jjacquet | April 3, 2008The green issue of Vanity Fair is out again this year (along with a barrage of other green issues of magazines) and the Board of Directors for Oceana is featured in the Green Heroes section, including my advisor and inventor of the term 'shifting baselines' Dr. Daniel Pauly (4th from the left)!
It's easy being green. What's hard is effecting real change. Here are the activists, agitators, scientists, and superstars who are fighting for us all.
jjacquet | April 3, 2008It took mammals and reptiles over two weeks on a raft of floating vegetation and a stroke of luck before they reached the Galapagos Islands. For Homo sapiens, it requires ~$400 (from Quito) and a few hours before arriving at the Galapagos airport.
From there, a boat tour is assuredly the best way to island-hop through Darwin's laboratory. If you have a bit more time than money, wait until arriving in the Galapagos to book your tour. This way you can explore the island of Santa Cruz (a launching point for most boat tours) and, in your downtime, meander into the numerous travel agencies on…
josh donlan | April 1, 2008Avocados and Osage Oranges only make sense in the light of megafauna. That is because American gomphotheres (related to elephants) and ground sloths ate and dispersed those large-seeded fruits. While those megafauna went extinct around 10,000 years ago, many large-seeded plants in the Americas are still around today. If those plants once relied on those large creatures to disperse their seeds, why have they not gone they way of the dispersers? Three ecologists have gotten us one step closer to understanding why.
In a paper published in the open-access journal PLOS One, Drs. Guimarães,…
jjacquet | April 1, 2008Imagine a verdant eight hectares of native Galapagos plants and a misty overlook of a bay dotted with boats.
Imagine fresh lemons, oranges, grapefruit, papaya, pineapple, guava, passionfruit. Imagine yuca, sweet potatoes, corn, beans. lettuce, carrots, beets, radishes, and tomatoes. Then imagine losing half of this crop to Galapagos bugs and birds. Imagine trading bananas for locally-caught fish.
Imagine fresh eggs. Fresh water. Fresh coffee. Fresh compost, including human waste. And an $8 bill for electricity.
This is the life for Scott Henderson (Regional Director of Marine Conservation…
jjacquet | March 31, 2008Jason Ensler, Hollywood director and co-founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project, released a short film he made on living locally in a digital age. The film spotlights NPR correspondent and now goat-herder Doug Fine and is a segue to Fine's latest book Farewell My Subaru--a disclosure of Fine's mistakes during his first year of going green. Watch the beautiful little piece here (or at BoingBoing).
p.s. For more on green living, check back here tomorrow.
josh donlan | March 30, 2008The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that 25-30% of plant species will be extinct or endangered in the next century. Any way you cut it - that is a very bad thing. Many of those plant species will be crops - food we eat. Some of you may have caught the announcement of the "Doomsday Vault" in the news recently: a vault located 600 miles south of the North Pole on a Swedish Island designed to safeguard seeds from climate change, wars, and other on-coming disasters.
The icy island of Spitsbergen is home to about 2,000 miners and researchers. In a few years, it will be also…
josh donlan | March 30, 2008Spring is in the air. And birds are starting to show up in America and elsewhere from their wintering grounds, gearing up to sing their little hearts out. Unfortunately, many of us are contributing to the decline of those birds by the food we choose to buy.
It is a complicated, globalized world these days. But, if you like those birds singing at your windowsill in spring, you may want to modify your grocery list.
In today's New York Times, Bridget Stutchbury wonderfully articulates the link between our food shopping habits and birds dropping dead left and right. And more importantly, what we…
jjacquet | March 28, 2008A chain of undersea volcanoes
Rumbled and then rose
Erupted on the equator
And thousands of years later
We call the islands Galapagos.
Birds flew in and built their nests
On shores sea lions came to rest
Reptiles by way of floating plants
Sharks and rays swam through by chance
And us. But we are merely guests.
Like Darwin we should go explore
But unlike him, not on the shore.
The underwater world waits
With fish, seahorses, nudibranches,
Corals, whales, sharks and more.
Because from fire these islands were born
Fumeroles the bottom adorn
These bubbles seep from the seascape
As volcano's…
jjacquet | March 27, 2008There are 19 species of seabirds that spend a portion of their lives in the Galapagos Islands and one seems a very unlikely resident. The Galapagos penguin, Speniscus mendiculus, is the only penguin to live as far north as the equator.
Speniscus mendiculus is most likely a descendant of the Humboldt penguin, brought north to the islands on the Humboldt current that travels from Antarctic waters up South America's west coast. The Humboldt Current converges with two other warmer currents making Galapagos the epicenter of the underwater confluence.
The third smallest of the penguin family, the…
jjacquet | March 27, 2008Call them Pavlov's fish: Scientists are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by swimming into a net when they hear a tone that signals feeding time. If it works, the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage to be harvested when they hear the signal.
Check out the full story at the CBC.
This particular experiment might seem harmless fun setting fish out to pasture, in the big picture, does evoke the rapid, large-scale domestication of marine species that has occurred…
josh donlan | March 26, 2008The Pew Environment Group and the Conserve Our Ocean Legacy Campaign just launched the new online game Ocean Survivor. It is designed to draw attention to the perils of overfishing and provide people with an opportunity to sign a petition to make a difference.
josh donlan | March 25, 2008Thanks to everyone who participated in the short survey - all 286 of you. Below shows the percentage of folks that were in favor of reintroducing our case studies under a scientific framework. Interesting indeed, although one person made the comment that the questions were slightly loaded to encourage positive responses. Perhaps the questions did unintentionally prime the respondents toward a positive response. Nonetheless, I find the results interesting. (See Dan Ariely's great new book Predictably Irrational on some very interesting science on priming and other facets of behavioral…
jjacquet | March 24, 2008As the folks behind Science Debate 2008 continue to push for a broader voice for the science world, David Sloan Wilson is probing into a similar issue with his column on the Huffington Post. He's asking whether the HuffPost should have an entire section dedicated to science. We think so. If you do, too, then register your vote with him.
jjacquet | March 24, 2008I should have added this one to the Galapagos drama that has occurred over the past year: this albino whale shark was spotted last September off the northern island of Darwin. Seeing is believing. Check it out:
josh donlan | March 23, 2008spending money on your friends and strangers? According to new research published in Science, spending money on other people has a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. This may come to a surprise to some, but makes perfect sense to others.
Given that we are creatures of reciprocity and live our lives not in absolute terms but in relative ones - both spending less money and spending it on others seems a reasonable path to increased happiness. Ethicist Jonathon Haidt has written a length about such dilemmas in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. There are important…
josh donlan | March 21, 2008Now this is some pretty interesting research. Here's the punch-line: Lap dancers earn more when they are fertile.
Because ScienceBlogs readers may be unfamiliar with the gentlemen's club sub-culture, some background may be necessary to understand why this is an novel setting for understanding real-world attractiveness effects of human female estrus.
Given that estrus - the outward signs of female ovulation - is concealed in humans, it is commonly thought that men cannot detect when women are fertile. Think again.
This theory is based on the idea that in evolutionary terms it benefits women…
josh donlan | March 19, 2008Ok, I would really like people to weigh in on this one. Jennifer is in the Galapagos, so I figured I might as well write about them. And what better topic to write about than rewilding the Galapagos. Here's the scenario: the Galapagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation has spent the last 8 years or so removing feral goat and pig populations from a suite of the islands. I was the Science and Conservation Advisor for this massive project which was a huge success. One of the islands we restored was Pinta Island, where we removed a couple thousand goats. The island is now free of non…
jjacquet | March 18, 2008Well, I'm back in the Galapagos Islands for a couple weeks. The last time I was here was May 2007 and a lot has happened in the last 10 months (i.e., humans, including myself, continue to stamp their footprints all over this delicate archipelago). First off, Galapagos tourism continues to grow like a cancer. In the early 1980s fewer than 15,000 tourists visited Galapagos. Last year, 160,000 visitors came to the islands.
It's really hard to get a handle on tourism given how lucrative it is. Just two weeks ago, the head of the Galapagos National Park was removed from power after a two year…
josh donlan | March 17, 2008So I think this is the first-ever Shifting Baselines survey. I hope you're keen, and I hope you will forward the survey to friends and colleagues far and wide.
Here's a bit of background.
In 2005, my colleagues and I published a paper proposing that we should consider reintroducing large animals - megafauna - back to North America. Large animals around today that could potentially act as analogs to the animals that were present in North America some 10,000 years ago. North America once had multiple species of giant tortoises, horses, camels, and - brace yourself - elephants and lions. Closely…
josh donlan | March 16, 2008Last summer, one million square miles of Arctic Ocean melted. The Arctic icecap is half the size that it was 50 years ago. The Northwest Passage is now a reality, and territory and resource claims are starting to show up at the United Nations. While the UN has rejected all Arctic claims, things are heating up in the north in more ways than one. Russian iceabreakers, submarines, and bombers are lingering around. Canadian icebreakers have joined them. Ironically (and uncharacteristically), the US is on the sidelines of this new, emerging arms race for Arctic resources and shipping shortcuts.…