ApocaDocuments (4) for the "Species Collapse" scenario from this week
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Thu, Jun 30, 2011
from National Geographic:
Hold the Champagne: Highway to Split Serengeti After All?
But after a closer look at the official Tanzanian statement behind the reports, it's questions, not toasts, that are being raised, and conservationists are divided as to whether it means the highway is truly canceled....
Officially, the road was supposed to boost Tanzania's economy by linking isolated, impoverished Serengeti villages outside the park with the Tanzanian city of Arusha, to the east, and the shores of Lake Victoria and other central African nations, to the west.
Some conservationists, though, have speculated that the real motive for the road is to accommodate mining interests or to lay the groundwork for a railway....
Duke's Pimm agreed. "Many in the conservation community are not popping the champagne cork just yet," he said. "This is not enough."
Gravel or paved, an expanded road that bisects the park will be devastating to Serengeti wildlife, he added.
"A road by any other name is still going to be a disaster," Pimm said. "I think this is sophistry. ... They're still going to build a road." ...
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We just want to migrate the minerals to where they belong -- what's wrong with that?
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Tue, Jun 28, 2011
from New Scientist:
Tasmanian devils were sitting ducks for deadly cancer
Despite its ferocious nature, the Tasmanian devil is a creature faced with extinction, the victim of a gruesome facial tumour disease. Now the first genetic sequencing of these carnivorous marsupials has revealed that we had a hand in their decline: centuries of human interference left the devils stripped of genetic diversity and vulnerable to disease.
This meant that when the parasitic face cancer dubbed "Devil facial tumour disease" appeared in 1996 it rapidly spread through the entire population. As a result, the Tasmanian devil, or Sarcophilus harrisii, population has fallen over 60 per cent since 1996.
The disease is transmitted by physical contact, mostly biting during sex. It is almost always fatal and has spread across most of Tasmania....
Some studies estimate the marsupials could be wiped out within decades....
Humans had a heavy hand in this. First the devils were wiped out in mainland Australia by dingoes brought in by settlers, then those that remained in Tasmania were hunted as pests, causing several population crashes. As their genetic diversity was slashed, the devils were left vulnerable to disease. ...
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We didn't give the devil his due.
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Tue, Jun 28, 2011
from New York Times:
Greatest Threat to Caribou Herd in Canada Isn't From Wolves
Humans are a much bigger problem than wolves for a caribou herd in the oil sands area of Alberta, Canada, scientists reported last week in Frontiers in Ecology.
Studies of scat of moose, caribou and wolves in the area showed that caribou accounted for only 10 percent of the animals consumed by wolves. Eighty percent of the wolves' diet was deer, with moose making up the remainder. Wolves' preference for deer, the researchers conclude, draws them away from the areas where caribou thrive.
But the oil sands contain the second largest reserve of petroleum in the world, and so they face a heavy human presence as they are developed. And by looking at hormone levels in caribou scat, the scientists found that when humans were most active in an area, caribou nutrition was poorest and psychological stress highest. When oil crews left, the animals relaxed and nutrition improved....
The scientists reported that removing wolves, favored by government and industry, could do serious damage to the ecosystem, and fails to help preserve the caribou. (The study was paid for by Statoil Canada, an energy company with oil leases in the area.)
The scientists said if development trends continue, within 30 years the caribou herd on the east side of the Athabasca River will be no more. ...
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Government and industry have such a herd mentality.
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Mon, Jun 27, 2011
from The Telegraph:
RSPB to destroy rats on Henderson Island
The RSPB will be destroying rodents introduced by humans on to Henderson Island, an uninhabited part of the UK's Pitcairn overseas territory, in a bid to save the endangered Henderson petrel which nests only on the island.
Rats are eating 25,000 newly hatched Henderson petrel chicks each year on the World Heritage-listed island, driving the species towards extinction.
The Henderson petrel is the most threatened of the four petrel species which nest on the island, as it is found nowhere else in the world, but all four have seen populations plummet as a result of the rats.
The rodents, which were introduced by Polynesian settlers, eat 95 percent of chicks alive within the first week of hatching and the number of petrels has dropped from millions of pairs 800 years ago to an estimated 40,000 now, the RSPB said....
"People introduced the rats which are threatening the survival of the Henderson petrel and now we're trying to make amends before it's too late." ...
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If we make all the amends that are due, who knows what may happen?
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