Richard Conniff's Blog, page 24

Warthog at the Bloodthirsty Mongoose Grooming Station

Looks nasty, but those mongoose are really doing the warthog a big favor (Photo: Andy Plumptre/WCS)

Yes, those mongoose are bloodthirsty, but only for the blood encapsulated in ticks that have been feeding on the warthog.  Videos of this strange behavior have been around for a while. Even so, it’s fun to be reminded.  Here’s the press release from the Wildlife Conservation Society:

New York (March 7, 2016)—Warthogs living in Uganda have learned to rid themselves of annoying ticks by seeking out the grooming services of some accommodating neighbors: a group of mongooses looking for snacks.

Specifically, the warthogs of Queen Elizabeth National Park have learned to lie down in the presence of banded mongooses. In response, the mongoose cleaning crew have learned to inspect the wild pigs for ticks, going so far as to

climb on top of their customers to gain access to more parasites.

A short article in the most recent edition of the journal Suiform Soundings describes the behavior, which has been observed by tourists to the park and was featured in a BBC video, and encourages further research on it.

“Such partnerships between different mammal species are rare, and this particular interaction illustrates a great deal of trust between participants,” said Dr. Andy Plumptre, director for WCS Albertine Rift Program, author of the new study. “It makes you wonder what else may be happening between species that we don’t see because, in order to see it, both species need to be unafraid of people.”

The common warthog is widespread throughout sub-Saharan Africa and inhabits grasslands, savannas, and woodlands. The species can grow up to five feet in length and is characterized by a pair of tusks, which the warthog uses for both digging and defense. The banded mongoose is a small cat-like carnivore that, as its common name suggests, possesses a series of bands across its back.  The species grows up to 1 ½ feet in length and travels in family groups numbering up to 40 individuals.

The warthog-mongoose encounter is a rare example of mammals exhibiting a symbiotic relationship called mutualism, where two animal species form a partnership with benefits for both groups. The warthogs get a cleaning and the mongooses get a meal. Other examples of mutualism include rhinos, zebras, and other animals that receive visits from parasite-eating birds called oxpeckers, and bees that feed on the nectar of flowers and deliver pollen to other plants.

“Wild pigs never fail to amaze me,” commented Dr. Erik Meijaard, Chair of the IUCN/SSC Wild Pigs Specialist Group. “Not many scientists are interested in studying the 18 species of wild pig, but behaviors like the one described here, reiterate how uniquely adaptive, intelligent, and even cute wild pigs are. Pigs play important roles in ecosystem and their protection helps many other species.”

WCS is working to conserve the Queen Elizabeth National Park, one of the most biodiverse savanna parks in Africa, by supporting the Uganda Wildlife Authority improve its law enforcement and monitoring of the park. Unique animal behavior, such as this mutualism between mongooses and warthogs, is just one of the special features of this site.

 

 

Killing Buddy MacKay

Leopard in Nagarahole (Photo: K Subbaiah, WCS India Program)

When researchers are trying to understand how leopards live, where they go, and what they need to survive, their best hope is still to go into the bush with them, by vehicle and on foot. That hasn’t changed despite the coming of ubiquitous digital camera traps, satellite tracking, and other technologies.

It is difficult, sometimes dangerous work. The leopards face the usual pathological hatred human dole out to big, dangerous predators almost everywhere, only more so.  Their lives often end by poisoning, trapping, or shooting at the hands of angry livestock ranchers.  Some of that animosity also rubs off on the people who study leopards.

The standard procedure for radio-collaring a leopard is to lure it, with bait, into a box trap and sedate it.  The biologist then has less than an hour to work with the animal as it recovers, taking samples, making measurements, and fitting the collar.  When it wakes up again, the leopard goes free. The biologist may never see it again in the wild, even when the slow, high-pitched bpp…bpp…bpp picked up from the radio collar via earphones reveals that the leopard is just 50 meters ahead. Leopards are the grand masters of staying hidden in plain sight.

And yet because researchers often work alone, amid hostile neighbors, the bond with that unseen animal can become their best consolation. Their great fear is not that the leopard might turn on them, but that the steady pulse from the collar will suddenly double, meaning an animal has gone motionless for too long, not rolling over in its sleep, not shaking its head.  That’s called the “mortality signal.”

Over the years I’ve heard a lot of sad stories from leopard researchers about their study animals, but none stuck harder, for me, than the lynching of Buddy MacKay.  I heard it one night last year, sitting on the verandah of a forest bungalow, drinking whiskey, in the

Western Ghats Mountains.  My host was Ullas Karanth, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society in India.  For him, the animosity had played out in the tabloid press for five years in the mid-1990s as he studied tigers and leopards at Nagarhole National Park in southern India’s Karnataka state.

Karanth (Photo: Richard Conniff)

One night back then, Karanth said, his box trap attracted the attention of a big male leopard.  But this newcomer just circled the trap night after night and then walked cautiously away.  “I kept seeing this guy’s tracks and saying ‘Baddi maga! Baddi maga! Baddi maga!’” It’s a local curse, best translated simply as “Bastard!”  (But worse: At one time, a debtor who fell behind on his interest payments could be obliged to surrender his wife to the lender for a time.  Any resulting child was the “baddi maga,” or “interest child.”)

Finally, an American colleague named Mel Sunquist who was helping Karanth with the work asked, “Why do you keep talking about Buddy MacKay?” Sunquist was on the faculty at the University of Florida and to his ear, “baddi maga” sounded like the name of a politician then plastering posters all over the landscape back home.

Eventually, the big leopard turned up inside the trap, and that name stuck.  For the purposes of science, Karanth identified the tigers and leopards he was following only by their radio collar signals, and this new leopard entered his field notes as L-01. But to himself, Karanth could not help thinking: “Buddy MacKay.”

Tracking that leopard over the next year or so “was the most amazing experience,” Karanth recalled. “I could hear him close by,” but the leopard was too careful at first to let himself be seen.  “He was very diurnal.  That’s when I realized how diurnal they are, going after monkeys.”

Karanth began to map out Buddy MacKay’s home range, which was just seven square miles, incredibly small for an animal that can easily roam 10 or 20 miles in a day.  “I realized the country could be full of leopards at these densities.” After six months, the big leopard became accustomed to Karanth, no longer bolting when he was nearby in his vehicle, or on foot.  “He would blend into the grass.  You couldn’t see him, but he was right there.”

Karanth was eventually able to stay close enough to observe Buddy MacKay on the hunt.  Once, he was tracking by vehicle when he heard the distress call of a langur monkey.  “So I got out of the car with the antennae, and we walked and we saw this sight.”  Buddy MacKay and a female companion had run up a tree to grab a monkey.

“I had a research building, and I would come home dead tired from tracking these four tigers and three leopards, and this guy would come right outside 50 meters away—hughgh hughgh, hughgh—you know that sawing noise they make. Then I would put the antennae on, and that’s how I would know it was him.  It was L-01.” Buddy MacKay.  “So it’s kind of a … You live with a cat, you get to know a cat.”

At about that time, one of Karanth’s collared tigers turned up dead.  Inevitably, “in a species with 20 percent mortality, animals die.”  But Karanth’s work on behalf of tigers and leopards had made him enemies.  He and the park ranger, who was a friend, had been fighting corrupt government officials tied to illegal logging and poaching in the park.

“So they made a big story that this new, dangerous technology” —meaning radio tracking—“is being used by this corrupt forest official and this scientist to kill tigers and export their skins, and they convinced the stupid politicians to stop my project.”  Karanth still keeps a fat file of court papers and tabloid headlines from that era. The fight led to his own exoneration, and defamation judgments against his accusers.

“This stuff deserves a novel,” he said. “It was not a comfortable telemetry study. I was operating under all these pressures. But anyway, I tracked this animal Buddy MacKay for two years. I knew him.  In some sense I knew the animal personally.

“And one day, with all this pressure on me—Ullas Karanth is killing tigers, he’s killing leopards, blah,blah,blah—Buddy MacKay’s motion sensor signal was inactive. Every time one of my animals went inactive I was in a panic, because I was under so much pressure, tabloid pressure. Every day of tracking was such stress, because tigers sleep, leopards sleep.  They don’t shake their heads for an hour, I start going into seizure. Three hours total stillness. He was old when we caught him.  Seven, eight.  These guys then get challenged, others kill them, it’s not that they don’t die.  I called the ranger, the guy who was my friend.  He came and we went out tracking,” certain they were hearing the mortality signal.

“We tracked, and it was really beautiful, the light through the trees. The flowers.  It was like a kaleidoscope of yellow, like some Chinese theater thing.  We walked through this tunnel-like area and then we saw it.”  Buddy MacKay had walked into a crude, hand-made snare set by indigenous hunters in the park to catch pigs. “Normally when they’re strangled, they’re flat on the ground. But he was a very powerful animal so he’d kind of jumped around,” and the sapling bent over as a spring for the snare had sprung upright. “So he was actually hanging like a man hanging.”

They cut him down, and the tabloids pounced on the story.  “Next day, the headline—‘Ullas Karanth Accuses Indigenous People of Killing His Leopard.’ The third day, in the little town of Hunsur, the local politicians called a huge meeting, 500 people, the mikes blaring, blaming me for attacking the innocent indigenous people for killing the leopard, which died because of my dangerous, dangerous technology. Radio tracking!”

Karanth sighed, then took a sip of his whiskey.

“That’s the story of Buddy MacKay,” he said.  “Just …” He grimaced back the emotion.  “I mean, it’s all objective.  Leopards die.  But that was like seeing a friend hanging.”

END

Here’s a link to one of Karanth’s recent papers, about wildlife conflict situations in India.

 

How “Angel’s Glow” Saved Wounded Soldiers at Shiloh

This is a natural history story, from Mentalfloss.com though it might not sound like it at first.  It’s by Matt Soniak:

By the spring of 1862, a year into the American Civil War, Major General Ulysses S. Grant had pushed deep into Confederate territory along the Tennessee River. In early April, he was camped at Pittsburg Landing, near Shiloh, Tennessee, waiting for Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s army to meet up with him.

On the morning of April 6, Confederate troops based out of nearby Corinth, Mississippi, launched a surprise offensive against Grant’s troops, hoping to defeat them before the second army arrived. Grant’s men, augmented by the first arrivals from the Ohio, managed to hold some ground, though, and establish a battle line anchored with artillery. Fighting continued until after dark, and by the next morning, the full force of the Ohio had arrived and the Union outnumbered the Confederates by more than 10,000.

The Union troops began forcing the Confederates back, and while a counterattack stopped their advance it did not break their line. Eventually, the Southern commanders realized they could not win and fell back to Corinth until another offensive in August (for a more detailed explanation of the battle, see this animated history).

All told, the fighting at the Battle of Shiloh left more than 16,000 soldiers wounded and more 3,000 dead, and neither federal or Confederate medics were prepared for the carnage.

The bullet and bayonet wounds were bad enough on their own, but soldiers of the era

were also prone to infections. Wounds contaminated by shrapnel or dirt became warm, moist refuges for bacteria, which could feast on a buffet of damaged tissue. After months marching and eating field rations on the battlefront, many soldiers’ immune systems were weakened and couldn’t fight off infection on their own. Even the army doctors couldn’t do much; microorganisms weren’t well understood and the germ theory of disease and antibiotics were still a few years away. Many soldiers died from infections that modern medicine would be able to nip in the bud.

A Bright Spot

Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.”

Read the full story, to find out how modern science solved the puzzle.

How “Round Round Get Around” Made Us Human

Anhaguera airborne (Photo: © Walter Myers /Stocktrek Images/Corbis)

For the Wall Street Journal, I reviewed Restless Creatures: The Story of Life in Ten Movements by Matthew Wilkinson:

Roughly 100 million years ago, in the mid-Cretaceous, a pterosaur with a spoonbill and a 16-foot wingspan dominated the skies over what is now eastern England. How did it fly? Or, more to the point, how did it get into the air in the first place? As a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge in the 1990s, zoologist Matt Wilkinson set out to answer these questions, with the help of reconstructions and wind-tunnel tests.

Anhanguera, the pterosaur he studied, would have weighed just 22 pounds, making it surprisingly light for such a large creature and well suited to staying aloft on rising warm-air currents. But its anatomy indicated that it could not manage the wing flapping necessary for takeoff. Mr. Wilkinson concluded that it must have relied on a combination of gravity and abundant thermals to become airborne, meaning that it probably plunged into the air, like modern frigate birds, from seaside cliffs.

“This experience was to be my epiphany,” Mr. Wilkinson writes in his often intriguing but ultimately flightless “Restless Creatures: The Story of Life in Ten Movements.” “I would never look at the world in the same way again, for once accustomed to a locomotory point of view I realized that flight is not unique in its power to shape adaptation. On the contrary—I began to see the guiding hand of locomotion everywhere I looked. Thanks to Anhanguera I had stumbled upon life’s big secret, hiding in plain sight.” That secret was that locomotion—the business of getting from one place to another—“has dominated evolutionary possibility from the very outset.”

Although this sounds like an audacious proposition, Mr. Wilkinson evidently means it. He starts out by lamenting that evolution by natural selection has come to seem like “the one and only answer to any question about life.” Though “sort of true,” he continues, “pointing at a single element in a causal chain hardly amounts to an intellectually satisfying explanation.” The randomness of natural selection also leaves us with the dispiriting idea of evolution as just “one damned thing after another.”

This is, of course, much too bold a start. Natural selection is hardly a “single element” in a causal chain but a collective term for a host of factors—like predation, weather, disease, hunger, competition and sexual (largely female) choice—that favor some traits and weed out others. Moreover, Charles Darwin himself included locomotion among those factors, arguing, for instance, that our own upright bipedal posture had been gradually favored in early human ancestors as forest habitat gave way to open savanna. But never mind all that. If we can set aside the opening flurry with Darwin, Mr. Wilkinson’s argument that locomotion provides “a way of making deeper sense of ourselves and other living things” begins to seem persuasive.

In describing the evolution of the human form, for example, he starts by pointing out that opposable thumbs, “though often casually held up as key human accoutrements,” are in fact common to most primates. I should confess that this hadn’t occurred to me before, though I have watched baboons delicately picking berries from trees and vervet monkeys gleefully squeezing toothpaste, my toothpaste, out of its tube. Such is the power of our preconceptions.

Primates, of course, need opposable thumbs for their arboreal way of life and particularly for negotiating the thinner branches on the periphery of trees, where the ripe berries tend to be. But the discussion really becomes interesting when Mr. Wilkinson adds in the origin of the primate gait. Most other mammals walk with “a lateral sequence gait”: right hind leg, then right fore, then left hind, followed by left fore.

On the ground, this is “a wonderfully stable sequence” that maintains “a large triangular polygon of support.” But it wouldn’t work on the narrow branches of a tree. So primates instead use a “diagonal sequence gait,” right hind foot followed by left fore foot. This has the advantage of shifting most of the weight to the hind legs. And if the foreleg reaching out senses that the branch is too thin to support the animal’s weight, it’s also easier to tilt back and avoid a fall.

The diagonal gait’s rearward weight shift made the eventual move to an upright stance much easier and, combined with opposable thumbs, freed primate forelimbs “to become uniquely specialized for manipulation and food acquisition.” Manipulative forelimbs in turn made social grooming easier, Mr. Wilkinson writes. Grooming facilitated the more complex social lives that are characteristic of many primate species, and complex social lives led in turn to the development of larger brains. All this because some tree shrew-like creature among our distant ancestors “ventured boldly where no mammal had gone before: onto the flimsiest branches of the Late Cretaceous trees.”

With the help of his locomotory worldview, Mr. Wilkinson goes on to provide a similarly enlightening perspective on such major evolutionary developments as the transition from wriggling spineless marine organisms to the first vertebrates, the movement of fish out of the water and onto dry land, and the evolution of flight.

He has enough grasp of the average reader’s frame of mind to lighten his science at times. Among many other curious tidbits, we learn, for instance, that the odd walking style that female fashion models affect on the catwalk—one hip swinging a little too low on each stride, counterbalanced by the exaggerated sideways swaying of the torso—is known as a Trendelenburg gait, otherwise employed mainly by race walkers and chimpanzees. And to introduce us to the “central pattern generators” in our nervous system, which enable us to get where we want to go without having to think about every muscle movement, he recounts the incredibly complicated choices made, largely unconsciously, on a bicycle ride around Cambridge.

Unfortunately, Mr. Wilkinson often seems to be in too much of a hurry himself and neglects to slow down enough to bring the reader along with him. This is particularly a problem because the physics or genetics of any given form of locomotion can be extraordinarily complicated and deserve close explanation. But Mr. Wilkinson’s idea of being lucid, in describing the function of the Hox genes in embryo development, reads like this: “Simply put, their job is to translate the fore-to-aft morphogen gradients into a transcription factor expression pattern.”

Mr. Wilkinson may well be right that our four-billion-year history of locomotion “has given us everything we hold dear, down to the very awareness and curiosity that’s enabled us to piece that history together,” but it hasn’t given him the ability to tell that story properly. Long before he arrives at his conclusion, most readers will have used their powers of locomotion, regrettably, to put this book down and go elsewhere.

Wildlife Has A Kind Word for a Hedge Fund Manager

A Siberian tiger in the forests of Primorskii province near Vladivostok, Russia. (Photo: Animal Press/Barcroft Media/Getty Images)

This is my latest for Takepart.com, a follow-up on last week’s New York Times column about illegal logging by Lumber Liquidators:

Everybody hates hedge fund managers, and even hedge fund managers don’t much like the short sellers among them. Short sellers are a peculiar breed who scrupulously avoid the happy talk that dominates the rest of the market. Instead, they specialize in ferreting out corporate bad behavior. Then they bet that the sins of such a company will sooner or later come out, causing the stock to collapse. This makes them about as popular as a fundamentalist preacher at a Mardi Gras parade. They are also not above public shaming to make a stock collapse sooner.

You might think this has nothing to do with wildlife. Let me fill in some background. In October 2013, the Environmental Investigation Agency, a conservation nonprofit, went public with the results of a five-year investigation in the Russian Far East. The forests there are the only habitat of the world’s last wild Siberian tigers and Amur leopards.

The tigers in particular have been the focus of a 25-year conservation effort by the Wildlife Conservation Society, the World Wildlife Fund, and their Russian counterparts. At a cost of about $7 million so far, that effort has succeeded in increasing the populations to about 500 tigers and 50 leopards. Each tiger needs hundreds of square miles of forest, and the biggest threat to their survival comes from illegal logging of that forest.

The EIA undercover agents had gone into the area posing as lumber buyers. They saw where the illegal logging was happening. Then they followed the wood back to a factory in China that was the single largest buyer. There they saw (and videotaped) former tiger habitat being turned into living room floors and packed in boxes labeled

Lumber Liquidators, the name of the largest seller of wood floors in the United States.

That company made itself famous with the slogan “Hardwood for Less,” offering prices that were frankly too good to believe. This is how it managed it, according to Alexander von Bismarck, EIA’s executive director: “They were the largest customer of the worst actor in terms of cutting and buying illegal timber in that forest.” Apparently acting on information from EIA, federal agencies raided Lumber Liquidators’ offices.

At this point, a hedge fund short seller named Whitney Tilson of Kase Capital Management got interested. “It was a very high-growth, high-flying, momentum company, and it can be very dangerous to short a stock like that,” Tilson told me. “The key is to find a catalyst,” something that could drive down the stock, “and it’s usually bad news when two federal agencies stage a raid on company offices.” When that sort of thing happens to hospital companies implicated in Medicare fraud, for instance, “their stock drops 50 percent,” Tilson said. “What was stunning to me with Lumber Liquidators was that they went from $115 down to $100, and by the time I presented my case” at the November 2013 Robin Hood Investors Conference, “it was back to $115. So it was a dream short.”

A dream, that is, if you can sleep at night with the stressful realities of how short sellers do their job: They borrow shares in a company, often a stock market darling of the moment, and immediately sell them at the current price ($115) in the expectation that they will be able to return those shares, or “cover the short,” by purchasing shares at a much lower price later on, when the truth comes out. But waiting for the truth can be agonizingly slow. If the usual analyst happy talk continues to push up the stock and investors pile on, the short seller’s cost can go up almost without limit. An investor like Tilson generally has millions of dollars on the line in each investment position.

Tilson made a detailed case against Lumber Liquidators at that 2013 conference. Roughly since the 2011 appointment of a new chief executive, Robert Lynch, the company had somehow managed to more than double its gross margins—the difference between its cost for materials and the revenue customers paid to buy its products. How? Tilson noted that it had significantly increased its buying from China. He then cited the EIA report, which he called “meticulously researched and documented,” and concluded that “a meaningful portion of LL’s margin expansion could be due to buying illegal wood.” But he also said, in effect, so what? “Lots of companies are doing lots of even more nefarious things and regulators/authorities do nothing.” He still needed a catalyst.

His thinking, he told me, was that “if I’m certain they’re cheating on hardwood and if their operating margin has suddenly doubled in 18 months, they might be cheating elsewhere.” So he dug up and helped publicize bad behavior of a sort even ordinary consumers might care about: Lumber Liquidators was exposing its own customers to wood contaminated with large amounts of formaldehyde, a lung irritant and a carcinogen. Xuhua Zhou, a little-known hedge fund analyst, had reported the formaldehyde contamination in mid-2013. (Tilson may also have heard from a whistle-blower inside the company.) The television show 60 Minutes picked up on this side of the story, and when its report aired in March 2015, Lumber Liquidators stock finally collapsed (to the mid $30s), Lynch resigned in disgrace, and Tilson went laughing to the bank.

“Making a dollar on the short side is psychically much more rewarding then making a dollar on the long side, because it appeals to the contrarian side of investors,” Tilson said. “Making a dollar on the long side is just floating down the river with everyone else. In this particular case, identifying a company that was hurting its customers and doing illegal things—and now the company isn’t doing it—that’s an extra bonus.”

Early this month, a federal judge approved a settlement between Department of Justice prosecutors and Lumber Liquidators under the Lacey Act, the fundamental U.S. law against trafficking in illegal wildlife and wood products. The company agreed to pay a fine of $13.1 million, the largest ever under that law. It also faces five years of probation during which federal officials will closely scrutinize its environmental compliance. The company stock is now down 90 percent from its former high to below $15 a share, representing a loss of value of about $2.7 billion.

Better still, this case is likely to strike fear in the hearts of other U.S. retailers who up to now have treated China as a black box for hiding the environmental crimes that often make their discount pricing possible. It’s also a message to all of us as consumers: Prices that are too good to be true may well be the product of hidden crimes. You don’t want those crimes on the walls or floors of your home, in the frames around your kids’ photos, or, really, anywhere in your life. Shopping local “Made in the U.S.A.” products suddenly seems like a much safer idea.

But the best thing about this case is that it will slow the rate of deforestation in the critical habitat of the Russian Far East. So next time you see a wild Siberian tiger in a photo or on television, spare a kind thought—unlikely as it may sound—for a hedge fund manager. Tilson has moved on to other stocks. But I’m betting that this case will keep both him and Zhou on the lookout for bad environmental practices as one more clue to stocks worth shorting.

Also give thanks—and more to the point, donations—to EIA, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the World Wildlife Fund. These guys are in this fight for the long term, sometimes at considerable risk to their lives. And hey, Whitney? When it comes to making such donations, I trust this is one more way you are already showing the rest of us an important lead.

 

In A Russian Forest: The High Cost of Our Discount Prices

From tiger habitat to your living room floor, via Lumber Liquidators (Photo by Anatoly Kabanets / WWF-Russia)

My latest for The New York Times:

I HAVE loved wood and the smell of sawdust ever since I was a child and got to wander among the open sheds at the local lumberyard. But for years now I have had a sick feeling every time I shop for almost anything made of wood. The prices are often unbelievably good, but then I notice the words “Made in Vietnam,” or some other country where illegal logging is demolishing forests at appalling speed, largely for the United States and European markets.

So I was pleased when I read this month that a federal judge had approved a criminal settlement in just such a logging case. But I was also disappointed that the settlement imposed no jail sentences and fined Lumber Liquidators just $13.1 million, pocket change for the largest retailer of hardwood flooring in the United States. The crime, a felony, was importing and selling flooring, via China, that was illegally logged in the forests of Russia’s Far East.

Lumber Liquidators is of course more notorious for having sold laminated flooring, also from China, that contained dangerous levels of formaldehyde, a carcinogen. The CBS program “60 Minutes” exposed that practice last March, leading to the collapse of the company’s sales and stock price, and the resignation of its chief executive, Robert M. Lynch.

But more than a year earlier, private investigators revealed the company’s criminal logging, and federal agents raided its headquarters. Oddly, the market shrugged it off then, and Mr. Lynch held onto his job. I don’t mean to minimize the formaldehyde issue, but people can rip tainted flooring out of their homes, and class-action lawsuits on behalf of customers and shareholders may help recoup their losses. Replacing old-growth forest, on the other hand, is almost impossible.

The forests of Russia’s Far East are the only remaining home of the 450 or so wild Siberian tigers and 50 wild Amur leopards in the world. Those 500 lives matter infinitely more than our discount prices.

The tigers require huge expanses of intact forest — a home range of 450 square miles for a male, and about a third of that for a female. They also need that forest to be abundantly populated with deer and wild boar, and these prey species in turn must feed on acorns from Mongolian oak and pine cones from Korean pine to survive. But forests like that are rapidly vanishing thanks to companies like Lumber Liquidators.

The statement of facts accepted by the company as part of its settlement was damning. In pursuit of sharp discounts and higher profit margins, employees sought out lumber they knew, or ought to have known, was illegal, and submitted falsified import declarations to disguise that fact. They asserted, for instance, that Mongolian oak, which grows only in the Far East of Russia, had been harvested in Germany. They did it by the boatload, and probably would have continued to do so, because customers flocked through the doors, and investors smiled. In 2012, Mr. Lynch’s first year leading the company, one financial website chose him as their “chief executive of the year,” noting Lumber Liquidators’ knack for deep discounting that “puts its peers to shame.”

But the shame turned out to lie elsewhere in October 2013, when the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit conservation group, unveiled the results of a long-term undercover operation in China and Russia. Investigators had followed the lumber from the forests north of Vladivostok to the mill, and from the mill to the Chinese factory that was the largest buyer. They weren’t looking for Lumber Liquidators, said Alexander von Bismarck, the conservation group’s executive director. But “we almost literally bumped into the stacks and stacks of boxes that have the Lumber Liquidators brand in the factory that we had gone to,” he said. “They were the largest customer of the worst actor in terms of cutting and buying illegal timber in that forest.”

The settlement was the largest ever under the Lacey Act, the fundamental United States law against illegal trafficking in wildlife. (The law ties penalties to how much a company profits from illegal activities rather than to the much larger social and environmental costs.) It was also one of the first successful prosecutions under a 2008 amendment that extended the Lacey Act to imports of illegal lumber. Similar legal changes have gone into effect in Australia and Europe, with the aim of shutting down the major markets for stolen lumber.

Beyond the $13.1 million fine, Lumber Liquidators’ market worth has sunk roughly 90 percent, from more than $3 billion in 2013 to less than $400 million as of last week. “This is the first time that the guys risking their lives in the Russian Far East have an actual concrete reaction in the market to their intelligence,” said Mr. von Bismarck. “It’s easy to say, ‘Is that all they get, $13 million?’ But we’ve had 100 years of losing forests where nothing has happened.”

The Lumber Liquidators settlement also includes a five-year probation, in which the company must enact an environmental compliance plan, with probation officers and Department of Justice lawyers looking on. Why no criminal sentences? Corporations typically compartmentalize knowledge, so someone may know that a wood product is illegal, and someone else may know the documentation is false, and someone in retail may know they’re getting an incredible price — but they ask no questions, any more than you would on being offered choice merchandise that “fell off the back of a truck.”

But the case puts companies on notice to ask those questions, said Mr. von Bismarck, because even if $13.1 million is pocket change, a couple of billion dollars loss in stock value starts to feel like real money. That message is also reaching companies in China and other countries that have exported illegal lumber with impunity, he said.

The legal change has also given hope to those who take the risk of fighting illegal logging in their home countries. In Houston last September, a tip from forestry officials in Peru led United States customs agents to seize a shipload of lumber said to have been illegally logged in the Amazon. That seizure was followed by a crackdown by Peru’s government on opponents of illegal logging, which included the firing of Peru’s top forestry official, death threats and the firebombing of his offices. But firing and intimidation may no longer avail: The same ship that made the Houston delivery is now being detained with another load from the Amazon by officials in the Dominican Republic.

This is all good news. It means tigers and a host of other species may still have forests to wander in, and honest companies will face less unfair competition from stolen timber. It’s also a reminder of a fundamental truth we all tend to forget in our insatiable quest for bargains: The lowest price is seldom the best deal for anyone.

Richard Conniff is the author of the forthcoming book “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth” and a contributing opinion writer.

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The Hadza-Honeyguide Story Ain’t as Sweet as TV Pretends

Greater honeyguide (Photo: Wilferd Duckitt/Flickr)

I just ran across this lovely story by Cara Giaimo at Atlas Obscura, and it’s another great example of how the tales we tell about nature just aren’t as neat and simple as we like to pretend.  The guilty parties this time include Discovery Channel and David Attenborough, but first, the background:

When Hadza want to find honey, they shout and whistle a special tune. If a honeyguide is around, it’ll fly into the camp, chattering and fanning out its feathers. The Hadza, now on the hunt, chase it, grabbing their axes and torches and shouting “Wait!” They follow the honeyguide until it lands near its payload spot, pinpoint the correct tree, smoke out the bees, hack it open, and free the sweet combs from the nest. The honeyguide stays and watches.

When they are done, the Hadza supposedly repay the honeyguide for its help by leaving some of the treat, which it otherwise could not get into without human help.  For instance, in the recent film, Hadza: Last of the First:

In one scene of the film, after a group of Hadza men smokes bees out of a hive, they are shown throwing pieces of the honeycomb, which hit the ground in slow motion. The bird, filmed in close-up on a flattened patch of grass, snaps them up. A narrator explains, “The bird will wait patiently and fly down, and will essentially take the leftovers… it’s the most developed, co-evolved, mutually helpful relationship between any mammal and any bird.”

Giaimo recounts similar just-so versions of the story, about the Maasai:

On Discovery’s “Human Planet,” for example, two Maasai boys leave their feathery convoy a big chunk of comb. As the narrator says, they “know they have to pay their guide.”

If you’ve come across the BBC show “Trials of Life,” you might have even watched the exuberant David Attenborough share honey with the Kenyan bird who led him to a chock-full tree. “If the bird hadn’t shown us where this bee’s nest was, we would have never gotten this sweet reward,” he says, his mouth full of it. “But then, if we hadn’t broken open a bee’s nest, the bird would never have been able to get into the honey. Since it is a partnership, it’s only fair that the bird should get a reward. So it’s the custom in these parts not to take all the honey, but to give some of it to the bird.” He molds a piece of waxy comb around the tip of a spear stuck in the ground, and is on his way.

Brian Wood selfie on a Hadza honey run.

But here’s the sticking point for happy talk about the natural world: A biological anthropologist at Yale named Brian Wood studied the Hadza in detail, and Giaimo reports:

Thanks to Hadza custom, the birds weren’t guaranteed any reward. Indeed, the Hadza were committed to stiffing their helper, meticulously destroying any grubs or wax that the honeyguide might make a meal from.

“I can go back into my notes to one of the very first times I was following a Hadza man,” Wood says. “I wrote down, ‘He’s taking the honeycomb and throwing it into the bush… he just grabs a handful of bee larvae and honeycomb and throws it into a tree.’” The second time, Wood says, the same thing happened: “He actually dug a hole and shoved the honeycomb that remained into it, and buried it.”

“I asked the Hadza guy to explain what was happening,” Wood says, “and his explanation was simply that they don’t want the honeyguide to get too full.” This would have impaired the bird’s work for the next day, according to the Hadza. Over and over, Wood watched foragers hide, bury, or burn excess wax, even when the birds were nowhere to be seen. In one video taken by Wood, a young man named Koyobe chews on some comb while detailing his reasoning. “If the honeyguide eats, she gets full,” he tells Wood, in Swahili. “Then she just would sit. She wouldn’t call.” Next to him, the remnants of a bee’s nest smolder in a fresh fire.

Check out the whole story here and keep it in mind next time you are tempted to recount some bit of natural lore that just sounds a little too good to be true.

Can We Save Bees by Using Them to Deliver Natural Pesticides?

Pest control agent on the wing? (Photo: Sam Droege/USDA)

One of the most persistent and destructive problems in modern agriculture is its heavy reliance on pesticides. The United States alone uses about 1.1 billion pounds of these chemicals every year to protect flowering crops. The indiscriminate spraying doesn’t just pollute soil and water, it also kills many of the beneficial organisms those same flowering crops depend on. That’s in addition to contamination of fruits and vegetables: residues of 165 different pesticides turned up in a 2013 U.S. Department of Agriculture sampling of the foods we eat every day.

But what if, instead of crop-dusters blanketing fields with chemicals, you could use bees to deliver a precise dose of a treatment directly to the plants that need them? That is, what if you could piggyback on the vital work pollinating insects are already performing, instead of inadvertently killing them?

That’s the idea in the technology called “entomovectoring.” Researchers in Canada and Europe have been experimenting for years with the idea of using bees (the “entomological” part of that word) as delivery systems (or vectors). They equip commercial beehives with trays containing a powder, and when bees are leaving the hive, they tramp through the powder and carry it on their limbs the way they carry pollen. When dosed with the appropriate bacterial, viral, or fungal additives, that powder deposited on the flower can protect a plant from a particular pest or disease. A Canadian company, Bee Vectoring Technology (BVT), has now opened a plant to produce packets of its patented powdery “vectorite” custom designed for particular crops.

Honeybees work best for large field delivery because they forage up to two miles from the hive. Bumblebees tend to stay close to home, sticking to within 400 to 600 feet of their nest. But they’re less aggressive than honeybees, and more tolerant of temperature fluctuations, making them effective in greenhouses. European researchers have also experimented with mason bees, which can sometimes be better vectors because they visit each flower more often.

Despite initial concerns, the bees haven’t suffered ill effects while delivering certain pest-killing viruses and bacteria to flowers.

In an interview, Michael Collinson, chief executive at Bee Vectoring Technology, said entomovectoring can drastically cut the amount of pesticide needed to treat crops. With conventional spraying, a farmer typically applies several rounds of a pesticide during the bloom period, requiring as much as 600 gallons of water per acre. Even at that rate, as many as half the flowers may open and die, untreated, between spray intervals.

The bees, on the other, require no water, visit throughout the blooming season, and need to apply only about five percent as much of a particular protective substance. Moreover, the substances they deliver appear to benefit the entire plant, not just the flowers. In one study, honeybees delivered a treatment against fungi, insects and mildew and it later turned up in 96 percent of tomato leaves and 76 percent of sweet pepper leaves.

The need to apply large amounts of pesticides and fungicides using conventional spraying also has one other inevitable side effect: Resistance to a chemical tends to develop much more quickly, often in as little as three or four years. According to Collinson, the much smaller doses required in entomovectoring could extend the life of some control agents to as much as ten or twelve years before plants become resistant.

Because entomvectoring typically works with biological control agents rather than with chemicals, it can also qualify as organic. David Passifume, an organic farmer in Ontario, said his reliance on entomovectoring in strawberries completely protected his crop from mold and rot even during the very wet 2015 growing season. After going organic, “we avoided some strawberry varieties because of their susceptibility to tarnish plant bugs,” said Passifume. But with entomovectoring, “we have gone back to planting them.”

For better or worse, entomovectoring has already attracted interest from the opposite side of the agricultural world. An executive from Syngenta, the agrochemical giant (currently being acquired by ChemChina), now serves as an advisor to Bee Vectoring Technology. Rival Monsanto, which made a failed takeover bid for Syngenta last year, has also expressed interest in testing products with the company.

Thus the technology now being touted for its ability to work with Mother Nature, may yet end up as just another tool of the agro-industrial complex.

— (With research by Karen Braeder)

Will “Flexibility” Benefit Threatened Beach Birds?

Young piping plovers. (Photo: Shawn Patrick Ouellette/’Portland Press Herald’ via Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart.com:

Visiting Nantucket a few years ago, I was dismayed to hear some of the island’s wealthy retirees complaining that the damned piping plovers were keeping them from their chosen fishing spots. The plovers, small beach-nesting birds, are a threatened species along the Atlantic Coast and endangered in the Midwest. And I had naively assumed that people with the money to summer in one of the world’s priciest destinations might have a little sympathy for birds that barely manage to survive at all on the open beach.

Not so. The recreational fishermen were determined to drive their off-road vehicles out the sandy spit of land called Great Point to their favorite surf-casting spots, and they were enraged that designated protected areas and buffer zones around plover nests blocked certain areas in breeding season.

So it caught my eye the other day when I saw that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is currently seeking public comment on a draft proposal to give Massachusetts beach managers more flexibility in determining how to protect piping plovers. “Flexibility” is often a code word for letting noisy constituents prevail over good science, and my suspicions increased when I read that an FWS spokeswoman was describing the change as “a solution that works for people and plovers.”

For such small and unobtrusive birds, piping plovers have elicited an extraordinary amount of animosity over the years. That’s because they like to nest on open beaches, usually just above the high tide line, exactly where humans also go to conduct their sacred summer rituals. The plovers are well camouflaged, making it easy to step on a nest or inadvertently crush a chick under the wheels of an off-road vehicle. That was one reason President Nixon ordered federal wildlife officials in the 1970s to limit off-road vehicle use in protected areas unless they could demonstrate that it posed no harm to wildlife. President Carter followed up with an executive order to the same effect.

But both FWS and the National Park Service largely ignored these orders until environmental groups finally sued in the 1990s. At the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, the park service didn’t even require permits for beach driving, much less protect piping plover nesting areas. When Audubon North Carolina and Defenders of Wildlife forced a change, angry locals sent death threats, banned staffers from restaurants, and assaulted them physically and verbally.

(Photo: Gregory Rec/’Portland Press Herald’ via Getty Images)

The standard method for protecting piping plovers is to put up a ring of fencing called an exclosure around each nest, or to close off large areas with “symbolic fencing,” meaning warning signs and marker tape. The vast majority of beaches remain open to human use. But people still often resent having to concede even fragment of what they perceive as their turf. In Massachusetts, the protests have largely been limited to angry complaining, focused on a few popular protected areas like the Cape Cod National Seashore and Nantucket’s Great Point.

Massachusetts is also the only major success story for piping plover recovery, having increased its population five-fold, from 139 breeding pairs in 1986 to 689 last year. That’s out of a 2015 total of just 1866 pairs along the entire coast from North Carolina into eastern Canada. The success in Massachusetts has, however, also been part of the problem, because it has required protection and buffer zones across increasing percentages of the beach.

Under the new regulations, according to Katharine Parsons, director of the coastal waterbird program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society, some beaches will see activities that have been banned up to now. For instance, off-road vehicles may be able to “self-escort” in close proximity past piping plover nests, if they have a trained passenger walking out in front as a lookout. There will also be increased monitoring of chicks to avoid any losses. Additional money for enforcement, and for mitigation programs aimed at increasing plover productivity, will come from local towns and beach managers, probably paid for from off-road vehicle permit fees. Some of those funds will help control predators, from house cats to coyotes, which often take piping plover chicks.

The new rules could be “risky,” said Parsons, “but we do see long-term benefits.” The Trustees of Reservations, a nonprofit that manages many Massachusetts beaches for both conservation and recreation also supports the new rules, according to Russ Hopping, ecology program director there.

But an initiative to escort vehicles past active nests lasted only one summer in Cape Hatteras, warned Jason Rylander, a staff attorney for Defenders of Wildlife. “It took a tremendous amount of Park Service resources, and escorting one vehicle at a time through narrow passages, you still end up with a line of angry vehicle operators. All the research says it’s not good to have vehicles driving by nests.”

The Audubon Society’s Parsons says the success or failure of the new “flexibility” will depend entirely on the details. If you want to remind federal regulators how important those details can be, make your comment here by February 19. The piping plovers will be returning to their nesting sites next month, and the likelihood that they will continue to return for many seasons thereafter may hang in the balance.