Bluebird

got those middle school blues...

T’was the night before middle school and all thru the shack

Not a person was stirring ‘cept  for mom gone all whack.

The backpacks were weighted, and all primed to go

In hopes they’d be loaded with lunches just so.

 

The kids were akimbo, all tousled in bed

As visions of terror unleashed in their heads.

As Papa in pj’s spotted my panic

while wobbling there on the threshhold of manic.

 

While searching the web, an idea she sought

And found one, behold, oh wow, what a thought!

just let her be, and surely somehow

she’ll work it all out, so sleep well for now.

A single, well-stuffed bag

This would be our actual weekly bag of garbage, which I am proud to say is no small potatoes for a family of four. But it's also due to the fact that the city of Oakland equips each residence with more ample compost and recycling containers. The garbage receptacle is the smallest of the lot. While I do deduct a sneaky tactic to get us all on board, I've been composting/recycling for just about forever. In fact my mother made us wash aluminum foil in the 70s, much to my then shame. (It was not disimilar to my older siblings insist I listen to Procul Harem instead of the trendy Partridge Family popular with my peers.) From radio underground to garbage mainstream, I seem to have somehow traveled from these past decades. Especially strange considering how my neighbor stuffs her garbage bin to overflowing, often asking to partake of our underused bin--while recycling and composting nada. They are a foursome too. Sad to say, but who am I to tell her otherwise? Preferring a good relationship, I remain silently judgmental. I guess we cannot all evolve.

March 23, 2012, 11:03 AM

Ancient Hawaiians Caught More By Fishing Less

By DOUGLAS M. MAIN

Getty ImagesA school of manini fish pass over a coral reef in Hanauma Bay in Honolulu.

Centuries ago, Hawaiians caught three times more fish annually than scientists generally consider to be sustainable in modern times — and maintained this level of harvest for more than 400 years, researchers report in a new study in the journal Fish and Fisheries.

The findings could be instructive for agencies that enforce fishing limits in overfished waters around the globe.

Native Hawaiians caught about 50 percent more fish than modern fleets catch today in both Hawaii and the Florida Keys, the two largest reef ecosystems in the United States, said a co-author of the study, Loren McClenachan, a fisheries researcher at Colby College in Waterville, Me.

Hawaiians harvested about 15 metric tons of fish per square kilometer of reef annually from 1400 to 1800, the study found. That’s five times the median harvest in island nations worldwide today.

Dr. McClenachan and her co-author, John Kittinger, a researcher at theCenter for Ocean Solutions in Monterey, Calif., drew on a variety of historical records and a method called catch reconstruction to estimate historical harvests in the Hawaiian Islands and the Florida Keys.

The Hawaiians used many techniques similar to those employed today, like temporary or permanent bans from fishing in certain areas, restrictions on certain species and gear, and catch limits. But they enforced the rules strictly; breaking them could mean corporal punishment or even death.

While the authors obviously don’t advocate such extremes, penalties in some areas could be stricter, the authors suggested, and enforcement could improve. In Hawaii today, “you get penalized much more harshly if you shoplift sunglasses from a store than if you take a bunch of fish that are the wrong size or kind,” Dr. Kittinger said in an interview.

Dirk Zeller, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study, said that the conclusion makes sense: Hawaiians were able to maintain such high levels because their fishing activities were so well managed and focused on a wide variety of different species, he said. They also left well enough alone, regularly outlawing fishing in spawning grounds and other areas to allow populations to regenerate, Dr. Zeller said.

The two places studied tell very different stories. As historians have documented, native Hawaiians employed a carefully controlled community-based system of regulations on fishing. Rules were passed down by oral tradition and recorded when missionaries introduced printing presses to the islands in the early 1800’s, Dr. Kittinger said.

In the Florida Keys, however, where intensive fishing didn’t take off until the mid-19th century, there have been fewer regulations and a repeating pattern of overfishing of one species for sale on global markets followed by a crash in that fish population and a switch to a new species. This cycle has severely depleted green turtles, sponges, sawfish and other creatures.

Now reefs in both places are overfished — “and there are less fish coming off the reef then back in the day,” Dr. Kittinger said.

Given that enforcement agencies are often underfinanced, he said, they might do better to devise a bottom-up approach. That is already happening in some areas, where officials have adopted co-management schemes with community groups that help draft rules and regulations.

Most productive reefs in long-ago Hawaii had community managers who knew a reef well and made rules unique to their own neck of the ocean, Dr. Kittinger noted.

The researchers reconstructed historical harvest levels by calculating the amount of fish consumption per capita necessary to maintain estimated population levels in Hawaii over the last 700 years. Dr. Kittinger said the results are conservative because he and his colleague used the low end of anthropologists’ population estimates in their calculations.

While some may question the use of such historical data, Daniel Pauly a researcher at the University of British Columbia, said that such information is probably just as accurate as current harvest estimates. One can estimate the catch of an isolated society like Hawaii by using population rates, which can be inferred quite reliably by anthropologists, said Dr. Pauly, who was not involved in the study.

Dr. Zeller suggested that the study shows “that we must learn from the past to save the future.”

If more marine reserves were established and limits were firmly imposed on fishing, he said, the fishing industry could actually catch more fish while making less of an effort.

But the blame should not be assigned solely to regulatory agencies, Dr. Pauly said. “We moderns cannot stomach restrictions on fishing that are necessary to maintain the stocks,” he said.

 

March 13, 2012, 9:59 PM

In Africa’s Vanishing Forests, the Benefits of Bamboo

By TINA ROSENBERG

 

In the district of Asosa, the land is thick with bamboo.   People plant it and manage the forests. They rely on its soil-grabbing roots to stabilize steep slopes and riverbanks, cutting erosion. They harvest it to burn for fuel, to make into charcoal sticks to sell to city dwellers and to build furniture.

Asosa is not in China, not even in Asia.    It is a district in the west of Ethiopia, on the Sudanese border.   To many people, bamboo means China.   But it’s not just panda food — mountain gorillas in Rwanda also live on bamboo.   About 4 percent of Africa’s forest cover is bamboo.

Soon it may be much more.  Bamboo may provide a solution to a very serious problem:  deforestation.  In sub-Saharan Africa, 70 percent of the people cook their meals over wood fires.  The very poorest cut down trees for cooking fuel; those slightly less poor buy charcoal  made from wood in those same forests.  Every year Africa loses forest cover equal to the size of Switzerland.  Terence Sunderland, a senior scientist at the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research, said that in southern Africa, even trees that can be used for fine carving, such as ebony and rosewood, are being cut down and made into charcoal.

Deforestation starts a vicious circle of drought and environmental decline.   Burning wood releases the carbon stored inside.   And deforestation accounts for at least a fifth of all carbon emissions globally.  As tree cover vanishes, the land dries out and the soil erodes and becomes barren — a major reason for Ethiopia’s periodic famines.

Reliance on hardwood fuel poses more present dangers as well.   It’s a woman’s job to collect firewood, and when trees are scarce, women must walk farther and farther to find it, an often dangerous journey.

Much cooking, moreover, is done indoors.  The resulting air pollution kills some two million people a year. Almost half the deaths are from pneumonia in children under 5.  Bamboo and charcoal made from bamboo burn more efficiently and cleanly than wood and wood charcoal

Sunderland is talking to several southern African governments about bamboo.  Farther north, the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan, a membership organization of 38 countries based in Beijing, is providing technical support for growing and using bamboo in Ghana and Ethiopia.

InbarHundimo Dedere owns and manages a plantation of African highland bamboo in Southern Ethiopia that was used as a model for modern bamboo cultivation and management training.

How does bamboo improve on hardwood?  Cut down a hardwood tree and it’s gone.  It will take several decades for another to grow in its place; it can take a century for a forest to grow back after cutting. But bamboo is a grass, not a tree.  Under the right conditions, it can grow a full meter a day — you can literally watch it grow.   It is also fast maturing.   A new bamboo plant is mature enough to harvest after three to six years, depending on the species.   Most important, bamboo is renewable.   Unlike hardwood trees, bamboo regrows after harvesting, just as grass regrows after cutting.  After it is mature, bamboo can be harvested every single year for the life of the plant.

Bamboo has other advantages.  Its roots grab onto soil and hold it fast.   Plant bamboo on a steep slope or riverbank and it prevents mudslides and erosion.  And bamboo is parsimonious with Africa’s most precious resource:  water.

“In Africa you want everything,” said Dr. Chin Ong, a retired professor of environmental science at the University of Nottingham in England, who was formerly a senior scientist at the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi.  “You want firewood, you want to reduce erosion, to maintain the water supply, generate cash and employment.   Bamboo comes the closest — it gives you the most things.”

The need for firewood is now critical in Ethiopia; trees covered 35 percent of the country a century ago; by 2000 they covered just 3 percent.   Ethiopia is trying to reverse deforestation by planting trees, and it lags behind only China and India in sheer numbers — in 2007 alone the country planted 700 million trees.   But even a huge, continuing campaign may not be enough to reverse deforestation.  It has been a problem wherever people settled in Ethiopia.   The country’s capital had to be moved five times since the first century B.C., because any concentration of people quickly ran out of firewood. In the 1890s the problem was solved by importing eucalyptus from Australia — a tree that, like bamboo, is renewable.    The first plantations were around Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s new capital, which at times has gone by the name Eucalyptopolis.

But while eucalyptus trees provide a renewable source of wood, they starve other trees and plants of water, and rob water from rivers and reservoirs.  They gobble so much water that they are sometimes planted for the purpose of draining swamps.  By 1913, the government issued a proclamation ordering the destruction of all eucalyptus trees.   It was ignored.

InbarIn Ghana, Chinese experts taught a local man how to use bamboo charcoal and energy efficient stoves.

In the last five years or so, Ong said, Ethiopia has realized that bamboo is a more profitable and greener solution. INBAR’s programis a four-year project financed by the European Commission and the Common Fund for Commodities, a United Nations organization.  The technology comes from China. The project provides bamboo seedlings and trains people to manage bamboo plantations.    It teaches villagers to build kilns to make charcoal, which they can sell to city dwellers (rural people in Ethiopia and Ghana can’t afford charcoal.  They burn wood. )   The program also promotes bamboo as fuel, and has helped village women to set up businesses making and selling a stove with a closed chamber that uses half the fuel of an open fire. In Ethiopia, the stove, locally made of iron and clay, costs only $3.

Coosje Hoogendoorn, INBAR’s director-general, said that while people in Ghana are slower to embrace bamboo because they can still find firewood,  Ethiopians need no convincing — there are hardly any trees left to cut down.

Bamboo is not the perfect plant.   Although the kinds of bamboo that grow in Africa are not invasive — some varieties that grow in cooler climates are — it can be very difficult to get rid of the networks of roots when the plant is no longer wanted.    While bamboo can tolerate dry conditions, like any plant it will grow more slowly with less water, and it cannot grow in desert climates — exactly where it is needed most.   And most bamboo is hollow, which means it burns more quickly than hardwood.  Fortunately, bamboo that grows in Africa’s lowlands is one of the few solid bamboo species.

Because bamboo requires few nutrients, it can grow in soil inhospitable to other plants — not only does it thrive there, it can reclaim the land so other plants can thrive, too.  Its roots leach heavy metals from the soil, hold the soil together and draw water closer to the surface.   One example is a project in Allahabad, India, to reclaim land whose topsoil had been depleted by the brick industry.  In 1996, an INBAR project planted the land with bamboo.  Five years later, villagers could farm the land again.   Dust storms — a local scourge — were greatly reduced.   The bamboo also helped raise the water table by seven meters.   In 2007, the project won the global Alcan Prize for Sustainability.

Charcoal, of course, is not the only thing that can be made of bamboo.  Its tensile strength makes it a good construction material, and it is also used for furniture, flooring and textiles, among other things.   Paradoxically, harvesting bamboo to make durable goods is greener than not harvesting bamboo.  Here’s why: bamboo culms — the poles — do not live as long as hardwood trees, usually up to a decade. When an old culm decays, it releases carbon into the atmosphere. (The root system, which hold 30 to 40 percent of its carbon, last much longer.) This means that an untouched bamboo forest is a poor carbon sink.    Fortunately, the best way to turn bamboo into an excellent carbon sink is to make money with it — harvest the bamboo to make durable products before it starts its decay. Treated bamboo flooring or furniture will last as long as wood, storing its carbon the whole time.

In some ways, the challenge in Africa is not to introduce bamboo, but to persuade people and governments that it has commercial uses.  “We’ve taken policymakers from Africa to China and India where bamboo used in everyday life — and there’s still very poor adoption,” said Ong.   In some countries, for example, Kenya, making charcoal is illegal — a well-intentioned ban that seeks to prevent deforestation, but one that is impractical as long as people need to find their own cooking fuel.   “It is not effective to ban charcoal production,” said Jolanda Jonkhart, the director of trade and development programs at INBAR.  “It is more effective to promote charcoal production with renewable biomass sources such as bamboo.”

---

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book is “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.”

 

The umbrella was originally invented to protect people from the hot sun...

Indeed a brilliant multi-tasking invention, especially on a day like today.  It's been coming down at a steady pace all day long. No boot camp for me. I am a weenie for sure.

 

 

 



Snow Fleas in the UP

March 12, 2012, 7:38 PM

When Snow Fleas Surface, Winter Study Comes to a Close

By JOHN VUCETICH

John VucetichWolves in the Chippewa Harbor Pack.

John Vucetich, a wildlife ecologist from Michigan Technological University, leads the wolf-moose Winter Study at Isle Royale National Park.

Saturday, March 3

Snow fleas by the hundreds have congregated on the surface of the snow. They belong to a group of creatures collectively known as collembola. They look like insects, but recent research suggests they may be as closely related to insects as mammals are to reptiles. They live in the soil, sustaining themselves on decomposing vegetation. Of the earth’s animals large enough to see with the unaided eye — and collembola barely qualify — these are reputed to be the most abundant. Usually they escape our attention almost entirely.

Then on certain warm days in late winter, some adventurous snow fleas crawl to the surface of the snow, where you can’t help but notice them. I wonder what the life of a snow flea is like. Is it itchy to molt your exoskeleton? Do their “springtails” feel stiffer on cold days, when their bodies are soaked in glycine-rich proteins that work like antifreeze? Why do they come to the surface of the snow?

What we do know is that when the snow fleas congregate, the end of winter is not far off. Soon the snow will begin receding and exposing stumps, and south-facing exposures will see the sun again as the snow recedes. The chickadees will switch to their spring song. And the ice will begin to break up.

Our plan, should the weather cooperate, is to fly home three days from now. If today’s snow and wind continue as forecast, then the last research flight of Winter Study 2012 was yesterday. It’s as sad as the last day of summer.

 

John VucetichThe skull of a wolf-killed moose.  The inset shows a tooth impacted with rotting vegetation.

JOHN VUCETICH

Posts From Isle Royale

• Preparing to Live With Wolves
• In Winter Weather, Flying to Find Wolves
• Wolves, Snow and the Red Dragon
• A Wolf-Moose Standoff at Isle Royale
• One Moose, Two Moose
• Following the Wolf Pack
• Much to Learn From What Remains
• A Luscious Meal for Moose
• An Eruption of Ravens
• A Pack of Hungry Wolves
• As Wolf Diminish, Moose Flourish
• Keeping an Eye on Two Intimate Wolves
• For Moose, an Easy Winter Turns Hard
• A Band of Boy Wolves

Sunday, March 5

In preparation for our departure, I decommission the bone boiling pot. The bones are cleaned, tagged, inventoried. Later we’ll move them to a permanent storage facility, where they’ll join the ranks of skeletal remains of some 4,500 other moose, souvenirs of 54 years of effort and the subject of many scientific papers on topics ranging from the causes of arthritis to long-term trends in atmospheric deposition of mercury and lead.

For now, the bones we collected this winter will wait here in the bone shed. Two of the specimens catch my attention. One is what remained of a skull that belonged to an old cow moose. Wolves consumed most of the skull, leaving only the palate — the roof of a mammal’s mouth — and two rows of teeth. It is rare for wolves to consume so much of an adult moose’s skull. It’s an indication of how tough a time they had capturing food this winter.

The skull of another old cow moose shows severe periodontal disease. Rotting, fermenting twigs and needles are packed in a space between the roots of her teeth. I don’t imagine that a human could endure such a severe infection. Of all the moose we’ve ever collected, more than half have significant debilitation, like severe periodontal disease or arthritis.

The next two days will be a blur, and tonight is the last time until next year for the three of us to relax together. We stay up late to watch the “Mollie B Polka Party.”

Monday, March 5

Tomorrow’s forecast is dicey. If we can fly off the island, there will only be a small window of opportunity in the morning. We’ll break down base camp today – all manner of gear and equipment; boxes of canned goods to the root cellar; dry goods, dishes, pots and pans to the shed; seven weeks’ worth of long underwear and winter socks in boxes; decommission the sauna, the water hole and the red dragon.

The Winter Study generates quite a few statistics about the wolves and moose. One of the most important is the kill rate — how frequently wolves kill moose. Right now the Chippewa Harbor Pack’s kill rate stands at five moose killed, divided by the six wolves in that pack, divided by the 42 days that we’ve been able observing them. If we fly today, we might find another kill, but at least we can add a couple more days to the denominator.

No kill in the past few days. As soon as we land, with the sun setting, we strip the Flagship of her telemetry gear and survival equipment and decommission the pump used to refuel her.

George DesortFrom left, Don Glaser, pilot of the Flagship; Rolf Peterson; and John Vucetich, leaders of the wolf-moose project, on Isle Royale National Park’s Washington Harbor.

Tuesday, March 6

At 10:30 a.m., we take off from the ice on Isle Royale’s Washington Harbor for the last time this winter. A warm, moist south wind blurs the boundary between Lake Superior and the sky. Before long, the island has faded into the haze.

This winter we observed the wolves of Isle Royale National Park experience one of their toughest years ever — high mortality rates and low recruiting left relatively few wolves. The Middle Pack is gone. The Chippewa Harbor Pack may not have any females. The future of this population may well rest with the West-End Duo. They mated last week. If all goes well, within a day or two of April 26, the female will be nursing half a dozen pups, each a little larger than your fist.

Despite recent snowstorms, the moose haven’t experienced times this good in more than a decade. That is partly a result of declining wolf predation. Climate warming is adversely affecting many populations of moose living at the southern limit of their range. Isle Royale moose are one of the few moose populations that have been doing well in recent years. It’s important to observe the moose respond positively to reduced wolf predation. With climate warming, that response cannot be taken for granted.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll prepare an annual report summarizing and contextualizing what we learned this past year. Throughout the year, Rolf and I will write papers and visit universities, high schools, local communities and government agencies to share what the wolves and moose have taught us and what our observations mean.

John VucetichThe Chippewa Harbor Pack heads into the forest.

The first lesson draws our attention away from “What does it all mean?” The more important question is, “From where does the meaning come?” The meaning comes from caring, and caring can be ignited by the simple act of paying attention. Pay attention to another creature from one day to the next, but understanding those observations may well require the context of observing from one year to the next, one generation to the next. Scientists can do this in a special way — enlivened with theories and equations.

But the essential lesson of Isle Royale wolves and moose is for all of us. Meaning comes from paying attention to the life that surrounds us, life in all its varied forms.

We land in Duluth at noon, and drive for the rest of the afternoon around the western end of Lake Superior to Houghton, Mich. There we reunite with our sweeties. Every year it ends just the same. We leave in a hurry, and our lives change tremendously. Indoor plumbing and complete disregard for the weather are two of the biggest changes. But we’ll return to Isle Royale in just a couple of months to begin the summer field season, and then again next January for the 55th annual Winter Study. Don, our pilot, captures the spirit entirely with an old English proverb: “It’s a long road that has no turning.”

“Fortunate Wilderness” is a documentary illustrating wolf and moose behavior in Isle Royale National Park over a four-year span. It was filmed by George Desort and had its premiere in the summer of 2008.

 

How to stop fishermen fishing

Of all the sea’s many problems, overfishing should be the most fixable. Here’s how

Feb 25th 2012 | from the Economist print edition

 

ACIDIFICATION, warming, the destruction of coral reefs: the biggest problems facing the sea are as vast, deep and seemingly intractable as the oceans themselves. So long as the world fails to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases, cause of the global warming behind these troubles, they will grow. By comparison, overfishing, another great curse, should be easier to put right, especially in the coastal waters where most fishing occurs. And yet it goes on, year after year.

Fishermen have every reason to do something. Many fisheries are hurtling towards collapse; stocks of large fish have been reduced by up to 90%. When stocks are overfished, they yield a smaller catch. The cost of mismanagement, in lost economic output, is huge: some $50 billion a year, according to the World Bank.

One reason why the pillage continues is that knowledge of fish stocks is poor, especially in developing countries. A new statistical attempt at estimating the remaining shoals (seearticle), from the University of California, Santa Barbara, is therefore welcome—even if that is not true of its findings, that stocks are even more ravaged than previously thought. The study found that better-understood fisheries are likelier to be healthy. Another reason for overfishing is new technology (developed, aptly enough, for battlefields), which makes shoals easier to detect. As large boats and refrigeration have spread, fishing fleets have covered greater distances and hoovered up larger catches. Because technology lets fishermen fish with less effort, it disguises just how fast the stocks are depleting.

Fishermen generally understand the risks of overfishing. Yet still they flout quotas, where they exist. That is often because they take a short-term view of the asset—they would rather cash in now and invest the money in something else. And it is invariably compounded by a commons-despoiling feeling that if they don’t plunder, others will.

In most fisheries, the fishermen would make more money by husbanding their resource, and it should be possible to incentivise them to do so. The best way is to give them a defined, long-term right to a share of the fish. In regulated industrial fisheries, as in Iceland, New Zealand and America, this has taken the form of a tradable, individual share of a fishing quota. Developing countries, where law enforcement is weak, seem to do better when a group right over an expanse of water is given to a co-operative or village fleet. The principle is the same: fishermen who feel like owners are more likely to behave as responsible stewards. The new statistical study confirms that rights-based fisheries are generally healthier.

The rights stuff

Yet only a few hundred of the oceans’ thousands of fisheries are run this way, mainly because such schemes are hard to get right. Limiting access to a common resource creates losers, and therefore discord. Cultural differences affect success rates; not everyone is as law-abiding as Icelanders. Almost everywhere it takes time to convince fishermen, the last hunter-gatherers, to change their habits. But, barnacled by caveats though it may be, the rights-based approach is the best available.

In rich countries, satellite imagery will increasingly help, by making monitoring cheaper and better. In many poor ones, devolution is making it easier to form local organisations. Another promising idea is to incorporate rights-based fisheries with no-catch zones. These safeguard breeding-stocks and are easier to monitor than individual catches. Where stocks are recovering, as a result of these reforms, fishermen are likelier to see scientifically determined quotas as in their self-interest. In the end, that may be the only hope.

 

Unprecedented number of sea otter deaths along California coast

After being brought back from the brink of extinction, the mammal is again in peril. The U.S. Geological Survey reported that 335 dead, sick or injured otters were found in 2011, a record high.

A sea otter basks in the sun in Moss Landing Harbor in Monterey Bay. The U.S. Geological Survey reported that 335 dead, sick or injured otters were found along the California coast in 2011, a record high. (Vern Fisher, Monterey County Herald / February 3, 2009)

By Dalina Castellanos, Los Angeles Times

February 26, 2012, 9:28 p.m.

After being brought back from the brink of extinction, sea otters are again in peril, with an unprecedented number of deaths along the California coast in the last year.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported that 335 dead, sick or injured otters were found in 2011, a record high.

"We're starting to see a perplexing trend suggesting increased shark attacks on sea otters," said Tim Tinker of the USGS' Western Ecological Research Center.

Shark bites accounted for 15% of otter deaths in the late 1990s, but that percentage nearly doubled in 2010 and 2011, Tinker said.

Sharks have long received some of the blame for the otter's mortality rate, but the population has also been thinned by infectious diseases, boat strikes and gunshot wounds, among other factors.

"If these stressors remain high and shark mortality remains high, then there is no chance" for the population to regenerate, Tinker said.

Sharks seem to favor breeding-age female otters, he said, which could deliver more of a blow to the sea mammals' numbers.

The last official population reported for the sea otter was 2,711, only 379 short of the threshold that would begin consideration for it being removed from the federal endangered species list.

 

Africa’s oceans

A sea of riches

Coastal waters could feed many more Africans, but need better protection

Feb 18th 2012 | BERBERA, FREETOWN AND MOMBASA

 

Commuters

 

MELITA SAMOILYS is a leading marine biologist. Since 2010 she has visited 72 coral reefs in east Africa. On only one did she see a shark. That is because so many black-tipped, white-tipped and grey sharks have been served up as shark fin soup, a delicacy in China.

Two-thirds of African countries have access to the sea. Some are making good use of it through fishing and tourism. But the productivity of African waters is plummeting. Kenyan fishermen now catch an average of 3kg of lobster on each trip, compared with 28kg in the 1980s. Grouper fish appear to have become extinct in the Comoros in the 1970s. South Africa’s fishy haul is lower today than in the 1950s.

The main reason is bad governance. African Union calls to fight overfishing with joint navy patrols and co-operation between fisheries have been ignored. Nigeria, among Africa’s richest countries, lacks a serviceable navy. Some governments even collude in overfishing. Angolan fisheries officers rarely report the illegal catches of boats owned by politicians.

At the same time African states are failing to invest in much-needed marine research. They say it is a “donor activity”, meaning they want foreigners to pay for it. The continent has only one large oceanography department, at the University of Cape Town, and that is underfunded.

Coastal wetlands have little protection and fishing grounds are especially vulnerable. In many countries lot of foreign boats operate in areas close to the shore supposedly reserved for locals in dugouts. Some vessels use banned methods like light-luring (attracting fish with floodlights) and pair-trawling (where nets strung between boats are dragged on the sea floor).

Industrial fishing has been encouraged by rising global demand. The European Union has a series of agreements for its boats to fish in African waters. China has moved in too. The Russian fishing fleet is resurgent. In many cases, says André Standing, a researcher into fisheries agreements in Africa, it is not clear how much money is being paid for licences, or to whom. Critics say Africa’s failure to protect its ocean is political, the definition of a continent too weak to exert full control over its resources. A recent deal between Mauritania and China makes it hard to reduce the catch even if it is unsustainable.

Meanwhile the human footprint along Africa’s vast coastline is growing. The UN says African seaside cities are spreading by more than 4% a year. By 2050, a corridor along the Gulf of Guinea from Côte d’Ivoire to Cameroon is likely to be one of the world’s most densely populated areas. It may also be one of its most unstable. Many of the cities are vulnerable to rising sea levels predicted by climatologists.

Making the sea safer and more productive may be the best way to keep landlubbers peaceful. Experts have plenty of suggestions. Community initiatives could help get rid of dynamite-fishing and its ruinous effects. Conservation no-catch schemes such as one run by Blue Ventures, a Madagascan outfit, have proven their value. But there is too little money to scale them up. The best way to find the cash would be to point out the security costs of unhappy fishing communities to rich governments. Somalia’s piracy problem began in part as an armed response to illegal fishing in Somali waters. Some banditry in Nigerian waters started as a protest against the threat to fishing from the oil industry.

Scientists would like to see more sanctuaries, starting with a big area in northern Mozambique. Mr Standing suggests that one radical idea might be to ban industrial fishing in the worst performing African countries for ten years, which would favour labour-intensive fishing from dhows (traditional sailing boats). But given the local and global hunger for protein, such schemes could only work if fish farms were expanded.

The tributaries of Africa’s oceans are mostly clean and its mangroves in good condition, especially compared with those of Asia. But abuse is growing. With the sharks almost gone, Chinese diners are demanding manta rays and mobulid rays as ingredients for their expensive banquet stews. Frank Pope, an Africa-based writer on oceans, says that the slow-breeding rays could be gone even sooner than the sharks they used to swim alongside on the glittering reefs.

From the Economist:

February 10, 2012, 5:26 PM

Darwin’s Papers Show the Evolution of His Ideas

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Cambridge University LibraryA drawing by Darwin’s son on a page of a manuscript of  “Origin of Species.”

Just in time for Charles Darwin’s 203rd birthday on Sunday, the American Museum of Natural History is unveiling the first phase of its online Darwin Manuscripts Project, a collection of more than 15,000 digitized manuscript pages and thousands of other documents drawn from Cambridge University Library, the Biodiversity Heritage Library and other institutions around the world. Among the documents available on the Web site are notes from Darwin’s time aboard the HMS Beagle, pocket diaries, early drafts of works like “The Origin of Species” (viewable with and without Darwin’s revisions), and previously unpublished manuscripts like an “experiment book” describing Darwin’s original research on plant breeding strategies, begun in 1856. In addition to revealing Darwin’s intellectual evolution, the project also reveals Darwin’s sometimes less-than-careful treatment of some of his own papers. Today, a first-edition of the “Origin” is a highly sought after rare book, but pages of the original manuscript are even rarer, thanks to Darwin’s habit of passing them out as scrap paper. Among the 42 full pages known to survive today, a few feature fanciful drawings on the reverse by his son Francis showing birds undreamed of in the Galápagos Islands as well as a soldier on a carrot battling a cavalier on an eggplant.