Loss of Biodiversity and Extinctions

Anup Shaw over at Global Issues has collected an exhaustive collection of recent analysis on the loss of biodiversity in the last few years.

As I wrote in my recent post Rivalry Among the Reefs, the loss of up to 1/3 of coral reefs in recent years could result in unprecedented extinctions of ocean biodiversity.

While occupying only 0.2 percent of the world’s oceans, coral reefs sustain 25 percent of species diversity; an oceanographic public works project that has been in existence for 3.5 billion years. . . Current estimates are that one-third of the world’s coral reefs are in imminent danger of extinction. In an international survey of these most diverse ecosystems in our oceans, researchers determined that global climate change is increasing the average temperature of the Earth’s oceans. This is killing the photosynthetic algae that has adapted into a pristine symbiotic relationship with their hosts. Coral bleaching on a global scale is the result and mass extinction will be the inevitable conclusion unless this trend is reversed.

But loss of biodiversity in the oceans is only one region currently experiencing crisis. The collection of studies and warnings from experts around the world that Anup has gathered are truly staggering. See below for a sample of some of what he posts:

Already resources are depleting, with the report showing that vertebrate species populations have declined by about one-third in the 33 years from 1970 to 2003. At the same time, humanity’s Ecological Footprint—the demand people place upon the natural world—has increased to the point where the Earth is unable to keep up in the struggle to regenerate.

- World Wide Fund for Nature, October 24, 2006

The world environmental situation is likely to be further aggravated by the increasingly rapid, large scale global extinction of species. It occurred in the 20th century at a rate that was a thousand times higher than the average rate during the preceding 65 million years. This is likely to destabilize various ecosystems including agricultural systems.

- Jaan Suurkula, Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and Technology, February 6, 2004

If current estimates of amphibian species in imminent danger of extinction are included in these calculations, then the current amphibian extinction rate may range from 25,039–45,474 times the background extinction rate for amphibians. It is difficult to explain this unprecedented and accelerating rate of extinction as a natural phenomenon.

- Malcom MacCallum, Journal of Herpetology, July 17, 2007

Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, are under attack from major environmental groups in the United States and other developed countries because of their environmental impact. Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for such restaurants leads to deforestation, land degradation, and contamination of water sources and other natural resources. For every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. The water necessary for meat breeding comes to about 190 gallons per animal per day, or ten times what a normal Indian family is supposed to use in one day, if it gets water at all.

- Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest, (South End Press, 2000), pp. 70-71

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Jane Goodall - A Personal Tribute

Primatologist and UN Peace Messenger at Duke University

Jane Goodall bridged the divide between two species.

Image: Hugo van Lawick
The primatologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky once wrote that, when he grew up he wanted to be a mountain gorilla. Me, I wanted to be a chimpanzee. His inspiration was Diane Fossey, but I was always most interested in the work by that other cover girl of National Geographic. As I’m sure was the experience for many of us, Jane Goodall was the only scientist I had ever heard of when I was growing up (I wouldn’t discover Carl Sagan until much later). Her friendly manner and relaxed charm was a stark contrast to the cold and cerebral stereotype of Hollywood films.

So it was a great pleasure to finally hear her speak in person after a lifetime of listening to her voice from the old, tinny speakers of my family’s television. As one of the 300 speaking engagements she’ll make this year alone, Dr. Goodall addressed the Duke University campus with a message that was both a warning and an encouragement.

Covering a wide variety of topics -- from her childhood love of animals, to chimpanzee psychology, to industrial farming to global warming -- her presentation was a mixture of great challenges for this generation along with her own story of how she overcame personal adversity. However, I felt her greatest strength was in relaying the interrelated problems of globalization in such a way as to make it both accessible and revealing. She impressed upon the students and faculty in attendance that we privileged elites of the world were primarily responsible for the harmful effects imposed on the developing nations through our wasteful and insatiable consumer appetites. Since we insist on saving a dime for our coffee, another acre of rainforest is burnt in order to turn a profit. While we’ll offer billions of dollars to our allies for weapons of war, we’ll balk at microcredit programs that offer the greatest potential to raise families out of poverty.

However, she was confident that our generation would rise to the challenge. Through her Roots and Shoots program they’ve initiated a program to import shade grown coffee from the highlands of Tanzania that saves both the rainforest and offers poor farmers a living wage. Likewise, by following in the lead of the Grameen Bank (last year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient), small loans are offering the villagers around Gombe an incentive to preserve their national heritage in a way that avoids the colonial attitude of earlier aid organizations. By explaining both the large scale problems as well as the small scale solutions, the unorganized mess of our global crisis was synthesized into a digestible whole.

It’s rare to have someone present a host of world problems that feel nearly overwhelming in their magnitude and yet to walk away feeling inspired and, dare I say it, hopeful. But such is the magic of Jane Goodall. I’ll still always remember her as she was in my youth, walking through the underbrush with her binoculars around her neck and blonde hair pulled back in a hurried bunch. The Gombe chimpanzees she introduced to the world (Flo, Fifi, Freud, Goblin, and, of course, David Greybeard) were my first introduction to a line of research that would eventually consume my thoughts. While now I want to grow up to be a bonobo, I’ll never forget the woman who first showed me how wonderful it is to be an ape.

UPDATE: Sheril at The Intersection offers her perspective on Goodall's message of hope in her latest post.

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Jane Goodall Speaks Out on Biofuels

Primatologist highlights environmental damage of emerging "green" market.



Primate scientist Jane Goodall said on Wednesday the race to grow crops for vehicle fuels is damaging rain forests in Asia, Africa and South America and adding to the emissions blamed for global warming.

"We're cutting down forests now to grow sugarcane and palm oil for biofuels and our forests are being hacked into by so many interests that it makes them more and more important to save now," Goodall said on the sidelines of the Clinton Global Initiative, former U.S. President Bill Clinton's annual philanthropic meeting.

As new oil supplies become harder to find, many countries such as Brazil and Indonesia are racing to grow domestic sources of vehicle fuels, such as ethanol from sugarcane and biodiesel from palm nuts.

The United Nations' climate program considers the fuels to be low in carbon because growing the crops takes in heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide.

But critics say demand for the fuels has led companies to cut down and burn forests in order to grow the crops, adding to heat-trapping emissions and leading to erosion and stress on ecosystems.

"Biofuel isn't the answer to everything; it depends where it comes from," she said. "All of this means better education on where fuels are coming from are needed."

Goodall said the problem is especially bad in the Indonesian rain forest where large amounts of palm nut oil is being made. Growers in Uganda -- where her nonprofit group works to conserve Great Apes -- are also looking to buy large parcels of rain forest and cut them down to grow sugar cane, while in Brazil, forest is cleared to grow sugar cane.

The Goodall Institute is working with a recently formed group of eight rain forest nations called the Forest Eight, or F8, led by Indonesia. The group wants to create a system where rich countries would pay them not to chop down rain forests and hopes to unveil the plan at climate talks in Bali in December.

Scientists from the forested countries are trying to nail down exactly how much carbon dioxide the ecosystems store, but the amount has been estimated to be about double that which is already in the atmosphere, Goodall said.

Source: Reuters

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Extinction Crisis Escalates in New Report

Great apes hardest hit in conservation crisis.


Bonobos are one of the critically endangered great apes with fewer than
10,000 estimated to live in the wild. (Photo by Vanessa Woods)

The World Conservation Union has just released its 2007 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The report states that of the 41,415 species now on their Red List, 16,306 are threatened with extinction (up from 16,118 last year). Currently one in four mammals, one in eight birds and 70% of the world’s assessed plants that appear on the List are in jeopardy.

The great apes are the most critically endangered:

A reassessment of our closest relatives, the great apes, has revealed a grim picture. The Western Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) has moved from Endangered to Critically Endangered, after the discovery that the main subspecies, the Western Lowland Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), has been decimated by the commercial bushmeat trade and the Ebola virus. Their population has declined by more than 60% over the last 20-25 years, with about one third of the total population found in protected areas killed by the Ebola virus over the last 15 years.

The Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo abelii) remains in the Critically Endangered category and the Bornean Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) in the Endangered category. Both are threatened by habitat loss due to illegal and legal logging and forest clearance for palm oil plantations. In Borneo, the area planted with oil palms increased from 2,000 km2 to 27,000 km2 between 1984 and 2003, leaving just 86,000 km2 of habitat available to the species throughout the island.

“Our lives are inextricably linked with biodiversity and ultimately its protection is essential for our very survival. As the world begins to respond to the current crisis of biodiversity loss, the information from the IUCN Red List is needed to design and implement effective conservation strategies – for the benefit of people and nature.”

- Jane Smart, Head of IUCN's Species Programme

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Congolese Rebels Invade Gorilla Sanctuary

Rebel takeover raises fears of more gorilla deaths


Several gorillas were killed and eaten by rebels earlier this year who have now
taken over Virunga National Park.

Rebel forces loyal to a renegade general in the Democratic Republic of Congo have seized control of large swaths of conservation reserve, placing the rare mountain gorillas that live there in grave danger.

Conservationists fear for the safety of the 380 gorillas living in the forests of the Virunga National Park, in the North Kivu province. There are only 700 of the gorillas worldwide.

North Kivu has been the scene of violent clashes between the Congolese army and forces loyal to General Laurent Nkunda. The army claims to have killed 28 rebel soldiers in recent weeks, while the general described the situation as "a state of war" over the weekend.

Conservationists reported that General Nkunda's forces surrounded ranger stations in the park on Monday, seizing rifles and equipment and forcing the evacuation of park workers and their families. The UN refugee agency estimates that 170,000 people have fled the fighting in North Kivu in the past year.

It is thought that General Nkunda's forces entered the park in pursuit of Rwandan Hutu rebels, who have bases there. His forces, which are frequently accused of human rights violations, purport to be acting in the interests of ethnic Tutsis. General Nkunda maintains that the Congolese government is collaborating with the Hutu-led FDLR, a group accused of involvement with the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis.

The current fighting appears to have further escalated yesterday, when it was claimed that the army used a helicopter gunship against rebel troops in the region for the first time, killing 50.

The difficulties of protecting endangered species in such a region are clear, and five national parks in the Democratic Republic of Congo are listed by Unesco as World Heritage Sites "in danger". In Virunga, nine mountain gorillas have been killed since the beginning of the year. In January two lone males were shot in an attack which was widely attributed to General Nkunda's troops. A female was then killed in June, and three females and a male slaughtered in late July. It is thought these attacks were carried out by charcoal traders, who are illegally felling the park's trees for fuel. The Congolese government has brought in various measures to try to protect wildlife, yet the job of policing the parks has become increasingly dangerous, with more than 120 rangers killed by poachers and rebels in the past 10 years.

Source: The Independent

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Gorilla Protectors Murdered in Congo

Violence continues in endangered gorilla sanctuary


Congolese Park Rangers risk their lives to protect the endangered gorillas.

Suspected Rwandan Hutu rebels killed a park ranger in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in the latest attack on guards who protect rare mountain gorillas in a national park, officials said on Friday.

The attack late on Thursday on the ranger station at Kabaraza, 95 km (60 miles) north of the North Kivu provincial capital Goma, followed the killings of five of the endangered gorillas in recent weeks in the Virunga National Park.

"Around 2300 hours, a ranger on night watch heard noises coming from some of the rangers' houses. He went there to find out what was going on and was shot in the belly," Robert Muir of the Frankfurt Zoological Society, which supports the protection programme for the Virunga gorillas, told Reuters.

The ranger died from his wounds, and a worker at the camp was injured by a bullet in the neck. Houses were looted.

Other rangers who drove the attackers off said they spoke Rwandan and were believed to be members of the largely Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebel group which operates in eastern Congo.

Several rangers have been killed in Virunga, Africa's oldest national park located near the intersection of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Conservationists are fighting to save the estimated 700 mountain gorillas who remain in central Africa.

Thursday's attack came in the same turbulent area of eastern Congo where government troops have been battling soldiers loyal to a renegade general, Laurent Nkunda.

On Thursday, thousands of civilians fled the fighting which has shattered a seven-month-old truce signed by Nkunda and dampened hopes of stabilising eastern Congo after landmark national elections held late last year.

The recent slayings of gorillas shocked conservationists, who suspect the killings are linked to a power struggle between local government agents trying to save Virunga and those engaged in the illicit trade in the charcoal made from its trees.

Under Congo's late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Virunga was a major tourist draw, but years of insecurity and the 1998-2003 war that killed an estimated 4 million people, mainly through hunger and disease, have led to a dwindling number of visitors.

Source: Reuters

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The Downstream Effects of Biopiracy

Dutch primatologist gets caught up in economic blowback.



As I recently highlighted, primatologist Marc van Roosmalen was sentenced to 16 years in Brazilian prison for alleged “biopiracy”. The case outraged scientists around the world and Roosmalen’s lawyers were able to have him released from custody pending appeal.

An article in today’s New York Times details his conviction and why Brazil has been so harsh in it’s laws regulating the nation’s biological inheritance. As the Times reports:

Fears of biopiracy, loosely defined as any unauthorized acquisition or transport of genetic material or live flora and fauna, are deep and longstanding in Brazil. Nearly a century ago, for example, the Amazon rubber boom collapsed after Sir Henry Wickham, a British botanist and explorer, spirited rubber seeds out of Brazil and sent them to colonies in Ceylon and Malaya (now Sri Lanka and Malaysia), which quickly dominated the international market.

In the 1970s, the Squibb pharmaceutical company used venom from the Brazilian arrowhead viper to help develop captopril, used to treat hypertension and congestive heart failure, without payment of the royalties Brazilians think are due them. And more recently, Brazilian Indian tribes have complained that samples of their blood, taken under circumstances they say were unethical, were being used in genetic research around the world.

Such biopiracy is widespread around the world. As genes and chemicals derived from the world's biodiversity have allowed companies to make fortunes, the rush to control those resources has been fierce. Indian physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva has written about how such policies have taken advantage of poor countries in her book Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge:

“At the heart of Columbus's "discovery" was the treatment of piracy as a natural right of the colonizer, necessary for the deliverance of the colonized. . . . Biopiracy is the Columbian “discovery” 500 years after Columbus. Patents are still the means to protect this piracy of the wealth of non-Western peoples as a right of Western powers.

Through patents and genetic engineering, new colonies are being carved out. The land, the forests, the rivers, the oceans, and the atmosphere have all been colonized, eroded, and polluted. . . Resistance to biopiracy is a resistance to the ultimate colonization of life itself – of the future of evolution as well as the future of non-Western traditions of relating to and knowing nature. It is a struggle to protect the freedom of diverse species to evolve. It is a struggle to protect the freedom of diverse cultures to evolve. It is a struggle to conserve both cultural and biological diversity.

Dr. Shiva has become an international spokesperson for those who have been taken advantage of in this new rush for biological gold. For example, attempts by Texas-based Rice-Tec to patent Basmati rice (a variety developed though thousands of years of Indian agricultural innovation), was thwarted largely due to her group’s efforts. An ongoing campaign is challenging Monsanto’s patenting of seed and preventing poor farmers from saving and sharing their seed as they’ve done for centuries.

While much of the commentary surrounding Dr. van Roosmalen's arrest has been focused on the draconian laws of the Brazilian government, what has been lost is why Brazil initiated such harsh laws in the first place. Western countries have been stealing the region's natural resources for five hundred years. The people of Brazil are understandably peeved and less likely to trust Western scientists.

Lawyers for Dr. van Roosmalen, a naturalized Brazilian citizen who was born in the Netherlands, say he is in large part a victim of the xenophobic sentiment attached to fears of biopiracy. They note that he was tried as a foreigner, initially denied habeas corpus and the right to appeal the verdict against him, given a near-maximum sentence despite being a first-time offender and sent to a notoriously harsh prison.

. . .

Edmilson da Costa Barreiros, the federal prosecutor in Manaus who argued the case against Dr. van Roosmalen, did not respond to requests for comment. But an article in A Crítica, the main newspaper there, quoted him as having urged that the scientist be made to “serve as an example so that others will see that you cannot do as you please at a public institution.”

Dr. van Roosmalen has clearly been improperly convicted for his work on behalf of science and conservation, work that all Brazilians ultimately benefit from. However, rather than quickly condemn the country for their "backwards ways" it might be wise to take a good, long look in the mirror to understand why such reactions would have arisen in the first place. Dr. van Roosmalen, it seems, has been ensnared in what the CIA refers to as "blowback," the unintended consequences of imperial actions abroad. We would be less hypocritical if we acknowledged these abuses as we continue our campaign to have Dr. van Roosmalen cleared of his charges.

Foundation to help Marc van Roosmalen

Petition for the UK government to pressure the Brazilian authorities

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New Life in the Congo

After recent Gorilla tragedy, the birth of a new baby offers hope



Conservationists announced the birth of a critically endangered mountain gorilla in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Virunga National Park. The newborn marked a positive development for the embattled apes in the park -- nine out of its 100 gorillas have been killed this year by poachers, including five last month.

WildlifeDirect called the birth "a key step toward the survival of this critically endangered species."

The baby gorilla, a male, was born to the only female in the Munyaga Family, according to WildlifeDirect.

The newborn gorilla is expected to spend its first few months of life in constant physical contact with its mother, usually riding on its mother's back or being carried. Infant gorillas begin to walk at around four or five months and start to feed on plant parts at four to six months.

The gorillas live in Virunga National Park park, which sits near the border with Rwanda and supports roughly 380 of the world's remaining 700 mountain gorillas. Another 320 mountain gorillas are found in neighboring Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park.

Mountain gorillas are generally well-protected relative to the more common lowland gorillas in other parts of Africa. As such, the July killings of five mountain gorillas sparked international outrage and led the U.N. to send a team of investigators to the region which is recovering from a decade of war. Rangers believe illegal charcoal harvesters from Goma are to blame.

Conservationists say gorillas can bring benefits to the local economy. In Uganda's Bwindi, well-trained guides lead small and carefully supervised groups of tourists who pay more than $300 each for a permit to see the gorillas. The efforts have provided some compensation for communities around the park who have had to give up their right to cut timber and harvest game from the protected forest.



WildlifeDirect, founded and chaired by renowned conservationist Dr Richard Leakey, promotes wildlife protection through blogs by rangers and conservationists. The WildlifeDirect website allows visitors to donate money directly to conservation efforts in the wild.

Story from Mongabay.com

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Two More Gorillas Found Dead

Good news of baby Ndeze's success marred by tragedy



Earlier this week I linked to a story showing that the baby of one of the four murdered gorillas (one of whom was also pregnant) is currently in stable condition. Yesterday conservationists in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo discovered the remains of two more adult gorillas with one of their infants almost assuredly lost as well. This brings the death toll to nine this year. As I highlighted before, with only 700 mountain gorillas alive in the wild the loss of these individuals now represents the equivalent of 85 million people, or the entire population of Germany.

According to Reuters:

"Effectively, this means that not only are there six that are now dead, but there will now be a group of 12 gorillas that may not carry on into the next generation, said Gerard Collin, a consultant with the UNESCO team.

So far this year, nine mountain gorillas have been killed in North Kivu.

Two adult males, known as silverbacks because of their grey colouring, were killed and eaten by rebels living off the land.

A third, a female, was shot in the back of the head in what conservationists said was an "execution-style" killing. Rangers found her baby clinging to her body, suggesting she was not killed for bush meat or the lucrative trade in primate infants.

Some conservationists say they suspect the killings are linked to a power struggle between local government agents trying to save Virunga, Africa's oldest national park, and those engaged in the illicit trade in charcoal made from its trees.

For those of you able to help, donations can be sent to the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund.

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The Evolution of Metapopulations and the Future of Humanity

Or: Who's Your Neighbor?



Earlier I put out a call for evolutionary questions, and several of you responded. I will answer them all in the next few days. First off, ETBNC asked:

It's my understanding this species [Homo sapiens] lived in relatively small social groups (of a few dozen) for at least 95% of its existence as a species. For the last 5% of its history these homo sapiens have been trying to live in increasingly large social groups, as much as 6 or 7 orders of magnitude larger. Since homo sapiens is known to be able to modify its behavior patterns in, um, "interesting" ways, such discontinuity isn't that remarkable.

My hypothesis is that small social groups are still the default behavior for the species homo sapiens. . . . Does that seem like a reasonable hypothesis to you?

It is my view that this is absolutely correct and it has important ramifications for modern human existence, which I'll discuss. The earliest evidence for Homo sapiens in Africa is from about 200,000 years ago. The earliest large-scale societies are from about 10,000 years ago. This means that 95% of our history was spent in small, mobile groups living as hunter-gatherers. However, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo habilis and the Australopithcines would likely have lived in similar small groups. If we include the rest of our family as part of the human lineage than small groups would have been the norm for 99.9975% of our existence. And if we include our common ancestors with great apes then we might as well round up and conclude that human civilization has simply been a calculation error.

