Richard Conniff's Blog, page 75

The Spirit of John Snow (Guardians Part 3)

In fact, Richardson soon learned, TB is now resurgent, largely because delayed response to the AIDS epidemic gave it fresh ground to become active again, in the lungs of patients with weakened immune systems. The disease is treatable with an antibiotic cocktail, but the regimen is long and brutal. Some 1.4 million people die of TB each year, and 8.7 million new cases appear—more than triple the annual number of new HIV infections. Most of these TB cases are in Asia, India, China, and Africa. Air travel has contributed to London’s becoming an outpost of this new epidemic; even if Richardson had stayed home, he could have picked up the disease.

If Dr. Cetron grows nervous about this sort of thing, he also cites reasons for optimism: Until a few years ago, the international community had to rely exclusively on national governments to report public health emergencies. But governments often didn’t realize they had a problem until it was too late; they were also sometimes reluctant to report a problem that might hurt trade or tourism. Now, though, listening posts like the CDC’s Global Disease Detection Operations Center constantly scan news and social media in almost every language for hints of trouble. Moreover, regulations adopted in 2005 and backed by 194 nations allow outsiders to monitor internal media for public health emergencies. If a hospital is suddenly overwhelmed, the disease commandos are ready to spring into action.

“The ability to find an outlier, to detect an early event, has probably never been better,” says Dr. Cetron. Epidemiologists zoom in on “enigmatic events where we know that people are dying,” says Kira A. Christian, D.V.M., a CDC global disease analyst. “We know their signs and symptoms, their demographics. But we don’t know why.” Then they investigate. As with the coronavirus, it can mean that disease detectives must travel to some of the worst places on earth at the worst possible times.

The CDC’s Kevin Clarke (Photo: Jamie Chung)

Often these specialists come from the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS, an elite corps of young doctors, nurses, veterinarians, and other health professionals. In the apocalyptic 2011 movie Contagion, Kate Winslet plays the role of a fictional EIS officer, and real-life EIS officer Kevin Clarke, M.D., says he had to tell his mother to skip the film because (spoiler alert) “my character ends up in a body bag.”

Dr. Clarke, a 35-year-old pediatrician from Connecticut, recently returned from Zambia, where he’d been on the sort of mission the EIS undertakes 80 to 100 times a year. Doctors in Lusaka, the nation’s rapidly growing capital city, had become alarmed when their clinics suddenly filled with stricken children. The symptoms indicated typhoid fever, probably from contaminated food or water. But where and why? The Zambian government called in the EIS to help.

In Lusaka, local medical staff provided the first clues about which of the city’s densely populated new neighborhoods the typhoid victims came from. Then Dr. Clarke went in with Zambian public health workers and teams of local college students. Narrowing down the possible causes of an outbreak is mostly a matter of methodical, even mathematical, evidence gathering, says Eric Mintz, M.D., head of the CDC’s waterborne disease program. “But you have to know where to look and what to ask. And when you do, those John Snow moments are out there.”

Snow, now considered the father of epidemiology, was a pioneering physician during the London cholera epidemic of 1854. At a time when most doctors held their noses and blamed the disease on miasmas—foul air—Snow went door to door to map out exactly where the cholera was striking, and where it was passing by. His map led him to a single public well that had been contaminated with sewage—and the epidemic ended.

In Lusaka, Dr. Clarke and his team used the same strategy and soon identified areas where the municipal water supply wasn’t being adequately chlorinated. Not coincidentally, they were the same areas where typhoid fever was occurring. The team alerted local authorities, and a month later the epidemic came to an end. It was, he admits, the kind of result that makes EIS work “pretty rewarding.”

Staying Safe in South Sudan (Guardians Part 4)

So how do people like Dr. Clarke stay healthy in places like Lusaka or, another of his recent postings, South Sudan? And what can they teach the rest of us? You can protect yourself plenty of ways, epidemiologists say, and we’ll detail some of them below. But it’s worth remembering that what happens in the farthest corners of the earth may be at least as important to your survival. The viral diseases that make headlines—AIDS, SARS, Ebola, and so on—almost always spill over from other species when people hunt animals for meat, turn them into pets, or otherwise make contact in ways that disturb habitats and disrupt the natural order. That’s happening far more rapidly now than at any time in our history, and we have few clues to what trouble we may stir up next. Scientists have so far identified about 2,000 virus species. But at least 3,000 more remain unidentified, and then there’s fungi and bacteria. The trick is to keep the bad stuff from spilling over into the human population.

