Richard Conniff's Blog, page 35

Your Tax Dollars at Work: The Federal Addiction to Killing Predators

In this photo provided by a former Wildlife Services trapper, a dead coyote hangs in a neck snare in Nevada. Using aerial gunning, traps and poison, the agency frequently kills predators whether they have harmed livestock or not. In the process, it also has mistakenly killed thousands of “non-target” animals, from family pets to federally protected bald and golden eagles.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division is our leading cause of needless, and often brutal, predator deaths. Here’s part of an interesting new report from Tom Knudson and Reveal, the journal of the Center for Investigative Reporting :

The odds are good you have never heard of a small federal agency that goes by the curious name of Wildlife Services.

There���s a reason for that. The agency ��� which specializes in killing wild animals that threaten agriculture, especially predators ��� prefers to operate in the shadows.

That is a lesson I learned repeatedly while reporting a series of articles about Wildlife Services for The Sacramento Bee in 2012. Even basic information about where species were killed ��� and with what methods ��� was closely guarded and accessible only via the Freedom of Information Act. When I asked to observe Wildlife Services��� lethal predator control in action on public land in Nevada, the answer was unequivocal: No.

Think about that for a moment: Even the military allows reporters into the field on its missions overseas. Here at home, on land owned by all Americans, Wildlife Services does not.

���Wildlife Services is

one of the most opaque and least accountable agencies that I know of in the federal government, outside of highly classified programs,��� said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., in the documentary film ���Exposed: USDA���s Secret War on Wildlife.��� ���They are a world unto themselves. And that���s a world we are not allowed to see into.���

Today, the agency is back in the spotlight again.

In late 2013, the U.S. Department of Agriculture���s Office of Inspector General announced that it would audit Wildlife Services. Today, that audit still hasn���t been released. When it will come out and what it will find is anyone���s guess.

What is known is that the watchdog agency plans to take a hard look at the agency���s costly, sustained war on predators and the secrecy that surrounds it.

That killing is carried out with a vast arsenal of rifles, shotguns, small planes, helicopters, snowmobiles, leg-hold traps, neck snares and sodium cyanide poison. My reporting for the Bee found that it is often done in ways that are indiscriminate, excessive, inhumane and scientifically unsound.

Carnivores of all kinds are killed, from bobcats to mountain lions, gray fox to timber wolves. But the primary target is the wily coyote. Since 2000, Wildlife Services has killed more than 1.1 million coyotes, an average of 82,174 a year ��� or 225 a day. ��Not only are many animals killed that have never harmed a sheep or cow ��� coyote pups are even gassed to death in their dens ��� the collateral damage to other species is high.

Read the full story here.

Legal Rhino Horn Trade? Both Sides Say Save Rhinos in Wild First

(Photo: courtesy of IUCN/ David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation)

At a recent mediation session in Cape Town, activists for and against legalized trade in rhino horns met to find common ground on saving rhinos in the wild.�� Both were mainly worried by the rising toll of animals being poached in South Africa, up to 1215 last year, from almost none in 2007.�� Here’s an excerpt from the report in South Africa’s Daily Maverick:

All participants agreed that, in the light of likely voting patterns when CITES members next meet in Cape Town (in March 2016), it is unrealistic to expect any changes��to the legislation for the trade in rhino products. Indeed, it appears that even if successfully motivated, legalisation in the trade of rhino products would not happen within the next decade, at which point, based on current poaching statistics, rhinos in the wild could well

be extinct. In fact, without a collaborative and united approach all parties present agreed that the fate of rhinos in the wild is dismal.There was also a collective acknowledgement that some one in seven South Africans depend on a thriving tourism industry for their income. The country���s reputation as a Big Five destination could well suffer if rhinos were to disappear from the wild and this could impact negatively on the industry and put jobs at risk.

Another point of consensus was recognition of the fact that although South Africa is the front line in the rhino war, the crisis involves many other countries in Africa and elsewhere. Strategies to prevent rhino poaching are thus not specific to South Africa, and need to be implemented on a global scale.

Finding a viable way forward, therefore, is in the interest of rhinos and people. And with this agreed the following multi-facetted plan emerged:

Calling for the immediate cessation of hostilities between pro- and anti-trade camps in favour of rallying around a common vision.


