Best of our wild blogs: 13 Feb 19

23 Feb (Sat) - Free guided walk at Chek Jawa Boardwalk
Adventures with the Naked Hermit Crabs

3 March: World Wildlife Day 2019 focusing on marine species for the first time
wild shores of singapore

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NParks to become lead agency for animal and wildlife management

Fann Sim Channel NewsAsia 12 Feb 19;

SINGAPORE: From Apr 1, all matters to do with wildlife, as well as non-food plants and animals, will be under the purview of the National Parks Board (NParks).

This comes after the Amendment Bill to transfer non-food plant and animal-related functions from the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) to NParks was passed on Tuesday (Feb 12).

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Singapore Food Agency to focus on food safety and security: Masagos

ALFRED CHUA Today Online 13 Feb 19;

SINGAPORE — Food safety and security are critical to Singapore, particularly as the country relies heavily on food imports, which can be affected by climate change and food crises.

That is why the two issues will be the focus of a new statutory board, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), said Environment and Water Resources Minister Masagos Zulkifli.

“Food security is fundamental for our national security. We have worked hard to ensure Singapore’s food safety and security over the decades,” said Mr Masagos during the second reading of the Singapore Food Agency Bill in Parliament on Tuesday (Feb 12).

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Indonesia: Beached whale shark dies on Sukabumi coast

The Jakarta Post 12 Feb 19;

A whale shark was found dead on Tuesday by locals and fishermen near the dock of a fishing port in Palabuhanratu, Sukabumi regency, West Java.

“I used to run into these [sharks] in the sea, and they had never disrupted our work. However, this time, we found one of them stranded on the dock,” an unnamed fisherman, who claimed to have discovered the beached shark first, said on Tuesday as quoted by Antara.

The stranded shark, known for its distinct white spots and stripes, weighed around 300 kilograms and was around 2 meters-long.

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Pangolins: Rare insight into world's most trafficked mammal

Helen Briggs BBC News 13 Feb 19;

The secret life of the world's most trafficked mammal, the pangolin, has been caught on camera in Africa.

Footage gives a rare insight into the behaviour of the giant pangolin, the largest of all the scaly animals.

Observed by remote-operated cameras, a baby take a ride on its mother's back, while an adult climbs a tree.

Scientists are releasing the footage to highlight the plight of the animals, which are being pushed to extinction by illegal hunting for scales and meat.

Large numbers of their scales have been seized this month alone, including Malaysia's biggest-ever interception of smuggled pangolin products.

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Why recycling, less single-use plastics are not the answers to our plastic scourge

Getting rid of straws and other single-use plastics, recycling and reducing our consumerism are noble efforts but a fundamental redesign of our global value chains is needed to tackle plastic waste, says the University of Denver’s Jack Buffington.
Jack Buffington Channel NewsAsia 13 Feb 19;

DENVER, Colorado: Plastic is everywhere, even in the most remote places on earth such as the deepest depths of the Pacific Ocean in the Mariana Trench, to the highest peak of Mount Everest.

But no place has been as negatively impacted by plastic waste as the fastest growing nations of Asia, where the United Nations has hailed the growing situation over plastic waste a “planetary crisis”.

A WORLD OF PLASTIC

Peak Plastic describes the point in time when the benefit of the next piece of plastic provides is outweighed by its irreversible damage to the environment, a timeline that will happen in the next eleven years.

Peak Plastic will occur in some places much sooner according to some studies, in the developing communities of China, Indonesia and Philippines where the production of plastic waste are already at a crisis level.

Worldwide, plastic production and use is growing at a 10 per cent rate, but in the developing regions of Asia, it is growing much faster than the existing waste management infrastructure can handle, leading to a large majority of the 9 million tonnes a year of plastic that is dumped into our oceans every year.

By 2050, it is possible that there will be more plastic in our oceans than fish, a scenario that seems almost impossible to believe given 71 per cent of the earth is covered by oceans.

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Best of our wild blogs: 12 Feb 19

9 Mar (Sat): Easy nature guiding - a FREE workshop
Celebrating Singapore Shores!

16 Mar (Sat): R.U.M. joins Celebrating Singapore Shores at Berlayar Creek
Restore Ubin Mangroves (R.U.M.) Initiative

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Parliament: Environment studies to be made public unless there are security concerns

Rachel Au-Yong Straits Times 12 Feb 19;

The authorities intend to make public the findings of environmental impact assessments (EIAs) unless there are specific reasons - like security considerations - to keep them confidential, said Second Minister for National Development Desmond Lee yesterday.

This is the first time security considerations have been cited as a factor for withholding the results of environmental studies.

Mr Louis Ng (Nee Soon GRC) had asked if the authorities would consider making EIAs mandatory for all construction works near national parks or nature reserves, as well as publicly available.

Mr Lee's response comes in the wake of disputes over the Housing Board's conclusion in a report that forests in Tengah, which is near a military training ground, were of "low conservation significance".

But ecologists consider the forests there an important vegetation node that allows wildlife to move from the Western Catchment to the Central Catchment Nature Reserve.

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Parliament: Cross Island Line extension from Pasir Ris to Punggol being studied

Zhaki Abdullah Straits Times 11 Feb 19;

SINGAPORE - The Land Transport Authority is still studying whether the future Cross Island Line (CRL) can be extended from Pasir Ris to Punggol.

Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan on Monday (Feb 11) said in a written parliamentary reply that engineering studies are ongoing for this proposed stretch of the CRL MRT line.

Mr Gan Thiam Poh (Ang Mo Kio GRC), had asked if the Thomson-East Coast Line (TEL) could be extended to connect to Pasir Ris and Punggol, to provide greater connectivity for residents in these areas.

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Toxic bacteria found on small pieces of plastic trash from Singapore beaches

NEO CHAI CHIN Today Online 11 Feb 19;

SINGAPORE — The small pieces of plastic trash on Singapore's shores are a hotbed for bacteria, some of which are toxic to humans, a study has found.

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) discovered more than 400 types of bacteria on 275 pieces of microplastics collected from the beaches of Changi, Sembawang and Lazarus Island between April and July last year.

The bacteria include those associated with coral bleaching (Photobacterium rosenbergii) and those that cause wound infection (Vibrio) or gastroenteritis in humans (Arcobacter).

WHAT ARE MICROPLASTICS?

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Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature'

Exclusive: Insects could vanish within a century at current rate of decline, says global review
Damian Carrington The Guardian 10 Feb 19;

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

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Environment in multiple crises - report

Roger Harrabin BBC 12 Feb 19;

Politicians and policymakers have failed to grasp the gravity of the environmental crisis facing the Earth, a report claims.

The think-tank IPPR says human impacts have reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy.

Scientists warn of a potentially deadly combination of factors.

These include climate change, mass loss of species, topsoil erosion, forest felling and acidifying oceans.

The report from the centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research says these factors are "driving a complex, dynamic process of environmental destabilisation that has reached critical levels.

"This destabilisation is occurring at speeds unprecedented in human history and, in some cases, over billions of years."

So what is needed?

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