Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan or, The Whale, shares his photographs
Posts Tagged ‘Wildlife’
Snipers to protect Sydney’s penguins
July 13th, 2009 |
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Night watch on endangered species in Australia after nine birds mauled to death
Fox attacks on endangered penguins have led Australia’s wildlife authorities to post snipers at night to protect the birds.
A colony of about 120 little penguins (Eudyptula minor), also known as fairy penguins, at Quarantine beach in Sydney has recently lost about nine of its number to attacks. On Sunday night, the two snipers took their first watch but were unable to shoot the animals responsible.
“We’ve got infrared cameras as well to detect fox movements along with fox baiting … This is really a microcosm of the devastation foxes can wreak in some areas,” the National Parks and Wildlife Service told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Autopsies on the dead penguins showed foxes or dogs were probably responsible because of the nature of the bite marks. DNA swabs were being analysed.
Angelika Treichler from local group Manly Environment Centre told the Herald the attacks were happening at dusk when the nocturnal penguins come ashore. She urged dog owners to keep their animals on leads.
Meanwhile, the snipers are there to stay. “We’ve had no luck so far finding what has done this so we’ll keep on trying,” the parks service said. “We’ll be there for as long as necessary.”
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BBC walks with dinosaurs on climate
July 13th, 2009 |
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The BBC’s output treats the findings of thousands of scientists on climate change as no more than ‘views’ or ‘opinion’
Years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I worked for the BBC’s natural history unit as a radio producer. It was a great job, and my colleagues were stimulating and fun. I was allowed to make investigative environmental programmes, and we exposed some shocking scandals. We recorded the head of customs in Abidjan offering to sell us smuggled chimpanzees, for example, and we found that a bulk carrier which crashed off the coast of Cork, polluting rare habitats, appeared to have been deliberately scuppered.
After Mrs Thatcher launched her coup against the BBC, its executives quickly lost their appetite for investigative programmes, and my boss explained that we no longer had the support we needed to continue. Since then the natural history unit has continued to broadcast beautiful, thrilling programmes about the world’s wildlife. Occasionally it makes an environmental programme. But by and large it presents the biosphere as if it inhabits a planet yet to be discovered by human beings (except of course the cameramen you see struggling with the elements in the “how we made it” segments).
The most extreme example was the three-part series on the Congo made for the BBC by Scorer Associates. At the height of a devastating civil war which had caused the deaths of some 4 million people, the series reported that “the Congo may once have been known as the ‘heart of darkness’ – today it seems more like a bright, beautiful wilderness.” In two and a half hours of programmes the killings were not mentioned.
Lovely as the unit’s output remains, I believe that it creates a misleading impression of the world, which can have grave political consequences. It encourages people to believe that all is well with the world’s ecosystems; often it produces the only footage viewers see from far-flung parts of the world. I am not arguing that the political or environmental context should dominate the unit’s output, only that it should be acknowledged and explained, however briefly. Is this too much to ask?
Yes, apparently. For the past few years an environmental campaigner called Peter Hack has been writing to the BBC asking about one of these gaps. As far as he can discover, over the past 17 years (since the 1992 Rio earth summit in other words) of BBC films about the ecosystems of east Africa, there has not been a single mention of climate change. Yet these places have been hit harder than almost anywhere else by changes in weather patterns. Kenya, for example, has suffered a series of extreme droughts, whose frequency appears to be unprecedented. These have direct and immediate impacts on the region’s wildlife. But watching Big Cat Diary or any of the other films the unit has made in the Serengeti, Maasai Mara and other great parks and reserves, you wouldn’t have the faintest idea that anything had changed.
Peter Hack has just shown me the latest letter he’s received from Gerald McCusker at BBC Information. McCusker explains the gap thus:
“It’s not always possible or practical to reflect all the different opinions on a subject within individual programmes and we feel that over a reasonable period our coverage will reflect a diverse range of views and opinions with regard to this issue.”
So it turns out that the entire science of climate change, the work of thousands of researchers, the tens of thousands of papers published in scientific journals, the indisputable facts about changes in temperature, precipitation and wildlife populations in east Africa is no more than a “view” or “opinion”. Nice to know where you stand, isn’t it?