Establishing efficient, effective, focused and sustainable fund-raising campaigns for rhino security and conservation.


Promoting public education primarily in Asia and worldwide to reduce demand for rhino horn.


Increasing the extent and efficiency of security and monitoring measures,


Centralising the application and issuing of permits to hunt rhino.


Establishing of a whistle-blowers fund and increased anti-poaching law enforcement.


Securing community buy-in and co-operation in rhino conservation of rhino, especially among people living in close proximity to rhino.


Being more proactive in targeting the middle-men in the criminal chain of command.


Increasing the deployment sophisticated technologies that can detect poachers long before any animal can be shot.


Securing increased governmental compliance with constitutional and legal rules in the struggle to conserve the rhino species.

In addition to attending this meeting, Malherbe also wrote to the Minister of Environmental Affairs, pleading for a change in the ���rules of engagement��� that currently place anti-poaching units at a distinct disadvantage when apprehending rhino poachers in the Kruger National Park.

Read the full story here.

Novelists Fiddle as the World Burns

Are novelists failing to confront the disastrous conservation crises of our time?�� Nigel Pitman, a conservation ecologist at the Field Museum makes that case in a scathing essay just out. I think he may be neglecting Margaret Atwood, who has campaigned and written along these lines. Jonathan Franzen dealt with environmental treachery in Freedom, and many of the large recent crop of dystopian novels also seem to me to have an environmental undercurrent, as in Station Eleven, though that starts with a pandemic.

But I think Pitman is onto something here, and not just about catastrophe.�� Reading older novels, I am often struck by how much more richly and knowledgeably writers incorporated the natural world into their work then.�� Writers now obey the advice to “write what you know,” and what they know is not nature.�� Here’s Pitman’s lead:

Novelists have a thing for catastrophe.

Something gets blown to bits���and decades later writers are still dropping by for a look, sniffing the air for cordite. The number of novels written about the Vietnam War now exceeds 3,500, which works out to about one novel for every combat platoon at the height of the conflict. The Holocaust, the Soviet purges, and the Ceausescu regime have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and some of them have done it more than once.

Shouldn���t we be baffled, then, by the empty stretch of shelf where one might reasonably expect to find a body of fiction about the greatest catastrophe of our time? These days everyone calls it climate change, but of course it���s not just the weather that has been pistol-whipped over the last 100 years. It���s everything else in the natural world as well: seafloor invertebrate communities, rare plants in Sri Lanka, the phylum Mollusca, you name it.

But if most people are aware by now of the destruction carrying on all around us, you wouldn���t know it from reading modern-day fiction. On the lists of prize-winning American novels published over the last ten years, the number with a strong environmental content���������and the number written by authors whohave a published history of interest in that kind of thing���������are both close to zero. The same can be said of the year���s-best lists and the bestseller lists. And the vacuum is not unique to the United States. Over the last 50 years South America has lost country-sized expanses of the world���s richest forests and has produced some of the world���s best novelists, but the two phenomena have never shown much interest in each other. All of which begs a question which has itself been strangely absent from the literary landscape: Where are the great conservation novels?

Read Pitman’s whole jeremiad here.

These Migrating Birds Take Turns at the Hard Work of Windbreaking

A flock of Northern bald ibis over the Adriatic Sea during their migration.
(Photo: A.G. Schmalstieg)

When flying in formation, the lead bird does the aerodynamic heavy lifting, and everybody else benefits by following in the aerodynamically sheltered path of another bird.�� So why does the lead bird do it? And do they take turns? A new study of Northern Bald Ibises tests that question with multiple observations of migrating flocks.

They find that these birds travel in stable flocks, often including many related individuals. So they know each other and have ample motive for reciprocation. The result is that they do indeed take turns, following certain character patterns of shifting position. The authors conclude: “The V-formation flight of Northern bald ibis does not only provide a convincing example for reciprocal altruism in animals, but it also delivers hints for the conditions that might have favored its evolution.”

Check out the full article in PNAS here.

