Best of our wild blogs: 17 Nov 08

The Semakau Project in the newspapers
some comments on the compressed air junkie blog

Changi with baby Knobbly sea star
on the wild shores of singapore blog

First Trip to Cyrene
on the Aesthetic Voyager blog

Blue-crowned Hanging Parrot and guava
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

Life History of the Chocolate Royal
on the Butterflies of Singapore blog

Yellow-crested or Sulphur-crested Cockatoo?
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

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In Malaysia Terengganu: Friday sermon on sea turtles

Sean Augustin, The New Straits Times 15 Nov 08;

KUALA TERENGGANU: Come next Friday, 482 mosques statewide will preach about turtle conservation in a bid to raise awareness on the species. State deputy assistant commissioner of mosque administration Kamaruddin Muhamad said the sermon would also include threats to the environment and the importance of preserving it in line with Islamic teachings.

Kamaruddin said a sermon on environmental conservation was delivered two years ago, but it did not touch on turtle conservation. Based on feedback, it was a success.

"We found that the congregation became more environmentally sensitive after the sermon in 2006. We hope we can do the same for the turtles as they are under threat.

"For now, it will be a one-off sermon, but we are willing to conduct more if necessary," he said.

The sermon, to be read on Nov 21, follows the efforts by the Ma'Daerah Heritage Community Association (Mekar) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Malaysia to use mosques as a medium to spread the message of saving the turtles since last year.

Mekar also prepared the text for the sermon with help from the Islamic Understanding Institute of Malaysia.

Formed in 2004, Mekar is a local community group aimed at raising awareness among locals on turtle conservation.

The initial project focused on three fishing communities in Kertih, Paka and Kemasik.

In June, a one-day workshop was organised with imam from various mosques attending to learn how to integrate turtle conservation messages in their ceramah, Maghrib lectures and Friday sermons.

Mekar chairman Amran Salleh is ecstatic over the decision by the state religious department to use the association's text for the sermon.

"We did not expect this to happen. We are happy to receive support and happier still knowing the whole state is going to hear it.

"I really hope the people will get the message we are trying to put across.

"I can't wait for next Friday. I wish more environment-themed sermons can be held in future," he said.

WWF Terengganu Turtle Programme team leader Rahayu Zulkifli said this was good news for the environment as people would take a religious call seriously.

She said many Muslims were not aware that Islam preaches conservation of natural resources and hoped it would remind people on the matter.

"The impact would be great. As a Muslim, I want to do something my religion asks me to do.

"Conservation is in the Quran although it is not highlighted enough (in public)," she said.

See also Mosques Support Sea Turtle Conservation in Malaysia by Nathan Brouwer, on mongabay.com 17 Nov 08

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A Seafood Snob Ponders the Future of Fish

Mark Bittman, The New York Times 15 Nov 08;

I suppose you might call me a wild-fish snob. I don’t want to go into a fish market on Cape Cod and find farm-raised salmon from Chile and mussels from Prince Edward Island instead of cod, monkfish or haddock. I don’t want to go to a restaurant in Miami and see farm-raised catfish from Vietnam on the menu but no grouper.

Those have been my recent experiences, and according to many scientists, it may be the way of the future: most of the fish we’ll be eating will be farmed, and by midcentury, it might be easier to catch our favorite wild fish ourselves rather than buy it in the market.

It’s all changed in just a few decades. I’m old enough to remember fishermen unloading boxes of flounder at the funky Fulton Fish Market in New York, charging wholesalers a nickel a pound. I remember when local mussels and oysters were practically free, when fresh tuna was an oxymoron, and when monkfish, squid and now-trendy skate were considered “trash.”

But we overfished these species to the point that it now takes more work, more energy, more equipment, more money to catch the same amount of fish — roughly 85 million tons a year, a yield that has remained mostly stagnant for the last decade after rapid growth and despite increasing demand.

Still, plenty of scientists say a turnaround is possible. Studies have found that even declining species can quickly recover if fisheries are managed well. It would help if the world’s wealthiest fish-eaters (they include us, folks) would broaden their appetites. Mackerel, anyone?

It will be a considerable undertaking nonetheless. Global consumption of fish, both wild and farm raised, has doubled since 1973, and 90 percent of this increase has come in developing countries. (You’ll sometimes hear that Americans are now eating more seafood, but that reflects population growth; per capita consumption has remained stable here for 20 years.)

The result of this demand for wild fish, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, is that “the maximum wild-capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans has probably been reached.”

One study, in 2006, concluded that if current fishing practices continue, the world’s major commercial stocks will collapse by 2048.

Already, for instance, the Mediterranean’s bluefin tuna population has been severely depleted, and commercial fishing quotas for the bluefin in the Mediterranean may be sharply curtailed this month. The cod fishery, arguably one of the foundations of North Atlantic civilization, is in serious decline. Most species of shark, Chilean sea bass, and the cod-like orange roughy are threatened.

Scientists have recently become concerned that smaller species of fish, the so-called forage fish like herring, mackerel, anchovies and sardines that are a crucial part of the ocean’s food chain, are also under siege.

These smaller fish are eaten not only by the endangered fish we love best, but also by many poor and not-so-poor people throughout the world. (And even by many American travelers who enjoy grilled sardines in England, fried anchovies in Spain, marinated mackerel in France and pickled or raw herring in Holland — though they mostly avoid them at home.)

But the biggest consumers of these smaller fish are the agriculture and aquaculture industries. Nearly one-third of the world’s wild-caught fish are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish and cattle and pigs. Aquaculture alone consumes an estimated 53 percent of the world’s fish meal and 87 percent of its fish oil. (To make matters worse, as much as a quarter of the total wild catch is thrown back — dead — as “bycatch.”)

“We’ve totally depleted the upper predator ranks; we have fished down the food web,” said Christopher Mann, a senior officer with the Pew Environmental Group.

Using fish meal to feed farm-raised fish is also astonishingly inefficient. Approximately three kilograms of forage fish go to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon; the ratio for cod is five to one; and for tuna — the most beef-like of all — the so-called feed-to-flesh ratio is 20 to 1, said John Volpe, an assistant professor of marine systems conservation at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

Industrial aquaculture — sometimes called the blue revolution — is following the same pattern as land-based agriculture. Edible food is being used to grow animals rather than nourish people.

This is not to say that all aquaculture is bad. China alone accounts for an estimated 70 percent of the world’s aquaculture — where it is small in scale, focuses on herbivorous fish and is not only sustainable but environmentally sound. “Throughout Asia, there are hundreds of thousands of small farmers making a living by farming fish,” said Barry Costa-Pierce, professor of fisheries at University of Rhode Island.

But industrial fish farming is a different story. The industry spends an estimated $1 billion a year on veterinary products; degrades the land (shrimp farming destroys mangroves, for example, a key protector from typhoons); pollutes local waters (according to a recent report by the Worldwatch Institute, a salmon farm with 200,000 fish releases nutrients and fecal matter roughly equivalent to as many as 600,000 people); and imperils wild populations that come in contact with farmed salmon.

Not to mention that its products generally don’t taste so good, at least compared to the wild stuff. Farm-raised tilapia, with the best feed-to-flesh conversion ratio of any animal, is less desirable to many consumers, myself included, than that nearly perfectly blank canvas called tofu. It seems unlikely that farm-raised striped bass will ever taste remotely like its fierce, graceful progenitor, or that anyone who’s had fresh Alaskan sockeye can take farmed salmon seriously.

If industrial aquaculture continues to grow, said Carl Safina, the president of Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group, “this wondrously varied component of our diet will go the way of land animals — get simplified, all look the same and generally become quite boring.”

Why bother with farm-raised salmon and its relatives? If the world’s wealthier fish-eaters began to appreciate wild sardines, anchovies, herring and the like, we would be less inclined to feed them to salmon raised in fish farms. And we’d be helping restock the seas with larger species.

Which, surprisingly, is possible. As Mr. Safina noted, “The ocean has an incredible amount of productive capacity, and we could quite easily and simply stay within it by limiting fishing to what it can produce.”

This sounds almost too good to be true, but with monitoring systems that reduce bycatch by as much as 60 percent and regulations providing fishermen with a stake in protecting the wild resource, it is happening. One regulatory scheme, known as “catch shares,” allows fishermen to own shares in a fishery — that is, the right to catch a certain percentage of a scientifically determined sustainable harvest. Fishermen can buy or sell shares, but the number of fish caught in a given year is fixed.

This method has been a success in a number of places including Alaska, the source of more than half of the nation’s seafood. A study published in the journal Science recently estimated that if catch shares had been in place globally in 1970, only about 9 percent of the world’s fisheries would have collapsed by 2003, rather than 27 percent.

“The message is optimism,” said David Festa, who directs the oceans program at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The latest data shows that well-managed fisheries are doing incredibly well. When we get the rules right the fisheries can recover, and if they’re not recovering, it means we have the rules wrong.”

(The world’s fishing countries would need to participate; right now, the best management is in the United States, Australia and New Zealand; even in these countries, there’s a long way to go.)

An optimistic but not unrealistic assessment of the future is that we’ll have a limited (and expensive) but sustainable fishery of large wild fish; a growing but sustainable demand for what will no longer be called “lower-value” smaller wild fish; and a variety of traditional aquaculture where it is allowed. This may not sound ideal, but it’s certainly preferable to sucking all the fish out of the oceans while raising crops of tasteless fish available only to the wealthiest consumers.

Myself, I’d rather eat wild cod once a month and sardines once a week than farm-raised salmon, ever.

Mark Bittman writes the Minimalist column for the Dining section of The Times and is the author of “How to Cook Everything.”

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Floods under Antarctic ice speed glaciers into sea: study

Yahoo News 17 Nov 08;

PARIS (AFP) – Scientists unveiled Sunday the first direct evidence that massive floods deep below Antarctica's ice cover are accelerating the flow of glaciers into the sea.

How quickly these huge bodies of ice slide off the Antarctic and Greenland land masses into the ocean help determine the speed at which sea levels rise.

The stakes are enormous: an increase measured in tens of centimetres (inches) could wreak havoc for hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying deltas and island nations around the world.

Researchers discovered only recently that inaccessible subglacial lakes in Antarctica periodically shed huge quantities of water.

Data collected by a satellite launched in 2003 -- the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat -- revealed a complex network of subglacial plumbing in which water periodically cascades from one hidden reservoir to another.

But the new study, published online in the journal Nature Geoscience, is the first to measure the potential impact of this invisible flooding on sea-bound glaciers.

A trio of scientists led by Leigh Stearns of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine matched ICESat data against a nearly 50-year record of how fast the Byrd Glacier in East Antarctica has moved toward the sea.

They discovered that during the same 14-month period that 1.7 cubic kilometres (0.4 cubic miles) of water cascaded through subglacial waterways, the 75-kilometre (45-mile) long glacier downstream pick up speed, moving about 10 percent faster.

"Our findings provide direct evidence that an active lake drainage system can cause large and rapid changes in glacier dynamics," the researchers concluded.

"Water acts as a lubricant, reducing friction at the base of the ice and making ice flow faster," explained Helen Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of California in a commentary, also in Nature Geoscience.

"The timing of the onset of speed up matched that of the lake drainage, and the slow-down coincided with the flood cessation," she noted.

The study adds to growing scientific concern about the pace at which glaciers are melting into the seas.

Two forces -- both driven by global warming -- cause sea levels to rise. One is thermal expansion of sea water.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned last year that thermal expansion will push sea levels up 18 to 59 centimetres (7.2 to 23.2 inches) by 2100, enough to wipe out several small island nations and severely disrupt low-lying mega deltas in Asia and Africa.

But the report failed to take into account the impact of the second force: additional water from melting sources of ice.

The ice sheet that sits atop Greenland, for example, contains enough water to raise world ocean levels by seven metres (23 feet).

Even the gloomiest global warming predictions do not include such a scenario.

But recent studies suggest that runoff from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets could drive sea levels higher than once thought, one reason the IPCC decided to remove the upward bracket from its forecast.

Under-ice flood speeds up glacier
Jonathan Amos, BBC News 17 Nov 08;

Great floods beneath the Antarctic ice sheet can now be linked directly to the speed at which that ice moves towards the ocean, scientists say.

Leigh Stearns and colleagues have been able show how the giant Byrd Glacier in east Antarctica sped up just as two lakes under the ice overflowed.

The flood water acts as a lubricant, easing the ice over the bedrock.

The observation is described as critical because of how it informs our understanding of future sea levels.

The more ice the polar regions dump in the ocean, the higher the waters will rise.

But when world scientists released their state of the climate assessment in 2007 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), they said ice behaviour in response to a warming Earth was one of the great uncertainties in projecting future ocean rise.

The work of Dr Stearns and colleagues, reported in Nature Geoscience, indicates that Antarctica's under-ice "plumbing system" must now be an important consideration in "ice dynamics".

"Previous work has shown that the water under the ice is moving around a lot, but what has been missing was the fact that this water is affecting ice flow," said Dr Stearns from the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, US.

"Not only is it moving, the addition of a little bit of water and a change of lubrication at the bed of a glacier can produce quite large-scale changes," she told BBC News.

Scientists have known about subglacial lakes in Antarctica for half a century. There are more than 150; and the biggest, Lake Vostok, is the size of Lake Ontario in North America.

Despite being capped by, in some cases, several kilometres of ice, the lakes' contents stay liquid because of warm spots in the underlying rock.

It was always thought, however, that these lakes were stagnant bodies, containing waters that were perhaps unaltered for millions of years.

Only in 2005 did scientists discover that the lakes' levels could actually change rapidly - they can fill and burst their rims under the ice sheet.

When they fill and flood, they actually lift the ice up by several metres - something which can be seen by overflying satellites that measure the height of the ice.

Ice acceleration

Dr Stearns - working with Ben Smith and Gordon Hamilton - took a 48-year record of ice speeds recorded along Byrd Glacier and compared the data with satellite observations of ice surface elevation.

The group found a marked increase in ice flow speed between December 2005 and February 2007.

This coincided with rapid changes in ice surface elevation about 200km upstream, which the team interprets as the filling and draining of two subglacial lakes some two kilometres below the top of the ice.

The numbers involved are remarkable. In a normal year, Byrd Glacier would funnel something on the order of 20 billion tonnes of ice through a tight fjord towards the Ross Sea, with that ice stream moving at approximately 825m per year by the time it reaches the "grounding line", the point where it ceases to be a glacier and feeds into a floating ice shelf.

When more than a cubic kilometre of water burst over the rims of these lakes and under Byrd, the glacier was seen to experience a jump in speed of 10%.

Between December 2005 and February 2007, the glacier dumped about 22 billion tonnes of ice a year into the Ross Sea.

Friction release

Once the flood waters had dissipated under the glacier and out through the fjord, Byrd was seen to return to its normal behaviour.

"Previous studies had shown that a lot of resistance to the flow of Byrd Glacier was coming from sticky spots at the bed; that friction really does play a role in slowing down the glacier," explained Dr Stearns.

"The addition of a little bit more water probably flooded those bumps that were gripping the bed of the glacier; and once the water passed through, they stuck again."

The research is the first to show a direct link in Antarctica between the behaviour of the lakes and the velocity of the ice moving overhead.

The past decade has seen a steady increase in the understanding of ice dynamics. For example, it has been shown how polar glaciers speed up when the floating ice shelves that block their way to the ocean are removed.

And in Greenland, scientists suspect the melt waters that drain through holes, or moulins, in the ice cap to the bedrock may have contributed to the speed-up of glaciers in that region, too.

Cause and effect

It should be stressed the events seen at Byrd are not of themselves climate-related. The lakes probably flood and drain on a regular basis that has nothing to do with atmospheric or ocean warming.

However, the scientists say the mechanisms involved need to be understood so the knowledge can be applied to those ice masses which are being exposed to warmer temperatures, such as in Greenland.

"These are all processes we need to get right in the models so we can make accurate predictions of sea-level rise over the next century," commented Dr Helen Fricker from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, US.

"We discovered these active subglacial systems just in the last couple of years. Everybody was thinking this has got to make the ice flow faster, surely. This latest research now pins down the link."

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Left untouched, world's largest mangrove forest recovering fast

Shafiq Alam Yahoo News 15 Nov 08;

DHAKA (AFP) – The world's largest mangrove forest is recovering fast from one of the worst disasters in its history, a year after it was badly damaged by a devastating cyclone, Bangladesh officials say.

The Sundarbans bore the brunt when Cyclone Sidr -- packing winds of up to 250 kilometres (150 miles) an hour -- slammed into southern Bangladesh on November 15, 2007, killing over 3,500 people and wiping out thousands of villages.

Assessments by the forest department said the cyclone had left a trail of devastation unseen for decades, with some 1,500 square kilometres (600 square miles) of the forest damaged.

But now, Bangladeshi officials say things are looking up for the mangrove swamp, made up of around 200 lush forested islands, separated by a complex network of hundreds of tidal rivers and creeks.

"There are positive signs all around. The government's policy to leave the forest untouched has helped," said Sundarbans forest chief M. Shahidullah on Saturday.

Officials say the vast swamp has recovered substantially and that the government's policy of leaving the forest to regenerate without human intervention helped it to regrow quickly.

"Golpata, the main tree of the mangrove forest, have started growing in the severely affected areas. Some of the areas have become leafy and the animals have returned," said Shahidullah.

The 10,000-square-kilometre forest straddles the borders of Bangladesh and India's West Bengal state and lies on the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta.

Experts say the huge expanse forms an important buffer shielding millions of people from the worst impact of the Bay of Bengal's many cyclonic storms and tidal waves.

Although uninhabited, the jungle is a magnet for thousands of impoverished villagers who live along its boundaries and work as fishermen there or collect honey and wood.

It is also one of the few havens for the endangered Royal Bengal Tiger, and is thought to be home to around 10 percent of the animal's worldwide population of between 5,000 and 6,000 - down from 100,000 in 1900.

Cyclone Sidr ripped through vast swathes of the Bangladesh side of the forest, uprooting hundreds of thousands of trees.

The force of the winds left many more stripped of their foliage and bark, giving the appearance of having been hit by a forest fire.

The forest department had initially considered assisted regeneration, such as clearing fallen trees or sowing seeds in the worst-hit areas.

But the government changed its mind after experts said the Sundarbans forest, a United Nations World Heritage site, would be best served if it was left alone.

The country's emergency government banned any human entry or collection of honey, leaves and fallen trees in the worst affected eastern parts of the forest.

"It worked amazingly," said Ashraful Islam, head of the government's Bangladesh Forest Research Institute.

"I visited the affected areas a few months back and I saw hundreds of thousands of 'burnt' trees becoming leafy again.

"The forest is recovering fast. The trees have started regenerating and I believe within two to three years whole areas will look like they did before the cyclone," he said.

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