This is a couple of weeks old. See those specks at the bottom of this picture? Those are helicopters. From LiveScience:
A cave so huge helicopters can fly into it has just been discovered deep in the hills of a South American jungle paradise.
Researchers found a new species of poison dart frog inside. I don't have a good feeling about this. Some scientists are starting to suspect that just maybe they are the ones responsible for spreading the fungus that is killing off the frogs of the world.
We humans just can't seem to resist the urge to discover new things, pick them up, and put them in a specimen jar. If it won't fit in a jar, we will shoot it with a tranquilizer dart and radio collar it, possibly throwing in a few ear tags for good measure. I can't think of a worse fate for a biologist than to realize he or she may be solely responsible for the extinction of a life form. There is a possibility this newly discovered frog has just seen its last days. The golden toad of Costa Rica disappeared shortly after its discovery, so did the Kihansi spray toad of Africa.
There was a glimmer of hope last spring:
Breaking update:
In late May 2005, Kihansi Spray Toads were found in the upper wet zone of the Kihansi Gorge. Very few, but some are still clinging on and thus the species is not officially extinct in the wild yet.
Unfortunately, last week's Science magazine tells us that these rediscovered toads have since disappeared. The fatal frog-killing fungus was not present when the researchers first visited this unique ecosystem ... odd that.
Disease brought by ice-age travelers and their dogs may have helped wipe out the megafauna of North and South America. Microbes honed to high levels of lethality by humanity's intimate contact with domesticated animals regularly swept through Europe and Asia for thousands of years. When the pockmarked and stunted descendants of the survivors of those plagues landed in the Americas they unleashed new plagues on continents full of people without any resistance to them.
Today, researchers are pushing into the last nooks and crannies of our planet and are in all likelihood introducing novel microbes to small, isolated populations without enough genetic diversity to resist new diseases. Maybe it is time for some kind of prime directive before it's too late.
Comments
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jdhlax Posted 3:53 pm
14 Mar 2006
Jeff Hoffman
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caniscandida Posted 7:16 pm
14 Mar 2006
I do not know anything really about how dangerous infections are transmitted from one species to another. I am prepared to accept that North American humans' contact with this newly discovered species of poison dart frog might be a kiss of death, it might introduce to the frog the fungus that has apparently been killing off lots of other frogs in many parts of the world. But, frankly, it is not clear to me how.
Still, I strongly agree that human beings are to be mistrusted. A big mistrustful fear of mine lately is that there are people paddling through the creeks and wetlands and backwaters of eastern Arkansas, up to no good: they are seeking to catch an ivory-billed woodpecker, and they know a no less evil rich person who will give them a lot of money for that bird.
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Icelander Posted 11:13 pm
14 Mar 2006
Sadly, stories like these have become all too common in the animal world. The government denies the existence of these beings, dubbed 'humans,' but more and more animals are coming forth with strange stories about being plucked from their homes, examined, and returned. Some say they were given diseases by these creatures.
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Chris Schults Posted 2:52 am
15 Mar 2006
That was quite amusing.
Thanks for the laugh,
Chris
Look out! It's a media shower!
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caniscandida Posted 9:12 am
15 Mar 2006
Being both an environmentalist, concerned especially in the preservation of biodiversity, and an animal lover supportive of animal rights, I continue to struggle with the significant conflict between those two values. As supremely valuable as I consider the preservation of endangered species, such as to justify the intrusions of well-meaning naturalists on individual members of those species, nevertheless, I am impressed by the arguments of David DeGrazia, perhaps best available in his little book "Animal Rights; A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford). He is right, and as much as I am casting about for an answer, I have not got one just yet: We want to preserve condors and cheetahs and rhinos, sure; but how is that not an anthropocentric goal?; and how is it not inhumane, for us to submit any individual condor or cheetah or rhino, and Scruffy Bear too perhaps, to fright, to isolation, to captivity, for our high-minded intentions to preserve their species? What do they know about their species?
Really, I am struggling with this awfully, and hope I shall come up with something positive to report to you all before long. Meanwhile, let us all recognize that there is this significant ethical divide between biodiversity-activists and animal-rights-activists.
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birdboy Posted 10:56 am
15 Mar 2006
It seems that the problem with humanity's interaction with Nature is his attitude- Man does not approach living things or special places with the kind of respect and honor that he gives his own species. Haven't we learned enough to know that our actions can be disasterous, and there are times and places where Man should just let it be?
I think I am not alone in my fear that one day, a very important link in the chain of life on Earth will break- one possibly unknown species goes extinct, leading to a collapse of the whole web of life. Species ARE interdependent, and the air, water, and soil we need to survive are tied into the web in ways we may never understand. The assumption that we know what we are doing (and that our impact is minimal) may be what kills us.
a liberal in redsville
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jdhlax Posted 11:12 am
15 Mar 2006
It is humans who caused the problems that the condors, cheetahs, etc. have. By preserving them, we're just undoing the harm that humans have done.
I unequivocally oppose tranqulizing, collaring, or otherwise harassing wild animals. All we have to do in the vast majority of cases is give them clean, large habitats and not directly kill them. Most of this lazy science (lazy because animals can be tracked instead of shot and caged) is nothing more than over intellectualization of a problem better suited to solutions from the heart and gut than from the intellectual mind.
Jeff Hoffman
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caniscandida Posted 8:01 pm
15 Mar 2006
But your words, doubting that "we know what we are doing," and that "our impact is minimal," have a biblical, prophetic resonance, which is at the heart of what most of us environmentalists truly believe. Bene dixisti; well put; Amen.
Jeff, you know I love you madly, and that I am your biggest fan, and thanks for trying to help me along with this ethics problem; but I hope you will elaborate on "lazy science," presumably in connexion with capturing endangered critters. I confess I am becoming addicted to the National Zoo's livecam of their cheetahs -- they have two litters of them now, who like snuggling, and probably would not be living so comfortably in Namibia or Tanzania. But David DeGrazia's arguments are important.
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WAL Posted 11:17 pm
15 Mar 2006
However, I think discussions of preservation and conservation simply expose the hubris of humanity. The earth was fine before we evolved to our current form, and it will fine after we go extinct or evolve into something else. Any talk of preservation and conservation is inherently anthropocentric because it is designed to maintain conditions on earth that are necessary for supporting humans as we currently exist. I don't believe people who claim to be trying to conserve the earth for the earth's sake, and the sake of other species. And what makes you think you have the ability to do so anyway? To get at something that was being discussed in a post about environmental ethics, even if we really believe that we are acting in the interests of species that don't have a voice or the rational though necessary to save themselves, perhaps we're really just acting on our own pure survival instinct. The fact is that by conserving the earth in a manner that supports other life that lives in this time period, we are also conserving conditions that support human life. I find it hard to believe that humans have evolved to the point that we are beyond basic survival instincts. We've simply dominated nature to the point that we have more time to spend thinking about it (the ideal form of civilized life, according to the old school Greek philosophers).
Having said all this, I'm still all about conservation. And I'm OK with the fact that I'm ultimately in it for me and the rest of humanity.
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caniscandida Posted 5:26 am
16 Mar 2006
The classical word is "conservo." "Praeservo" is post-classical, and originally meant "to observe beforehand," the prefix having a temporal sense. It is not clear to me that we speakers of modern English sufficiently distinguish between "conserve" and "preserve." And even "reserve" gets tangled up there sometimes.
And as for another classical etymon, "hubris" in classical Greek is not just overweaning pride, but also the violent activity that tends to result from that attitude. The derived verb "hubrizo" means in fact to act with violence against someone.
I understand what you are saying, in effect that certain animals, such as cheetahs, rhinos and the California condor, are on their way out anyway, so there is no ethical obligation for us to prevent the falling of the curtain. And indeed you are I think saying even more, that when we try to keep the cheetahs going, for example, we are doing it for ourselves, not for the cheetahs, and not for the African savannah ecosystems.
This is a terrificly important ethical issue, which deserves to be discussed. As a humanist Christian, who eschew anthropocentrism and accept the premisses of both deep ecology and animal-rights ethics, I think human needs, human virtues and human aesthetics must count for something, and indeed have a positive role to play. But I certainly understand the sentiments of others, who would prefer that the human presence generally be diminished. Humanist that I am, I do not believe that the world is obviously a better place because human beings exist. Maybe it CAN be, but that is entirely up to us. We are the moral agents; we are the critters with time on our hands, who think about what we are up to.
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birdboy Posted 11:02 am
16 Mar 2006
This is exactly what I am talking about- the very idea that a biologist could ever do something stupid is absurd? Doesn't that imply that they always know exactly what they are doing? Are you saying that biologists never cut down trees to count the rings? What we consider the best science today may be proven wrong tomorrow. Rememeber BioD's implication- that biologists just might be spreading the fungus that is killing frogs? Is that impossible?
"The earth was fine before we evolved to our current form, and it will fine after we go extinct or evolve into something else." -WAL
Another example of knowledge we like to think we have, but don't. This is a statement of faith- you cannot prove it- and it is used (by the enemy) to justify doing whatever people want, 'cause the Earth will take care of itself. The assumption is that puny humans cannot possibly screw up something so huge and powerful as life on Earth. How do you know that the Earth won't look like the surface of Mars in a few hundred years, solely because of the impact of Man? No one can prove either prediction, but your assumption is rather dangerous- and justifies the 'live for today' attitude that has directly caused extinction of (who knows how many) species.
You guys are scaring me- I don't expect that kind of talk on an environmental blog- tell me you don't mean it?
a liberal in redsville
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caniscandida Posted 6:00 pm
16 Mar 2006
Nevertheless, on further reflexion I withdraw my initial statement of disbelief after all. I had wrongly been assuming that any tree which might be the world's oldest organism must be gigantic, the largest of the redwoods or sequoias, say, or like that famous huge tree near Oaxaca. But of course that is not necessarily the case. There is, I believe, some sort of conifer, a juniper I think, that lives high in the mountains, at the uppermost windswept margin of the treeline, which is amazingly long-lived, but does not grow very large at all. It is quite credible, I am now thinking, that an individual with a power saw could cut down one of these trees, and that on inspection it turns out to be surprisingly ancient.
As for whether the biologists who discovered the new poison-dart frog could unwittingly transmit the frog-killing fungus to that population, of course that is possible. I am just unclear on the process of the transmission. And in general I am unclear on how the fungus spread from frogs in gynecology/obstetrics labs to the wild, in many parts of the world. Biologists are certainly not saints, and the transmission is obviously possible. As our very good friend Michael Crichton's Cassandra-character in Jurassic Park, Malcolm, tells us, after considering the careful, thoughtful high-tech creation of all-female dinosaurs, "Life finds a way." Right; the fungus finds a way. Still, I am curious to know how it happens.
The statement that you attribute to WAL is in fact something of a commonplace. Do you know that wonderful book from the early 1980s by Dougal Dixon, called something like "50 million years in the future"? The premiss is that human beings will shortly go extinct, and take with them lots of kinds of animals, including all mammals save for rodents, lagomorphs and bats. So in 50 million years, the predator niches are filled by nasty-looking rat-wolves and rat-lions, the big-herbivore niches are filled by sweet mouse-buffalo and bunny-deer, and on one island-continent bats have evolved to do everything. The largest animal on earth is a gigantic ocean-going penguin. What a happy world! Clearly our only truly moral choice is to go drown ourselves.
Whether that sentiment can be used counter to the good of the world by the enemy (forgive me for noting that that kind of speech has a rather paleo-christian resonance), I cannot say, though of course I believe you if you say so. Paranoia is sometimes justified.
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WAL Posted 10:04 pm
16 Mar 2006
Who is to say what fine means? As humans, we all have a subjective definition and we use the term to describe things that fit our definition. If there were no humans to assign value, would anything be capable of being fine? People have argued in other posts that things would still be fine, based on the needs of non-human animals. That is, whether or not other animals have rational thought, they still value the things that allow them to survive, so some extent. However, this is all based on life on this planet. Perhaps in several thousand years the surface of the earth will look like Mars. How can we assume that this will not be fine? Obviously we won't exist, along with a lot of other life that currently exists today. But perhaps there will be highly complex forms of subterranean life. Perhaps one of the other planets in the galaxy will suddenly blossom with life. In the larger scheme of things, everything will be fine. The earth could be a dead ball of rock, but still be fine relative to the galaxy, or some larger plan.
By the way birdboy, I don't necessarily mean it. I like the philosophical discourse created by these blogs, and I'm just tossing ideas around.
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kmp Posted 1:03 am
17 Mar 2006
As a resident non-saintly biologist, I thought I would do a little searching on this frog fungus and see what I could figure out.
This paper, presented at the 3rd International Veterinary Conference, describes an overview of the disease. The language is fairly technical, but the "population pyramid" (Fig 3) is worth looking at.
From what I can tell this specific amphibian disease, chytridiomycosis, is caused by invasive infection of the animal with a chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.
Symptoms and Etiology
Many frogs infected with the fungus may be asymptomatic (therefore biologists "in the know" have been observing strict quarantine procedures in their handling of any amphibians). Other animals may show sloughing of the skin and others show atypical behavioral patters, like a river frog found high up in a tree, or nocturnal animals found out and about in the daytime. Some scientists suspect the disease may have a central nervous system component that is affecting behavior.
No one knows yet how the infection actually kills frogs, or why some species seem to be relatively unharmed while others face 100% mortality. As illustrated in the Population Pyramid in the link above, current thinking is that a number of factors contribute to frog survival or death: ambient temperature, altitude, UV radiation exposure, amount of water available in the habitat. Many scientists claim global warming is a prominent a cause of the decline in global amphibian populations that has been observed since the 1980's.
The fungus itself attacks keratin in the skin of frogs. The slide in the link above shows vacuoles ("holes" filled with air) in the skin of a frog that died from fungal infection. Biologists theorize that, since frogs breathe through their skin, the infection may eventually create so many vacuoles that the frog eventually suffocates - however, this is really only a theory. Little research has been done to date.
Spread of the Fungus
Again, scientists do not know how the fungus is spread - they suspect global trade/transport in amphibian species is to blame, however in contrast to that theory some of the worst outbreaks have occurred in protected (national parks) or remote (mountain-top rainforest) areas. It appears that the fungus lives in water or in soil (although some say it may live parasitically in some plants) and the theory is that it is transmitted frog-to-frog through the water that they live in. This would make it more difficult for humans to directly transmit the fungus to frogs, as the fungus does not seem viable in air for long. Of course, this does not mean that humans have no impact in transmitting the disease, by collecting amphibians for study and housing them together in a lab, or introducing non-native species to an outdoor environment.
Pregnancy Tests
The story on the pregnancy tests is that in the 30's, a common pregnancy test in South Africa was to inject the urine of a suspected pregnant woman into an African clawed frog. If the woman was pregnant, the hormones in her urine would cause the frog to spawn in matter of hours. I don't believe anything about the test itself is held responsible for the spread of the fungus - it seems that African clawed frogs may have been carriers of this fungus all along (they are currently not susceptible to disease even when infected). When these frogs started being exported to other countries as the pregnancy test became popular, presumably some escaped or were released into the wild, thereby leading to the spread of the fungus into local water systems by these carrier frogs.
FrogWeb.gov (who knew such a thing existed?) has a lot of info as well, but it is pretty generalized.
Scientists are currently trying to develop an anti-fungal medication in the hopes that this disease can be treated.
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jdhlax Posted 3:44 am
17 Mar 2006
I'm not clear what you're asking. Don't assume I watch TV, I generally don't, and I have no idea who David DeGrazia is.
Animals living in zoos have nothing to do with animals in the wild. The only legitimate reason for the existence of zoos is to preserve species until we can restore their habitats and release them back into the wild.
Re shooting and collaring/caging animals, except for the reason stated above, I'm totally against this. Even for this reason, as I stated in my last post, this type of mistreatment of wild animals is almost always unecessary. First, animals can be tracked, which was how these types of studies were done before all the high tech crap was invented. Second, all we have to do is stop killing them, destroying their habitat, and polluting the Earth, and they'll be fine. The purpose of these studies is to determine how much we can destroy the Earth before we do harm to species. Not a very good premise.
Jeff Hoffman
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Backcut Posted 4:29 am
17 Mar 2006
In my short stints as a California Spotted Owl surveyor, I had to question whether feeding mice to the owls was a good thing to do. Would it get the owls used to humans and maybe even cause them to expect fresh mice meals? Would it harm the birds to eat animals raised by humans? Did wildlife biologists even think about these impacts?
I had an interesting discussion with a forester friend about the practice of putting increment borer samples back into the trees we've cored. The common practice was to put the core back into the tree to keep boring critters out. It was his contention that it may not be the best thing for the health of the tree to do so. It may introduce a fungus or disease into the interior of the tree. Generally, we usually bore into pine trees and they are very well-adapted to plugging holes.
Just my two cents worth and I'm even under budget this time!
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caniscandida Posted 5:45 am
17 Mar 2006
And thanks, Backcut, for reassuring me that (at least some) trees can heal themselves well enough after a core sample is taken.
On feeding mice to owls, I would suspect that it would not have a bad effect on adult owls. After all, many of us put out food for songbirds, and my understanding is it has not been demonstrated that they grow dangerously dependent on that supply. March, by the way, is a good time to feed them.
Chicks are another matter, which is why those guys raising California condors have to wear those condor-head puppets when they feed the little 'uns.
Thank you, Jeff, for explaining "lazy science."
David DeGrazia is an ethicist who in 2002 was (and maybe still today is) teaching at George Washington University in DC, and co-editing the journal Biomedical Ethics. He seems to believe that our wish to preserve endangered species does not justify the stress on individual animals necessarily involved in the collection of a captive population.
The National Zoo's cheetahs (and other critters) are not on TV. Go to CNN.com; go to Space&Science; scroll down to the livecam menu; click on National Zoo. The Monterey Bay Aquarium is there too, but their cameras are not as good. I might add that the quality of writing in the National Zoo's site is excellent. E.g., check out the page on caracals, or the page on the evolution of birds.
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jdhlax Posted 9:43 am
17 Mar 2006
When I worked with Earth First!, we actively opposed the captive breeding program for California condors, because we opposed removing them from the wild. We were proven dead wrong and so admitted. While our gut feelings don't like messing with wild animals, protecting and/or preserving the species is an exponentially more important consideration.
Jeff Hoffman
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caniscandida Posted 1:59 am
18 Mar 2006
I really want to agree with you on this, Jeff, but as I wrote before, I am finding it difficult to do so.
DeGrazia and other animal-rights ethicists argue that individual animals have interests, including avoiding pain, captivity, separation from their companions (in the case of social species such as wolves and elephants), and death. Human beings have generally not recognized those interests, and so have given themselves license to manipulate and exploit individual animals in countless ways. One subtle form of such exploitation comes with the recent concept of speciesism. Many of us, such as myself and apparently yourself as well, assign value to species, and even rights. In that way we can justify imposing a certain amount of suffering and stressful captivity on individual animals, with the reasoning that the rights of the species outweigh the rights of the individuals; or, put another way, that the value of the species is greater than whatever value we may assign to treating individuals humanely.
But we do not ask ourselves how we can reach that decision. It seems to me that it can be reached only by utilitarian reasoning ("The needs of the many . . . ") or by anthropocentric reasoning ("Species are beautiful to us human observers," "Species are interesting to us human observers," "Species are useful to us human consumers"; so are individual animals, but we cannot keep them alive indefinitely; therefore we must do what we can to preserve their species from extinction). But both utilitarianism and anthropocentrism, despite some superficial appeal to some, have repellent implications.
Work in progress!
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