Richard Conniff's Blog, page 27

GOP Still Blocking The Land & Water Conservation Fund

Back in February, I wrote about how Congress has chronically stolen funds from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Check out that article. It will make you mad. And you’ll be even madder to know that in September, our eminent representatives actually let the law expire, to mark the passage of its unanimous approval by a wiser Congress in 1965.

It’s a law that has benefited every single American community, and yet the relentless, petty, narrow-minded squabbling goes on. Republicans want to minimize use of the fund to acquire and preserve land.  They’d rather we spent out money on buying easements from private landowners.

Easements can in fact be more cost effective than outright purchase.  But what’s really motivating the Republicans isn’t efficiency or the opportunity for greater environmental and wildlife protection.  They’re only interested in minimizing federal influence and maximizing benefits to private property owners, even if it is to the detriment of the recreational and other needs of the American people.

As always, they are all about protecting the 1 percent.

Here’s the latest update from the Land Trust Alliance:

With the Land and Water Conservation Fund expired since September, the House of Representatives is determining the future direction for one of the nation’s foremost conservation

programs.

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT) recently unveiled a draft bill to reauthorize – and significantly change – LWCF. Among other provisions, his bill limits federal land acquisition – which has for years accounted for about 60 percent of LWCF – to no more than 3.5 percent. This would dramatically impact land trusts’ ability to do federal projects.

On Nov. 17, the bill was the subject of a hearing in Rep. Bishop’s Committee with most Democrats on the committee standing firm that no structural changes should be made and Republicans calling for evaluation/overhaul of the program. Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) suggested that one change that needed to be considered is to allow land trusts to use LWCF funds to purchase easements, citing her experience as a former board member of the Wyoming Stockmen’s Agricultural Land Trust.

The Alliance has worked with our Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition partners in support of bipartisan legislation by Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) that would continue major funding for LWCF and federal land acquisition with only modest changes.

We hope that reauthorization will occur as soon as possible. The path, however, will likely be a long and winding one.

 

Cambodian Soldiers Kill Cambodian Police, as China Profits

It is a familiar story in Southeast Asia. In truth, it has become a familiar story almost everywhere: China’s vast appetite for luxury items was the underlying cause of last week’s execution-style killing of two government conservation workers in Cambodia.

Sieng Darong, a 47-year-old forest ranger, and Sab Yoh, a 29-year-old police officer, were murdered as they slept on November 7, shot with AK-47-style heavy weapons. A third member of the team survived with injuries, and a fourth escaped. The killings happened shortly after the team confiscated chainsaws at an illegal logging site in northwestern Cambodia’s Preah Vihear Protected Forest.

Investigators have arrested six soldiers from the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces on charges of illegal logging in the incident. One of the six has already been jailed to serve a prior sentence of ten years in prison on an old armed robbery conviction. But so far, no formal murder charges have been filed, nor has anyone above the level of foot soldier been implicated in the case.

The killings happened in an area heavily affected by the illegal trade in rosewood (also known as hongmu), a rare precious wood prized in the Chinese luxury market for ornately carved beds and other status symbols. In a comment on the killings, an Environmental Investigation Agency campaigner noted that “China is the global centre of hongmu demand and its log imports in 2014 were the highest on record, topping $2 billion in value, with Cambodia the fifth largest contributor to this industry.”

The two murder victims in the current case were both associated with the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). In a statement Ross Sinclair, director of WCS Cambodia, said that organization was “encouraged by the swift action by local authorities.” He also praised the Cambodian government “for assigning high-level investigators to this case.” But he added, “We are committed to ensure that the murders of Darong and Yoh are honored by the prosecution of those who killed them and by working to ensure the illegal logging networks are dismantled and the forests and wildlife are protected.”

