicenter of the industry...

At the Golden Island plant, the jellies are dried and shipped to China and Japan, where they are cut into long, thin strips and served in salads with cabbage and teriyaki sauce. If prepared right, the jellyfish are crunchy, like a carrot. Jellyfish are popular in China, along with other sea creatures like geoducks (those gigantic phallic clams from the Pacific Northwest) for similar textural reasons.

But these sorts of foods are being embraced well beyond Asia. And as climate change and the global industrial agriculture system continue on what many view as a doomed course, we may have no choice but to eat foods that make sense ecologically — or can at least thrive in a changed environment.

More at the link.  Photo credit Mary Wong.

Read more ...

Let's have a lead party!

The front cover shows Dutch Boy, carrying his paint bucket, being greeted by a toy lead soldier, a shoe, a plate and a light bulb. The back cover features a hand that has made a broad brush stroke with the admonition "'Save the surface and you save all'; Paint & Varnish"... The first page shows the Dutch Boy talking to the lead soldier; it is followed by 14 images--7 in color and 7 in outline--of items that use lead. Items include a light bulb (lead glass), shoes and baseballs (lead in the rubber), and a bullet (entirely made of lead). Each outlined image was to be filled in using the complementary color image at its side as a guide.

Text via The Ethical Adman, where there is additional information; image via Sweet Dreams.

Read more ...

The surprising effect of road salt on butterflies

Salting roads in winter can tweak the physiques of butterflies the next summer.

Milkweeds and oaks, plants that caterpillars graze on, collected from alongside a country road carried higher sodium concentrations than the same species growing at least 100 meters from the splash and drift of deicing salt, says Emilie Snell-Rood of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.

Monarch (Danaus plexippus) caterpillars raised on the sodium-boosted plants turned into males with extra thoracic muscles and females with bigger eyes and probably bigger brains than butterflies reared on the more distant foliage, Snell-Rood and her colleagues found.

A different butterfly, the cabbage white, echoed these his-and-hers effects when reared on a sodium-boosted lab diet, researchers report June 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So is road salt good for butterflies? “I do not want that to be the take-home message,” Snell-Rood says. Instead, she says, the study demonstrates for the first time that road salt can alter how animals develop physically.

Text from Science News, with a tip of the hat to reader Bradley Ruben for bringing it to my attention.  Photo from our yard.

Related: The double-edged sword of salting roads in winter, and Cheese brine for icy roads.

Read more ...

Birds catching fire in mid-air

IVANPAH DRY LAKE, Calif. — Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.

The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group...

More than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect solar rays onto three boiler towers each looming up to 40 stories high. 

Federal wildlife officials said Ivanpah might act as a “mega-trap” for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their death in the intensely focused light rays...

BrightSource also is offering $1.8 million in compensation for anticipated bird deaths at Palen, Desmond said.

It's not clear to whom the company would pay the compensation.  Presumably to the families of the dead birds.

Further details at the Calgary Herald, via the QI elves.

Addendum:  A hat tip to reader Wales Larrison for providing a link to a detailed study of avian mortality at the facility.  I'm dismayed to note that the researchers also noted significant insect mortality, including many Monarch butterflies.

Read more ...

Mayflies

A beautiful, delicate creature - and the epitome of "ephemera."

Mayflies spend the majority of their lives in an aquatic environment, emerging as a flying insect in the early summer:

The final moult of the naiad is not to the full adult form, but to a winged subimago that physically resembles the adult, but which is usually sexually immature. The subimagos are generally poor fliers, and typically lack the colouration patterns used to attract mates. The subimago eventually moults to the full adult, making mayflies the only insects where a winged form undergoes moulting.

They live for only a day or two. Some people are offended by the fact that when the mayflies emerge, they do so by the tens of millions, coating lakeside vegetation (and cabins and vehicles and anything in the riparian area), and offering game fish enough free nutrition from their dead bodies that fishing declines for a measureable period.

The photo enlarges to wallpaper with a click (photo credit me).

Addendum:  Reposted from 2009 to add this awesome radar image of a massive emergence of mayflies along the Mississippi River valley near La Crosse, Wisconsin:

Image from the NOAA website, where there are also a dozen or so still images of the effects of the massive swarm on ground structures (especially those lit at night like gas stations).  The Star Tribune and other local newspapers also documented the phenomenon and noted that the masses of mayflies were responsible for a three-car accident on a local highway bridge, but note that the emergence is a favorable sign of local water quality:

By the 1980s, mayflies, stoneflies, caddis flies and even some species of fish had disappeared from the Mississippi River from the Twin Cities area all the way to Lake Pepin. But modern sewage treatment facilities and regulations on disposal of toxic chemicals have brought mayflies, and a healthy food chain, back to most waterways.

Read more ...