josh donlan | March 14, 2008Shifting Baselines' very own Jeremy Jackson was awarded the 11th Annual Roger Tory Peterson Medal presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The Harvard Museum initiated the award in 1997 to honor the pioneering naturalist and author of the classic Peterson Field Guide to Birds. Dr. Jackson joins an impressive list of past recipients that include E.O. Wilson, Jared Diamond, Bruce Babbitt, Peter Matthiessen, David Attenborough, and David Suzuki.
Dr. Jackson will deliver a lecture entitled Brave New Ocean on April 6th at 3pm at Harvard. For more information go to http://www.hmnh.…
jjacquet | March 14, 2008Young Mexicans have a warped view of what is 'normal' in the Gulf of California. This was first shown in a marvelous 2005 study on Rapidly shifting environmental baselines among fishers of the Gulf of California where the authors interviewed 108 fishermen.
Compared to young fishers, old fishers named five times as many species and four times as many fishing sites as once being abundant/productive but now depleted. Old fishers caught up to 25 times as many Gulf grouper as young fishers on their best ever fishing day.
Their results were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and a…
josh donlan | March 13, 2008We all would love to see a moose and its calf along the roadside, right? I woke up to one on my front deck last week. Well in Yellowstone National Park, your chances are better than ever. Moose may be smarter than you think though: they are using you and your car as a shield. Human shields.
University of Montana and Wildlife Conservation Society Biologist Joel Berger has been studying Yellowstone moose for decades, and he started noticing that moose were hanging out along roads a bit more than in the past. Why? To hide from grizzly bears. "We think they are doing it because they've figured…
jjacquet | March 12, 2008Q1: How do you skillfully publicize a mediocre movie?
Create a good story around it.
Q2: What lies at the heart of a good story?
A good source of tension or conflict.
Q3: Are preview screenings of a mediocre movie a good source of tension or conflict?
No.
Q4: Are preview screenings where you have to sign non-disclosure agreements a good source of tension or conflict?
Yes. Very good.
Q5: Would The New York Times be likely to cover preview screenings of a mediocre movie?
Only if the screenings had non-disclosure agreements required.
Q6: Does the evolution community take the bait every…
josh donlan | March 11, 2008You can now contribute to the study of climate change by reporting on the trees and plants in your backyard. Project BudBurst is a national field campaign for citizen scientists designed to engage the public in the collection of important climate change data based on the timing of leafing and flowering of trees and other plants. BudBurst participants take careful observations of the phenological events such as the first bud burst, first leafing, first flower, and seed or fruit dispersal of a diversity of trees and other plants, including weeds and ornamentals. Scientists can use this data to…
jjacquet | March 10, 2008Just yesterday, Stuart Sandin from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography wrote a piece for the San Diego Tribune on shifting baselines and our marine environment.
In older (but still worthy) news, this National Geographic piece explains that scientists estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers annually in oceans worldwide, and that up to 10 percent of coral reefs are threatened by sunscreen-induced bleaching. Of course, people only blow the alarm whistle on coral reefs after the reefs are already heavily degraded...
This is your coral. This is your coral on…
jjacquet | March 9, 2008This is the bottom line I've been waiting for. I've been sort of picking up this vibe with the advance word, but here it officially is--the film critic for the Orlando Sentinel reviewed Ben Stein's anti-evolution movie, "Expelled," and, bottom line, said:
"It just isn't particularly funny."
That's all that matters. End of story. It's not entertainment. Film is first and foremost an entertainment medium. Anything on film that isn't entertaining is an attempt to drive a square peg into a round hole. Michael Moore's films are entertaining. "Super Size Me" is entertaining. "Flock of Dodos,"…
josh donlan | March 7, 2008You know what a natural stream looks like, right? The Yukon in northern Canada or the Onega in Russia come to mind. If you are like me, you are pondering images of a sinuous stream with meandering channels after meandering channels. Ever since scientists started studying fluvial geomorphology - the study of rivers - those meandering channels have become the backbone that defines a natural stream.
Last month, two scientists from Franklin and Marshall College rocked the [river] boat with a paper in Science Magazine. They present a slew of evidence that suggests our view of a natural stream is a…
jjacquet | March 7, 2008Lost, derelict fishing gear as old as 60 years continues to 'ghost fish' and kill lots of marine life across Washington State's Puget Sound all for the sake of nobody. At the American Fisheries Society meeting of the North Pacific International Chapter I attended this week, Ginny Broadhurst the Northwest Straits Initiative spoke on a great project working to remove this web of derelict fishing gear from the waters of Puget Sound. So far, the group has recovered 1286 derelict crab pots and 679 nets. Most of the nets they find are gill nets, which drift and kill fish and other animals until…
josh donlan | March 6, 2008A new study by Wildlife Conservation Society chronicles the disappearance of white-tailed jack rabbits from the Yellowstone ecosystem. The scary part is that the bunnies have disappeared from Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks - those treasures set aside to "preserve, protect, and share natural heritage legacies" - with few people even noticing! Historical records for over 130 years show that the jack rabbits were abundant (and apparently reproducing like rabbits). The last confirmed sighting in Yellowstone was 1991.
The disappearance remains a mystery. "It could be disease, extreme…
josh donlan | March 5, 2008Everyone has a bad Monday every now and then, right? Here's one for you: at 7a.m. spilled an entire cappuccino on my laptop and at 7p.m. I hit some black ice on the highway and rolled (and totaled) my truck. That is what I call a rough Monday...but what a banner, no?
Carl Buell is one of the most sought after paleo-artists. He brings life to fossils. Been looking for a ground sloth painting for your living room? Carl Buell is your man. Carl and I first crossed paths back in 2004. If you start researching scientific illustrators that specialize in ecological history, it doesn't take long to…
jjacquet | March 4, 2008Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Crochet Hook--that's the title of an article in today's New York Times on how the Wertheim sisters are recreating an environmental version of the AIDS quilt. So far, their cochet coral reef spans over 3,000 square feet. Check out more photos of their woolly reef here.
josh donlan | March 2, 2008I'm lying. But here I am blogging on Shifting Baselines. Over the past six years or so, I've spent a decent part of my energy thinking and writing about ecological history and its role in biodiversity conservation and society. That thinking and writing has included proposals that toy with the idea of bringing lions and elephants back to North America. Bring Back the Megafauna! a group of us proclaimed. To no surprise, our proclamation was met with gasps and groans (more about that later). When not pondering bringing the big stuff back, I spend much of my time restoring islands around the…
jjacquet | March 1, 2008You might have noticed the new face here at Shifting Baselines along with the new banner (more on that soon) and, in just a little while, lots of new content. Just one month shy of Shifting Baselines' one year anniversary at SEED's ScienceBlogs, we're branching out--expanding our blogging team and the application of the shifting baselines syndrome.
Dr. Josh Donlan joins the blog with an expertise in altered terrestrial ecosystems and a penchant for all things Pleistocene. Don't worry, ocean lovers, Josh also knows a thing or two about the marine environment. In fact, I first met Josh when…
jjacquet | February 29, 2008NPR has a great story today about what happened in one Nevada neighborhood after new suburbanites complained about an old neighborhood resident--a braying donkey named Gambler. Gambler was shipped out of town and his 4-acre pasture might now be sub-divided into two lots to make way for more development.
Complaints of animal noise are becoming increasingly common across the U.S. as urban sprawl encroaches on rural neighborhoods that have traditionally had a few horses, chickens, and even a donkey in their midst. In nuisance cases, the law will acknowledge only 'reasonable' complaints--but…
jjacquet | February 28, 2008Holy moly! Check out this article in the New York Times reporting on a study that shows today 1 in every 100 Americans are behind bars (the overall number of prisoners has tripled since 1987).
jjacquet | February 28, 2008Norwegian scientists have just unearthed another pliosaur fossil and this one is the largest on record. This Jurassic sea reptile measures 50 ft. and its jaws were strong enough to "to pick up a small car in its jaws and bite it in half." How about that for a baseline? Read more about this great sea reptile and look at cool fossil photos at the BBC.
jjacquet | February 27, 2008Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
As this Wall Street Journal piece points out, Rep. Wayne Gilchrest's primary loss two weeks ago accelerated the decline of another endangered species: the Moderate Republican.
Organizations like the Club for Growth, which raised and spent over $1 million for Gilchrest's primary opponent, have aggressively targeted what they refer to as "RINO's" (Republicans In Name Only), with the explicit goal being to run them out of the party.
The result is an increasingly uni-polar Republican party that brooks no dissent from party orthodoxy, rather than…
jjacquet | February 27, 2008Andy Revkin also has a great blogpost at the New York Times on Our Exhausted Oceans. With opposition to aquaculture by many scientists as well as support for more marine protected areas, Revkin asks where we think seafood will come from in the future? My own answer: If we're smart, we'll eat like pigs--lower on the marine food web taking fewer of these small tasty fish out of the sea to feed to farmed fish, chicken, and pigs.
jjacquet | February 25, 2008Three shifting baselines to note today:
1) An article in today's New York Times by Andrew Revkin discusses how "scientists are setting baselines to gauge future effects on the seas." The article is a nice summary of some of the latest attempts to document the decline in ocean health even if it's not brimming with lots of new facts. This example Revkin cites is a perfect shifting baseline:
In the 1970s, I worked summers for the Rhode Island marine fisheries agency. At one point, I was tagging lobsters as part of an effort to find ways to revive depleted populations. A crusty old custodian in…