This raises two provocative questions: 1) Why after so long did humans begin living in large sedentary groups? and 2) What does this mean for our modern experiment in group living? The answer to the first question is simple: farming. The most recent ice age lasted from around 70,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE. According to genetic evidence, humans first migrated out of Africa between 59,000–69,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found the first evidence of farming and sedentary, long-term habitations from around 10,000 years ago (and most famously in the region known as the Fertile Crescent). These independent pieces of evidence strongly suggest that the ice age played a significant role in some human populations' original migration and subsequent discovery of agriculture. As Jared Diamond has brilliantly summarized in his Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, agriculture then only had to be discovered independently a few times before it could spread across entire continents within a few hundred to a thousand years. Why agriculture wasn't struck upon earlier than 70,000 years ago is an interesting question, which I can follow up on if there is any interest.

However, agriculture proved to be a radically different way of interacting with the natural world, and it's easy to understand how our ancestors could find it so attractive (and also addictive). Up until this time food had never been an issue, that is, if you were hungry you went out and found food. You followed the migrating herds. You lived along rivers teeming with fish. You collected seeds, and grasses and tubers. On occasion there would be a shortage and many of your loved ones wouldn't make it through the winter, but in general a relatively small proportion of your time was devoted to food preparation.

Agriculture required remaining fixed to a certain area. It required daily toil to plow, plant and harvest the crops and, on top of that, there were constant pests and diseases that could decimate what you'd sown. But it offered control. You could store food and ride out long periods of inclement weather that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. It was a devil's bargain and some groups accepted. As Daniel Quinn suggested in his novel Ishmael, the early conflict between the hunter-gatherer way of life and that of the farmer may have been passed on to us through the myth of Cain and Abel.

These sedentary agricultural communities also allowed enormous population expansion. With a controlled reserve of food more people would survive. The population would expand and more food would be grown to compensate. For the first time in human history, people began to be surrounded by strangers in their own community.

But what does this say about human destiny? If our natural habitat is one of small, migrating groups how are we able to live in cities numbering in the millions? Answer: just barely. The most recent World Bank data demonstrate that only a tiny percentage of us live relatively decent lives, economically speaking. 84% of the world population currently lives on only 16% of the world's combined income. To put that into perspective, the richest 1% in the world today makes an average of $24,000 a year. When we think of the super rich we shouldn't think of Bill Gates, we should think of kindergarten teachers.

We are also living amidst a community of strangers. How many of your neighbors have you met? Where are they originally from? What did their parents do? My guess is that most people reading this don't know their neighbors very well at all. This is important when combined with such extreme inequality. Ethical behavior that was honed through group living (see my post on The Evolution of Morality) and that people would normally demonstrate towards a friend or loved one, doesn't apply as strongly towards a stranger. There are very few costs associated with cheating someone in a business transaction if you're unlikely to ever see that person again. This has necessitated blind laws (such as mandatory minimums and three strikes) in order to punish bad behavior that, in our hunter-gatherer days, could have been decided upon as a group. The earliest laws such as the Code of Hammurabi and the Ten Commandments decreed that death was to be the punishment for most infractions. That we've improved remarkably in our clemency isn't so much a testament to our own beneficence as it is a demonstration of just how off balance human civilization has always been.

So the answer is we're managing, but only barely. However, if the history of human civilization is any guide (think Angkor Wat, think Chichén Itzá), once the human population outstrips the landbase needed to support it then collapse is imminent. As I wrote earlier, we are seriously outstripping our global landbase and we're accelerating. It's going to be a wild ride.

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Good News Amidst Gorilla Tragedy

Baby Ndeze appears to be doing well.



Earlier I reported on the four gorillas (one of whom was pregnant) that were massacred in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It appears that a baby who wasn't expected to live without her mother is in stable condition.

Ndeze was left in desperate need of water and food after the attack in July, and experts are still trying to work out why the gorillas were killed.

Emergency measures have now been brought in to protect the rest of the gorillas in the Virunga National Park.

Extra patrols have been set up in the part of the park where the other gorillas live to keep them safe.

The bodies of one silverback and three female gorillas were discovered on 22 July in Virunga National Park.

It's a mystery why the gorillas - all from one family - were killed.

The four animals belonged to a group of 12 gorillas, known to researchers as the Rugendo family, which are often visited by tourists.

There are only around 700 mountain gorillas alive in the world, and more than half of them live in the national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Story here.

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The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe

A plea for a new exploration, one that is within our reach



Extraterrestrial intelligence would be the single most important discovery of human existence. In many ways it is the continuation of a search for answers in the sky that began with our distant ancestors. Unfortunately the UFO mythos is lacking any evidence and scientists are having a difficult time even locating bacteria.

Recent news that Saturn's moon Enceladus is unlikely to support life is reducing the possibility even further that any living organisms will be found in our solar system. We may have to face the possibility that beyond our thin dusting of atmospheric gases lay a domain of shadows.

This demonstrates how rare and precious life can be and should generate increased concern for our fragile biosphere. UFO visitations will not save this generation any more than gods or angels did for generations past. We have to overcome our myopic vision of culture and political ideology to become a true caretaker for the myriad organisms on our planet, or at least find a way to leave them the hell alone.

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (two powerhouses in evolutionary anthropology) predicted the ultimate legacy our current path would bring us in their 1996 book The Sixth Extinction:

Even if we take a figure in the lower range of [extinction] estimates, say thirty-thousand species per year, the implication is still startling. David Raup has calculated from the fossil record that during periods of normal, or background, extinction, species loss occurs at an average of one every four years. Extinction at the rate of thirty-thousand a year, therefore, is elevated 120,000 times above background. This is easily comparable with the Big Five biological crises of geological history, except that this one is not being caused by global temperature change, regression of sea level, or asteroid impact. It is being caused by one of Earth's inhabitants. Homo sapiens is poised to become the greatest catastrophic agent since a giant asteroid collided with the Earth sixty-five million years ago, wiping out half the world's species in a geological instant.

According to the latest WWF Living Planet Report, since 1970 as many as 1/3 of all terrestrial, freshwater and marine species have gone extinct and our current ecological footprint (the amount of natural resources used solely by humans) exceeds the Earth's ability to regenerate by 25%. This has a dramatic effect on our ability to make contact with other intelligent life. Since it's unlikely that bacteria are abundant in our solar system, the chances of finding alien intelligence is reduced considerably. However, there are quadrupedal (and sometimes even bipedal) beings with sizable frontal lobes already among us. Unfortunately they, too, may soon be unknown to science.

Last year Conservation International, the World Conservation Union and the International Primatological Society issued a report entitled "Primates in Peril." Of the 625 unique varieties of primates, 26% are at crucial risk of extinction.

They are among the most beautiful and intelligent of tropical wonders, and they are among the most persecuted — relentlessly hunted for their meat and fur, bodies broken for dubious medicines, shot for stealing crops in fields which were once their home. All the forests of the world cannot satisfy the sum of human hunger: they are cut and burned, day and night, and the remnants of their grandeur will not long survive without our intervention.

Primates are also our closest link with the natural world, they help us to understand who we are and how we came to be. As Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan so beautifully wrote in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors:

We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep, with no note explaining who it is, where it came from, what hereditary cargo of attributes and disabilities it might be carrying, or who its antecedents might be.

Primates possess that missing note which should have accompanied our bassinet at the foundling home. By understanding how primates negotiate their environments, their cognitive landscape, their social and sexual lives, we can better understand ourselves. It is their mysterious intelligence that should fuel our passions. Just imagine, even if for a moment, how the world would be transformed if the patriarchs of antiquity hadn't set up conflicts between the "revealed texts" of the Bible, Qu'ran, and Hindu Vedas but looked instead at the reality in front of them. What if our common framework was simply the natural world without the flailing argument and violent retaliation in support of some unseen and unknowable skyward intelligence?

So consider this a plea for a new exploration -- a search for intelligent life in the universe and a campaign to ensure that such life remains abundant. What's more, we don't have to travel to distant stars and our plea for answers won't be returned with silence. It's simply this. Visit your local library and check out a book on our primate origins (I've offered a list of my favorites below). Then visit the web pages of the Jane Goodall Institute, the Great Ape Survival Project (GRASP), the World Conservation Union or the Bonobo Conservation Initiative (many more options are available here). Learn the current statistics and conservation strategies so you can tell your friends, co-workers or give a special presentation in your child's classroom. Find out how you can change your consumption to reduce our ecological footprint. Donate your time or money to organizations working to make the difference we all want to see.

It's a small and rather ridiculous request, for certainly that solution has always been in front of us. But so have primates. While we've searched in vain for distant intelligence to bring us "the Answer" we've always had the potential right in our backyard (cosmically speaking). But we won't for very much longer. Just as we're running out of celestial bodies that harbor extraterrestrial life, so are we losing the very life forms that could offer solutions to some of our species' most profound questions.

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Update: Van Roosmalen Freed

Dr. Marc van Roosmalen, a renowned primatologist and one of Time magazines "Heroes for the Planet" for his conservation work has been released from Brazilian prison while he appeals his sentence.

According to the Associated Press:

Marc Van Roosmalen was convicted on June 15 of trying to illegally auction off the names of monkey species, keeping rare monkeys at his house without authorization and selling a scaffolding donated to the National Institute for Amazon Research where he worked.

He was sentenced to 15 years and nine months in a prison in the Amazon city of Manaus, where he lives.

Roosmalen, a Dutch expatriate and naturalized Brazilian citizen, has told the press that he was framed by Amazonian ranchers and logging interests who are attempting to sabotage his conservation work.

In 2002 Roosmalen was accused of violating Brazilian wildlife laws when he rescued rare monkeys from backwoodsmen who, Roosmalen said, were planning to eat them. The local government claimed he was involved in animal trafficking, confiscated the 27 orphaned monkeys and fined Roosmalen $1,667.

Roosmalen has discovered at least 12 new species and has been celebrated for his pioneering conservation work.

A fund to help Dr. Roosmalen has been set up and donations can be provided at the link below.

The Foundation to Help Marc van Roosmalen

For further commentary see my post The Downstream Effects of Biopiracy.

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Scientists demand Brazil release renowned primatologist

Biologist's incarceration is an attack on science, say scientists


Primatologist Marc van Roosmalen

A prominent group of scientists have issued a petition to free world-renowned primatologist Marc van Roosmalen from Brazilian prison after he was charged with illegally keeping monkeys without a permit and other crimes. The scientists have called his imprisonment an "attack on the practice and profession of biological science in Brazil."

