F6, the next time you're in a particularly fine state of mind and a fundie shows up to disrupt your reverie, simply ask him/her/it to explain/justify 'specie extinction' to you. The resultant mental contortions will be truly wondrous, I promise.
MONITOR Jay S. Famiglietti of the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling found that from October 2003 to March 2010, aquifers under the state's Central Valley were drawn down by 25 million acre-feet. Ann Johansson for The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER Published: May 30, 2011
IRVINE, Calif. — Scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify trouble spots around the globe where people are making unsustainable demands on groundwater, one of the planet’s main sources of fresh water.
They found problems in places as disparate as North Africa, northern India, northeastern China and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley in California, heartland of that state’s $30 billion agricultural industry [ http://www.cfbf.com/ ].
Jay S. Famiglietti, director of the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling here, said the center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, known as Grace, relies on the interplay of two nine-year-old twin satellites that monitor each other while orbiting the Earth, thereby producing some of the most precise data ever on the planet’s gravitational variations. The results are redefining the field of hydrology, which itself has grown more critical as climate change [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier ] and population growth draw down the world’s fresh water supplies.
Grace sees “all of the change in ice, all of the change in snow and water storage, all of the surface water, all of the soil moisture, all of the groundwater,” Dr. Famiglietti explained.
Yet even as the data signals looming shortages, policy makers have been relatively wary of embracing the findings. California water managers, for example, have been somewhat skeptical of a recent finding by Dr. Famiglietti that from October 2003 to March 2010, aquifers under the state’s Central Valley were drawn down by 25 million acre-feet — almost enough to fill Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir.
Greg Zlotnick, a board member of the Association of California Water Agencies, said that the managers feared that the data could be marshaled to someone else’s advantage in California’s tug of war over scarce water supplies.
“There’s a lot of paranoia about policy wonks saying, ‘We’ve got to regulate the heck out of you,’ ” he said.
There are other sensitivities in arid regions around the world where groundwater basins are often shared by unfriendly neighbors — India and Pakistan, Tunisia and Libya or Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories — that are prone to suspecting one another of excessive use of this shared resource.
Water politics was hardly on Dr. Famiglietti’s mind when he first heard about Grace. In 1992, applying for a job at the University of Texas, he was interviewed by Clark R. Wilson, a geophysicist there who described a planned experiment to measure variations in Earth’s gravitational field.
“I walked into his office and he pulled out a piece of paper saying: I’m trying to figure out how distribution of water makes the Earth wobble,” said Dr. Famiglietti. “This was 1992. I was blown away. I instantly fell in love with the guy. I said, ‘This is unbelievable, this is amazing, it opens up this whole area.’ ”
Back then the Grace experiment was still waiting in a queue of NASA projects. But he and Matt Rodell, a Ph.D. candidate under his supervision, threw themselves into investigating whether Grace would work, a so-called “proof of concept” exercise that turned out to show that Grace data was reliable and could support groundwater studies.
“It was a wide-open field we came into,” said Dr. Rodell, now a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center [ http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/home/index.html ]. “We were like kids in a candy store. There was so much to be done.”
When Grace was conceived by a group of scientists led by Byron D. Tapley, the director of the Center for Space Research [ http://www.csr.utexas.edu/ ] at the University of Texas, it was the darling of geodesists, who study variations in the Earth’s size, shape and rotational axis. Climate scientists also were keenly interested in using it to study melting of ice sheets, but hydrologists paid scant attention at first.
But, Dr. Wilson recalled, “Jay jumped on the problem.”
Ten years later, the two satellites were launched from the Russian space facility at Plesetsk [ http://www.russianspaceweb.com/plesetsk.html ] on the back of a used intercontinental ballistic missile in a collaboration between NASA and the German Aerospace Center [ http://www.dlr.de/en/ ] and began streaming the gravity data back to Earth.
Acquiring the data for general research purposes would have been impossible before the end of the cold war because maps indicating the normal wiggles in Earth’s gravitational field were used for targeting long-range missiles and were therefore classified.
For decades, groundwater measurements in the United States had been made from points on the Earth’s surface — by taking real-time soundings at 1,383 of the United States Geological Survey’s observation wells and daily readings at 5,908 others. Those readings are supplemented by measuring water levels in hundreds of thousands of other wells, trenches and excavations.
The two satellites, each the size of a small car, travel in polar orbits about 135 miles apart. Each bombards the other with microwaves calibrating the distance between them down to intervals of less than the width of a human hair.
If the mass below the path of the leading satellite increases — because, say, the lower Mississippi basin is waterlogged — that satellite speeds up, and the distance between the two grows. Then the mass tugs on both, and the distance shortens. It increases again as the forward satellite moves out of range while the trailing satellite is held back.
The measurements of the distance between the craft translate to a measurement of surface mass in any given region. The data is beautifully simple, Dr. Famiglietti said. From one moment to the next, “it gives you just one number,” he said. “It’s like getting on a scale.”
Separating groundwater from other kinds of moisture affecting gravity requires a little calculation and the inclusion of information on precipitation and surface runoff obtained from surface studies or computer models.
Grace data, like the information in a corresponding visual image, has its limits. Gravitational data gets sparser as the area examined gets smaller, and in areas smaller than 75,000 square miles it gets more difficult to reach conclusions about groundwater supplies. Most aquifers are far smaller than that — California’s 22,000-square-mile Central Valley overlies several different groundwater basins, for example.
Dr. Famiglietti was able to calculate the overall drawdown of groundwater and to indicate that the problem was most severe in the southern region around the city of Tulare, for example, but the data was far too sparse to make statements about, say, the Kings River Water Conservation District, which measures about 1,875 square miles.
Grace “gives a large picture,” said Felix Landerer, a hydrologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory [ http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ ] in Pasadena, whereas a water manager has a couple of wells to monitor in a given district. “It’s difficult and not intuitive and not straightforward to bring these things together.”
In other areas of the world, like northern India, the novelty of the gravitational measurements — and perhaps the story they tell — has led to pushback, scientists say.
“It is odd, if you’re a hydrologist, especially a traditional hydrologist, to imagine a satellite up in the air that determines groundwater” supply levels, said John Wahr, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado.
Like Dr. Famiglietti and Dr. Rodell, Dr. Wahr and his colleague Sean Swenson faced opposition for a study on aquifer depletion in northern India. As Dr. Swenson explained, “When in a place like India you say, ‘We’re doing something that is unsustainable and needs to change,’ well, people resist change. Change is expensive.”
While Dr. Famiglietti says he wants no part of water politics, he acknowledged that this might be hard to avoid, given that his role is to make sure the best data about groundwater is available, harvesting and disseminating all of the information he can about the Earth’s water supply as aquifers dry up and shortages loom.
“Look, water has been a resource that has been plentiful,” he said. “But now we’ve got climate change, we’ve got population growth, we’ve got widespread groundwater contamination, we’ve got satellites showing us we are depleting some of this stuff.
“I think we’ve taken it for granted, and we are probably not able to do that any more.”
The decline of large predators such as big cats, wolves, sharks and giant whales may be “humankind’s most pervasive influence on the natural world,” causing prey animals to swell in population and throw food chains out of balance, a new report says.
Humans have touched off the world’s latest mass extinction, according to the report, published Thursday in the journal Science, and the consequences are being felt on land and in water systems as large predators vanish.
“Recent research suggests that the disappearance of these animals reverberates further than previously anticipated,” says the report, “Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth [ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6040/301.abstract ].” In addition to creating an overabundance of prey, the dwindling number of predators contributes to the spread of disease, wildfires and invasive species.
The decline of wolves in Yellowstone Park is cited as an example of what can happen. Elk and deer in the park once flourished on willow trees and saplings, threatening a crucial part of the forest on which other creatures rely.
The report also mentions the slaughter of lions and leopards by hunters and herders in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. As a result of the killings, disease-carrying olive baboons have thrived without their top predators and inched closer to food crops and people.
The decimation of sharks along the U.S. Atlantic Coast has allowed their main prey, the cow-nosed ray, to proliferate and dine heavily on the threatened Chesapeake Bay oyster.
A reduction of big herbivores such as buffalo and wildebeest in East Africa through hunting is also a problem, the report says. Their demise has led to increases in plants that fuel giant wildfires in the dry season.
Americans don’t have to visit federal parks or sub-Saharan Africa or plunge into seas to see the consequences, said Ellen K. Pikitch [ http://www.somas.stonybrook.edu/people/pikitch.html ], a co-author of the report and a professor at Stony Brook University in New York. Many experience the problem every day in their own back yards.
“People who live in North America know it’s hard to grow a garden because deer will eat it,” said Pikitch, a marine biologist. “The lack of wolf populations throughout North America has led to an expansion of the deer population.
“You may hate wolves. You might think they’re dangerous. But without them, the land changes,” Pikitch said. “Deer carry ticks. We humans become more susceptible to diseases such as Lyme disease.”
Wildlife advocates say efforts to protect one species of predator in the United States were set back when the Obama administration signed a bill in April that removed 1,300 wolves from the endangered species list in northern Rocky Mountain states. It was the first time Congress had taken a species off the endangered list. The law allows limited hunting of the animals to begin this summer.
Other studies have examined the collateral damage caused by the near-extinction of large predators and herbivores. But the report in Science is the first to tie together the impact on land animals as well as salt and freshwater marine life, Pikitch said. It was conducted by an international team of 24 scientists and funded primarily by the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook.
Much of the science in this area of study has focused on the threat to life at the bottom of the food chain, theorizing that small animals and plants are important because so many creatures rely on their survival.
Although “bottom-up” research is fundamental and important, the report says, “top-down” research deserves wider consideration “if there is to be any real hope for understanding and managing the workings of nature.”
The report acknowledges that top-down research of the food chain is difficult to conduct, noting that it can take decades to measure the effects of the disappearance of large predators.
“The irony .?.?. is that we often cannot unequivocally see the effect of large apex consumers until after they have been lost” and the ability to restore the species has also been lost, the report says.
Large predators, or apex species, include animals that people adore, such as otters, and others not so popular, such as vultures.
On the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to the southern tip of California, sea otters were hunted in the 1900s to near-extinction for their pelts. Their absence started a chain of events that nearly eliminated the kelp forests that nurture all manner of marine life on the coast.
Sea otters feed on sea urchins, which dine on kelp. Without otters, the sea urchin population exploded. The kelp forest started to disappear. When sea otter populations elsewhere were re-introduced to a few areas along the coast, the kelp started to rebound.
A telling consequences of the absence of large predators can be found on the Scottish island of Rum, where wolves have been gone for more than 250 years and red deer thrive, the report says. The once forested island is now treeless.
Loss of large predators, top consumers disrupts ecosystems
The large predators include lions, wolves, killer whales and sharks.
July 14, 2011
The decline of large predators and other "apex consumers" at the top of the food chain has disrupted ecosystems all over the planet, an international team of scientists reports tomorrow (July 15) in Science [ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6040/301.abstract ].
The study reviewed research on a wide range of terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems and concluded that "the loss of apex consumers is arguably humankind's most pervasive influence on the natural world."
The “top down” ecological effects of losing these large animals have been underestimated compared to the “bottom up” effects of environmental changes, said Distinguished Professor of Biology Tom Schoener of the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology, one of the authors of the review. The lead author is James Estes, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz.
“There are enormous implications for all aspects of ecology, from species diversity to effects on the air, water and soil, to the emergence of human diseases and the prevalence of wildfires,” Schoener said.
The decline of apex consumers has been most pronounced among the big predators, such as wolves and lions on land, killer whales and sharks in the oceans, and large fish in freshwater ecosystems. But dramatic declines have also occurred in populations of large herbivores, such as elephants and bison. These big animals are essentially invulnerable to predators — except for humans.
Apex consumers are also difficult to study and not amenable to the laboratory experiments that have guided a lot of thinking in ecology. But accumulating evidence from the field shows that the loss of apex consumers from an ecosystem triggers an ecological phenomenon known as a "trophic cascade," a chain of effects moving down through lower levels of the food chain.
Estes, Schoener and their co-authors cite several examples in their review, including:
•The destruction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park led to over-browsing of aspen and willows by elk, and restoration of wolves has allowed the vegetation to recover.
•The reduction of lions and leopards in parts of Africa has led to population outbreaks and changes in behavior of olive baboons, increasing their contact with people and causing higher rates of intestinal parasites in both people and baboons.
•A rinderpest virus epidemic decimated the populations of wildebeest and other ungulates (hooved animals) in the Serengeti, resulting in more woody vegetation and increased frequency and size of wildfires, before the virus was eradicated in the 1960s.
•Dramatic changes in coastal ecosystems have followed the collapse and recovery of sea otter populations; sea otters maintain coastal kelp forests by controlling populations of kelp-grazing sea urchins.
•The decimation of sharks in an estuarine ecosystem caused an outbreak of cow-nosed rays and the collapse of shellfish populations on which the rays feed.
Despite these and other well-known examples, the extent to which ecosystems are shaped by such interactions has not been widely appreciated.
"There's been a tendency to see it as idiosyncratic and specific to particular species and ecosystems," Estes said.
For example, Schoener points out that some ecologists have viewed trophic cascades as an issue largely for ocean systems, but the review discusses many examples from land.
Schoener’s own work has looked at the impact of a small predator, although large in its own world — lizards on small islands. He has found, for example, that removing the lizards from an island ecosystem can lead to increased damage to plants, because insects that eat the plants (and would normally be eaten by the lizards) multiply.
The review’s findings have profound implications for conservation. "To the extent that conservation aims toward restoring functional ecosystems, the re-establishment of large animals and their ecological effects is fundamental," Estes said. "This has huge implications for the scale at which conservation can be done. You can't restore large apex consumers on an acre of land. These animals roam over large areas, so it's going to require large-scale approaches."
The paper's co-authors include 24 scientists from institutions in six countries. Support for the study was provided by the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science, Defenders of Wildlife, White Oak Plantation, U.S. National Science Foundation, NSERC Canada and NordForsk.
About UC Davis
For more than 100 years, UC Davis has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform the world. Located close to the state capital, UC Davis has more than 32,000 students, more than 2,500 faculty and more than 21,000 staff, an annual research budget that exceeds $678 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges — Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science. It also houses six professional schools — Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.
Media contact(s):
•Tom Schoener, Evolution and Ecology, (530) 752-8319, twschoener@ucdavis.edu
•Andy Fell, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-4533, ahfell@ucdavis.edu
Woolly mammoth to be brought back to life from cloned bone marrow 'within five years'
- Thigh bone discovered in permafrost soil of Siberia
- Contains elusive undamaged genes essential for nucleus transplantation
- Nuclei of elephant's egg cells will be replaced with mammoth's marrow DNA
- Embryo will then be planted into elephant womb for gestation
By Simon Tomlinson Last updated at 7:45 PM on 3rd December 2011
Scientists believe it may be possible to clone a woolly mammoth within five years after finding well-preserved bone marrow in a thigh bone recovered from permafrost soil in Siberia.
Teams from Russia's Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University will launch fully-fledged joint research next year aiming to recreate the giant mammal, Japan's Kyodo News reported from Yakutsk, Russia.
By replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth's marrow cells, embryos with mammoth DNA can be produced, Kyodo said, citing the researchers.
Clone hope: The discovery of marrow inside the thigh bone of a woolly mammoth in Siberia has led scientists to believe they can bring the species back to life
Exciting: Mammoth bones like this one have been dug up many times before, but finding one with undamaged genes has proven a challenge (file picture)
The scientists will then plant the embryos into elephant wombs for delivery as the two species are close relatives, the report said.
Securing nuclei with an undamaged gene is essential for the nucleus transplantation technique, it said.
For scientists involved in the research since the late 1990s, finding nuclei with undamaged mammoth genes has been a challenge.
Fertile land: The thigh bone was discovered in the permafrost soil of Siberia as were these tusks which came from an entire 23,000-year-old mammoth dug up in 1999
Mammoths became extinct about 10,000 years ago.
But the discovery in August in Siberia has increased the chances of a successful cloning.
Global warming has thawed ground in eastern Russia that is usually almost permanently frozen, leading to the discoveries of a number of frozen mammoths, the report said.
Endangered California condor struggling in Utah, Arizona
By Amy Joi O'Donoghue December 3rd, 2011 @ 12:08pm
ZION NATIONAL PARK — The California condor continues to suffer from lead poisonings, shootings and interactions with humans since they were introduced in southern Utah and northern Arizona in the mid-1990s, with little more than half of those released into the wild still surviving.
Efforts continue to bolster their numbers, with a goal of having two geographically separate populations of 150 birds each — one in California and the other along the Utah and Arizona border. Those numbers should include at least 15 breeding pairs, according to biologists and public lands managers.
The California condor reintroduction program comes under review once every five years, with part of that a public comment period designed to measure public acceptance of the program and garner recommendations.
Comments, due Dec. 16, can be submitted to SWcondorComments@fws.gov or mailed to Field Supervisor, Arizona Ecological Services Office, 2321 W. Royal Palm Road, Suite 103, Phoenix, AZ., 85021-4951. Comments can also be faxed to 1-602-242-2513.
The condor, the largest land bird in North America, can weigh up to 26 pounds and have a wing span that extends past 9 feet. Although adult condors have few natural predators, their numbers are in continual jeopardy from lead poisoning, the leading cause of death for the birds in Arizona. Land managers and condor biologists say 19 deaths have been confirmed due to that cause since 2000.
Utah wildlife officials were tracking a pair of nesting condors searching for sites in southern Utah, but both of the females died of lead poisoning before they could reproduce.
A scientific study funded by the Arizona Game and Fish Department identified lead from spent ammunition as the major source of lead found in condors, which are trapped twice a year to have their blood tested.
Condors, which are scavengers, ingest lead bullet fragments remaining in game carcasses and gut piles. Because lead fragments into hundreds of pieces before it exits game such as coyote or deer, one animal carcass has the potential to poison several condors.
A variety of public education efforts have been launched to encourage hunters to use alternatives, including voluntary programs in Arizona and Utah. Alternatives include high performance all-copper bullets that do not fragment and are far less toxic.
Rachel Tuller, a Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman based in St. George, said the ongoing reintroduction efforts are critical to the species survival in the wild.
"The birds have been on the cusp for so long," she said. "We are really trying to get them established and get them into some exciting numbers."
As part of that outreach, the BLM is the land hosting agency of an annual event at the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument where hundreds of people gather to watch a release of the birds. The young animals are raised in captivity and then released several at a time.
Tuller said it is a breathtaking event to witness.
"It is a big deal for people who are birders, for those who follow this species," or even those who appreciate the wild, she said.
Condors, which were first named to the Endangered Species List in 1967, mate for life and can live for up to 50 years. While they are known to fly long distances, the reintroduced birds generally prefer the greater Grand Canyon ecosystem and the vicinity of Zion National Park. There are 73 free-flying condors in northern Arizona and southern Utah, according to condor biologists, including seven wild-fledged birds.
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