The Lazarus flower

The adage goes, "Extinction is forever."

It's a sobering thought.  There's been talk of "de-extinction" -- using intact DNA from well-preserved fossils to resurrect, Jurassic-Park-style, extinct animals -- but so far, the research in that vein has been tentative and not particularly promising.  Plus, there are the inevitable ethical questions about bringing back woolly mammoths, passenger pigeons, and dodos into a world where their environment has changed into something they couldn't survive in anyway.  It seems like recreating a few individuals of an extinct species, then having them live out their lives in zoos, is nothing more than generating a handful of entertaining curiosities at a very great cost.

There are, however, a few species that have been declared extinct which have turned out not to be.  The most famous of these is the coelacanth, a weird-looking fish that's one of the lobe-finned fish, the fish group with the closest relationship to amphibians.  It was thought that all the lobe-fins had become extinct along with the non-avian dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Extinction 66 million years ago, but then someone caught one in the Indian Ocean.  There are, in fact, two living species of coelacanth -- the West Indian Ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) and the Indonesian coelacanth (Latimeria menadoensis).  This long-term survival of a species that was thought to be long gone has resulted in the coelacanth being labeled a "living fossil" or a "Lazarus taxon."

There are also the ones that have been declared extinct, but that a handful of true believers -- and sometimes some scientists, as well -- are convinced are still alive.  The last thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus), which is neither a wolf nor restricted to Tasmania, died in a zoo in 1936 -- except there continue to be sightings of purported thylacines, both in Tasmania and adjacent South Australia.  In fact, there's a Facebook group devoted to alleged thylacine sightings, which so far, have either been anecdotal, or accompanied by photos of Bigfoot-level blurriness.

Then there's the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campophilus principalis), an enormous woodpecker species that used to live in swampy regions of the North American southeast.  The last confirmed sighting was in Louisiana in 1944, but there have been sporadic reports ever since -- most, probably, of the related (but smaller) pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus).  But a friend of mine, an employee of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, was part of the team sent to investigate a cluster of alleged sightings, and she was one of the people who say they actually saw one.  Now, let me add that my friend is an accomplished and knowledgeable birder, and knew what she was looking for; she, and the other members of the team, would not mistake a pileated woodpecker for this bird.  Unfortunately, the only video they got was short and of poor quality, and although she and the rest of the team have serious credibility, it still amounts to a single anecdotal report, and a lot of folks are not convinced.

All of this is just by way of introducing a discovery that should give some hope to the thylacine and ivory-billed woodpecker aficionados.  Just last week, a paper in the journal PhytoKeys described the (re)discovery of a plant in the family Gesneriaceae, a tropical group most familiar to collectors of rare houseplants -- the best-known members are the African violet (Saintpaulia spp.),  Cape primrose (Streptocarpus spp.), and gloxinia (Gloxinia spp.).

The recent discovery was in the Centinela region of southern Ecuador, in the foothills of the Andes Mountains.  Centinela has been devastated by deforestation -- by some estimates, 97% of the original old-growth rain forest has been cleared or extensively damaged -- so it's to be expected that any species endemic to the region are gone.  That's what the botanists thought about a glossy-leaved, orange-flowered plant that grew in the humid understory; it was last seen in the 1980s.  By the time it was discovered and catalogued, it was gone.

That's why they named it Gasteranthus extinctus.

And then, a couple of months ago, some botanists studying what's left of Centinela found that it wasn't extinct after all.  Here's the plant:

[Photograph by Riley Fortier]

They took lots of photographs but were careful not to disturb the few remaining plants -- nor are they telling exactly where they found them.  This same strategy was adopted by the folks from Cornell looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker; the last thing they needed was a bunch of overenthusiastic amateurs stomping about the place (and you know they would).  But it is a hopeful thought, that some of the species we thought were gone forever might still be out there somewhere.  (For what it's worth, they're keeping the name Gasteranthus extinctus, and hoping that it doesn't one day become accurate in fact.)

"Rediscovering this flower shows that it’s not too late to turn around even the worst-case biodiversity scenarios, and it shows that there’s value in conserving even the smallest, most degraded areas," said Dawson White, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago, who was the paper's lead author.  "New species are still being found, and we can still save many things that are on the brink of extinction."

So that's today's optimistic news.  Me, I'm still hoping for the thylacine.  Those things were cool.  While thus far the evidence thus far has been less than convincing, it's certainly still a possibility that it -- and some of the other species most folks have given up on -- are still alive after all.

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The mystery from Manu

So much of the damage we've done to the planet hasn't been deliberate destructiveness; it's been due to our carelessly stomping about the place.  We've long had the attitude that resources will never run out, that we can get away with doing whatever we want with no consequences, that nature will rebound like it always does.  There's little awareness of the absolute fragility of it all.

The "bull in a china shop" metaphor seems all too apt.

Of course, that mindset does require a good dollop of willful ignorance.  Just two weeks ago, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service declared that 22 species in the US that were previously classified as critically endangered are now officially considered extinct.  The most famous of them is the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the largest woodpecker species native to North America, victim to habitat loss as the wetland forests where it lived were drained, the trees felled for lumber.  A full nine of the 22 are bird species endemic to Hawaii, eight of them part of the unique group called Hawaiian honeycreepers that were decimated by the double whammy of habitat loss and susceptibility to avian malaria, carried by the introduced Asian tiger mosquito.

So to think "everything's just fine" you have to make a practice of not paying attention.

One of the problems is that in some of the most vulnerable places in the world, species are disappearing before they're even identified and studied.  Take, for example, the species of tree native to the Amazon basin of Peru that was first seen by scientists in 1973 -- and that has just now been classified and named.

Robin Foster of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute was the one who noticed it, while walking in Manu National Park -- and despite a thorough knowledge of Amazonian flora, he couldn't figure out what it was.  "When I first saw this little tree, while out on a forest trail leading from the field station, it was the fruit -- looking like an orange-colored Chinese lantern and juicy when ripe with several seeds -- that caught my attention," Foster said.  "I didn't really think it was special, except for the fact that it had characteristics of plants in several different plant families, and didn't fall neatly into any family.  Usually I can tell the family by a quick glance, but damned if I could place this one."

So Foster sent a branch of the plant to the Field Museum of Chicago, where it sat in the herbarium for almost fifty years.  When DNA analysis became de rigueur for doing taxonomy, back in the 1990s, researchers tried extracting DNA from the dried leaves -- unsuccessfully.  Then last year, scientist Patricia Álvarez-Loayza, who is part of the team that studies the ecosystem in Manu National Park, found a living specimen of the tree, and this time the DNA extraction worked.

Aenigmanu alvareziae

The results were a shock to botanists, because it showed beyond any question that the little tree belonged to an obscure tropical family called Picramniaceae, made up of 48 (now 49) species native to northern South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, but not common anywhere.  "When my colleague Rick Ree sequenced it and told me what family it belonged to, I told him the sample must have been contaminated.  I was like, no way, I just couldn't believe it," said Nancy Hensold of the Field Museum, part of the team that studied the plant and finally identified its affinities.  "Looking closer at the structure of the tiny little flowers I realized, oh, it really has some similarities, but given its overall characters, nobody would have put it in that family." 

The plant was christened Aenigmanu alvareziae -- the genus name means "mystery from Manu," while the species name honors Patricia Álvarez-Loayza, who found the living specimen that helped to place the species.

What strikes me about this whole story is how easily the branch of this little tree could have been forgotten in the herbarium, or the plant itself overlooked completely.  The Amazon is a big place, large swaths of which are unexplored.  While one odd plant species may not seem all that important, this does give us a sense of the extent to which we're blundering around damaging living ecosystems without even understanding them fully.  "Plants are understudied in general," said Robin Foster, the first scientist who noticed Aenigmanu back in 1973.  "Especially tropical forest plants.  Especially Amazon plants.  And especially plants in the upper Amazon.  To understand the changes taking place in the tropics, to protect what remains, and to restore areas that have been wiped out, plants are the foundation for everything that lives there and the most important to study.  Giving them unique names is the best way to organize information about them and call attention to them.  A single rare species may not by itself be important to an ecosystem, but collectively they tell us what is going on out there."

Conservation isn't some kind of academic game, and rare species shouldn't just be of interest to the taxonomists.  We need to understand on a visceral level that you can't pull threads out of the tapestry of life without the entire thing coming unraveled.  Chief Seattle said it best, back in 1854: "The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth.  This we know.  All things are connected like the blood which unites one family...  Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.  Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

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During the first three centuries C.E., something remarkable happened; Rome went from a superpower, controlling much of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, to being a pair of weak, unstable fragments -- the Western and Eastern Roman Empires --torn by strife and internal squabbles, beset by invasions, with leaders for whom assassination was the most likely way to die.  (The year 238 C.E. is called "the year of six emperors" -- four were killed by their own guards, one hanged himself to avoid the same fate, and one died in battle.)

How could something like this happen?  The standard answer has usually been "the barbarians," groups such as the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alans, and Huns who whittled away at the territory until there wasn't much left.  They played a role, there is no doubt of that; the Goths under their powerful leader Alaric actually sacked the city of Rome itself in the year 410.  But like with most historical events, the true answer is more complex -- and far more interesting.  In How Rome Fell, historian Adrian Goldsworthy shows how a variety of factors, including a succession of weak leaders, the growing power of the Roman army, and repeated epidemics took a nation that was thriving under emperors like Vespasian and Hadrian, finally descending into the chaos of the Dark Ages.  

If you're a student of early history, you should read Goldsworthy's book.  It's fascinating -- and sobering -- to see how hard it is to maintain order in a society, and how easy it is to lose it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The kites fly again

The iconic movie Jurassic Park has provided us with quite a number of quotable lines:

"I hate it when I'm always right."

"Clever girl."

"That is one big pile of shit."

"See?  Nobody cares."

"Hold onto your butts."

But as someone who has studied (and taught) evolution for decades, none of them has stuck in my mind like Ian Malcolm's pronouncement, "Life... uh... finds a way."

This short sentence sums up something really profound; however the Earth's ecosystems are damaged, they always bounce back.  Even after the catastrophic Permian-Triassic Extinction -- which by some estimates wiped out 90% of the existing taxa on Earth -- there was a recovery and rediversification.

Note that I'm not saying that means it was a good thing.  The end Permian extinction event was, it is believed, caused by an unimaginably huge series of volcanic eruptions, followed by a major spike in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere -- leading to a jump in the global temperature and catastrophic oceanic anoxia.

So yeah.  "Life survived" doesn't mean it'd have been a fun event to live through.  But it should give us hope that the damage humans can do to the Earth as a whole is, in the grand scheme of things, short-lived.

As an encouraging example of this, take a recent study out of the University of Florida on snail kites.  These birds, related to hawks and falcons, are serious food specialists; they eat only one species of snail, found in salt marshes like the Everglades (and also parts of Central America; I first saw snail kites in Belize).  When things are stable, being a specialist is a good thing -- you pretty much corner the market on a particular resource, like the South American hummingbird species whose bills are shaped to fit one and only one species of flower.  The snail kite's food finickiness is this same sort of thing, and as long as the Everglades was undamaged and had an abundant supplies of snails, all was well.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, Snail Kite (Rosthramus sociabilis) Poconé, Mato Grosso, CC BY-SA 2.0]

But when the environment is rapidly changing, either through human effects or because of natural events, being a specialist is seriously precarious.  When a new species of snail -- the island apple snail -- was introduced to the Everglades, its larger size and voracious appetite outcompeted the native snails, and the snail kites were in trouble because their bills weren't large and heavy enough to tackle the bigger prey.

Snail kites were already on the Endangered Species List, given that the Everglades has been massively damaged by human activity.  This, it seemed, might be the death blow to the Florida population of this striking bird.

But... life, uh, finds a way.

The snail kite, in a near-perfect reenactment of the bill diversification in Darwin's finches in the Galapagos, had a variety of bill sizes.  Genetic diversity, despite their extreme specialization.  Before the introduction of the island apple snail, bill size probably didn't make much difference, positive or negative, to the individual birds.  But now, large bills were a serious advantage.  The birds with the biggest bills could tackle the larger snail species -- meaning they had a copious food source that their smaller-billed cousins couldn't utilize.

And in the thirteen years since the introduction of the island apple snail, the average bill size has gone up dramatically -- and the overall population is rebounding.

"Beak size had been increasing every year since the invasion of the snail from about 2007,” said Robert Fletcher, who co-authored the study.  "At first, we thought the birds were learning how to handle snails better or perhaps learning to forage on the smaller, younger individual snails...  We found that beak size had a large amount of genetic variance and that more variance happened post-invasion of the island apple snail.  This indicates that genetic variations may spur rapid evolution under environmental change."

As I said earlier, this is not meant to give the anti-environmental types another reason to say, "Meh, we don't have to change what we're doing, things'll be okay regardless."  Most species aren't as fortunate as the snail kites, already having the genetic diversity to cope with a sudden change.  Much more likely, if we keep doing what we're doing, the specialist species in the world will simply be wiped out.

Whether we'll be able to survive in such a changed world remains to be seen.

But one thing is nearly certain; even if we catastrophically damage the global ecosystem, it will rebound eventually.  Which is hopeful, as far as it goes.  Even after Homo sapiens is another fossilized footnote in the Earth's geological history, life will persist -- once more generating, in Darwin's immortal words, "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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 Many of us were riveted to the screen last week watching the successful landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance, and it brought to mind the potential for sending a human team to investigate the Red Planet.  The obstacles to overcome are huge; the four-odd-year voyage there and back, requiring a means for producing food, and purifying air and water, that has to be damn near failsafe.

Consider what befell the unfortunate astronaut Mark Watney in the book and movie The Martian, and you'll get an idea of what the crew could face.

Physicist and writer Kate Greene was among a group of people who agreed to participate in a simulation of the experience, not of getting to Mars but of being there.  In a geodesic dome on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, Greene and her crewmates stayed for four months in isolation -- dealing with all the problems Martian visitors would run into, not only the aforementioned problems with food, water, and air, but the isolation.  (Let's just say that over that time she got to know the other people in the simulation really well.)

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, Greene recounts her experience in the simulation, and tells us what the first manned mission to Mars might really be like.  It makes for wonderful reading -- especially for people like me, who are just fine staying here in comfort on Earth, but are really curious about the experience of living on another world.

If you're an astronomy buff, or just like a great book about someone's real and extraordinary experiences, pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.  You won't regret it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A botanical messiah

Given all the horrible and discouraging news we're bombarded with on a daily basis, sometimes it's nice to focus on some of the positive things humans are doing.

Today we'll look at Carlos Magdalena, the Spanish-born botanical horticulturist who works with saving severely endangered plant species in his lab at Kew Gardens, near London.  As a brief aside, Kew is one of those places I think everyone should visit at some point in their lives.  Besides simply being gorgeous, it has one of the most extensive collections of rare plants in the world, and a half-day's walk through their greenhouses (or "glasshouses" as they call them in the UK) will open your eyes to the astonishing diversity gifted to us by the process of evolution.

The darker side of this, however, is the extent to which the world's plant species are threatened.  It's a general rule in evolutionary biology that when conditions are stable, natural selection favors specialization (witness the hundreds of species of hummingbirds in the Andes, many of which specialize in living at a narrow range of altitudes and feeding on only one or two species of flowers).  Changing conditions, however, favor generalists -- such as the preponderance of rats and pigeons in most of the world's cities.

The problem is that human actions have caused formerly stable ecosystems to start changing quickly, and the specialists are being hit hard.  Nowhere is this more obvious than the Amazonian rain forest, where a policy of turning over tracts of woodland on what honestly is marginal soil to agricultural and mining interests, something that has only accelerated with the reckless and ignorant policies of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.  (Encouraged, it must be added, by Donald Trump, whose attitude toward the environment seems to be "use it up and who gives a shit what happens afterward.")

The result has been devastating.  Magdalena estimates that one in five plant species worldwide is on the way to extinction, and that species go extinct every day -- some without ever being catalogued and studied.

But I said this was going to be an upbeat post, so I want to look at what Magdalena is doing to fight against this -- and how his efforts may be saving dozens of species from disappearing forever.

Magdalena's specialty is figuring out how to germinate seeds.  It's trickier than it sounds; if you're a gardener you probably buy packets of seeds at your local home and garden store, but what you may not realize is that the reason those varieties are sold is because they've got the unusual feature of being easy to germinate.  Where I live, here in upstate New York, seeds of most native species need to be stratified in order to germinate -- they need to be exposed to a period of cold, simulating passage through the winter.

Explaining why my attempts as a kid to grow an apple tree from a seed in an apple I'd eaten all resulted in failure.

Other plants, though, have additional complications.  Despite my background in evolutionary biology, one thing I've never quite understood is why some plants have seeds that are ridiculously difficult to germinate (many types of orchids come to mind).  The only reason I've come up with goes back to specialization; if a plant lives in a very stable ecosystem with an extremely narrow range of conditions, evolving to require those conditions and no others isn't a significant disadvantage.  It only becomes a problem if you take the seeds and try to sprout them elsewhere -- because then you have to somehow emulate all of those factors in your greenhouse.

But Magdalena might be the world's expert on solving this problem.  He single-handedly saved the world's smallest water lily, Nymphaea thermarum, when the only known population of the plant (in Rwanda) was destroyed in 2008.  His work with this and other species of severely endangered plants led to his being dubbed in a Spanish newspaper as el mesias de las plantas -- "the messiah of plants."

It's an apt moniker.

Nymphaea thermarum [Image courtesy of Carlos Magdalena and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew]

What Magdalena is trying to accomplish, however, sometimes must seem an uphill battle.  "There are seventy species of plants that we know of that have less than ten individuals left," he said in the interview linked above.  "In some cases, there is just the last individual plant left, or there are the last three individuals left.  Those will probably be more of a priority because the clock is ticking, and these specimens might have only few minutes left.  These last individuals could disappear by the end of this week.  Maybe the individuals could disappear with the next cyclone, or when the next pest gets introduced."

He's currently working on plant species from the island of Mauritius, best known to biologists as the former home of the dodo.  He was successful at germinating the seeds of a species in the genus Elaeocarpus for which only two individuals were left alive, but has been unsuccessful thus far at propagating the palm Hyophorbe amaricaulus -- which is down to a population of one.

However difficult his job can be, Magdalena is impelled to keep at it because of its critical importance.  "We cannot stabilize the planet’s climate if there is no tropical forest," he said.  "We cannot ensure that we will have resources to support humankind in terms of medicines, food, water and more without protecting these forests...  Plants are going extinct every single day, probably every single hour.  It’s like killing all your golden-egg hens systematically.  It is so nonsensical.

"We really need to realize that protecting the forests is not optional," he added.  "This is not something that’s just idealistic.  This is at the very core of our survival."

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Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Gone is gone forever

A month ago I wrote about an alarming study that looks at the population decline amongst American bird species.  We're not talking small numbers, here.  The best overall estimate is that there has been at 25% drop in the number of birds continent-wise, a loss of a grand total of three billion birds.

What surprised me about the response to this news, both to my blog post and to the media announcements in general, is that it can be summed up as, "Oh, that's sad.  Oh, well, what can you do?"  Unfortunate that the little feathery guys at our bird feeders aren't showing up like they used to, but... well, they're just birds, right?  Primarily decorative, and most of the species they're talking about I've never heard of anyway.

The people who were the most alarmed were the ones who were already alarmed about the state of our environment.  I very much got the impression everyone else just kind of shrugged and went about their business at usual.

It brings up a question of how you get people to care.  Not the environmentalists and eco-activists and birdwatchers and Sierra Club members.  Like I said, they care already.  But how do you reach your average person, and get them to see the magnitude of what we're doing to the planet -- and how the possibility is very real that we won't avoid horrible consequences, not just to a few obscure species of animals, but to ourselves?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Drpranjit, The endangered species, CC BY-SA 4.0]

This is the topic of a study that appeared this week in Nature: Scientific Reports, by Stefan Schubert, Lucius Caviola, and Nadira S. Faber, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University.  Titled, "The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction," the study asked individuals both in the United Kingdom and United States to consider the possibility of both human and other-species extinction, and an interesting pattern emerged.

In each of the types of extinction that Schubert et al. asked their test subject to think about, they asked two questions: how bad is it?  And, why is it bad?  What they found was that people tended to think quantitatively.  No matter what species was being considered, the bigger the percent drop, the worse it was.  An 85% reduction was worse than a 60% reduction, a 60% reduction worse than a 35% reduction, and so on.  So far, nothing too shocking.

What is alarming -- to we environmental types, anyhow -- is that this "degree of harm" is scaled up in a fairly linear fashion, all the way up to 100%.  Complete extinction.

Why this is alarming is that people don't seem to recognize the qualitative difference between a 100% loss and a 99% loss.  At least theoretically, if you have even 1% of the individuals left, recovery is possible (although not likely; 1%, for most species, is probably below the minimum viable population, the point at which the natural death rate exceeds the natural birth rate, so a downward spiral is inevitable).

But complete extinction?  Gone completely is gone forever.  And the magnitude of that just doesn't seem to register with most people, even when we're talking about humans themselves as the victims.

The authors write:

Our studies show that people find that human extinction is bad, and that it is important to prevent it.  However, when presented with a scenario involving no catastrophe, a near-extinction catastrophe and an extinction catastrophe as possible outcomes, they do not see human extinction as uniquely bad compared with non-extinction.  We find that this is partly because people feel strongly for the victims of the catastrophes, and therefore focus on the immediate consequences of the catastrophes.  The immediate consequences of near-extinction are not that different from those of extinction, so this naturally leads them to find near-extinction almost as bad as extinction. Another reason is that they neglect the long-term consequences of the outcomes.  Lastly, their empirical beliefs about the quality of the future make a difference: telling them that the future will be extraordinarily good makes more people find extinction uniquely bad. 

Thus, when asked in the most straightforward and unqualified way, participants do not find human extinction uniquely bad.  This could partly explain why we currently invest relatively small resources in reducing existential risk.

Which makes sense (of a sort) of what we started with -- that dire reports on the decline in wild species don't seem to generate much beyond an "aw, that's too bad" response in your average media consumer.  It also makes it clear that if the people who write about the environmental crisis focused on the long-term consequences of our current behavior, rather than just on sad photographs of starving polar bears, we might see a bigger seismic shift in attitudes.

Of course, this doesn't take into account other factors, such as disinformation from corporations heavily invested in business as usual, and the ignorant, self-serving politicians who are in those corporations' pockets.  But since those politicians are elected by us ordinary folk, it's still worthwhile to try to create a change in attitudes that could, perhaps, avert disaster.

It is, after all, in our common interest to do so.  And the Schubert et al. gives us a possible approach to make that point clear to everyone.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Silence in the skies

Much as I hate to end the week on a dark note, I felt like I had to tell you about an alarming piece of research indicating that we may be in a lot more ecological trouble than we realized.

My wife and I live in a very "birdy" area -- right in the middle of a flyway, so we get a lot of what are called "passage migrants" that come through in spring heading to breeding grounds in eastern Canada, and back again in autumn as they fly toward their winter homes in more temperate latitudes.  We also have a great number of breeding residents, and (especially in a rural area such as ours) any wooded areas or natural fields are usually alive with birds, especially in late spring and early summer.

This spring, though, we noticed that there seemed to be a much smaller number, and smaller diversity, than usual.  One of the first spring birds we hear around here is the Eastern Phoebe, and the first one I heard was weeks later than usual (and we heard very few of them at all, despite the fact that they're very common most years).  We ordinarily have Baltimore Orioles nesting in our back yard, and I only heard a single oriole -- and that from a distance -- all summer.  The lovely Rose-breasted Grosbeak, usually a common bird at our feeders, showed up only once or twice in May, and not at all afterward.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of photographer Ken Thomas]

Not a single Scarlet Tanager this year.  No Least Flycatchers.  No House Wrens.  No Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.  No Veeries (sad, because its beautiful song is usually a lovely part of a walk through the woods around here).  No Black-throated Blue, Black-throated Green, Blue-winged, or Black-and-White Warblers.  Barely any Eastern Meadowlarks (usually common in the field across the road from our house, and part of the dawn chorus all summer), Indigo Buntings, Savannah Sparrows, Wood Thrushes.

Now, I'm not saying this decline was true everywhere, and it may be that some of the species we didn't see this year were abundant elsewhere.  But the shift in what once were commonplace backyard birds was striking -- and disconcerting.

Apparently, however, we're not the only ones who are experiencing an overall decline in numbers and diversity.  According to a paper published this week in Science, compared to 1970 there's been a 29% overall decrease in avian populations in the United States.

You read that right.  Over one in four are gone, an estimated total of three billion birds.

If this doesn't scare the absolute shit out of you, you need to stop and think about this a little more.

This loss of America's avifauna affects more than just birders, especially when you read the paper and find out that the decline wasn't uniform.  Species whose habitat was protected under the Migratory Bird Act -- mainly waterfowl like ducks and geese -- have done all right, and in fact some species have increased in numbers since 1970.  The hardest hit were the woodland and grassland birds -- species vulnerable to poor land utilization practices, habitat loss, and the increasing use of pesticides in agriculture.

Still, why does it matter?  A few pretty birds gone, which is sad, but why is it a concern for your average human being?  The term "canary in the coal mine" has almost become a cliché, but it applies here.  These species are sounding the alarm for overall ecological degradation, which ultimately affects all species, ourselves included.  The idea that we can devastate the environment and reap no consequences can only be believable if you have no concept whatever of how biology works.

If we don't change our ways, we're going to get our comeuppance sooner rather than later.  You can't keep pulling threads out of the tapestry without the entire thing falling to pieces.  Or, as Sierra Club founder John Muir put it: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Bee all, end all

That a lot of people would prefer it if the world was simple is hardly an earthshattering claim.  You see it all over, especially in political debates -- the single-cause fallacy, attributing complex phenomena to one ultimate origin.  The mess in the Middle East?  George W. Bush, of course.  The loss of jobs to outsourcing?  Thanks, Obama.  Yesterday's unusually hot afternoon?  Has to be climate change.

Oh, but wait.  Climate change doesn't actually exist.  Almost forgot there for a moment.

I suppose it's understandable enough.  Figuring out complicated cause-and-effect relationships is hard work.  Sometimes even with lots of data, the answers are unclear.  We humans don't tend to like uncertainty, especially when we hear that the experts themselves are uncertain.  Much easier to fall back on the simple explanation and stop thinking about it.

Which, I think, explains the reactions I saw to the Washington Post article entitled "Bees Were Just Added to the U.S. Endangered Species List for the First Time."  Most of the comments I saw fell into one of the following categories:

• We're ruining the Earth and we're all gonna die.
• Farms are going to fold for lack of pollinators and we're going to run out of food.
• It's what we deserve for spraying pesticides all over the place.
• Monsanto sucks.

Never mind that when you actually read the article, it turns out that the additions to the ESL were seven rare species of endemic yellow-faced bees native to Hawaii, and the probable reason for their decline is habitat loss and destruction of native wildflowers, not pesticides or the rest of it.  There are actually an estimated 20,000 species of bees worldwide, so assuming that all bees are going extinct because seven uncommon island endemics are endangered is a little like using the near-extinction of the California condor to conclude that pigeons and starlings are about to go the way of the dinosaurs.  (Actually, it's worse; according to the most recent tallies, there are a few more than 10,000 species of birds in the world, so there's actually twice the biodiversity in bee species than in bird species.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That's not to say that there haven't been problems with declining numbers of more common bee species recently, but as I alluded to in the first paragraphs, it's not as simple as it sounds.  The still-unexplained colony collapse disorder has reduced the populations of western honeybees, the most common bee species in North America -- particularly among captive hives.  But the truth of the matter is, CCD seems to be declining itself, and honeybee numbers are on the rise in most places.

As far as wild bee species, the situation is even less clear.  A study by Insu Koh et al. last year suggested that in some places, wild bee populations had declined by 23%, but if you look at the study itself, you find that there is a huge amount of uncertainty in the data, mostly due to the difficulty of estimating bee populations in the wild.  The numbers Koh et al. used were developed from spatial-habitat models, using subjective information such as the "quality of nesting sites," and generated numbers that sounded alarming.  A review of the study in Science 2.0 was scathing:

How did they count wild bees when no one else has been able to do so? They didn't, which means it adds to the list of PNAS papers that can't possibly have been peer-reviewed.  The team instead identified forty-five land-use types from two federal land databases and asked fourteen hand-picked experts about each type of land and how suitable it was for providing wild bees with nesting and food resources.  They then averaged the experts' input and levels of certainty (no, really) and built a computer model that they think predicts the relative abundance of wild bees for every area of the contiguous United States, based on their quality for nesting and feeding from flowers.  Lastly, they validated their model against bee collections and field observations they also hand-picked.

In other words, they created an academic model that would get them fired from every single company in existence for being wildly suspect and based on too many assumptions. 

The authors then claim the decline they don't know is happening must be due to pesticides, global warming and farmers.

In fact, a study (this one peer-reviewed) in Nature last year suggested that populations of the dominant (and therefore most agriculturally relevant) species of wild bees are actually doing okay:

Across crops, years and biogeographical regions, crop-visiting wild bee communities are dominated by a small number of common species, and threatened species are rarely observed on crops. Dominant crop pollinators persist under agricultural expansion and many are easily enhanced by simple conservation measures, suggesting that cost-effective management strategies to promote crop pollination should target a different set of species than management strategies to promote threatened bees.

So the bottom line is: colony collapse disorder still exists, but seems to be declining in frequency, and we're still not entirely sure what causes it (neonicotinoid pesticides are one possibility, but there are others).  The western honeybee, the most common and important pollinator species in North America, is actually increasing in numbers.  There are a few species (out of the 20,000) of bees that are threatened or endangered, some because of human activities, but the same is true for any taxon you pick.

In short: the situation is complicated, whether you like it or not.  It'd be convenient to have a clearly-outlined problem with a certain culprit and an obvious solution, but the world seldom works that way.  And as far as "Beemageddon" goes; there are a lot of other ways we could self-destruct that are far more likely than the loss of honeybees.

Maybe it's not justified to be an optimist, but at least be a pessimist about the right things.