Van Roosmalen, 60, was sentenced in June to 15 years and 9 months by a federal court for allegedly keeping wild animals without a permit and embezzlement. The scientist, who has worked in the Amazon for nearly 20 years and is credited with the discovery of several previously unknown species of monkeys, was named a "hero for the planet" by Time magazine in 2002 for his work to save the increasingly threatened Amazon rainforest.

Full story at Mongabay

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Gorilla Massacre in Perspective

Deaths Are Equivalent to the Entire Population of England



The shocking news that four more critically endangered mountain gorillas were killed last week should make all primates of good conscience wince. Furthermore, one of the females was pregnant and another was nursing a five month old infant who is not expected to live.

According to the World Wildlife Foundation, there are an estimated 700 mountain gorillas alive in the wild. The loss of these six gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo represents 0.86% of the total population. This would be the equivalent of slaughtering 5,910 endangered African elephants or 60 million human beings in a single week. In human terms this is the death of every man, woman and child in England (and nearly as many as the population of Congo).

While it's unknown who is responsible for the killings one of two possibilities is the most likely: they were killed by supporters of rebel leader Gen. Laurent Nkunda who were also responsible for killing two gorillas earlier this year, or they were killed by traders who cut down trees to be sold as charcoal in Rwanda. According to the UK Telegraph:

"Virunga has been under enormous pressure from the exploitation of timber for the charcoal trade," said Mr de Merode.

"There's a very real possibility that this is an act of sabotage against the national park because it represents an opposition to the charcoal trade."

This latter cause is the result of extreme poverty in the region that will push desperate people to enter the National Reserves to earn a living. The Global Policy Forum has an excellent article illustrating the critical conditions in the region.



Pictured above are Safari, who was killed in the shooting, and her daughter Ndeze, who is thought unlikely to live. The other victims were named Neeza and Mburanumwe, and the male, Rugendo.

To help, visit the WWF website here.

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Behind Enemy Lines

Reprinted from Wildlife Conservation Magazine
November/December 2005

          December 2002. After four days traveling upriver in a dugout canoe, Belgian primatologist Jef Dupain became the first researcher in five years to return to the war-torn Lomako Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). As he surveyed the overgrown field station that had once been his home, a boy soldier wielding an AK-47 stepped into view from a concealing tangle of vines. Fortunately the boy was only one of the rebel fighters who had escorted Dupain behind enemy lines into this lush forest, which lies along the front between the Congolese Army of President Joseph Kabila and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo, a rebel group intent on toppling the government.
          The Congolese civil conflict that erupted in 1997, forcing Dupain to abandon his work, has exacted a devastating toll. As many as three million people have been killed and many millions more displaced by the warring factions. But in 2002, with United Nations peacekeeping forces deployed throughout the country, Dupain took advantage of the relative calm to check on the condition of the Congolese primate he had been studying -- the endangered bonobo. Prior to the war, researchers estimated that fewer than 10,000 bonobos were alive in DR Congo, their sole home on Earth. How had they fared during the turmoil?

Jef Dupain, a primatologist, studies bonobos in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country struggling to make peace after years of civil war.

          Sometimes called the pygmy chimpanzee, the bonobo was officially recognized in 1929 as a separate species, Pan paniscus from the chimpanzee, P. troglodytes, based on examination of a skull in a Belgian museum. The bonobo's name, Pan derives from the vivacious Greek forest god; paniscus indicates diminutive stature, although bonobos and chimpanzees are similar in size.
          During the 1970s, Japanese and Western scientists began to study elusive bonobo in the wild. What they found upset notions of aggressive behavior in primates and raised fundamental questions about the male-based model of human evolution. Such popular books as Man the Hunter, Demonic Males or The Dark Side of Man described violent behavior among our closest relatives. By contrast, primatologist Franz de Waal calls bonobos--a species that shares 98.7 percent of its genetic makeup with humans--the “Make Love Not War hippies of the animal kingdom."

A mother bonobo lifts the head of her youngster to better look into her eyes. Considered to be the most human-like of all primates, bonobos can walk bipedally, and unlike other apes, they form cooperative groups of non-related females.

          “[Bonobos are] not free of aggression,” adds Frances White, a University of Oregon primatologist and long-time colleague of Dupain, “I have seen knock-down, drag out fights.” But compared to chimpanzees or gorillas, bonobos are very egalitarian and form cooperative groups of non-related females--unheard of in other non-human anthropoids.
          “Evolutionarily, it makes sense that, if you’re going to help someone, you help a relative,” explains White. From an evolutionary standpoint the goal--though not a conscious one--is to pass as many of your genes as possible to the next generation. Natural selection would favor those behaviors that resulted in reproductive success and the survival of close relatives. “So it was thought very strongly that unrelated females would not cooperate together in a group,” White continues. “The fact that they do is really unique.”
          But the real shock to researchers was the sexual behavior of bonobos, which involves frequent same-sex couples, sex as play, sex to avoid aggression, and sex to make up after fights. Whereas sexual activity is often a distinct category for reproduction purposes only in other animals, with bonobos it's the glue and salve of their social lives, and any description of their societies would be incomplete without it. Referred to as pansexual, bonobos engage in a gamut of pleasures: genito-genital rubbing between adult females, male-male mountings, what has been termed, “penis fencing,” oral sex, tongue kissing and, what may be most alarming to human vanity, face-to-face mating between females and males. Bonobos definitely contradict the notion that sex is intended solely for procreation. In doing so, they invoke the image of their Greek namesake dancing lasciviously with the nymphs and satyrs of Arcadia.
          “Although, you have to be careful,” says White, “because even though females will mate with all males its not just mating with all males indiscriminately or for no reason. Mating happens for many different reasons.”
          In fact, females become extremely choosy around the time of ovulation and will frequently form consortships with a single male, sneaking off into the forest together for several days. There are also frequent examples of sexual coercion, a behavior common in all primates.
          “I have seen males aggressively charge--screaming with their hair raised, mouth open and teeth bared--jump on and bite at females,” says White. This often leads to the female screaming, retreating a yard or so and initiating sex to calm down the males.