That will be harder than it sounds. Cambodia has one of the worst overall deforestation rates in the world, according to a 2014 report from the University of Maryland. That didn’t even count the trade in rosewood, which is harder to detect by satellite. But that trade is lucrative, largely illegal, and made possible only by widespread official collaboration. A report early this year from Global Witness, another investigative organization, linked Cambodian rosewood exports to officials in the military and at the highest levels of government, including key allies and advisors of longtime Prime Minister Hun Sen.

In the normal order, the murder investigation would probably fade away when international attention inevitably shifts elsewhere. But “the interesting thing about this case is … suddenly it’s Cambodian military versus Cambodian police,” said one observer on the scene. “They can no longer blame this on activists. This is premeditated violence within their own ranks. The Cambodia police are very unhappy with the Cambodian military, and that ups the stakes considerably.” The case may thus be “working its way up the chain. There are people who don’t want to let it lie, because of what was done.”

One sign of that determination: In the aftermath of the killing, conservation groups issued a joint statement expressing their alarm and concern, which by itself would be business as usual. The statement declared that “this heinous crime highlights the importance of a strong collaboration between conservation NGOs, their community partners and the government to empower law enforcement officials and rangers in their important mission to fight against illegal activities that destroy the country’s natural capital.” But in a remarkable show of unity, the director general of Cambodia’s Forestry Administration has now posted that statement on his agency’s own web site.

Meanwhile the hunger for luxury continues to drive the seemingly unstoppable demand for rosewood objects in China. The Global Witness report urged China to impose a ban on illegal timber imports. But there is very little evidence that China gives a damn, any more than it does about tigers, elephants, rhinos, pangolins or a host of other imperiled species.   We can hope, perhaps, that the ghosts of Darong and Yoh–husbands, fathers, honest defenders of the natural world–will haunt the buyers as they lie in those delicately carved rosewood beds.

Shit Happens & It Makes the World a Better Place

(Photo: Richard Conniff)

My latest for Takepart:

Not long ago in South Africa’s Soutpansberg, I watched a line of otherwise fastidious visiting high school students standing at a workbench happily sifting with their fingertips through specimens of excrement. Leopard excrement, to be precise. They were picking out hair, teeth, bones, horns, and claws, the undigested remnants of victims of predatory attacks—to be used in identifying the shifting dietary habits of local leopards.

The yuck factor aside, animal excrement, dung, scat, spoor, feces, poop, crap, or just plain shit is a topic of enormous importance for biologists and for biodiversity. It is of course also a source of many bad jokes, as anyone who has performed an owl pellet dissection in high school biology may recall.

But never mind that. Let’s start with the biodiversity, or rather, with the story of the honey locust tree. It produces long, leathery seedpods, which look completely unappetizing. But the woolly mammoth and a few other ancient megafauna used to gobble them up, inadvertently dispersing the seeds in their droppings. Then the megafauna went extinct, and the honey locust would inevitably have followed them–except that humans rediscovered the tree and widely dispersed its seeds (by hand) in cities and suburbs around the country.

Other fruiting plants have been less fortunate, and many are now on the path to extinction. New Zealand and Hawaii in particular are full of what botanists call “widow plants,” because extinctions have taken away the species they depended on to consume their fruit and defecate their seeds.

This form of partnership is common to a huge variety of plant species, which over the course of their evolution have come to depend on a bat, a bird, a fish, a gorilla, or even a crocodile to perform this vital service of dispersal by defecation. Beyond the coevolutionary richness of the connection between species, all sorts of other biodiversity benefits follow. Among other things, a tree that simply dropped its seeds in place would quickly find itself hemmed in by a monoculture of its own seedlings, all squabbling for resources and room to grow. But plants that can reliably disperse their seeds farther away—by means of some animal’s digestive tract–have more surviving offspring and in habitats that are more diverse. Scat is in short the stuff of life.

