BBC News

"Ig Nobel" feelings of not-so-intense jealousy.

September 18, 2018

Ignoble. ig-no-ble. /ig’ nōbel/. Adjective.

1. not honourable in character or purpose.

“ignoble feelings of intense jealousy”

synonyms: dishonourable, unworthy, base, shameful, contemptible, despicable, dastardly, vile, degenerate, shabby, sordid, mean.

2. of humble origin or social status.

“ignoble savages”

Ig Nobel. An elegant, grand and most noble prize, a take on the Nobel Prize, but a lot more fun. And with more laughs.

It’s a science award — after a fashion — designed to make you laugh and then afterwards, and only afterwards, think. Laughter is not only the best medicine: Nine out of 10 leading scientists say it also makes you think harder.

Or maybe not.

The science, truth be told, isn’t in on that part yet. Sounds reasonable, though.

The 28th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony (2018) was held over the weekend at Harvard University, and the winners were in good form. Humble origin, check. Low social status, check — at least, when compared to that annual soirée in Oslo, Norway. Or is it Stockholm?

And if the losers — excuse me, “non-recipients” (it’s an honour just to be nominated!) — harboured any “ignoble feelings of intense jealousy,” they were dignified enough not to show it. The ignoble savages behaved themselves, for the most part, right up to the part where Wilfrid Laurier assistant professor Lindie Hanyu Liang — a teacher of “organizational behaviour and resource management” at Laurier’s Lazaridis School of Business and Economics in WEaterloo, Ont. — won the grand prize for her groundbreaking research on how angry employees can use voodoo dolls to get even with abusive bosses.

“We were really excited to hear we had won,” Liang said, with characteristic humility and understatement — so much so that onlookers were willing to overlook her use of the royal ‘we.’ Unless, by that, she meant her team of underlings and staffers. Assistants to the assistant professor, if you will.

And to be recognized in such a competitive field of finalists, too!

“Our work manipulating the psychological state of retaliation is really novel and can pave the way for future researchers,” Liang added.

There you have it, then. The next time you confront your abusive boss, feel free to poke away with a sharp needle, and then cite research as your excuse. Hey, it works for the Japanese whaling fleet.

“We’re trying to understand why people retaliate against abusive bosses,” Liang continued. “We found that, with voodoo dolls, people feel they’ve restored their sense of justice.”

According to their study, Righting a Wrong: Retaliation on a Voodoo Doll Symbolizing an Abusive Supervisor Restores Justice (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104898431730276X), published in the February issue of Leadership Quarterly, Liang and fellow researchers asked participants to recall an abusive workplace interaction. Some participants were asked to harm an online voodoo doll using the materials provided (pins, pliers, etc.), while others weren’t given that option. “Those who hurt the voodoo doll felt a greater sense of justice than those who did not,” the release found.

Even so,, Liang is hesitant to recommend that people use voodoo dolls.

“Employees retaliate because there’s mistreatment going on in the workplace,” she said in a statement. “Instead of punishing people who retaliate against their bosses, the focus should be on the leader’s behaviour.”

Oh, like, that’ll work.

But enough about bad bosses and voodoo dolls.

Other leaps of the imagination jumped to the fore at this year’s ceremony, all in the name of weird science.

The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) as a way to recognize real, actual science, just not the kind you’d expect to learn about in Oslo or Stockholm. The presentation itself may be silly at times, but the science of the prizewinning research is legit.

Adding to the occasion, the prizes are awarded in person by a group of “genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel laureates” — this, according to the Ig Nobel’s official website (https://www.improbable.com/ig/2018/)

BBC News thought enough of the event that it assigned its senior science correspondent, Pallab Ghosh, to the ceremony.

The Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine went to researchers from Michigan State University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, who found that riding a really, really dangerous roller-coaster is an effective — if ill-advised— way to pass kidney stones. (Don’t laugh: This actually happened when Michigan State professor Dr. David Wartinger, a urologist, assessed a patient who returned from a vacation to Walt Disney World in Florida, complaining that a spin on the theme park’s Big Thunder Mountain ride gave him a lot more than he bargained for.

Prof. Wartinger was intrigued. He pursued the research further, going so far as to build a silicone model of his patient’s renal system, complete with artfiical kidney stones and scale-sized models of theme park rides.

Prof. Wartinger discovered through his research that Big Thunder Mountain is more effective than similar yet scarier rides (because of their prolonged drops) such as Space Mountain and Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster. Prof. Wartinger found that Big Mountain boasts more side-to-side and up-and-down movements that “rattle” the rider, rather than long, steep drops that simply scare the living bejesus out of one.

But wait, there’s more.

Other awards went to British researcher James Cole, who won the Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition for a study that found that good old-fashioned cannibalism is not as nutritious as you might think, copmpared weith other kinds of meat — one imagines the researcher intoning, much like a self-important network-TV news anchor, “We looked into it, and what we found might surprise you.”

(Don’t be alarmed: This wasn’t part of some industry study to come up with a cost-effective alternative source of protein, but rather a look at the dietary habits of early humankind, which branches of early humans survived or died, and why._

Prize winners will have their research published in the Annals of Improbable Research, which is a little like the journal Nature, only not really.

The evening went quickly by all acounts — more quickly than those tedious Hollywood ceremonies like the Oscars and the Emmys.

That’s in part because the award winners were told they had 60 seconds, and no longer, to deliver an acceptance speech.

The time limit was strictly enforced by an eight-year-old girl who was instructed to say, “Please stop — I’m bored,” over and over again, until the speaker stopped.

Perhaps Hollywood could take the cue.

After all, you know what they say: Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

https://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2018

‘But we should not give up:’ elegy for a white rhino named Sudan.

March 22, 2018

Much of the world may not care, but make no mistake: The planet shed a tear when the last known male northern white rhino died this week.

“The world’s last surviving northern white rhino has died after months of poor health, his carers say,” BBC News reported under the heading Northern white rhino: Last male Sudan dies in Kenya.

Sudan, who was 45, lived at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. He was put down Monday after age-related complications worsened to the point where his carers decided he was in significant pain and unlikely to recover.

Sudan had lived at Safari Park Dvür Králové in the Czech Republic until 2009, when he was repatriated to his ancestral home in the arid thorn-bush scrublands of northern Kenya.

Dvür Králové is the only zoo in the world where northern white rhinos have successfully given birth, but here’s the catch: The last calf was born in 2000.

©Ami Vitale/National Geographic Creative

Sudan’s death leaves just two females, his daughter and granddaughter, of the subspecies.

There are five species of rhinos, of which the white rhino is the largest. There are two subspecies: The southern white rhino, which is native to South Africa and neighbouring countries, is at risk but not yet critically endangered. (Wild populations outside South Africa are hard to ascertain, but it’s believed southern white rhinos may already have vanished from several southern African countries, owing to a recent spike in poaching driven by the insatiable demand for rhino horn in Asian countries.)

“His death is a cruel symbol of human disregard for nature and it saddened everyone who knew him,” Jan Stejskal, an official with Dvür Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic’s Labe (Elbe) river valley region of Bohemia, told the AFP news agency, as reported on BBC News’ main website Tuesday.

“But we should not give up.”

An elegy — a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead — might not seem appropriate for an animal, but as anyone who has spent time around animals knows, they’re sentient beings, capable of emotion and, in many cases, the ability to feel pain and know sadness.

What’s telling about the outpouring of sentiment on social media, from those who saw him on a day-to-day basis at Ol Pejeta and by those who barely knew him, except from wildlife films and photo essays in nature periodicals, is how raw and open the emotional wounds are — at least, among those care about about species extinction and somehow finding the right balance between Nature and a fast-growing human population.

It may not be easy to remember now, but northern white rhinos were actually quite widespread, as recently as the 1970s and ‘80s. They ranged from Uganda and Kenya in East Africa to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Central African Republic (CAR) in central Africa, to Chad in northern Africa, and to Sudan itself, after which Sudan was named (obviously). A poaching epidemic in the mid- to late 1980s for both rhino horn and elephant tusks proved catastrophic for one species and near-catastrophic for the other, all to service the demand for use in traditional Chinese medicines and the quaint notion that ground rhino horn is both an aphrodisiac and a cure for cancer. (Spoiler alert: It’s neither.)

Rhino horn was also used for dagger handles in Yemen; it’s hard to assess, given the present turmoil in Yemen, exactly how much demand remains for dagger handles.

The World Wildlife Fund declared the northern white rhino extinct in the wild in 2008.

Even the mere idea that an iconic species like a rhino that could still be found in the Congo as recently as the early 2000s should be virtually extinct by 2018 should be cause for alarm, but it clearly isn’t — not when a recently U.S. administration can look at a melting polar ice cap and put it down to a Chinese hoax. The only Chinese hoax is the insistence that rhino horn is a cure for cancer.

(To be fair, China has become politically active in the past year on the issue of climate change and in species extinction, in no small part because many Chinese cities are on the verge of being unliveable, due to air pollution and wild swings in the weather. The current U.S. administration, on the other hand, remains bereft of ideas and unwilling to accept that there’s even a problem.)

Sudan was 45 — or 90 in human terms — when he was put down by veterinarians. He was being treated for degenerative deterioration to his muscles and bones, and was unable to stand. He also suffered from extended bruising and skin wounds. Putting him down was the humane thing to do.

Sudan’s genetic material has been collected and stored, in the hope that science might one day find a way to clone extinct animals from DNA. Rhino IVF (in vitro fertilization) is relatively untested and is considered both an invasive and radical procedure. And expensive. Geneticists, conservationists, veterinarians and wildlife biologists put the price as high as USD $10 million.

Then again, some might argue — and they have a case — that no price is too high where species extinction is concerned, especially a species as familiar and symbolic as a rhino.

https://www.nation.co.ke/news/Sudan-northern-white-rhino-death-Ol-Pejeta-Laikipia-lessons/1056-4350838-4mq77dz/index.html

Botswana bites back: Trophy hunting boosts poaching, not other way round.

March 20, 2018

One of the perils of growing old, the respected novelist and essayist Paul Theroux wrote in his Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, is hearing the same old arguments over and over again from younger people who believe they were the first to think fo that argument.

To anyone on the ground with a working knowledge of the campaign to save endangered wildlife, a wearily familiar — and thoroughly discredited — old saw goes like this:

Trophy hunting is good for conservation, because it generates much-needed revenue to finance anti-poaching efforts.

It’s quite all right for a fat American dentist to shoot Cecil the Lion for the trophy wall, because the fee and costs he paid will go toward saving other lions.

Leaving aside the fact that in all probability not one Zimbabwe dollar — or American dollar for that matter — was ploughed back into lion conservation, it’s a bogus argument from top to bottom. The licence fee for a trophy bull elephant in Zimbabwe is USD $20,000; that same fee for an elephant in South Africa with tusks weighing over 50 lbs. is USD $50,000, not counting mandatory daily safari costs and the official daily rate per hunter and attendant trackers and camp staff.

Here’s where common sense trumps the financial-incentive argument, though — common sense over common cents, if you will.

An elephant shot for its ivory, or to be mounted on the wall of the family den back in the good state of Minnesota, or wherever, is a one-off in terms of revenue, even if that revenue was being put back into conservation, which it isn’t.

Tourism, though — much maligned by trophy hunters as a pastime for weaklings, losers and snowflakes — generates income, and jobs, day after day, for as long as the animal(s) in question stays alive in the wild.

That fat American dentist got his money’s worth out of Cecil the lion — arguably — but who knows how much money would still be generated today, right now, if Cecil were still alive, still there to show off his pride to tourists willing to pay USD $500 a night in some cases for the privilege of staying in a lodge within driving distance of lion territory. Botswana is the most expensive travel destination in Africa by far, in part because, unlike Kenya, Tanzania and even South Africa, Botswana’s national government made a conscious decision to cater to an elite few who can afford the exorbitant cost of a safari in the Okavango Delta, Chobe National Park and Moremi Game Reserve. in the theory that small numbers of well-paying visitors leave less of an imprint on a fragile environment than a mob of backpackers flocking to the Amboseli, Maasai Mara and Serengeti on the cheap, in East Africa.

Even in the Mara, though, where many of the local area conservancies are owned, managed and maintained by local Maasai stakeholders, even high-volume tourism is preferable to letting fat American dentists shoot every lion they see, no matter how high a licence fee they may be willing to pay.

That’s why Botswana President Ian Khama’s announcement late last week that Donald Trump’s decision to reverse his proposed ban on the import of big-game trophies, such as lions and elephants, will encourage more poaching, not less.

The reason legal hunting encourages illegal hunting doesn’t have so much to do with hunting itself as it does the market. Legal trophy hunting boosts the demand for legitimate ivory and lion trophies, which in turn feeds the market for illegal hunting. Since hardly anyone — not even a forensic pathologist or wildlife biologist — can tell the difference between legal ivory and that which has been harvested illegally, it doesn’t much matter where it came from, since no one can prove it anyway.

Only by closing down the market can the demand be controlled and eventually eliminated entirely.

And there’s no better way to shut down a market than to ban the importation of whatever it is people are trying to import, where it’s a lion head, elephant tusks or Bolivian marching powder.

If a fat American dentist shoots a trophy lion, but is unable to take that trophy home to show off to his friends and brag about what a He-Man he is, he’s unlikely to want to shoot that lion in the first place, especially at those prices ($25,000+, not including travel costs and mandatory daily fees and camp costs, not to mention tips for the staff).

Khama, speaking this past weekend at an anti-poaching summit in Kasane, Botswana, pointed out that Botswana banned hunting entirely some time ago, but that it is still legal in countries like Tanzania, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. (Hunting has also been banned in Kenya, which has on occasion fed cross-border tensions between Kenya and neighbouring Tanzania,)

Khama said Trump’s overturning the US ban on the import of hunting trophies would only fuel poaching in his home country of Botswana. There has been a dramatic spike in poaching across Africa over the past 18 months, driven almost wholly by insatiable demand in Southeast Asia, China and, yes, the U.S. for elephant ivory and rhino horn.

Khama didn’t stop at trophy hunting, where Trump was concerned. He told the BBC that he was concerned about Trump’s “attitude toward the whole planet,” not just the import of hunting trophies.

The situation facing elephants is grave, despite the worldwide campaign by environmentalists, ecologists, conservationists, wildlife biologists and ordinary, everyday working people who want their children and grandchildren to possibly be able to see an elephant in the wild one day. Mike Chase, director of the conservation agency Elephants Without Borders, said at that same conference that he believes the worst of the poaching crisis is not yet over.

Botswana aside, Chase told delegates, “The political will to address these issues is not there, unfortunately.

“It has been in Botswana. And if our neighbours can learn from Botswana’s example, it will go a long way toward addressing this crisis.”

Despite the old, discredited argument that trophy hunting aids conservation efforts financially, the bottom line remains the bottom line: A lion or elephant is worth more alive, in terms of jobs, income and education opportunities to local communities in rural Africa, than it is dead.

Even a fat American dentist should be able to figure that out.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/campaigns/GiantsClub/donald-trump-encouraging-poachers-a8260776.html

Ami Vitale: In a world of 7 billion people, our fate is inextricably linked with that of nature.

March 13, 2018

One of the world’s leading international news agencies features a weekly thread on its website titled, “World sport: 10 photos we liked this week.”
It sounds generic — and it is — but it reminded me of how so often of how I find my favourite nature photographers. Often they are cameramen and women I’ve never heard of before. I end up stumbling over one of their images — I’m a restless reader, and constantly curious — and am moved and inspired for reasons I can’t quite pin down.

Photography — not just the taking of photographs, but being appreciative of other people’s work as a consumer — is subjective. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve come across the winner of a high-profile photography contest, and then seen the runners-up, and thought to myself: What were they thinking?

Nine times out of ten, I see a runner-up that, to my eye, is so much more revealing and emotionally stirring than the one the judges picked that I’m at a loss for words. Who’s to say one image is “better” than another, anyway? It comes down to personal taste, an instant reaction followed by a gut feeling and a dawning realization that one has just witnessed greatness, a seminal moment captured in time forevermore.

So often, when I think of “10 photos we liked this week,” I think of a single image, and then an entire portfolio of images by that photographer, once I check that person’s website, their past work and present work.

I’d be terrible at editing a “10 photos we liked this week” list because, inevitably, my list would feature 10 photos by the same photographer.

And this past week, that photographer was Ami Vitale.

I came across a web article by BBC News picture editor Phil Coomes, ‘Ami Vitale: A life devoted to photography’

http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-43329546

and was immediately reminded of an image I had glimpsed briefly once before, while editing a blog item on this year’s World Press Photo Awards. Her picture of a ranger bonding with an orphaned baby elephant at the small, community-based Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya had just been nominated in the environment category for this year’s awards. (The winners will be announced on April 12th in Amsterdam, followed by an exhibition at the World Press Photo Festival on April 13th and 14th.)

I read the piece by Phil Coomes, and Vitale struck a recurring chord in me. My own background is hard news — I came to nature photography in early retirement from daily journalism — and I was struck how Vitale started out as an intern at a small newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina in the early 1990s, around the time I started to cover municipal news in my local big-city newspaper-of-record. Vitale quit her job in North Carolina to pursue her dream of being a foreign correspondent; I, too, briefly entertained ambitions of one day being a foreign correspondent, early in my career. The difference is Vitale took a leap of faith and took the jump. She did a brief spell at a newspaper in the Czech Republic, then found herself covering the conflict in Kosovo.

One of my first media interviews at the time was with CNN’s London-based correspondent and anchor Christiane Amanpour, who had made her own reputation covering the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1998.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/contributors/v/photographer-ami-vitale/

This is actually quite common for high-profile conservation and wildlife photographers. South Africa’s Brent Stirton, current holder of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award — sponsored by London’s Natural History Museum and the largest and most influential wildlife photo competition of its kind in the world — began his career as a photojournalist covering famine, genocide and political upheavals in conflict zones throughout his home continent of Africa. Stirton won numerous prizes, including several citations from the United Nations for a long-term project he did based on the social, economic and political instability caused by the HIV-AIDS epidemic sweeping across Africa and the developing world at the time. Several years ago, in 2007, while covering an outbreak of violence in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), he took a stirring image of a dead mountain gorilla being hauled out of its rainforest home by park rangers, and vowed to become a conservation photographer for the remainder of his career with a camera.

http://infocus.gettyimages.com/post/brent-stirton-the-photo-i-took-that-meant-the-most-to-me#.WqgwEoIh14Y

It’s no coincidence that Stirton, Steve Winter, Cristina Mittermeier — and Vitale herself — have done some of their finest, most stirring work for National Geographic. As Vitale told BBC’s Coomes, she learned over time that she wanted to work on stories that bring people together and reflect life beyond the latest headline.

“The thing that struck me,” Vitale told Coomes, “after witnessing so much conflict and violence in my career is that every single issue I covered, whether it was war or poverty or health, always ended up being dependent on nature for its outcomes.”

Coomes’ interview with Vitale brought me in a roundabout way to her website (amivitale.com), and her striking portfolios of ‘Pandas Gone Wild’ (soon to be a book, Panda Love: The Secret Lives of Pandas); ‘Montana Ranching Redefined’ (the state Vitale now calls home); ‘Kenya’s Last Rhinos,’ ‘Kashmir: Paths to Peace,’ ‘Coffee and Ethiopia,’ ‘Budapest Baths,’ ‘The Cost of Coal,’ ‘Gujarat,’ ’Cappadocia’ and ‘Israeli Palestinian Conflict.’

If asked right now to pick “10 photos I liked this week,” I’m afraid all 10 would be Vitale’s, as I only now devoted the better part of an hour poring through her images on her website. They’re, in a word, stunning.

The word is getting out. She will appear as a featured speaker this weekend (March 17) at The Photography Show in Birmingham in the UK, and is scheduled to talk as one of the featured NatGeo photographers in the National Geographic Live series, in Kitchener, Ontario on April 26th; Buffalo, NY on May 8th; and San Jose, Calif. the following night, on May 9th.

“The world is a beautiful place and we need to celebrate the goodness,” Vitale said in a TED Talk in Shanghai, two years ago. “It’s everywhere.”

‘The sheer size of what we were looking at took our breath away.’ Now for the hard part — keeping it that way.

March 07, 2018

Hearing of that super-colony of Antarctic penguins spotted from space, I immediately thought about The Lost World.

Not the part about how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s band of Victorian explorers discovered a lost world of dinosaurs and early humans hidden on a towering mountain plateau in the jungles of Venezuela, but rather the part about how, having stumbled over a find of extraordinary and rare beauty, they weighed whether or not to tell the outside world.

Late last week, the journal Scientific Reports announced the discovery of a previously unknown “super-colony” of Adélie penguins in the east Antarctic peninsular.

The find was dramatic, the “how” somewhat less so.

The colony numbers more than 1.5 million birds, a sizeable number by any reckoning, but especially in the facts-challenged world of 2018.

The penguins were spotted living among and around a rocky archipelago in east Antarctica known as the Danger Islands — aptly named, as it turns out — after gargantuan patches of their guano appeared in images taken by the US Landsat satellite.

This was one satellite picture of the polar regions that wasn’t all about the melting ice cap. For that reason alone, it immediately caused a stir.

Researchers used a computer algorithm to scan images for signs of possible penguin activity. The scientists were genuinely surprised by the scale of their find, as University of Oxford researcher and science team-member Dr. Tom Hart told BBC News.

“It’s a classic case of finding something where no one really looked,” Hart told BBC. “The Danger Islands are hard to reach, so people didn’t really try that hard.”

As Heather Lynch, a researcher with Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, told BBC.

“The sheer size of what we were looking at took our breath away,” she said. “We thought, ‘Wow, if what we’re seeing is true, these are going to be some of the largest Adélie penguin colonies in the world, and it’s going to be well worth our while sending in an expedition to count them properly.’”

Knowing how many penguins there are is one thing.

Ensuring their survival for future generations — future generations of people, as well as penguins — is another entirely.

The discovery will only truly mean something if a long-proposed marine protected area is signed into international law, a super-protected area, if you will, for the super-colony of penguins, and other Antarctic species.

It’s a big deal because, continent-wide, Adélie penguin populations have fallen by more than 65% in just the past 25 years, according to some estimates.

Just in the last seven years, thousands of chicks died in an unexplained mass die-off of chicks and stillbirths in the west Antarctic peninsular.

Some conservationists are concerned that the discovery will lead people to think that the Antarctic isn’t in so much trouble, after all.

To most people’s minds, endangered animals are either endangered or they aren’t. Mid- and long-term factors like habitat loss caused by climate change, which manifests itself in the form of warmer, more acidic waters, loss of sea ice and mass die-offs of krill, plankton and other micro-organisms that underpin the entire ecosystem, are harder to weigh in the mind than waking up one morning to learn that all the penguins have suddenly disappeared.

The Danger Islands lie in an area of the Weddell Sea that has yet to feel the effects of climate change the way other parts of Antarctica have.

That doesn’t mean the Adélie penguins, all 1.5 million of them, are out of danger, though.

As conservation writer Lucy Siegle noted this past weekend in the UK Sunday Observer, “Enthusiasm for this (discovery) needs to translate into a legally enforceable marine protected area, so that the penguins, left undisturbed for 60 years, remain that way.”

It was Einstein, after all, who said that whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/adelie-penguins-colonies-discovered-antarctica-environment/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/12/penguin-catastrophe-leads-to-demands-for-protection-in-east-antarctica

World Pangolin Day: a rallying cry for the world’s most trafficked mammal.

February 16, 2018

Today, Saturday, is World Pangolin Day. Little is known about the animal dubbed “the world’s most trafficked mammal” except that it physically resembles an anteater, does not do well in captivity and is over-hunted throughout its range in Africa and Asia.

It’s hunted both for its meat — pangolin is one of the most sought-after types of bush meat — and for its scales, which local healers believe to be a potent and powerful source of traditional medicine.

The pangolin faces the same parade of threats that confront so much of Africa and Asia’s wildlife: Deforestation, climate change and illegal hunting, much of it for the restaurant trade in China and Vietnam, where pangolin is considered a delicacy. More than a million pangolins are believed to have perished in the past decade alone, according to some estimates.

‘Estimate’ is the key word here because so little is known about their habits, Pangolins are nocturnal and largely solitary — they meet only to mate — and give birth to just one offspring at a time.

They have weak eyesight and rely on a keen sense of hearing and sense of smell to survive. They’re picky eaters and subsist on ants and termites, but only certain types. They will eat just one or two species of insects, even when many species are available to them, this, according to a 2015 study by the University of Wisconsin.

When threatened, they curl into a tight ball, using their scales for protection; the name ‘pangolin’ comes from the Malay word pengguling, which means “one who rolls up.”

There is poaching, and then there is annihilation.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) officially lists the eight known species of pangolin on its Red List of Threatened Species as “Critically Endangered” but that only tells half the story.

There’s a war going on, and pangolins are fast falling victim to the numbers game.

More than 10,000 kg (11 soft tons) of illegally traded pangolin meet were seized from a Chinese ship that ran aground in the Philippines in 2013.

An Indonesian man was arrested in 2016 after police raided his home and found nearly 700 pangolins in freezers on his property, according to news reports from the Associated Press and BBC News.

More recently, in October last year, more than 100 pangolins were rescued alive after an anti-smuggling raid on a fishing boat off the east coast of Sumatra, as reported at the time by National Geographic.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) notes smugglers have changed their habits in recent years.

Whereas before they used large, freeze-controlled shipping containers on container ships that could only be accommodated by major seaports, they’re now turning to smaller shipments of live pangolins on small fishing boats that tack from one small port to another, making them that much harder to trace and apprehend.

And all this, because so many people in China and southern Asia believe the pangolin — about the size of a domestic cat — can treat stomach cramps, aid lactation and is a potential cure for cancer.

Screen Shot 2018-02-16 at 12.32.20 PM.png

Some believe pangolin soup — “pangolin fetus soup,” to be precise — enhances virility and helps reverse impotency, even though it goes without saying there’s no scientific evidence to back it up — any of it.

Even so, the scales from a single pangolin can command as much as USD $3,000 across China and Vietnam.

Quite apart from the ethical and moral considerations of species extinction through sheer ignorance and greed, scientists are particularly aggrieved over the pangolin’s plight because it’s genetically distinct from any other animal. It might look like an anteater, but it isn’t one. Despite its nickname, “scaly anteater,” the pangolin is its own separate, distinct species.

A plan to boost captive breeding in zoos, through a specially designed breeding program, may be doomed to failure, some critics say, because pangolins don’t fare well in captivity. They’re susceptible to common diseases like pneumonia, and often contract severe stomach ulcers — not helped by their picky their dietary habits.

All that said, there is some reason for hope. Small, grassroots conservation groups, working on the ground in wilderness areas of Africa where pangolins are known to live, have had some success. Maria Diekmann, director of the locally based conservancy Rare & Endangered Species Trust (http://www.restnamibia.org / http://restnamibia.org/sponsors.html ) in Outjo, Namibia has successfully raised a number of orphaned pangolins from a young age, the first time that is believed to have been done. REST researchers have recently outfitted adolescent pangolins with tracking devices and released them into the bush, to monitor and record their habits in the wild.

The more we learn about pangolins, Diekmann believes, the more chance there is of saving them.

World Pangolin Day is more than an empty cry for help. It’s a bid to raise awareness and galvanize people to action.

South Africa has some of the toughest legislation against wildlife trafficking in the world, for example. The fine for being caught in possession of a pangolin can be as high as USD $700,000 and 10 years’ imprisonment.

Enforcement is another matter, though. There have been few actual convictions to date.

World Pangolin Day can only help get the message out. It may not be a solution in itself, but it’s a start — one small step on the long road to redemption.

10 FACTS ABOUT THE PANGOLIN

(Source: Africa Geographic)

1. The hard, overlapping scales of the pangolin are made of keratin, the same substance found in our nails and hair. The scales continue to grow throughout its life.

2. The pangolin does not have teeth. Instead it uses a thick, strong and sticky tongue to catch its food. When extended, the pangolin’s tongue is longer than its head and body. It is attached at its pelvis and last pair of ribs, and the rest of it is stored in its chest cavity.

3. Their stomach has keratinous spines projecting into its interior. Small ingested stones accumulated in the stomach help to mash and grind food, in much the same manner as a bird’s gizzard.

4. Pangolins are capable swimmers. According to Save Pangolins (http://savepangolins.org), “while some pangolin species such as the African ground pangolin are completely terrestrial, others, such as the African tree pangolin are adept climbers, using their claws and semi-prehensile tails to grip bark and scale trees.”

5. When threatened, pangolins curl up into a tight ball. They may also emit a noxious acid from glands near their rear end.

6. The life cycle of a pangolin in the wild is largely unknown, as they are hard to study. Some pangolins are recorded have lived as long as 20 years in captivity.

7. Adult pangolins live solitary lives, rather than in pairs or families.

8. Pangolins are nocturnal — they come out at night, for the most part.

9. Pangolins eat insects, such as ants and termites, but are fussy in their eating habits, and focus on just one or two species, even when others are readily available. They can eat up to 70 million insects a year, according to some estimates. They have uniquely designed muscles that seal their nostrils and ears shut, protecting them from insects. They also have special muscles in their mouths which prevent ants and termites from escaping after capture.

10. Mother pangolins keep their young in burrows until they are old enough to ride on their mother’s back. The mother curls up snugly around the baby pangolin at night, or if she senses danger.

Winter is coming for the polar bear — and not in a good way.

February 04, 2018

“Polar bears require more food to survive than thought,” read Friday’s heading in Scientific American. CNN International’s take: “Polar bears face extinction faster than thought, study says.”

The New York Times’ told a similar story: “What Cameras on Polar Bears Show Us: It’s Tough out There.”

There’s more.

“Polar bear videos reveal impact of melting Arctic sea ice,” CBS News reported.

“Polar Bears Are Fighting For Survival as Melting Arctic Ice Cuts Off Their Only Food Source,” Newsweek’s heading warned.

“Polar Bears Really Are Starving Because of Global Warming, Study Shows,” was National Geographic’s take.

BBC News took a simpler route: “Polar bears ‘running out of food,’ study says."

Results of a study on a group of polar bears off Alaska’s Arctic coast were published late last week in the journal Science, and they make for grim reading, even aside from the technical jargon and sheer weight of detail, as scientific reports tend to be. ”Regional declines in polar bear (Ursus maritimus) populations have been attributed to changing sea ice conditions, but with limited information on the causative mechanisms. By simultaneously measuring field metabolic rates, daily activity patterns, body condition, and foraging success of polar bears moving on the spring sea ice, we found that high metabolic rates (1.6 times greater than previously assumed) coupled with low intake of fat-rich marine mammal prey resulted in an energy deficit for more than half of the bears examined.”

(Link to the original here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6375/568.full)

In more simple terms that anyone can understand, the 2,600-word final report can be summarized in a few basic highlight notes:

Arctic sea ice is melting faster than expected. Faster even than the most dire predictions.

Temperatures are wamwarminging more quickly in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet, for whatever reason.

Polar bears need seals for food, in order to survive.

The less sea ice there is, the harder it is for the bears to get at the seals.

The harder it is for bears to find seals, the more energy they expend looking for those seals. This is not rocket science.

The more energy they expend, the more food they need to survive.

The less food bears find, the less energy they have to hunt.

And so on.

Over time, the process speeds up rather than slows down. If bears are in trouble today — and they are — then by tomorrow they be gone entirely.

This isn’t hyperbole or alarmist claptrap designed to gin up donations to conservation organizations — it’s basic fact.

Charles Darwin’s landmark studies in species survival are often mistranslated as “Survival of the Fittest,” when in fact Darwin’s theory of evolution focused in the main on natural selection — a species' ability to adapt to a changing environment, rather than which individual species is best positioned to win a physical fight.

Polar bears could adapt to a life without sea ice and seals, given time. But they don’t have that time.

And eating out of garbage dumps in Churchill, Manitoba one month of the year isn’t going to cut it.

Polar bears are terrific swimmers — adaptability at work — but they’re not sea mammals. They’re not whales. In open water — i.e. the open ocean — they will drown.

They stay close to land in most cases, and need ice floes to climb onto and rest. If there are no ice floes — and in recent summers, Arctic sea ice has disappeared entirely and the Northwest Passage has opened up to regular sea traffic — they will drown as quickly as any grizzly or black bear that suddenly finds itself out at sea, with nowhere to swim to.

The study tracked nine female polar bears fitted with high-tech tracking collars and GPS cameras, as they foraged for food in the Beaufort Sea, off the coast of Alaska. The study was sponsored by the United States Geological Survey and conducted by researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz (UC-Santa Cruz) over the course of three consecutive springs, in 2014, 2015 and 2016 (https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/02/polar-bears.html).

The study follows on the heels of dramatic — and heartbreaking — video footage that went viral in early December, of a disoriented, starving polar bear in Canada’s far north. That video, taken by one-time biologist-turned-photographer and environmental activist Paul NIcklen, together with National Geographic lecturer and photojournalist Cristina Mittermeier, founders of the non-profit group Sea Legacy, shook ordinary, everyday people to the core, because it showed a tragedy-in-the-making in simple, stark, emotional terms that no peer-reviewed scientific study can. (Nicklen and Mittermeier’s work is easy to find; Nicklen, a former Wildlife Photographer of the Year and Mittermeier, an environmental photographer who specializes in indigenous cultures throughout the Americas and Pacific Region, have had their work exhibited in galleries around the world.)

The original video — warning: it’s not easy to watch — can be found by following the links from National Geographic’s main website (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/polar-bears-starve-melting-sea-ice-global-warming-study-beaufort-sea-environment/) reignited the debate about what’s happening to the world’s polar bears.

Since the polar bear is one of the most easily recognized and readily identifiable living beings on the planet, it highlights a basic, simple question anyone and everyone needs to be asking themselves:

If we can’t save an iconic species like the polar bear, what can we save? Food for thought, if not exactly food for the bears.

A note on the video links below: The first is a generic news item from earlier in the week from CNN International, about the USGS UC-Santa Cruz survey. The second is an 18-minute TED Talk Paul Nicklen gave in 2011. Yes, that’s years ago now but, if anything, it’s even more relevant today than then. It has everything you might expect from a TED Talk: a compelling story, a charismatic storyteller, and a real emotional punch at the end. Well worth seeing, and seeing all the way through.

Dolphin feeding study sheds new light on ocean conservation.

January 17, 2018

Olympic swimmers burn 12,000 calories a day during training. Dolphins burn nearly three times as many: 33,000, according to a new research study of common bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay, Florida.

That’s equivalent to 60 portions of salmon a day, or 10 to 25kg (22 to 55 lbs) of fish, just to survive.

Why does it matter? With climate change, discarded plastic and industrial pollution affecting the world’s oceans at an alarming — and growing — rate, researchers say it’s important to study the metabolic rates of whales and dolphins if we’re to learn exactly what’s going on in our oceans, and why. The blue planet depends on knowledge — actual scientific knowledge, not opinion or guesswork — if it is to survive.

This wasn’t some fly-by-night survey, either, but a proper scientific, peer-reviewed study sanctioned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Oceanographic Foundation in Spain and published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/1/171280

Calculating the nutritional health of an active sea mammal like a bottlenose dolphins is a complex mathematical equation that involves sea temperature, lung function and the number of calories a dolphin burns while diving, swimming, resting and sleeping during a 24-hour period.

Determining the exact diet and energy requirements of whales and dolphins is critical to conservation efforts, researchers such as Andreas Fahlman argue, in part because the future of the world’s oceans will depend on effective fisheries management.

The study’s results have already had an impact. Knowledge is power — the power to actually do something if, as a society, we have the will to do it.

“We can use this as a health check of various populations, and therefor the environment,” Fahlman said, as reported Wednesday by BBC News.

“If the dolphins are sick, there may be problems with the environment.”

First Nations coastal people and scientists who work the West Coast of Canada have been saying this for years about B.C.’s resident population of killer whales. Autopsies of marine mammals have showed increasing levels of toxins in their blood, leading scientists to conclude that coastal pollution is having a long-term and in many cases deadly effect on marine life, even — perhaps especially — apex predators at the top of the food chain.

Food for thought, as the critically acclaimed Blue Planet II prepares to make its Canadian and US TV debut this weekend.

Meet ‘Pongo tapanuliensis,’ the first new great ape to be identified in nearly 100 years.

November 03, 2017

The news that a new species of orangutan has been discovered — if “discovered” is quite the right word — is both wondrous and troubling.

Wondrous, because it reminds us that, even in 2017, seeming miracles can and do happen. It’s a reminder of both the resilience of nature and the fallibility of science and humankind, in that such a large mammal — and a primate species at that — can elude detection for so long.

Troubling, though, because yet another creature has been added to the IUCN list of Critically Endangered species, the official designation for animals that are not just in trouble but in serious trouble. Just 800 remain of the Tapanuli orangutan, as it’s being called. Tapanuli is the central rainforest region in Sumatra where those remaining apes cling to life, even as Indonesian developers — legal and illegal — are hidebound determined to burn their forest to the ground, all in the name of palm oil plantations.

But wait, it gets worse. Acting on the notion that what the world really needs is more hydroelectric power dams, Indonesia is in the process of constructing a monster dam that will finish the job the land developers have started, if they have their way.

Naturally, conservation groups, advocates for nature and assorted NGO’s are scrambling to save the rainforest by any means possible, but as the Amazon Basin has shown, petitions and public protests are no match for armed militias willing to burn, loot and murder to do their paymasters’ bidding. Corrupt politicians and land developers get their way every time, and so the Tapanuli orangutan faces uphill odds, even though it’s only now been identified as a separate species.

What constitutes a specific species, as opposed to a subspecies or distant cousin, is a technical branch of zoology, ably explained by National Geographic’s Jason Goldman in a story posted earlier this week. (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/new-orangutan-species-sumatra-borneo-indonesia-animals/)

The accompanying photos, by the way — a couple of which appear here — were taken by veteran primate photographer Tim Laman for National Geographic Creative, a digital branch of the National Geographic Society’s tree-of-life. Laman is not new to this: He won last year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award for his image of an orangutan climbing a tree towards his remote-controlled camera placed high in the sky, the rainforest spreading out below.

Scientists are cautious by nature. They’re not inclined to jump to conclusions until a new find has been subjected to peer review. The “discovery” is not technically new; the orangutans in question where first reported to exist following an expedition into the remote mountain forests of Sumatra in 1997. A research project devoted the intervening years to unlocking the apes’ genetic code, to determine whether or not the species was genetically different from the two species already known to exist, the Sumatran and Bornean orangutan.

This is unglamorous work, involving long hours of poring over electron microscopes and DNA-testing computers — not like tramping through virgin jungle in person, like a latter-day Professor Challenger in a post-modern update on Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lord World. The discovery is only coming to light now because the study, authored by researchers from University of Zurich and Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, in conjunction with the wildlife NGO Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (https://sumatranorangutan.org), published their work in the latest issue of the scientific journal Current Biology.

If the find is still determined to be true years and decades from now, the Tapanuli orangutan will go down in history as the first new great ape to be identified as such in nearly a century.

In the shorter term, though, the Tapanuli orangutan’s greatest contribution to conservation and the fight to preserve what remains of nature, will be that it has forced the plight of Indonesia’s rainforest — and rainforests in general — into the mainstream media, however briefly, from BBC World News to USA Today, from Radio New Zealand to the Hindustan Times, from The Independent to India Today.

In this case, all publicity is good publicity, where survival of a species is concerned.

As the study’s co-author, Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool’s John Moores University since 2012, told the BBC: “It’s . . . worrying, to discover something new and then immediately also realize that we have to focus all our efforts before we lose it.”

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen