(CNN) -- Just 12 years after the arrival of the 6 billionth individual on the planet in 1999, humanity will greet the 7 billionth arrival this month. The world population continues its rapid ascent, with roughly 75 million more births than deaths each year. The consequences of a world crowded with 7 billion people are enormous. And unless the world population stabilizes during the 21st century, the consequences for humanity could be grim.
A rising population puts enormous pressures on a planet already plunging into environmental catastrophe. Providing food, clothing, shelter, and energy for 7 billion people is a task of startling complexity.
The world's agricultural systems are already dangerously overstretched. Rainforests are being cut down to make way for new farms; groundwater used for irrigation is being depleted; greenhouse gases emitted from agricultural activities are a major factor in global climate change; fertilizers are poisoning estuaries; and countless species are threatened with extinction as we grab their land and water and destroy their habitats.
The economic challenges are equally huge. Population is growing most rapidly in the world's poorest countries -- often the places with the most fragile ecological conditions. Poor people tend to have many more children, for several reasons. Many live on farms, where children can be engaged in farm chores.
Poor societies generally suffer from high rates of child mortality, leading parents to have more children as "insurance" against the possible deaths of children. Girls rarely make it to high school, and are often married at a very young age, leading to early childbearing. And modern methods of contraception may be unavailable or unaffordable.
When poor families have six or eight children, many or most of them are virtually condemned to a lifetime of poverty. Too often, parents lack the wherewithal to provide decent nutrition, health care and education to most of them. Illiteracy and ill health end up being passed from generation to generation. Governments in poor countries are unable to keep up, their budgets overmatched by the need for new schools, roads and other infrastructure.
So the arrival of the 7 billionth person is cause for profound global concern. It carries a challenge: What will it take to maintain a planet in which each person has a chance for a full, productive and prosperous life, and in which the planet's resources are sustained for future generations? How, in short, can we enjoy "sustainable development" on a very crowded planet?
The answer has two parts, and each portends a difficult journey over several decades. The first part requires a change of technologies -- in farming, energy, industry, transport and building -- so that each of us on average is putting less environmental stress on the planet. We will have to make a worldwide transition, for example, from today's fossil-fuel era, dependent on coal, oil and gas, to an era powered by low-carbon energies such as the sun and wind. That will require an unprecedented degree of global cooperation.
The second key to sustainable development is the stabilization of the global population. This is already occurring in high-income and even some middle-income countries, as families choose to have one or two children on average. The reduction of fertility rates should be encouraged in the poorer countries as well. Rapid and wholly voluntary reductions of fertility have been and can be achieved in poor countries. Success at reducing high fertility rates depends on keeping girls in school, ensuring that children survive, and providing access to modern family planning and contraceptives.
Two centuries ago, the British thinker Thomas Robert Malthus famously warned that excessive population growth would cut short economic progress. That is a threat still with us today, but it is a warning, not an inevitable outcome.
We face an urgent task: to adopt more sustainable technologies and lifestyles, and work harder to achieve a stable population of some 8 billion or so by mid-century, rather than the current path, which could easily carry the world to more than 10 billion people by 2100.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jeffrey Sachs.
Mass Species Loss Stunts Evolution for Millions of Years
Artist’s rendering of Lystrosaurus, one of the “disaster taxa” to survive the Perminan period, as did the now-extinct spore-tree Pleuromeia, which flourished in the aftermath. (Victor Leshyk)
By Brandon Keim October 26, 2011 | 11:31 am
When searching for causes of Earth’s mass extinctions, scientists instinctively turn to geophysical calamities: erupting volcanoes, methane bursts, asteroid strikes and other obvious dooms.
But in the most massive extinction of all, when most of everything that lived died out some 250 million years ago, a more subtle form of destruction has been suggested. Following an initial volcanic upset, the loss of life itself may have fueled further extinctions, then slowed life’s recovery.
That possibility, suggested by massive analyses of fossils and chemical signals left during the Permian-Triassic extinction event [ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event ], represents more than an interesting wrinkle to a notable period in history. By this reading of the fossil record, biological diversity — something that’s now imperiled by human appetites — may be a sustaining, stabilizing force on planetary scales, and its disruption self-perpetuating.
“Earlier interpretations have looked at the Permian-Triassic extinction as purely the result of external physical processes,” said paleobiologist Jessica Whiteside of Brown University. “But low diversity itself can be a feedback.”
Whiteside’s specialty is mass extinctions and their geophysical consequences, cycles of energy and nutrients that play out over millions of years.
Her latest study, co-authored with University of Utah paleobiologist Randall Irmis and published Oct. 26 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, follows on earlier findings that the taxonomic richness of ammonoids [ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ammonite ], a once-dominant class of marine invertebrates, rose and fell in tandem with fluctuations in Earth’s carbon cycle [ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/biodiversity-carbon-cycle/ ] for 10 million years after the Permian-Triassic extinction.
During that time, the carbon cycle — the flow of life’s essential element through all Earth’s systems — oscillated wildly, a period known as a “chaotic carbon interval.” And rather than rebounding and steadily filling suddenly open niches, as might be expected, life appears to have entered a boom-and-bust cycle. Species flourished and collapsed, over and over, a planet-level version of the jellyfish bloom-and-bust cycles [ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079661108000487 ] now seen in overfished oceans.
One seemingly plausible explanation is ongoing Permian-Triassic volcanic activity, which could have decimated new species as they arose. However, carbon chaos continued for millions of years after volcanoes cooled. A newer explanation, favored by Whiteside, draws from the work of ecological theorists who say that, at planetary scales as well as local, complexity generates resilience [ http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/08/16/rsbl.2011.0662.short?rss=1 ].
Applied to mass extinctions, this idea is somewhat radical — but in a coral reef or rainforest, or even a computer network, it’s an accepted notion. Just as distributed systems are more secure than a handful of mainframes, ecosystems composed of many interlocking and sometimes redundant species are especially sturdy. Because they’re stable, they in turn nourish life’s diversification over evolutionary time. It’s a biological catch-22: A richness of life requires stability to develop, but stability requires a richness of life.
Species abundance (black bar) before, during and after the Permian-Triassic extinction event. Species "evenness," a measure of food web stability, is in blue. Fossil records are from Africa (above box) and Russia (below box), with carbon cycle measurements in the middle. Image: Whiteside & Irmis/Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Through this lens, “chaotic carbon intervals record the instability of the ecosystem itself,” wrote Whiteside and Irmis. It doesn’t simply reflect the lingering aftereffects of the Permian-Triassic extinction’s initial causes, but life’s new post-extinction rules.
Whiteside’s earlier study [ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/biodiversity-carbon-cycle/ ] joined marine fossil records with carbon analyses taken from ancient seafloor sediments. The new study ventures onto land: Irmis painstakingly classified some 8,600 terrestrial vertebrate fossils collected in southern Africa and the Ural region of Russia, spanning the period from 260 to 240 million years ago. Carbon records came from several studies of Permian-Triassic sediments [ http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/338411 ].
When Whiteside joined the terrestrial fossil record to carbon cycling, the same basic patterns emerged as she’d seen at sea. Over several million years, roughly 80 percent of all terrestrial animal species vanished. A few tough groups — so-called “disaster taxa,” such as a German shepherd-sized lizard called Lystrosaurus, pictured above — survived and prevailed in post-extinction ecosystems, which were dramatically simplified compared to what existed before.
Ecological chaos reigned, with slight natural perturbations of climate and circumstance repeatedly sending these simple new ecosystems into drastic decline. Another eight million years passed before species abundance and ecological richness recovered to pre-extinction levels. Cause and effect are difficult to establish, especially at the distance of geological time, but the patterns fit with evolutionary simulations [ http://www.santafe.edu/research/working-papers/abstract/d00d1dc15b7c559fcdb11b8845b4a99f/ ] that show biodiversity loss limiting post-mass extinction recovery in the early Triassic.
“We are very interested to see that this specimen-oriented study supports our conclusion,” said those simulations’ authors, paleobiologists Peter Roopnarine [ http://zeus.calacademy.org/roopnarine/peter.html ] of the California Academy of Sciences and the Field Museum’s Kenneth Angielczyk [ http://fieldmuseum.org/users/kenneth-d-angielczyk ], in a joint e-mail. “It really is a pioneering approach.”
Whiteside and Irmis plan to conduct similar studies of other mass extinctions. If reduced biological diversity really did make it harder for life to rebound, then the most pressing questions aren’t historical, but immediate.
Scientists say that Earth may now be entering another period of mass extinction [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/08/humans-sixth-extinction ], with species dying at a pace seen only five times in life’s history, including the Permian-Triassic. Exactly how current extinction rates compare to those episodes [ http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v471/n7336/abs/nature09678.html ] is an open question, all the more pressing if modern extinctions represent not just the loss of a lineage but a constraint on evolution for the foreseeable future, if not millions of years to come.
“We’re showing that low-diversity systems take a long time to recover,” said Whiteside. “When you destroy links in the food web, effects exist that are difficult to see. Normally when people think of extinctions, it’s of single species. This is a systems approach.”
According to Roopnarine and Angielczyk, their analyses differ subtly from Whiteside’s in more precisely tracing post-extinction instabilities to losses of specific animal groups, especially large predators and herbivores. Those equilibrium-maintaining animals [ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/big-animal-ecology/?pid=1667&viewall=true ] are the ones now dying off fastest. Species that survive are often so rare as to be, in ecological parlance, functionally extinct.
“My own personal feeling is that many modern communities are probably well on their way to the type of instability inferred for the Early Triassic,” said Roopnarine. “The more we understand of the workings of these systems, the better equipped we are to make good choices.”
Citation: “Delayed recovery of non-marine tetrapods after the end-Permian mass extinction tracks global carbon cycle.” By Randall B. Irmis and Jessica H. Whiteside. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Vol. 278 No. 1723, Oct. 26, 2011.
University of Florida researchers hold a 162-pound Burmese python captured in Everglades National Park, Fla. Therese Walters, left, Alex Wolf and Michael R. Rochford, right, are holding the 15-foot snake shortly after the python ate a six-foot American alligator in 2009.
Scientists say pet snakes are bringing on an environmental nightmare in Florida
By Matt Sedensky Associated Press updated 1/30/2012 4:53:30 PM ET 2012-01-30T21:53:30
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A burgeoning population of huge pythons — many of them pets that were turned loose by their owners when they got too big — appears to be wiping out large numbers of raccoons, opossums, bobcats and other mammals in the Everglades, a study says.
The study [linked below], published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that sightings of medium-size mammals are down dramatically — as much as 99 percent, in some cases — in areas where pythons and other large, non-native constrictor snakes are known to be lurking.
Scientists fear the pythons could disrupt the food chain and upset the Everglades' environmental balance in ways difficult to predict.
"The effects of declining mammal populations on the overall Everglades ecosystem, which extends well beyond the national park boundaries, are likely profound," said John Willson, a research scientist at Virginia Tech University and co-author of the study.
Tens of thousands of Burmese pythons, which are native to Southeast Asia, are believed to be living in the Everglades, where they thrive in the warm, humid climate. While many were apparently released by their owners, others may have escaped from pet shops during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and have been reproducing ever since.
Can swallow alligators
Burmese pythons can grow to be 26 feet long and more than 200 pounds, and they have been known to swallow animals as large as alligators. They and other constrictor snakes kill their prey by coiling around it and suffocating it.
The National Park Service has counted 1,825 Burmese pythons that have been caught in and around Everglades National Park since 2000. Among the largest so far was a 156-pound, 16.4-foot snake captured earlier this month.
For the study, researchers drove 39,000 miles along Everglades-area roads from 2003 through 2011, counting wildlife spotted along the way and comparing the results with surveys conducted on the same routes in 1996 and 1997.
The researchers found staggering declines in animal sightings: a drop of 99.3 percent among raccoons, 98.9 percent for opossums, 94.1 percent for white-tailed deer and 87.5 percent for bobcats. Along roads where python populations are believed to be smaller, declines were lower but still notable.
Rabbits and foxes, which were commonly spotted in 1996 and 1997, were not seen at all in the later counts. Researchers noted slight increases in coyotes, Florida panthers, rodents and other mammals, but discounted that finding because so few were spotted overall.
"The magnitude of these declines underscores the apparent incredible density of pythons in Everglades National Park," said Michael Dorcas, a professor at Davidson College in North Carolina and lead author of the study.
Prime suspect
Although scientists cannot definitively say the pythons are killing off the mammals, the snakes are the prime suspect. The increase in pythons coincides with the mammals' decrease, and the decline appears to grow in magnitude with the size of the snakes' population in an area. A single disease appears unlikely to be the cause since several species were affected.
The report says the effect on the overall ecosystem is hard to predict. Declines among bobcats and foxes, which eat rabbits, could be linked to pythons' feasting on rabbits. On the flip side, declines among raccoons, which eat eggs, may help some turtles, crocodiles and birds.
Scientists point with concern to what happened in Guam, where the invasive brown tree snake has killed off birds, bats and lizards that pollinated trees and flowers and dispersed seeds. That has led to declines in native trees, fish-eating birds and certain plants.
In 2010, Florida banned private ownership of Burmese pythons. Earlier this month, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a federal ban on the import of Burmese pythons and three other snakes.
Salazar said Monday that the study shows why such restrictions were needed.
"This study paints a stark picture of the real damage that Burmese pythons are causing to native wildlife and the Florida economy," he said.
In Florida Everglades, pythons and anacondas dominate food chain
A Burmese python wraps around an American alligator in Everglades National Park, Fla. A National Academy of Science report indicates that the proliferation of pythons coincides with a sharp decrease of mammals in the park. “Pythons are wreaking havoc on one of America’s most beautiful, treasured and naturally bountiful ecosystems,” Marcia McNutt, director the U.S. Geological Survey, said in a statement. Lori Oberhofer/ AP [additional photos at http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/pythons-kill-off-native-animals-in-everglades/2012/01/30/gIQAdawJdQ_gallery.html ]
By Darryl Fears, Monday, January 30, 6:37 PM, 2012
Every child learns this sad and basic truth about nature: The snake eats the rabbit.
But in the southernmost part of the Florida Everglades, things have taken a really wild turn. Pythons and anacondas are eating everything. The most common animals in Everglades National Park — rabbits, raccoons, opposums and bobcats — are almost gone, according to a study released Monday.
“There aren’t many native mammals that pythons can’t choke down,” said Robert N. Reed, a research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geologial Survey’s Fort Collins Science Center and a co-author of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Officials can’t stop invasive pythons and anacondas from marauding in the Everglades, Reed said; they can only hope to contain them. “We’re trying to prevent spread to the Florida Keys and elsewhere north.”
The snakes were released by pet owners [ http://www.nps.gov/ever/naturescience/burmesepython.htm ] into the Everglades, where they started to breed. A female python can lay 100 eggs, though 54 is considered the norm. The study was described as the first to show pythons are causing the decline of native mammals in the Everglades.
When researchers struck out to count animals along a main road that runs to the southernmost tip of the park, more than 99 percent of raccoons were gone, along with nearly the same percentage of opossums and about 88 percent of bobcats. Marsh and cottontail rabbits, as well as foxes, could not be found.
The Obama administration recently banned the import and interstate commerce of Burmese python, two species of African pythons, and the yellow anaconda. But under pressure from the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers, trade of the world’s longest snake, the reticulated python, and the boa constrictor were allowed to continue.
The reptile trade is a $2 billion business in the United States, according to the Humane Society. About 11 million reptiles were kept as pets in 2005, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association. More reptiles are imported here than anywhere else in the world.
“Pythons are wreaking havoc on one of America’s most beautiful, treasured and naturally bountiful ecosystems,” Marcia McNutt, director of the USGS, said in a statement. “The only hope to halt further python invasion .?.?. is swift, decisive and deliberate human action.”
But officials do not yet know what can be done to slow the migration of pythons to other areas in Florida, and north to Georgia and Louisiana.
“We need more research into methods to limit the population spread,” said Michael F. Dorcas, one of the authors of the study, Severe Mammal Declines Coincide with Proliferation of Invasive Burmese Pythons in Everglades National Park [ http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/midorcas/research/Pythons/Python.htm (actual study linked below)].
Researchers collected data through repeated night road surveys, traveling 39,000 miles for eight years ending in 2011, counting live animals and road kill. They compared the data with findings of similar surveys conducted in 1996 and 1997, according to a statement by the USGS.
Andrew Wyatt, president of the Reptile Keepers, which advocates on behalf of snake importers, dismissed the study.
“They play fast and loose with facts and make big jumps to conclusions,” Wyatt said. The authors contradict prior studies showing that mercury in the water has played a role in the deaths of small mammals, he said.
Wyatt also said pythons can only survive in southernmost Florida and that they would perish in extreme cold.
Dorcas, who participated in several studies of pythons and cold weather, said it’s not simple. Hundreds of adult pythons and hatchlings were captured and removed from the park months after a cold snap, he said.
Dorcas was also part of a study that removed 10 snakes from the Everglades to winter in South Carolina, where each died of exposure. But researchers noted that the snakes were far more tolerant of cold weather than they had thought.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service predicted that a new generations of Burmese pythons on the edge of their non-native range can adapt and “expand to colder climates [ http://www.fws.gov/home/feature/2012/pdfs/ColdWeather.pdf ].”
In this photo supplied by Mwanga Lodge, Shamva, Zimbabwe, a baby elephant is bottle fed by a carer shortly before falling ill late last month, Jan. Conservationists say round-the-clock efforts to save the elephant, seperated from its mother on a busy highway, have failed. The six-week-olf calf, hand-fed for three weeks, died, apparently from pneumonia. (AP Photo-Mwanga Lodge-Jo-Anne Lamb)
By ANGUS SHAW Associated Press HARARE, Zimbabwe February 8, 2012 (AP)
Conservationists in Zimbabwe said Wednesday round-the-clock efforts to save a baby elephant, separated from his mother on a busy highway, have failed. The six-week-old calf who has been hand fed for three weeks has died, apparently from pneumonia.
Conservation expert Gordon Putterill said that elephants are notoriously difficult to hand rear, unlike other wild animals. The baby calf was named Kunda, or Triumph in the local Shona language, for his determination to survive after he was found alone on the highway, he said.
Kunda's mother may have been injured by a truck after the herd fled from a busy trucking highway in northwestern Zimbabwe, uncharacteristically leaving him behind, trackers said. The herd's tracks led deep into the thick bush several miles (kilometers) away from where the baby calf was found.
With shoulders that measured just 2 feet 9 inches (80 centimeters) across, Putterill said Kunda touched the hearts of all those who tried to save him.
Kunda gained more than 40 pounds (20 kilograms) while in human care to reach about 200 pounds (100 kilograms) in weight, Putterill said. But then he got diarrhea despite receiving specialized soy milk, palm and coconut oil derivatives and nutrients prescribed by top veterinarians in eastern and southern Africa. The veterinarians, however, had warned that it was rare for young elephants to survive without a mother.
"The poor little guy looked so frail," said Putterill, a veteran game ranger based at the Mwanga Lodge conservancy about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Harare.
The stomach condition sapped Kunda's strength but he recovered. Soon after, though, his temperature soared and he began breathing noisily as pneumonia set it in.
Kunda was fed and given medication intravenously but his "vital signs" deteriorated and he died peacefully in his sleep, Putterill said.
Kunda had very little control of his small trunk but, like human babies, "sampled new things with his mouth," Putterill said.
"Had his mother been feeding him, he would have been boosted by her antibodies," he said.
Kunda snored at night, played in water, squealed when he was frustrated, didn't want to be alone in his new environment and liked people around him. The calf had a character all his own that deeply affected his human helpers.
"Kunda became an ambassador for elephant conservation. One must not give up on trying to help orphaned and vulnerable wildlife despite the heartbreaks," he said.
As Bison Return to Prairie, Some Rejoice, Others Worry
Bison released by the American Prairie Reserve, near Malta, Mont., are among two groups set free in the state. Some are descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds. Lynn Donaldson for The New York Times
Some of the bison were from Yellowstone National Park. The New York Times
The bison's return has been welcomed by American Indians, but some ranchers are less pleased. Lynn Donaldson for The New York Times
By NATE SCHWEBER Published: April 26, 2012
WOLF POINT, Mont. — Sioux and Assiniboine tribe members wailed a welcome song last month as around 60 bison from Yellowstone National Park stormed onto a prairie pasture that had not felt a bison’s hoof for almost 140 years.
That historic homecoming came just 11 days after 71 pureblood bison, descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds, were released nearby onto untilled grassland owned by a charity with a vision of building a haven for prairie wildlife. Some hunters and conservationists are now calling for bison to be reintroduced to a million-acre wildlife refuge spanning this remote region.
“Populations of all native Montana wildlife have been allowed to rebound except bison; it’s time to take care of them like they once took care of us,” said Robert Magnan, 58, director of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation’s Fish and Game Department [ http://www.fortpecktribes.org/fgd/ ], who will oversee the transplanted Yellowstone bison program.
But with several groups now navigating a complex and contentious path to return bison to these plains, agribusiness is fighting back. Many farmers and ranchers fear that bison, particularly those from Yellowstone, might be mismanaged and damage private property, and worry that they would compete for grass with their own herds.
“Bison are a romantic notion, but they don’t belong today,” said Curt McCann, 46, a Chinook rancher who this month drove four hours to a public meeting in Jordan to speak against bison reintroduction.
Scientists estimate that tens of millions of bison once roamed America, but by 1902 there were only 23 known survivors in the wild, all hiding from poachers in a remote Yellowstone valley. For decades, attempts to transplant bison from the rebounding Yellowstone herd were thwarted, despite requests from tribes to steward some of the animals.
“I call them my brothers and sisters because they are a genetic link to the same ones my ancestors hunted,” said Tote Gray Hawk, 54, a Sioux who has brought the Fort Peck bison hay and water each day since their arrival. Their meat, lower in cholesterol than beef, will feed elderly tribe members and their skulls will be used in traditional sun dance ceremonies, he said.
The last hunt for indigenous bison on the Fort Peck reservation happened in 1873. In the 1880s, hundreds of tribe members starved to death on the barren land. Around them homesteaders from Europe began wresting an agricultural living from this windswept expanse of rolling amber in northeast Montana. Most of the neighboring farmers and ranchers today are descendants of those pioneers, and they safeguard their traditions with generational grit.
“Bison is a big issue that could really impact our livelihood,” said Brett Dailey, 52, who ranches near Jordan.
Today there are three million cattle in Montana and agribusiness is the state’s biggest industry, but not a single bison roams free. A 2011 survey [ http://www.restoringbison.org/Polling.html ] commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation [ http://www.nwf.org/ ] showed that a majority of state residents support reintroducing huntable bison to the vast Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, similar to a Utah herd created in 1941 from the last few bison allowed out of Yellowstone.
“Within this sea of agriculture there is room for small islands of conservation,” said Sean Gerrity, president of the American Prairie Reserve [ http://www.americanprairie.org/ ], the charity that brought the group of genetically pure bison back to a pasture just north of the refuge.
The arrival of Yellowstone bison was welcome news around the troubled Fort Peck reservation. When the first calf was born on Sunday, a rust-colored baby bull, tribal flags still hung at half-staff for a teenage boy who had committed suicide days earlier. Rates of poverty, unemployment, disease and addiction hover stubbornly above national averages here.
Census data shows that around northeast Montana, a prairie expanse almost the size of Indiana, most county populations peaked in the early 1900s and have since dropped by almost half.
The region’s fastest growing economic engine, oil production, is proving a mixed blessing. In 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency reported that toxic chemicals from nearby drilling contaminated drinking water supplies for Poplar, a reservation town of around 3,000. This year a schoolteacher from Sidney, near the North Dakota border, was kidnapped during her morning jog and murdered. The suspects are two Colorado roughnecks.
“These bison represent healing,” said Iris Greybull, 62, of Poplar.
The bison debate has dredged up old tensions between tribes and their neighbors. Before Ms. Greybull, a Sioux, spoke in favor of the animals last fall at a fractious meeting in Glasgow, dozens of farmers and ranchers walked out in protest.
She and other tribe members say they see an ugly double standard in the fact that there are more than 130 private bison ranches in the state, including one belonging to the mogul Ted Turner housing dozens of controversial Yellowstone bison, and yet only the Fort Peck herd has been visited by protesters.
But some say the bison on the ranches do not pose the threat that the wild ones do.
“Unless they have the German wall and a moat with a bunch of crocodiles and piranhas, they’re not going to contain those woolly tanks,” said State Senator John Brenden of nearby Scobey, who has long done battle on the bison issue in the state Legislature.
Around a century ago some Yellowstone bison contracted disease from domestic livestock and in recent decades thousands have been slaughtered in an effort to protect ranchers’ herds. At the direction of Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a few of these bison were quarantined for years and certified healthy. Some may soon go to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, about 170 miles west of Fort Peck, pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by opponents.
“I took a lot of arrows for this, but it was the right thing to do,” Mr. Schweitzer said. “If you want to get into a fistfight in Montana, go into a bar and share your opinion about bison or wolves.”
Quantifying the decline for the first time, the analysis, published online Friday in the journal Conservation Biology, shows that shark populations fare worse the closer they are to people — even if the nearest population is an atoll with fewer than 100 residents.
The team of eight scientists examined the results of a decade of underwater surveys across 46 Pacific islands and atolls and found densities of reef sharks — gray, whitetip and blacktip reef sharks, as well as Galapagos and tawny nurse sharks — “increased substantially as human population decreased” and the productivity and temperature of the ocean increased.
“Our results suggest humans now exert a stronger influence on the abundance of reef sharks than either habitat quality or oceanographic factors,” the authors wrote.
Near populated places, such as the main Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa, the study found, there were roughly 26 sharks per square mile. Remote reefs, such as in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and Johnson Atoll, a U.S. territory west of Hawaii, by contrast, boasted 337 sharks per square mile.
“In short, people and sharks don’t mix,” Marc Nadon, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the University of Hawaii’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, said in a statement.
The scientists relied on more than 1,600 “towed-diver surveys” for their study. This form of underwater survey, aimed at reaching a more accurate count of fast-moving, wide-ranging fish, entails having a pair of scuba divers record the number of sharks they see while being towed behind a boat.
The researchers said previous underwater surveys, which focused on a small transect of the ocean or a stationary point, skewed results by double-counting some sharks that passed through the same area multiple times.
“These types of surveys can vastly overcount numbers of large mobile fishes (such as sharks),” one of the paper’s co-authors, Julia Baum, an assistant professor at British Columbia’s University of Victoria, wrote in an e-mail.
A 2010 study by Australian and British researchers, for example, showed that reef shark populations had declined 90 percent since the 1970s at three remote atolls in the Chagos Archipelago [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/01/AR2010040102894.html ] in the Indian Ocean. “In this case, even though the atolls have few people, the decline is attributed to distant-origin fishing fleets,” Shivji wrote in an e-mail.
The study showed both the potential conservation benefits, and limits, of creating marine reserves in remote areas. Several of the areas the researchers surveyed — including the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, three Mariana Islands and all of the islands in a region known as the Pacific Remote Island Area — enjoy a significant level of federal protection. Enforcement, however, is often absent.
Baum wrote in an e-mail that she regularly sees a large fishing vessel in U.S. waters near Kiritimati atoll in the northern Line Islands while conducting field work, and this operation hires local villagers to cut fins from sharks.
“To me, enforcement of these islands is a major unsung conservation challenge, and I suspect that if this is not effectively addressed [as soon as possible], the reef sharks on these islands will be fished out within the next 10 years,” she wrote.
Steller Sea Lion Population Taken Of NOAA's Threatened Species List
AP | By MARK THIESSEN Posted: 10/23/2013 7:22 pm EDT
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The eastern population of the Steller sea lion will be taken off the threatened species list, a federal agency announced Wednesday.
The sea lions, whose range stretches from Alaska's Panhandle to California's Channel Islands, are the first animal to be delisted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 19 years.
The last animal delisted was the eastern North Pacific gray whale, which was taken off the threatened list in 1994, NOAA spokeswoman Julie Speegle said.
The agency earlier this year recommended delisting the eastern population of the Steller sea lions, an action sought by the states of Alaska, Washington and Oregon. Commercial fishermen also protested fishing regulations because of the listing.
"We're delighted to see the recovery of the eastern population of Steller sea lions," Jim Balsiger, administrator of NOAA Fisheries' Alaska Region, said in a statement announcing the delisting. "We'll be working with the states and other partners to monitor this population to ensure its continued health."
The delisting does not affect the status of the western population of the Stellar sea lions, whose range goes from Cape Suckling, Alaska, to Russian waters. They remain on the endangered list.
The agency estimated there were about 18,000 animals in the eastern population in 1979, and the population was listed as threatened in 1990. In 2010, the latest year a count was available, the agency estimated just over 70,000 sea lions.
The decline in the population was blamed on fishermen and people on other boats or on shore shooting the animals because they were a nuisance and killing fish.
Significant safeguards remain for the sea lions, Speegle said by phone from her office in Juneau.
"While they are being removed from the list of threatened and endangered species, they are still provided a good measure of protection under the Marine Mammal Protection Act," she said.
When an animal is delisted, the Endangered Species Act requires a monitoring plan that covers five years. NOAA has decided to double that length of time to monitor the sea lions.
"We are just proceeding carefully and cautiously to ensure that this species can be maintained in the recovered status," she said.
The delisting becomes effective 30 days after a notice is published in the Federal Register.
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