          What Jef Dupain witnessed, however, when he returned to his former Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp field station was not the simian equivalent of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” but more the forsaken landscape of Rousseau’s ironically titled “Virgin Forest.” The irony is that the great ape that is considered to be the most peaceful of all primates had had its paradise shattered at the hands of the most violent.
          “During those weeks we found almost no nests of bonobos, no monkeys, and almost no traces of ungulates,” says Dupain. "The few monkeys we did see reacted like monkeys that were very used to hunting." This was hardly a surprise since Dupain saw soldiers pass by in the forest carrying slaughtered wild pigs and colobus monkeys, and the villagers who had formerly been under his employ admitted that they had resorted to hunting the very animals they had once been paid to protect.
          “The people had been waiting for us to come back so they could assist in our research, and at some point, they lost hope” says Dupain. "Then of course they started hunting themselves and no longer reacted to hunters coming in from outside."
          This is how war erodes conservation efforts. Fleeing the violence of warring factions, homeless refugees push deep into the virgin forest. Settled villagers who could once earn a living selling their crops in urban districts find it too dangerous to plant their fields, so the land lies fallow. Or, if they are able to harvest, there's no way to transport it to market. For soldiers, refugees, and villagers, killing wildlife becomes a way to survive.
          The rise in this bushmeat crisis in Congo has been documented by Wildlife Conservation Society field biologist John Hart. “The trends are disturbing,” he says, “particularly the increase in the number of bonobos killed in areas where they had not been seriously threatened before.”
          While there are some protected areas (on paper at least), such as Salonga National Park, or minimally protected regions at Lac Tumba or the Lokuru Reserve, the majority of bonobo habitat, including the Lomako Forest, remains unprotected. This means that community involvement to self-enforce a ban on bushmeat is the only safety net for wildlife.
          Offering employment to people who have few other opportunities can be the best hope to encourage communities to value their endangered species. “Hiring local people as part of field survey teams, even as park guards, can be an effective way to establish a link with the community,” says Hart. The emerging reality of conservation is that, to protect the endangered bonobo, economic alternatives have to be made available for humans who share their range.

Bonobos finish up a meal of sugarcane in Wamba, northern DR Congo, the site of the longest running study of bonobos in the wild. By growing sugarcane for these animals, primatologist Takayoshi Kano enticed them out of the forest and won their trust. Kano's pioneering fieldwork revealed much about the bonobo's social life.

          That's why Jef Dupain is setting up a project for the African Wildlife Foundation to organize the transport of crops from the Lomako Forest region to DR Congo's interior markets. “If we can reopen the markets for these people,” says Dupain, “fifty percent of those who stay in the forest and hunt will return to their villages and start working on their plantations again. For me, that’s conservation at the moment in Congo.”
          Dupain is also meeting with the Institute Congolo pour le Conservation de la Nature (ICCN), the national agency in charge of protected areas, to establish an official reserve in the Lomako Forest. “We did surveys throughout the landscape and identified specific areas with high potentials for conservation,” says Dupain. The difficulty, as always, is finding sources of funding for the basic infrastructure, such as salaries for park guards and further field surveys to determine the boundaries of bonobo habitats.
          In the most recent survey of the Lomako Forest, in late 2004, Dupain found more bonobos than expected, but with population levels still dangerously low: at pre-2002 levels, or about two individuals per square kilometer. “That means the people are telling the truth,” reasons Dupain. “The villagers killed a lot of animals. Probably they killed some bonobos, too, but they also told us in 2002 that bonobos had left the area to get away from the hunters. It seems that, in the last few years, the people started believing again that we might come back, so they decreased their hunting, and now bonobos are back in the area. This is indeed a very positive surprise.”
          But Dupain’s cautious optimism depends upon the international community’s response to Congo’s humanitarian and natural resource crisis. “We are facing increased hunting pressure and forestry activities [logging] all over the area,” says Dupain. “We also have to worry about the susceptibility of these great apes to diseases that might decimate huge populations in a short time. Bonobo populations are dying out little by little. So its very important for us to come together now."
          Plutarch recounts how a traveler, journeying farther into the realm of the gods than any had before, heard a mysterious voice call out, “When you reach your journey’s end proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.” With Congo’s human population doubling every twenty years, that same voice has been heard today, and the fate of Pan paniscus depends on what is done with the message.

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