The Ultimate Price of Ivory

As an international convention decides what to do with over 100 tons of old ivory, the slaughter of elephants in Africa continues

African elephants are quickly disappearing to the ivory trade. With less than 500,000 remaining, their numbers have been reduced to just 35 percent of what they were 1980, mostly to supply consumer demand for ivory in China, Japan and Thailand.

This week, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) will decide whether to grant requests by Tanzania and Zambia to reduce the protection status of their elephants so that they can offload 112 tons of their stockpiled ivory with a one-time sale.

Kenya and Mali, on the other hand, are leading a group of African nations calling for a 20-year ban on ivory exports, arguing that any legal trading encourages poaching, which has lately been on the rise.

An international team of 27 conservationists has weighed in on the debate, writing in the March 12 edition of the journal Science that permitting the sale could lead to increased slaughter of elephants throughout the continent, according to ScienceDaily.com.

The scientists point to Tanzania and Zambia as major corridors for the illegal ivory trade, citing DNA evidence of ivory seized in 2002 and 2006 that traces back to the two countries.

"These two countries are at the center of the illegal ivory trade in Africa. It's kind of unbelievable that their requests have gotten this far," said Samuel Wasser, a University of Washington conservation biologist and lead author of the Science paper.

As CITES debates the request of Tanzania and Zambia, they must remember the main question: Do we want elephants or ivory? Because in the end, we can't have both.

GET INVOLVED

• Sign an Avaaz.org petition urging the 175 parties of the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to reject any exemptions in the global ban on the ivory trade, to extend that ban for at least 20 years, and to take all necessary steps to enforce that ban and protect the elephants
• Sign a Care2 petition to permanently ban the sale of ivory
  
• Sign a petition urging eBay to ban all ivory sales on its site
• Adopt an elephant from the World Wildlife Fund for $25
• Donate to Save the Elephants

RELATED POSTS

• Elephants in Vietnam: Just 80 Left (December 3, 2009)
• Of People, Pachyderms and Peppers (October 20, 2009)
• Bye Bye Bangkok (August 15, 2009)
• Elephants Beaten At Ringling (July 24, 2009)
• RIP Ned (May 28, 2009)
• Free Lucky (April 27, 2009)
  
• Remembering Buddha's Precious Pachyderm (February 26, 2009)
• L.A. Times Poll: Should Billy the Elephant Remain at the L.A. Zoo? (January 9, 2009)
  
• 2,000 Elephants Missing in Chad (December 15, 2008)
• Getting Close to the Elephants of Samburu (August 19, 2008)
• Elephant Extinction Possible by 2020 (August 3, 2008)
• Future Uncertain for Thailand's Elephants (July 31, 2008)
• Listening to the Secret Lives of Elephants (July 5, 2008)

image: The tusks and face of an elephant killed for its ivory lie on the ground in an African forest (credit: Karl Ammann).

A New Home for America's Jaguars

North America's largest native big cat is finally getting its own critical habitat. The only question is where

In the middle of the 19th century, jaguars roamed from southern Brazil and Argentina as far north as the Grand Canyon. But by 1990, it was thought that they had been driven to extinction from illegal hunting and habitat loss.

Then in 1996, two male jaguars were photographed in southwestern Arizona and New Mexico -- the first documented sightings of jaguars in the United States since two were illegally killed in Arizona in 1971. One of them, Macho B, became a national icon of jaguar conservation and perseverance. The following year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the jaguar as an endangered species.

Now, after a court ruling following a decade-long fight led by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Fish & Wildlife Service is finally designating a critical habitat for North America's largest native big cat.

But the feline can't breathe easy just yet: The question of where the jaguar's habitat will be located still remains unanswered.

The Center is proposing the Sky Islands and Gila headwaters/Mogollon Rim regions of Arizona and New Mexico as critical habitats vital to jaguar recovery.

The Fish & Wildlife Service is accepting public comments on the matter, due today.

GET INVOLVED

• Sign a letter to FWS in support of the Center's proposal to designate critical habitat for the endangered jaguar (due today, March 15)
  

RELATED POSTS

• Tyger! Tyger! (Not Burning So Bright) (February 16, 2010)
• Thousands Protest Indian Tiger Conservation Plan (January 1, 2009)
• Saving Sumatran Forests, Keepers of Carbon (October 11, 2008)
• Celebrities Join World Bank to Save Tigers (June 12, 2008)

image: Macho B

Titan's Sikun Labyrinthus

Scientists have found eerie similarities between Earth and Titan's largest moon

Utah's White Canyon. Papua New Guinea's Darai Hills. China's Gaungxi Province.

These three very different regions of the world have one thing in common: karst. Littered with sinkholes , karst is a type of landscape shaped by the dissolution of bedrock.

This terrain is strange on Earth. But what is even eerier is the discovery of a similar landscape in the Sikun Labyrinthus region on Saturn's largest moon Titan, the only object other than Earth on which astronomers have found evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid. The presence of karst terrain on Titan suggests the presence of underground caves.

