Richard Conniff's Blog, page 41

Killing Elephants for Fun and Profit

A game guard points out where the poacher’s bullet killed this young elephant.

This is a hard photograph to look at, but it’s what ivory poachers do, and what we are complicit in when we buy ivory objects.

It’s from a poaching incident in Mozambique, where a survey is about to begin to determine how many elephants still survive there.  You need to know how many there are in order to protect them and keep stuff like this from happening.  Here’s the press release:

Great Elephant Survey To Commence in Mozambique
Hard Data Needed to Better Address Elephant Poaching Crisis

Maputo, Mozambique, Sept. 26, 2014 –The Wildlife Conservation Society is partnering with the government of Mozambique, Paul G. Allen, and USAID to conduct a national elephant survey to collect data essential to protecting Mozambique’s highly threatened and diminishing savannah elephant population.

The survey is a part of the Great Elephant Census–an effort to count savannah elephant populations across sub-Saharan Africa  in response to the current escalating wave of poaching sweeping across Africa. The census will provide an essential

baseline of data that can be used to inform conservation approaches toward protecting Africa’s savannah elephants.

The Mozambique survey will take place in October and results will be available in early 2015. WCS will use three, four-seater Cessna aircraft to fly over six protected areas and three other regions. Observers in the plane will count both live elephants and elephant carcasses to understand the rate of poaching. Other large wildlife such as zebra and buffalo will be counted within the Niassa National Reserve.

“While I am aware that this survey very likely could bring shocking news about elephant numbers in Mozambique, I know that the results are critical to providing the hard data that the Government of Mozambique and conservation partners, including WCS, need to be effective,” said Alastair Nelson, Director of the WCS Mozambique Program. “WCS thanks the Government of Mozambique, Paul G. Allen, and USAID for coming together to make the survey happen.”

The last national elephant count in Mozambique was done six years ago in 2008 and put the total elephant population at 22,000. Within the Niassa National Reserve, which is home to Mozambique’s largest elephant population in the remote far north of the country, more than 4,000 elephants have been killed since 2010. The last count in Niassa was in late 2011, and at that time, it was estimated that there were only 12,000 elephants living in the reserve.

There is plenty of evidence that the current continent-wide elephant poaching crisis is affecting Mozambique. It is estimated that 100,000 elephants have been killed across Africa in the last three years. This is being done by organized criminal networks that are also negatively impacting the security, governance, and development potential of local communities and African nations. Niassa Reserve has not been spared and one to two elephants are killed each day at the hands of these criminals, who enter the reserve armed with hunting rifles and AK-47’s.

In western Mozambique poachers are poisoning waterholes to kill elephants which also kills all other wildlife. This is the same method that has been reported from neighboring Zimbabwe.

“We need this survey to count the live elephants and the carcasses,” said Nelson. “This information will help us know the actual population numbers, and where the elephants are getting hammered. Other information, such as the ratios of carcasses to live animals, of males to females, and of adults to juveniles will help us to understand what is happening in each elephant population. This will allow the Mozambican Government, WCS, and other conservation partners, to allocate our scarce resources for maximum impact.This, and other recent action, is the start of turning things around in Mozambique.”

By the end of 2014, the Great Elephant Census will have surveyed elephants in 18 countries, covering more than 80 percent of the savannah elephant range with the aim of counting 90 percent of Africa savannah elephants.

Altogether 50 scientists, thousands of aerial transects and 600,000 km will be involved. In addition to the Wildlife Conservation Society, many African governments, the IUCN African Elephant Specialist Group, African Parks, Frankfurt Zoological Society, Elephants Without Borders, and Save the Elephants are participating in the survey. Survey teams will also explore how new technologies can improve on current aerial survey methods and allow for enhanced data gathering.

The Great Elephant Census continues Paul G. Allen’s history of supporting global initiatives with the potential to catalyze solutions that accelerate scientific and social progress. Allen’s strong ties to Africa include his investment of more than $10 million since 2008 to help support wildlife and landscape conservation efforts, and community and economic development projects.

Leopard Attacks Honey Badger, Loses

Yesterday the leopard seemed to have the world by the ass.  But today a leopard meets a honey badger, a quarter of its size and ten times as mean. World now has leopard by ass.  Circle of Life and all that.

This sequence also comes from Botswana, by way of Dutch photograher Vincent Grafhorst.  The text is from The Mail Online (Caveat:  I am doubtful about the attribution of that quote to Mark Twain):

An unlucky leopard got more than it bargained for after trying to catch and eat a honey badger.

These pictures show the leopard lamenting its overconfidence when the smaller beast lived up to Mark Twain’s old adage: ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.’

After spotting the badger from a distance, the leopard managed to rush down inside its burrow and drag it outside for what it thought was going to be an easy meal.

But despite catching its prey by the neck, the tough mammal managed to wriggle free thanks to its loose skin.

David and Goliath: An unlucky leopard

got more than it bargained for after trying to catch and eat a honey badger in Botswana, Africa

Nip: Captured on camera by Dutch wildlife photographer, Vincent Grafhorst, 40, in Botswana, Africa, the leopard decided to give up on its lunch after receiving some nasty injuries.

‘The badger did not seem injured but the leopard clearly was,’ said the photographer who chronicled the savage battle

However, instead of running away from its attacker, the animal, famed for its ferocity, manages to land some vicious bites and scratches of its own.

Captured on camera by Dutch wildlife photographer, Vincent Grafhorst, 40, in Botswana, Africa, the leopard decided to give up on its lunch after receiving some nasty injuries.

Vincent said: ‘All of a sudden the leopard stood still as she noticed a honey badger foraging, a mere 20-30 metres away from her.

‘The badger noticed her and the leopard charged, it disappeared into the nearest burrow for safety but the leopard dragged it out with its head in her jaws.’

Face-off: The two combatants bare their teeth during a lull in the frenzied fight. Neither the photographer nor his guide had ever seen a fight like it

The honey badger was able to get free thanks to its loose skin, which allows it to twist and escape the grasp of predators

Pick on someone your own size: The honey badger latches onto the leopard’s jaw.

‘She was taken by surprise that her intended prey fought back and hurt her seriously, it was clear she had no idea what she was getting herself into’

He added: ‘A ferocious, super fast fight was what followed.

‘Badgers have thick skin which is also very loose and allows them to twist inside their skin when grabbed and are also armed with a dangerous set of teeth as well as enormous claws.

‘The badger did not seem injured but the leopard clearly was.

‘It lay down at the same spot where the fight happened and began licking the wounds on both of her legs for many minutes, before she moved on.

‘She was taken by surprise that her intended prey fought back and hurt her seriously, it was clear she had no idea what she was getting herself into.

‘Neither myself or our experienced guide have ever seen such an altercation, it was a very rare moment.’

Don’t Look Now, It’s A Leopard Dive-Bomb

I was in the Okavango Delta recently and saw a leopard gracefully climb down a tree, at leisure. 

But this photo and video sequence from the same vicinity is incredible.  It’s by Yasmin Tajik of Shalimar Studios (which is–go figure–a Las Vegas wedding photo outfit; I bet they catch every punch when a cat fight breaks out on the dance floor).

First the video, then the stills, with Tajik’s narration.

On a safari trip at Chief’s Camp in Botswana we were out one morning with our ranger Tutalife, exploring Moremi National Park, when Tutalife stopped the vehicle and pointed out a female leopard in the tree tops.

The leopard was intently

watching a group of impala grazing nearby, and as they slowly moved under the tree we knew we were about to witness a once in a lifetime event. After about 10 minutes, we witnessed the leopard leap from the tree onto an unsuspecting impala below and before we knew it, the struggle had ended with a successful kill. With the adrenalin pumping through our veins, we moved closer and captured amazing images of the leopard attempting to drag the carcass up a tree. She failed, and elected to eat the carcass on the ground instead. The scene continued to unfold in front of us, as she tore into the flesh of the impala, enjoying the spoils. She then made a second attempt to drag the carcass up into a tree, but the weight of both the leopard and carcass were too heavy for the branches and both subsequently fell to the ground. It was at that point that the leopard opted to hide the impala carcass behind her and nap in the cool shade. The opportunity to capture the entire scene unfolding right in front of me was pure luck. A big thank you to our ranger Tutalife for his excellent tracking skills.

10 American Species Your Kids May Never See

The Endangered Species Coalition has produced a new report on American species most likely to become extinct, including such currently familiar backyard animals as the monarch butterfly and the little brown bat.  Take a look, and here’s a press release from the Natural Resources Defense Council:

New Report: Monarch Butterfly a Species Our Children May Never See

WASHINGTON (September 23, 2014) – The monarch butterfly, whose spectacular 2,000-mile migration has captivated scientists and school students for generations, is disappearing largely due to

pesticides and may not be around for our children to witness in the future, according to a new report.

The monarch is one of 10 threatened species highlighted in the report, Vanishing: Ten American Species Our Children May Never See, by the Endangered Species Coalition, which comprises hundreds of national and local conservation groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. The report identifies everyday actions that people can take to help slow the disappearance of our nation’s iconic wildlife. The report can be viewed and downloaded from the website: vanishingwildlife.org

NRDC, the Xerces Society and the Center for Biological Diversity have each launched efforts to save the monarchs, whose population has plummeted by more than 90 percent in large part because the heavy application of the weed killer glyphosate (initially marketed as RoundupTM) on genetically modified corn and soybeans has contributed to the decline of milkweed plants, which the monarchs need to survive.

“When species like monarch butterflies are in trouble, that means we’re all in trouble, because they’re leading indicators of the health of the planet,” said Frances Beinecke, President of NRDC. “By acting now to conserve these beautiful creatures for future generations, we will also be restoring our natural heritage and creating a safer, healthier world for all.”

“The monarch butterfly is a familiar backyard friend and its drastic decline is a wakeup call that we are spraying and paving our way to a lonely, less interesting and dangerously less-diverse planet,” said Tierra Curry, senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Restoring the monarch butterfly’s habitat will require a large scale commitment to replant milkweed across the millions of acres from which it has been lost,” said Sarina Jepsen, endangered species director at the Xerces Society. “We have already seen leadership from some farmers to bring milkweed back into the landscape.”

“With each passing day, our children are less and less likely to experience the full beauty of nature and see the kind of wildlife that baby boomers, Gen Xers and even Millennials experienced,” said Leda Huta, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition. “We owe it to our future generations of Americans to protect our vanishing wildlife and the special places they call home.”

The other species in the report are the whitebark pine, mountain yellow-legged frog, North Pacific right whale, great white shark, little brown bat, rusty patched bumble bee, greater sage-grouse, polar bear, and the Snake River sockeye salmon.

According to the report, up to a billion monarch butterflies used to color our skies each summer, yet only about 33 million now remain. NRDC earlier this year filed an emergency petition with the Environmental Protection Agency seeking restrictions on glyphosate. Its use on corn and soybeans has soared 20-fold since the introduction in the 1990s of genetically modified crops that are glyphosate resistant, enabling farmers to blanket their fields with the herbicide and destroy native milkweed. Separately, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Xerces Society, along with the Center for Food Safety and renowned monarch researcher Lincoln Brower, last month petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the monarch as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, which would allow significant protections for monarch habitat.

The organizations are also engaging in efforts to plant locally appropriate species of native milkweed along the monarchs’ main migration route, which stretches from a winter refuge in the mountains of Mexico through the eastern and Midwestern states up to southern Canada – as well as throughout western states for the population that primarily overwinters in California.

Coalition member groups nominated wildlife species in the report.  The Center for Biological Diversity, NRDC and the Xerces Society each nominated the monarch. A committee of distinguished scientists reviewed the nominations, and decided which species should be included in the report.

The Endangered Species Coalition has also produced a slide show to accompany the report, featuring stunning photos of each of the ten species in the report. The Coalition produces a “Top 10” report annually, focusing on a different theme each year. Previous years’ reports are also available on the Coalition’s website.

The Pond Scum Artist

This video caught my attention this morning, partly because it reminded me of the beautiful arrangements made by the nineteenth-century naturalist Ernst Haeckel, and partly because it documents an indisputably strange behavior of the species-seeking kind.  It’s about a British eccentric who makes microscopic arrangements of diatoms.  They are a kind of algae, with simple but symmetrical bodies, and there an estimated 100,000 different species of them at the base of the aquatic food chain.

I like the line at about four minutes: “I just could not get over how nature could produce something that beautiful. Most of the world never sees that beauty.”

We see only pond scum and scrunch up our noses instead..

 

 

 

South Africa Busts (Another) Major Rhino Poaching Syndicate

South Africa’s “Hawks” anti-poaching squad has broken up another major rhino poaching syndicate.  The question is whether they can bring them to trial.  The Hawks made a similar splash when they busted the “Musina Mafia” poaching gang in 2010, but the suspects have yet to come to trial four years later.

Here’s the story on the new arrests, from The Citizen:

The accused, wearing a white collared shirt and black formal pants, exited the court building cuffed  hand  and foot.

The arrest formed part of an operation led by the Hawks, who pounced on the alleged gang boss and nine other syndicate members simultaneously in various parts of the country during an arrest mission.

The alleged head of the syndicate was nabbed in front of court as he was due to appear on charges of illegal possession of scheduled substances and firearms.

The Citizen learnt that among the members arrested is the alleged right-hand-man, a Warrant Officer for the Organised Crime Unit in Pretoria, as well as the alleged kingpin’s wife, attorney, brother, a pilot and a professional poacher.

Nine of members of the syndicate were arrested, while one

of the members handed himself over to police.

The arrest follows a year-long, prosecutorially guided investigation led by the Hawks, which has resulted in the arrest of these suspects.

The syndicate is believed to be responsible for the brutal slaughter and mutilation of 24 rhino, including a pregnant  cow and a small calf, in state and privately owned reserves around the country between June 2008 and June 2012.

Of the poached rhino, 22 were darted with a potent drug, known as M99, used by poachers to knock out rhinos. The other two rhino were shot with a firearm.

Only two of the poached rhino survived the attacks.

The syndicate operated in the Limpopo, Mpumalanga, North-West Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal and the Free State.

It is understood that the syndicate’s main aim was to acquire as many rhino horns as possible for sale to the Eastern black market, specifically Vietnam.

The syndicate is alleged to have obtained up to 84 rhino horns by poaching rhino, as well as stealing horns obtaining them in other illegal ways: 41 of the horns were taken from 24 rhino that were poached; 14 horns were stolen – some  taken from a government building in Giyani – and 29 were obtained by other means.

A conservative estimate of the value of the 84 horns is over R16 million, with the value of the 22 rhino that died from being around R5.5 million.

There are 318 charges that will be laid against the suspects, including various common law offences such as theft, fraud, malicious injury to property and attempting to defeat the ends of justice as well as statutory offences including racketeering, money laundering, conspiracy, incitement to commit crime, intimidation, killing and dehorning of rhino, the illegal possession, transporting and selling of rhino horns and illegal possession of firearms and scheduled substances.

Three of the arrested men, whose identities are known to The Citizen, have also been arrested and convicted of several  crimes in the past.

The 10 suspects are expected to appear in Hatfield court in Pretoria on Monday.

Intelligence Is About Making Friends, Not Tools

 

My latest, for the Yale Alumni Magazine:

One day in the late 1990s, Nicholas Christakis was on the South Side of Chicago visiting a woman who had Alzheimer’s disease. Christakis was then a young physician and social scientist at the University of Chicago, taking care of terminally ill patients and also studying the widower effect—in which the death of one spouse dramatically worsens the likelihood of death for the other.

That day’s patient was gradually dwindling away, attended by her daughter. “The daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother,” Christakis recalls. The daughter’s husband was also sick from his wife’s exhaustion. Then Christakis got a phone call from one of the husband’s pals, “depressed by what was happening to his friend.”

It dawned on Christakis that the widower effect was not just about husbands and wives, or even pairs of people like the mother and her daughter. It rippled outward across networks of family, friends, and coworkers. Most surprisingly, given the narrow focus of his own work up to that point, it wasn’t just about death. “So I started to see the world in a completely new way,” Christakis recalled, in a 2010 TED talk, “and I became obsessed with how it might be that we’re embedded in these social networks, and how they affect our lives.”

Questions about the nature of networks have dominated his research ever since, first at Chicago, then during a 12-year stint at Harvard, where his growing interest in networks and biosocial science ultimately led him to give up his medical practice, and now at Yale, to which Christakis returned in summer 2013 as a professor of both sociology and medicine. (His full title is the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science.)

Over the past few years, his work illuminating the nature of social networks has won Christakis recognition not just within the scholarly world, but on Time magazine’s 2009 list of 100 “people who affect the world,” and on Foreign Policy’s 2009 and 2010 lists of top global thinkers. His 2009 book, Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do, has appeared in nearly 20 languages. He wrote it, appropriately, with his best friend and longtime research collaborator James H. Fowler ’97MA, now at the University of California, San Diego. Their work demonstrating the contagious nature of everything from obesity to altruism has stirred up considerable debate in the research world. It has also suggested powerful new ways to intervene in networks—for instance, to speed the switch to generic drugs, or to slow the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

What Christakis and Fowler are proposing amounts to a strikingly different way of looking at our own lives, adding a new “n’ to the familiar dichotomy of nurture and nature: we are also creatures of our social networks—simultaneously individuals and, says Christakis, intimately connected parts of a superorganism. We are metagenomic. It’s a term that has lately come into common usage to describe how the microbial genomes in and around our bodies help shape our physical and emotional well-being. But Christakis means it in a broader sense, too. Each of us also “lives in the sea of genes of others, others with whom we have chosen to connect.” Our friends’ genes, for diverse traits, may help determine how our own genes are expressed and thus who we are.

Christakis believes, moreover, that three recent developments make it possible for the first time to understand how these networks function: first, cell phones, Twitter feeds, medical administrative records, and countless other sources now make possible “massive, passive” gathering of data about social networks. New computational methods also allow researchers to identify social patterns in this sea of data and begin to make sense of them. And finally, inexpensive and widely available DNA sequencing technologies provide a window into the genetic character of these networks.

In another 2010 TED talk, Christakis likened the combined effect to the moment “when Galileo came to use the telescope and could see the heavens in a new way, or Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope and could see biology in a new way.” What’s opening up this time is the hidden universe of our own social behavior.

“Maybe intelligence isn’t about making tools, but about making friends,” Christakis tells his audience, at one of the get-acquainted talks he has been giving around the Yale campus. “Our need for social networks may have shaped our ability to think.” He is a contagiously enthusiastic speaker, both erudite and animated, his hands constantly moving, palms up to suggest a possibility, than waggling for an approximation. He has a tendency to talk much too fast, because there is so much to say, but he also says it with a certain playfulness.

When he puts up an animated graphic of shifting social relationships over 30 years among test subjects in the Framingham Heart Study, he remarks that it took five years to make. Then he adds that his teenage daughter, Lena, has described it as “more expensive than Avatar and much less interesting.” For him, though, these maps have the fascination of living organisms.

On the map of a social network, a dot stands in for each person. (See illustration above) The dots, or nodes, are strewn in a seemingly random pattern across a two-dimensional playing surface. Lines, representing friendships, link each node to four or five others, forming a little group of friends. Some groups overlap in a dense cluster at the middle of the network. Others drift out on the periphery, tethered to the larger network by only one or two threads. Centrality, Christakis tells his audience, is a key to understanding how networks function.

(Illustration: Mark Zurolo ’01MFA and Celia Poirier)

Being at the center of a group (like Node C) might seem better—for instance, if you’re hoping to pick up your friends’ gossip. But being on the outskirts (like Node D) can have its advantages, if what’s going around instead is a deadly virus. Advantages and disadvantages also apply to other aspects of a node’s position, he says. “If the challenge is to kill a mastodon,” Node A can band together quickly with his friends, because the people in his tight-knit group all know each other. But “if the job is to find the mastodon,” then it’s better to be Node B, whose friends have connections with other groups. Node B can ask his friends, who can ask their friends, “Did you see the mastodon? Did you see the mastodon?”

The hunter-gatherer reference is deliberate. Christakis believes that the basic structure of social networks has been with us as long as we have been human. Moreover, it hasn’t changed much despite the invention of agriculture, cities, and telecommunications. “If you talked with your great-grandmother” who had no phone or “my teenage daughter who has a phone in her pocket,” he says, they’d both have the same small circle averaging 4.5 close friends.

So would the Hadza, a group of fewer than a thousand people who still follow the traditional hunter-gatherer way of life in north-central Tanzania. Christakis and a postdoc, Coren Apicella, now at the University of Pennsylvania, recently set out to construct a kind of “Hadza Facebook,” on the theory that the Hadza are the closest living approximation of how our ancestors lived before agriculture. (With any other researcher, Apicella says, “I would’ve walked out thinking, ‘This is impossible.’” But Christakis’s enthusiasm—“This is dynamite! We have to study the social networks of the Hadza!”—made it seem almost reasonable.)

“Humans are unusual as a species,” the resulting study in Nature began, “in the extent to which they form long-standing, nonreproductive unions with unrelated individuals—that is, we have friends.” Christakis and Apicella went on to argue that all the same basic network structures operate whether among the Hadza or, say, undergraduates at Harvard—the same variation in the number of social ties (degree distribution), the same likelihood that two of a person’s friends will in turn be friends with each other (transitivity), the same odds that an outbound social tie will elicit an inbound tie from the same person (reciprocity), the same inclination of similar people to form ties together (homophily), and even the same clique-ish knack of popular people for befriending other popular people (degree assortativity).

Christakis’s decision to return to Yale was also a network phenomenon. It started a few years ago when he gave a talk at the University of Pennsylvania and an old colleague asked him to consider coming back to Philadelphia. Christakis had done his residency in internal medicine and earned a PhD in sociology there, after having taken his medical degree and a master’s in public health at Harvard. (Academic cross-training was, and remains, his thing.) His wife, Erika, a childhood educator and public health advocate, had also earned a degree from the University of Pennsylvania. But a Yale alumnus passed along word of the Pennsylvania bid to Peter Salovey ’86PhD, then Yale’s provost. On the resulting visit to New Haven, Christakis says, he “fell in love with the place.”

Or back in love: Christakis was born in New Haven in 1962, when both his parents were Yale graduate students. The family returned to Greece when he was three, and Greek became his first language. (Greek mythological references still turn up routinely in his speech: he says, for instance, that Yale appealed to him this time because it seemed like a place where new ideas could arise from the cross-fertilization of disciplines, “like Daedalus being inspired to invent the first saw after seeing a fish’s jawbone on the beach.”) His father Alexander’s work as a consultant and futurist brought the family back to this country when Nicholas was six. His mother Eleni became a high school science teacher and then a clinical psychologist in Washington, DC. When it was time to choose a college, Christakis didn’t want to go any place but Yale. He went on to graduate with the top prize for science in his class. He was, he says, “incredibly nerdy.”

The off-note in this otherwise ebullient history is that much of the trajectory of his career after Yale derived from a childhood obsession with death. Both his clinical work and his research focused on hospice care and on finding ways to improve medical decisions around the end of life. His doctoral thesis became his first book, Death Foretold: Prophecy and Prognosis in Medical Care. At one point, his thesis adviser worried aloud about this focus: “Do you think it might have something to do with your childhood?” Christakis had immersed himself so thoroughly, so nerdily, in his work that he immediately replied, “It never occurred to me.”

In fact, his career choice had everything to do with the terminal cancer with which his mother Eleni struggled throughout his childhood. “As a boy,” he says, “all I wanted to know was would my mother live or die.” That drove him to “prognostication and death, and how doctors make predictions.” By the time she finally died, he was 25 and in medical school. The career choice was another network phenomenon: his two brothers, Dimitri Christakis, Yale 1986, and Quan-Yang Duh, Yale 1977, also became physicians.

For Nicholas, though, the switch to networks and social science made a better fit. The scholarly intensity aside, he is a highly social, outgoing figure, or, as an interviewer for the Harvard Crimson phrased it, “a total baller.” A college roommate, the author Hampton Sides ’84, recalls that Christakis would occasionally arise from his books, “put on a lot of cologne, the dancing clothes with the bling, and become very Greek” with “a big Mediterranean fro” like “a Saturday Night Fever Adonis.” He was also an aficionado of good Scotch. (He and Fowler still make bets with bottles of Oban over key research questions like whether Modern Apizza or Pepe’s is better.)

At Harvard, he and Erika served as co-masters of a residential house, while their three children were in school, and opened their home as a refuge for the community. When the same Crimson interviewer asked Christakis what he liked best about the job, he replied, “You get to dress up in ridiculous costumes.” (His polar bear outfit was apparently a big deal.) Erika Christakis has also joined the Yale faculty, as a lecturer at the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. They announced the move to their son Lysander, according to Nicholas, soon after he took early admission to Yale, saying, “Good news, Lysander, mommy and daddy are coming to college with you.”

The network research by Christakis and Fowler first attracted public attention in 2007 when they reported that the “obesity epidemic” wasn’t just a phrase, but an apt description of how weight gain spreads through social networks, even across relatively distant connections. Or as they write in Connected: “Your friend’s husband’s coworker can make you fat.” One particularly hostile critic accused them of “chronic widespread misuse of statistics.” Another characterized the general scholarly response as “respecticism,”—that is, a mixture of respect with a skeptical expectation of further evidence. Andrew C. Thomas, a statistics and social networks scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, reanalyzed their data and argues that their results “were an artifact of their study design and not evidence of contagion.” The issue was partly that “this is very new math,” Thomas says, and partly that the Framingham Heart dataset was inadequate for their purposes. “There would be hope with a much more fine-grained data set in the future that they will be able to show that those effects might be real.” But such a data set would have cost $25 million to assemble, “so they did the best they could with what they had.”

Christakis cites Teddy Roosevelt’s remark that it’s not the critics who count, but the person who acts, “the man in the arena,” who may fall short, “because there is no effort without error and shortcoming” but who nonetheless strives for “the triumph of high achievement.” With his characteristic knack for being lofty and down in the dirt, more or less simultaneously, he adds that critics “sometimes piss me off, and sometimes piss him off,” meaning Fowler. “When they piss us both off, we strike.” The two have gone on to provide supporting evidence not just for the contagious nature of obesity, but for drinking, tobacco use, happiness, sleep, exercise, the prescribing behavior of physicians, and a variety of other phenomena that, Christakis says, have been confirmed by other labs. They’ve also refined their methodology, weeded out potential confounding factors, and branched out into new forms of online experimentation. Still, one observer, Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman, says, “I think they’ve gradually backed down from their strong claims, toward a more general sense that their results are interesting and suggestive.”

The concern Christakis and Fowler themselves frequently raise about their research is the “So what?” question. That is, the insights into social networks are intriguing, but what can you do with them?

This ring network maps the sexual relationships among half the students in a Midwestern high school over a period of 18 months. (Orange nodes represent females, blue nodes males.) Node X represents a student who had an STD. Node A and Node B are each five steps from X—but Node A is more vulnerable, because the STD can travel in either direction around the ring to reach him. (Illustration by Mark Zurolo ’01MFA and Celia Poirier)

A lot, they say. In Connected, they present one startling map of a social network of romantic pairings over 18 months in a Midwestern high school. The network included person X, who had an STD. The map shows how person A was more vulnerable than person B to the STD, even though each of them was five steps from X and each had had unprotected sex with just three partners. Their personal risk wasn’t only about individual behavior. It was also about the structure of the network and their dramatically different places within it.

But since nobody inside a network has the perspective to see where they fit in it, so what? Christakis and Fowler argue that public health workers could do better at blocking the spread of a disease if they collected network data and tailored their approach accordingly. In the network at that high school, for instance, there wasn’t a lot of “transitivity”—that is, overlap or duplication among sexual partners. Students largely obeyed the “no-partner-swapping rule”: when a boy and a girl dumped their current partners to become a couple, the dumped parties did not become a couple in turn. With most people being connected to the larger network by only a single link, a school-wide awareness program was the likeliest way to stop the STD outbreak, according to Christakis and Fowler. But in other types of networks, it would be quicker to target a core of individuals who are highly sexually active.

It is, however, often impractical to map any human network, much less a sexual one, meaning again: So what? Christakis says that it’s possible to tweak network behaviors without necessarily mapping them. For instance, the “friendship paradox” says that if you ask each person in a group to name a friend, that named friend will tend to have more friends than the person you are asking. At a cocktail party, say, the suggested names will gravitate toward the host, not the wallflowers. It’s a shortcut for getting at the center of the social network.

Christakis and Fowler tested the idea during a 2009 H1N1 outbreak at Harvard. They found that the more-central individuals got flu two weeks before the random individuals who named them—and as much as 46 days before the epidemic peaked. With current methods, says Christakis, epidemiologists generally spot an outbreak weeks after it occurs. Using network methods instead would allow them to predict and perhaps preempt the flu epidemics that now kill 49,000 Americans every year. Where epidemiologists must now immunize 95 percent of the population to be effective against a highly contagious disease like measles, they could in theory reach the same level of protection immunizing just 30 percent.

When Christakis outlines these ideas during a talk to faculty at the Yale medical school, his audience soon becomes… let’s say reskepticited, a mind-blown blend of respectful, skeptical, and unmistakably excited. When he tells them that identifying central individuals on Twitter makes it possible to predict what’s going to go viral nine days from now, someone inquires, “What about stocks?” (They are doctors, after all.) When he talks about how network strategies can get people to adopt beneficial behaviors more quickly, someone else suggests, “Could you try this on Congress?” With “massive, passive” gathering of data on American citizens by the National Security Agency in the news, a third person wants to know, “how do you keep network ideas and technology from getting into the wrong hands?”

“I know it’s getting in the wrong hands,” Christakis replies. Marketers, hedge funds, and almost every other organization imaginable are all looking for the next advantageous angle, and the new field of computational social science is booming as a result. It is the tantalizing nature of such research: the same network methods that can accelerate the switch to a lower-cost generic drug can serve equally well to increase use of its more profitable brand-name counterpart. The same tools that prove highly effective for getting out the vote can become tricks to keep certain voters at home. One of the functions of networks is to magnify small effects, more or less agnostically: they can spread love. Or they can spread Ebola.

Thinking about how his findings might be misused, Christakis recounts the story of one of his Yale professors, the botanist and bioethicist Arthur Galston. Galston’s doctoral research focused on finding a chemical means to make soybeans flower earlier. Decades after that research, he was devastated to learn that his discoveries had become the basis for the herbicide Agent Orange and that its misuse by the US military as a defoliant in Vietnam had killed, maimed, or permanently disabled hundreds of thousands of people.

But Christakis is in fact far more optimistic than this story suggests. “I believe that the work we are doing will make the world more resistant to disease,” he says, “will make the world more cooperative, will make the world more creative and more civic-minded, and will improve the quality of our society.”

This thought, this dream, makes him reach for a 1968 Robert F. Kennedy speech about the flawed concept of Gross National Product, and in his enthusiasm he reads an excerpt aloud: GNP, Kennedy said, “measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short,” and there is an unmistakable hitch in Christakis’s voice, “except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

The emotion in his voice seems, at that moment, to define him. Christakis is that rare thing in our cynical era—a man still willing to reach for a grand, romantic ideal. He thinks he can tell us something about who we are not just as Americans, but as humans. He understands that he cannot know, any more than Arthur Galston, who will use his research, and that of others in his field, or to what end. But he believes, even so, that he can make it work to build a better world.

It will be interesting to watch him try.

 

Africa’s Hidden Population Boom Is Bad News For Humans & Wildlife

(Photo: Simon Maina/Getty Images)

A few years ago in Kenya, a taxi driver and I were remarking on the endless shambas—tin-roofed farmhouses on impossibly small plots of land–sprawling out from Nairobi all the way across the Great Rift Valley to Lake Nakura. Kenya’s population had quintupled in the driver’s lifetime, from 8.1 million people in 1960 to 44.4 million today, and the consequences were all around us. He pointed out places where he could remember seeing rhinos, hippos, elephants and other wildlife.

All gone now.

It’s the sort of thing that makes conservation biologists foresee an Africa without wildlife. And a new analysis just out in the journal Science suggests that the problem may be worse than anyone has imagined, with the population in Africa increasing from a billion people today to as much as 5.7 billion by 2100.

Past analyses have generally concluded that the total world population would increase from 7.2 billion today to about 9.6 billion in mid-century and then stabilize or even slowly decline. But the new analysis, from a global consortium of demographers and the Population Division of the United Nations, finds “little prospect of an end to world population growth in this century.” Instead, the Earth will somehow need to feed and accommodate 11 or 12 billion people by 2100, with much of the increase happening in sub-Saharan Africa.

That conclusion is surprising because the birth rate continues to decline worldwide and in Africa. But the decline in Africa is happening at only a quarter of the rate seen “in Asia and Latin America in the 1970s, when they were at a comparable stage” in the transition to smaller families, according to the new analysis. In some African countries, the rate of decline has actually stalled over the last 15 years, according to John Wilmoth, the report’s co-author and director of the UN Population Division.

Among possible factors behind the slowdown: The desired family size reported in Africa was

larger to start with (at 6.5 children) requiring a more dramatic shift in expectations to get to replacement level (2.1 children). The level of socio-economic development in those countries has lagged behind even some Asian countries decades ago. And delivery of family planning programs needs to be better supported and more culturally sensitive. Wilmot noted that the stalled fertility decline has a compounding effect. Not only do families today have more children, “but those children have more grandchildren and so on into the future.”

In Nigeria alone the population is now estimated to increase as much as five-fold, from 160 million today to as much as 914 million people—in shouting distance of a billion– by 2100, according to the new analysis. That’s bad news for people in what is already one of the most notoriously chaotic nations in the world, and currently struggling with both an Ebola outbreak and an Islamic revolt. It’s also terrible news for wildlife, in a nation that has already eradicated cheetahs, pygmy hippos, black rhinos, giant elands, and a vast menagerie of other species.

“Human pressure is already so high in Nigeria that there is almost no wildlife left outside of national parks,” Andrew Dunn, Nigeria Country Director for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in an email.  The increasing human population, he said, will require protecting national parks with “greater investment, stronger political will, and most important of all, ensuring that surrounding communities benefit in some way from the presence of the national parks.”  Otherwise, “wildlife will not survive till 2100.”

Also on the list of countries facing major increases are Tanzania (due to quintuple its population by 2100) and Kenya (on track to quadruple), where rapidly dwindling wildlife populations have made tourism a mainstay of their economies, up to now.

The new study provides a grim list of likely challenges from a rapidly increasing population, including depletion of natural resources and rising environmental pollution; unemployment, low wages, and poverty; high maternal and child mortality; lagging investments in health, education and infrastructure; and increasing crime and social unrest.

By failing to reduce the rate of population growth, countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania also miss out on “a potential long-lasting demographic dividend,” according to the report.

Adrian Raftery, a co-author and demographer at the University of Washington, explains it this way: When fertility goes down, that means fewer children in a particular cohort. As the larger population just above them enters their productive years in the workforce, they have fewer kids to support, and a relatively small number of elderly. Thus “the potential to have a very strong economy,” he said. “Usually the effect will last a working life, 30 years or so. In Ireland, for example, fertility declined rapidly after 1960, and that was a big factor in the Celtic Tiger economy, and also in the rapid recovery” after the 2008 recession.

“African economies could reap the same benefit,” he added, if they get serious about more effective family planning programs now. (Wilmoth noted that governments in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Malawi have already begun to put more emphasis on reproductive health, and are seeing increased uptake of contraception.)

Apart from the African results, the new study is important because it corrects flaws in past UN population estimates, which often came under attack for failing to take realistic account of probabilities. For instance, the UN used to provide high and low population projections simply by taking a country’s total fertility rate per woman and adding or subtracting half a child. While that half-child difference might have applied in a given country or year, it would hardly have applied to all countries and all years. The new statistical model “takes better account of fluctuations over time of fertility and mortality,” said Raftery.

He developed some of the new methodologies, curiously, while calculating whale population sizes for the International Whaling Commission, and trying to project populations in the future based on fragmentary data. The methods used for whales, which are also big, long-lived mammals, turned out to apply to humans. Whales could thus indirectly do us the great service of encouraging support for family planning.

“The bottom line I hope people will take away from our work,” said Raftery, “is that population needs to go back to the top of people’s agenda. It’s going to drive a lot of other issues. So it should be a priority.”

Apart from lobbying governments to make that happen, Wilmoth added that individuals should look to the flip side of the population debate: “A lot of this has to do with how we live, what we consume, how we produce the goods we consume, and how we dispose of them, and the energy we use.”

If we want to have a world worth living in—and for most people that means a world with room for wildlife to live alongside us—we are going to have to come up with new ideas, new behaviors, and new designs for landscapes and for living.

And with the nightmarish prospect of a billion-person Nigeria in sight, we are going to need them pretty damned quick.

Why Field Biologists Do What They Do

I like this account of working in the natural world.  I found it in an article by Don Lyman, about field work in a New Jersey salt marsh. (That’s my old habitat.  And “ticks on the delicates”? Yes, I have been there, too.)  The speaker is Yoel Stuart, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin:

“We like being surprised by nature. We enjoy watching an organism conduct some behavior in the field that we could have never seen in the lab. We enjoy finding organisms living in places we never would have expected them, like kilometers under the Antarctic ice. We enjoy the adventure of getting to new places and discovering species new to science. We take great pleasure in understanding how species interact with each other in the wild as they find food, avoid predators, reproduce, and pass genes on to the next generation. Nature never ceases to amaze, so we always return to nature, where we pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake. To many of us, that’s worth bloody knuckles,

scraped shins, whining mosquitoes, simultaneous sunburn and hypothermia, ticks on the delicates, and mud in the ears.”

Every Tree Its Own Microbiome

Lush life in the Barro Colorado Forest (Photo: Les Cunliffe /Fotolia)

I like this new study in part because I’ve written about the microbiome, but also because the research took place on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, and I think it relates to a story I wrote there about the microbiome of sloths.  This was back in 1982, before the word “microbiome” existed.  (You can read that story in my book, Every Creeping Thing, or I may try to get around to posting some of the details here at a later date.  In brief, it turns out sloths partition the forest canopy based on the microbiome of different trees.)

Anyway, here’s the press release:

Each tree species has its own bacterial identity. That’s the conclusion of University of Oregon researchers and colleagues from other institutions who studied the genetic fingerprints of bacteria on 57 species of trees growing on a Panamanian island.

“This study demonstrates for the first time that host plants from different plant families and with different ecological strategies possess very different microbial communities on their leaves,” said lead author Steven W. Kembel, now a professor of biological sciences at the University of Quebec at Montreal.

For the study — published this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — researchers gathered bacterial samples from 57 of the more than 450 tree species growing in a lowland tropical forest on Barro Colorado Island, Panama.

Scientists at the UO’s Genomics Core Facility sequenced the bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA gene isolated from the samples. That gene, which biologists call a barcode gene, allowed researchers to identify and measure the diversity of bacteria based on millions of DNA fragments produced from bacterial communities collected from the surfaces of leaves, said Jessica Green, a professor at both the UO and Santa Fe Institute.

“Some bacteria were very abundant and present on every leaf in the forest, while others were rare and only found on the leaves of a single host species,” Kembel said. “Each tree species of tree possessed a distinctive community of bacteria on its leaves.”

In the world of microbiology, plant leaves are considered to be a habitat known as the phyllosphere. They are host to millions of bacteria, Kembel said. “These bacteria can have important effects — both positive and negative — on the health and functioning of their host plants,” he said. “For example,

while some bacteria on leaves cause disease, others may protect the plant against pathogens or produce hormones that increase plant growth rates.”

In the animal microbiome, the researchers noted, studies comparing large numbers of species have shown that host diet — for example, herbivory versus carnivory — has a large effect on the structure of microbial communities in their guts. The new study, Kembel and Green said, provides a comparable understanding of the host attributes that explain patterns of microbial diversity in the plant microbiome.

“We found that the abundance of some bacterial taxa was correlated with the growth, mortality, and function of the host,” Kembel said. These included bacteria involved in nitrogen fixing and the consumption of methane, as well as bacteria linked to soil and water.

Dominating the bacterial communities were a core microbiome of taxa including Actinobacteria, Alpha-, Beta- and Gamma-Proteobacteria and Sphingobacteria. Some types of bacteria, the researcher found, were more abundant when growing on the leaves of fast-growing or slow-growing tree species, or on leaves with different concentrations of elements such as nitrogen or phosphorus.

“Because of the importance of the microbiome for the growth and function of the host, understanding the factors that influence bacteria on the leaves of different trees could have important implications for our ability to model and conserve biological diversity and ecosystem function,” Kembel said. “Ultimately, we hope that understanding the factors that explain variation in bacterial abundances across host species will help us better manage biological diversity in forests and the health and function of forest ecosystems.”