Richard Conniff's Blog, page 89

Bird Species Discovered, and Promptly Marked for Drowning

Take a look, and hear it sing.

It’s relatively rare to find a new species of bird, like this one in Colombia.  But it’s apparent fate is not so rare.  Having been described for the first time in July, it’s already facing extinction with its habitat scheduled to be submerged by a new hydroelectric project.

Here’s the press release from the American Bird Conservancy:

(Washington, D.C., September 5, 2012) Celebrations over the discovery in Colombia of a new species of bird were short lived when it was revealed that much of its habitat – also the habitat for a threatened macaw – is in danger of being flooded by a new hydro-electric dam project.

The July edition of The Auk – a leading, peer-reviewed ornithology journal – announcing the discovery of the Antioquia Wren (Thryophilus sernai) in the Central Andes of Colombia, came one year into a seven-year construction project for what is to become the largest power station in the country. The nearly $5.5 billion, 738 foot tall Pescadero-Ituango hydroelectric dam will flood 15 square miles of habitat, drowning all six locations where the newly identified bird has been confirmed so far.

Of equal concern is the likely flooding by the dam of habitat for the last colony in the region of the threatened Military Macaw. This spectacular green, red, and turquoise parrot has scattered, sparse populations throughout Central and South America, including one colony 15 miles (25 km) upstream from the dam—well within area targeted for flooding.

“The timing of this discovery of a new species seemingly couldn’t have been worse, especially given the dam project has been in the pipeline for decades and just recently has gotten a green light. Despite the seriousness of the threat to these birds posed by this massive engineering project, here is still some hope to mitigate impacts to the birds,” said Benjamin Skolnik, Conservation Project Specialist for American Bird Conservancy, who oversees the organization’s conservation work in Colombia. “This region of Colombia is a world-class birding tourism destination, and the government understands how valuable birds are to the economy. This may help in the survival of the new wren and the macaw.”

One potential mitigation action that could be taken by the government to aid the new wren is the protection of non-flooded habitat upstream of the dam. If enough suitable habitat is protected as a new protected area, it may be possible to safeguard viable populations of the macaw and wren populations against loss to logging, cattle grazing, and agriculture. Detailed environmental impact studies should explore these possibilities as well as other measures to conserve remaining habitat.

Colombia is home to 1,890 bird species, over 100 of which are threatened globally and 70 of which are endemic to the country. Some of the key species that are threatened are the Santa Marta Parakeet, Dusky Starfrontlet, Gorgeted Puffleg, Chestnut-capped Piha, and Blue-billed Curassow. In addition, the country boasts extensive birding infrastructure such as reserves and lodges. ABC has worked with Fundación ProAves, a leading Colombian environmental group, to establish fourteen such reserves encompassing around 50,000 acres.

“Bird conservation efforts have a history of giving back to local communities for the long haul in a fashion that has been a win-win for all concerned. The conservation programs are helping to not only protect and rehabilitate the land and forests but they also provide improved habitat for birds and other wildlife that ultimately bring in tourism dollars. And we’ve demonstrated a variety of conservation and farming techniques that benefit wildlife while at the same time offer equal or even higher farming returns,” said Lina Daza Rojas, Executive Director from ProAves.

 

The new wren is predominantly brown and white, and differs from similar species in several ways, including, plumage coloration of the upper parts, the pattern of barring on the wings and tail, overall smaller body size, and unique vocalizations. It prefers patches of dry forest at 820-2,800 feet (250-850 meters) in elevation in the dry Cauca River Canyon, a narrow inter-Andean valley enclosed by the rainforests of the Nechí Refuge and the northern sectors of the Western and Central Andes of Colombia.

 

According to The Auk, the resultant flooding from the dam would lead to the loss of an important area for the conservation ofthenew wren, precisely in the sector with the least-disturbed dry forests of the region, and where other bird species of conservation concern occur. This new wren is presently known from six localities within an estimated total area of about 650 square miles (1,700 km2), and the extent and quality of its habitat are expected to decline. Thus, the species would be classified at least as “vulnerable” under IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List Criteria.

 

Make ‘Em Laugh

The  Guardian has an article about laughter, excerpted from Robert Provine’s book Curious Behavior, and this section about gender differences caught my eye:

On average, men are the best laugh getters. These differences are already present by the time joking first appears, around six years of age. Based on this evidence, it is no surprise that your school clown was probably a male, a worldwide pattern. Laughter is sexy. Women laughing at men are responding to more than their prowess in comedy. Women are attracted to men who make them laugh (ie, “have a good sense of humour”), and men like women who laugh in their presence.

The next time you are at a party, use laughter as a guide to what people really feel about each other – and you. Laughter is a particularly informative measure of relationships because it is largely unplanned, uncensored and hard to fake. Men and women mindlessly and predictably act out our species’ biological script. A man surrounded by attentive, laughing females is obviously doing something right, and he will comply by continuing to feed his admirers whatever triggers their laughter. Such good-humoured fellows don’t need a big supply of jokes – their charisma carries the day. Laughter is not, however, a win-win signal for males and females; if it is used carelessly, you can laugh your way out of a relationship or a job.

Repulsive? Oh, Susan, you must be joking

The asymmetrical power of laughter and comedy for men and women is noted by comedian Susan Prekel, who bemoans that men in her audience will “find me repulsive, at least as a sexual being”. In contrast, “male comics do very well with women”.

Personal ads provide a direct approach to the value of laughter, because people spell out their virtues and desires in black and white. Laughter and humour are highly valued in the sexual marketplace. In 3,745 personal ads published by heterosexual males and females in eight US national newspapers on 28 April 1996, men offered “sense of humour” (or “humorous”) and women requested it. Women couldn’t care less whether their ideal male partner laughs or not – they want a male who makes them laugh. Women sought humour more than twice as often as they offered it. The behavioural economics of such bids and offers is consistent with the finding that men are attracted to women who laugh in their presence. Without such a balance between bids and offers, there would be no market for laughter and humour, and the currency of these behaviours would decline.

The End of the Passenger Pigeon

Ninety-eight years ago today, what had once been the most abundant bird species in North America became extinct, when the last surviving Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Passenger pigeons flew in dense flocks, for protection from their many predators.  Cotton Mather once described a flock a mile wide that took hours to pass overhead.  But that same safety-in-numbers strategy made them vulnerable to hunting by humans, who easily slaughtered them with shotguns and nets, and shipped the carcasses by the boxcar load to the cities as cheap food.

Here’s John James Audubon’s description of passenger pigeon courtship behavior:

The male assumes a pompous demeanor, and follows the female, whether on the ground or on the branches, with spread tail and drooping wings, which it rubs against the part over which it is moving. The body is elevated, the throat swells, the eyes sparkle. He continues his notes, and now and then rises on the wing, and flies a few yards to approach the fugitive and timorous female. Like the domestic Pigeon and other species, they caress each other by billing, in which action, the bill of the one is introduced transversely into that of the other, and both parties alternately disgorge the contents of their crop by repeated efforts.

Green Heron Gone Fishin’

You must check out this ingenious green heron using bread as bait to catch fish.

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Watching the video, I was pretty sure the fish were just going to steal his bait, but hang on.

Green heron breed in my side yard, so a little oddly, I admit, this makes me feel parentally proud.

IT’$ NA$A AND IT KNOW$ IT

 

Hey, nice production values, as expected from NASA.  And it’s great that they can somehow make computer-bound robotics geeks look like the bomb.

 

Wish we could show a little of that love for explorers and naturalists who actually risk their lives in the cause of discovery here on Earth.

Hey, all you species seekers out there, think of it as a throwdown.  If you want to see just a shadow of those sweet NASA budgets, maybe it’s time to strut what you got, if you got it.

Or, you know, get your post-docs to do it for you.

Who Cares About Life on Other Planets?

Alien life form fantasy: Dude, it looks kinda like us

Another dumb piece of NASA propaganda appears on the New York Times op-ed page today, arguing that we really need to pour billions more into outer space.  I like exploration, which is why I wrote a book about it. 

But here’s my argument for protecting what we have here on Earth first:

You may have noticed the welter of headlines lately about planets outside our solar system dubbed “earth-like” or “potentially habitable,” orbiting in what astronomers call “the Goldilocks zone.”  That’s the elusive sweet spot close enough to a star to be not too hot and not too cold for life to begin.  Most of the recent announcements about these “exo-planets” are a product of the Kepler Telescope, launched by NASA in 2009 and credited, at last count, with having identified 139 wannabe Earths.

The excitement among scientists is understandable.  People have been wondering for centuries if there are planets like ours beyond this solar system.  Or, as it’s often phrased:  Are we alone in the universe?

Honestly, though, these stories mostly make me yearn for what the Book of Common Prayer calls “this fragile earth, our island home.”  As with the mothers who raise us, we tend to take her for granted.  Space exploration advocates have somehow persuaded us that it’s more exciting to look outward, and that finding any hint of life in outer space would be momentous, even down to the microbial level (also known as “exo-crud”). But even as NASA spends $50 million a year on astrobiology, plus $600 million so far on Kepler, we spend pennies to find the alien life forms we know live all around us here at home.

Alien life form reality: Doesn’t look at all like us, but actually lives here

By conservative estimates, about 80 percent of species here on Earth remain undescribed. Even biologists discovering new primates do so on a NASA publicist’s lunch budget, though these are creatures more astonishing than anything we will ever see in outer space.  We spend almost nothing even on identifying species that might keep us alive. The Pacific yew tree, for instance, was widely regarded as worthless—until it turned out to be the source of Taxol, a $1.7 billion-a-year drug that now routinely saves the lives of cancer victims.

The idea that finding intelligent life in outer space would somehow relieve our deep sense of being alone in the vastness of the universe also blithely overlooks the braininess all around us here on Earth—the way honeybees waggle-dance to map out of the location of a flower patch for their hive mates, or the idea that a border collie named Chaser can recognize words for more than 1000 objects.  For exo-planet types, the real value of studying how other species communicate, according to one scholarly journal, is to “de-provincialize” our thinking about how to communicate with extraterrestrials.

Though it’s not the fault of the Kepler scientists, the search for “habitable” planets is also tainted by the lunatic idea that humanity needs someplace to escape to when we reduce this planet to ashes. Physicist Stephen Hawking has argued for drastically increasing spending to find a way off this planet; he figures a quarter of one percent of the world’s annual gross domestic product would be a good start.  You might think it would be more practical to spend that money fixing big problems here on Earth like nuclear proliferation or climate change.  But Hawking makes that sound like a holding action.  “Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth,”  Hawking declared recently, “but to spread out into space.” One headline summed up his argument this way:  “Abandon Earth or Face Extinction.”

Will the Kepler discoveries actually improve our chances of escape?  That’s not the point of the program.  But that’s what the public thinks when scientists chatter about “earth-like” or “potentially habitable” exo-planets. NASA, with its instinct for marketing (and perhaps also with an eye to extending the Kepler budget) surely knows it.  Too much enthusiasm can, however, also hurt.  After being featured on the front page of The New York Times, one early Goldilocks contender, Gliese 581-g, turned out to be little more than a smudge on the lens, a fairy tale.  Other planets commonly get described as “potentially habitable” merely for being in the Goldilocks zone, though scientists lack basic details like whether there’s an atmosphere, how hot it gets, and even whether we are talking about setting foot on solid rock, or roiling gases.

Kepler 22-B is the celestial bolthole du jour, said to have a climate worthy of a shopping mall.  An astronomer has predictably dubbed it “a phenomenal discovery in the course of human history.”  But 22-b is also 600 light years away.  In human history terms, getting there would take 100 times longer than Homo sapiens has existed as a species.

“We have no evidence that any planet is habitable,” says MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager, a member of the Kepler team who has tried to tone down the exo-planet hype, “and we won’t have that evidence for a very long time.”

Even if Earth were to become “a lot less habitable than it is now,” she says, it would still be far easier to construct a livable space in the desert or under the ocean than on another planet.  It may be inspiring to think that “hundreds or a thousand years from now,” people may travel to other planetary systems.  But it won’t be because they need to.  “They’ll be traveling there in the interest of exploration.” Meanwhile, says Seager, “There is no Plan B.”

Abandon the Earth?  Giving up on our island home isn’t an alternative to extinction.

It’s a recipe for it.

“Ecosystem Services” is a Dangerous Idea

I recently posted a piece under the headline “Why Species Matter-Or Putting a Value on a Vulture.”  It cited an example in India, where the inadvertent destruction of vultures has produced an epidemic of stray dogs and rabies.  So I am obviously tempted by the idea of using “ecosystem services” as a way to get people to value the natural world.   But it also makes me uneasy.

This article by George Monbiot in The Guardian suggests why we should think more carefully about where this approach is taking us.   Monbiot is the founder of The Land is Ours campaign and author of Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, among other books.  He starts with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, attacking the farmer who first enclosed the common land for private use:  “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau would recognise this moment. Now it is not the land his impostors are enclosing, but the rest of the natural world. In many countries, especially the United Kingdom, nature is being valued and commodified so that it can be exchanged for cash.

The effort began in earnest under the last government. At a cost of £100,000, it commissioned a research company to produce a total annual price for England’s ecosystems. After taking the money, the company reported – with a certain understatement – that this exercise was “theoretically challenging to complete, and considered by some not to be a theoretically sound endeavour”. Some of the services provided by England’s ecosystems, it pointed out, “may in fact be infinite in value”.

This rare flash of common sense did nothing to discourage the current government from seeking first to put a price on nature, then to create a market in its disposal. The UK now has a natural capital committee, an Ecosystem Markets Task Force and an inspiring new lexicon. We don’t call it nature any more: now the proper term is “natural capital”. Natural processes have become “ecosystem services”, as they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests and river catchments are now “green infrastructure”, while biodiversity and habitats are “asset classes” within an “ecosystem market”. All of them will be assigned a price, all of them will become exchangeable.

The argument in favour of this approach is coherent and plausible. Business currently treats the natural world as if it is worth nothing. Pricing nature and incorporating that price into the cost of goods and services creates an economic incentive for its protection. It certainly appeals to both business and the self-hating state. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force speaks of “substantial potential growth in nature-related markets – in the order of billions of pounds globally”.

Commodification, economic growth, financial abstractions, corporate power: aren’t these the processes driving the world’s environmental crisis? Now we are told that to save the biosphere we need more of them.

Payments for ecosystem services look to me like the prelude to the greatest privatisation since Rousseau’s encloser first made an exclusive claim to the land. The government has already begun describing land owners as the “providers” of ecosystem services, as if they had created the rain and the hills and the rivers and the wildlife that inhabits them. They are to be paid for these services, either by the government or by “users”. It sounds like the plan for the NHS.

Land ownership since the time of the first impostor has involved the gradual accumulation of exclusive rights, which were seized from commoners. Payments for ecosystem services extend this encroachment by appointing the landlord as the owner and instigator of the wildlife, the water flow, the carbon cycle, the natural processes that were previously deemed to belong to everyone and no one.

But it doesn’t end there. Once a resource has been commodified, speculators and traders step in. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force now talks of “harnessing City financial expertise to assess the ways that these blended revenue streams and securitisations enhance the ROI [return on investment] of an environmental bond”. This gives you an idea of how far this process has gone – and of the gobbledegook it has begun to generate.

Already the government is developing the market for trading wildlife, by experimenting with what it calls biodiversity offsets. If a quarry company wants to destroy a rare meadow, for example, it can buy absolution by paying someone to create another somewhere else. The government warns that these offsets should be used only to compensate for “genuinely unavoidable damage” and “must not become a licence to destroy”. But once the principle is established and the market is functioning, for how long do you reckon that line will hold? Nature, under this system, will become as fungible as everything else.

Like other aspects of neoliberalism, the commodification of nature forestalls democratic choice. No longer will we be able to argue that an ecosystem or a landscape should be protected because it affords us wonder and delight; we’ll be told that its intrinsic value has already been calculated and, doubtless, that it turns out to be worth less than the other uses to which the land could be put. The market has spoken: end of debate.

All those messy, subjective matters, the motivating forces of democracy, will be resolved in a column of figures. Governments won’t need to regulate; the market will make the decisions that politicians have ducked. But trade is a fickle master, and unresponsive to anyone except those with the money. The costing and sale of nature represents another transfer of power to corporations and the very rich.

It diminishes us, it diminishes nature. By turning the natural world into a subsidiary of the corporate economy, it reasserts the biblical doctrine of dominion. It slices the biosphere into component commodities: already the government’s task force is talking of “unbundling” ecosystem services, a term borrowed from previous privatisations. This might make financial sense; it makes no ecological sense. The more we learn about the natural world, the more we discover that its functions cannot be safely disaggregated.

Rarely will the money to be made by protecting nature match the money to be made by destroying it. Nature offers low rates of return by comparison to other investments. If we allow the discussion to shift from values to value – from love to greed – we cede the natural world to the forces wrecking it. Pull up the stakes, fill in the ditch, we’re being conned again.

Do Dead People Have a Right to Bear Arms?

This is a bit outside my usual territory, but it is undeniably strange behavior.  Call it posthumous territoriality.  The web site Guns.com (also not on my usual reading list) reports on the nineteenth-century practice of deterring grave robbers by booby-trapping  coffins and cemeteries with heavy artillery.

The golden age of body thefts in the United States was just after the Civil War. From 1865 and 1890, the number of medical schools in the country increased by over 100%. These students needed cadavers to train their budding surgeons in anatomy and physiology. At this time, practically the only bodies available were those of condemned convicts. This led to a cottage industry in grave robbery for recent, fresh corpses. It was during this period that John Scott Harrison, the son of former President William Henry Harrison and the father of President Benjamin Harrison, was stolen and later found at a medical college in Cincinnati.

In 1878, a number of “Coffin Torpedoes” hit the market. One design by Phil Clover of Columbus, Ohio was for an abbreviated shotgun that rested just inside the coffin lid. Once the lid was raised, the gun would fire directly into the face of the violator, discharging a number of 36-caliber lead balls.

Another inventor, Thomas N Howell, perfected two different “Grave Torpedoes.” Each was more like a landmine than any firearm. Borrowing Civil War technology, Howell’s device weighed 8-pounds and carried a charge of more than .75-pound of black powder ignited by a percussion cap. Buried atop the coffin with a protective plate above the torpedo, if disturbed the metal plate would help serve as a shape charge directed right at the would-be grave robber. An advertisement for the weapon declared that it would allow one to, ““sleep well sweet angel, let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest, for above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo, ready to make minced meat of anyone who attempts to convey you to the pickling vat.”

In 1881 at least three men were killed when one such device ignited during a late night traipse through the cemeteries near Gann in Knox County, Ohio.

O.k., these were clearly businesses that took the Second Amendment right to bear arms seriously.  No doubt it was all about maintaining a well-regulated militia of the undead.

Why Species Matter–Or Putting a Value on a Vulture

Today’s New York Times reports on the epidemic of stray dogs and rabies in India, but neglects a key contributing factor:  The near extinction of vultures over the past 15 years.  I wrote about this unexpected connection in this piece which originally appeared on Yale Environment 360:

We live in what is paradoxically a great age of discovery and also of mass extinction. Astonishing new species turn up daily, as new roads and new technologies penetrate formerly remote habitats. And species also vanish forever, at what scientists estimate to be 100 to 1,000 times the normal rate of extinction.

Over the past few years, as I was working on a book about the history of species discovery, I often found myself coming back to a fundamental question: Why do species matter? That is, why should ordinary people care if scientists discover one species or pronounce the demise of another?

It may seem too obvious to need asking. In certain limited contexts, people clearly do care. We will go to great lengths to protect a boutique species like the giant panda, for instance. We also thrill to the possibility of finding the slightest microbial hint of life in outer space, hardly blinking when the U.S. government spends $7 billion a year largely for that purpose. Meanwhile, we spend pennies exploring the alien life forms that are all around us here on Earth.

Maybe it’s just human nature not to value — or even see — the thing that’s right in front of our faces. And maybe it’s also a failure of communication.

That is, scientists may need to explain their work on a far more basic level — not “Why do species matter?” but “Is food important to you?” or “Do you want your children to have effective medicines when they get sick?” or even “Do you like to breathe?”  None of these questions overstates the importance of species.

For instance, Prochlorococcus is an ocean-dwelling genus of cyanobacteria and among the most abundant life forms on Earth. Why should we care? Because it produces about 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe — and yet until an MIT microbiologist named Sally Chisholm discovered it in 1986, Prochlorococcus was unknown. We need to understand in short that our lives depend on species most of us have never heard of — species we otherwise tend to shrug off as obscure, trivial, even undesirable.

Vultures, for instance. When we cause a species to go into decline, we almost never know — and hardly even stop to think about — what we might be losing in the process. In truth, it may be hard to think about, because the cascading effects of our actions are sometimes freakishly distant from the original cause. So in India in the early 1990s, farmers began using the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac for the apparently worthy purpose of relieving pain and fever in their livestock. Unfortunately, vultures scavenging on livestock carcasses accumulated large quantities of the drug and promptly died of renal failure. Over a 14-year period, populations of three vulture species plummeted by between 96.8 and 99.9 percent.

Losing these efficient scavengers meant livestock carcasses often got left in the open to rot. It was one of those “ecosystem services” — manufacturing oxygen, soaking up carbon dioxide, preventing floods, taking out the garbage — that species generally provide unnoticed, until they stop. But the impacts went well beyond the stench, according to a 2008 article in Ecological Economics. Moving into the niche vacated by the vultures, feral dog populations boomed by up to 9 million animals over the same period. Dog bites and the incidence of rabies in humans also increased, and the authors conservatively estimated that an additional 48,000 people died during the 14-year period as a result. Calculating the bottom-line worth of what we get from the natural world is notoriously difficult. But even pricing lives at a fraction of developed world values, the near-total loss of three insignificant vulture species has so far cost India an estimated $24 billion.

A diversity of species can also help prevent the emergence of new diseases, though we tend to blame, rather than credit, nature for this particular ecosystem service. We sometimes respond to Lyme disease, for instance, by trying to kill the major players, blacklegged ticks and white-footed mice. But the “dilution effect,” proposed by Rick Ostfeld at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, suggests counterintuitively that having the broadest variety of host species in a habitat is a better way to limit disease. Some of those hosts will be ineffective, or even dead ends, at transmitting the infectious organism. So they dilute the effect and keep the disease organism from building up and spilling over to humans. But when we reduce biodiversity by breaking up the forest for our backyards, we accidentally favor the most effective host — in this case, the white-footed mouse. And we free the undiluted disease organism to operate at full strength.

The implications go well beyond Lyme disease. Around the world over the past half-century, researchers have tracked about 150 emerging infectious diseases, from Ebola to HIV, with 60 to 70 percent being zoonotic — that is, transmitted from animals to humans. “The question,” says Aaron Bernstein, a Harvard pediatrician and co-editor of the 2008 book Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, “is whether humans are doing something to make these zoonotic diseases come out of the woodwork.” Clearly, we are doing a lot of one particular thing — knocking down forests and creating species-poor habitats with no “dilution effect” in their place. Thus the fear is that many more such epidemics may lie ahead.

And yet the value of even big, charismatic species remains so poorly understood that a Rutgers University philosopher writing in The New York Times recently proposed gradually wiping out cruel carnivorous species and replacing them with gentle vegetarians. He was upset that lions do not lie down with lambs, except to eat them for dinner. And he was apparently oblivious to the larger cruelty called a trophic cascade: Loss of predators strips a habitat of its diversity and leaves behind the animal equivalent of the civil service, or what writer David Quammen has called “a pestilence of minor nibblers.”

For instance, in the rocky world between high and low tides on the Pacific Coast near Seattle, the food chain (or trophic community, from the Greek trophikos, or nourishment) consists of barnacles, limpets, chitins,  anemones, and particularly mussels. Starfish are the dominant predator. So mussels normally crowd up along the high tide line, where starfish are less likely to chomp them. In one study, a biologist removed the starfish to see what would happen. The mussels soon crept down toward deeper water, crowding out other species. Within a few years, only eight of the 15 original species still lived in that neighborhood. For all their apparent cruelty, killer species can be a means of fostering biodiversity.

So do individual species matter? Or is it just the diversity of species? The truth is that our understanding of the natural world is far too primitive for anyone to say one species is important, and another isn’t. In fact, scientists don’t even have names for most species; they’ve described only about 1.8 million of them, with an estimated 10 to 50 million still to go. So instead of waging pitched battles for individual species, conservationists in recent years have prudently tended to emphasize diversity, working to protect large swaths of habitat for a multitude of species. It’s the motorcycle mechanic’s approach to conservation, as articulated by Aldo Leopold: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

But that should not stop us from trumpeting the benefits to humanity from individual species that might otherwise get written off as worthless, or even as impediments to human progress. Some conservationists may cringe at the thought of cheapening the natural world by defending it in economic terms. But NASA manages to hold onto a sense of wonder about its mission while simultaneously touting the idea that space exploration can pay for itself in technology transfers to the civilian world. (There’s actually a NASA “spinoff coloring book.” It celebrates an outer space mirror-polishing technology now also used to make ice skates go “super fast!”) The difference is that the spinoff argument for exploring species here on Earth is far more persuasive.

The yew, for instance, was until recently a “trash tree,” says David J. Newman of the National Cancer Institute; he figures it was last valued around the time his ancestors used it to fashion bows for firing arrows at the Battle of Agincourt. But it’s now the source for taxol, relied on by tens of thousands of people as a life-saving treatment for breast, prostate, and ovarian cancers. Sales topped $1.6 billion last year. Likewise, no one ever marched to save the gila monsters, but their venom is the source of a new drug for people who resist conventional treatments for Type 2 diabetes, an epidemic disease now on track to affect more than a third of all Americans over their lifetimes.

In fact, the common idea that drug companies can cook up their medicines out of thin air through “rational drug design” in the laboratory is simply wrong. One recent study looked at more than 1,000 drugs approved worldwide over a 20-year period and found not one that was traceable to a totally synthetic source. Getting our ideas from species in the natural world is still the rule.

Likewise, wild species continue to be the mother lode of genetic material for making agricultural crops more productive, or more resistant to pests, disease, and drought. That kind of bio-prospecting is likely to become far more important over the next few years as biologists begin to explore the bacteria, fungi, and other microbial life forms that help plants do what they do. In fact, we will have little choice but to find smarter ways of exploiting the hidden resources of the natural world. If NASA in its glory years had a mission — to get to the moon in 10 years — biologists now have one, too: To sustain the species and habitat here on Earth that will be essential to providing food, medicine, and sanity as the human population grows to 9 billion people over the next 40 years.

There is one final argument for the value of species, and it has to do with beauty, biophilia, and a sense of the sacred. In the course of researching my book on species discovery, it seemed to me that one young 19th-century specialist in marine mollusks made the case most persuasively. In pursuit of new species along the coast of Alaska, naturalist William T. Dall experienced all the usual adventures, among them a long frigid trip in a sealskin dory across open water, trying to avoid being crushed by waves loaded with cakes of ice.

He gave his family an eloquent explanation of what motivated him, and by extrapolation most other species seekers: “There is a singular delight,” he wrote home in 1866, “in taking these delicate and almost microscopic animals and putting them under a strong glass, seeing the tiny heart beat, and blood circulate and gills expand, counting the muscles and blood vessels and almost the tiny disks that form the blood and to know that you are the first that has penetrated these mysteries and are perhaps the only one who ever will, and that all your notes and drawings and observations are so much solid knowledge added to the power and grace and beauty of the Infinite.”

Elephants and Ostracism

I like this account of elephant behavior from the New York Times “Scientist at Work” series.   Biologists used to scrupulously contend, despite the evidence in their own private conversations, that animals have no personality, no individuality.  Now scientists like O’Connell-Rodwell acknowledge that animals’ lives can be as messy and complex as our own:

The Darker Side of Elephant Country
By CAITLIN O’CONNELL-RODWELL

Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, who teaches at the Stanford University School of Medicine, writes from Etosha National Park in Namibia, where she is studying elephant societies.

Monday, July 23

Something ugly has arisen in elephant country. These animals are revered for their gentle nature, for their nurturing and for their reputation as sentient beings. But they can be just like humans when it comes to fighting over limited resources, and it is hard to watch. What we are experiencing with elephant family group behavior at Mushara conjures images of bad human behavior under a set of unique pressures and under conditions of great duress. In this bleak environment, with very little available water right now, elephant families are not only pitted against other families but also against each other.

I spent half the night worrying about Paula’s little baby, Bruce. Paula, a young female, is being ostracized by her family for reasons not easily discernible. And the more time this family spends at Mushara, the more horrified we have become with their behavior not only toward Paula, but also toward her calf. Having seen him get swatted by a preteen male, it struck me just how bad the situation must be for little Bruce.

Normally a fragile baby like this would be coddled by everyone in the family. One always thinks about the glory days of an elephant calf’s youth, growing up with caring mothers, watchful aunts and playful siblings and cousins. But the behavior of Mia and the Athlete family against Paula and her baby was deplorable. Each time Paula sought the comfort of the inner circle of the family, she was immediately pushed out by one of the other females. Paula was forced to the edge of the pan where Bruce bathed on his own, without the pleasure of other contemporaries to share in the experience. He splashed his trunk in play all by himself. There was one brief moment during the visit where another baby approached with a trunk-to-mouth greeting, but the encounter was short-lived as the other baby was ushered off.

In great contrast to this familial rejection, the family was able to unite under a different kind of crisis: a baby had fallen into the trough. Suddenly, the whole family was engaged, some panicking, running back and forth as they watched the baby swim, uncertain of what to do as its mother pushed others out of the way. Then, finally, the matriarch, Mia, knelt down and scooped the baby out with her trunk between its little hind legs. With the crisis averted, a large contingent gathered around to soothe the wee one. In that moment, I wondered what would have happened if it had been Paula’s baby that fell in. Would the family have rallied together in rescue, or would they have stood back and watched Paula handle the crisis on her own?

In other places in Africa, where poaching has caused a breakdown of family structure and the merging of unrelated females into makeshift groups, the kind of behavior that we have witnessed from this family toward Paula might make sense in the confusion of rebuilding family ties. But the elephants of Etosha National Park are fortunate enough not to have experienced such things. We have photo evidence that Paula has been in the Athlete family for at least the past five years, as long as we’ve known this family.

I can’t help wondering, after seeing the darker side of nature, if we might see the horrors of our own species more clearly by witnessing those of others. Can we take these opportunities to see a piece of ourselves in the mirror and recognize our own foibles? I couldn’t help being reminded of the fragility of our own social situations and the importance of friends and loved ones. This insight helped make observing the darker side of nature more bearable. But the more I watch, the more I hope for the ugliness of elephant country to subside.