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Week in wildlife
July 11th, 2009 |
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Montana and Idaho plan wolf hunt
July 9th, 2009 |
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Rocky Mountain states’ plans for an open-season wolf hunt in September criticised by environmentalists
It is a clash of civilisations as old as the colonisation of the American west – wolves v humans – and it has entered into a new and more violent phase as two Rocky Mountain states moved to allow the first open hunt in years of an animal that was once driven to extinction.
The states of Montana and Idaho are going ahead with plans for an open-season hunt against wolves in September, in which licensed members of the public can take part.
The decisions follow a ruling earlier this year by the Obama administration, widely criticised by environmentalists, to remove wolves from the list of endangered species in the Rocky Mountain states. The interior secretary, Ken Salazar, was endorsing a decision by the Bush adminstration.
Montana wildlife commissioners voted yesterday to allow hunters to kill about 75 wolves, which is about 15% of the state’s population. Officials in Idaho will meet later this month to decide on their quota. But earlier plans called for hunting of up to 250 wolves.
Federal and state government biologists claim the wolf population in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho has grown so rapidly since the species was re-introduced to the region in the mid-1990s that it has become a choice between ranchers’ family pets and livestock, and wolves.
“The population has been growing 22% a year. We have more wolves in more places than we ever hoped for,” said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery co-ordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “The issue is what is the best way to manage wolves into the future now that the population is fully recovered.”
He said there are about 1,650 wolves in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, and their existing habitat cannot sustain a much larger population without bringing the animals further into conflict with ranching operations.
“If you live in an urban area where your only exposure to wolves is watching them on TV and seeing them running in a national park, it is very easy to be supportive of wolves,” he said. “The debate right now isn’t about the biology. People think it is morally wrong to kill wolves because it reminds them of pet dogs or people because wolves live in packs like families.”
But critics say the administration based its decision on science that is decades out of date, and does not take into account a growing body of evidence for the importance of protecting genetic diversity. If the wolf population dwindles too much – or if wolves survive only in isolated pockets – inbreeding would endanger their future.
“The recovery plan for wolves in the Rocky Mountains dates from the 1980s and has no reference to modern genetics,” said Michael Robinson, a conservationist for the Center for Biological Diversity.
The government recovery plan for wolves in the three Rocky Mountain states envisaged a much smaller population than the current population – perhaps 300 wolves overall, Robinson said. That translates into perhaps 10 breeding pairs in each state, he said. “That is completely inadequate to avoid inbreeding and fatal genetic defects.”
He argued that the government already had in place measures to protect humans from expanding wolf populations.
The administration already allows selective hunting of wolves – but only if ranchers claim their flocks are at risk. Government wildlife officials killed 265 wolves in the Rockies last year, including 21 entire wolf packs, Bangs said. In the midwest, where there are about 4,000 wolves spread across Minnesota and other states, government biologists conduct aerial culls of wolves.
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Montana and Idaho plan wolf hunt
July 9th, 2009 |
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Rocky Mountain states’ plans for an open-season wolf hunt in September criticised by environmentalists
It is a clash of civilisations as old as the colonisation of the American west – wolves v humans – and it has entered into a new and more violent phase as two Rocky Mountain states moved to allow the first open hunt in years of an animal that was once driven to extinction.
The states of Montana and Idaho are going ahead with plans for an open-season hunt against wolves in September, in which licensed members of the public can take part.
The decisions follow a ruling earlier this year by the Obama administration, widely criticised by environmentalists, to remove wolves from the list of endangered species in the Rocky Mountain states. The interior secretary, Ken Salazar, was endorsing a decision by the Bush adminstration.
Montana wildlife commissioners voted yesterday to allow hunters to kill about 75 wolves, which is about 15% of the state’s population. Officials in Idaho will meet later this month to decide on their quota. But earlier plans called for hunting of up to 250 wolves.
Federal and state government biologists claim the wolf population in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho has grown so rapidly since the species was re-introduced to the region in the mid-1990s that it has become a choice between ranchers’ family pets and livestock, and wolves.
“The population has been growing 22% a year. We have more wolves in more places than we ever hoped for,” said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery co-ordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “The issue is what is the best way to manage wolves into the future now that the population is fully recovered.”
He said there are about 1,650 wolves in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, and their existing habitat cannot sustain a much larger population without bringing the animals further into conflict with ranching operations.
“If you live in an urban area where your only exposure to wolves is watching them on TV and seeing them running in a national park, it is very easy to be supportive of wolves,” he said. “The debate right now isn’t about the biology. People think it is morally wrong to kill wolves because it reminds them of pet dogs or people because wolves live in packs like families.”
But critics say the administration based its decision on science that is decades out of date, and does not take into account a growing body of evidence for the importance of protecting genetic diversity. If the wolf population dwindles too much – or if wolves survive only in isolated pockets – inbreeding would endanger their future.
“The recovery plan for wolves in the Rocky Mountains dates from the 1980s and has no reference to modern genetics,” said Michael Robinson, a conservationist for the Center for Biological Diversity.
The government recovery plan for wolves in the three Rocky Mountain states envisaged a much smaller population than the current population – perhaps 300 wolves overall, Robinson said. That translates into perhaps 10 breeding pairs in each state, he said. “That is completely inadequate to avoid inbreeding and fatal genetic defects.”
He argued that the government already had in place measures to protect humans from expanding wolf populations.
The administration already allows selective hunting of wolves – but only if ranchers claim their flocks are at risk. Government wildlife officials killed 265 wolves in the Rockies last year, including 21 entire wolf packs, Bangs said. In the midwest, where there are about 4,000 wolves spread across Minnesota and other states, government biologists conduct aerial culls of wolves.
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From iron curtain to green belt
July 4th, 2009 |
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When Germany was divided during the cold war, nature took control of the deserted border area. Today it forms a reserve as fascinating as the country’s recent history
When I told friends I was setting off to explore the former border that once separated East and West Germany, several of them, even the German ones, scratched their heads and dug out their maps to find out where it ran. Unlike the Berlin Wall, the infamous symbol of the cold war that separated West Berlin from East, the much longer border that ran through the heart of Germany, has been largely forgotten.
German nature lovers, however, are well aware of the scar left by the iron curtain, once one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders. For four decades up to the end of the cold war in 1989, around 600 threatened species of animal and plant life were given a free rein in a no man’s land overshadowed by minefields, metal fences and watchtowers. The legacy is a unique and extraordinarily rich chain of ad hoc nature reserves running for nearly 1,400km in a gentle zigzag from the Vogtland region, near the German-Czech border in the south, to the Baltic Sea in the north, now interlinked to form a grünes band, or green belt.
It is an impressive living monument to recent European history that is accessible to walkers and bikers. Eckhard Selz, a ranger and former East German from the Harz national park, summed it up over a bowl of pea and sausage soup atop the Brocken peak, one of the highlights of the route: “The division of Germany was a travesty that robbed people of their freedom, but a positive side effect was the way the sealed border allowed nature to flourish.”
It has created a treasure trove of wildlife, including black storks, wild cats and winchats, a range of rare mosses and wood grouse. The newcomer is the lynx, which has been successfully reintroduced to the region since the border came down.
In four days we hiked around 100km of the green belt, starting at the Torfhaus visitor centre in the Harz national park, just outside the picturesque former mining town of Goslar. It was organised for us by the Harz tourist board and the Green Belt initiative, who will arrange guides, luggage transfers, routes and accommodation, allowing you the freedom to concentrate on the surroundings. Alternatively you can do the hikes alone. The paths are well marked and the local tourist offices on the route are stocked with plenty of maps and information about activities.
In Torfhaus, our guide, biologist Jens Halves, offered everything from reflexology foot massages in the park’s cool mountain streams to tours that trace the past journeys of Hans-Christian Andersen and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to reconstructing the lives of the 18th- and 19th-century charcoal burners who lived in the forest and served the steel industry.
In Goslar – home to the delicious Gose beer that is brewed with a high concentration of malt and the region’s soft and mineral-rich water – we stayed at the Kaiserworth Hotel, once a 15th-century cloth traders’ guild house. The following day our rucksacks were picked up by a luggage taxi for delivery to our next destination while we set off on foot to the charming town of Hornburg. A room in the local museum details the West German town’s precarious proximity to the iron curtain, including a model of the automatic spring guns that the East German authorities installed at the border. Triggered by movement, they sprayed would-be escapees with bullets.
“It was like living at the edge of the world,” said Hinrich Schüler, our guide, who worked as a forester on the border and recalls the day in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. He and his colleagues had to act rapidly, cutting paths through the forest and laying temporary roads for the thousands of Trabants and pedestrians rushing from East to West. Now the towering 69-year-old was accompanying us on a brisk walk through a forest in Lower Saxony into the 1,030-year-old village of Osterwieck in the former East.
Osterwieck has received millions of euros in grants over the last 20 years to help restore its stunning collection of 400 half-timbered houses. But much of the former East is revealed in the many abandoned homes of the thousands who have been forced to leave because of lack of work.
In Ilsenburg we spent the night in a former East German army barracks, now the swish Berghotel, from where we trekked in drizzle through the pine and rock landscape of the Brocken along the distinct border patrol path, constructed out of perforated slab concrete, that runs like a seam for practically the entire length of the former border.
“The Brocken is to the Germans what Ben Nevis is to the Scots,” explained Friedhart Knolle, a national park geologist.
The 1,141m mount was also a favourite haunt for British tourists as far back as the 1830s, when they were lured by the promise of the Brockengespenst – the Brocken spectre – an illusion formed, it is believed, by the thick fog and the shadows of climbers cast upon it. The seminal role it played in the history of broadcasting, when the 1936 Olympics were transmitted from the world’s first television tower here, is explained in a museum at the summit.
The GDR authorities turned it into a military zone, out of bounds for all Germans, so today it is one of the most potent symbols of German partition and reunification.
A 19th-century narrow-gauge steam railway, the Brockenbahn, took us downhill to the pretty town of Schiercke (in the former East), close to our next destination, the town of Braunlage (former West). At the foot of Wurmberg mountain there, slalom skiers were once instructed to concentrate on curbing the end of their runs lest they ended up cruising into the forbidden East.
Hartmut Dörge, a former customs officer on the West German border who now gives tours of the area around Braunlage, pointed out the gaps in the heavily-fortified fences where foxes, rabbits and badgers were able to tunnel their way through.
Our walk took us past a brook, just 1m wide, that was pedantically split down the middle by the international border, a house in the forest where secret agents once met and a former East German army barracks turned asylum seekers’ home.
Dorge gave me a piece of the metal mesh border fence as a souvenir before handing us over in the pretty town of Hohegeiss to our next guide, his former colleague Manfred Gille. He led us on a steep path through a spectacular pine forest that was so thick and dark it would have been the ideal setting for a Grimm fairytale. In a clearing near the East German village of Sorge, he pointed out how the tilling of the earth in search of landmines inadvertently churned up seeds and helped a wealth of birch and pine saplings to take root all along the former border. There are still bare patches, however, where industrial weed-killer sprayed by GDR authorities to ensure unbroken views of their borders, have killed all the nutrients.
Gille recalled a bizarre encounter he had with a Westerner who fled to the East, saying he was sick of the capitalist system: “He clung to the fence, rattling on it and crying ‘Let me in!’ while ignoring our suggestions that he should think twice about what he was doing.”
At the Ring of Memory near the village of Sorge (which, fittingly, means “woe” in German), landscape artist Hermann Prigann’s sculpture of naked concrete pillars encircled with charred wood piles celebrates how the forest has enveloped the former border area.
We met Inge Winkel, the mayor of the 120-soul village, who admitted she still stuck to the border patrol path for fear of stepping on an undiscovered landmine if she strayed into the forest. She stood at the fence marking the first of the two metal fortifications that once separated Sorge from the West and dwelt on a detail that has haunted her for years. “It’s the highest quality steel, especially chosen by a regime that needed to keep its citizens locked in, otherwise they’d have run away,” she said.
We ended our four-day journey in Eichsfeld, a Catholic enclave that is famous for successfully defying the regime, and rested our weary limbs on a bench at the former border – a gift to the green belt initiative from none other than the man who had initiated the monumental changes, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Way to go
Getting there
Air Berlin (0871 5000 737, airberlin.com) flies Stansted-Hanover and Stansted-Berlin from £48 rtn inc tax.
Border trail
German tour operator Wandern im Harz (0049 5322 559603, wandern-im-harz.de) arranges hikes along the border trail from April to November. Hikes last four to six nights; the four-night tour costs €230pp, including hotel accommodation, transfers to and from the nearest railway station, breakfast, packed lunch, introductory talk, map, information material, luggage transfers and SOS assistance, but no guide.
Further information
Harz Mountains Tourist Board: +5321 34040, harzinfo.de. For details of the wider route across Europe: greenbelteurope.eu.
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Shrinking sheep riddle solved
July 2nd, 2009 |
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Shorter, milder winters caused by global warming to blame for steady decrease in size of St Kilda sheep, experts say
The mysterious shrinking sheep of St Kilda sounds like a job for super-sleuth Sherlock Holmes.
The case involves a rare herd of wild sheep on the remote Scottish island – known in Scottish Gaelic as Hirta – that are refusing to bow to conventional evolutionary pressure, which says big is best. Instead, they have steadily decreased in size since the 1980s.
Scientists have now stepped in to solve the conundrum, and fingered the culprit as the new Moriarty of mankind: global warming.
The experts say shorter and milder winters mean that lambs do not need to put as much weight on during their first few months of life. Smaller animals that would have perished in harsh winters a few decades ago can now survive to their first birthday. As a result, the average weight of the sheep has dropped by 81g each year.
The difference is too small to see with the naked eye, but it is important because it shows how animal populations can respond to climate change. Tim Coulson, a biologist at Imperial College London who worked on the study, said: “If animals can respond [to climate change] and can respond fairly rapidly, then evolution could play a role in helping them to adapt.” The results appear in the journal Science.
Biologists have reported that several species of birds and fish are changing size and shape, which could be down to global warming. Coulson said it was difficult to say what the response of the St Kilda sheep could mean for other species.
Their island home, St Kilda, is just “vegetation and sheep” he said. In other cases, predators and competition for food from other animals complicate the picture and make it difficult to tease out the influence of changing climate.
The study looked at a herd of wild Soay sheep on Hirta that biologists have studied since 1985. Dogs are forbidden on the island, so the scientists acted as human sheepdogs to herd the animals, which are expert jumpers, towards areas where they could be weighed. “These aren’t fluffy white sheep, these are small and brown and wild animals,” Coulson said.
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Puffins get satnav to trace decline
July 1st, 2009 |
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Severin Carrell meets the zoologist investigating the Farne islands’ fall in puffin numbers
Meet the satnav seabird
July 1st, 2009 |
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Stubby seabird with comedy beak to help scientists investigate steep decline in seabird populations across Britain
Short, stubby and gifted with a distinctive comedy beak, the puffin is an iconic bird. But seabird may also be the bellwether for a crisis in the seas around Britain.
The puffin now has a new role, helping scientists investigate the causes of a steep decline in seabird numbers across the British Isles using miniaturised digital tracking devices, including one borrowed from in-car satellite navigation systems.
Data for last year shows puffin numbers suddenly and sharply crashed. Scientists found that on the most significant North Sea colonies, puffin populations fell by a third or more. Adult puffins were malnourished, with large numbers washed up dead along the UK’s coast.
Confronted by other evidence of a significant change in the North Sea’s health, which has led to declines of up to 40% in seabird numbers in just eight years, conservationists have begun a series of urgent studies into its possible causes. Many believe climate change is the main culprit.
On the Farne islands, a low-lying archipelago off the Northumberland coast 50 miles north of Newcastle, puffins are now being fitted with equipment which should help plug large gaps in scientific knowledge about the species and, in turn, other threatened seabirds.
Scientists will use three different devices on up to three dozen puffins: GPS monitors; “geo-locators” which work differently; and time and depth recorders.
They will monitor how and where they feed and behave once they leave their burrows on the Farnes, and track their movements while they winter at sea. Each puffin will carry only one small device which will be attached with super-strength glue onto its back.
Food is a critical issue: zoologists believe last year’s population slump – when numbers plummeted on the Farnes from 58,000 in 2003 to just 38,000 – is closely tied to a collapse in their main food source, the sandeel.
Populations of the slender, silvery fish, whose availability may be crucial to the puffins’ long-term survival, have been in decline since the 1990s because of heavy trawling for fishfarm feed and exposure to the changes in plankton distribution brought about by rising sea temperatures.
Puffins nest in dark, dry burrows that the birds carve out each spring from the soft, sandy earth, shaded by sea campion, nettles and coarse, hardy grasses. Their behaviour on land and within sight of the islands is well understood. However at sea, scientists have been largely guessing.
Dr Richard Bevan, a zoologist with Newcastle university who is leading the National Trust research on the Farnes, said: “All we can record at the nests is the number of chicks, how quickly the chicks are growing and the numbers that fledge, but what we don’t know is what they do as soon as they fly away.
“Puffins can theoretically be foraging anywhere within a 60km radius of the islands, which is a huge area for us to cover. But the further they have to forage the more energy they use, and the intervals between when they feed their chicks will increase, so chicks will be fed less and are less likely to do well.”
The results of the hi-tech monitoring will help conservationists establish whether puffins have regular feeding grounds and allow them to protect those places. Evidence that puffins spread across a wide area would present a more difficult problem, perhaps increasing pressure for a more substantial conservation effort.
That information will also help protect the significant Arctic tern, sandwich tern, guillemot and shag colonies on the Farnes, which are home to approximately 160,000 adult seabirds and their offspring.
This research could prove crucial. Last month, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, the UK’s most authoritative conservation research agency, reported that about 600,000 seabirds had been lost since 2000, 9% of the total population. There are now 40% fewer black-legged kittiwake – another bird that feeds on sandeels – and 33% fewer European shags breeding in the UK than 40 years ago. On Shetland, globally significant colonies have collapsed.
Yet this year’s research so far has given Bevan and the trust grounds for optimism. Their trawls for sandeels around the Farnes suggested the tiny fish were, this year at least, relatively abundant. Puffins are flying in – their short wings urgently flapping 400 times a minute, with sandeels dangling from their beaks.
Bevan believes last year’s population crash may be explained by unusual north-easterly winds during last year’s breeding season, which may have cooled the seas at the wrong time. Herring – a fish which competes for sandeels – were also abundant, and may have out-eaten the puffins.
Last year’s population crash may be a blip, not a trend. But it does indicate there are changes in the marine environment which scientists do not yet understand, Bevan added.
“It’s a warning sign. I’m willing to bet that this year numbers would be up from last year, but not up to pre-2008 levels. The problem is, we don’t know what’s happening out there. There’s a change in the ecology of the North Sea. What the implications are of that, we have no idea.”
Seabirds in trouble
Black-legged kittiwake
Its numbers have fallen by 35% since 2000 due to declines in sand eels caused by overfishing and climate change. Breeding success has fallen markedly on the North Sea.
Herring gull
One of the UK’s best known gulls, notorious for scavenging from trawlers and city dumps, but is a new entry to the UK “red list” of threatened birds because its numbers are sharply falling, down by 69% since 1969 and 33% since 2000.
Arctic skua
This relatively rare inshore seabird was put on the UK’s “red list” of threatened species this year as its numbers are declining rapidly: 2,100 were counted in 2002, but it has declined by 57% since then.
Seabirds on the up
Great skua
Its numbers have rocketed by nearly 400% since 1969 and by 56% in the last eight years alone – but at the expense of others. The large scavenger has outmuscled the herring gull for trawler discards and preyed on Arctic skuas. Cuts in discarded fish suggest it will increasingly have to steal food from other seabirds to survive.
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Garden wildlife photography contest
June 30th, 2009 |
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Eco fears over invading ladybirds
June 30th, 2009 |
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A voracious predator, the Asian harlequin ladybird has spread across the UK since its arrival from continental Europe in 2004
Millions of very hungry ladybirds are poised to create ecological havoc for hundreds of Britain’s native species, scientists warn today.
Experts said the anticipated warm summer would provide the perfect conditions for the Asian harlequin ladybird to breed and prepare for a springtime assault. “They are creating a huge genetic stock ready for next year,” said Helen Roy, a scientist with the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
The insect, a voracious predator, has spread across the UK since its arrival from continental Europe in 2004. The bugs have been spotted as far north as Orkney, though they remain strongest in south-east England, where they have overrun many of London’s parks.
“We believe that the negative impacts of the harlequin on Britain will be far-reaching and disruptive, with the potential to affect over a thousand of our native species,” she said. “It’s a big and voracious predator, it will eat lots of different insects, soft fruit and all kinds of things.”
Unlike British ladybirds, such as the most common seven-spot, the harlequin does not need a cold winter for adults to reach sexual maturity, and so be able to breed. “That gives them a massive advantage,” Roy said.
The ladybird, originally from Asia, was introduced to Holland and other European countries to control aphids on crops. From there, it crossed the English Channel on the wind, or hidden on fruit and flowers.
A public survey launched in 2005 has tracked its progress using some 30,000 online records. Roy said the results revealed a “staggering expansion”. Scientists fear the harlequins will push out natural rivals through competition for food. They can munch through more than 12,000 aphids a year, as well as feed on other species such as lacewing larvae. The harlequin has even been recorded eating the large caterpillar of a brimstone butterfly.
Scientists from five organisations will present the latest findings on the spread of the harlequin this week at the Royal Society summer exhibition, and warn its arrival will mean “one winner, 1,000 losers”.
Scientists are exploring whether harlequin numbers could be controlled using their few native enemies, such as fungal disease, male-killing bacteria and parasitic wasps and flies. One idea is to encourage the transmission of a sexually transmitted mite that makes some ladybirds infertile.
The researchers said people should not take matters into their own hands. Vigilante action against the harlequin invaders would make no difference to the overall population and could inadvertently kill similar-looking native species.
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DNA reveals trail of ivory smugglers
June 28th, 2009 |
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Scientists have used a revolutionary genetic technique to pinpoint the area of Africa where smugglers are slaughtering elephants to feed the worldwide illegal ivory trade.
Using a DNA map of Africa’s elephants, they have found that most recent seizures of tusks can be traced to animals that had grazed in the Selous and Niassa game reserves on the Tanzania and Mozambique borders.
The discovery suggests that only a handful of cartels are responsible for most of the world’s booming trade in illegal ivory and for the annual slaughter of tens of thousands of elephants. The extent of this trade is revealed through recent seizures of thousands of tusks in separate raids on docks in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan. These were aimed at satisfying the far east’s growing appetite for ivory, a new status symbol for the middle classes of the region’s swelling industrialised economies.
As a result, ivory prices have soared from $200 a kilogram in 2004 to more than $6,000. At the same time, scientists estimate that between 8% and 10% of Africa’s elephants are now being slaughtered each year to meet demand.
“In the past, law enforcement agencies – including Interpol – thought these shipments of ivory had been put together by traders cherry-picking small stockpiles across Africa,” said Professor Sam Wasser, director of the University of Washington’s Centre for Conservation Biology, where the DNA elephant map was developed.
“Our work shows that isn’t true. The vast majority of poaching is being carried out by a few big organisations – possibly one or two major syndicates – that are targeting one area and then hammering its elephants. It is grim, but it also suggests we can target our anti-poaching efforts very specifically by focussing efforts on these regions.”
At present, Tanzania is at the centre of the world’s ivory slaughter. However, other work by Wasser and his team indicates that different areas, including parts of Zambia and Malawi, have been targeted in the recent past.
Ivory poaching was halted by an international campaign in the 1990s after it reached a peak between 1979 and 1989, when more than 700,000 elephants were killed for their tusks. However, aid that helps African nations fight poachers has dried up and the illegal ivory trade has returned to its previous high levels.
Killing for tusks is a particularly gruesome trade. Elephants are highly intelligent animals whose sophisticated social ties are exploited by poachers. They will often shoot young elephants to draw in a grieving parent, which is then killed for its tusks. “Our estimates suggest that more than 38,000 elephants were killed using techniques such as this in 2006 and that the annual death rate is even higher today,” said Wasser.
His team’s technique – outlined in the current issue of Scientific American – involves two separate sets of analyses. First, volunteers and researchers across Africa collected samples of elephant dung. Each contains plentiful amounts of DNA from cells, sloughed from the intestines of individual animals. These provide material for DNA fingerprints, which have since been mapped for the whole of Africa. Animals from one area have very similar DNA fingerprints, the researchers have found.
As part of the second analysis, a section of tusk seized from smugglers is ground up and its DNA is carefully extracted. Again a DNA fingerprint is made and compared with those on the dung map, in order to pinpoint the origin of the elephant.
In this way, Wasser and his colleagues analysed ivory seized when more than 11 tonnes of tusks were found in containers in raids on Taiwan and Hong Kong docks in July and August 2006. About 1,500 tusks were discovered and all were traced to elephants from the Selous game reserve, a Unesco heritage site in Tanzania, and the nearby Niassa game reserve in Mozambique. However, Japanese authorities – who had made another seizure of ivory that summer in Osaka – refused to co-operate and have since burnt the 260 tusks they found before their origins could be established. “You can draw your own conclusions,” said Wasser.
Since then, major seizures of ivory have been made in Vietnam and the Philippines, both this year, and Wasser and his team are now preparing to use their DNA map to trace its origins.
“Ivory is now traded globally in the same illegal manner as drugs and weapons,” said Wasser. “It is shameful that this has happened and we need to press the countries whose elephants are being targeted this way and get them to halt this trade.”
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