Little Changes Today is a conservation themed blog with weekly informative posts aimed at suggesting how you can personally improve the planet. Posts include weekly articles, species information and other interesting information to allow you to become more informed about the natural world.
So there has been some good news recently in the conservation world. A species which has been experiencing a rapid unstoppable decline in its populations might be about to turn a corner.
The Tasmanian devil have suffered over a 80% decline in it's population since the original outbreak of DFTD or Devil facial tumour disease. This is a type of contagious cancer which grows on the faces of devils and expands till the individual eventually dies through starvation or suffocation.
There has been a lot of work attempting to find a cure for this disease so as to prevent the extinction of the species and recently research believe a solution has been found thanks to a evolutionary response due to the selection pressures DFTD is applying to the devil populations.
So it is a bank holiday weekend currently in the UK and
thanks to that I was able to get to West Midlands Safari Park and Cotsworld
wildlife park this weekend so because of this today's fact file will be based
around Zoos.
Zoos commit a lot of time money and effort towards the
conservation of certain endangered species, and in some cases without the input
from Zoos many of these species would either be extinct or nearer extinction. However
many endangered species aren’t represented in breeding schemes (95% of
threatened birds, 0.6% of threatened amphibians and only 3.5% of all threatened
species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species). These numbers are
extremely low. It is important to remember that these number can never be 100%
due to factors such as space and the fact that some species don’t lend
themselves to captivity.
Zoos can cause unusual problems for captive animals. This is
because they are a collection of animals from all over the world and most of
which don’t usually ever come into contact with each other. Therefore it is
possible for the transfer of new and unusual diseases and parasites to be
passed between animals. A classic example of this was when Asian and African
elephants were kept in the same enclosures many of the Asian elephants would
die as a type of elephant herpes would
be passed from host African elephants to the Asian ones, which were unable to
survive the infection unlike African elephants.
Zoos are a great source of education for all generations,
everyone remembers their childhood trip to the zoo with either their families
or school trips. In fact 175 million people visit zoos every year, and this
creates an income of $US 16 Billion annually from all zoos and aquariums
worldwide.
Finally many Zoos are trying to change the image created by
some other institutions which act as money sources. In fact in Australia four
Zoos (Taronga, Perth, Adelaide and Victoria zoo) are all acting as non-profit
organisations as when the running costs are recouped all profit is put into
conservation and welfare schemes.
So Zoos help and also neglect some issues but overall thanks to greater control and restrictions on animal welfare I believe they are a extremely useful conservation and education tool. What do you think?
There is a growing problem in some parts of the world, and
it is a problem which has already been faced in other regions where it turned
into a complete disaster, bushmeat. Hunting has always been present in human society with it
providing a key source of protein for many different cultures around the world, however like
everything with a growing population and economy it’s becoming more of an
issue.
Currently the main areas which have been affected by hunting
is lowland tropical forest that have been opened up to easy access due new forestry
roads and the increased availability of weapons which make hunting more efficient. Bushmeat began to become a problem in South East Asia just over 40 years
ago. Since then 12 vertebrates have been extirpated through over hunting driven
by the bushmeat demand within Asia. Bushmeat demand has now become a problem in the rich forests of Central Africa with
estimates of 1-3.4x106 tonnes begin harvested every single year many of which are primates and so are not being replaced due to slow breeding cycles. The trade is beginning to pick up in South America in countries such as Peru as well, with it expected to
become a major issue in that region in the next 10 years.
The bushmeat trade is mainly being driven by growing
economies. This happens because as rural populations move into urban areas and
become successful they still like traditional foods and as they can now
afford it bushmeats become a regular meal and so animals become harvested at an
unsustainable rate. For instance on the
Island of Bioko of the west coast of Africa is consuming over 100,000Kg of wild meat by some 80,000
inhabitants annually.
There is hope with some bushmeat however as long as they are
harvested sustainably. In South America studies have shown that many animals
such as peccary (a species of wild pig), grey brocket deer and paca can all be
harvested due to their r selected breeding systems, while tapir and many
primates will suffer if the same levels of bushmeat harvest were to continue.
It isn’t just the meat that wild animals are hunted for in
Java many thousands of snakes are captured every year to provide skins for the
fashion trade. Within living memory the average length of the large
constrictors has dropped by over a foot (from a little over 4ft to less than
3ft). This is a sad fact as until recently there had been a smaller call for
animal based fashion products since the protests in the 20th
century. These protests have slowly been forgotten about and I believe that
they is a need for a reminder of the pain fur and skin fashion industries cause
on wildlife.
Finally it’s important to remember that although bushmeat
usually refers to the collection of terrestrial meat, but can also be stretched
to include marine life as well. Due to the fact that both Japan and South Korea
refuse to monitor their marine bycatch market a large number of whales are
being caught and not reported, number from genetic data recently have suggested
that twice the numbers of whales which have been reported are being sold in
markets. This is due to the fact that a single whale has a worth in excess of
$100,000 and so it is economic greet and demand driving this trade.
So how can the effects of illegal and unsustainable bushmeat
harvesting be reduced? Well to start with more money needs to be spent in
developing rural areas so as the villages don’t have to resort to hunting as a
source of income. Currently in Peru for
example, the rural hunting sector is worth US
$1,131,910 annually so is see as
a profitable sector to enter and this is a view we need to change.
Secondly people need to be educated so as to understand that
these methods ‘they have always used’ are no longer an option simple due to the
large number of people wanting to practice them.
So if you read the post on Monday you would have heard about the excessive amounts of freshwater melting from the polar ice caps. To follow this on a article which has become available in Nature Communications has been using elephant seal behaviour to assess how the increased input of fresh water is changing the salinity of the sea water which in turns disrupts the great ocean currents.
So how did Elephant seals help this study? Well they were fitted with sensors which would record critical information whilst the seal is diving (sometimes up to 500m) and then proceeds to upload this information to satellites. This method of collecting information is extremely helpful as it can provide a near constant stream of information as opposed to if it was manly collected it would be slower, expensive and extremely time consuming.
So as I’ve just started a new job related to rivers this
week’s fact file will focus on the aquatic world.
Only 0.8% of the earth’s surface is covered with 0.01% of
the Earth’s water, despite the size of freshwater ecosystems they still contain
100,000 different described species (6% of all those known). It is also
believed that they is the potential for many more invertebrate species to yet
be discovered and even many other vertebrates left to be ‘discovered’.
Water debt is a serious problem, climate change is
disrupting the world’s distribution of fresh water and it is believed that by
2050 4.8 billion people will be at risk due to water stress. To put this in a
different way 45% of the total GDP in 2050 ($63 trillion) will be at risk due to the
lack of water, that’s 1.5x the current global economy. This would be mainly because of the lack of crop production.
In fact water is so important in densely populated areas
that the water is likely to be abstracted from the river treated, used, cleaned
and returned multiple times before it flows through its entire course. For instance
water in the Thames which passes through London is commonly used multiple times
and there have been proposals that in the future (2025 onward) it will pass through
at least seven people due to high demands.
Finally a fact not directly about rivers but one linked to
them, and a fact which is very sad. A team of UK researches has been analysing
satellite image of ice sheets and have recently concluded that 1 trillion
tonnes of ice has been lost from Greenland’s ice sheet from 2011-14. This loss
is believed to have been because of an increasing number of lakes (nearly 8000
more lakes from 2000-2013) forming on the surface of the ice sheets, due to increased temperatures, which
effect the stability of the ice.
Thanks for reading!
I hope these fact have created some food for thought about
why we need to protect all rivers globally not only for the natural world but
for humanity as well.
If you’ve liked this post please follow the blog and check back on Wednesday for another post.
To round off this Olympic week the creature we’ll be
learning about today is the national animal of Brazil, the jaguar.
Jaguars are the third largest feline in the world behind
tigers and lions; this also means that they are the largest cat in the
Americas. Unlike many of the other large cat species jaguars currently have
fairly sizable populations in different areas of South America and so a survey
in 2008 made the IUCN red list classify them as near threatened. This is due to
the ever increasing pressure being applied on the species through deforestation
because of illegal logging and other activities. Despite the sound of this
information though it is important for efforts to be made to protect and
conserve the jaguar, because as of 2002 54% of its historic range had been destroyed
and so there is a strong likelihood of a tipping point coming soon which will see
a drastic decrease in total populations driven by lack of habitat. This time
point is drawing ever closer as populations have been slowly decreasing since
2002.
Contrary to popular belief jaguars unlike other cats
actually enjoy water in fact a large amount of their diet is made up of fish,
turtles, capybaras and even caimans. However due to their original large range
which used to stretch from Argentina to Arizona the jaguar will take an
extremely wide variety of prey. It is common for jaguars to hunt on the ground
but not unheard of some animals taking up positions in trees which allows them
to pounce onto their unsuspecting prey from above. Once they have succeeded in
catching a prey item jaguars sometimes bury their prey so as to save it for
later.
Like the majority of big cats (excluding lions) jaguars are
solitary animals usually only coming together to breed. In Brazil, Peru,
Colombia and Mexico it is estimated that there are around 1.7-4 adults per
100km2 with males possessing territories which overlap several small
female territories.
Along with the habitat destruction which is creating heavily
fragmented populations which jaguars have to cope with there is also pressure
being applied through poaching. Up until the mid-1970s the jaguars coat was in
high demand, thankfully demand has declined to some extent. However there is
still a trade of jaguar parts for traditional medicine which has created a black
market for jaguar goods. Some jaguars are also being shot due to cattle farmers
claiming they cause a risk to their herds and so they are seen as a pest by
some.
As this is an Olympic themed post it’s sadly important to bring
to the attention to everyone what happened during the Olympic torch relay. In
the city of Manaus a jaguar escaped its handler in the ceremony that was taking
place. Despite then being shot with four tranquilizing dart the jaguar
proceeded to attack a soldier and was shot dead with a pistol. This is sadly
another example of when humans and wildlife simply don’t mix and we shouldn’t
be creating situations like this as it is believe the animal escaped and
attacked due to the stress it was being put under from being surrounded by
hundreds of people.
Hopefully although the jaguar is currently still in a stable
(ish) situation they will with the correct conservation effort remain at decent
total population number for many many more years to come.
Thanks for reading!
Check out this video of a jaguar hunting from classicgrag
So to continue the Olympic theme for this week I will be
bring you some information about the Zika virus. So this has been a subject
which has been hotly debated in the run up to the Olympics with many different
news headline and lots of Olympians refusing to compete in the event due to the
risk.
Hopefully if you read a couple of these links hopefully you’ll
be able to get a very basic understanding of what the Zika virus actually is. I
say basic but it’s important to remember however that very little is known or
understood about this virus.
The virus does have some history however as it didn’t first
appear in April 2015 (when it started appearing in the media). The virus was
actually first recognised in 1947 in the Zika forest of Uganda, it wasn’t till
1952 however that it’s first found in humans. It then was another 55 years till there was a
recognised significant outbreak of the disease in the Island of Yap (2007).
WHO website has a some interesting information on the virus
and is the place I suggest that you you start using this link.
In 2016 a article was published in The New England Journal
of Medicine which proved that it was indeed the virus which was the source of
birth defects in babies.
There has been good news on the Zika front recently however,
this article talks about the production of a test which uses saliva to
establish whether a patient is infected with the virus.
Finally this post from science alert was published a little
over 10 days ago and gives a slight insight into the stages at which vaccines
are which will bring Zika outbreaks under control (hopefully)
So it’s time for another fact file and in case you haven’t
realised the Olympics has been taking placing in Rio for the past week or so. Therefore
this week’s fact file will be focusing on Brazil and how it is currently
attempting to create the ‘greenest Olympics’ ever! Sadly however although they have made improvement in a lot of areas they have fallen short of many of the targets set by officials.
Rio pollution levels have not been portrayed well in most
media outlets across the world but if you haven’t heard the water in which a
lot of the rowers, sailors and open water swimming have been competing in is extremely polluted. This is despite
the fact that Rio officials claimed that 80% of the raw sewage being released into Guanabara Bay would be
treated in time for the games to start. However they haven’t even achieved close to this figure with only 48%
being treated.
Along with the raw sewage the bay is filled with rubbish and
dead animals. This has resulted in greater than 1 billion viruses per litre of
water within the bay. To put this into some context that’s more than 1.7
million times the level thought of as being hazardous in Europe and many other
parts of the world.
Another major issue is the destruction of certain
environments to create Olympic venues. Brazil already has a massive problem with
both legal and illegal logging but one venue which has been affecting other a
different habitat is the Olympic golf course. It has been constructed on the
edge of a delicate sandbank habitat which is home to over 238 registered
species. Beach butterflies, White-sand-lizards and rare species of
orchid and cactus are just a few of the many endangered species this construction is applying pressure too.
The carbon footprint for the spectators alone is estimated to exceed 1.380 ktonnes CO2eq, with the Game wide emissions expected to measure in at around 3600 ktonnes CO2eq.
Finally to put a brighter light on the whole situation the
5,130 medals which will be awarded throughout the course of the Olympics were
made from gold mined so called sustainable conditions with the gold medals
being completely free of mercury and the silver medals are comprised of 30%
recycled material.
This post is again focusing on the methods used to map the
variation in Earth’s climate over its history and this time we’ll be focusing
on the use of proxy measurements.
Proxy measurements take many forms and can provide
information on climate for a few hundred years up to many millions of years.
However like the measurements currently being used which were discussed in the
last post each method has its own flaws.
So the first methods which most of you will have heard of is
the use of tree rings or dendrochronology, this method has many benefits for
instance trees can be found nearly on every continent an
d so a good spread of
data can be gathered. However there are drawbacks the width of tree rings are
not solely affected by temperature factors such as rain, soil temperature and
age will also have an influence and so need to be considered. Through research
we have been able to learn that conifer tree ring width changes exponentially
with age so this can be compensated for. Other tree species ring width are not
so easy to read however such as Oaks, this is a drawback as species such as Oaks
tend to have a longer life span and so can provide more data when sampled.
A second method used to monitor climate change is through
the use of Ice cores. These provide general information on climate across the
global due to the isotope composition within the layers. There are several
different Oxygen isotopes (O16 and O18) and it is the
composition of these isotopes within the ice cores which suggest historic
temperature. This is possible due to the fact that each isotope has a slightly
different boiling temperature and so the ratios which they are found within the
ice cores give a suggestion to the previous temperature at the equator which is
where the majority of water evaporates from to create the snow at the poles. There
are again problems with ice cores however for instance they can only be found
in certain locations. Along with this they can be affected by water flowing
through the ice layers disrupting the isotope composition, these ratios can
also be affected where the ice touches the bedrock. Dating the layers can cause
issues as they require a significant event such as a volcano to lay down ash so
as to act as a time point within the ice layers otherwise samples cannot be
used as they are not accurate enough. Finally ice cores can capture gas bubble
within them and these give information about the atmospheric composition in the
past and so suggest at historic temperatures.
A further method which many of you won’t have heard of is
the use of soil sediments magnetism to provide temperature data. This has been
put to use in China with sediment known as loess. Temperature and rainfall
effect how magnetic the sediment is and so historic temperature can be extrapolated
from these levels as warmer wetter years create a higher level of magnetism.
The drawback with this method however is the fact that sites where this is
possible are extremely limited.
There are many other methods which have been used to provide
accurate measurements on historic temperatures. Further methods include pollen
and fossil records, Ocean sediments, stalactites and stalagmites CaCO3 composition
to name just a few. Each of which has their own drawbacks and benefits and so
as a collective they provide an almost complete image of earth climate variation.
So currently across the world there are many different groups of people who are attempting to find a solution to the planets need for fuel. Bio-fuels and other non-carbon based fuels such as solar and wind turbines are currently leading the field but these neglect the problem of the excess CO2 and they all have limitations such as the need for sunlight or wind.
Another method which bypasses these problems is to use CO2 are the raw materials and create fuel. We have been capable of creating fuel from CO2 for well over 20 years now (see link 1) but the ability to do so is not the problem. The issue arises with practicality of the process, previously the energetic costs of the fuels creation, to be a viable option it needs to provide as close to the amount of energy you put in as possible and the source energy needs to be abundant.
This latest article claims that they have created a new method which uses a synthetic leaf to create fuel from CO2 and sunlight and more importantly they claim that the process is cost effective unlike previous methods.
So Its time to start a new section of this blog and I hope you all enjoy it.
Each week I'll be posting a couple of interesting facts on a variety of different topics related to conservation and ecology. Hopefully it will be something just to give you a break on a Monday.
This week the facts will focus on the global waste crisis!
On average a person in the UK throws away their own body weigh in rubbish every seven weeks, whilst in the USA on average 4.4 pounds of rubbish is thrown away per person per day. When this number is converted it means Americans throw there body weight of rubbish away every 6 weeks.
The United States, Russia, Japan, Germany and The United Kingdom make up the top five most wasteful nations as of 2006. However it is estimated that by 2030 China will be producing more than double that of the USA at 533 million tons.
Sweden is currently setting an extremely good example which should be emulated by other nations. This is because although Sweden produces the same amount of waste when compared to other European countries, less than 1% of this waste makes it to landfills. This is due to the 32 waster to energy plants which have been consuming 50% of the countries waste annually. in fact these plants are now so effective that Sweden have been importing an extra 80,000 tons annually.
Finally of the 41 million metric tonnes of electronic waste binned every year (2014) the majority of it is illegally exported to African countries such as Ghana where there are vast graveyards of broken equipment. This waste is then stripped of valuable parts before being burnt which pours pollutants into the atmosphere.
To finish this post off I think you might enjoy a look around this website, it shows a couple of scary counters, check it out!
