ApocaDocuments (5) matching "ecosystem interrelationships" from this week
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Sun, Feb 22, 2009
from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Great Lakes scourge infects West
...Zebra and quagga mussels have been making a particular mess of the Great Lakes ecosystem and economy since they were discovered in the late 1980s. The filter-feeding machines have cost this region billions of dollars by plugging industrial water intake pipes, starving fish populations and spawning noxious algae outbreaks that have trashed some of the Midwest's most prized shoreline.
For nearly two decades the western U.S. was spared this havoc.
No more.
The first quagga mussel west of the Continental Divide was discovered on Jan. 6, 2007. It was likely a stowaway hiding on the hull or in the bilge water of a Midwestern pleasure boat pulled across the Great Plains, over the Rockies and down a boat ramp at Lake Mead near Las Vegas, where a marina worker found some suspicious shells clinging to an anchor.... What took decades to unfold in the Great Lakes has played out in a matter of months in Lake Mead. Quaggas can lay eggs six or seven times a year in the warmer water, compared with once or twice a year in the Great Lakes.
If you drained Lake Mead above Hoover Dam, says National Park Service biologist Bryan Moore, it would reveal that brown canyon walls that were mussel-free just two years ago are now black with quaggas at densities of up to 55,000 per square meter. ...
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Quaggas sound like a possible renewable resource to me.
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Tue, Feb 17, 2009
from Mother Jones:
What Invasive Species Are Trying to Tell Us
Nowadays when species obey the commandment to "be fruitful and multiply, to fill the waters in the seas, to let the birds multiply on the Earth," all is decidedly not good. Proliferation on a biblical scale generally signals biological apocalypse, what scientists call invasion—the establishment and spread of introduced species in places they've never lived before. Species have always been on the move. But they've also been held in check by Earth's geographical barriers, like mountains and oceans. Today the rate of invasions has skyrocketed because of our barrier-hopping technology—jets, ships, trains, cars, which transport everything from mammals to microorganisms far beyond their natural ranges. The process is further accelerated by global climate change, that enormous human experiment unwittingly redistricting the natural world.
The results devastate both planetary and human health—most disease organisms, from influenza to malaria, are invaders over most of their range -- and few invasions can be stopped once they're successfully established. Biological invasions are now second only to habitat loss as a cause of extinction -- the leading cause of the extinction of birds and the second-leading cause of the extinction of fish. Twenty percent of vertebrate species facing extinction are doing so because of pressures from invasive predators or competitors. In a classic example, brown tree snakes arrived in Guam (snakeless but for a worm-sized insectivore) sometime after World War II and systematically ate 15 bird species into extinction while consuming enough small reptiles and mammals to redesign the food web. They also began traveling an expanding network of power lines, electrocuting themselves and causing about 200 power failures annually. In all, invasive species are estimated to cost $1.4 trillion each year. ...
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For some reason I can't hear what they're trying to tell us. What? Must be nothing.
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Tue, Feb 17, 2009
from Rutland Herald:
VT Residents Warned about Bats and White Nose Syndrome
WATERBURY -- The Vermont Agency of Natural Resource's Fish & Wildlife Department recently issued a reminder to residents who live near caves and mines to expect unusual levels of bat activity as a result of the White Nose Syndrome that is afflicting hibernating bats.
Reports of sick bats have been coming in most recently from Norwich, Thetford and Strafford, near the Elizabeth Mine, where thousands of bats hibernate each winter.
Some people are finding dead bats on their porches or screen windows, some have bats entering their homes and some are seeing bats flying during the day.
"One of the symptoms of White Nose Syndrome is that bats are extremely emaciated, and many are awakening early and flying out of the cave in search of food," said State Wildlife Biologist Scott Darling. ...
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Beware: once again the flapping dead are on the move.
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Tue, Feb 17, 2009
from Indianapolis Star:
Study: Birds wintering farther north could signal climate change
A recently released report by the National Audubon Society has tied changes in migratory bird habits to global warming. According to data from the group's annual Christmas bird count gathered over the past 40 years, nearly 60 percent of the 305 bird species sampled in North America now winter farther north than they did previously.... "The birds are an indicator of what's happening," said Greg Butcher, the lead scientist on the study and the National Audubon Society's director of bird conservation. "They are showing us that global warming has been going on for years, and it's having strong biological effects in Indiana and elsewhere." ...
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Do those numbers include the migratory patterns of canaries in coal mines?
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Tue, Feb 17, 2009
from New York Times:
The Unintended Consequences of Changing Nature's Balance
In 1985, Australian scientists kicked off an ambitious plan: to kill off non-native cats that had been prowling the island's slopes since the early 19th century. The program began out of apparent necessity -- the cats were preying on native burrowing birds. Twenty-four years later, a team of scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division and the University of Tasmania reports that the cat removal unexpectedly wreaked havoc on the island ecosystem.
With the cats gone, the island's rabbits (also non-native) began to breed out of control, ravaging native plants and sending ripple effects throughout the ecosystem. The findings were published in the Journal of Applied Ecology online in January. ...
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In the Battle of the Invasives, nothing wins.
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