"Even though Titan is an alien world with much lower temperatures, we keep learning how many similarities there are to Earth," said Karl Mitchell, a Cassini radar team associate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, in a recent NASA press release. "The karst-like landscape suggests there is a lot happening right now under the surface that we can't see."

"I've been in love with Titan since Cassini beamed down the first images of Titan's Shangri-La sand sea," said Mike Malaska, organic chemist and Cassini radar team collaborator based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. "It's been amazing for the public to see data come down so quickly and get data sets so rich that you can practically imagine riding along with the spacecraft."

GET INVOLVED

• Participate in Cassini's Saturn Observation Campaign
• View a video of Titan's canyon country
  
• Sign a petition to add the option for US taxpayers to contribute to NASA on the IRS 1040 tax form
  
• Donate to the American Astronomical Society
  
• Download this month's free night sky map and calendar from Skymaps.com

RELATED POSTS

• Encedalus Lives Again (February 12, 2010)
• Saturnian Hex (December 11, 2009)
• Saturn's Vanishing Rings (August 11, 2009)
• Orbiting Saturn, Five Years Later (July 10, 2009)
  
• Goodbye Ulysses (June 30, 2009)
• An Old Lake on the Red Planet (June 20, 2009)
• A Possible New World Fit for Life (April 28, 2009)

image: This artistic interpretation of the Sikun Labyrinthus area on Saturn's moon Titan is based on radar and imaging data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft and the descent imaging and spectral radiometer on the European Space Agency's Huygens probe. The relative elevations are speculative and organized around the assumption that fluids are flowing downhill. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/ESA/SSI and M. Malaska/B. Jonsson)

The Spirit Bear

British Columbia's rare and mythical white bear cubs may lose their mothers to a trophy hunt next month

In the rainforest of the central and north coast of British Columbia lives the Kermode Bear (Ursus americanus kermodei), a subspecies of the American Black Bear.

Due to a unique recessive trait in their gene pool, about 10% of these bears have a white or cream-colored coat, a feature that has made it a prominent animal in the mythology of Canadian First Nations and American Indians, who call it the "Spirit Bear."

Next month, a trophy hunt threatens to edge the Spirit Bear towards extinction. Only about 400 of these rare animals remain.

"While Spirit Bears themselves are protected from hunting, Spirit Bear cubs could face starvation if their black-coated mothers are gunned down," said Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke in an email.

"Yet the government of British Columbia has approved a massive hunt across 98 percent of the black bear’s range putting this rare gene in grave jeopardy."

GET INVOLVED

• Sign a National Resources Defense Council letter urging British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell to end the trophy bear hunting and protect the rare Spirit Bear
  
• Watch an International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) video of orphaned bear cubs

RELATED POSTS

• The Fate of the Tongass (March 9, 2010)
• How Much for That Polar Bear Rug? (February 1, 2010)
• The Final Act for India's Dancing Bears (January 7, 2010)
• Protecting Polar Bears (December 23, 2009)
• No More Lox for Bears (November 24, 2009)
• Slipping Away: The Polar Bear (November 17, 2009)
• Farewell to the Polar Bears (January 14, 2009)
• Closing Off the Arctic (July 23, 2009)
• Gone in 75 Years: Polar Bears (June 29, 2009)
• Salazar to Decide Polar Bear Fate Today (May 8, 2009)
• Ursus Melancholius (April 19, 2009)
• The Russian Bear Hunt (November 28, 2008)

image: Jackmont

The Darwin Effect

A new interactive online report assesses the impact of On the Origin of Species

In 1859, English naturalist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Introducing his then-radical theory that species evolved from a common ancestor through a process called natural selection, Origins is the foundation upon which evolutionary biology has been built.

But the effects of his revolutionary idea have been far-reaching, impacting such fields as anthropology, biology, geosciences, polar sciences and astronomy.

So, exactly how has this seminal book influenced science and society during the last 150 years?

An international group of scientists attempts to answer this question in a new, beautifully illustrated National Science Foundation (NSF) interactive online report, "Evolution of Evolution: 150 Years of Darwin's On the Origin of Species."

The report features a comprehensive timeline of scientific discoveries that gives particular attention to evolution-related events spanning the decades from Nicolaus Copernicus' 1543 treatise supporting heliocentrism to the faster sequencing of genomes in 2007.

Darwin was also painfully aware of mankind's disregard for our fellow planetary inhabitants. "Animals," he said, "whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal."

GET INVOLVED

• Sign a Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) letter urging American lawmakers to increase conservation funding directed overseas to save global priority species in their natural habitats (U.S. citizens)
• Sign a petition to the United Nations to show your support of biodiversity
• Support Conservation International campaigns to protect biodiversity hotspots around the world
• Build a pond and study the many species that will undoubtedly make it home, or at least visit
  
• Join the "Million Ponds Project"
• Analyze and reduce your impact on the environment with the National Grid Floe

RELATED POSTS

• Killing Enemies, Saving Species (February 23, 2010)
• Dig a Hole, Fill It with Water (February 9, 2010)
• Bye Bye Biodiversity (October 15, 2009)
• New Kids on the Block (June 4, 2009)
• The Sands of Time (May 22, 2009)
  
• The Missing Link (May 21, 2009)
• The Air That We Breathe (April 15, 2009)
• The Shadow Lives of Others (March 3, 2009)
• Fighting Where the Wild Things Are (February 27, 2009)
• From Snakes on a Boat to Guam's Silent Forests (February 7, 2009)
• The Common Ancestor of All Life on Earth (December 21, 2008)
• Saving Wildlife on the Back Nine (December 4, 2008)
• So Long to Species at Walden (Yellowstone, Too) (October 30, 2008)
• One-Third of Coral Reefs Face Extinction (July 11, 2008)

image: J. Cameron, 1869

The Fate of the Tongass

Congress considers a bill to allow a single corporation to clearcut pieces of America's biggest ancient forest

Sprawling across the Alaska Panhandle, the Tongass National Forest is by far the largest of America's 155 national forests. At 26,000 square miles, it's about the size of West Virginia.

Teeming with old-growth spruce, cedar and hemlock trees, Tongass is a prime example of virgin temperate rainforest. And it is biologically rich, with populations of bald eagles, black and brown bears and five different species of Pacific salmon.

But a bill working its way through Congress could lead to the destruction of much of the remaining ancient forests of Tongass. If passed, S.881: Southeast Alaska Native Land Entitlement Finalization Act will grant extensive clearcutting right to Sealaska, a large timber corporation. The bill is sponsored by the Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Clearcutting is a controversial practice that cuts down most or all trees in a harvest area whether or not they are commercially viable, leaving no canopy. This practice leads to a host of problems, such as soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, ecosystem instability, increased wildfires and loss of carbon storage leading to increased global warming.

"Sealaska Corporation has already clearcut some 300,000 acres of the best and biggest trees on the Tongass, exporting the timber to international markets," said Kathy Kilmer of the Wilderness Society in an email.

"The Tongass must be protected for its ecological values and to help local communities transition to a more sustainable forest economy," Kilmer said.

S. 881 "does not represent the future for Southeast Alaska. It represents a dying industry that should be relegated to the past," writes Myla Poelstra in SitNews (Ketchikan, Alaska).

"While Sealaska is requesting access to new lands to support its declining timber base, the rest of Southeast Alaska is looking to more sustainable avenues for their future economy. Just like the 'gold rush' days of the late 1800's, the timber industry's time in Southeast Alaska has clearly come and gone. The main reason for this are changing attitudes toward conservation and sustainable resource use. The economy of the world has changed, and it is no longer acceptable to destroy irreplaceable resources to profit small numbers of people. Sealaska's methods of clearcut harvesting can never be represented as sustainable, as evidenced by their selections in this bill."

GET INVOLVED

• Sign a Wilderness Society letter urging Congress to oppose S. 881
  
• Protect an acre of rainforest through Conservation International
• Donate to the Rainforest Action Network

RELATED POSTS

• Forgetting the Forest People (Febraury 2, 2010)
• The World's Most Important, Most Destructive Edible Oil (January 26, 2010)
• Gone Bananas (October 12, 2009)
  
• Don't Cry for Trees Argentina (September 28, 2009)
• Happy Markets, Happy Forests (April 27, 2008)
• Plight of the Penan (September 14, 2009)
• Lost World (September 9, 2009)
• The Trees of the Maya (July 29, 2009)
• Environmental Showdown in the Amazon: Big Oil vs. Native People (July 21, 2009)
• The Rare Animals of the Amazon (June 13, 2009)
• Trade Carbon, Save Orangutans (June 8, 2009)
  
• Hey You, Get Off of My Cloud (May 30, 2009)
• Blowing Noses Into Dead, Ancient Trees (February 29, 2009)
  
• Dismembering the Earth's Heart and Lungs (January 25, 2009)

image: U.S. Forest Service

"The Cove" Wins Best Documentary

Dolphins get a guerrilla-style shout-out at the Oscars

While onstage during the Academy Awards last night, Ric O'Barry, the dolphin advocate behind the Best Documentary film "The Cove," did something upon which the Academy frowns: He inserted a political message during the proceedings.

Before getting off the stage, he held up a sign that said "TEXT DOLPHIN to 44144."

The movie, filmed in guerrilla style, exposes the horrific annual mass slaughter of approximately 20,000 dolphins in the coastal village of Taiji, Japan. Their meat is then mislabeled as whale meat and fed to Japanese schoolchildren.

Dolphins have long been considered to be among the smartest animals. Recent studies suggest that dolphins' cognitive capacity is second only to humans.

Yet we have treated them badly, with approximately 300,000 cetaceans killed by hunting and other human activity each year.