Biologists and foster parents with hand-raised Northern bald ibis at the ultralight paraplane used in the study. (Photo: Johannes Fritz)

Bears Nosh on Ants, and that Makes Everything Different

(Photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

My latest for Takepart:

In a remote mountain meadow in central Colorado, treehopper nymphs and western thatching ants have come to a mutual understanding, and it makes for a case study in just how nuanced the natural world can be, and how small changes���changes we might consider trivial���can send huge effects cascading through a habitat.

The nymphs are the immature stage of treehopper insects, and they���re not wonderful to look at, with spines, and hairs, and legs sticking out everywhere from their tiny black-and-gray bodies.�� (Think Jeff Goldblum in ���The Fly.���) When you���re having a John Denver moment about the beautiful shrubbery on that mountain meadow, they���re clustered along the stems and branches, busily sucking out the sugar-rich phloem. ��But the ants think they���re adorable. They keep the nymphs safe from marauding beetles and spiders. ��In return, the ants get to eat the sweet honeydew excreted by the nymphs.

This lovely bit of mutualism is part of a larger food web extending, improbably, to the black bears living nearby. Black bears, it turns out, like to eat ants. Lots of ants. In Colorado���s Rocky Mountain National Park ants make up nearly a third of the diet for black bears, by volume. And yep, grizzlies do it, too. A study of Ursus arctos in Scandinavia found that 16 percent of summertime food for one of the scarier predators on earth consists of ants. The bears invade large ant mounds, using their sticky tongues to lap up the tiny, honeydew-packed morsels within, like sprinkles on a dirt ice cream cone. Yum.

By doing so, the bears cause a trophic cascade, according to a paper published last month in the journal Ecology Letters.�� That is, the effect of their feeding cascades from one organism to another down the food chain. ��Fewer ants mean fewer babysitters for the hungry nymphs.�� The nymphs then become an all-you-can-eat buffet for beetles, spiders, and other small predators. The shrubs in turn become bigger and more productive, because the bears have spared them from the nuisance of being sucked dry by treehopper nymphs. ���I���ve seen lady beetles just go through a colony of twenty, eating one after another,��� said Josh Grinath, who discovered the cascade while researching his PhD dissertation at Florida State University.

Trophic cascades aren���t exactly news. Aldo Leopold described one, about what happens when we remove wolves from a habitat, in his classic 1949 book A Sand County Almanac.�� The University of Washington���s Robert Paine established a scientific basis for trophic cascades with his 1960s study showing that removing starfish from a coastal habitat caused a half-dozen other species to go kaflooey.�� But Grinath���s study takes the concept a step further, combining the effects of a top predator with an incidence of mutualism.

He didn���t run into the exact same story in every season of his study.�� (The truth is, nature doesn���t give the hindquarters of a Rattus rattus for a simple story.)�� In some years, the bears raided only about a quarter of the ant mounds in the study site, and in other years they got 86 percent of them, probably because drought made berries and other favorite foods scarce.�� The treehopper nymph population rose and fell accordingly. One year, the hungry bears even rooted around some of Grinath���s equipment and left a bite mark in a two-gallon bucket.

What���s the take-home?�� The study shows that ���we need to not disturb these predators,��� said Grinath. We may consider them scary, or a nuisance.�� But ultimately, ���they are maintaining ecosystems in a way that humans want them to be maintained,��� even if such benefits are not immediately obvious. More to the point, they are maintaining them the way nature wants them to be maintained.

The paper ���contributes to a larger corpus of work that���s beginning to show that top predators in ecosystems have some pretty sweeping effects that we haven���t, up until now, really appreciated,��� said Os Schmitz, a professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, who wasn���t involved in the study. ���We really need to step back and appreciate animals like bears in a different light.���

One trophic cascade in particular has become an object of public attention���and seems to get oversimplified by almost everybody.�� Until recently, Yellowstone National Park was overrun with elk, because the wolves that preyed on elk had been extirpated from the park.�� And overgrazing by the elk decimated the willow saplings that used to grow thick along the edges of streams. After wildlife managers reintroduced wolves in the 1990s, it became a popular just-so story among conservationists that the wolves had brought the elk population under control and that the willows in turn are coming back as a result, meaning the streams are healthier, and the species in the streams, and ��� you get the idea.

���But hang on, there,��� biologist Arthur Middleton said, in a New York Times piece last year. ��Elk populations may be down (although that has as much to do with the loss of native cutthroat trout from the park as it does with wolves) but the willows and aspens are still struggling.�� That���s mainly because beaver populations declined as streamside trees and shrubs disappeared. Lack of beavers meant lack of dams which meant faster-moving rivers, which cut more deeply into the earth, which lowered the water table to the point that the landscape is no longer suitable habitat for willow trees. Ecosystems change, often permanently. By themselves, no number of wolves will bring those willows back.

Pretending we can restore an entire ecosystem by putting one ingredient back into the mix is a fool���s game. We need to pay attention to entire ecosystems and to real science, not just-so stories, and we need to have the patience and persistence to rebuild accordingly.�� Better still, we need to learn not to do the damage in the first place, because our misdeeds may never be undone.

A Cardinal Tests the Limits of Sexual Diversity

This are brownish-gray feathers of a female cardinal on the right side a male cardinal’s red feathers on the left.
(Photo: Western Illinois University)

So, yeah, I’m talking about a bird, and definitely not about a member of the Roman Catholic College of Cardinals.�� A gynandromorph is an animal that has traits of both sexes, but this cardinal is truly Janus-faced, all female on one side, all male on the other.�� Or rather, not like Janus. More like Tiresias, the male prophet in Greek mythology who spent seven years as a woman. Oh, hell, let’s just call it the Transgender Cardinal.

How did other cardinals react? “We never knowingly heard the gynandromorph cardinal vocalize nor was it obviously paired with another individual, whereas other cardinals in the area vocalized and were paired, especially as the breeding season approached.” But here’s the key line: “There were no unusual agonistic interactions between the gynandromorph and the other cardinals, although at times it appeared less likely to approach the seed when other cardinals were in the vicinity feeding.” So a little shy and confused. But other birds were basically o.k. with that.

Here’s the press release

Western Illinois University biological sciences Professor Brian Peer is receiving attention for his research and publication on a bilateral gynandromorph bird found in the wild.

More specifically, the bird has the brownish-gray feathered appearance of a female cardinal on its right side and that of a male cardinal’s red feathers on its left side.

The Northern Cardinal was spotted several years ago in Rock Island, IL by Peer and his colleague Robert Motz and was observed between December 2008 and March 2010. The two men documented how the cardinal interacted with other birds

on more than 40 occasions during that time period and how the bird responded to calls.

“Our paper represents the most detailed observations of a bilateral gynandromorph bird in the wild,” said Peer. ” We never observed the bird singing and never saw it paired with another cardinal. It was one of the most unusual and striking birds that I’ve ever seen.”

The research paper surrounding the unique bird, titled “Observations of a Bilateral Gynandromorph Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis), was published in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology in December and was then featured in Science magazine.

Peer’s primary research focus is on the coevolutionary interaction between avian brood parasites and their hosts.

Journal Reference:

Brian D. Peer and Robert W. Motz. Observations of a Bilateral Gynandromorph Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis). The Wilson Journal of Ornithology, December 2014, Vol. 126, No. 4, pp. 778-781

The Deadly Dozen Effects of Losing Nature

Richard Conniff:

Billfish preparing to dice and slice (or rather gun and stun).

There���s a tendency in our flat screen-fixated society to treat the preservation of nature and wildlife as a boutique issue. I mean ���boutique��� in the sense that it���s become a ladies-who-lunch sort of thing. Nice, but it doesn���t really matter.

Our own experience also reinforces the subliminal impression that destroying nature���or at least pushing it back away from civilized life���actually makes us healthier. Turning forests into fields has made it easier for us to get food, for instance, and building dams provides the electricity to power those flat screens, build products, and create jobs.

But a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argues that the continued loss of habitat is in fact increasingly a matter of life and death. Let���s skip the subtleties and go straight to a list of the study���s dozen deadly effects:

1. In Asia, Africa, and South America those seemingly beneficial dams and irrigation projects have created new homes for the aquatic snail species that transmits schistosomiasis. It now afflicts more than 200 million people worldwide with symptoms including coughing, abdominal pain, diarrhea, fever and fatigue. The altered habitat also provides breeding places for mosquitoes and other disease-carrying organisms, increasing the incidence of malaria, filariasis, encephalitis, and other dreadful diseases.

2. Our increasing incursions into remote wilderness areas are bringing epidemic diseases out of the jungle and into our backyards. Roughly 75 percent of emerging diseases���think HIV, Ebola, West Nile virus, SARS, and the new coronavirus in the Middle East���spill over from the animal world.

3. When we reduce the variety of species living in an area, we make it more likely that new diseases will spill over to humans. The ���dilution effect��� theory suggests that when you have many species in a habitat, some of them will be ineffective, or even dead ends, at transmitting a particular disease pathogen. So they dilute the effect of the pathogen and keep it from building up and spilling over to humans. Studies have correlated reduced species diversity with increases in West Nile virus, Chagas disease, Lyme disease, and hantavirus.

4. When we destroy coastal mangrove swamps in Sri Lanka, or dune vegetation on the beach in New Jersey, we lose vital protection against deadly storms. In the Asian tsunami of 2004 one village in Sri Lanka that had cut down its mangrove swamps to create shrimp farms suffered 6,000 deaths. In a comparable Sri Lankan village that left its mangroves intact, only two people died.

5. By providing nursing grounds for young fish and for the prey species they will eventually eat, those mangrove swamps are responsible for about 80 percent of the global seafood catch. The continuing loss of seafood, as well as of land-based bushmeat, threatens a large segment of the human population with chronic iron and zinc deficiencies, meaning anemia, fatigue, and other symptoms.

6. Most of our drugs, including all antibiotics, originally came from the natural world. To cite three quick examples: ACE inhibitors, currently the most effective blood pressure medicine, were derived from the venom of South America���s deadly fer-de-lance snake. AZT, the first drug to turn AIDS from a death sentence to a treatable disease, was derived from an obscure Caribbean sponge discovered in the 1950s. Prialt, a potent pain medicine, comes from a Pacific cone snail that people used to value only because it has such a pretty shell.

7. When plant breeders need to make a drought-resistant strain of rice, or a wheat variety that doesn���t drop dead from disease, they often borrow traits from closely related plants in the natural world. The need for those traits is increasing because of climate change. But borrowing only works if there is a natural world left to borrow from.

8. When we lose habitat and species, we also lose essential pollinators for our crops, including insects, birds, and bats. Honeybees pollinate about a third of U.S. crops, and the recent drastic decrease in their population imperils a harvest worth more than the $15 billion a year. According to the study, pollinators are a key factor in producing about a third of the calories and micronutrients we depend on.

9. Clearing forests has led to reduced access to fuel for cooking, creating an extra burden for the women and girls in developing nations who generally do the wood gathering.

10. Loss of hillside forests means water tends to run off rather than soak in. That makes it harder to find water, for crops, sanitation, or safe drinking. And again, it���s generally the women who have to go farther and pump harder, then carry the water home by the bucketful.

11. More than 100,000 people have died so far in the civil war in Syria, which, it���s been argued, was set off as much by persistent drought as by bad government. On a much smaller scale, but closer to home, a heat wave last summer caused 82 known deaths across the United States and Canada. Climate disruption is likely to cause increasing human health impacts in the form of heat stress, air pollution, respiratory disease, and food and water shortages. The question of social justice runs through this discussion: We in the developed world tend to benefit in our relatively prosperous lives, while the poor and disenfranchised get stuck with the bill.

12. In our mobile, rootless society, it���s easy to forget what we have never had.�� But losing habitat can mean losing an essential sense of place and of self, and that can lead to depression, emotional distress, and other psychological effects.

The authors of the new study, who come from Harvard University, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Conservation International, and other institutions, make one major recommendation. Up to now, our research into the natural world has been driven largely by scientific curiosity. Instead, scientists now need to think a lot harder about policy.

For instance, when Brazil eases restrictions on land use in the Amazon, researchers should be ready to project exactly how that will affect local malaria rates. When policymakers in Southeast Asia are debating the use of fire for land clearing, scientists should be able to explain the public health implications from air pollution in downwind areas of Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia.

These kinds of considerations may sound, as the editor at a prominent magazine recently told me, ���unsexy.��� Not cool. But the new study makes it clear that if we don���t start paying much closer attention to them, and to the state of the natural world, we are all in imminent danger of ending up dead.

And that would be the unsexiest thing of all.

Originally posted on strange behaviors:

My latest for TakePart:

There���s a tendency in our flat screen-fixated society to treat the preservation of nature and wildlife as a boutique issue. I mean ���boutique��� in the sense that it���s become a ladies-who-lunch sort of thing. Nice, but it doesn���t really matter.

Our own experience also reinforces the subliminal impression that destroying nature���or at least pushing it back away from civilized life���actually makes us healthier. Turning forests into fields has made it easier for us to get food, for instance, and building dams provides the electricity to power those flat screens, build products, and create jobs.

But a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argues that the continued loss of habitat is in fact increasingly a matter of life and death. Let���s skip the subtleties and go straight to a list of the study���s dozen deadly effects:

1. In Asia, Africa, and South America���

View original 959 more words

When a Baby in the Oven Means Mom is Totally Cooked

This one goes out to all you happy couples out there stuck at home by the snow and thinking about maybe having sex and making a baby.�� It’s a heartwarming little story about a species where mom’s blessed event is also always her funeral.

Don’t thank me. It comes from Matt Simon at Wired:

Ah, motherhood. I don���t know anything about it, but I heard there���s a lot of, like, sacrifice and stuff. Not only do you have to bring the brat into the world, but then you have to feed it for at least 18 years or you get in big trouble. That���s a lot of pressure.

But with all due respect to human mothers out there, their sacrifice is nothing compared to a momma strepsiptera. (Cue phone call from my own mother in 3���2���1���) This little parasite invades the bodies of all manner of insects, where she waits patiently as the young that fill her body consume her from the inside out. Eventually they erupt out of their sacrificial mother and emerge from the still very much alive host insect into the light of day���as many as a million of them in one particularly large species that parasitizes big grasshoppers. Yeah, you can go ahead and throw away that ���Mother of the Year��� mug now.

The 600 or so species of strepsiptera are some of the cleverest, most brutal parasites on Earth. Unlike a lot of parasites out there, they have no interest in keeping their host alive for very long: They use them, abuse them, and explode out of their bodies, leaving gaping wounds that haven���t the slightest chance of healing. And their life cycle must be one of the strangest and most wonderfully complex among all parasites.

Read the rest of the story here.

A Spy in the Sky Against Pirate Fishing

Bluefin tuna (Photo: Franco Banfi/Getty Images)

On a large monitor in a room in Harwell, England, the planet Earth rotated against a black background. Brightly colored dots bunched up against the shorelines of the continents, with other points scattered across the oceans. It looked like something from the latest James Bond film. In fact, those dots represented the location of nearly every known fishing vessel now at sea, monitored in close to real-time by satellite.�� The visualization���it���s not quite reality yet���was part of an ambitious new program that its backers believe will be the best tool yet for ending the scourge of pirate fishing.

���Outside of the military, we are not aware of any project that will bring so many layers of information together and bring so many stakeholders together to end illegal fishing,��� said Tony Long, director of the Ending Illegal Fishing Project for the Pew Charitable Trusts. ���Project Eyes on the Seas,��� he said, will shine ���a quicker and brighter spotlight��� on illegal fishing. ��The project, a collaboration between Pew and Satellite Applications Catapult, a company established through a British government initiative, will begin monitoring two Pacific regions on a pilot basis and gradually spread worldwide over the next three to five years.

That may be just in time. A study published last week in Science warned that,

with marine fish populations down 38 percent since 1970, our current practices are leading to what the authors called ���defaunation������that is, oceans without animals: ���On land, we know of the phenomenon of ���empty forests,��� ��� meaning ecological extinctions of forest species, they wrote. ���We are now observing the proliferation of ���empty reefs,��� ���empty estuaries,��� and ���empty bays.���

Illegal and unreported fishing is one big cause���with as many as one in three seafood meals we put on the dinner table caught illegally���and it is notoriously difficult to control. Many countries have fishing quotas, and areas designated as marine protected areas, at least on paper. But there are not nearly enough enforcement agents to police the oceans, especially around developing nations.

If a given fishing vessel flouts the law in the current enforcement climate, by fishing, for instance, in a marine reserve, it now takes hours at best before anybody knows about it.�� Far more often, the crime goes undetected.�� Vessels that have been fishing illegally often meet up with other vessels at sea and transship, or offload, their catch, making it difficult to detect where those fish came from.�� To address these issues, said Long, the new system combines satellite monitoring with databases on individual vessels, maps of protected areas, and other information.�� It incorporates algorithms designed to analyze and interpret the movement of ships.

Speeds above a quarter knot and below five knots, for instance, may indicate that a ship is fishing.�� A slow back-and-forth movement could be the tipoff to long line fishing, which is illegal in some areas because of bycatch and ghost-fishing issues. When two ships come close, a proximity alert can call attention to the likelihood that a transshipment may be occurring. ��Where a team of human monitors now needs 18 hours to analyze this sort of data, the developers of ���Project Eyes on the Sea��� say they can deliver the same results in 18 milliseconds.

Unlike a similar initiative by Google, the Pew project uses multiple methods to track ships. That matters, said Long, because ships sometimes turn off the transponders that allow them to be tracked, especially if they���re going into protected areas where fishing isn���t allowed, or if they attempt to transship the fish. The new system is also designed to take pictures from satellites of suspicious ships that have shut off their transponders.

Having this information doesn���t mean that overworked and underfunded enforcement agencies are going to be able to show up and make an arrest eight hours���or even one hour���out at sea. ��But it could put teeth in the new international ���port state measures��� agreement, under which coastal nations pledge to keep foreign vessels suspected of illegal fishing out of their ports.

���Any official in any port around the world should have access to enough information,��� said Long, ���that they can make the right decision about a vessel trying to enter that port, and be aware if there is any illegal activity in the history of that vessel ����� Lots of this data already exists, but it���s not being shared. It’s the power of sharing this data that will make this work.����� And these data feeds will be immediately accessible even to the poorest nations.

The project will start out monitoring in just two locations: Around Easter Island in the southeastern Pacific, and the island nation of Palau, in the western Pacific east of the Philippines. Both of these areas are under consideration for protected marine reserves.�� Long said that over the next three to five years, he hopes to grow the project to cover many more protected areas. Eventually, he said, he envisions a traffic light system, tagging each vessel on a database with the equivalent of a green, yellow, or red light. Port officials would then be able to look up a vessel���s identifying number, check its status on a mobile phone or other device, and know whether to let it enter unhindered, inspect it, or simply turn the ship away.

Meanwhile, much of the burden in the fight against illegal fishing will continue to rest with the United States, which is the world���s leading consumer of illegal seafood. A presidential task force issued recommendations last month for how best to stem the tide of illegal or ���black market��� seafood flowing into the United States, and both Republicans and Democrats support the task force���s suggestions. Among other recommendations, the task force called for all seafood coming into the U.S. to have tracking information associated with it, so customs agents, retailers, and ultimately shoppers at their supermarket seafood counters can be sure of what species of fish is being imported, where it was caught, by which type of fishing gear, and even by what vessel. This week, a United Nations working group is also expected to make recommendations on how to protect ocean habitats in international waters.

But no need to wait.�� Seafood consumers can already stop the illegal harvesting, with only minor sacrifice:�� It means, for instance, passing up the all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet at your favorite restaurant, and gently letting the manager know why:�� America���s favorite seafood, by volume, makes up fully a quarter of all our imported seafood, and it���s often not what���s advertised on the label. Illegal shrimp fishing in Mexico is, among other things, the leading cause for the impending disappearance of the vaquita, a small porpoise that is the world���s most endangered marine mammal.

Tuna���both the canned type and the stuff in sushi rolls���is another common illegally-sourced fish on American plates, according to a study last year in Marine Policy. ���Almost all of the world���s tuna stocks are nearly fully exploited and some are overexploited,��� the paper noted. Unreported catches of bluefin tuna from the Mediterranean are a major factor in the rapid decline of the population there. Likewise, North Sea cod have struggled to recover due to illegal fishing.�� Since no sane shopper can keep track of all this stuff, bring along the Monterey Bay Aquarium���s Seafood Watch app to help.

Ask the people behind the seafood counter where the fish they sell is caught and whether they can document that it is legal.�� The more consumers ask the question, the more retailers will feel the need to get the answers���and avoid, for instance, the 40 percent of tuna imported from Thailand that���s caught illegally, and the 70 percent of salmon from China.�� Finally, you can support American fishermen by joining your local Community Supported Fishery.�� Find the one nearest you here.

Illegal and unreported fishing is ���probably the largest contributor to global overfishing,��� said Roberta Elias, deputy director of marine and fisheries policy at the World Wildlife Fund. ���It���s a major factor in the global degradation of marine ecosystems.����� The good news is that it���s something we can stop without waiting for new laws or technologies, simply by the way we choose to shop.

 

Cone Snails Catch Prey with a Chemical Net

Cone snail showing its siphon and proboscis.

I’ve often wondered how cone snails, which cannot swim and move like, yes, snails, manage to make a living as predators on fast-moving fish.�� Now we have an answer.�� They gas their intended victims to slow them down as they swim past.

Here’s the press release:

As predators go, cone snails are slow-moving and lack the typical fighting parts. They’ve made up for it by producing a vast array of fast-acting toxins that target the nervous systems of prey. A new study reveals that some cone snails add a weaponized form of insulin to the venom cocktail they use to disable fish.

A synthetic form of the snail insulin, when injected into zebrafish, caused blood glucose levels to plummet. The insulin also disrupted swimming behavior in fish exposed through water contact, as measured by the percentage of time spent swimming and frequency of movements. The researchers propose that adding insulin to the mix of venom toxins enabled predatory cone snails to disable entire schools of swimming fish with hypoglycemic shock. The study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”It is very unlikely that it is serving a different purpose,” said lead author Helena Safavi-Hemami, a research assistant professor at the University of Utah.

Olivera

“This is a unique type of insulin. It is shorter than any insulin that has been described in any animal,” said senior author Baldomero M. Olivera, a distinguished professor of biology at the University of Utah. “We found it in the venom in large amounts.”

Cone snails are abundant in most tropical marine waters, especially around coral reefs. Each species makes a distinct repertoire of venom compounds, mixtures that have evolved to target particular prey. Conus geographus, a cone snail that has killed dozens of people in accidental encounters, traps fish by releasing a blend of immobilizing venoms into the water, according to the prevailing hypothesis.

The snail protrudes a stretchy mouth-like part and aims it like a gun barrel at fish, which become disoriented and stop moving even as the snail’s mouth part slowly advances and engulfs the fish.

Seeking to understand how the cone snail springs its slow-motion trap, the Utah researchers searched the gene sequences of all of the proteins expressed in the venom gland of Conus geographus. They found two sequences that looked surprisingly similar to that of the hormone insulin, used by humans and other vertebrate animals to regulate energy metabolism. The insulin genes were more highly expressed in the venom gland than genes for some of the established venom toxins. One sequence proved very similar to that of fish insulin. Chemical analysis of venom confirmed that it contained abundant amounts of this insulin.

The type of insulin found in venom glands seems to match the prey of a given cone snail. Fish insulin was present in the venoms of Conus geographus and Conus tulipa, which both practice the same fish-trapping method. But the Utah researchers found no evidence of fish insulin in the venom of five species of fish-eating cone snails that are ambush hunters that attack with a harpoon-like organ. Nor did they find fish insulin in the venom of cone snails that prey on molluscs or worms. (Those snails expressed insulins similar to those used by mollusc and worms.)

For more clear-cut evidence that snails use insulin as a weapon, Joanna Gajewiak, a research assistant professor at the university, came up with a fast way to synthesize enough of the insulin to directly test its effects on fish. The team was concerned about getting scooped by competitors. “We knew that other people could stumble upon this very soon,” Safavi-Hemami said.

The snail insulin could prove useful as a tool to probe the systems the human body uses to control blood sugar and energy metabolism. The snail insulin consists of 43 amino acid building blocks, fewer than any known insulin. Its stripped down size and odd chemical modifications may have evolved as a way to make it better at causing hypoglycemia in prey.