Richard Conniff's Blog, page 5

Was Our Ancestral Homeland in Botswana–not East Africa ?

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by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

Anyone lucky enough to have visited the Okavango Delta in the southern African nation of Botswana will recall the comforting and oddly familiar sensation of looking out from the shelter of a stand of trees at the panorama of wildlife—from elephants and African wild dogs to lilac-breasted rollers—moving across the lush surrounding floodplains. That sense of familiarity may run deeper than we imagine, a new study suggests—back to a time when early modern humans also wandered there.

The study, appearing Monday in the journal Nature, uses genetic, archaeological, linguistic and climatic evidence to argue that the ancestral homeland of everyone alive today was in northern Botswana—not in East Africa, as previously thought. Based on mitochondrial DNA, passed down from mother to daughter, the paper’s co-authors argue that we are all descended from a small community of Khoisan hunter-gatherers who lived 200,000 years ago in vast wetlands encompassing Botswana’s Okavango Delta and the Makgadikgadi regions.

Much of that place is now a dry salt pan—and inhabited by modern Khoisan people, sometimes called Bushmen. But back then, it was a vast wetland covering an area the size of Switzerland. The community that lived there was unusually stable, thriving almost unchanged for 70,000 years in a habitat closely resembling the modern Okavango Delta, according to senior author Vanessa M. Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia.

The new study looks at the mitogenomes, or mitochondrial genomes, of 1,217 individuals from multiple southern African ethnic identities, and focuses on a “rare deep-rooting” lineage called L0, or L zero. It’s the oldest known mitochondrial lineage, passed down intact from mother to daughter across the generations, though mutations can sometimes occur and may be associated with important evolutionary changes. Hayes became interested in that lineage as a result of her work with the South African Genome Project, which found evidence of L0 ancestry distributed across southern Africa. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, descended mainly from Bantu groups who migrated into southern Africa 1,500 years ago, was among those identified as having Khoisan ancestry, a connection he said left him feeling “very privileged and blessed.”

Tracking the accumulation of mutations in the L0 lineage across the eons provides geneticists with a time stamp for evolutionary changes. The co-authors of the Nature paper identify and date changes in the L0 lineage. They also correlate these “branching” events with evidence of climatic shifts, as well as with archaeological evidence of human migrations. During the initial 70,000 years of stable habitation, says co-author Axel Timmermann, a climate scientist at Pusan National University in South Korea, migration was probably constrained by harsh, dry conditions in the surrounding landscape. But about 130,000 years ago, a period of increased rainfall opened a green corridor for migrations to the northeast. Then, about 110,000 years ago, drying conditions within the homeland and opening of a green corridor to the southwest led to further migrations down to the southern tip of Africa. Evidence of both events survives, according to the study, in subgroups of the L0 lineage found in living descendants of those migrations.

The new research fits with other recent genetic evidence of human origin in southern Africa, including a study earlier this year suggesting that a migration from that region to East Africa, and the resulting mixture with populations there, might have been a key turning point in the evolution of modern humans and their migration out of Africa. Another paper this year also argues that a migration from southern Africa to East Africa immediately preceded a major out-of-Africa migration 100,000 to 70,000 years ago. The alternative pan-African, or “polycentric,” viewpoint holds that multiple interlinked populations evolved across the continent, sometimes in isolation and sometimes together.

James Cole, an archaeologist at the University of Brighton in England, who was not involved in the new study, praises Hayes and her colleagues for their cross-disciplinary approach to understanding mitochondrial evolution. But he also notes that their paper overlooks major archaeological evidence, such as the 315,000-year-old skeletal remains of an anatomically modern human recently found in Morocco. Hayes replies that her study focuses only on the population of direct ancestors of “people walking around today,” and in the absence of genetic evidence from the Morocco specimens, the connection to living humans is unknown.

Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Michigan who also was not involved in the new work, similarly argues that the evidence its authors present is too narrow. Reliance solely on mitochondrial evidence leads to misinterpretation, he says, and risks overlooking important evolutionary information in the separate DNA of the cell nucleus. Our widespread inheritance of Neandertal genes shows up, for instance, only in the nuclear DNA, and it is completely absent from the mitogenome. Likewise, Wolpoff says, “the nuclear genome, with three billion base pairs, might tell an entirely different story about the African origin of modern humans from what the mitogenome’s 16,000 base pairs” suggest.

“We’re dealing with a puzzle of a million pieces,” Cole says, “and we’ve probably got the first 100 in place.” Paleogenetics has “ramped up the scale of complexity exponentially,” he adds. “From the paleontological and archeological record, it was a 1,000-piece puzzle.” But instead of providing a grand answer to the story of human origin, Cole suggests, so far, genetics is mainly showing us just how complex that story really is.

 

Eeeek! There’s a Dinosaur in The Living Room

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by Richard Conniff/National Geographic

Sitting poolside at a motel in the middle of Tucson, Arizona, a head-and-neck surgeon in cowboy boots and blue jeans is rhapsodizing about skulls. He has brought one along in his carry-on luggage on the flight into town, and he’s plainly thrilled by the perfect state of the brain case and the openings where cranial nerves once ran.

“I can see the ophthalmic nerve that gave vision,” he says, as if the former occupant of this skull still lives. “I can see the abducent nerve which allowed lateral eye motion, and the trigeminal nerve, which gave sensation to the skin of the face.”

The surgeon has asked not be identified in this article. Owning a collection of fossil skulls makes him both gleefully happy and nervously private, like many other collectors in town for the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. At the moment, the surgeon is building an underground room to house the skulls, and he grins at the thought of displaying them in chronological order: the 36-inch-long Allosaurus skull, the toothy sea monster Elasmosaurus, the most complete skull of a Pteranodon ever found.

Private fossil collectors are pretty common these days. Some, like the surgeon, are serious enough about it to pass for professional paleontologists. He buys unprepared fossils and spends much of his free time meticulously extricating them from their stone prisons. Other collectors seem mainly to be indulging a boyish taste for big, scary—and expensive—monsters. (“The things that sell are jaws, claws, and horns,” one dealer confides.)

A few collectors rank among the world’s mega-rich, like the Chinese real estate developer haggling in Tucson for a slab fossil of an Ichthyosaurus, a large marine reptile, being offered at $750,000. More nervous privacy: The developer interrupts a question to his translator by loudly clearing his throat and marching off grimly in the direction of a $3 million Stegosaurus.

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The passion for paleontology among private collectors means that dinosaurs and other fossil giants can turn up in homes and businesses almost anywhere. In a waterfront summer house in Massachusetts, the shield and horns of a Triceratops skull greet weekend guests in the foyer, and a 17-foot-long mosasaur, a giant lizard of the sea, hangs from the living room ceiling. In Southern California, a monstrous Ichthyosaurus adorns the master bathroom of one collector’s house, because the living room is already full of fossils. In Dubai, an 80-foot-long Diplodocus is the star attraction of a shopping mall. And in Santa Barbara, California, one of the best Tyrannosaurus skulls ever found sits in the lobby of a software company, glowering, fangs bared, at the indifferent receptionist seated just opposite.

Collectors tend to be secretive about their private fossils because the commercialization of paleontology has stirred up two decades of furious controversy, dating back at least to the 1997 auction of the Tyrannosaurus rex named Sue. That commercially collected specimen ended up in Chicago’s Field Museum, but the $8.4 million sale price induced gold rush fantasies in some landowners. It also left many museum paleontologists fearful that they’d be priced out of a domain they’d long considered their own.

But the gold rush never quite materialized. There’s a glut of Tyrannosaurus specimens on the market now, and other prize specimens sell only after years of price-cutting. Even so, assorted scandals—faked specimens from China, illicitly smuggled dinosaur bones from Mongolia, and careless or illegal excavations everywhere—have sustained the hostility of some academic paleontologists toward private collectors. So has the tendency to treat precious fossils merely as aesthetic objects, or worse.

In Tucson, one dealer hawked an Apatosaurus leg to passersby, crying, “That would’ve been a heckuva barbecue!” Another dealer was selling a Tyrannosaurus skull—just a resin cast, not the real thing—coated in gold, for the discerning buyer to “show it to friends to say, Wow!” Little wonder one paleontologist argued in a blog post for seizure of some dinosaurs by eminent domain to discourage “those who would profit by stabbing science in the eyes.”

What’s surprising, though, is the extent to which private collectors, commercial fossil hunters, and museum paleontologists now quietly cooperate, despite the war of words. The détente stems partly from necessity. Cash-strapped museums everywhere have cut research staff and budgets. Commercial collectors are thus “digging much more than scientists,” says Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “We go for three weeks’ vacation. They dig for five months.”

The specimens that commercial dealers discover and sell to private collectors would not otherwise “automatically have gone to museums,” adds American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Mark Norell. More likely, they would have eroded out of remote hillsides unnoticed and weathered to nothing over time.

The cowboy-and-farmer excavations that “destroyed a lot of really important stuff” in the late 1980s and 1990s are less common now, Norell says. In the American West, commercial collectors often do better work than academic paleontologists, he says, if only because “the quality of the excavation adds so much to the value of the specimen.”

That’s not the case in China, where untrained amateurs still do most of the digging. But commercial collectors in both countries have found what Johnson calls “some really exquisite stuff” during the past quarter century.

Such discoveries almost inevitably oblige collectors and paleontologists to work together. A few years ago when Norell was helping prepare a pterosaur exhibit, he included a celebrated specimen called Dark Wing, on loan from the German retiree who prepared the flying reptile’s fossil and had kept it hanging over his mantel. When a spectacular fossil of a birdlike dinosaur called Archaeopteryx appeared, a private collector acquired it for the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, a museum he created in Thermopolis, Wyoming.

Other private specimens ultimately wind up in museums on permanent loan or as gifts—assuming the buyers have preserved critical scientific documentation. The donors may not be the private collectors who bought dinosaurs to make friends say, Wow! But sooner or later, the tantalizing vision of a tax-deductible donation will glimmer in the eyes of their heirs as they realize, says one museum exhibit designer, that dinosaurs are “not really conducive to the home environment” and are “not easy to dust.”

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Richard Conniff, an award-winning science writer, is now at work on a book about the fight against epidemic disease. Please consider becoming an underwriter of this work. Click here to learn how.

Note: I think the story is easier to read in the version above. But check out the version in the October issue of National Geographic, where the photographs by Gabriele Galimberti and Juri De Luca are so much better than my own snapshots included above.

The CIA, World War II Bombs, and 8 Million Dead Fish: A True Story

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Mississippi paddlefish, Polyodon spathula. (Photo: Richard Conniff)

by Richard Conniff/National Geographic

It is a horror movie director’s dream of a natural history collection. You find it by driving 10 miles southeast of New Orleans, to a piece of land that is part swamp, part forest, on a bend in the Mississippi River, down a dirt track named Wild Boar Road. Alligators and water moccasins live in the tangled woods to the left. On the right stands ammunition bunker number A3, its flanks heavily bermed against the danger of explosion, its loading dock cracked and skewed forward by the more reliable detriments of time.

There are 26 such bunkers, widely distributed around the roughly 400-acre property, most of them abandoned. During World War II, U.S. Navy ships stopped here to pick up artillery shells before heading out to sea. Later the Central Intelligence Agency trained Cuban guerrillas on the property for the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

Tulane University owns the place now, and the visitors tend to be biologists, drawn here by the nearly eight million dead fish housed in bunkers A3 and A15. (Another bunker nearby holds the University of Louisiana Monroe’s fish collection.)

[image error]Inside, the fish soak in alcohol, in tightly sealed jars of assorted sizes, lined up on shelves that rise 10 feet high and run 36 feet long, in row after row after row. Some of the specimens are outlandish. A couple dozen paddlefish huddle together in a five-gallon jug with their translucent paddles raised heavenward, looking like congregants at an extraterrestrial prayer meeting. But nine of the 22 rows in the main collection are Cyprinidae, which mostly means minnows. Ordinary is really the guiding aesthetic of the place.

It is the world’s largest fish collection, a title that comes with asterisks.

“It’s actually the largest post-larval collection,” says Justin Mann, the 38-year-old collection manager, who spends much of his time fighting back the mildew that paints and repaints itself across the interior walls. It’s the largest by number of specimens, he adds, not species. In fact, more than a million specimens belong to a single species, Cyprinella venusta. (Yes, it’s a type of minnow.) The collection includes outliers from as far away as Indonesia. But most of the fish here originally were at home in the Southeast United States, from the Gulf Coast of Texas to the Carolinas.

The Tulane collection consisted of just two mounted fish when an ambitious young fish biologist named Royal D. Suttkus arrived in 1950. Suttkus set out to change that, on the principle that you cannot understand the aquatic world unless you can see it and study it, and you are unlikely to protect what you cannot understand. Suttkus was a relentless field biologist, wading hip- and neck-deep in the waters of the region over the next 50 years, pulling one end of a 10-foot-long seine net while a graduate student at the other end tried to keep up.

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(Photo: Richard Conniff)

Other fish biologists often roam from place to place, collecting a little here, a little there, always looking for something new and interesting. Instead, Suttkus, who died in 2009, typically collected from the same sites on the same rivers year after year for decades, often conducting mandatory environmental impact surveys for paper mills and other polluters. The customary practice for fish biologists is to lay out the catch at the end of a run, choose a few fish worth preserving, and set the rest free. The rule for Suttkus, on the contrary, was that everything in his net ended up in a jar.

Other biologists frowned. Overcollecting at the same spot once a year wasn’t likely to damage the population; it just looked bad. One of them wrote a song dubbing Suttkus “the collecting machine.” It included this horror movie–worthy verse:

So you best fetch up your old hound-dog and all your goldfish too

Hide your pet iguana and your talkin’ cockatoo

And keep a close eye on your children, don’t let them roam too far

Cause the Collecting Machine is on the loose, and he’ll stuff ‘em in a jar.

And yet, here’s the thing: Those systematic, take-all methods have turned out to be the enduring strength of the Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection.

They make it “a window into the past,” without the distortions that tend to creep onto the shelves of more selective museums, says Bernie Kuhajda, an aquatic conservation biologist at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. Most fish researchers, “if they’re going to take only 10 fish, are going to take the larger ones,” he says, “so they can count scales” and the spiny rays in the fins, the traits that enable them to identify species correctly. “With Suttkus taking everything, you know what the actual age structure was at that time and place”—for example, whether it included all the age groups for a healthy population—“which is useful.”

Useful how? That’s a question college administrators now often ask, with an eye to more glamorous ways of allocating budgets. The University of Louisiana Monroe recently tried to evict its fish collection on two days’ notice because administrators were keen to build a better sports facility. A consortium of institutions, including Tulane, came to the rescue, adding another 11 rows of specimens to one of the Suttkus bunkers (pending final distribution).

The collection is useful because it’s a window into a particularly interesting past. Suttkus collected when rivers were still being dammed for hydropower and navigation. Pollution was largely unregulated. After a chemical factory opened in northern Alabama, says John Caruso, a Suttkus graduate student in the 1970s, “I remember pulling sunfish out of the river, and blood just came pouring out of their gills.”

Now biologists studying how rampant 20th-century development changed the Southeast turn to the Suttkus collection to find out. They turn to it virtually, as well as in person, because the National Science Foundation helped make the collection one of the first natural history museums to put the data and location for every specimen online.

One such study led by researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey looked at the Alabama River, where regular visits by Suttkus recorded a time-lapse of loss, with the number of species dwindling by almost two-thirds from the 1960s to the end of the century. During that period, dams completed the transformation of the old free-flowing river into a system of 16 reservoirs. Agricultural runoff, urbanization, and wastewater from sewage plants and surface mines also did their damage.

Among the victims were the Alabama sturgeon, now blocked by dams from its ancient migratory routes, and the Gulf sturgeon, now largely vanished from the river.

The Alabama shad, frecklebelly madtom, and crystal darter are also mostly gone, and minnows like the Mobile chub and the fluvial shiner no longer appear at sites where Suttkus commonly caught them. By 2005, 10 of the river’s fish species were listed by the federal government as threatened or endangered, with experts deeming at least 28 more species vulnerable, or worse. Without corrective action, the study warned, “fish species extinctions appear inevitable.”

The real horror story, it turns out, isn’t the Suttkus collection, but what it reveals about human destruction of the world around us.

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Richard Conniff is an award-winning science writer. His books include The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (W. W. Norton, 2011). He is now at work on a book about the fight against epidemic disease. Please consider becoming a supporter of this work. Click here to learn how.

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A monkfish, caught in deep water of Hawaii (Photo: Richard Conniff)

First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All The Authors

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(Illustration: Wellcome Library, London.)

I didn’t plan this piece to coincide with the Patreon campaign I started last week. But it suggests what’s happened for writers like me on the book publishing side of our lives. The magazine and newspaper sides have also suffered at the hands of Internet giants like Google and Facebook.  For me, 2017 was the year these changes really hit home.  In the past, magazines sent me wherever I needed to go to get the story, from Easter Island to Bhutan.  But suddenly three major magazines hiring me to write feature stories asked me, in so many words, to phone it in. One wanted me to write a story “with lots of tick-tock” about tropical deforestation. But the editor would only give me expense money to travel to Washington, D.C. (On reading the manuscript, he complained that he wasn’t “smelling the rainforest.”) Another magazine where I have been a contributor for 34 years asked me to write a travel feature but wouldn’t send me to the destination because a different magazine had sent me there on an unrelated feature the year before. (The editor made it that month’s cover story.) Finally, a magazine (contributor for almost 30 years) didn’t actually tell me I couldn’t travel.  But they asked me for an expense estimate for a proposed day trip to New Jersey from my home in Connecticut. (I went. Yay!)

I don’t mean to complain. I have been extremely lucky to have a career and support my family as a writer. I want to continue doing this work, though, and I want younger writers to have the same opportunities. That is becoming harder and harder for us all. 

by Richard Conniff/ The New York Times

One day not long ago in a college class I was teaching, some of my students couldn’t find the page I was talking about in the reading. And it dawned on me: There was only one required text in the class, an anthology of writing about the natural world called “American Earth.” And they were reading pirated copies — versions downloaded free from some dubious “provider” on the internet.

It was a college well known for its progressive politics. So maybe my students thought they were striking a blow against the dark hegemony of greedy textbook publishers. Or maybe, tuition and textbook costs having soared into the stratosphere, they just wanted to save 27 bucks, the discounted online price. As gently as possible, I informed them that they were in fact stealing from the author (or, in this case, editor) who happened to be the climate activist Bill McKibben, one of their environmental heroes. Also, Library of America, which published the book, is legally a nonprofit. (Many other publishing companies now achieve that status merely de facto.)

I’m afraid it was a teaching moment fail. My students looked baffled, but unpersuaded, caught up in the convenient rationalization that authors subsist on inspiration and the purest love of subject matter. I tried to explain: Authors need to eat, too, and we get by (or not quite, these days), by showing up at our writing places at a designated time day after day and staying there till we have fretted out our quota of words, to be sent off, after a time, to a publisher, in the hope that, two or three years down the road, a few pennies may come trickling back under the ludicrously grandiose name of “royalties.”

These days, though, what comes trickling back are mostly email alerts about websites in brazen violation of copyright law, offering free downloads of books the authors have spent years of their lives producing. At the moment, I have about 400 such offers of my own books in an email folder labeled “Thieves.” Most of them, it turns out, are phishing scams, asking gullible users to hand over credit card information before proceeding to their ostensibly free copy.

The real theft happens elsewhere, though, according to publishing industry experts who track the rapid growth of book piracy. It happens in a bewildering assortment of venues, including “piracy libraries” that turn up in Google searches, illegal PDFs on eBay, counterfeit physical copies on Amazon, private file-sharing groups on Facebook, and person-to-person sharing via thumb drive.

“There are people out there that just want everything to be free,” says Mary Rasenberger, the executive director of the Authors Guild (where I am a member), “and it’s like a religion to them.” Some piracy sites, she says, even advise users how to buy a digital copy of a book, strip out the digital rights management (D.R.M.) intended to protect the author’s rights, upload the book to a file-sharing site, and then return the book for a refund, “so they don’t even have to pay for the original.” Some sites are so insanely bent on copyright piracy that they offer their followers wedding vows, in which the couple solemnly commits to support the copying culture. “They don’t understand that writers need to get paid, and publishers are not going to publish books if they can’t make money on them.”

Since 2009, when eBooks and book piracy became a phenomenon, income for full- and part-time authors has declined 42 percent, according to Rasenberger, with the median income from writing now so low — just $6,080 a year — that poverty level looks like the mountaintop. By contrast, a 2017 Nielsen survey found that people who admitted to having read a pirated book in the previous six months tend to be middle class, educated, female as well as male, between the ages of 30 and 44 — and with an income of $60,000 to 90,000 a year. Weirdly, many of them, like the students in my class, are fans of the authors they pirate, as if circulating copies of someone’s lifetime of work without payment is somehow high praise. Book series are especially vulnerable, because hoarding behavior leads some book pirates to think it’s cool to put the whole shebang together and make it available free.

The Nielsen survey, commissioned by Digimarc, a provider of copyright and trademark protection services, estimated that book publishers lose $315 million in sales per year to piracy. Taking the typical starting percentage for royalties, that works out to $31.5 million authors no longer earn. And that translates into many authors giving up and going into public relations, or worse.

What’s maddening is how little we can do about any of this, or rather, how much we can do, with so little effect. American law allows the legal copyright holder to send a formal takedown notice to the culprit site, which generally ignores it, especially if operating outside the United States. Even in the unlikely event that the culprit complies, the book simply moves to a new URL, or web address, requiring the author or publisher to send another takedown notice, and another, and another. Whack-a-mole can become a full-time unpaid job.

It’s also maddening because the platforms that enable this behavior, including Google (2018 profits: $31 billion), Amazon ($10 billion), Facebook ($22 billion), and eBay ($2 billion), are far better equipped financially and technologically to block piracy before it even starts. But the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act specifically exempts them from liability for the illegal and antisocial behaviors they communicate. Recent public outrage has made these platforms fearful of regulation and thus more attentive to the business of monitoring and policing content. But Google’s business model remains largely “indifferent to whether consumers arrive at legitimate or pirated goods,” according to a recent statement by the Association of American Publishers. Likewise, Amazon enables “widespread counterfeiting, defective products, and fake reviews” which leave authors and publishers at a rapidly deepening loss.

Maybe, though, it’s too narrow to focus on the way our society has discounted its authors. No doubt musicians, and local retailers, and hometown newspapers, and schoolteachers, and factory workers all feel discounted in much the same way. We have surrendered our lives to technocrat billionaires who once upon a time set out to do no harm and have instead ended up destroying the world as we knew it. Convenience and the lowest possible price, or no price at all, have become our defining values. We have severed ourselves from our communities and from the mutual give-and-take that was once our ordinary daily life. Now we sit alone in our rooms, restlessly scrolling for something free to read.

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Richard Conniff is an award-winning science writer. His books include The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (W. W. Norton, 2011). He is now at work on a book about the fight against epidemic disease. Please consider becoming a supporter of this work. Click here to learn how.

The Single Best Thing You Can Do to Protect Your Child

[image error]by Richard Conniff/Patreon

Lately, I have been thinking about the changes in American health that have taken place in my lifetime, all of them explainable in one word. But before everybody shouts out the word, let’s look at a few of the changes, detailed in an article published in 2007 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, by Sandra W. Roush & Trudy V. Murphy, both then at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

Incidence of measles down 99.9%, deaths down 100%. (Peak year was 1958, when 763,094 cases occurred, my own among them.)
Mumps cases down 95.9 %. (Peak was 212,932 in 1964.) Deaths down 100% from peak of 39.
Polio cases and deaths both down by 100%. (Peak year was 1952, at 21,269 cases and 3145 deaths.)
Rubella cases down 99.9%, deaths down 100%. Peak year was 1964 with 488,796 cases, but deaths were higher in 1968 at 24.
Smallpox down 100%.  Peak of 110,672 cases occurred in 1920, and 2510 deaths in 1902. (OK, I wasn’t alive then. But the last major U.S. outbreak occurred in 1949, two years before I was born. And the disease was still causing 10-15 million cases a year worldwide as late as 1967. Smallpox became the first disease successfully eradicated in 1980.)
Hepatitis A cases and deaths both down 87%.  Peak was 254,518 and 298 deaths in 1971.
Hepatitis B cases and deaths both down 80%.  Peak of 74,361 cases and 267 deaths occurred in 1985.
HIB (invasive Haemophilus influenzae Type B) peak unknown, down 100% from an average of 20,000 cases and 995 deaths a year, mostly in small children.
Chickenpox cases down 85% and deaths down 81%.  The peak of 5.4 million cases occurred in 1988 and the peak of 138 deaths was in 1973.  That works out today to 3.5 million cases and 86 deaths avoided every year.

O.K.  You can say the word now: Every one of these extraordinary success stories was the result of a VACCINE, and each of these vaccines has saved the lives and well-being of people you and I know and love.

Think about that next time you hear someone expressing vague doubts about getting their kids vaccinated.  A recent survey of anti-vax parents found that 27% of them would rather have a child die than be born with autism.

Independent studies have repeatedly demonstrated that the risk of getting autism from a vaccine is entirely imaginary.

But the choice of death is real.

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Richard Conniff is now at work on a book about the fight against epidemic disease. Please consider becoming a supporter of this work. Click here to learn how.

 

 

How We Lived (and Died) Before Vaccines

[image error]By Richard Conniff/National Geographic

Like most American children of my generation, I lined up with my classmates in the mid-1950s to get the first vaccine for polio, then causing 15,000 cases of paralysis and 1,900 deaths a year in the United States, mostly in children.  Likewise, we lined up for the vaccine against smallpox, then still causing millions of deaths worldwide each year. I’ve continued to update my immunizations ever since, including a few exotic ones for National Geographic assignments abroad, among them vaccines for anthrax, rabies, Japanese encephalitis, typhoid, and yellow fever.

[image error]Having grown up in the shadow of polio (my uncle was on crutches for life), and having made first-hand acquaintance with measles (I was part of the pre-vaccine peak year of 1958, along with 763,093 other young Americans), I’ve happily rolled up my sleeve for any vaccine recommended by my doctor and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with extra input for foreign travel from the CDC Yellow Book.  I am deeply grateful to vaccines for keeping me alive and well, and also for  helping me return from field trips as healthy as when I set out.

One result of this willingness, however, is that I suffer, like most people, from a notorious Catch-22: Vaccines save us from diseases, then cause us to forget the diseases from which they save us. Once the threat appears to be gone from our lives, we become lax. Or worse, we make up other things to worry about. Thus, some well-meaning parents avoid vaccinating their children out of misplaced fear that the MMR vaccine (for measles, mumps, and rubella) causes autism. Never mind that independent scientific studies have repeatedly demonstrated that no such link exists, most recently in a study of 657,000 children in Denmark.  This irrational fear is why the United States has experienced almost 1200 cases of measles so far this year, almost two decades after public health officials proudly declared it eliminated. About 124 of these measles victims, mostly children, have been hospitalized, 64 of them with complications including pneumonia and encephalitis, which can cause brain damage or death.

And yet autism can still seem like a bigger threat than measles, if only because it appears in countless television shows and movies such as “Rain Man” and “Gilbert Grape.” Meanwhile, you’re more likely to catch measles at a movie theater than see the disease featured onscreen.

And so, parents forget, or more likely never knew, that 33 of every 100,000 people who experienced actual measles ended up with mental retardation or central nervous system damage. (That’s in addition to those who died.)

They forget that an outbreak of rubella in the early 1960s resulted in 20,000 children being born with brain damage, including autism, and other congenital abnormalities.

They forget that, before it was eradicated by a vaccine in the 1970s, smallpox left many survivors blind, maimed, or brain damaged.

One remedy for this Catch-22 is to make a conscious effort to remind ourselves about the world before vaccines. Tdap, for instance, is a recurring but somewhat puzzling item on my immunization card. (Children get a slightly different formulation called DTaP.) The “T” is for tetanus and the “P” for pertussis, or whooping cough. But I was totally ignorant about the “D” for diphtheria.

Even doctors now tend to know the disease only from textbooks.  But before the development of an effective vaccine in the early 1940s, diphtheria was among the great terrors of childhood.  It killed more than 3,000 young Americans one year in the mid-1930s, when my parents were in high school. It is once again killing children today in Venezuela, Yemen, and other areas where social and political upheaval have disrupted the delivery of vaccine.

Among other symptoms, diphtheria produces a gray membrane of dead cells in the throat that can block a child’s windpipe, causing death by suffocation. Hence one of its nicknames: “the Strangling Angel.”

New England, where I live, suffered one of the deadliest epidemics in the 1730s and ‘40s—“the most horrible epidemic of a children’s disease in American history” according to one historian. It was made more horrible by the commonplace idea that it had been sent by God to punish sinful behavior. Or as a 1738 verse warned misbehaving boys and girls:

So soon as Death, hath stopt your Breath,

Your souls must then appear

Before the Judge of quick and dead,

The Sentence there to hear.

 

From thence away, without delay,

You must be Doom’d unto,

A dreadful Hell, where Devils dwell,

In Everlasting woe

Diphtheria was terrifying not only because it could kill with stunning speed, but also because it could hopscotch so easily from child to child by way of the coughing and sneezing it induced. Some families may also have unwittingly hastened the dying by having children line up to kiss a dying brother or sister goodbye. The results are still evident in our local burial grounds.

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Grave of Ephraim, Hannah, and Jacob Mores (Photo: Heather Lennon)

In Lancaster, Massachusetts, for instance, mottled slate tombstones lean together, like family, over the graves of six children of Joseph and Rebeckah Moor.  Ephraim, age seven, died first on June 15, 1740, followed by Hannah, three, on June 17, and Jacob, eleven, a day later.  All three were buried in one grave.  Then Cathorign, two, died on June 23, and Rebeckah, six, on June 26. The dying—five children gone in just 11 days—paused long enough to leave the poor parents some thin thread of hope.  But two months later, on August 22, Lucy, 14, also died.  A few years after that, diphtheria or some other epidemic disease came back to collect the three remaining Moor children.

Joseph and Rebeckah were by no means alone in their tragedy. Many other parents also lost all their children to diphtheria, in one case 12 or 13 in a single family.  (In their stunned grief, the parents could not put an exact number on their loss.) On a single street less than a half-mile long in Newburyport, Massachusetts, 81 children died over three months in 1735. Haverhill, Massachusetts, lost half its children, with 23 families left childless.

Parents now rarely know such grief because our children are protected by vaccines, including Tdap/DTaP. It’s why we feel secure in having smaller families. It’s also a major reason life expectancy of newborns in the United States increased from 47.3 years at the start of the twentieth century to 76.8 at the end.

The level of this protection has continued to increase year by year in our own lifetimes, though the language of recommended immunizations tends to obscure these improvements. No parent has ever lost sleep, for instance, about something called “Hib,” short for “Haemophilus Influenzae Type B,” or about another pathogen called “rotavirus.”

But when he was starting out in the 1970s, “Hib dominated my residency,” says vaccinologist Paul Offit, M.D.  It’s a major cause of childhood meningitis, pneumonia, and sepsis, a systemic blood infection. Children with this bacterial infection came into the emergency room so routinely that the hospital maintained a special darkened room with a fish tank to calm the child while an anesthesiologist rushed down and a surgical team prepared to operate. The danger, if the child became excited, was that the swollen, inflamed epiglottis would begin to spasm, blocking the windpipe.

“I had a lot of really painful conversations with parents when kids had meningitis or sepsis,” Offit recalls. “Often kids would have permanent hearing loss, intellectual deficits, motor deficits.”

Stanley Plotkin, M.D., also a vaccinologist, started out in the 1950s. Sixty years later he still recalls helplessly watching a child with a Hib disease “die under my hands.” A tracheostomy—a tube inserted through an incision in the windpipe below the blockage—would sometimes help. “But at the time I was an intern and didn’t know how to do a tracheostomy.”

Doctors (and parents) starting out today need not live with that particular memory. An effective vaccine introduced in the 1990s has reduced incidence of Hib disease in the United States by 99 percent, down from 20,000 to as low as 29 cases a year.

Rotavirus is an equally unfamiliar term for most parents. But it used to infect almost every child before the age of five and cause about 40 percent of severe infant diarrhea cases. In the absence of medical treatment, dehydration led to between 20 and 60 deaths a year in the United States and 500,000 deaths worldwide.

A vaccine for rotavirus became available in the 1990s, and in 2006 the CDC approved a safer version developed by Offit and Plotkin, together with the late H. Fred Clark, a microbiologist and social activist. Rotavirus-induced diarrhea has become rare as a result, preventing 40,000 to 50,000 hospitalizations of U.S. infants and toddlers every year. But in a California rotavirus outbreak in 2017, a child who had not been vaccinated still died of the disease, two months before its second birthday.

It is of course true that vaccinations entail risks, like everything else in the world. They range from the commonplace, like soreness at the site of injection, to the vanishingly rare, like a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction.  Medical researchers are typically the first to identify and characterize these risks.  A CDC study in 2016, for instance, looked at 25.2 million vaccinations over a three-year period and found 33 cases of severe vaccine-triggered allergic reaction—1.3 cases per million vaccine doses.

How should parents think about a risk like that? Being a good parent isn’t about protecting children from every medical risk. Instead, it’s about making a judgment, with advice from a doctor, about relative risk. Ask yourself: Which is worse for my child—the remote possibility of an allergic reaction, or the risk of Hib disease, rotavirus, pneumonia, or even chickenpox—which, despite its trivial reputation, killed 100 to 150 American children a year before the 1995 approval of an effective vaccine? Which is worse, a fictitious link between the MMR vaccine and autism—now dismissed as fraudulent even by the journal in which it was originally published—or exposing your child every day to the possibility of measles, with all its potentially deadly or debilitating consequences?

For my wife and I, the decision was always to get our children their recommended vaccinations.  We still worried, as all parents do. But they stayed healthy, and we slept better, knowing we had put so many medical terrors of the past safely behind us.

END

Richard Conniff is at work on a book about the fight against epidemic disease.

Taxpayer-Funded Conservation on Private Land Should Not Be Secret

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Coyote Ridge, part of the Santa Clara Valley Habitat Conservation Plan in Northern California. (Photo: Bjorn Erickson/USFWS)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

A few years ago, an environmental lawyer named Jessica Owley set out to learn how well it works when the federal government allows development in the habitat of an endangered species. Under the terms of these deals, introduced in the 1980s to mollify opponents of the Endangered Species Act, the developers provide mitigation, typically with a conservation easement on some other parcel of private land.

Owley focused on four California examples, out of the almost 700 so-called Habitat Conservation Plans (or HCPs) that now exist nationwide. She had a long list of questions, from “Where are the protected parcels?” to “How do endangered species fare in the face of these deals?”

“I ended up being stopped at the first question,” says Owley, now a professor at the University of Miami School of Law. “It wasn’t just that I couldn’t find the HCP sites, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t know and couldn’t find them.” In one case, an HCP to protect the Mission blue butterfly outside San Francisco, nobody had even bothered to record the easement in municipal land records. Owley came away thinking that a lack of transparency is standard for conservation practices on private land — even when these practices are paid for by taxpayers and meant to serve a significant public interest.

Conservation on private land costs the public hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Just from 2008 to 2012, for instance, landowners donating conservation easements claimed tax deductions that cost the U.S. Treasury

$1.6 billion. (Land is typically conserved either by outright purchase or, less expensively, by easement — a deeded agreement by the owner to protect a property in perpetuity.) That’s in addition to a host of other costs — for instance, local property tax reductions for managing land in a particular way, or federal programs that pay farmers for conservation initiatives on their land.

These programs provide enormous public benefits, with easements alone protecting an estimated 40 million acres of natural habitat in this country. And yet the public in many cases has no way to know how its money is being spent, or whether it’s a good deal for either the environment or the taxpayer. Over the past 10 years, the National Conservation Easement Database has made a concerted effort to fix that. It’s managed by the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a nonprofit group working on open space issues with communities nationwide, and Ducks Unlimited, a nonprofit focused on wetland protection. The database currently maps and provides information on 158,422 conservation easements, encompassing about 27 million acres of land nationwide.

But that represents only about two-thirds of the estimated 40-million-acre easement total. (TPL also maintains the Conservation Almanac, mapping the results of federal, state, and local funding for land conservation over the past two decades. The U.S. Geological Survey maintains a national inventory of public protected areas, which covers just 60 percent of state, regional, and local holdings.) Meanwhile, tens of millions of acres of protected land, representing hundreds of millions of dollars in conservation spending, are either missing or with incomplete data. The degree of transparency also varies wildly depending on whether you happen to be looking at the local, state, federal, or international levels.

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The boundary of land under conservation easement in Marion County, Oregon. (Photo: Tracy Robillard/NRCS)

In 2017, the U.S. Office of the Inspector General lambasted the Interior Department for “putting grant funds at risk of waste and abuse” by failing to track how much it spends to purchase land for conservation, how much land it has purchased, and whether grantees are putting that land to its intended use. Of 561 grants for land purchases in fiscal 2014 and 2015, at a cost of $574 million, the Inspector General found that only 56 percent of the grantees had even bothered to file the follow-up reports required by the department.

Private protected areas may be even more important for conservation efforts internationally–but also less transparent. In Guatemala, for instance, almost 20 percent of the total protected area is in private ownership. The International Union for Conservation of Nature currently has a working group looking at these protected areas, and Michael Mascia of Conservation International says his group has “compiled hundreds of datasets from dozens of countries” with the aim of building a comprehensive Conservation Atlas combining private and public areas.

But it’s still a work in progress. A study published last week in the journal Biological Conservation found that scientific studies tend to pay attention to private protected areas in just four countries — the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Half the time, these studies also contain no evidence that the authors engaged with any of the stakeholders.

The lack of transparency — and attention — can leave investments on private land vulnerable to abuse. In one recent case, Wyoming’s Jackson Hole Land Trust discovered a house being built in the middle of a conservation easement intended to protect the “Path of the Pronghorn” migration route. The builder, coal industry billionaire Chris Cline, agreed to donate another easement nearby. But the incident left some conservationists seething.

Incomplete and rudimentary data about publicly funded conservation initiatives on private land also makes them substantially less beneficial than they could be, according to the University of Wisconsin’s Adena Rissman. Conservation planners and researchers working in a landscape must now often proceed more or less blindly. But if they had proper geographic information system (GIS) data, including exact locations and boundaries of easements and other conservation initiatives on private property, they could, for instance, identify critical gaps in a wildlife corridor, develop better plans to manage forests more sustainably, and target new conservation initiatives more precisely to improve water quality, prevent soil erosion, or provide other practical benefits, including recreation.

In some cases, having detailed knowledge about conservation initiatives on private land can be a matter of public health, says Craig Cox, vice president for agriculture and natural resources at the Environmental Working Group. For instance, agricultural runoff commonly pollutes downstream drinking water with excess nitrate levels. In Iowa, the Des Moines Water Works sued unsuccessfully to make upstream agricultural drainage districts share in the cost of an $80 million technological fix to reduce nitrates in drinking water to safe levels. But it could be more effective to do the job at the source, says Cox, with conservation practices like maintaining buffer strips along streams, planting off-season cover crops to reduce runoff from fields, and intercepting drainage water before it gets into streams. And taxpayers already pay farmers to employ many of these practices—but detailed information about these transactions is generally unavInailable. In the 2018 Farm Bill, Congress pushed the Department of Agriculture to take steps toward transparency about conservation initiatives. But it didn’t require development of tools to make that information available to researchers.

“If we knew more specifically where these practices are being installed,” says Cox, “it would create the opportunity to target the most effective practices in the areas where they are most needed. There are dozens of drinking water utilities in the same watershed that are also in trouble with nitrates,” says Cox. “Most of these are smaller community water systems, and it’s really the rural people that are as much at risk themselves.”

Transparency advocates acknowledge that there may be legitimate arguments for protecting information about some government-funded conservation sites — for instance, to avoid exposing rare species or cultural artifacts to unscrupulous collectors. Landowners also worry about loss of privacy, trespassing, and vandalism. Government information systems are often “not well designed,” says Amos Eno of the Land Conservation Assistance Network, a private landowner organization, “and there’s no safeguard for information divulged.” The purpose of conservation easements, he adds, isn’t to provide data “for scientists or people pushing scientific agendas” but “to help land owners and their stewardship.” Making information about their properties public could just leave them vulnerable to an endangered species listing, he suggests, citing the recent fight following discovery of the endangered bone cave harvestman, a Daddy Longlegs relative, on a ranch near Austin, Texas.

That discovery resulted, however, from a highway construction project, not a leaky public information system. “The way to deal with legitimate privacy concerns,” says Craig Cox, “isn’t to eliminate all possibility of accessing any data at all.” A better model for handling information, he suggests, is the U.S. Census Bureau, which has demonstrated the potential to grant access to sensitive data “under different restrictions, based on the type of data you’re looking for, how it’s going to be used, and by whom. There’s no reason that kind of approach shouldn’t also be used with these conservation investments.”

“We’ve made tremendous progress in terms of transparency,” says Andrew du Moulin of the Trust for Public Land, and so far it has not caused any significant issues for landowners. But when skittish land trusts and others request secrecy, the databases maintained by TPL comply, on the theory that it’s better to have the easements catalogued in one place, even if not publicly displayed.

More often, he adds, the problem in trying to track down publicly funded conservation easements is simply a lack of basic record keeping. “Budgets get in the way, capacity gets in the way, and mapping isn’t first and foremost in the minds of many agencies.” In Colorado, for instance, auditors examined a conservation easement program that has protected more than 1.7 million acres in the state since 2000, at a cost of almost $1 billion in tax credits. The audit found that no state agency keeps track of the types of land being preserved, and suggested that the tax break was often a bigger driver of such deals than any benefit to wildlife or the environment.

The same problem occurs with open space purchases funded by public bond issues. When TPL phones jurisdictions afterward to ask, “What have you bought with the money,” says du Moulin, the common response is “We’ll get back to you.” But “when the money for open space runs out, you want to go back to the taxpayers and get more money. If you can’t tell them what you did with the money before, how can you expect them to approve giving you money again?”

TPL aims instead not just to map easements and open space acquisitions but to analyze the economic impact — typically at least a $4 return for every $1 invested in open space, and in some cases as much as $11, according to du Moulin. It also analyzes data in terms of state legislative districts. “If you have a legislator who’s opposed to a conservation program, and you can show that people in that district have had 2,000 acres protected, or a popular farm, it can be very persuasive,” he says.

The bottom line is that keeping conservation deals secret is not just unwise, but also increasingly unlikely. Satellites can spot changes in a landholding from one week to the next, drones can fly anywhere, and databases keep the results in public view. “We live in an era when people expect transparency,” says Ernest Cook, also of the Trust for Public Land. “There’s a great deal of pressure on the government and the private sector to release information, and if they don’t release it, somebody hacks it and releases it anyway.” The smart response, when it comes to public conservation initiatives on private land, is to make sure the results look good not just for the landowner, but for the environment and the taxpayer, too.

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Richard Conniff is an award-winning science writer. His books include The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (W. W. Norton, 2011).

Ear Wiggles Open Up New Worlds In Bat Echolocation

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Greater Horseshoe Bat Ears (Photo: Mittu Pannala)

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

One big problem with putting autonomous drones to work delivering packages—or flying search-and-rescue missions—is that the sky is complicated and unpredictable. Trees, utility wires and spiraling footballs can turn up almost anywhere in the flight path. A new strategy for dodging these obstacles could come from an unexpected source: the way bats wiggle their ears.

The idea first occurred to Rolf Mueller, a Virginia Tech mechanical engineering professor, a few years ago while looking at bat photographs. He noticed that the ears of some species often looked blurry, because the animals were continually making rapid ear movements. But why?

Mueller studies bat behaviors, including their adaptations to the Doppler effect or Doppler shift. Both terms refer to the way sound waves from a fast-moving object such as a train or an ambulance get compressed—and therefore higher in pitch—as the object approaches a listener. Then the sound waves lengthen out again and become lower in pitch as the vehicle moves away. Even when the train or ambulance is out of sight, a person can tell roughly where it is at any moment from these changes in sound. Bats use the Doppler shift to locate objects in much the same way, but far more precisely.

Scientists have known since the 1930s that insect-hunting bats produce bursts of sound as they bob and weave through the night. They use the reflected sound waves to identify obstacles and target prey, an ability called echolocation or biosonar. Research in the 1960s showed that bats also interpret Doppler shifts, in sounds bounced off of flying insects, to zero in on a meal with high precision—even while maneuvering at breakneck speed through dense vegetation. More impressively, they can do this even though their flight movements produce their own potentially confusing Doppler shifts in the sound waves echoing back at them. The bats don’t get disoriented, because they adjust the frequency of the calls they produce to compensate for this “bad” Doppler shift.

“Since these groundbreaking discoveries, the general belief in the scientific community has been that the role of Doppler shifts in the biosonar systems of these animals has been completely understood,” Mueller says. But looking at photographs of blurry-eared bats, he wondered how rapid ear movements might fit into the complicated picture. He and co-author Xiaoyan Yin, a doctoral student in his lab, pursued two methods of testing whether the ears might actually move fast enough to produce Doppler shifts of their own—and what that might mean for echolocation. Their results were published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

First, working with trained horseshoe and leaf-nosed bats, the researchers painted visible spots at 60 points on each ear (concentrated on the more flexible outer ear). Then, using a synchronized array of high-speed cameras and ultrasonic microphones, they filmed each bat hanging from a perch as a novel object moved past. This demonstrated that the ear movements are fast enough to produce Doppler shifts, that these shifts are within a range bats can easily perceive, and that the shifts are timed to incoming echoes. Moreover, each ear moves independently and various parts of each deform at different times—“so at every point of time the bat is listening with a different ear shape,” Mueller says. He and Yin interpret this to mean that the bats are producing “good” Doppler shifts to alter the incoming sounds, thereby gaining more accurate information about the direction a biosonar target is traveling. To further test the idea the two researchers developed an artificial horseshoe bat ear out of silicon, with devices called “fast actuators” that move different parts of the ear in the same way bats do. These movements also added Doppler shifts to incoming sounds.

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Bat hat.

So what does any of this have to do with drones? Even the state-of-the-art versions being developed are “all pretty much clunkers when you compare them to bats,” Mueller says, especially if you “want the drone to be able to go into dense vegetation” (to do forestry work or search-and-rescue missions, for example). He and Yin have already designed what he calls a “bat hat” for a drone—a device that emits ultrasonic signals and has two moveable “ears” to record the echolocation. So far they have experimented with moving the device through a forest only by hand or on a zipline. “My career dream,” Mueller says, “is to have a drone that has the same agility in a natural environment as a bat.”

“I think that’s very smart,” says Melville J. Wohlgemuth, a neurobiologist at Johns Hopkins University, whose 2016 study of big brown bats was the first to show that bats use head waggles and ear movements as parts of their hunting process. “Artificial sonar and radar systems, and these autonomous systems for self-driving vehicles, could definitely be refined through some of the things we are learning from the biological world.” Research has shown, he adds, that “when we sense the world, we do it very actively. We’re constantly moving our eyes, and it’s the movement that enables us to take in information at high resolution.” Much the same thing now appears to be true for the way bats use their ears. Wohlgemuth, who was not involved in the new study, praises its findings as “highly plausible,” in part because of Mueller’s dual background in biological systems and engineering. “He walks that line very well,” Wohlgemuth says.

“When I first heard about this paper, I thought, ‘I don’t know,’” says Roman Kuc, a Yale electrical engineering professor whose work also walks that line, and who was not involved in the new research. “What they came up with—ear movements causing Doppler shifts—isn’t something I would have expected. Why is that believable?” Sensory mechanisms in the biological world can often seem counterintuitive, he suggests. “Engineers will tell you they want to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio. Bats do the opposite. They move theirs ears to the sides, which means sounds from the front are reduced. They reduce the signal-to-noise, but gain in the ability to echolocate.” Rapid ear movements now appear to be another such counterintuitive technique: the constant signal a bat emits is good for detecting the presence of an insect, Kuc says, but not necessarily for precisely locating it. But adding the Doppler shift as the sound returns to the ear makes it possible for the bat to track the insect’s location with pinpoint accuracy as it moves past, and even as it attempts to evade the bat. “This article,” Kuc says, “opens up a rather interesting complexity in the processing of echoes.”

One possible result: Doppler-shifting drones that can dodge airborne hazards to arrive safely at every doorstep.

Hello, China? You’re Wrecking The Ozone Layer (All Over Again)

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Barrels containing CFC-11 at a factory in Dacheng, Hebei Province. (Photo: The Environmental Investigation Agency)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

When the Montreal Protocol marked its 30th anniversary in 2017, it seemed like an unalloyed triumph for environmental common sense. By banding together to address a planetary emergency, the 197 signatory nations had officially ended production and use of chemicals responsible for depleting the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, an essential shield against the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. It was a “milestone for all people and our planet,” according to António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations. “The Earth’s Ozone Hole is Shrinking,” one celebratory headline announced. “Without the Ozone Treaty,” another advised, “You’d Get Sunburned in 5 Minutes.”

But an unexpected recent spike in emissions of CFCs (or chlorofluorocarbons), the major ozone-depleting chemicals, now suggests it’s far too soon to close the file on ozone depletion. A new study published this week in Nature pins down the source of 7,000 metric tons a year of new CFC-11 (trichlorofluoromethane) emissions to the provinces of Shandong and Hebei on the northeastern coast of China. That’s an area half the size of Texas, with a population of about 170 million people, including the city of Beijing. The bulk of these emissions are believed to come from small factories that are using CFC-11, in violation of the Montreal Protocol, to manufacture foam insulation used in refrigerators and buildings.

The new study accounts for roughly half the emissions reported last year in Nature, by some of the same authors. Based on data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the previous study reported new emissions of about 13,000 tons a year of CFC-11 from somewhere in eastern Asia starting in 2012.That was two years after the 2010 date for ending all CFC production under the terms of the Montreal Protocol. It was “the first time that emissions of one of the most abundant CFCs have increased for a sustained period since production controls took effect in the late 1980s,” according to that study.

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An atmospheric monitoring station.

Protecting the ozone layer has thus come to look increasingly like an endless search for new and unsuspected threats, as well as for old threats unexpectedly revived. It’s a search conducted primarily by a patchy network of monitoring stations managed in a multinational collaboration, on islands and mountaintop sites around the world. These stations measure trace concentrations of about 50 ozone-depleting chemicals and greenhouse gases in parts per trillion in the upper atmosphere. The protocol of sampling many times each day for decades on end is difficult and expensive, requiring a long-term commitment from the country where each observatory is located. Hence only 15 observatories now participate in the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), leaving huge geographic gaps in coverage.

The new study is based on reports from monitoring stations in Gosan, South Korea and Hateruma, in southern Japan. Because of the gaps in the AGAGE network, however, it’s unlikely that scientists will ever be able to detect the source of the rest of the reported 13,000 tons of new emissions. And because the monitoring stations measure only emissions, not production, that 7,000-ton figure probably represents only a small fraction of the total CFC-11 production even within Shandong and Hebei provinces, according to Sunyoung Park, one of the study’s authors and an atmospheric chemist at South Korea’s Kyungpook National University. The remainder is now banked in the foam insulation or other products it was used to manufacture and will slowly leak out over the course of the century.

These reported violations of the Montreal Protocol come at an especially perilous moment. The so-called Kigali Amendment to the protocol went into effect in January.It begins an 80 percent phasedown by midcentury in the production and use of HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), the chemicals that replaced CFCs in air conditioning, refrigeration, and foam insulation starting in the 1990s.HFCs are much less harmful than CFCs for the ozone layer. But they have turned out to be thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a cause of global warming, with the potential to add half a degree Celsius of warming by the end of the century. The danger now, according to some observers, is that the shift away from HFCs will push some manufacturers to fall back on an illegal trade in CFCs.

The new emissions aren’t large enough so far to be catastrophic. A separate study last year in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the level of ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere over Antarctica continues to decline at a rate of about .8 percent a year. But that could change as the new emissions make their way up into the stratosphere and begin to break down, a process that typically takes about five years, according to Susan Strahan, an atmospheric scientist with the Universities Space Research Association at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The reported emissions, if continued, will slow the rate at which these chemicals decrease and could delay recovery of the ozone layer by a decade or more, until the end of the century, according to Stephen Montzka, of the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an author on both Nature studies. On the other hand, he says, “If they go away quickly, the influence should be small.”

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CFC-11 emissions in northeast China before 2012 (left) and after (right), showing a significant spike (Map: Rigby et al, Nature, 2019)

The Chinese source of the emissions was expected. A report last year by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an independent nonprofit group, found that 18 of 21 manufacturers it contacted in the region around Beijing readily acknowledged use of CFC-11 in discussions with an undercover agent posing as a commercial buyer. That investigation caused the Chinese government to shut down two manufacturing locations. It has also recently promised to strengthen its campaign against illegal production of ozone-depleting chemicals. But it will not be easy. A report in The New York Times

described the culprits as small, mobile plants that often operate in out-of-the-way locations, without commercial registration, or even a name.

The manufacturers appear, moreover, to be adept at circumventing enforcement. When an EIA investigator visited one company, for instance, he noticed a bank of legal HFC canisters and asked what they were for, since the company actually used CFC-11 in its products. “Well, this is for the government when they come by to check on us,” a salesman replied, according to Alexander von Bismarck, EIA’s director. CFCs don’t have any obvious identifying characteristics, like color or smell. Thus as of last November, Chinese enforcement officers had managed to identify only 10 instances of continuing CFC-11 production, despite visiting 1,172 production plants.

“China needs to crack down on the drivers of this program,” said von Bismarck. “Their first argument was that it wasn’t really happening. It was too embarrassing. Now they are saying, ‘This is really hard to enforce,’ and we actually agree, because production is happening in these meth lab-like facilities. The answer is that you really have to deter the demand side. If they say it’s tough to go around the country checking meth labs, then check the people who are using it. Go into any building, or any construction site, and you can test the insulation foam.”

The Chinese government’s own well-intended development programs appear to have inadvertently aggravated the problem. It is aggressively promoting a national system of cold storage and refrigerator trucks, for safer handling of its food supply. It has also added ultra-efficient energy standards to its massive national construction program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Both initiatives require heavy reliance on foam insulation.

“But this should not be treated as an isolated China issue,” said Avipsa Mahapatra, the climate change lead for EIA. “One has to understand the drivers that caused this to happen, or a year later it could happen in India, or Mongolia, or Bangladesh. The key drivers are explosive growth in demand for polyurethane insulation, both rigid board and blown-in foam, combined with the low cost and high effectiveness of CFC-11 as a blowing agent.”

In its report, EIA recommended a series of steps China needs to take to stop black-market manufacturing of ozone-depleting chemicals, including targeted testing of products, with well-publicized seizures, arrests, and prosecutions, and with penalties “severe enough to deter repeat offenses.” EIA also urged China to work with industry and the Multilateral Fund, which helps developing countries comply with their obligations under the Montreal Protocol, “to enable the swift adoption of environmentally friendly blowing agents in the foam industry” to replace both CFCs and HFCs. The likely candidates are chemicals called HFOs (or hydrofluoroolefins), with demand now expected to grow exponentially over the next few years. But HFOs are expensive, with many of the key patents held by major corporations, including Dupont and Honeywell.

For the Montreal Protocol and its parties, the EIA report recommended closing a loophole that allows trade in CFC-11 once it is blended into a polyol, one of the liquid components used to produce blow-in foam insulation at a construction site. The EIA report advocated that all signatory nations also put legal responsibility for use of banned substances on the construction contractors involved. And it urged the Montreal Protocol to undertake the first really comprehensive review of its monitoring and enforcement regime.

A key part of that involves enhancing AGAGE, the global system of atmospheric monitoring sites. The first African observatory recently opened in Rwanda, under the direction of Rwandan scientists. But given the parts-per-trillion measurements required, each observatory can monitor only to a distance of at most 600 miles upwind, “depending on how fast the wind is blowing,” said Ronald Prinn, an atmospheric scientist at MIT, who has led AGAGE since the 1970s. Despite conversations with interested officials in Brazil and India, neither government has yet committed to establishing an observatory. Thus South America and most of Asia remain uncovered.

One country that has paid for a proper monitoring facility is China, which has an observatory in Shangdianzi, about 60 miles northeast of Beijing. But it is 5,000 miles west to the next available AGAGE station, which is in northern Italy, and that gap leaves uncovered many countries where environmental law is minimal to nonexistent.

The Chinese observatory is coincidentally in the heart of the illicit manufacturing area described in the new study from Nature. But Shangdianzi also turns out to be a spectacular instance of how complicated, messy, and even at times self-contradictory the business of saving the earth’s atmosphere from ourselves can sometimes be.

Asked why the data from Shangdianzi wasn’t included in the new study, Montzka, a co-author, paused momentarily, then called the monitoring equipment at Shangdianzi “an excellent instrument” and noted that in 2011 China moved it to “a wonderful new building.” But at that point, reporting of CFC-11 numbers from Shangdianzi stopped.

“HUGE irony,” Montzka said. To meet ambitious new energy standards the new observatory had been thoroughly insulated, he said, “with foam insulation that was clearly blown with CFC-11.” The persistent level of contamination remains so high, eight years later, that measurements from Shangdianzi for that ozone-depleting chemical are currently unusable.

Trophy Fish–And A Chain of Species Destruction at Yellowstone

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Stocked fish are often home-wreckers for native species

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

Recreational fishing is a pastime in which people have come to expect the fish they want in the places they happen to want them. That is, they want their fish stocked and ready to catch, even in places those fish never originally lived. This practice can seem harmless, or even beneficial. But the introduction of one “beneficial” species in Yellowstone National Park suggests how rejiggering the natural world for human convenience can cause ecological disaster for almost everything else.

All it took at Yellowstone Lake, the 136-square-mile centerpiece of the park, was the introduction of lake trout, a fish originally found mainly in the Northeast and Canada and beloved by anglers everywhere. The federal government had transplanted them to smaller lakes within the park in the 1890s, a time when adding fish to remote fishless lakes seemed like a smart way to spread around America’s amazing abundance. But a century later, in 1994, the introduced species turned up in Yellowstone Lake, which was already celebrated for its own native Yellowstone cutthroat trout. Park managers theorized that an angler illegally introduced the fish, either by accident or in the misguided belief that it would improve a big lake with plenty of potential for further sportfishing. One result is that anglers now catch 20,000 lake trout a year there.

But the lake trout went on to gorge on the young of the cutthroat trout, and the population of the native subspecies plummeted. Because there were fewer cutthroat trout around to eat them, large water fleas soon proliferated. The water fleas in turn gobbled up the microscopic plants at the bottom of the food web, causing the lake water to become clearer and probably also warmer near the surface, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. When the cutthroat trout largely vanished from the shallow waters they prefer, the lake trout didn’t take their place, because they like deeper waters. So the switch deprived ospreys, white pelicans, bald eagles and other fish-eating birds of their main food source. The osprey population around the lake soon dropped from 38 nesting pairs, with almost 60 percent of them successfully fledging young birds, to just three nests with zero success. Eagles likewise declined almost to a level last seen during the height of DDT use in the 1960s, again with zero reproductive success.

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Spawning cutthroat trout (Photo:Jay Fleming)

Because far fewer cutthroat trout were making their springtime spawning run up streams around the lake, grizzly and black bears that once lined the banks to feed on them had to go elsewhere in search of food. The density of river otters also fell to the lowest levels known for that species. To casual park visitors the lake no doubt still looked wild and beautiful (that clear water!). But it was like visiting a celebrated European city when all the locals have vanished and everybody you bump into is a tourist.

What happened at Yellowstone Lake is a familiar story for conservationists, because fish stocking has produced cascading ecological disasters pretty much everywhere. For this, Americans can thank Robert B. Roosevelt, a 19th century congressman, conservationist, and uncle of Theodore Roosevelt. He was the fishing world’s version of the infamous New Yorker who set out to give his fellow Americans every bird mentioned in Shakespeare and instead bequeathed us a plague of starlings.

Roosevelt was a leading proponent of the post-Civil War “fish culture movement,” which espoused hatchery-reared fish as a means of replenishing depleted stocks of native species. But Roosevelt also promoted hatcheries as a tool for swapping species willy-nilly across the continent and the globe, with fish eggs shipped “from one end of our country to the other with as little trouble or danger” as a letter dropped in the mail. “Rivers that are now deserted could be filled to repletion,” Roosevelt gushed, “so that there would be abundance for netters, seiners, and fishermen of all kinds, whether they fished in season or out of season, early or late, and with murderous or legitimate implements. This is the object to be obtained.”

In 1871, Congress established the United States Fish Commission, the first federal agency set up to address the depletion of a natural resource. Roosevelt ensured that the legislation included a mandate to move fish into new territories. “There is no reason why the waters of the West should be less prolific than those of the East,” he argued, “provided the right species were introduced; and were trout, salmon, bass, shad and sturgeon to take the place of catfish, pickerel and suckers, the gain would be manifest.”

Some anglers even now subscribe to this magical belief that introducing new species and replacing dull natives with flashy newcomers will make everything better. Until recently, many state fish and wildlife agencies — largely funded by hunting and fishing license fees — felt the same way, introducing new species as a matter of policy. But these introductions have had disaster built in from the start.

“Think about it,” the University of Washington ecologist Julian D. Olden recently told Scientific American. “The fish that we stock are those that grow rapidly, are highly fecund, and are great on the end of the hook. It shouldn’t be too surprising that the same attributes we love as anglers are also responsible for the high impacts we are witnessing on native species and ecosystems.”

So what can we do about it now? The spectacle of a pristine ecosystem being wrecked almost overnight forced Yellowstone to undertake a major effort to remove lake trout, according to Todd Koel, who heads the park’s native fish conservation program. As a result, the cutthroat trout population is slowly recovering and the spawning run in nearby streams is rebuilding. But the control program costs taxpayers and donors $2 million a year and will continue to do so, says Dr. Koel, “for the foreseeable future.”

A better plan is of course to prevent these introductions from happening in the first place. Some anglers now recognize the threat and work to educate other anglers about how doing things that may seem beneficial or even humane — dumping a bucket of live bait at the end of the day, or releasing unwanted fish from one lake into another — can wreck the fishing for everybody else. Some jurisdictions have also begun to enlist anglers in the control effort, by removing bag limits or banning catch-and-release for problem species. At Yellowstone Lake, the rules announce in bold face and italics that lake trout “must be killed — it is illegal to release them alive.”

State and federal agencies have refrained in recent decades from stocking nonnative species into new territories. Some agencies have also begun to designate native species conservation areas, removing barriers to upstream spawning areas and maintaining barriers against downstream intruders. But the practice of stocking nonnative fish into water bodies where they already exist remains standard for now, because the people who pay fishing license fees want it and an entire recreational fishing industry depends on it. The theory, in any case, is that the damage is already done — though that may prove to be wishful thinking, as increased flooding causes introduced species to spread to new habitats, and to still other new habitats beyond that.

A Saturday morning spent fishing is at least still an opportunity to get outdoors and enjoy what nature remains to us — and maybe even forget for a little while the recent news about the extinction emergency now threatening a million or more species worldwide. But for an angler standing by a stream and casting out a line, the thought that rises helplessly to mind is that every species we lose, every habitat we compromise in the name of “human convenience,” is one more piece of the American character and of our own souls inadvertently washed away into oblivion.