Richard Conniff's Blog, page 62

The Unexpected Way Dogs Are Saving Cheetahs

An Anatolian on the job in South Africa

My latest for TakePart:

Roughly 6,000 years ago in the uplands of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, a few clever humans began to deploy dogs to guard their livestock. This idea—Fido standing up alone against wolves, bears, or even lions—may seem like ancient (and insanely courageous) history. And yet every now and then, someone wakes up and says, “Oh! Wait! Maybe that was a smart idea, after all.”

That person is right, according to a new study in Wildlife Society Bulletin, which backs up that perception with numbers. Nicola A. Rust and her coauthors looked at a guard dog program launched by the conservation group Cheetah Outreach in 2005 along South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe and Botswana.

Ranchers there, as elsewhere in the world, tend to regard native predators as a menace to their livestock, and given the chance, they sometimes kill them. But the emotional appeal of what American ranchers living with wolves call “shoot, shovel, and shut up” didn’t work out too well in South Africa, says Rust, a University of Kent graduate student.

When twentieth-century farmers exterminated lions, leopards, and spotted hyenas, the lack of competition from larger cats benefited cheetahs and other smaller predators. Populations of jackals and caracals boomed as a consequence, to the point that sheep farming in particular was no longer economical in some areas. When farmers then began to target the smaller predators, it began to seem as if they were only killing off the dumber jackals, leaving the wilier ones to do even more damage. Where jackals normally give away their presence with nocturnal yipping and wailing, says Rust, a population of silent jackals appeared in one area.

Cheetah Outreach thought that guard dogs might work better than random predator killing to protect both the livestock and the predators. So, in 2005, the group began to train Anatolian shepherd guard dogs. These big, powerful animals can weigh 150 pounds and stand 29 inches at the shoulder—slightly larger, in fact, than a cheetah. The name of the breed, and its lore, suggests that it dates back 6,000 years to those same early shepherds in the Eastern Mediterranean uplands.

South African farmer Peter Knipe with his Anatolian shepherd Neeake

The dog program planners interviewed interested farmers who had suffered livestock losses from predators. The ones who made the cut received instruction in how to train and care for their dogs. In addition to acquiring and training the puppies, Cheetah Outreach agreed to pay the cost of each dog’s food, vaccines, neutering, microchipping, and other veterinary services for the first year. The program also hired a dog officer to visit each farmer monthly for the first year, then quarterly, and finally once a year. In return, the farmers, who had been losing as much as half their livestock to predators every year, agreed not to kill any more cheetahs.

Rust and her coauthors suggest that it worked. Their study looked at 97 farms where dogs went to work in the first six years of the program and found that about 90 percent of them had completely eliminated the reported loss of livestock to predators. All of the farms experienced a minimum 33 percent decline in losses.

The program was, however, hard on the dogs. A leopard killed one, a hyena another, and altogether 21 dogs died—from vehicle accidents, poachers’ snares, electrocution, and especially snakebite. Puff adders are sometimes known as “lazy snakes,” but their bite is deadly, says Rust, who recommends that the program train the dogs to leave the snakes alone.

Also on the negative side, the program cost Cheetah Outreach about $2,800 per dog in the first year. But even after picking up all costs from the second year on, the farmers saved about $500 annually. That’s not counting “intangible benefits,” like reduced disease transmission between wildlife and livestock, reduced stress from finding the carcasses of lost animals, and an improved sense of security.

So, will it save cheetahs, now considered a vulnerable species, with fewer than 10,000 adults surviving in the wild? Among the farmers surveyed by Rust and her coauthors, most thought they had seen an increase in cheetahs in their area. And 79 percent also said their tolerance for cheetahs had greatly increased as a result of being involved with the guard dog program.

Rust says that the guard dog program, now up to several hundred dogs, may never be a good fit for some farmers. They don’t want the hassle of feeding and caring for a dog. They’ve also grown up in a habitat shaped by a century of bounties for killing predators. Once the predators had been exterminated from large areas, farmers didn’t need guard dogs anymore, she says, and “it’s quite surprising how people forget. So you have to remind people that their ancestors were using these dogs for millennia.”

And maybe, she suggests gently, they were onto a good thing.

Lessons for China from Righteous Connecticut Yankees

Wildlife products are big business in China, and the rabid desire for these products can be shocking to outsiders. Running down the list of species China’s newly rich are eating, or otherwise consuming, to the brink of extinction, it’s easy to get the impression that they are utterly depraved. Shameless.

