Rewilding That Works : Shifting Baselines

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The Shifting Baselines Blog

Jennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses.
Josh Donlan is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.

Scientist turned filmmaker Randy Olson, founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is also a blog contributor.

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November 2008 Jennifer Jacquet is lead author of the study In hot soup: sharks captured in Ecuador's waters published in Environmental Sciences.

November 27, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Why Consumers Alone Can't Save Our Fish" at 1pm at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is co-author on a new paper titled Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles published in Biological Invasions.

August 2008: Jennifer Jacquet is co-author on a new paper titled Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-Scale Fisheries published in Conservation Biology.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Journal of Applied Ecology titled Diversity, invasive species, and extinctions in insular ecosystems.

July 26, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the East Coast at the Woods Hole Film Festival in MA.

July 24, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a talk on biodiversity offsets to The Alcoa Foundation and the Alcao Intalco Aluminum Plant in Bellingham, Washington.

July 22, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "A Way Forward in a Sea of Market Based Initiatives to Save Wild Fish" at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.

July 19, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the West Coast at Outfest in Hollywood, CA.

July 17, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "In Hot Soup: Shark's Captured in Ecuador's Waters" at the Society for Conservation Biology Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, TN.

July 9, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Flawed Data, Reef Fisheries, And Food Security: A Close Inspection Of Marine Fisheries Catches in Mozambique, Tanzania, Fiji, And The Solomon Islands" at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

June/July 2008: Josh Donlan attends training for his Kinship Conservation Fellowship in Bellingham, WA.

May 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Ambio titled High impact Conservation: Invasive Mammal Eradications from the Islands of Western Mexico.

May 15, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood at the Tyee.

April 2008: Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood by Jennifer Jacquet and Daniel Pauly is published in Marine Policy.

April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound:.

Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.

Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card

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Rewilding That Works

Category: New Research • Rewilding
Posted on: May 26, 2008 3:11 AM, by Josh Donlan

Back in 2005 when my colleagues and I proposed using closely related species to ecological replace extinct large North American animals, there were many who cried foul. Too risky, won't work, impossible to measure - were among the top of the list.

Danish ecologist Dennis Hansen and his colleagues just provided some data to suggest otherwise - at least on islands. Using giant tortoises from a nearby island to replace extinct tortoises on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, Dr. Hansen found that the tortoises increased the survivorship of a critically endangered plant by dispersing its seeds. When seeds of the endangered plant passed through the gut of a tortoises and was ultimately dispersed away from its mother plant, the seeds grew taller, had more leaves, and in general flourished more than seeds not consumed by tortoises.

By using a closely related species as an ecological analog, an important mutualism has been reunited on the Mauritius Islands: giant tortoises and island plants. The harsh critics of ecological analogs and Pleistocene Rewilding now have some solid data to chew on.

See Dr. Hansen's article in the recent issue of the journal PLOS-One.

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Comments

Excellent news. It seems like the slimest wedge of evidence but irrefutable and I hope it has longranging implications. And let's hope the tortoise, true to the fabled story, emerges with us all winning in the end. HOw are were the views from the rooftop of the world?

Posted by: doug l | May 27, 2008 12:04 PM

You can send a trackback whenever you link to one of the PLoS ONE papers...just sayin' ;-)

Posted by: Coturnix | May 27, 2008 4:56 PM

Cool stuff Josh...

Posted by: Pete Nelson | May 27, 2008 10:20 PM

I was one of the bazillion journalists who covered your rewilding article in Nature. At the time I was working for a classroom magazine publisher, and we got a mountain of mail from elementary school students who loved the idea.

Now that I'm at the Aquarium, I'm absorbed by oceans. Is there any talk of rewilding oceans? Or are oceans a completely different ballgame. Most of the biologists around here are concerned with getting rid of invasive species rather than introducing new species.

Posted by: Jives | May 30, 2008 6:28 AM

I'm absorbed by oceans. Is there any talk of rewilding oceans? Or are oceans a completely different ballgame.

Posted by: deeper voice | August 29, 2009 2:55 AM

Oh wow! What a cute creature. You should post more pics of it :)

Posted by: panic attack relief | September 18, 2009 6:17 AM

Is there any talk of rewilding oceans? Or are oceans a completely different ballgame

Posted by: miRC indir | September 25, 2009 11:59 PM

Or are oceans a completely different ballgame.

Posted by: Hosting | September 27, 2009 2:38 PM

this page I really like the news and articles and even I have my homework sometimes begeniyorum

Posted by: Termal Oteller Kaplıcalar | October 2, 2009 2:33 AM

Can you please upload more pictures?