“The old approach 10 years ago was that you just waited until lots of people started dying,” says William Karesh, D.V.M., a veteran of past Ebola outbreaks who now works with EcoHealth Alliance in New York City. “And then a lot of foreigners would show up wearing what looked like space suits, and that would just terrify everybody locally. A lot of them would run away because they didn’t know. Their family members were being taken away alive and never coming back. They were dying.”

The villagers who lived told stories that weren’t much different from those stories about spaceship abductions. But they were real. “Then somebody said, why don’t we talk to them between outbreaks? Why don’t we talk to them all the time? And that’s the solution—regular engagement and education,” says Dr. Karesh. So the strategy now is to have a continuing epidemiological presence out in the disease hot spots, teaching local people both to minimize environmental disturbances and to recognize trouble when it comes. Now, he says, if they run across a dead animal in the forest, they report it to health authorities instead of eating it. Local people have become the advance guards of surveillance.

CDC virus hunter Stuart Nichol (Photo: Jamie Chung)

Outsiders still pour in to respond to an outbreak, but the approach now is more precise and less panicky. At the CDC, Stuart Nichol, Ph.D., had just come back from an Ebola outbreak. Nichol downplayed the Hollywood “hot zone” reputation of hemorrhagic diseases: “Most of the cases that show up are not bleeding from every orifice. They are not melting down.”

But that actually makes diagnosis more difficult because the typical symptoms could just as easily be caused by common flu. So the response now is to set up a small field lab in the thick of an epidemic for rapid diagnosis. Patients are tested in the morning, “and by 5 o’clock in the evening we can tell people whether they’ll be going into the isolation ward or going home,” says Nichol, chief of the CDC’s Viral Special Pathogens Branch. “The basic approach to containing one of these outbreaks is to remove the infected people from the community and place them into isolation wards, to stop those chains of transmission.”

Is that enough? All of last year’s hemorrhagic fever outbreaks were limited to a few dozen cases, rather than the hundreds in past outbreaks. But the trouble with prevention is that you never know if you’ve done enough.

It’s still possible, says Nichol, that someone with Ebola or Marburg could catch a jet to New York or some other great megalopolitan splotch of light and start a chain of human-to-human transmission. “Would it kill a lot of people? Probably not. But the report of 10, 20, 100 cases in New York would cause significant panic. So we can’t be complacent.”

What about keeping yourself safe as an individual traveler in what can seem like a scary world? Epidemiologists going out on a posting typically consult the CDC’s own Yellow Book, the bible of recommended vaccines and medicines for countries worldwide. (Check out your destination at cdc.gov/travel.) For frequent flyers, the Yellow Book is now available as an iPhone app. (There’s also an app called Outbreaks Near Me, from an infectious-disease mapping service the CDC relies on.)

Chutney’s Deadly Charms (Guardians Part 5)

Men are far less likely than women to seek health advice before a trip, and that may be one reason they account for 71 percent of travel hospitalizations. It’s smart to visit a travel clinic to be certain that you have the right immunizations and to make sure false assumptions don’t get you into trouble. For example, some parents forgo measles immunization for their children because measles is no longer a big problem in the United States. Or they avoid the vaccine because they mistakenly believe it’s more dangerous than the disease. But even an ostensibly safe destination like France reported 14,000 cases of measles in 2011, and some unprotected American travelers brought the disease home with them.

You may also mistakenly regard immunizations and antimalarial drugs as superfluous if you are one of the 13 percent of U.S. residents born abroad. “You don’t even think about it,” says Rish Sanghvi, a 36-year-old biotech market researcher in California. He grew up in India until he was 16, and on a return trip there in 2011 he figured he was just going home to visit family. So he didn’t take any precautions, except to avoid raw foods and drink only filtered water. “I guess if I were going to Africa, I’d be more careful.” But it turns out that his risk was real enough.

One day early in his visit, Sanghvi was playing soccer with friends and he felt exhausted. “I thought I was going to pass out,” he says. Then the stomach problems started, followed by mild hallucinations. His brother, a physician, recognized typhoid fever and immediately put him on antibiotics. Even so, Sanghvi couldn’t keep his food down, and he was laid up for a month. Back in the States, with his weight down 30 percent, he spent another 2 months unable to do more than “sit at home and chill. Man, that’s the last time I don’t take my drugs,” he says.

Sanghvi figures he picked up the disease from the less visible things—the dairy products in a lassi drink, the chutney served with a dosa pancake, the raw onions in a sandwich. Even for experienced epidemiologists, it’s not always easy to follow the familiar advice for eating in foreign countries—boil it, cook it, peel it, or forget it. “We commonly work in refugee camps and remote settings,” says the CDC’s Dr. Clarke, “and sometimes the only food to come by is some goat stew and rice, and you may not have full control over how it was prepared.”

Foreign visitors also often end up feeling social pressure to fit in by drinking the water or eating the food. “It’s a 100-degree day, and somebody’s offering you a nice tall glass of iced lemonade, and it’s a big deal for them to offer ice because it’s hard to get,” says Jason Love, a Portland, Oregon, resident who was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. “It’s hard to turn down from a desire point of view, and it’s hard to turn down for social reasons.” But Love ended up with a 6-month case of giardia, a nasty way to say goodbye to a quarter of your body weight.

For those kinds of emergencies, a travel clinic will typically send you out with a powerful antibiotic like ciprofloxacin. But antibiotics can also cause serious side effects. You may just want to wait it out. Carry salt packets and mix them with clean water to help you retain fluids. As for the social pressure, Cyrus Shahpar, M.D., M.P.H., another EIS officer, tries to make his preference for his own water bottle seem quirky rather than rude.

Sinking a Ship to Get Rid of the Rats (Guardians Final)

Keeping yourself fit on the road can also stave off disease, or minimize the symptoms. The novelist George Orwell, in frail health and an enthusiastic smoker, wrote that his TB treatment was like “sinking the ship to get rid of the rats,” and he died of the disease 20 months later. Simon Richardson, on the other hand, took on a fundraising challenge 3 months into his TB treatment. On behalf of a group called TB Alert, he logged 34,000 meters on a rowing machine—the equivalent of crossing the English Channel—in just over 3 hours. In rowing parlance, that’s an average split time of 2:41, well on the way to recovery.

Even if exercise isn’t always possible, Dr. Lipkin (just off the plane from investigating the coronavirus in Saudi Arabia) recommends relaxation exercises to shake off the stress of travel. Eat well and stay hydrated, he says, to keep the protective tissues of the nose and mouth moist. Avoid shaking hands, and because that’s not always possible, wash your hands frequently and carry a hand sanitizer. Don’t touch your face, and for pity’s sake, don’t pick your nose or touch your eyes, especially after shaking hands. People touch their noses and other parts of the face far too many times an hour. He says you’re basically “inoculating your nose with what was in somebody else’s nose.”

What about the travel nightmare of being stuck beside a passenger who’s coughing up a lung on a sold-out flight? You may wish you had tucked a paper face mask in your carry-on. But even in the middle of an epidemic, people often end up wearing such masks on top of their head because they’re so uncomfortable. The flimsy ones with a single blue rubber band also will not protect you, according to a doctor who works with tuberculosis patients. Try the more expensive filtering masks, available at hardware stores, that have two elastic straps to pull the mask snug around your nose and mouth. Accept the fact that you will look like a fool. And since you probably won’t see anybody on that flight ever again, you won’t have the pleasure of laughing last. Plus, if you end up avoiding illness, you may not even remember to thank yourself for having done the smart thing.

And there in a nutshell is the frustrating conundrum of disease prevention in a dangerous age on a shrinking planet. Doctors who cure us when we are sick no doubt deserve the glory and gratitude we lavish on them. But the bigger achievement of keeping us from getting sick in the first place goes almost unnoticed. The virus hunters and disease detectives who spend their lives at it are a kind of ghost service, engaged in shadowy, uncertain, inglorious work. Ideally, if they succeed, we never even know they were there. Or as Dr. Clarke puts it, in a philosophical moment, “If something was prevented, how do you report that it never happened?”

Fur, Feathers, and Pharmaceuticals

The pharmacist is in

House sparrows and finches pad their nests with nicotine-laced cigarette butts to reduce mite infestations.  Wood ants do the same sort of thing with an antimicrobial resin from conifer trees, preventing microbial growth in the colony. Monarch butterflies infected with parasites protect their offspring from that irritating fate by laying their eggs on anti-parasitic milkweed.  (Well, if they can find any milkweed.)   And baboons exploit a well-stocked medicine chest, treating parasitic infections with the fruit of the Balanites tree, halting bouts of diarrhea by eating leaves from the Sodom apple, and relieving menstrual cramps by munching on the leaves of the candelabra tree.

“When we watch animals foraging for food in nature, we now have to ask, are they visiting the grocery store or are they visiting the pharmacy?” says Mark Hunter, co-author of an article on “Self-Medication in Animals,” published online today in the journal Science. “We can learn a lot about how to treat parasites and disease by watching other animals.

“Perhaps the biggest surprise for us was that animals like fruit flies and butterflies can choose food for their offspring that minimizes the impacts of disease in the next generation,” says Hunter, can ecologist at the University of Michigan. “There are strong parallels with the emerging field of epigenetics in humans, where we now understand that dietary choices made by parents influence the long-term health of their children.”

But the authors are actually far more interested in how pharmaceutical choices affect the ecology of the animals.  Here’s an excerpt:

We argue that there are at least four major consequences of animal medication.

First, when animal medication reduces parasite fitness, we expect to observe effects on parasite transmission or virulence. Neither consequence has received much attention yet, but two studies indicate that medication can indeed influence the interactions between hosts and their parasites. For example, when gypsy moth caterpillars consume foliage high in phenolics, it reduces transmission of a polyhedrosis virus and facilitates moth outbreaks (12). There is also preliminary evidence that medication affects virulence evolution: increasing parasite virulence is predicted from models of medication behavior by monarch butterflies using toxic milkweed (13).

Second, animal medication should affect the evolution of animal immune systems. Immune responses are costly, suggesting that animals should not use or evolve immunity when they do not need it. Animal medication provides an alternative to cellular and humoral immune responses and may thus result in a reduction or loss of such immune responses. This hypothesis has not yet been tested formally, but there is suggestive evidence. Perhaps most strikingly, honeybees use a series of behavioral immune mechanisms, including the incorporation of antimicrobial resin into their nests (14). Analysis of their genome suggests that honeybees lack many of the cellular and humoral immune genes of other insects, raising the possibility that their use of medicine has been partly responsible—or has compensated—for a loss of other immune mechanisms (14).

Third, host-parasite interactions are often used to explore patterns of local adaptation, yet surprisingly few studies provide evidence for adaptation of parasites to their local hosts or vice versa (15). Most of these studies are based on experiments in which hosts and parasites from multiple populations are exposed to each other in sympatric and allopatric combinations. By not allowing hosts to behave naturally, such studies preclude animals from medicating themselves or their kin. Thus, if animals have locally adapted to their parasites through medication behaviors, studies must be designed such that animals can display their naturally evolved behaviors. It is our expectation that when this is done, more studies will find that hosts have locally adapted their behavior to their parasites.

Finally, the study of animal medication will have direct relevance for human food production and health. Disease problems in agricultural organisms can worsen when humans interfere with the ability of animals to medicate. For example, increases in parasitism and disease in honeybees can be linked to selection by beekeepers for reduced resin deposition by their bees (14). A re-introduction of such behavior in managed bees would likely have great benefits for disease management. In addition, as self-medicating animals, humans still derive many of their medicines from natural products, and plants remain the most promising source of future drugs. Studies of animal medication may lead the way in discovering new drugs to relieve human suffering.

Source: J. C. de Roode, T. Lefevre, M. D. Hunter. Self-Medication in Animals. Science, 2013; 340 (6129): 150 DOI: 10.1126/science.1235824

See also: Shuker, KPN. 2001. The Hidden Powers of Animals: Uncovering the Secrets of Nature. London: Marshall Editions Ltd. 240 p.

Monarch Butterflies in a Tailspin

Last of the monarch migration? (Photo: Chip Taylor)

 

University of Kansas insect ecologist Orley R. “Chip” Taylor is the founder and director of Monarch Watch, an outreach program focused on conservation of monarch butterflies.  Monarchs are beloved for their spectacular migration from across Canada and the United States to overwintering sites in the Mexican states of Michoacán and México—and back again.  But a new study suggests that, like the vast passenger pigeon migrations of the nineteenth-century, the flight of the butterflies may be vanishing from our lives.  Here’s my interview with Taylor, for Yale Environment 360:

 RICHARD CONNIFF:  The study that happened in December indicates a pretty dramatic decline in the monarch population.  Could you describe what that study found?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  The measure of the overwintering colonies takes place every December down in Mexico, and what that measures is the total area of trees that are occupied by monarchs in up to twelve different overwintering sites.  They’ll have a team that will go up into the forest and they will examine all of the trees that have got butterflies on them.  The butterflies tend to be grouped, so there might be 47 trees in one area covered by butterflies, and there might be another area which has 427 trees covered with butterflies.

They measure the polygons occupied by these fir trees, figure out the area of each one, and add them all together.   It came out to only 1.19 hectares this year, about 2.74 acres, the smallest all-time measure.  In 1996 we had an overwintering population that was almost 18 times larger.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  What percentage decline did the current study find, over one year?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  It was a 59% decline, but that’s not really important.  In 2003-4, the population declined a lot more from one year to the next.  So it’s not the total percent decline.  It’s the total amount of butterflies that are out there that we’re really concerned about.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  In the past they bounced back, and you think the prospects are less likely for that now?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  One of the things that you can say about almost all populations is that when they get really small they get very vulnerable to one peprturbation or another.  What we’re really worried about here is that there would be some sort of catastrophic event that can send the population spinning downward even more.   Then the impetus for conservation of the population could weaken, because if you don’t see them, you don’t have the motivation to do something about it.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  A  lot of Americans assume the problem is deforestation of the monarch’s winter habitat in Mexico.  How has that situation changed?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:

They’ve made a terrific effort to control illegal logging down there and the last report that they had showed that they had completely eliminated illegal logging by the organized mafia-like groups that go in there with guns and cut down a hectare of forest in one night with 15 or 20 trucks and then haul it all off before morning.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  That’s stopped?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  As far as we know, it’s stopped, but there still is a little nibbling at the forest here and there and that’s very hard to control.  You’ve got a lot of people living close to the bone, and each of those mature trees is worth about $300. It’s a fairly big area, it’s remote, and the question is, how do you patrol this area?  How do you eliminate the day-to-day things that are going on in remote mountainsides?

RICHARD CONNIFF:  Let’s talk about the problem on the American and Canadian end of the migration.

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  What we’re seeing here in the United States is a very precipitous decline of monarchs that’s coincident with the adoption of Roundup-ready corn and soybeans.  The first ones were introduced in 1997, soybeans first, then corn.   By 2003, 2004, the adoption rate was approaching 50%, and then we really began to see a decline in monarchs.  And the reason is that the most productive habitat for monarch butterflies in the Midwest, in the Corn Belt, was the corn and soybean fields.  Before Roundup-ready crops, weed control was accomplished by running a tiller through those fields and chopping up the weeds and turning over the soil, but not affecting the crops.  The milkweed survives that sort of tillage to some extent.   So there were maybe 20, 30, 40 plants per acre out there, enough so that you could see them, you could photograph them.  Now you are really hard pressed to find any corn or soybeans that have milkweed in the fields.  I haven’t seen any for years now because of the use of Roundup after they planted these crops.  They have effectively eliminated milkweed from almost all of the habitat that monarchs used to use.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  The amount of herbicide sprayed on these fields has gone up?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  Oh, yes, it’s gone up.  The glyphosate used in agriculture has tripled since 1997, when they first introduced these Roundup-ready crops.  The developers of these crops not only provided the seeds that were glyphosate-resistant, but they also provided the glyphosate–the Roundup.   And, boy, that was a pretty good system.  You could make money on both, right?

RICHARD CONNIFF:  Right.

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  For the farmers it looked good too.  if I was a farmer and I was holding two jobs to keep my farm and I didn’t want to have my rear end sitting on the tractor too long I would use that product as well, because the ordinary mechanical tillage took a lot more time and cost a lot more money.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  This is not the sort of thing people originally worried about with genetic engineering–it’s not a mutant gene getting loose, it’s not food safety.  It’s just a change in conventional farming practice.

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  It’s a collateral damage issue, and one of the things that we’re worried about now is that it looks like there’s going to be a lot of collateral damage from the use of various herbicides and pesticides coming down.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  You’re worried about other genetically-engineered crops?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  Yeah, there’s apparently 15 genetically-engineered crops in the pipeline.  One of the concerns is that some of them are stacked.  That is to say, they’re genetically engineered to resist not just one herbicide, but two, three, four different classes of herbicide.   Some of those herbicides are noteworthy for having a lot of collateral damage already because they are volatile. They tend to be difficult to confine, and so they are likely to be dispersed when they are applied and affect areas outside of the field.  And that could have a tremendous impact on the vegetation, on the pollinators and of course, on the Monarch butterflies.

RICHARD CONNIFF: There’s more going on here, though, than genetically-engineered crops?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  Ethanol is a big issue too.  We’ve seen a 25.5 million-acre increase in the amount of corn and soybeans since 2006.  And that’s been at the expense of nearly ten million acres of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) land, which farmers are paid to set aside for wildlife.   The other 15.5 million acres means that farmers had to plant a lot of marginal land—that would be milkweed habitat, pollinator habitat, rangeland, grassland and so on.  So there has been a tremendous change in agriculture to accommodate the production of biofuel.

The price of corn and the price of soybeans has gone way up.  There is also an increase in international markets.  So a combination of things have pushed the corn and soybean acreage up to the highest level since just after the second world war–169 million acres of corn and soybeans were planted last year.  This is just an unprecedented amount of landscape put into those particular row crops.  What farmers are tending to do–and you can’t blame them–is that they are narrowing field margins.  They are getting closer and closer to the edge of the road.  These strips from the road to the field are often six or eight feet wide and there’s nothing in there but grass.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  And in the past it would have been milkweed?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:   You’re basically creating a desert for out there, except for the corn and the soybeans.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  It’s ironic that the Conservation Reserve Program is suffering because of another government program that was ostensibly intended to protect the environment.

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  Yes, exactly.  We have 27 million acres of CRP land right now, and that’s going to go down to about 24 million acres. Congress has actually dictated that the CRP land should be capped at about 25 million acres.  Well, it’s going to go below that because of these other economic forces.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  So are there prospects for monarch recovery given all these things weighing against it?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  Basically for monarch recovery we’re going to have to create a lot of milkweed habitat and the question is where are we going to do it and how are we going to mobilize people to do it.  What people are going to be asked to do is to save wildlife by creating habitats in their gardens.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  But gardens are not going to make up for 25.5 million acres of additional corn and soybeans.

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  No.  It’s an Alice in Wonderland story of the Red Queen’s race.  You have to run as fast as you possibly can to stay in one place, and if you want to get any place, you have to run twice as fast.  But  I have to believe that we can have an impact if we get the gardeners in this country to help us out by planting milkweed and putting in native plants to stabilize native pollinator communities.  So people now have another purpose for creating a garden.  The purpose is conservation.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  This is the best-known butterfly in America and it’s also the state insect in six or seven states. But it sounds as though it might be on the path to extinction.

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  I wouldn’t say extinction.  Monarchs could disappear from the vision of most of us in this country as the migration goes way, way down.  But the butterfly will persist.  On the other hand, if we start talking about climate change, then we may be looking at an even grimmer scenario.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  I saw a recent study projecting a 73-100% decline in suitable conditions at those overwintering sites.

DR. CHIP TAYLOR: A  study by some Mexican colleagues is projecting that by 2030 the temperature will be so high at those overwintering sites that a lot of the trees will begin to die and the microclimate that butterflies need is going to become vanishingly small. I hate to think that they’re correct.  Their projection is based on the temperatures in those mountains increasing by two degrees centigrade in that 17-year period and if the planet has temperature rises that are that fast, we’re not going to be talking about Monarch butterflies.   We’re going to be talking about survival of a lot of things.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  You teach a course about the world in 2040, when your current students will be in their 50s.  What does the fate of the Monarch say to you about how that world is going to look?

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  You know, I don’t even put the Monarch in that world.  I mean you know the population is projected to increase by two billion people by 2040.  Well, we can’t do that.  We are going to see a lot of changes, a lot of restrictions on how fast populations can grow simply on the basis of our food production, the declining available arable land, the limitations on water.  If we don’t get with it and if we don’t start modifying our behavior, then things are going to get really out of whack.   But you know there’s still a chance and there’s still a way that we can deal with things fairly effectively.  I mean almost every day there  are new things that human beings have come up with which will help us deal with some of these crises ahead.  We are going to have to make a lot of adjustments and if we don’t make these adjustments, life is going to get to be pretty tough.

RICHARD CONNIFF:  So in all of this, the decline of the Monarch butterflies is a kind of side show.

DR. CHIP TAYLOR:  It is.  You know it’s my way of introducing people to the larger issues.

Circus Tragedy: Send In The Fleas

Mechernich-Kommern weeps.

Here’s the report from Rob Williams at The (UK) Independent:

An entire troupe of 300 performing fleas have fallen victim to the freezing weather gripping Germany.

The acrobatic insects, which were due to appear at an open-air fair in the western town of Mechernich-Kommern, were found dead inside their transport box on Wednesday morning.

Flea circus director Robert Birk said it was the first time he had lost all his fleas in one go because of cold weather.

As they say in the business, however, the show must go on and the circus immediately scrambled to find and train a new batch of insects so it could fulfill its engagements at the fair.

Michael Faber, who organizes the fair, said an insect expert at a nearby university was able to provide 50 fleas in time for the first show on Sunday.

Faber added he hopes they’ll “get through this without any more fatalities.”

Fleas are famous for their phenomenal strength which allows them to pull 160,000 times their own weight and jump to heights 100 times their size.

When contacted Mr Faber told the Independent the story was not an early April Fools joke.

Minneapolis Not So Cool, Phoenix Rules

Minneapolis can no longer be smug about Miami, or even, good God, about the sprawling, energy-extravagant, air-conditioned cultural wasteland called Phoenix.

New research suggests that it’s just greener to live in the Sun Belt.  As a New England resident, I eagerly wait for other scientists to shoot holes in this work.  (Hint:  To make a comparison possible, the study somehow omits consideration of the energy used to extract fuels from the ground, the losses during energy transmission, and (!) energy costs) :

Mar. 26, 2013 — Living in colder climates in the US is more energy demanding than living in warmer climates. This is according to Dr Michael Sivak at the University of Michigan, who has published new research today, 28 March, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters.

Dr Sivak has calculated that climate control in the coldest large metropolitan area in the country — Minneapolis — is about three-and-a-half times more energy demanding than in the warmest large metropolitan area — Miami.

Dr Sivak calculated this difference in energy demand using three parameters: the number of heating or cooling degree days in each area; the efficiencies of heating and cooling appliances; and the efficiencies of power-generating plants.

Not included in the analysis were the energy used to extract fuels from the ground, the losses during energy transmission, and energy costs.

“It has been taken for a fact that living in the warm regions of the US is less sustainable than living in the cold regions, based partly on the perceived energy needs for climate control; however, the present findings suggest a re-examination of the relative sustainability of living in warm versus cold climates.”

Heating degree days (HDDs) and cooling degree days (CDDs) are climatological measures that are designed to reflect the demand for energy needed to heat or cool a building. They are calculated by comparing the mean daily outdoor temperature with 18°C.

A day with a mean temperature of 10°C would have 8 HDDs and no CDDs, as the temperature is 8°C below 18°C. Analogously, a day with a mean temperature of 23°C would have 5 CDDs and no HDDs.

Based on a previous study, Dr Sivak showed that Minneapolis has 4376 heating degree days a year compared to 2423 cooling degree days in Miami.

In the study, Dr Sivak used a single measure for the efficiency of heating and cooling appliances, as most are currently rated using different measures so they cannot be directly compared. His calculations showed that a typical air conditioner is about four times more energy efficient than a typical furnace.

“In simple terms, it takes less energy to cool a room down by one degree than it does to heat it up by one degree,” said Dr Sivak.

Grouping together climatology, the efficiency of heating and cooling appliances, and the efficiency of power-generating plants, Dr Sivak showed that Minneapolis was substantially more energy demanding than Miami.

“In the US, the energy consumption for air conditioning is of general concern but the required energy to heat is often taken for granted. Focus should also be turned to the opposite end of the scale — living in cold climates such as in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Rochester, Buffalo and Chicago is more energy demanding, and therefore less sustainable from this point of view, than living in warm climates such as in Miami, Phoenix, Tampa, Orlando and Las Vegas,” Dr Sivak concluded.

The Fertile Soils of Mars?

Sorry to say, but this research just seems dumb to me.  How do they think they are going to grow crops on Mars, or the moon, given that the soil there almost certainly lacks the microbes plants depend on here on Earth?

And since the real problem is how to feed an additional two billion humans here on Earth by mid-century, shouldn’t that be the focus of real interest?

Well, at least this time it’s Dutch money that’s being wasted, not NASA’s.  ANd I like the line about how the planned voyage to Mars does not include a return ticket.  Score one point for reality.  Here’s the press release:

We have been to the moon several times. Next time, we may go back for a considerable period. And concrete plans for a one-way ticket to Mars have already been forged. Food will have to be grown on location. Is this a distant future scenario? Not for Wieger Wamelink, ecologist at Alterra Wageningen UR, for whom the future will begin on 2 April. He will be researching whether or not it is possible to grow plants on the moon.

Will plants survive in Martian soil or moon dust? This question was initially prompted by Dutch plans to establish a colony on Mars. As the plan does not include a return trip, the basic necessities would have to be satisfied on location. “Mars is still a long way off,” says Wieger Wamelink, explaining his plans. “But the moon is closer, so it would be more realistic to establish a colony there. What’s more, we already know the mineral composition of the soil on the moon, and of moon dust. So what I’m aiming to find out now is whether plants will grow in moon substrate, or whether certain essential elements are lacking. This has never been done before. We are gradually discovering more about Mars, which is why the planet has been included in this research.”

Wamelink’s research will compare the requirements of certain species of plants with the mineral composition of the soil on the moon and Mars. Alterra has a database that can analyse 25 abiotic preconditions per species and calculate whether a plant species will survive or not. The database also stores information about heavy metals and minerals, although as yet, there are no fixed preconditions for these elements. Using this data, he will be able to determine which plant species would theoretically be capable of growing in moon dust or Martian soil.

Wieger Wamelink: “We will then allow certain species of wild plants and agricultural crops to germinate in pots of artificial moon and Martian soil supplied by NASA. The growth of these plants will be compared with that of the same species in ordinary soil from the Earth. Preconditions relating to heavy metals and minerals will be derived from our findings. Our research is based on the premise that an atmosphere will be available to the colony, perhaps in domes or buildings. We are also assuming the presence of water, either from the moon or Mars or transported from Earth. The plants would produce oxygen and recycle carbon dioxide, ultimately creating a kind of ecosystem.”

At a later stage, Wamelink also wants to look into the food safety of agricultural crops grown in human-made conditions on the moon in moon soil. The first trial crops will be planted in greenhouses on 2 April.

Tiger Cub: Ready for My Closeup

Camera traps are such a spectacular way to see animals in the wild without disturbing them.  Here’s the latest example.

The press release is from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS):

NEW YORK  (March 27, 2012) — A 4-5 month old tiger cub examines a remote camera last month in India’s Bhadra Tiger Reserve, a protected area where tiger numbers are increasing. The second camera can be seen in the background.

WCS conservationists, led by tiger expert Ullas Karanth, conduct annual surveys in the region, photographing and identifying individual tigers by their unique stripe pattern. WCS has been working in Bhadra Tiger Reserve since the late 1980′s. WCS’s partners led by DV Girish and other local conservationists have strongly pushed for increased protection in the reserve, and fought against forest exploitation, illegal settlements, and development projects that would have damaged the area.

Scientific data collected by WCS show that on account of conservation measures, prey numbers have doubled and tiger numbers are on the rise. Bhadra stands out as a model of tiger conservation success that affirms the value of the ‘source site’ strategy advocated by WCS for recovering wild tigers.