GET INVOLVED

• Sign a petition to end the Taiji dolphin slaughter
  
• Sign up to receive updates from "The Cove" dolphin campaign
  
• Watch the trailer for "The Cove" and support the Save the Dolphins campaign
• Sign an Ocean Project petition to end Japan's dolphin slaughter
• Adopt a dolphin from the World Wildlife Fund
• Take the Food & Water Watch Anti-Triclosan Pledge to stop the exposure of the chemical to dolphins
  
• Download a BeyondPesticides.org factsheet listing products containing triclosan to stop buying products that contain this chemical harmful to dolphins
  

RELATED POSTS

• Flipper: Smart Like Us, and a Lot Nicer (January 5, 2010)
• Hold That Thought About Thought (September 21, 2009)
• First Case of Dolphin Tool Use Documented (December 22, 2008)
• New Film Exposes Japan's Dolphin Slaughter (January 18, 2009)
• Singapore's Dolphin Deal with the Solomons (December 8, 2008)
• Bloody Waters in the Faroe Islands (February 19, 2009)
• Massive Dolphin Slaughter in Japan (June 23, 2008)
• From Dirty Hands to Dolphin Blood (July 28, 2009)

Catching Stardust

The first pieces of the interstellar dust that we're all made of have been captured

In 1999, NASA launched a spacecraft named Stardust on an unprecedented mission to collect grains of cosmic dust from the coma of the comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt 2") at the edge of our solar system, almost 3 billion miles away.

Seven years later, Stardust returned, dropping off a package of the interstellar granules, which scientists believed would contain that primordial material that made up the solar system -- the Sun, the Earth and everything on it, including us -- perfectly preserved in ice for billion of years.

For the next four years, an army of more than 27,000 volunteers from the around the world scanned 71 million images of the cosmic stuff that Stardust collected.

Finally, a Canadian man who spent 15 hours a day on the project hit pay dirt: two specks that represent the first pieces of interstellar dust ever captured.

According to the journal Nature, "The two probable dust particles found so far could mark the beginning of an analysis of what stars and planets really are made of, and also offer a way of charting the chemical evolution of the Milky Way."

"The interstellar dust is fundamentally the stuff we're made of," says Andrew Westphal, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley who announced the discovery on March 3rd at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference near Houston, Texas.

"We're trying to understand our own origins."

GET INVOLVED

• See images taken by the Stardust team
• See what's in the sky tonight
• Join the Great World Wide Star Count
• Visit NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site
• Download SETI@Home to help in the search for extraterrestrial life
  
• Sign a petition to add the option for US taxpayers to contribute to NASA on the IRS 1040 tax form

RELATED POSTS

• Remembering Challenger (January 28, 2010)
• It Came from Outer Space (January 18, 2010)
• Hunt for Earth 2 (January 8, 2010)
• How the Sun Will Die (December 18, 2009)
• Saturnian Hex (December 11, 2009)
  
• Planet Hunters (October 6, 2009)
• Hubble Captures a Butterfly (September 11, 2009)
  
• Kepler and the Gate to the Black Forest (February 15, 2009)
• Basic Chemistry of Life Found on Exoplanet (December 14, 2008)
• Reclaiming the Night Sky (October 2, 2009)
  
• Empire of the Sun (August 7, 2009)
• Sailing Through Space on Sunshine (November 13, 2009)
• The Lost Siblings of the Sun (November 6, 2009)
• Where Stars Are Born (July 16, 2009)
• Star Light, Star Bright (September 25, 2009)
• A Message from the Universe's More Youthful Days (October 30, 2009)

image: NASA

Earthquake in Chile: The Animals

Dogs are both the victims and the rescuers in the Chile earthquake relief effort

On Monday, rescuers in Chile found a frightened puppy stuck inside a demolished house located in the seaside resort town of Constitución, two days after the massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck the nation. They gave him comfort and "bits of food and water," according to MSNBC.

But there are some animals in Chile that don't need rescuing: Dogs are a critical part of the search and rescue, but destroyed infrastructure is hampering these efforts.

"I cannot even start to describe how I feel," writes Catalina Valencia on Working Dog Forum. "I go from sadness to rage, mostly rage, rage all day for being trapped [in] this city without being able to reunite with my team, but collapsed bridges prevent me from doing that.

"In this TV capsule you can see my team working in Constitución. The black female is the dog I raised and trained," says Ms. Valencia.

Also on Monday, Joe the search dog and his handler, Linda Tacconelli, an alumnus of the Longmont Humane Society, boarded a military transport plane at California's March Air Force Base, where they flew to Chile to help with the search for survivors.

"Our disaster management team in South America is working hard to find out as much as we can about the situation in Chile, so we can plan what to do for the animals there," according the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA).

"Once the initial shock subsides there may be hundreds or thousands of domestic animals in need of care and attention," wrote International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) president Fred O'Regan.

"Shortly after the earthquake, IFAW reached out to our friends at animal protection groups in Chile to assess the needs of animal victims. We are standing ready to provide emergency grants or whatever else is appropriate during these difficult times."

GET INVOLVED

• Support the WSPA Disaster Animal Fund
• Support the HSUS International Disaster Fund
• Support IFAW
  
• Adopt a site for USArray, a 15-year project to install seismographs across the continental United States in order to study and predict earthquakes
• Download IFAW's "World of Animals" newsletter
  

RELATED POSTS

• Earthquake in Haiti: The Animals (January 15, 2010)
• Leaving No Stone Unturned (April 9, 2009)
• The Tsunami Returns, Again (December 16, 2008)
• Witnessing the Birth of An Ocean (October 2, 2008)
• Giant Pandas Survive China Earthquake (May 15, 2008)

image: Huffington Post

Sailing Around the Globe on Sunshine

The "world's mightiest solar boat" will circumnavigate the world in 120 days

Taking command of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition to the Philippines after the Spanish explorer died in the Battle of Mactan in 1521, Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the first circumnavigation of the globe the following year.

Now, Swiss engineer Raphael Domjan and French sailor Gerard D'Abouville are going to repeat Elcano's famed journey in what Scientific American has called the "world's mightiest solar boat."

The PlanetSolar catamaran, unveiled last week at a shipyard in Kiel, Germany, is a fully electric boat made of the same lightweight carbon-fiber composite of which airplane wings are made. It is designed to operate at sea indefinitely.

During its 25,000-mile (40,000-kilometer) voyage scheduled for early next year, PlanetSolar will be powered only by the energy amassed by 1,540 square feet (470 square meters) of solar panels and move at an average speed of 8 mph (13 kph).

Planned stops in Hamburg, London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Singapore and Abu Dhabi will focus on educating the public about the power and possibilities of renewable energy.

"Our main goal is to be optimistic and to spread optimism," says Domjan, "because almost everybody on this planet knows we have to change, but they think we cannot change. What we'd like to say to the world is, 'look, it will work -- we can keep our level of life and if we use technology, it can be sustainable.'"

GET INVOLVED

• Subscribe to the PlanetSolar newsletter
  
• View the World Sunlight Map to see where the Sun in shining on the Earth right now
  
• Find out how to use solar power at home
• Support the WCN Solar Project in their effort to provide solar electricity to conservationists in the field
• View the World Sunlight Map to see where the Sun in shining on the Earth right now
  

RELATED POSTS

• How the Sun Will Die (December 18, 2009)
• Sailing Through Space on Sunshine (November 13, 2009)
• American Lawmakers Consider Geoengineering (November 11, 2009)
  
• Light for Lions (October 1, 2009)

image: PlanetSolar

Could Commercial Whaling Be Legalized?

A proposal to legalize commercial whaling threatens the survival of the world's gentle giants

Today, representatives of the member nations of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) are meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida, to debate a new proposal devised in closed-door meetings of pro-whaling members of the regulating body: a ten-year plan to legalize commercial whaling.

In 1946, the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) was signed in Washington, D.C., to "provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry."

But forty years later, in response to growing opposition to whaling by a majority of the 59 member nations, the IWC adopted a moratorium on commercial whaling, a moratorium that still stands today.

However, the killing of whales continues due to a loophole in the law that permits whaling for "scientific purposes" -- a fact evidenced by the availability of whale meat in stores and restaurants in pro-whaling countries -- and a lack of enforcement.

"From habitat destruction to marine pollution, from underwater noise to climate change, whales face more threats today than ever before in history," wrote Fred O'Regan, president of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), in an email.

"Now this new whaling threat puts thousands of these gentle giants of the deep in the gunsights of Japan, Norway and Iceland, the last three countries still killing whales for commercial purposes in 2010."

GET INVOLVED

• Sign an IFAW letter urging your representative to co-sponsor the Whale Conservation and Protection Act of 2009 (U.S. citizens)
  
• Sign a Whale & Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) letter urging European Union members to reject a proposal for Greenland to increase its whale hunts to include humpback whales
  
• Listen to the songs of humpback whales (The Whalesong Project)
• Support Sea Shepherd's efforts to stop Japanese whaling
  
• Sign a Greenpeace letter to Iceland's prime minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir urging her to cancel Iceland's five-year commercial whaling quota
  
• Sign the Whale's Revenge petition urging the International Whaling Commission to close the loophole that allows whaling in the name of so-called "scientific research"

RELATED POSTS

• Singing the Blue Whale Blues (December 14, 2009)
• Silencing Whale Songs (May 31, 2009)
• First-Ever Whale Songs Heard in New York Waters (September 20, 2008)
• Of Whales and Shrimp (October 13, 2009)
• The Whale Warrior (July 31, 2009)
• Denmark: Humpback Whales Are Tasty (June 23, 2009)
• Illegal Whale Meat Still on Japanese Menus (April 14, 2009)
• Bloody Waters in the Faroe Islands (February 19 , 2009)
• Gray Whales, Meet Big Oil (November 22, 2008)
• Palin Rebuffed As Unique Alaskan Whales Score Major Victory (October 18, 2008)
• Whales Get New Sanctuary in Chile (September 30, 2008)
• Greenland's Request to Kill Humpback Whales Denied (July 1, 2008)
• Greenpeace Activists Jailed in Tokyo (June 22, 2008)
• The Future of Whaling (June 14, 2008)
• US Condemns Iceland's Whale Hunt (May 26, 2008)

image: IFAW

Yellowstone: America's Crown Jewel

The world's first national park was born 138 years ago today

On March 1, 1872, U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant signed an act of Congress that established Yellowstone National Park. It would be the landmark legislation of his administration.

In a 1997 speech commemorating the 125th anniversary of Yellowstone, Vice President Al Gore called it "the crown jewel of America's park system."

Spanning the northeast corner of Wyoming and spreading into Montana and Idaho, Yellowstone's roughly 3,500-square-mile wilderness (roughly 9,000 square kilometers -- about the size of Puerto Rico) has been witness to over 11,000 years of human history.

It even has a clock to count all that elapsed time: The park's famous Old Faithful geyser erupts every 90 minutes.

It is also home to over 1,700 native species of trees and plants, and is considered to be the best wildlife habitat for large mammals -- like the endangered gray wolf, coyotes, bighorn sheep and grizzly bears -- in the 48 contiguous states.

It is the only place in the lower 48 states that has supported a continuous population of wild American bison since prehistoric times.

The American Pulitzer prize-winning author Wallace Stegner once wrote that national parks are "America's best idea."

The record-breaking 2.3 million visitors who visited Yellowstone last summer would likely agree.

GET INVOLVED

• Plan your visit to Yellowstone National Park with the U.S. National Park Service
  
• Sign a Defenders of Wildlife letter urging your representative to cosponsor America's Wildlife Heritage Act (H.R. 2807). This bill will help restore balance between resource development and wildlife conservation, so our public lands can provide benefits for generations to come (U.S. citizens)
  
• Download a summary of America's Wildlife Heritage Act
• Sign a Buffalo Field Campaign petition to stop the government slaughter of wild bison within Yellowstone
  
• Sign a Buffalo Field Campaign letter to President Obama urging him to take action to protect the buffalo breeding ground outside Yellowstone
  

RELATED POSTS

• Protecting America's Public Land (July 6, 2009)
• Buffalo Soldier On (May 23, 2009)
• Obama Approves Bush's Wolf Plan (March 8, 2009)
• Good News for America's Wolves, Maybe (September 19, 2008)
  
• Record Number of Yellowstone Bison Slaughtered (March 23, 2008)
• Warmer Yellowstone Allows Bears to Flourish (March 18, 2008)
• So Long to Species at Walden (Yellowstone, Too) (October 30, 2008)
• Yellowstone Bison Get Help in Montana (April 30, 2008)

image: Bison near a hot spring in Yellowstone (credit: Daniel Mayer)

The Toucan's Cobweb

From a mountaintop in Chile comes a new glimpse at the brightest star nursery in a galactic neighbor

From their 7,800-foot-high perch on a mountain in the southern part of Chile's almost rainless Atacama Desert, astronomers at La Silla Observatory last week captured a striking new image of NGC 346, a cluster of thousands of stars 210,000 light-years away.

The hazy cluster, 200 light-years across, is the brightest star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy in the constellation Tucana (Toucan) that is visible to the naked eye in the southern hemisphere.

"Images like this help astronomers chronicle star birth and evolution, while offering glimpses of how stellar development influences the appearance of the cosmic environment over time," according to the European Southern Observatory (ESO), an intergovernmental astronomical organization with 14 European members, famed for building some of the world's most technically advanced telescopes.

The image was taken using the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument at the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope, which is on permanent loan from the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science in Munich.

"The light, wind and heat given off by massive stars have dispersed the glowing gas within and around this star cluster, forming a surrounding wispy nebular structure that looks like a cobweb," according to the ESO press release.

"NGC 346, like other beautiful astronomical scenes, is a work in progress, and changes as the aeons pass. As yet more stars form from loose matter in the area, they will ignite, scattering leftover dust and gas, carving out great ripples and altering the face of this lustrous object."

GET INVOLVED

• Download this month's free night sky map and calendar from Skymaps.com
• Join the Great World Wide Star Count
• Visit NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site
• Download SETI@Home to help in the search for extraterrestrial life
• Sign a petition to add the option for US taxpayers to contribute to NASA on the IRS 1040 tax form

RELATED POSTS

• Encedalus Lives Again (February 12, 2010)
• NGC 3603 (February 5, 201o)
• Caught on Film: The Cat’s Paw (January 29, 2010)
• Remembering Challenger (January 28, 2010)
• Ring of Fire (January 22, 2010)
  
• It Came from Outer Space (January 18, 2010)
• Hunt for Earth 2 (January 8, 2010)
• For New Year's Eve, a Blue Moon (December 31, 2009)
  
• How the Sun Will Die (December 18, 2009)
• Saturnian Hex (December 11, 2009)
• Intergalactic Metal (December 4, 2009)

image: ESO

When Killer Whales Attack

The death of a trainer by a captive orca brings up a larger issue

Yesterday, Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau was killed by an orca named Tilikum.

This tragic event underlines another tragedy: the capturing and confining of these majestic animals for our entertainment.

This is senseless and stupid.

Orcas, or killer whales (Orcinus orca ), are the largest species of the dolphin family.

"They are highly social animals, that tend to live in cohesive groups, so it's quite an artificial environment to capture them and put them in a small area," said wild orca expert Dr. Andrew Foote, from the University of Aberdeen, UK, in a BBC article.

"Tilikum, like other orcas that have been in captivity for decades, was captured from the wild," according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

"Now 30 years old, he was taken from the waters of Iceland at the approximate age of two. Other orcas, such as Corky, who resides at SeaWorld San Diego, and Lolita, residing at the Miami Seaquarium, have been confined for nearly four decades after being captured from their native waters in the Pacific Northwest."

If these captive animals possess some rage against humans, who could blame them?

GET INVOLVED

• Sign a petition urging Arthur Hertz, the owner of Miami Seaquarium, to free Lolita, an orca who has been held in captivity since 1976, currently held in a tiny tank, where she has lived in solitary confinement for 18 years
• Join the Orca Network's "Free Lolita" list and read their proposal to free Lolita the orca
  

RELATED POSTS

• Flipper: Smart Like Us, and a Lot Nicer (January 5, 2010)
• Hold That Thought About Thought (September 21, 2009)
• First Case of Dolphin Tool Use Documented (December 22, 2008)
• New Film Exposes Japan's Dolphin Slaughter (January 18, 2009)
• Singapore's Dolphin Deal with the Solomons (December 8, 2008)
• Bloody Waters in the Faroe Islands (February 19, 2009)
• Massive Dolphin Slaughter in Japan (June 23, 2008)
• From Dirty Hands to Dolphin Blood (July 28, 2009)
• World Protests Planned for Japan Dolphin Day (August 29, 2008)
• SPECIAL FEATURE: Capt. Philip G. Renaud, If You Could... (March 21, 2009)
• Dolphins Get Much Needed Help (July 30, 2008)
• South Africa's Shark Tale (June 24, 2009)
• Species Feeling the Heat (December 29, 2009)
• Oil and Water Don't Mix (October 7, 2009)
• Denmark: Humpback Whales Are Tasty (June 23, 2009)

image: whale trainer, Dawn Brancheau, with male orca, Tillikum, at SeaWorld Orlando

Acid Waters

Mankind's carbon dioxide emissions have made the world's oceans more acidic than they have been in the last 800,000 years

Ocean acidification is the continuing decrease in the ocean's pH level due to the increased absorption of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

It is blamed for harming oceanic calcifying organisms such as corals, molluscs and crustaceans, all important members of a long food chain and critical elements in a healthy marine ecosystem.

According to the first global reef extinction study, one-third of reef-building coral species face extinction.

Economically speaking, that is troubling news, as coral reefs are estimated to provide about $300 billion of value annually, giving millions of people around the world food, protection from killer waves and jobs.

In 2007, Richard Feely, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) led an expedition to North America's Pacific coast waters to investigate pH levels.

What he found was shocking: a level of acidification that wasn't expected until 2050.

Now, the NOAA is set to release its first ocean acidification research plan.

"Today, the atmospheric CO2 concentration is about 388 parts per million," said Victoria Fabry, a visiting research scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in a recent Scientific American article.

"This is the highest that it's ever been in the past 800,000 years -- as far back as the record goes right now," said Fabry, who is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) committee mandated by Congress to release a study on the effects of ocean acidification. "And there are concerns about where we're headed."

One of the biggest misconceptions that people have about the ocean is "that the sea is a very durable ecosystem -- it’s really not," said executive director of the Living Oceans Foundation Capt. Philip G. Renaud in an exclusive 13.7 Billion Years interview.

"It’s a delicate and complex balance of life and we can’t disrupt major parts of that ecosystem without unfortunate circumstances resulting."

GET INVOLVED

• Sign an Oceana petition urging Congress to enforce lower CO2 emissions to stop ccean acidification (U.S. citizens)
  
• Sign the Reef Check Foundation's International Declaration of Reef Rights
• Analyze and reduce your impact on the environment with the National Grid Floe
• Sign the "We Can Solve It" petition for a global treaty on climate change

RELATED POSTS

• Once Upon A Time, Arctic Gators (May 4, 2009)
• Photographing the Coral Triangle (April 23, 2009)
• Enter the Dead Zone (April 20, 2009)
• Coral Reefs: Here Now, Gone Tomorrow? (April 3, 2009)
• 13.7 BILLION YEARS EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Philip Renaud, Executive Director, Living Oceans Foundation (Part 1 of 5) (March 15, 2009)
• Oceanic Acid Trip (March 10, 2009)
• One-Third of Coral Reefs Face Extinction (July 11, 2008)
  

image: fringing coral reef near Eilat, Israel (credit: Mark A. Wilson, Department of Geology, The College of Wooster)

Killing Enemies, Saving Species

America's military bases are becoming safe havens for endangered plants and animals

In 2003, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed Congress to give the military exemptions from federal environmental rules meant to protect endangered plants and animals.

He argued that the laws made it difficult for the armed forces to carry out training exercises in the wilderness areas of it many bases.

The House voted to grant the military a broad waiver in regard to the Endangered Species Act. The Senate also approved a waiver, but only as long as the military developed their own conservation plans.

Today, dozens of military bases across the nation are spending more and more time conserving endangered species, as commanders realize that they will have fewer restrictions placed on in their exercises if they preserve the ecosystems in which those exercises are carried out.

"Even as it conducts round-the-clock exercises to support two wars, Fort Stewart spends as much as $3 million a year on wildlife management, diligently grooming its 279,000 acres to accommodate five endangered species that live here," writes Leslie Kaufman in The New York Times.

"Last year, the wildlife staff even built about 100 artificial cavities and installed them 25 feet high in large pines so the woodpeckers did not have to toil for six months carving the nests themselves."

GET INVOLVED

• Sign a Save the Dugong Campaign Center petition to stop the construction of a military base that threatens the Okinawa dugong with extinction
• Sign a PETA petition urging President Obama to ban military trauma exercises on animals
• Watch a New York Times video about military base species conservation
  
• Check out these 15 ways to attract birds -- and birdsongs -- into your backyard
  
• 25 Things You Can Do to Help the Birds in Your Backyard
  

RELATED POSTS

• The Marines vs. the Dugongs (December 29, 2009)
• Supreme Court: Move Over Whales, Here Comes the Navy (November 14, 2008)
  
• Whales vs. Navy in Supreme Court (October 16, 2008)
• Terra Australis (December 1, 2009)
  
• Military Torture: Not Just for Humans (May 17, 2009)
• She's Got A (One-Way) Ticket to Ride (November 3, 2009)
  
• Putting for Birdie (November 4, 2009)
• Saving Wildlife on the Back Nine (December 4, 2008)
• Death Row Baby Seals Find A Friend in Canada's Senate (March 15, 2009)

image: the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker has custom-built nests created by the military in Fort Stewart, Georgia (credit: Lance Cpl. Matthew K. Hacker, United States Marine Corps)

The Galileo Affair

Three hundred and seventy-eight years ago today, the father of modern science turned the world right-side up with his Dialogo

At the turn of the 17th century, science was still dominated by the millennia-old ideas of Aristotle and Ptolemy -- ideas that were tightly aligned with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

But in March of 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei published Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), a slender volume containing hefty discoveries that started to shake the scientific method from religious ideology.

Until that point, the moon was thought to have had a smooth surface (after all, the heavens were believed to have been more "perfect" than the Earth). But using a telescope, Galileo discovered that the moon was not smooth at all -- it was covered in mountains up to four miles high.

The book also described another, even more troubling discovery: four objects orbiting Jupiter.

This observation was a difficult one to accept for church leaders, as it threw into question one of the most cherished beliefs of the time: geocentrism. If Earth was at the center of the universe, with all celestial bodies revolving around it, how could Jupiter have its own moons?

In August, after Jesuit astronomers rejected these discoveries (even refusing to look through his telescope), a frustrated Galileo wrote a letter to his fellow astronomer Johannes Kepler:

"My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth."

During a sermon in Florence in 1614, a Dominican friar named Tommaso Caccini publicly denounced Galileo for promoting the radical theory of heliocentrism, which was originally devised by Copernicus in his famous 1543 text De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

On February 22, 1632, Galileo published Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems).

He got permission to publish the text from the Inquisition, provided that he presented heliocentrism as merely a hypothesis and gave equal treatment to geocentrism. He didn't.

The following year, Galileo was summoned to Rome to stand trial for heresy, while his
Dialogo was placed on the church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books").

The aging and ailing scientist was found guilty and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. The publication of any of his past or future books was prohibited.

Still, Dialogo managed to be a bestseller. It was finally taken off the Index in 1835.

In 1966, Pope Paul VI abolished the Index.

In 1989, NASA launched an unmanned spacecraft to study Jupiter and its telltale moons.

The name of the spacecraft? Galileo, of course.

GET INVOLVED

• Participate in Cassini's Saturn Observation Campaign
• View a moon phase calculator
  
• Sign a petition to add the option for US taxpayers to contribute to NASA on the IRS 1040 tax form
  
• Donate to the American Astronomical Society
  
• Download this month's free night sky map and calendar from Skymaps.com

RELATED POSTS

• Saturn's Vanishing Rings (August 11, 2009)
• Empire of the Sun (August 7, 2009)
• Where Stars Are Born (July 16, 2009)
• Orbiting Saturn, Five Years Later (July 10, 2009)
  
• Goodbye Ulysses (June 30, 2009)
• An Old Lake on the Red Planet (June 20, 2009)
• It's the End of the World As We Know It (June 12, 2009)
• Getting Closer to the Beginning of Time (May 16, 2009)
• A Possible New World Fit for Life (April 28, 2009)
• Sizing Up the "King of the World" (March 31, 2009)
• Blast From the Past (March 28, 2009)
• Captured on Film: The Personification of Dread (March 13, 2009)
• The Shadow Lives of Others (March 3, 2009)
• Kepler and the Gate to the Black Forest (February 15, 2009)
• A Smashing Reunion for the Galaxy Twins? (February 9, 2009)
• Here Comes the Warm Jets (February 3, 2009)
• Famous 400-Year-Old Star Death Observed (December 7, 2008)
  
• The Final Frontier According to Ptolemy, Kennedy, Hubble and Obama (November 17, 2008)

image: Galileo before the Holy Office, 19th-century painting by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury