Wildlife Update : Natural born killers stalk Kiwi birdlife
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Stoats have wreaked havoc on the birds of New Zealand. Now conservationists are fighting back. The Independent reports
The terrible irony of creatures – mammals in this case – introduced with good intentions, but with negative, deadly, unforeseen consequences
In Britain, stoats are part of the rhythm of nature. They prey on rabbits and rats; they are preyed on by foxes and eagles. In New Zealand, whose only land mammals were two species of bats until Europeans arrived, stoats are the single biggest threat to the unique and increasingly threatened native birdlife.
A world leader in conservation, New Zealand has saved some of its rarest birds from extinction by ridding off-shore islands of predators. Stoats, which can swim, were thought to have a maximum range of 1.5 kilometres (less than a mile). Recently, though, the sleek, furry killers have turned up on an island more than five kilometres from the mainland, raising questions about the safety of offshore sanctuaries.
Many of New Zealand’s birds live and nest on the forest floor. Some, such as kakapo, weka and kiwi, are flightless. When they feel under threat, they freeze, making them easy prey for animals such as rats, cats and ferrets. Stoats – introduced in 1884 to combat a rabbit plague – are particularly formidable predators. They can tackle animals 10 times their body weight; they hunt by day as well as at night; they can travel vast distances, climb trees, and survive in almost any habitat. They are also prolific breeders, and they kill far more than they need to satisfy their hunger.
“When stoats get into a seabird colony or chicken hutch, they kill everything,” says Andrew Veale, an expert on stoat genetics at Auckland University. He cites credible reports of a moorhen being attacked by a stoat and taking off into the air, with the stoat still attached. Dr Veale says: “They are phenomenal killers, with an immense bite strength.”
More than 80 of New Zealand’s offshore islands are pest-free sanctuaries where all mammals have been removed through trapping, shooting, and dropping poison from helicopters. Last year, a stoat was found on Rangitoto Island, more than three kilometres off Auckland. The island had been declared predator-free only a year earlier, following a NZ$3m (£1.6m) eradication programme. By analysing the stoat’s DNA, Dr Veale established that it was from the mainland. This year, three stoats have been trapped on Kapiti island, a wildlife reserve 5.2 kilometres off Wellington. Dr Veale believes a female swam over and gave birth.
The destructive potential of stoats is well established. A single male killed 93 petrels on Motuotau island, in the Bay of Plenty, in four weeks. There have been instances of one or two stoats arriving on islands and wiping out entire populations. Philip Bell, a biosecurity officer with the Department of Conservation (DOC), said that if stoats could swim more than five kilometres, “there would be implications for the majority of islands around New Zealand”. He added: “A couple of stoats can create a breeding colony and wipe everything out. Stoats are arguably the biggest threat to our native bird species.”
They are also expensive. DOC has already spent more than NZ$200,000 trapping the three stoats on Kapiti. It will have to monitor hundreds of traps and tracking tunnels on the island for at least two years, as well as using dogs trained to detect stoats. No one is sure what prompts stoats to swim, although they appear to be in search of food. Dr Veale speculates that they take to the water after spotting land on the horizon. With the right tides, they could then travel considerable distances.
New Zealand’s first offshore wildlife refuge was established in 1891, on Resolution Island, off the South Island‘s Fiordland coast. A decade later, stoats reached Resolution and killed off its kakapo population. However, more island sanctuaries followed, and kakapo were among the bird species rescued from extinction. Another bird, the Chatham Islands robin, was down to five individuals; but after being transferred to an island, the population recovered.
Original article : http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/natural-born-killers-stalk-kiwi-birdlife-2367814.html
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Bees threatened ….. global issue… is agriculture to blame?
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Two stories highlight the deadly plight of an incredible insect….
In The Independent
The mysterious collapse of honey-bee colonies is becoming a global phenomenon, scientists working for the United Nations have revealed. Declines in managed bee colonies, seen increasingly in Europe and the US in the past decade, are also now being observed in China and Japan and there are the first signs of African collapses from Egypt, according to the report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
From The Guardian
Globalisation is killing bees, as bee pests and diseases are being passed swiftly around the world thanks to the opening up of trade, says a UN study. Attempts to industrialise pollination are making the problem even worse, the authors found.
Full articles
Decline of honey bees now a global phenomenon, says United Nations
The mysterious collapse of honey-bee colonies is becoming a global phenomenon, scientists working for the United Nations have revealed.
Declines in managed bee colonies, seen increasingly in Europe and the US in the past decade, are also now being observed in China and Japan and there are the first signs of African collapses from Egypt, according to the report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Links: http://www.unep.org/ and bees: http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=664&ArticleID=6921&l=en
The authors, who include some of the world’s leading honey-bee experts, issue a stark warning about the disappearance of bees, which are increasingly important as crop pollinators around the globe. Without profound changes to the way human beings manage the planet, they say, declines in pollinators needed to feed a growing global population are likely to continue. The scientists warn that a number of factors may now be coming together to hit bee colonies around the world, ranging from declines in flowering plants and the use of damaging insecticides, to the worldwide spread of pests and air pollution. They call for farmers and landowners to be offered incentives to restore pollinator-friendly habitats, including key flowering plants near crop-producing fields and stress that more care needs to be taken in the choice, timing and application of insecticides and other chemicals. While managed hives can be moved out of harm’s way, “wild populations (of pollinators) are completely vulnerable”, says the report.
“The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century,” said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director.
“The fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90 per cent of the world’s food, over 70 are pollinated by bees.
“Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature.
“Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people.”
Declines in bee colonies date back to the mid 1960s in Europe, but have accelerated since 1998, while in North America, losses of colonies since 2004 have left the continent with fewer managed pollinators than at any time in the past 50 years, says the report.
Now Chinese beekeepers have recently “faced several inexplicable and complex symptoms of colony losses in both species”, the report says. And it has been reported elsewhere that some Chinese farmers have had to resort to pollinating fruit trees by hand because of the lack of insects.
Furthermore, a quarter of beekeepers in Japan “have recently been confronted with sudden losses of their bee colonies”, while in Africa, beekeepers along the Egyptian Nile have been reporting signs of “colony collapse disorder” – although to date there are no other confirmed reports from the rest of the continent.
The report lists a number of factors which may be coming together to cause the decline and they include:
* Habitat degradation, including the loss of flowering plant species that provide food for bees;
* Some insecticides, including the so-called “systemic” insecticides which can migrate to the entire plant as it grows and be taken in by bees in nectar and pollen;
* Parasites and pests, such as the well-known Varroa mite;
* Air pollution, which may be interfering with the ability of bees to find flowering plants and thus food – scents that could travel more than 800 metres in the 1800s now reach less than 200 metres from a plant.
“The transformation of the countryside and rural areas in the past half-century or so has triggered a decline in wild-living bees and other pollinators,” said one of the lead authors, Dr Peter Neumann of the Swiss Bee Research Centre.
“Society is increasingly investing in ‘industrial-scale’ hives and managed colonies to make up the shortfall and going so far as to truck bees around to farms and fields in order to maintain our food supplies.
“A variety of factors are making these man-made colonies vulnerable to decline and collapse. We need to get smarter about how we manage these hives, but perhaps more importantly, we need to better manage the landscape beyond, in order to recover wild bee populations.”
Globalisation and agriculture industry exacerbating bee decline, says UN
Globalisation is killing bees, as bee pests and diseases are being passed swiftly around the world thanks to the opening up of trade, says a UN study. Attempts to industrialise pollination are making the problem even worse, the authors found.
Unexplained bee deaths have become an increasing issue around the world in the past five years, a phenomenon labelled “colony collapse disorder“. Bees in the US, Europe and Asia have been affected, though it is hard to gather reliable data on how many of them died. Some bee colonies die off naturally all the time, chiefly in winter, but the scale of the demise reported by beekeepers has prompted governments and scientists to examine why bees appear to be under threat, and in some cases to try to get around the problem by changing the ways bees are kept.
But attempts by the agricultural industry to halt the fall in bee numbers through breeding programmes and massing bees in huge hives are only exacerbating the problem, a UN official told the Guardian, because industrialised hives create the ideal breeding conditions for some of the very pests and fungal diseases seemingly responsible for many of the bee deaths. Moving the hives from farm to farm to encourage pollination then spreads the diseases further.
“We are creating the ideal conditions in the man-made hives that promote pests chemical contamination and other factors,” the official said. “This is the irony and [it is] not just confined to bees – one thinks of natural forests versus plantations and monoculture crops [which are also more susceptible to disease].”
The UN Environment Programme concluded in the report – titled Global Bee Colony Disorders and Other Threats To Insect Pollinators – that “more than a dozen factors” were behind the bee deaths, including air pollution, new fast-spreading fungal diseases and varieties of parasites such as the varroa mite, as well as the loss of habitat for wild flowers in intensively farmed areas.
The increased use of pesticides, including broad spectrum and systemic pesticides, which are absorbed by plants and can be expressed in pollen and nectar, appears to be another important factor, according to the UN. It said that when some pesticides are allowed to combine, they form a potentially lethal cocktail that can damage bees’ sense of direction and memory.
The scientists were unable to pinpoint which were the most important factors, suggesting instead that more research was needed. Last year a £10m British research project was launched to study the decline of bees.
Researchers are concerned that the loss in numbers of pollinators, given the growing global population, could lead to serious problems with foodsupply in the medium term. Of the 100 crop species that provide 90 per cent of the world’s food, more than 70 are pollinated by bees, contributing about $200bn a year to the global economy.
Achim Steiner, the executive director of UNEP, said: “The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century. Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people”.
The report suggested that as many as 20,000 flowering plant species upon which bees depend could go extinct, if conservation efforts failed. Air pollution is also making it harder for bees to find the plants – scents that could carry 800m in the 19th century may travel only about 200m today, which impairs bees’ ability to find food.
Martin Smith, the president of the British Beekeepers Association, welcomed the UNEP report, and said: “The BBKA calls on the UK government not only to take action to protect existing habitats but to find the ways and means to create new habitats beneficial to bees and other pollinators. We urge increased planting of wild flower margins around agricultural fields and also stronger guidance to local authorities on increasing flowering trees and wild flower planting in towns and cities.”
Fact or country fiction : Can Sustainable Farming Feed the World?
From ‘International Herald Tribune’ a powerful blog…
A new report proposes agro-ecology as a way to feed the world
The oldest and most common dig against organic agriculture is that it cannot feed the world’s citizens; this, however, is a supposition, not a fact. And industrial agriculture isn’t working perfectly, either: the global food price index is at a record high, and our agricultural system is wreaking havoc with the health not only of humans but of the earth. There are around a billion undernourished people; we can also thank the current system for the billion who are overweight or obese.
Yet there is good news: increasing numbers of scientists, policy panels and experts (not hippies!) are suggesting that agricultural practices pretty close to organic — perhaps best called “sustainable” — can feed more poor people sooner, begin to repair the damage caused by industrial production and, in the long term, become the norm.
On Tuesday, Olivier de Schutter, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the Right to Food, presented a report entitled “Agro-ecology and the Right to Food.” (Agro-ecology, he said in a telephone interview last Friday, has “lots” in common with both “sustainable” and “organic.”) Chief among de Schutter’s recommendations is this: “Agriculture should be fundamentally redirected towards modes of production that are more environmentally sustainable and socially just.”
Agro-ecology, he said, immediately helps “small farmers who must be able to farm in ways that are less expensive and more productive. But it benefits all of us, because it decelerates global warming and ecological destruction.” Further, by decentralizing production, floods in Southeast Asia, for example, might not mean huge shortfalls in the world’s rice crop; smaller scale farming makes the system less susceptible to climate shocks. (Calling it a system is a convention; it’s actually quite anarchic, what with all these starving and overweight people canceling each other out.)
Industrial (or “conventional”) agriculture requires a great deal of resources, including disproportionate amounts of water and the fossil fuel that’s needed to make chemical fertilizer, mechanize working the land and its crops, running irrigation sources, heat buildings and crop dryers and, of course, transportation. This means it needs more in the way of resources than the earth can replenish. (Fun/depressing fact: It takes the earth 18 months to replenish the amount of resources we use each year. Looked at another way, we’d need 1.5 earths to be sustainable at our current rate of consumption.)
Agro-ecology and related methods are going to require resources too, but they’re more in the form of labor, both intellectual — much research remains to be done — and physical: the world will need more farmers, and quite possibly less mechanization. Many adherents rule out nothing, including in their recommendations even GMOs and chemical fertilizers where justifiable. Meanwhile, those working towards improving conventional agriculture are borrowing more from organic methods. (Many of these hybrid systems were discussed convincingly in Andrew Revkin’s DotEarthblog last week.)
Currently, however, it’s difficult to see progress in a country where, for example, nearly 90 percent of the corn crop is used for either ethanol (40 percent) or animal feed (50 percent). And most of the diehard adherents of industrial agriculture — sadly, this usually includes Congress, which largely ignores these issues — act as if we’ll somehow “fix” global warming and the resulting climate change. (The small percentage of climate-change deniers are still arguing with Copernicus.) Their assumption is that by increasing supply, we’ll eventually figure out how to feed everyone on earth, even though we don’t do that now, our population is going to be nine billion by 2050, and more supply of the wrong things — oil, corn, beef — only worsens things. Many seem to naively believe that we won’t run out of the resources we need to keep this system going.
There is more than a bit of silver-bullet thinking here. Yet anyone who opens his or her eyes sees a natural world so threatened by industrial agriculture that it’s tempting to drop off the grid and raise a few chickens.
To back up and state some obvious goals: We need a global perspective, the (moral) recognition that food is a basic right and the (practical) one that sustainability is a high priority. We want to reduce and repair environmental damage, cut back on the production and consumption of resource-intensive food, increase efficiency and do something about waste. (Some estimate that 50 percent of all food is wasted.) A sensible and nutritious diet for everyone is essential; many people will eat better, and others may eat fewer animal products, which is also a eating better.
De Schutter and others who agree with the goals of the previous paragraph say that sustainable agriculture should be the immediate choice for underdeveloped countries, and that even developed countries should take only the best aspects of conventional agriculture along on a ride that leaves all but the best of its methods behind. Just last month, the U.K.’s government office for science published “The Future of Food and Farming,” which is both damning of the current resource-intensive system (though it is decidedly pro-GMO) and encouraging of sustainable, and which led de Schutter to say that studies demonstrate that sustainable agriculture can more than double yields in just a few years.
No one knows how many people can be fed this way, but a number of experts and studies — including those from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the University of Michigan andWorldwatch — seem to be lining up to suggest that sustainable agriculture is a system more people should choose. For developing nations, especially those in Africa, the shift from high- to low-tech farming can happen quickly, said de Schutter: “It’s easiest to make the transition in places that still have a direction to take.” But, he added, although “in developed regions the shift away from industrial mode will be difficult to achieve,” ultimately even those countries most “addicted” to chemical fertilizers must change.
“We have to move towards sustainable production,” he said. “We cannot depend on the gas fields of Russia or the oil fields of the Middle East, and we cannot continue to destroy the environment and accelerate climate change. We must adopt the most efficient farming techniques available.”
And those, he and others emphasize, are not industrial but sustainable.
Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/sustainable-farming/
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