17 & 18 Nov: Leonids meteor showers
from wild shores of singapore
Observation Notes on the variability of the female Jacintha Eggfly
from Butterflies of Singapore
Cobra at Ubin!
from wild shores of singapore
Purple Heron in comfort mode
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Climbing Bukit Timah
from The Lazy Lizard's Tales
Monday Morgue: 16th November 2009
from The Lazy Lizard's Tales
Straits Times 16 Nov 09;
I REFER to last Monday's letter by Mr Harry Mason, 'Public need to know the facts'. I am appalled to read such misinformation about climate change.
The crucial Copenhagen summit is less than a month away and a fair and ambitious global deal must emerge from it to tackle the increasingly urgent issue of climate change. At this moment, we should not go into denial or promote misconceptions.
The general consensus on climate change is clear and unequivocal. Over the past 150 years, human civilisation has allowed carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to reach around 390 parts per million, the highest level in more than 800,000 years. A correlated and consistent increased trend in temperature has also been observed.
The earth's climate has changed many times in its history, but the current observable changes are occurring at a much faster rate, resulting in numerous negative impacts which are already seen today and will only worsen in the future.
The number of scientific institutions which agree that climate change is human-induced are plenty. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an independent body consisting of over 2,000 scientists, concluded this in its 2007 peer-reviewed report. Volcanic and solar flare activity have already been discounted as possible factors.
Furthermore, many prominent national and international science academies have concluded that the world must take serious action to avoid the wide-ranging deleterious impacts of climate change.
There has been no vested interests or media green hype over climate change, as Mr Mason suggests. If this was the case, measures taken to tackle the problem now would not be so woefully inadequate.
A strong signal from Copenhagen to limit greenhouse gas emissions will allow the world to become truly sustainable, weaning us away from dirty fossil fuels, transforming the entire economic structure of the world, and creating numerous opportunities for us to emerge from the current economic crisis.
Solving the climate crisis will also have many other co-benefits by improving energy security and access, increasing food security and sustainable agriculture as well as more concerted biodiversity protection. There is not only an environmental imperative to take action, but also a social, economic and moral one to make the world more equitable and prosperous for all humanity.
Lee Zhe Yu
Get all the facts about climate change first before taking a stand
Straits Times Forum 18 Nov 09;
THE rebuttal from Mr Lee Zhe Yu on Monday ("Why it is crucial to act quickly on climate change") to Mr Harry Mason's letter ("Public need to know the facts", Nov 9) is insufficient to disprove Mr Mason's observations as "misinformation about climate change".
Mr Mason was advocating for more public debate on the global warming issue so that Singaporeans can then make informed choices on the true state of affairs. Mr Lee's argument that "the general consensus on climate change is clear and unequivocal" hardly qualifies as valid evidence to support the scientific truth. It could, instead, prove Mr Mason's point that "the global warming saga is a sorry affair of apparently deliberate media and scientific misinformation".
Just because an opinion is shared by the majority does not make it any sounder.
Mr Lee's subsequent argument that "the number of scientific institutions which agree that climate change is human-induced are plenty", followed by the quoting of an independent scientific body comprising more than 2,000 scientists and "many prominent national and international science academies", is, at best, an attempt to "quote the authority". This in itself offers no substantial counter-argument to Mr Mason's assertion that climate change might not be human-induced.
To Mr Mason's opinion that there has been vested interest in the environmental discourse, Mr Lee argued that there has been "no vested interests or media green hype over climate change" simply because "if this was the case, measures taken to tackle the problem now would not be so woefully inadequate". This is once again inadequate and unconvincing.
During my university days, I came across academic papers that argued that the environmental crisis is an attempt by the developed world to "subjugate" the developing world by curbing their productions. Not politically correct, I am sure. Others predict the near end of the world given the way we use up resources. Which theory is closest to the truth? There is no clear indication.
I am not in either camp, but I second Mr Mason's point that it is vital for all to acquire as many facts as possible in any debate before stating the unequivocal. No one has the right to claim that one's opinion is the final word and should not state that the other party's opinions are "misinformation", unless they can be proven beyond reasonable doubt, which is unlikely in the case of science anyway.
Lee Khum Thong
Agreement sought with palm-oil industry to create ape-saving forest corridors
Lewis Smith, The Independent 16 Nov 09;
Wildlife campaigners have made "a deal with the devil" in a bid to save the orang-utan from being driven into extinction. They have teamed up with the palm-oil industry, widely condemned by conservationists for causing devastation to orang-utans.
But palm-oil companies and the Sabah state government in Borneo have agreed to a project to create wildlife corridors that will link forest areas and create a network of safe havens. They signed up to the pilot scheme last month in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, and will meet again this month in London to try to agree final details. There are hopes the project can be expanded.
Dr Marc Ancrenaz, director of the Kinabatangan Orang-utan Conservation Project, agreed the alliance between conservationists and the palm oil industry was like a pact with the devil but said the green lobby had to be pragmatic in its hopes of saving the red ape.
"The oil-palm industry is going to stay," he said. "There's no point in fighting development. We need to look for a solution together to save the orang-utan. By recreating 100m-wide corridors of forest along major rivers we will provide contiguous corridors of natural habitat to link isolated orang-utan populations. The oil-palm industry has to be part of our conservation efforts if we want to succeed, since the major orang-utan populations in Sabah are fragmented by oil-palm estates."
The meeting in London has been organised by the World Land Trust (WLT), which is anxious to keep all sides talking. Mary Tibbet, of the WLT, said: "It's important to get everyone to the table. The palm-oil industry has been vilified but there could be a mechanism in which they are engaged in the conservation of orang-utans.."
Orang-utans live only in Borneo and Sumatra but have been pushed back into ever-smaller areas of their rainforest habitat largely because of intensive logging and agriculture. In the past century, orang-utan numbers in Borneo and Sumatra have slumped by more than 75 per cent, and in Sabah they have crashed up to 90 per cent in 200 years. But Sabah remains a stronghold for the animal, with more than 11,000 orang-utans living there, a fifth of the total estimated wild population.
The palm-oil industry has expanded rapidly over 20 years, encroaching heavily on the forests where orang-utans live, in response to increasing demand from western countries for palm-oil in cooking and in biofuels. Malaysia is the world's biggest producer of palm oil, the country's third-biggest export, worth £11.5bn last year.
Without the corridors, the animals, which dislike travelling either on the ground or through crop plantations, are trapped in small areas of forest. These fragments support only a handful of the apes and in the long term they would die out because the gene pool is too small to be biologically viable.
The World Bank has stopped lending money to the palm-oil industry amid concerns about the impacts of plantation expansion on local people and the effects of deforestation on orang-utans and other wildlife. Companies such as Lush cosmetics and Cadbury New Zealand have stopped using palm-oil because of environmental concerns.
Andi Abdussalam, Antara 15 Nov 09;
Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Greenpeace activists --who set up a camp last month and sealed the heavy-duty equipment of PT Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper (RAPP) in Kampar Peninsula, Riau, two days ago -- left the location on Saturday after police gave them until 6 pm to leave the place.
"Fifteen of the volunteers --who came there in protest against deforestation and peatland drainage-- have already left the camp while the other 35 are still packing their belongings," Southeast Asia Greenpeace forest campaigner Bustar Maitar said on Saturday evening.
He said Greenpeace would not stop its fight to protect forests in Riau and would continue to call for protection of Kampar Peninsula forest and exert pressure on the company that had cleared the natural forest.
However, according to latest negotiations the local police in Pelalawan had given them a security guarantee and until Sunday morning to leave.
Earlier, chief of the Pelalawan police resort Adj. Chief Coms. Ari Rachman called on them to leave the site and vacate the `Climate Protection Camp` as soon as possible around the peatland area.
The call was directly made by the Pelalawan police resort chief when he had a dialog with the locals who held a rally against the presence of the Greenpeace activists.
Rachaman said police would not take risk in maintaining the presence of the environmental activists in the area. He said he received orders from the Riau police chief to evacuate them in order to prevent physical clashes between the volunteers and local people.
Since the activists` presence, tension between groups of local people who were for and against the activity had also increased although it was believed it was the company who had incited local sentiment against the environmental activists.
Greenpeace`s action took place on the Kampar Peninsula on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, on Thursday, where Greenpeace has set up a `Climate Defenders` Camp`.
The activists locked themselves to three excavators, owned by Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL), one of Indonesia`s biggest pulp and paper producers, to prevent it destroying the rainforest to make way for tree plantations, grown to make pulp and paper for international customers, including UPM Kymmene.
UPM-Kymmene is one of the world`s leading forest industry groups and the leading producer of printing papers. It is a modern, efficient and focused forest industry company. It has production facilities in 15 countries and its main market areas are Europe and North America. UPM`s shares are listed on the stock exchange in Helsinki. UPM creates value from renewable and recyclable.
The activists decided to leave the area in an effort to prevent increasing tension among groups of local people.
"Greenpeace is in a position where it has to make a hard decision for the sake of the interest of the local people," Greenpeace forest campaigner Bustar Maitar said.
He added: "We are at a loss about what to do," he said. As an organization that shuns violence, he said, the organization did not want to see a communal conflict to happen after they had left.
Maitar believed that the company was behind all this and therefore his side had asked the police to follow it up.
"The license of PT Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper (RAPP) is not complete and therefore the company`s action in clearing the forest is against the law. If the government acts as if it does not know it it means they are ignoring existing public norms," he said.
He said Greenpeace would also hand over the camp set up last month on the side of Kampar River to the local community.
It was reported on Friday that police have named 21 of the activists after they sealed the heavy-duty equipment of RAPP.
The 21 were among 33 Greenpeace activists detained at the Pelalawan police resort after they sealed the heavy-duty equipment in a peatland forest area in the peninsula on Thursday, their lawyer Susilaningtias said.
Twelve of the 33 Greenpeace activists are foreign nationals. They come from Brazil, Germany, Thailand, Spain and the Philippines.
Their lawyer said the 21 activists are charged with committing an unpleasant act under article 335 of the Criminal Code and violating a ban on entry into a company`s working area without a permit under article 551 of the code.
"They may be penalized under articles 335 and 551 of the Criminal Code. It was a RAPP employee who reported them to the police," Susilaningtias said.
However, police denied having arrested them. All the 21 suspects are from Indonesia.
Chief of the Pelalawan police resort Adj. Chief Coms. Ari Rachman denied that the police had detained tens of Greenpeace activists after they sealed the heavy-duty equipment.
"The police did not arrest but protected them after the local people had written to the Riau governor, the Riau provincial police and the Pelalawan police resort rejecting the presence of the Greenpeace activists," he said.(*)
Into the wild, once again
A rehabilitator plans to start releasing rescued orangutans back into Borneo's forests. But there are concerns whether the tamed apes will survive out there.
Andrew Higgins, The Washington Post 14 Nov 09;
PALANGKA RAYA, INDONESIA -- Over the past decade, Lone Droescher-Nielsen, a former Scandinavian Airlines Systems flight attendant, has saved nearly 600 orphaned orangutans in Borneo from almost certain death. Funded by donations from abroad, she has given the apes food, shelter and better health care than many humans in these parts ever get.
Now, the 46-year-old Dane is preparing for a more difficult -- and controversial -- task: returning tame orangutans to the wild. "They were born wild, and they deserve to go back in the wild again," said Droescher-Nielsen, founder and director of the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation and Rescue Project. "That is our ultimate objective."
Early next year, if all goes according to plan, she'll release a first batch of about 75 rehabilitated orangutans into a remote forest in Central Kalimantan, an Indonesian province on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo. Tiny radio transmitters placed under their skin will monitor their movements -- and help answer a big question: Can the animals survive?
Some experts wonder whether orangutans raised by humans will be able to hack life in the forest and whether diseases they might have caught in captivity will harm kin that never left the jungle.
Droescher-Nielsen, whose 10-year-old project has grown into the world's largest primate rescue effort, expects most to make it. "The ones we set free are not going to be wild, but they can manage," she said.
It will take a couple of generations for bad habits picked up in captivity to be completely purged. Disease, she added, shouldn't be a problem because the area selected for the trial release doesn't have a viable orangutan community of its own.
The orangutan -- which means "man of the forest" in a local language -- is one of mankind's closest cousins in the animal kingdom, sharing about 97 percent of its DNA with humans. But it has suffered catastrophically from contact with man.
A century ago, Borneo had more than 300,000 wild orangutans. Today, the number has fallen to about 50,000, most of which live in Central Kalimantan. They could vanish if forests keep getting chopped down at the current rate of what Indonesian environmentalists say equals the size of six football fields every minute. Palm oil plantations, which have expanded rapidly in recent years as demand for the cheap oil surged, have led to an even bigger influx of baby apes at the rescue center.
Droescher-Nielsen initially hoped to start returning orangutans to the wild years ago, but, as forests kept retreating, it became increasingly difficult to find a safe place to put them. The task was further complicated by the fact that rehabilitated apes don't fear humans -- a big problem when many humans see them as a menace and want them dead.
Keeping orangutans fed and sheltered is expensive. The Nyaru Menteng project has a staff of about 200 people. Salaries, food, medicines and other expenses mean that it costs about $2,000 a year for each of the nearly 600 apes in residence. That is more than twice the average annual income in the area. An additional 400 or so of the primates are being cared for in other rehabilitation centers in Borneo.
"I'd like to be an orangutan," joked Nordin, a local environmental activist, who like many Indonesians uses one name. "They get given meals, and when they get sick they get sent to hospital."
Droescher-Nielsen's center has a well-equipped clinic. Adult orangutans spend much of the day in a nearby peat-land forest that is off-limits to loggers and oil palm growers. Each afternoon, dozens come out of the trees for a "social hour" in the main compound. They munch fruit, climb on a jungle gym and play on swings. At night, they are escorted to a cluster of cages; the younger primates are piled into wheelbarrows and taken to a separate sleeping area.
To survive in the wild, the orangutans will have to forget their pampered past lifestyle. Droescher-Nielsen's staff members have devised a number of techniques to try to help prepare the animals for life on their own in the forest. About 125 apes, for example, have been moved onto islands in a nearby river, where they have little contact with humans. Most of their food is still provided, but they have to work much harder to get it: It has been placed in trees, not simply left on the ground.
Some of her center's orangutans, Droescher-Nielsen said, have scant chance of surviving in the wild, so they will have to stay put until they die. This could mean decades, as the animal's average life expectancy is 40 to 45 years. Those likely to stay include the blind, the maimed and apes "just too plain stupid to make it."
Some question whether protecting apes in captivity will contribute to the long-term survival of the species. Rescuing baby orangutans is a "welfare issue, but it is not good for conservation," said John Burton, head of World Land Trust, a British conservation group. He's against returning orangutans that might be carrying human diseases to the forest and thinks that keeping them in expensive rehabilitation centers is "not cost-effective" as it only adds to a "world surfeit of captive orangutans." The main focus, he said, should be on protecting forests and the wild apes that live in them.
Droescher-Nielsen agrees that the fundamental problem is the destruction of trees. But she also says humans must take responsibility for the havoc they've already caused.
"I don't look at this with my brain. I look at it with my heart. I cannot leave these victims," she said. "We're the cause of their becoming orphans. What should we do, just euthanize them? Should we just kill them and say, 'I don't really care?' "
Staff photographer Linda Davidson contributed to this report.
Yahoo News 14 Nov 09;
BEIJING (AFP) – China has started construction on a research centre to help captive pandas adapt to the wild with a view to releasing them into nature, state media reported.
The centre is being built in a mountainous area of the southwestern province of Sichuan, the official Xinhua news agency said, where an 8.0-magnitude earthquake left more than 87,000 people dead and missing in May 2008.
It is expected to be completed within three to five years, at a cost 60 million yuan (8.8 million dollars), the report said.
"Currently, there are about 300 captive giant pandas and it's time for us to think about putting them back in the wild," Zhang Zhihe, director of the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base, was quoted as saying.
A large experimental area will accommodate 10 pandas that will be trained into adapting to the wild, according to the report.
Those animals that perform well will then be transferred to a "half-wild area" within five to 10 years, where they will live in caves and feed by themselves.
Finally, another five to 10 years will see some pandas let out into real nature.
There are about 1,590 pandas living in the wild around China, mostly in Sichuan, northern Shaanxi and northwestern Gansu provinces.
A total of 180 have been bred in captivity, according to earlier reports, but their notoriously low libidos have frustrated efforts to boost their numbers.
Jonathan Leake, Times Online 15 Nov 09;
Reindeer imported to Britain for Santa’s grottoes and festive parades are dying prematurely after exposure to diseases from British farm animals, a senior government vet has warned.
An official investigation has revealed a sharp increase in deaths in young reindeer, also linked to bad diet, poor welfare and the stress of being uprooted from their natural habitat.
Dr Aiden Foster, who carried out the research at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA), said the deer, which normally live to 12 years, were badly suited to life in Britain. He said: “Reindeer are highly specialised Arctic deer. The recent fashion of keeping them in captive situations many degrees south of their normal range is fraught with health and welfare issues.”
The warning comes amid greater commercial exploitation of the animals, which are now a common festive feature. Today, reindeer parades are planned in Birmingham and Middlesbrough, and others in cities across Britain.
About 500 of the animals have been imported in the past five years, taking advantage of a relaxation of quarantine rules. Some cases are detailed in quarterly bulletins published by the VLA’s network of regional laboratories. In the past year these have included:
• A two-year-old female kept on a farm near Shrewsbury, which died of malignant catarrhal fever — a sheep disease that causes mucus to pour from their muzzles. Reindeer are highly vulnerable to this.
• A herd of seven reindeer, from the same area, which contracted liver and gut flukes, probably from contact with farm animals.
• A reindeer kept near Winchester that died from lung infections.
• A 15-month-old animal killed by parasites and copper deficiency.
Reindeer owners are not obliged to notify the VLA of unusual deaths, so Foster is uncertain exactly how many reindeer there are in Britain, or how many have died, but he said the trend was worrying: “We have noticed a significant increase in the number of submissions of reindeer carcases and samples, and when we looked at the causes of death it was clear there were common factors.”
Earlier this year, Foster outlined his concerns in a paper given to the Veterinary Deer Society, and a lay version of his research is about to be published in Smallholder magazine. Foster hopes it will make farmers aware of the risks of buying reindeer, most of which are purchased for hiring out for festive parades and Santa’s grottoes in shopping centres around Britain.
Foster points out that reindeer suffer when removed from their natural life of roaming the tundra, eating fresh lichen and other plants and mingling with fellow reindeer. He said: “They are not like other livestock. It is very difficult to keep these animals here. They are semi-wild and vulnerable to the diseases and parasites carried by British farm animals.”
Foster says much of Britain’s farmland is unsuitable for reindeer and many owners simply lack the expertise to keep them. He warns that reindeer also carry microbes dangerous to humans, such as salmonella, campylobacter, E coli and yersinia.
Inexperienced owners are also at risk. In September this year, Kay Davies was gored by Mr Frosty, her 18-stone reindeer, after entering its pen while the creature was in rut, a period of high aggression.
Davies owns the firm Wedding Horses, based in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and planned to rent Mr Frosty out for Christmas displays.
Davies, who has since had the reindeer destroyed, said: “I fed him the day before without a problem.”
Tilly Smith, owner of the Cairngorm reindeer herd and widely regarded as Britain’s authority on the animals, believes there is nothing inherently wrong in using the animals for such events.
She supplied a team of reindeer for the Christmas parade at Harrods earlier this month, with no ill effects. The creatures were part of her 150-strong herd, which since 1952 has roamed over hundreds of acres of Scottish mountains — a landscape chosen for its similarity to their native habitat.
She said: “When animals are imported, they have been taken from huge, semi-wild herds and then they are expected to live alone or in small groups in enclosed areas, often near other livestock. It’s no wonder they get sick.”
Foster said: “Like puppies, reindeer should be kept for life, not just for Christmas.”
Yahoo News 16 Nov 09;
SAO PAULO, Brazil (AFP) – Environmentalists on Sunday warned bluefin tuna was on its way to extinction after a international meeting of fishery ministry officials trimmed catch quotas but upheld continued hauls of the fish, prized in sushi dishes.
"After meeting for 10 days, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) refused to end fishing for Atlantic bluefin tuna," the Pew Environment Group, a US organization that sat on in the meeting in Recife, Brazil, said in a statement.
"Instead, ICCAT set the catch limit for bluefin, considered the most valuable fish in the sea, at 13,500 tons," it said.
That is down from the 19,950-ton quota originally decided for 2010 in an EU accord with ICCAT in Brussels in April this year.
Ecological outfits warned that bluefin tuna faced disappearance because of overfishing in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, mainly for lucrative markets in Asia, especially Japan.
Yearly quotas set up by ICCAT are systematically exceeded by industrial fleets. That and illegal fishing have caused the population to decline by more than 85 percent in the eastern Atlantic and by more than 90 percent in the western Atlantic.
ICCAT "has failed once again to act beyond the interests of a few tuna fishing and farming industries," Greenpeace said in a statement. "Again it has approved recommendations which fail to ensure the recovery of Atlantic bluefin tuna."
It said that a catch limit of 8,000 tons would have given bluefin tuna "a 50 percent chance of stocks recovering by 2023," Greenpeace said.
Susan Lieberman, the head of international policy for the Pew Environmental Group, told AFP in a telephone interview that while a quota cut was a positive step, it was "too little too late" and was "not enough for even 50 percent chance of recovering the species."
"We were calling for a suspension" of all bluefin tuna catches for at least a year, or, failing that, the quota of "8,000 tons or less," she said.
"What they are doing is responding to economic pressures from the fishing industry. But in the long term there won't be a fishing industry," she said.
Other groups, including Greenpeace, were equally disappointed by Sunday's decision.
Environmental groups are now backing a call from Monaco for the issue of bluefin tuna to be taken before a March meeting of CITES, an international body that sets rules against illegal wildlife trade, with the aim of declaring the fish endangered and putting a ban on catching it.
Francois Provost, Greenpeace International oceans campaigner, said: "A ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna is now the only remaining chance to save the iconic fish from commercial extinction."
ICCAT was set up in the late 1960s to conserve "tuna and tuna-like species in the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent seas," according to its website.
Forty-eight countries in every region of the world -- ranging from Algeria, Barbados, China and France, to Ivory Coast, Japan, the United States and Venezuela -- are contracting parties to ICCAT.
Reuters 15 Nov 09;
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Man-made ponds and rice fields irrigated using groundwater may be responsible for arsenic contamination of groundwater in Bangladesh, a study has found.
Arsenic is a naturally occurring chemical poisonous to humans and is known to cause skin lesions and cancers of the bladder, kidney, lung and skin.
While it is known that organic carbon triggers the release of arsenic from sediments into groundwater, the source of this carbon has been unclear.
In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, researchers said they used chemical tests and models to examine the flow of groundwater in a typical agricultural area in Bangladesh and found that man-made ponds were a key source of organic carbon.
"The chemical signature of high-arsenic groundwater points toward ponds as the source of the contaminated water," wrote the scientists, led by Charles Harvey from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.
They warned against the building of artificial ponds above existing tube wells.
"The development of artificial ponds above wells should be avoided if it is possible, and drinking-water wells should not be placed downstream of recharge from existing ponds, wetlands, rivers or other permanently saturated water bodies potentially elevated in organic carbon," they wrote.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh suffer from skin lesions and experts have warned for years that Bangladesh can expect more cases of cancer if its people continue drinking arsenic-contaminated water from millions of small tube wells spread across the countryside.
Ironically, the tube wells were installed from the 1970s with the help of international agencies like the United Nations Children's Fund to provide "clean water" and as an answer to dirty surface water and widespread gastrointestinal diseases.
Arsenic contamination of ground water has been found in other countries, including Argentina, Chile, China, India, Mexico, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States, and is a global problem.
But Bangladesh's plight is unprecedented and some experts have described it as the largest mass poisoning of a population in history.
According to the World Health Organization, arsenic contaminated water directly affects the health of 35 million people in Bangladesh, which has a total population of 130 million.
Arsenic is widely distributed throughout the earth's crust and is introduced into water through the dissolution of minerals and ores. There should not be more than 0.01 milligrams/liter of the chemical in drinking water, according to the WHO.
(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Charles Dick)
Bangladesh mass poisoning mystery solved
Fred Pearce, New Scientist 16 Nov 09;
One of the world's great poisoning mysteries may have been solved – the source of the arsenic that turns up in lethal quantities in hundreds of thousands of wells across Bangladesh. The answer is ponds.
Bangladesh occupies the flood-prone delta of the river Ganges. In the past half-century, villagers have had to dig pits for soil to raise their homes above the floods. Water-filled pits cover roughly a tenth of the delta, and appear to be poisoning the wells Bangladeshis sink for drinking water.
Organic carbon in silt and sewage settles on the bottom of the stagnant ponds and seeps underground, where it is eaten by microbes. This microbial oxidation releases arsenic already in the delta silt – it washed down into the delta from the Himalayas over thousands of years. The arsenic dissolves in underground water and is tapped by village wells.
Rebecca Neumann of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues, cracked the problem after seven years spent plotting the chemistry and underground flows of water beneath villages near Dhaka. She found that oxidation only occurs beneath the stagnant ponds. In contrast, oxygen-rich rice paddies trap the arsenic in soils at the surface.
Future poisoning?
As long as Bangladeshis drank surface water they were safe. In the late 1970s the country switched to ground water and since then Neumann estimates arsenic has poisoned 2 million Bangladeshis. Luckily for rice eaters, arsenic in the paddy fields is usually flushed away during the monsoon season.
Neumann's analysis reveals that most of the arsenic in well water today seeped underground from ponds dug about 50 years ago, though pits are still being dug today, which could exacerbate poisoning in future.
However, John McArthur of University College London published a study last year showing no link between ponds and arsenic across the border in West Bengal. "Ponds may have an effect locally, but in the big picture, they may not be so important," he says. But Neumann recommends Bangladeshis play safe by sinking wells away from ponds.
Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO685
David Rand and Martin Nowak, New Scientist 15 Nov 09;
HAVE you ever noticed a friend or neighbour driving a new hybrid car and felt pressure to trade in your gas guzzler? Or worried about what people might think when you drive up to the office in an SUV? If so, then you have experienced the power of reputation for encouraging good public behaviour. In fact, reputation is such an effective motivator that it could help us solve the most pressing issue we face - protecting our planet.
Environmental problems are difficult to solve because Earth is a "public good". Even though we would all be better off if everyone reduced their environmental impact, it is not in anyone's individual interest to do so. This leads to the famous "tragedy of the commons", in which public resources are overexploited and everyone suffers.
Public goods situations crop up all over the place, including decisions on maintaining roads, funding the police and whether or not to shirk at work. This leads us to an important question: is it possible to make people care enough about such problems to do their bit? To help answer this, researchers have developed a representation of such situations called the public goods game. The results give cause to believe that the tragedy of the commons can be overcome.
In the public goods game, each player is given a sum of money, say $10. They then choose how much to keep and how much to anonymously contribute to a common pool. Contributions are multiplied by some factor (less than the number of players) and then split equally among all players. If everyone contributes, the payout is higher. But making a contribution is costly, and causes you to end up worse off than if you did not contribute.
Imagine, for example, four people playing a game in which contributions are doubled. If everyone contributes their $10, they all end up with $20. But a player who refuses to contribute while the others put in the full amount ends up with $25 while the rest get $15 each. If only one player contributes their $10, they end up with just $5 and everybody else $15. The self-interested thing to do, therefore, is never to contribute.
When the public goods game is played in the lab, most people usually begin by contributing a large amount, trying to do their part towards maximising the group's earnings. Some people, however, decide to take a slice of the profits without contributing. Over time this free-riding undermines the others' willingness to pay and the average contribution decreases. This results in significantly lower earnings all round, recreating the tragedy of the commons.
The public goods game gives us an opportunity to explore interventions that encourage cooperation. Experiments have shown, for example, that making each player's contribution public can sustain contributions at a high level. It appears that the benefit of earning a good name outweighs the costs of doing your part for the greater good, and even selfish people can be motivated to care. It is worth contributing in order to protect your standing in the community.
Out in the real world, these experiments suggest a way to help make people reduce their impact on the environment. If information about each of our environmental footprints was made public, concern for maintaining a good reputation could impact behaviour. Would you want your neighbours, friends, or colleagues to think of you as a free rider, harming the environment while benefiting from the restraint of others?
The power of reputation is already being harnessed to protect the environment. Hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius have recognisable designs, advertising their driver's commitment to cleaner energy for all to see. Some energy companies give green flags to customers who choose to pay extra for energy from a more environmentally friendly source, allowing people to openly display their green credentials. Similarly, individuals who volunteer in environmental clean-up days receive T-shirts advertising their participation.
Tokens such as these serve a dual purpose. First, they allow those who contribute to reap benefits through reputation, helping to compensate them for the costs they incur. Secondly, when people display their commitment to conservation, it reinforces the norm of participation and increases the pressure on free riders. If you know that all of your neighbours are paying extra for green energy or volunteering on a conservation project, that makes you all the more inclined to do so yourself.
Even better than voluntary displays would be laws enforcing disclosure. For example, governments could require energy companies to publish the amount of electricity used by each home and business in a searchable database. Likewise, gasoline use could be calculated if, at yearly inspections, mechanics were required to report the number of kilometres driven. Cars could be forced to display large stickers indicating average distance travelled, with inefficient cars labelled similarly to cigarettes: "Environmentalist's warning: this car is highly inefficient. Its emissions contribute to climate change and cause lung cancer and other diseases." Judging from our laboratory research, such policies would motivate people to reduce their carbon footprint.
Although laws of this kind raise possible privacy issues, the potential gains could be great. In a world where each of us was accountable to everybody else for the environmental damage we cause, there would be strong incentives to reduce the energy we use, the carbon dioxide we emit and the pollution we create. In such a world, we might be able to avert a global tragedy of the commons.
David Rand is a postdoctoral fellow in mathematical biology at Harvard University.
Martin Nowak is professor of biology and mathematics at Harvard University.
Xinhua 14 Nov 09;
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 14 (Xinhua) -- The future of the Maldives, the Indian Ocean islands facing the real prospect of disappearing into the sea, rests squarely in the hands of its younger generations.
As sea levels rise and threaten the very existence of the Maldives, children and adolescents increasingly face the prospect of moving to higher ground, either within their national boundaries or beyond.
Maldivian Vice-President Waheed Hassan told Xinhua that raising awareness about the effects of climate change was a top priority for his government and, while older generations still might cling to antiquated ideas, it was the country's youth that appeared more flexible.
"A lot of young people are educated and they are exposed to the debate on climate change," he said at his home in the capital of Male. "Of course, there are also traditional people, who think, for example, when there is a natural disaster it's the wheel of God and we do not have anything to do with it."
On the international stage, the Maldivian government has taken the lead in sounding the alarm over climate change. Most of the country's 200 inhabited islands are less than a meter above sea level, making them extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels.
President Mohamed Nasheed has announced the establishment of a sovereignty fund to relocate his people beyond Maldivian borders, should his country disappear under the aqua blue waters of the Indian Ocean.
But there is also another, less drastic plan. The island of Hulhumale, an ambitious land reclamation project, is an artificial island built three meters above sea level. It was originally conceived under the previous administration to relocate people living in Male, the most congested city in the world.
But with rising sea levels, Hulhumale will also provide an option for people whose homes are destroyed in extreme storms, tsunamis, or the slower but equally dangerous effects of climate change.
Hassan said the right incentives will lure Maldivians to leave their homes and move to bigger islands, including Hulhumale.
"In the future, I believe that most of the Maldivian people will live on similar bigger islands," he said. "We don't have to force people to migrate from their islands. I think we just have to create the necessary conditions for people to move, and they will."
Older generations who have grown up and learned to live off the land and sea of small islands might be harder to convince, Hassan admitted.
But not for young people.
On Guraidhoo island, a half-hour boat ride from the capital, Xinhua spoke to several adolescents and young adults who did not seemed phased by the prospect of leaving their tiny home should the ocean eventually wash it away.
Aslam Ahmed, 15, shrugged with a smile and said he did not worry about climate change or having to move one day. This is coming from a boy who kept watching a movie when the 2004 tsunami hit on the other side of the island.
Similarly, a group of boys, ages 14 to 18, said they did not concern themselves with "what if" scenarios. They could even laugh about it.
Perhaps the very idea of climate change is too daunting for many local youths. They all expressed a "que sera, sera" attitude.
Yet, even considering how to tackle tangible environment and development challenges seemed just as troublesome for those on Guraidhoo.
The beaches are littered with rubbish, something Shafiu Ahmed, 18, acknowledged made his home look ugly but would do little to change.
In the Maldives, waste is a major environmental headache. With little land to spare, trash is something to be thrown on the beach.
Abdul Hadhee Hussein is the island chief of Guraidhoo. He said his office has been urging locals to stop throwing away their rubbish along the shorelines.
"I have been advising and giving announcements to the people of the island not to do that," he said in Devehi through a translator.
However, so far his office has not doled out any penalties.
Michael Casey, Associated Press Yahoo News 15 Nov 09;
KOKONOGI, Japan – A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venomous tentacles trapped in a fishing net. Within minutes, hundreds more were being hauled up, a pulsating mass crowding out the catch of mackerel and sea bass.
The fishermen leaned into the nets, grunting and grumbling as they tossed the translucent jellyfish back into the bay, giants weighing up to 200 kilograms (450 pounds), marine invaders that are putting the men's livelihoods at risk.
The venom of the Nomura, the world's largest jellyfish, a creature up to 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter, can ruin a whole day's catch by tainting or killing fish stung when ensnared with them in the maze of nets here in northwest Japan's Wakasa Bay.
"Some fishermen have just stopped fishing," said Taiichiro Hamano, 67. "When you pull in the nets and see jellyfish, you get depressed."
This year's jellyfish swarm is one of the worst he has seen, Hamano said. Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand kilometers (miles) of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan.
Scientists believe climate change — the warming of oceans — has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes.
The gelatinous seaborne creatures are blamed for decimating fishing industries in the Bering and Black seas, forcing the shutdown of seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa, and terrorizing beachgoers worldwide, the U.S. National Science Foundation says.
A 2008 foundation study cited research estimating that people are stung 500,000 times every year — sometimes multiple times — in Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast, and 20 to 40 die each year in the Philippines from jellyfish stings.
In 2007, a salmon farm in Northern Ireland lost its more than 100,000 fish to an attack by the mauve stinger, a jellyfish normally known for stinging bathers in warm Mediterranean waters. Scientists cite its migration to colder Irish seas as evidence of global warming.
Increasingly polluted waters — off China, for example — boost growth of the microscopic plankton that "jellies" feed upon, while overfishing has eliminated many of the jellyfish's predators and cut down on competitors for plankton feed.
"These increases in jellyfish should be a warning sign that our oceans are stressed and unhealthy," said Lucas Brotz, a University of British Columbia researcher.
Here on the rocky Echizen coast, amid floodlights and the roar of generators, fishermen at Kokonogi's bustling port made quick work of the day's catch — packaging glistening fish and squid in Styrofoam boxes for shipment to market.
In rain jackets and hip waders, they crowded around a visitor to tell how the jellyfish have upended a way of life in which men worked fishing trawlers on the high seas in their younger days and later eased toward retirement by joining one of the cooperatives operating nets set in the bay.
It was a good living, they said, until the jellyfish began inundating the bay in 2002, sometimes numbering 500 million, reducing fish catches by 30 percent and slashing prices by half over concerns about quality.
Two nets in Echizen burst last month during a typhoon because of the sheer weight of the jellyfish, and off the east coast jelly-filled nets capsized a 10-ton trawler as its crew tried to pull them up. The three fishermen were rescued.
"We have been getting rid of jellyfish. But no matter how hard we try, the jellyfish keep coming and coming," said Fumio Oma, whose crew is out of work after their net broke under the weight of thousands of jellyfish. "We need the government's help to get rid of the jellyfish."
The invasions cost the industry up to 30 billion yen ($332 million) a year, and tens of thousands of fishermen have sought government compensation, said scientist Shin-ichi Uye, Japan's leading expert on the problem.
Hearing fishermen's pleas, Uye, who had been studying zooplankton, became obsessed with the little-studied Nomura's jellyfish, scientifically known as Nemopilema nomurai, which at its biggest looks like a giant mushroom trailing dozens of noodle-like tentacles.
"No one knew their life cycle, where they came from, where they reproduced," said Uye, 59. "This jellyfish was like an alien."
He artificially bred Nomura's jellyfish in his Hiroshima University lab, learning about their life cycle, growth rates and feeding habits. He traveled by ferry between China to Japan this year to confirm they were riding currents to Japanese waters.
He concluded China's coastal waters offered a perfect breeding ground: Agricultural and sewage runoff are spurring plankton growth, and fish catches are declining. The waters of the Yellow Sea, meanwhile, have warmed as much as 1.7 degrees C (3 degrees F) over the past quarter-century.
"The jellyfish are becoming more and more dominant," said Uye, as he sliced off samples of dead jellyfish on the deck of an Echizen fishing boat. "Their growth rates are quite amazing."
The slight, bespectacled scientist is unafraid of controversy, having lobbied his government tirelessly to help the fishermen, and angered Chinese colleagues by arguing their government must help solve the problem, comparing it to the effects of acid rain that reaches Japan from China.
"The Chinese people say they will think about this after they get rich, but it might be too late by then," he said.
A U.S. marine scientist, Jennifer Purcell of Western Washington University, has found a correlation between warming and jellyfish on a much larger scale, in at least 11 locations, including the Mediterranean and North seas, and Chesapeake and Narragansett bays.
"It's hard to deny that there is an effect from warming," Purcell said. "There keeps coming up again and again examples of jellyfish populations being high when it's warmer." Some tropical species, on the other hand, appear to decline when water temperatures rise too high.
Even if populations explode, their numbers may be limited in the long term by other factors, including food and currents. In a paper last year, researchers concluded jellyfish numbers in the Bering Sea — which by 2000 were 40 times higher than in 1982 — declined even as temperatures have hit record highs.
"They were still well ahead of their historic averages for that region," said co-author Lorenzo Ciannelli of Oregon State University. "But clearly jellyfish populations are not merely a function of water temperature."
Addressing the surge in jellyfish blooms in most places will require long-term fixes, such as introducing fishing quotas and pollution controls, as well as capping greenhouse gas emissions to control global warming, experts said.
In the short term, governments are left with few options other than warning bathers or bailing out cash-strapped fishermen. In Japan, the government is helping finance the purchase of newly designed nets, a layered system that snares jellyfish with one kind of net, allowing fish through to be caught in another.
Some entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are trying to cash in. One Japanese company is selling giant jellyfish ice cream, and another plans a pickled plum dip with chunks of giant jellyfish. But, though a popular delicacy, jellyfish isn't likely to replace sushi or other fish dishes on Asian menus anytime soon, in view of its time-consuming processing, heavy sodium overload and unappealing image.
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On the Net:
Jellyfish Report from National Science Foundation: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/jellyfish/index.jsp
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Associated Press writer Shino Yuasa contributed to this report from Tokyo.
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