Inhuman, even.

In fact, though, their appetite for wildlife products—from shark fin soup and pangolin stew to ivory trinkets—in some ways echoes our own nineteenth-century rise to wealth. We are the ones, for instance, who brought off the great slaughter of American bison, from 60 million animals down to about 700 in 1902. We alone are to blame for the mindless killing of billions of passenger pigeons, down to the death of Martha, the sole surviving female, in 1914. But those sad stories are already well known. I’m going to tell a hometown story instead, one that resonates with what China is doing to elephants in Africa today.

For many years, I lived in a Connecticut River Valley community that rose up entirely on the strength of the ivory trade. The rival companies at the heart of Deep River and neighboring Ivoryton, Conn., were makers of piano keyboards covered with ivory, and they dominated the ivory market in the Western Hemisphere. The river landing just below my house was an unloading point for ivory tusks. And at the beginning of the twentieth century, the factory at the other end of my street was cutting the ivory of 1000 elephants a year.

When I lived there in the 1980s and ’90s, people could still remember fertilizing their tomatoes with ivory sawdust. The local pond below the mill used to turn yellow with it, a local elder told me, and when he and a friend came home from swimming there as boys, “we looked like the Gold Dust Twins. How my mother would holler.”

For American buyers then, as for Chinese consumers now, ivory was all about status. In the prosperous decades after the Civil War, the piano was the essential “badge of gentility,” as one social observer put it, “being the only thing that distinguishes ‘Decent People’ from the lower and less distinguished…‘middling kind of folks.’ ”

At the height of the public craze for the piano, from about 1860 to 1930, demand from Pratt, Read & Company in Deep River and Comstock, Cheney & Company in Ivoryton helped determine demand for ivory in Zanzibar, the major trading center, and even the price paid for tusks in the East African bush, where the elephants were being killed. Then, about 50,000 elephants died each year to supply the ivory trade. At the risk of overstating the moral complications of what seemed like an innocent pastime, they died so girls in the rising middle class could display their musical talent and families could gather around the piano to sing.

It’s hard for us now to grasp the extraordinary intimacy with elephant tusks that was once commonplace in the two towns. These days, scientists tracking the illegal ivory trade can determine the origin of a tusk by studying its isotopes, persistent biochemical traces of what the elephant ate, and where it lived. But the old ivory cutters had something like that knowledge in their hands. They could tell Congo ivory from Sudanese, Mozambique, Senegalese, or Abyssian ivory, Egyptian soft from Egyptian hard, and Zanzibar prime from Zanzibar cutch.

They knew the ivory not just by how it responded to their saws but by how it felt beneath their fingertips. “To observe a man at work with ivory,” a reporter who visited the Pratt, Read cutting rooms once wrote, was “to watch a man in love. As it is sorted, sliced, cut, and matched, each workman actually fondles and caresses it.” No doubt the ivory carvers of modern Hong Kong or Bangkok feel the same way.

There is, of course, a big difference between the ivory market then and now. The idea of eliminating elephants from Africa would have seemed absurd back then, like suggesting we could remove all the fish from the sea. Moreover, today we have television and the Internet to bring the slaughter of elephants into our homes and make it real. Even with the current censorship in China, only willful ignorance could keep the people who still buy ivory trinkets from knowing the bloody cost of their status symbols.

And yet the Connecticut River Valley’s nineteenth-century ivory merchants also understood the damage they were doing. Local men who represented the ivory companies in Zanzibar knew that elephants were disappearing from vast areas of East Africa. As the years passed, the Arab-run ivory-trading caravans, armed by Yankee merchants, were obliged to travel deeper into the continent and be away for longer.

Escaped slave Billy Winter, rescued by George Read, stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, holding tusks then worth $1500 in Deep River

One especially painful irony is that George Read, the founder of Deep River and its ivory company, was an anti-slavery activist even in the 1830s. His home was a station on the Underground Railroad. Meanwhile, the caravans that brought the tusks down to the East African coast also brought slaves to carry the tusks, and those slaves were then sold into the trade. Read, who died in 1859, must at some point surely have realized his own connection to the slave trade, and yet he did nothing to stop it.

So how does all this history matter to the present challenge of getting people in China to stop buying ivory? What ultimately killed the business in Connecticut wasn’t any concern about the elephants (or the slaves). Instead, it required a change of taste among consumers: The phonograph arrived, and playing the piano became old hat. By the 1950s, the ivory trade in the Connecticut River Valley was dead.

The moral is that we shouldn’t be too quick to call Chinese ivory buyers inhuman or depraved. They are a lot like we once were. At the same time, our own bad behavior then should not become the means of justifying China’s continued bad behavior today. We need to be quick and clear about that, because at the current rate of killing, elephants, rhinos, tigers, and many other species could soon completely vanish from the wild.

But a change in taste, like the one that killed the Connecticut ivory trade, is still eminently possible. Social pressure and the need to save face are the forces most likely to make it happen. In my lifetime, I have seen that kind of pressure make fur unfashionable and more than halve the rate of cigarette smoking among American adults.

So here’s the lesson for China: The ivory trade of the nineteenth century is now a permanent mark of shame for the Connecticut River Valley. It will be a far greater disgrace, and an everlasting one, if China now causes the extinction of the largest and most beloved land mammal on Earth. Stepping up and saving the elephants, on the other hand, will bring China the thing great nations crave most, which is the admiration of the world.

The hunger for status, which is now killing the elephants, could thus instead become their salvation.

At Play in the Fields of Fliskets, Zant, and Fred

Jawseus charlottei (Illustration: Calene Luczo/http://www.luczoillustration.com/)

I happened to come across two lovely poems this morning about the challenge of naming the animals.  The first is by John Hollander.*

                                 Adam’s Task

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field … GEN. 2:20

Thou, paw-paw-paw; thou, glurd; thou, spotted

Glurd; thou, whitestap, lurching through

The high-grown brush; thou, pliant-footed,

Implex; thou, awagabu.

Every burrower, each flier

Came for the name he had to give:

Gay, first work, ever to be prior,

Not yet sunk to primitive.

Thou, verdle; thou, McFleery’s pomma;

Thou; thou; thou—three types of grawl;

Thou, flisket; thou, kabasch; thou, comma-

Eared mashawk; thou, all; thou, all.

Were, in a fire of becoming,

Laboring to be burned away,

Then work, half-measuring, half-humming,

Would be as serious as play.

Thou, pambler; thou, rivarn; thou, greater

Wherret, and thou, lesser one;

Thou, sproal; thou, zant; thou, lily-eater.

Naming’s over. Day is done.

The second poem comes from Anthony Hecht, in roughly the same spirit:

                      Naming the Animals

Having commanded Adam to bestow

Names upon all the creatures, God withdrew

To empyrean palaces of blue

That warm and windless morning long ago,

And seemed to take no notice of the vexed

Look on the young man’s face as he took thought

Of all the miracles the Lord had wrought,

Now to be labelled, dubbed, yclept, indexed.

Before an addled mind and puddled brow,

The feathered nation and the finny prey

Passed by; there went biped and quadruped.

Adam looked forth with bottomless dismay

Into the tragic eyes of his first cow,

And shyly ventured, “Thou shalt be called ‘Fred.’”

I am sending these poems out to all the discouraged taxonomists out there, contemplating how to name 100 new ants, or ground beetles, or flies.  Bring on those pommas and pamblers!

* Personal note: I once signed up for Hollander’s poetry class as an undergraduate, then, fool that I was, forgot to attend.  I discovered this lapse, to my horror, two weeks before semester’s end.  Hollander, bless him, gave me a “high pass” anyway.  Academic standards were gentler then.

Defeat and Defiance: Two Faces

I have been writing, off and on, for a while now, about the incredible ability of facial expressions to reveal our inner emotions.  So this photo from today’s (UK) Telegraph caught my eye.

The photo’s not dated, so I don’t know if it was taken in the wake of revelations about Nigella Lawson’s alleged cocaine use.  (The allegations–fair warning–come from her estranged husband Charles Saatchi, who called her “Higella.”  Clever boy.) It appears to have been taken Monday.

What interests me is the defeated angle of her head, the fear in her eyes, and the wary, anticipatory way her lips drop open.  That, and the glowering, untouchable defiance of the 19-year-old daughter:

Nigella Lawson and her daughter Cosima. (Photo: Wenn)

Defeat and Defiance

I have been writing, off and on, for a while now, about the incredible ability of facial expressions to reveal our inner emotions.  So this photo from today’s (UK) Telegraph caught my eye.

The photo’s not dated, so I don’t know if it was taken in the wake of revelations about Nigella Lawson’s alleged cocaine use.  (The allegations–fair warning–come from her estranged husband Charles Saatchi, who called her “Higella.”) It appears to have been taken Monday.

What interests me is the defeated angle of her head, the fear in her eyes, and the wary, anticipatory way her lips drop open.  That, and the glowering untouchable defiance of the 19-year-old daughter:

Nigella Lawson and her daughter Cosima. (Photo: Wenn)

Ninja Seahorse Sneak Attack

This brief video comes from Discover Magazine:

And here’s their text:

Forget Sharknado. The scariest thing to come out of the ocean recently is a video capturing the stealthy advance and attack of a seahorse.

The video came about during research on whether the shape of a seahorse’s head changes its hydrodynamic profile (it does). The animal’s creeping, shadowy profile hunting unsuspecting potential snacks is the stuff of nightmares.

But the video also demonstrates how the dwarf seahorse Hippocampus zosterae, and other members of its family, advance on prey with minimal water disruption. The shape of its head and its stealthy pre-attack posture allow the seahorse to achieve what the researchers call “hydrodynamic silence,” meaning it avoids stirring up the water as it moves, a disturbance that would be detected by its prey.

See their full account here.

And here’s a link to the original study in Nature Communications.

Shoot-out in Dog Town

My latest for TakePart:

The other day I was reading up on passenger pigeons and the 19th-century slaughter that rushed a population of billions of birds into extinction over a matter of decades. It reminded me that the same sort of mindless killing happens in the United States even now. It made me think in particular of an afternoon I spent years ago near Rapid City, S.D., with a group of shooters who sometimes jokingly referred to themselves as “the red mist society,” because that’s what a prairie dog turns into on impact with one of their high-powered bullets.

To biologists, prairie dogs are a keystone species of the American West. Those plump little bodies, concentrated in huge colonies or “towns,” are an essential food for coyotes, kit foxes, golden eagles, black-footed ferrets, and dozens of other species. But to a lot of ranchers, farmers, and home owners, prairie dogs are an agricultural pest, or just a blight on suburban lawns. Shooting and poisoning them, even on federal lands, has somehow become completely legal and acceptable behavior.

As a result, the five prairie dog species, which once sprawled across hundreds of millions of acres, from northern Mexico to Canada, now survive in fragmented colonies, altogether covering perhaps 3 million acres. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed the Utah and Mexican species under the Endangered Species Act but has declined to provide protected status to the more widespread black-tailed prairie dog. In its wisdom, FWS has also ruled that recreational shooting in the estimated population of 24 million black-tailed prairie dogs does not constitute a significant threat.

My encounter with this odd sport happened in the course of filming a television documentary about prairie dogs, and if you are at all squeamish, you should just stop reading at this point because—fair warning—it gets gruesome.

I was a guest of the Varmint Hunters Association (motto: “Courtesy, Camaraderie, Conservation”), on a rolling, grassy ranch east of Rapid City. They’d gone out of their way to put on a good show.  One newlywed couple had driven 500 miles for the day’s sport, which they likened to golf.

“I have no ill will towards the prairie dogs,” said Ned Kalbfleish, then president of the association. “The killing of the prairie dogs is just a byproduct of my evolving accuracy” as a shooter, he reasoned. Hitting prairie dogs rather than paper targets gives a more “immediate resultant effect.”

Kalbfleish was using Winchester ballistic Silvertip bullets, each capped with a polycarbonate tip. “This is an exceptionally frangible bullet and will fall apart much faster than its hollow point counterpart,” he explained. “On a small, thin-skinned target, it’s also much more destructive.”

We could see the prairie dogs popping up and grazing on a distant hillside. “There’s one saying, ‘Take me now. Take me first,’” said Kalbfleish. “You don’t need a long lens for that one. He’s just 45 yards out. Having a morning salad.” He fired, and there was a cloud of dust where the prairie dog used to be. A couple of burrowing owls, which live in prairie dog burrows, skittered up and flew off.

Another prairie dog took a hit, flopped around, and then stumbled out of sight. “He’s gonna have a long night,” Kalbfleish remarked. A third prairie dog sailed 10 feet through the air, spewing blood. “That makes me nauseous,” he joked, as he lit up a cigarette. “That’s why I say they’re reactionary targets.” A fourth prairie dog went down, decapitated. “That’s what we in the prairie dog field call ‘good head.’ I heard it pop. Just took it right off. Big time. Gone.”

He gradually extended his choice of targets out to 500 yards and beyond. “Oh, my God,” Kalbfleish joked at one point. “It would take the bullet two and a half minutes to get there.” Then, after hitting another dog: “There you go, that bounced him.”

“At what distance?” someone asked.

“Two zip codes. Usually if I want to get a bullet that far I just call UPS.”

The afternoon went on like that (“That looked like it hurt real bad”).

And on (“He’s going over to see his friend. Ooooh, his friend died!”).

And on (“He’s cantaloupe!”).

At one point, we went down range to examine the results and found a prairie dog with its face flattened, the back of its head blown out, and its belly already bloated in the afternoon sun, the flies moving in. Gratified, the shooters returned to their positions and fired some more.

“Now for the most important part,” Kalbfleish declared at the end of the day, totaling up the body count. “Shooters: 136; prairie dogs: zero.”

It would have been a fine afternoon of sport, if only the prairie dogs had had a chance to shoot back.

Instead, I went away thinking that prairie dogs are on track to become America’s next passenger pigeon.

Daredevil Endangered Leopard Sets up House in China

The Amur leopard (not the more celebrated Amur or Siberian tiger) is down to just 30-50 animals surviving in the wild.  Now it’s turned up on camera trap video, with a young cub in tow, in China, otherwise known as WHERE ANIMALS GO TO BE EATEN INTO EXTINCTION.

You can see the video here  (Sorry, WordPress doesn’t let me insert it directly in this blog item.)

Check out the additional photos below, including one of the very cute cub.

Here’s the news release from the Wildlife Conservation Society:

NEW YORK (November, 26, 2013) — The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) confirmed today that camera traps in the Wangqing Nature Reserve in northeast China recorded footage of a female Amur leopard with two cubs, marking the first record of breeding by this critically-endangered cat in China. The cameras, located some 30 km (18 miles) away from the primary Amur leopard population on the Russia side of the China-Russia border, are part of a region-wide camera trap project conducted by the Forestry Bureau of Jilin Province.

The WCS China Program runs camera trap monitoring at Hunchun Nature Reserve, 13 km (8 miles) southeast of Wangqing. Other partners in this project include World Wilde Fund for Nature, the Feline Center of the State Forestry Administration, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Amur Leopard and Tiger Alliance (ALTA).

WCS has been working for more than a decade to improve conditions for leopards, including expanding and improving law enforcement efforts, educating government agencies, and working with local communities to improve livestock husbandry techniques that reduce human disturbance and conflict in leopard habitat. This evidence of reproduction shows that our efforts are paying off.

“This incredible find is important for two reasons. Firstly, it shows that our current efforts are paying off but, secondly, it shows that China can no longer be considered peripheral to the fate of both wild Amur Leopards and Tigers,” said Joe Walston, WCS Executive Director for Asia Programs. With a few key decisions by the government, China could become a major sanctuary for the species.”

Known as the Amur (or Far Eastern) leopard, it is the world’s most endangered big cat, with only 30-50 individuals left in the wild. Cold and deep snows have prevented the leopard’s successful colonization farther north; while in the south, poaching and intensive development have practically eliminated leopards from China and Korea. Today these leopards are found only in a thin strip of land along the Russian-Chinese border.

The Deadly Dozen Effects of Losing Nature

Mangroves (Photo: Diego M. Rossi/Getty)

There’s a tendency in our flat screen-fixated society to treat the preservation of nature and wildlife as a boutique issue. I mean “boutique” in the sense that it’s become a ladies-who-lunch sort of thing. Nice, but it doesn’t really matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. When plant breeders need to make a drought-resistant strain of rice, or a wheat variety that doesn’t drop dead from disease, they often borrow traits from closely related plants in the natural world. The need for those traits is increasing because of climate change. But borrowing only works if there is a natural world left to borrow from.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that would be the unsexiest thing of all.

The Secret Megalopolis of the Ants

They move 40 tons of soil, one ant-load at a time, to excavate a city staff 50 meters across and 8 meters deep: