Octopi are super smart and super weird. Maybe they are as smart as us. If they evolved superior intelligence, would we even notice? Maybe they don’t care about inventing things like agriculture, the steam engine, and the radio. Maybe they are just happy doing what they’re doing. They have plenty of real estate to work with, after all.
A group of orcas is repeatedly and intentionally attacking small boats off the coast of Spain. It sounds terrifying, and I’m sure it is, if you are in one of the boats. But according to this article at least, no humans have been hurt in these incidents. One theory is that the orcas think this is fun, like toddlers playing with bath toys.
This is pretty cool – basically, something called “Haikubox” is a microphone that records bird songs around your house and sends them to a computer at Cornell, which identifies them and sends them back to an app on your phone that tells you what is going on. My immediate reaction was do I really need to buy this high tech microphone? Couldn’t I just make recordings with whatever I have lying around and send those to the computer? And yes, there is an app for that too called “Merlin Bird ID”. I guess the advantage of buying the hardware is that it is always on and processing and transmitting the recordings without extra effort from you.
I like the little guys. They are not “immune” to rabies or Lyme disease, as some have claimed, but they seem to get these diseases fairly rarely. They can carry fleas and ticks because…they’re animals. Although one study suggested they like to eat a lot of ticks, other studies have failed to confirm this unfortunately. This article cites a number of good things about them, and then seems to reach an illogical conclusion that they are nonetheless pests. I don’t quite get it – yes, they have sharp teeth and might use them if they are really cornered, or if a house pet that doesn’t know any better attacks them. That’s about it.
While it’s true that opossums eat ticks, thereby potentially preventing some spread of Lyme disease, their good characteristics may be overhyped by some social media users. Opossum-control mechanisms vary by state, but most pest control experts recommend treating their removal in the same way as one would treat raccoons or skunks. After determining that an opossum has moved in, experts say to make the surroundings less appealing to them by cleaning up overgrown shrubbery and trees that they may use to hide in, clean up fallen fruit, and hide garbage cans, pet food containers, or other food sources. Secure home areas so that they cannot hide out under stairways or other nooks and crannies.
Snopes
This sounds like a pretty good prescription to remove wildlife habitat in general on your property. Anything that is not mown turf grass with maybe the occasional well-mulched tree is “overgrown” in the eyes of some (not mine).
I had heard that dogs may have been domesticated as a food animal at some point, which is a somewhat dark tale for the modern dog lover. This Independent article says new evidence tells a different story. First, Siberian wolves started sniffing around garbage in human settlements during the ice age. Then, they settled in. Although it might seem like humans would feel threatened by wolves in their midst, they may actually have helped defend the human settlements against other animals, including other wolves. (You can imagine there might have been a few misunderstandings early on where hungry wolves ate people and vice versa.) And then, because they are so smart, a specific pack of wolves would pass behaviors down from generation to generation, and in just a few generations you would have a population with distinct behavior and over time even a distinct appearance. At some point, humans did start training and breeding them to perform specific tasks, like pulling sleds.
This is not 30% of species. It’s not just song birds, or bald eagles, or other charismatic species. It’s a third of the total birds in the sky, gone. This is an ecological collapse in motion – we are losing birds, insects, amphibians, you name it.
House cats have hired a major lobbying firm to promote their interests, as the song bird special interest attacks continue to escalate.
Okay, that’s my onion-like joke headline. But apparently, there is a vicious academic debate about just how much of a risk domestic cats pose to biodiversity when they are allowed to range outdoors. There is also a values conflict between people who feel very strongly about the welfare of individual animals, both wild and domestic, and people who feel very strongly about ecosystem functions and services. And obviously, there are lots of people who have strong feelings about all these things, and may have some internal conflicts to resolve.
There was one turn of phrase in this article I particularly liked: describing cats as “sentient, sapient, and social individuals”. I looked up sapient in the Websters 1913 dictionary:
Sapient
Sa”pi*ent
(?), a.
[L. sapiens, -entis, p. pr. of sapere to taste, to have sense, to know. See Sage
, a.
] Wise; sage; discerning; — often in irony or contempt.
Where the sapient king
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse.
Milton.
Syn. — Sage; sagacious; knowing; wise; discerning.
This is an agent-based model of wild boars coming from wild lands into a city. We don’t have wild boar issues where I live, but raccoons and deer occasionally show up. I’ve lived places where black bears show up unexpectedly in urban areas, and that can cause a stir.
Pigs in space: An agent-based model of wild boar (Sus scrofa) movement into cities
Last decades saw a dramatic increase in wildlife populations within urban areas. Policymakers seek to minimize human-wildlife conflicts resulting from overabundance of species, such as wild boars (Sus scrofa). To this end, there is a need to understand the drivers governing infiltration of wildlife into cities. In this paper we study the availability and distribution of food resources in urban areas as driver of wild boar movement patterns. Based on the optimal foraging theory, we utilize an agent-based simulation model to investigate the ever-growing infiltration of wild boars into some cities. We apply the model to an artificial city that mimics the landscape of the city of Haifa. Manipulating food availability and relative resistance costs of different land-covers we demonstrate that infiltration of boars depends on population size of wild boars and on the amount and spatial distribution of attractors (e.g., food). Model outputs for likely sets of parameters demonstrate good correspondence to the reports of boar observations within the city of Haifa, Israel, where the porosity of the urban fabric and the connectivity of open space patches provide a trail network that makes food throughout the city accessible at a relatively low search-cost. Our results indicate that land cover and food patterns determine critically boars’ foraging movement and infiltration into the city. The proposed modeling framework provides a tool to investigate wildlife management policies that aim at reducing people-wildlife conflicts in cities.
At least, I think that is what this paper in Conservation Biology is about. The key conclusion is that biodiversity impacts (of the roads and rails themselves? it’s unclear) can be reduced by up to 75%. I am presuming this is by locating a linear park of sufficient width along the road or railway. Presumably you might need to do something to keep the animals off the road too. Could a few larger reserves located along the corridor reduce the impact to zero? I would find it very encouraging both to know that it is possible and to know that we have the quantitative tools to accurately predict the outcomes of policy and design choices.
Quantifying the conservation gains from shared access to linear infrastructure
The proliferation of linear infrastructure such as roads and rail is a major global driver of cumulative biodiversity loss. Creative interventions to minimise the impacts of this infrastructure whilst still allowing development to meet human population growth and resource consumption demands are urgently required. One strategy for reducing habitat loss associated with development is to encourage linear infrastructure providers and users to share infrastructure networks. Here we quantify the reductions in biodiversity impact and capital cost under linear infrastructure sharing and demonstrate this approach with a case study in South Australia. By evaluating proposed mine-port links we show that shared development of linear infrastructure could reduce overall biodiversity impacts by up to 75%. We found that such reductions are likely to be limited if the dominant mining companies restrict access to infrastructure, a situation likely to occur without policy to promote sharing of infrastructure. Our research helps illuminate the circumstances under which infrastructure sharing can minimise the biodiversity impacts of development.
The Los Angeles Times says a Trump administration attack on the Endangered Species Act could be coming. The last paragraph of the article has a links to number of (sincere) criticisms of the act and ideas for how it could be improved.
The act does have its shortcomings. The focus is on habitat preservation, which is important, but scientists now believe there need to be more adaptive solutions, such as public-private partnerships to integrate wildlife habitats with development, and more efficient use of the act as the nation adapts to changing habitats. That should be the road map for revising the act, and conservationists from the left and right need to pressure Congress to ensure pro-development forces don’t destroy the act under the guise of fixing it.