For biologists, so is scat analysis. It’s not just a way of picking out victims from a leopard’s woolly turd. Using sophisticated laboratory technologies, Sam Wasser at the University of Washington can measure what certain animals have been eating, how they feel, whether they’re stressed, how many pollutants are sequestered in their flesh, and what reproductive state they’re in. That is, fecal samples can answer the most personal questions imaginable—like a blood test at your annual physical–without the researcher ever having to handle, annoy, or even see the animal itself. Better still, the animal never has to see the person doing the research.

Finding the scat can be a challenge, particularly when the animals in question are whales at sea. So Wasser’s lab has trained dogs as scat hunters, and one, named Tucker, now rides in the bow of a research boat sniffing out the leavings of various Pacific cetaceans. With Tucker’s guidance, Wasser and his fellow researchers have recently used fecal analysis to identify levels of DDT, PCB, and other persistent pollutants in killer whales off the coast of Washington and southern British Columbia. Other research has turned up high levels of pollution from the petroleum industry in caribou living near Alberta’s heavily exploited tar sands.

Scatology’s most impressive achievement so far was the result of a fifteen-year project to gather elephant dung specimens from across Africa and map the DNA for each location. That enabled law enforcement agents to answer a question that has eluded them for more than 30 years: When they seize contraband ivory, they might be able to determine a tusk’s DNA. But it didn’t tell them where the elephant actually lived and died. That changed dramatically with an article published this past June in the journal ScienceExpress. Wasser and his co-authors looked at 28 large ivory seizures and matched up the DNA of those tusks against the DNA map of elephant dung.

“We can take a seizure from anywhere in Africa and place it to within 300 kilometers of where it was poached,” said Wasser. Africa is huge. The U.S. lower 48 States would fit into it five times over. So being able to locate the crime to an area roughly the distance between Seattle, Wash., and Portland, Oregon, “shows you the power of the tool.”

The study turned the spotlight on just two areas as the dominant sources of the modern war on elephants: About 90 percent of all contraband savannah elephant ivory came from southeast Tanzania or just across the border in Mozambique. For the forest elephant, about 90 percent came from the so-called Tridom, an area on the border of northern Gabon and the Republic of Congo, and southeastern Central African Republic. (The latter includes the Dzanga-Sangha Protected Area, site of a notorious 2013 poaching raid.)

The results put governments in those two areas under intense pressure to admit the scale of the problem. As a result, Tanzania last month arrested a Chinese woman law enforcement agents dubbed “the queen of Ivory,” and a Tanzanian man dubbed “the Devil.” The arrests so far have not touched corrupt government officials, widely believed to have profited from the poaching. But having hard data enables international agencies to push for change and enforcement agencies to focus their efforts on where the problem is at its worst.

It is a testimony to the considerable importance of poop, which is after all no joke.

In the Field (and City) with Leopards

Lit by a camera-trap flash and the glow of urban Mumbai, a leopard prowls the edge of India’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park. (Photo: Steve Winter)

My article on leopards appears in the December issue of National Geographic magazine, and a slightly reformatted version appears today online. I did the reporting in southern Africa, and India.  Here’s the lead:

We were sitting in the dark, waiting for the leopards beside a trail on the edge of India’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park, 40 square miles of green life in the middle of the sprawling gray metropolis of Mumbai. A line of tall apartment buildings stood just opposite, crowding the park border. It was 10 p.m., and through the open windows came the sounds of dishes being cleaned and children being put to bed. Religious music floated up from a temple in the distance. Teenage laughter, a motorcycle revving. The hum and clatter of 21 million people, like a great machine. Somewhere in the brush around us, the leopards were listening too, waiting for the noise to die down. Watching.

About 35 leopards live in and around this park. That’s an average of less than two square miles of habitat apiece, for animals that can easily range ten miles in a day. These leopards also live surrounded by some of the world’s most crowded urban neighborhoods, housing 52,000 people or more per square mile. (That’s nearly twice the population density of New York City.) And yet the leopards thrive. Part of their diet comes from spotted deer and other wild prey within the park. But many of the leopards also work the unfenced border between nature and civilization. While the city sleeps, they slip through the streets and alleys below, where they pick off dogs, cats, pigs, rats, chickens, and goats, the camp followers of human civilization. They eat people too, though rarely.

They are fearful of people, and with good reason. Humans make

fickle companions, admiring, rescuing, and even revering leopards in some contexts, and reviling them in many others—shooting them, snaring them, poisoning them, hanging them, even dousing a trapped leopard with kerosene, striking a match, and calmly filming as the animal writhes and whirls in a ball of fire, dying, but not nearly fast enough. Conservationists call leopards the world’s most persecuted big cat.

And yet leopards have become our shadows, our quasi-companion animals. They have no choice …

Check out the rest of the story at National Geographic.  I’ll post them whole thing here later, but for now, National Geographic was willing (unlike many magazines these days) to spend the money and send me into the field on this story, and they deserve the traffic.

A Solution to Criminal Overfishing Comes Closer

(Photo: Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart:

The odds that American consumers will be able to go into a store and buy fish that’s safe and legally caught have begun to improve, perhaps dramatically, over the past week. At the same time, a new report from the World Wildlife Fund illustrates just how bad the situation has become: It estimates that 86 percent of global fisheries are now at high or moderate risk of pirate fishing.

The official term is IUU, for Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated fisheries, and it means that those glistening imported fillets in your local market are highly likely to have been harvested in the wrong place or with the wrong methods. They may not even be the species advertised on the label. Or they could be contaminated with antibiotics, other drugs, or toxic chemicals used in some countries in farming or processing fish.

IUU, including fishing in protected marine reserves, is also a major factor in the global “empty seas” crisis. It’s been implicated in human trafficking. And it undercuts U.S. boats working in highly regulated and largely sustainable American fisheries. With an estimated value of $10 to $23 billion every year, IUU implicates every seafood merchant and every consumer in some of the worst criminal wildlife trafficking in the world. This is a lot to swallow for dinner.

The promising news is that the federal government on Friday published its proposed list of IUU-prone fish groups for a pilot program in which producers will be required to provide proper documentation, from harvest or farm to entry into the United States. It’s a long way from bait-to-dinner-plate traceability. Consumers will still not be able to go the local seafood counter and see a label certifying that their purchase is legal, safe, and sustainable. But the plan means customs agents at U.S. ports will now have that information for a group of seafoods where IUU and fraud are common: Abalone, Atlantic and Pacific cod, blue crab and king crab, dolphinfish (or mahi mahi), grouper, red snapper, sea cucumbers, sharks, shrimp, swordfish, and tuna.

Proposed rules under the plan are due in December, followed by a 60-day comment period, with the pilot program going into effect next September. The ambition, after a trial period, is to expand traceability requirements to all imported seafood as early as January 2017. The program represents a partial fulfillment of President Obama’s 2014 commitment to close U.S. borders to what he called “black market fishing.”

It’s also an important early step in implementing the U.S. commitment to the “Port State Measures Agreement,” under which coastal nations pledge to keep foreign vessels suspected of illegal fishing out of their ports. That agreement goes into effect when 25 countries have taking the necessary steps to end IUU; 13 countries have already done so, and another seven or eight, including the United States, are working their way through the process.

“I’ve worked in this field almost 30 years,” said Michele Kuruc, vice president for oceans policy at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), “and there has never been an effort like this in the United States. So I am confident we are making real strides.” At the same time, she pointed to the new WWF analysis showing that only 14 percent of global fisheries are now considered at low risk of IUU. Of 567 fish stocks examined in the study, 304 (or 52 percent) were at high risk, with many of them also overexploited or with no data on sustainability. Another 181 were at moderate risk. Fisheries from the eastern Indian Ocean through the southeastern and central Pacific were the worst performers.

“The US imports more than 100 different wild-caught species of fish, and the vast majority are plagued by serious problems of illegality,” said Kuruc. “Such extensive illegality requires a comprehensive solution that protects all species, not just a few. The long-term viability of our planet’s fisheries and ocean ecosystems requires it.”

Even with the proposed new regulations, the United States still lags far behind the European Union in working to stop IUU, added Dan Schaeffer of the Pew Charitable Trust’s End Illegal Fishing campaign. The EU in 2014 issued “yellow card” warnings to Korea and the Philippines, and the threat to ban imports from those countries resulted in “massive reforms,” according to Schaeffer. Thailand recently received a yellow card, and Guinea, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka are currently cut off from the European market. Closing the much larger U.S. market could rapidly end pirate fishing worldwide.

The Obama administration has requested an additional $3 million in IUU enforcement funding for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, to verify the documentation on imported seafood. “Anybody can write something on a form,” said Kuruc. “So obviously it requires a system to audit those forms occasionally.”

But “that’s the rub,” said Schaeffer. Governments and the major seafood importers are astonishingly unified in their support for ending pirate fishing. The U.S. Senate actually approved the Port State Measures Agreement by unanimous vote, a modern miracle. But paying for it is a different matter. “Support is a mile wide, but the funding behind it is an inch deep,” said Schaeffer. Conservationists are now racing to develop a system using satellites, and other modern technology to make monitoring of global fisheries more efficient and economical. “We’ll be able to say, ‘This is the ship I should be looking at, not that one,’” said Schaeffer.

But for now, and probably for another two or three years, the consumer’s simplest option is to stick with seafood harvested by U.S. boats. They brought in 9.5 billion pounds of fish and shellfish last year, worth $5.4 billion, and you can eat it with a clear conscience.

The Fake Science That Keeps Cats on the Streets

“Cat eating a rabbit” (Photo: Eddy Van 3000)

This is a piece I wrote a while ago. I read it again today and realized that it still makes an awful of sense, because the fake science of TNR is still alive in the world:

Various estimates say that anywhere from 20 to 100 million feral cats—an introduced and heavily subsidized predator—now roam the United States. Together with pet cats that are allowed to wander free, they kill billions of birds, mammals, and other animals every year. Every time I write about the need to deal with this rapidly worsening problem, certain readers argue for a method called TNR, which stands for “trap, neuter, and release,” or sometimes “trap, neuter, and return.”

So let’s take a look at how it might work.

TNR is an idea with enormous appeal for many animal welfare organizations, because it means cat shelters no longer have to euthanize unwanted cats: They just neuter and immunize them, then ship them back out into the world. It’s a way to avoid the deeply dispiriting business of putting animals down, not to mention the expense of feeding and caring for the animals during the usual waiting period for a possible adoption. And it enables animal shelters to put on a happier face for donors: “We’re a shelter, not a slaughterhouse.”

TNR advocates generally cite a handful of studies as evidence that this method works. The pick of the litter is a 2003 study in which TNR enabled the University of Central Florida to reduce the feral cat population on its Orlando campus by 66 percent. On closer examination, though, what that study actually showed was that 47 percent of the cat population was removed through an intensive adoption program, another 11 percent were euthanized, and at least another six percent were killed by automobiles or moved off campus to nearby woods. TNR itself appears to have accomplished almost nothing—and took 11 years to do it.

By email, the lead author of that study, Julie K. Levy, told me that adoption is a common component of TNR programs. She added, “I’d hate to speculate about what the outcome would have been without some cat removal, as that introduces a lot of uncountable variables.” But Levy, who remains a TNR advocate, was part of a team that subsequently examined just that question in two large-scale TNR programs in San Diego County, California, and Alachua County, Florida. She and her co-authors found that “any population-level effects” from TNR alone “were minimal.”

The programs might have been effective, the co-authors suggested, if they had neutered 71 to 94 percent of all feral cats, but that was “far greater than what actually achieved.” It is, in fact, far greater than almost any TNR program ever achieves, because, as Levy has written more recently, “capturing free-roaming cats, transporting them to a central facility for sterilization, and returning them to the trapping site are resource-intensive activities,” and “challenging to sustain” on a larger scale.”

TNR advocates also frequently cite a large-scale program on 103 cat colonies in Rome, Italy. Trapping and neutering decreased the populations of 55 cat colonies—while the other 48 colonies either gained population or stayed the same. The authors of that study concluded that, in the absence of a public education campaign to stop people from abandoning cats, “all these efforts” are “a waste of money, time and energy.”

And yet TNR proponents just go on touting the same evidence, with an almost magical faith that it will somehow turn out support their almost religious beliefs. They do this, I think, because anyone who has seen a pet dies knows how emotionally devastating it can be. Twice in my life, I’ve been the person who delivered a pet to the veterinarian to be, as the euphemism has it, “put to sleep.” They rank among the worst days of my life. But both deaths were quick and painless, a matter of falling asleep on my lap, and in both those cases it was infinitely better for the animal than to go on living with disease and impairment.

That’s the choice TNR advocates refuse to make.   They see only the individual cat saved from euthanasia and willfully blind themselves to the consequences for the cat itself and for everyone else. When they cite the Rome study as a success story, for instance, they neglect to note that Italy doesn’t have rabies. In this country, on the other hand, rabies prevention efforts cost $300 million a year, and 40,000 people must receive treatment after being bitten or scratched.

Cats are three to four times more likely than dogs to have rabies—and yet TNR programs inevitably leave a significant percentage of feral cats on the street, untreated, for years at a time, aggravating the rabies problem and numerous other diseases of both cats and humans. Because of the threat to public health, most communities have laws preventing individuals from hoarding animals even in the privacy of their homes. But as the authors of one recent article on cat-borne diseases put it, TNR “is essentially cat hoarding without walls.”

The cats in TNR programs also go on killing. Let’s say each cat kills 30 birds a year—and the local TNR program has a population of 100 cats. Over a 10-year period, that program has made itself an accessory to 3000 unnecessary deaths. (Yes, I’m assuming that the population stays the same. That’s because a lot of TNR programs explicitly aim “to maintain stable cat populations.”) TNR advocates see the cat deaths as individual tragedies. But birds somehow just die as populations, or species. Because the cats do their killing out of our sight, and without our direct intervention, people fail to see that those other deaths are equally individual, and—because cats like to have their fun–far more cruel.

Despite all this, TNR continues to gain popularity. It could well show up next in your community. Politicians like how it sounds to be against killing, so they are easy targets for TNR advocates driven by an extremely narrow definition of “animal welfare.” Be prepared to stand up and remind community leaders that if they are genuinely against killing animals—and if they believe in protecting public health–they need to be against TNR.

Namibia’s Hidden Poaching Crisis

From the ivory black market in Okahandja, Namibia (Photo: Shi Yi)

This story is dismaying for me, as I have often written about Namibia as a model of smart conservation and anti-poaching common sense. But no place is safe in the current war on wildlife. Or, let’s call it what it is –China’s continuing war on wildlife.

Here’s the reporting by Shi Yi, a Chinese investigative journalist working in southern Africa:

It was a quiet evening in Zambezi, until a herdsman heard a gunshot in the wilderness. By the time the police arrived, they found an elephant carcass – and the tusks had been taken.

“It could be a good trophy animal. Poachers never take small ones,” said chief control warden Morgan Saisai at the Katima Mulilo office of Namibia’s Ministry of Tourism and Environment (MET).

The carcass brought the number of elephants poached in Zambezi, [a region ] in the far north-eastern region of Namibia, to 37 this year.

Namibia is known for its extremely dry climate and desert landscape, but Zambezi is an exception. With the Zambezi river and its tributaries flowing through lush wetlands, it is home to nearly 10,000 resident elephants and thousands of migratory elephants, according to MET.

Poachers take advantage of this. Since 2011, more than 230 elephants have been reported poached in Namibia, more than 90% of them killed in Zambezi.

In the southwest of the country, more than 100 black rhinos have been poached. In addition to these two iconic species, poaching of other animals such as lions and pangolins is also on the rise.

There are indications that Chinese are the buyers behind some of the cases. Despite the anti-poaching messages that can be seen at many places in Namibia, I was frequently approached by locals for ..

Read the whole story at the Wits Journalism China-Africa Reporting Project.

Beer & Bread: It’s a Family Thing, Even for the Yeast

I’m not much interested in the biotechnology implications here. But making beer and bread are among my family’s favorite pastimes, and it’s fascinating that the yeast doing the real work also recognize family bonds.  They’re single-celled microorganisms, but they nonetheless help out kin and exclude outsiders (much more ruthlessly than we could imagine doing).

But, you know, we all say: “Screw gluten free.”

Here’s the press release from the University of Cambridge:

Baker’s yeast cells living together in communities help feed each other, but leave incomers from the same species to die from starvation, according to new research from the University of Cambridge.

The findings, published in the open access journal eLife, could lead to

new biotechnological production systems based on metabolic cooperation. They could also be used to inhibit cell growth by blocking the exchange of metabolites between cells. This could be a new strategy to combat fungal pathogens or tumour cells.

“The cell-cell cooperation we uncovered plays a significant role in allowing yeast to help us to produce our food, beer and wine,” says first author Kate Campbell.

“It may also be crucial for all eukaryotic life, including animals, plants and fungi.”

Mrs. MacWeeney’s Brown Bread

Yeast metabolism has been exploited for thousands of years by humankind for brewing and baking. Yeast metabolizes sugar and secretes a wide array of small molecules during their life cycle, from alcohols and carbon dioxide to antioxidants and amino acids. Although much research has shown yeast to be a robust metabolic work-horse, only more recently has it become clear that these single-cellular organisms assemble in communities, in which individual cells may play a specialised function.

Mr. Lahey’s No Knead Bread

For the new study funded by the Wellcome Trust and European Research Council, researchers at the University of Cambridge and the Francis Crick Institute found cells to be highly efficient at exchanging some of their essential building blocks (amino acids and nucleobases, such as the A, T, G and C constituents of DNA) in what they call metabolic cooperation. However, they do not do so with every kind of yeast cell: they share nutrients with cells descendant from the same ancestor, but not with other cells from the same species when they originate from another community.

Using a synthetic biology approach, the team led by Dr Markus Ralser at the Department of Biochemistry started with a metabolically competent yeast mother cell, genetically manipulated so that its daughters progressively loose essential metabolic genes. They used it to grow a population of yeast with multiple generations that ended up to be deficient in different nutrients.

Campbell then tested whether cells lacking a metabolic gene can survive by sharing nutrients with their family members. When living within their community setting, these cells could continue to grow and survive. This meant that cells were being kept alive by neighbouring cells, which still had their metabolic activity intact, providing them with a much needed nutrient supply. Eventually, the colony established a composition where the majority of cells did help each other out. When cells of the same species but derived from another community were introduced, social interactions did not establish and the foreign cells died from starvation.

Mr. Conniff’s cinnamon bread (here replicated by his granddaughter

When the successful community was compared to other yeast strains, which had no metabolic deficiencies, the researchers found no pronounced differences in how both communities grew and produced biomass. This is implies that sharing was so efficient that any disadvantage was cancelled out.

The implications of these results may therefore be substantial for industries in which yeast are used to produce biomolecules of interest. This includes biofuels, vaccines and food supplements. The research might also help to develop therapeutic strategies against pathogenic fungi, such as the yeast Candida albicans, which form cooperative communities to overcome our immune system.

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by eLife. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:

Kate Campbell, Jakob Vowinckel, Michael Muelleder, Silke Malmsheimer, Nicola Lawrence, Enrica Calvani, Leonor Miller-Fleming, Mohammad T Alam, Stefan Christen, Markus A Keller, Markus Ralser. Self-establishing communities enable cooperative metabolite exchange in a eukaryote. eLife, 2015; 4 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.09943

Governor Vetoes Bill Pretending Outdoor Cats are Wildlife

Adorable but deadly (Photo: Richard Conniff)

Thank common sense for this week’s decision by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to kill this bit of misguided legislation.  It would have treated cats as wildlife and wasted public money on a methodology (Trap, Neuter, Release) that does nothing to control outdoor cat populations.  It would also have worked to the detriment of genuine wildlife, including birds and small mammals.

Here’s the press release from the American Bird Conservancy:

(Washington, D.C., October 28, 2015) This week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo vetoed legislation that would have used public funds to support statewide Trap, Neuter, Release (TNR) programs for feral cats. The decision came on Monday, Oct. 26, after a lengthy public debate.

Under the proposed legislation (A 2778/S 1081), up to 20 percent of the state’s Animal Population Control Program Fund, which is supported by dog license fees, could have been allocated to TNR programs and away from the fund’s original purpose: to support low-cost spay/neuter of dogs and cats for low-income owners.

A diverse coalition of stakeholders, including American Bird Conservancy, Audubon New York, New York birders, animal welfare organizations, and sportsmen’s groups, rallied to oppose the TNR legislation, submitting numerous letters, emails, and phone calls expressing serious concerns.

“By vetoing this proposed legislation, Governor Cuomo has acted with

vision and courage to protect the wildlife of New York,” commented Grant Sizemore, Director of Invasive Species Programs for American Bird Conservancy, noting that studies have shown that free-roaming cats kill billions of birds in the U.S. each year.

“This bill was an effort to legitimize the systematic abandonment of cats,” Sizemore continued, “and to inappropriately require that public funds prop up a failed TNR strategy. We hope that other law-makers draw inspiration from this decision and recognize TNR is a ‘lose, lose, lose’ scenario for cats, wildlife, and people.”

In a public statement about his decision, the governor called the proposed bill “problematic” for a number of reasons, including evidence that shows TNR does not reduce feral cat populations and that feral cats have a major impact on wildlife, “including threatened and endangered species, habitats, and food sources for native predators.”

The governor’s message is consistent with the position of American Bird Conservancy and its Cats Indoors Program: TNR programs have been widely shown to be unsuccessful at reducing feral cat populations while simultaneously maintaining cats in the environment, where they contribute to unsustainable wildlife predation and serious public health risks. A 2013 study by scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identified outdoor cats as the top source of direct, human-caused mortality of birds, and the mere presence of cats in the environment has been shown to negatively affect nesting birds.

Not only are feral cats a non-native predator, but they are also a source of potential infectious diseases and parasites, such as rabies and toxoplasmosis. Cats are the number-one carrier of rabies among domestic animals in the United States and require regular vaccinations to protect a cat and its community.

Cats are the definitive host of the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis, which can lead to miscarriages, blindness, memory loss, and death in humans. Feral and other outdoor cats may excrete hundreds of millions of infectious eggs in feces, effectively contaminating the environment with this parasite.

 

 

 

Hey, Science Fiction! Face it: Reality is Weirder

(Photo: Piotr Naskrecki)

This is the latest of many bizarre insect images the entomologist and photographer Piotr Naskrecki posts at his website The Smaller Majority.  He found these characters in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, where most people think wildlife means only those hairy things with four legs, the what-do-you-call’em. Oh, right, vertebrates. So boring.

Why on Earth is it that people think we need to go to outer space to find alien species?

Great molting ghost mantid! (Photo: Piotr Naskrecki)