ApocaDocuments (5) for the "Species Collapse" scenario from this week
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Sat, May 15, 2010
from AP, via PhysOrg.com:
Asian ivory black market poses danger to African elephant
Carefully, the Chinese ivory dealer pulled out an elephant tusk cloaked in bubble wrap and hidden in a bag of flour. Its price: $17,000. "Do you have any idea how many years I could get locked away in prison for having this?" said the dealer, a short man in his 40s, who gave his name as Chen.
A surge in demand for ivory in Asia is fuelling an illicit trade in elephant tusks, especially from Africa. Over the past eight years, the price of ivory has gone up from about $100 per kilogram ($100 per 2.2 pounds) to $1,800, creating a lucrative black market.
Experts warn that if the trade is not stopped, elephant populations could dramatically plummet. The elephants could be nearly extinct by 2020, some activists say. Sierra Leone lost its last elephants in December, and Senegal has fewer than 10 left.... In Kenya alone, poaching deaths spiked seven-fold in the last three years, culminating in 271 elephant killings last year. The Tsavo National Park area had 50,000 elephants in the 1960s; today, it has 11,000. And at least 10 Chinese nationals have been arrested at Kenya's airport trying to transport ivory back to Asia since the beginning of last year. ...
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I think the elephant decline is just natural variation.
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Sat, May 15, 2010
from Nola.com:
Tiniest victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may turn out to be most important
But scientists who know these estuaries best are more concerned about a less photogenic community.
The grass, microscopic algae and critters living in the wafer-thin top layer of marsh mud - called the benthic community - are the fuel that drives the whole system. If it's covered with oil, everything above, including birds, fish and cute, furry critters, will be in trouble. And so will the humans who rely on the marsh for storm protection and seafood production.
"The top two millimeters of that marsh muck is where the action is in a coastal estuary," said Kevin Carman, dean of the College of Basic Sciences at LSU. "That's the base, the food that fuels the whole system... fish, shrimp, oysters, all the species that rely on the estuary." Half of the all the life created in the one of the world's most productive estuaries takes place in this slimy zone just seven-hundredths of an inch thick. It's a world too small for the human eye to detect and involves creatures few people have ever heard of, but one that looms huge for the larger critters in the system.... But if the oil is thick enough to coat the soil as well as the leaves and stems and seeps into the soil to affect the roots, the impact could be far longer, and much more serious.
"In that case it might be five or six years before the oil is degraded enough, because the soil would have no oxygen and no light and the organisms that can degrade the oil would not be there," he said. "We seen examples at inland spills when the soil was soaked, and nothing really grew there for four years." ...
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And here I thought the oil would work like moisturizer!
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Fri, May 14, 2010
from BBC:
Climate change link to lizard extinction
Climate change could wipe out 20 percent of the world's lizard species by 2080, according to a global-scale study.
An international team of scientists also found that rising temperatures had aready driven 12 percent of Mexico's lizard populations to extinction.
Based on this discovery, the team was able to make global predictions using an "extinction model".
They conclude, in an article in Science journal, that "lizards have already crossed a threshold for extinctions".
Although the grim prediction for 2080 could change if humans are able to slow global climate warming, the scientists say that a sharp decline in their numbers had already begun and would continue for decades. ...
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Pshaw, in 70 years we'll have fixed every problem.
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Wed, May 12, 2010
from SciDev.net:
Biodiversity leaders lament failure to reach the powerful
Poor communication has contributed to the failure to meet the 2010 global conservation targets, according to a major report released yesterday (May 10).
The world is nearing ′tipping points′ in which whole ecosystems could collapse, said the third Global Biodiversity Outlook, produced by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
But, though the importance of biodiversity loss has reached some parts of many governments around the world, it has failed to be absorbed by those with the power to act, the report finds....
"The CBD has very nearly universal participation from the world's governments, yet those involved in its implementation rarely have the influence to promote action at the level required to effect real change," says the report. ...
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There, there, biologists. You just go and do another of your little studies, and we'll put it on our "to be read" stack.
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Mon, May 10, 2010
from BBC:
Nature loss 'to damage economies'
The Earth's ongoing nature losses may soon begin to hit national economies, a major UN report has warned.
The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) says that some ecosystems may soon reach "tipping points" where they rapidly become less useful to humanity.
Such tipping points could include rapid dieback of forest, algal takeover of watercourses and mass coral reef death.
Last month, scientists confirmed that governments would not meet their target of curbing biodiversity loss by 2010.... The global abundance of vertebrates - the group that includes mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish - fell by about one-third between 1970 and 2006, the UN says.... "If the world made equivalent losses in share prices, there would be a rapid response and widespread panic."... "Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity, or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over nine billion people by 2050." ...
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And who are you to be calling my belief system an illusion?
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