Attack of the jellyfish

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Kallista/Getty Images

In September, 62-year-old marathon swimmer Diana Nyad attempted to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, which had never been done before. But after making it roughly halfway there, Nyad had to abandon her goal. It wasn’t sharks that forced her to quit, but jellyfish: she received a number of stings, including to her face. The pain had become unbearable, she said, and made it dangerous for her to continue.

In the Gulf of Mexico, fishermen were complaining about them, too. Just over a year after the BP oil spill, a blanket of milky white moon jellies was clogging the water, slowing down business. This summer, media reports said jellyfish were being spotted on south Florida beaches “in record numbers.” Across the Atlantic, in the U.K. and the Mediterranean, bathers worried about large swarms of jellies (which are called blooms). A nuclear reactor in Scotland was temporarily shut down in June after jellyfish clogged its seawater filters. Off the coast of Japan, reports suggested Nemopilema nomurai, or Nomura’s jellyfish, which are as big as refrigerators, are increasing, but researchers aren’t sure exactly why.

Scientists have been sounding alarms about the “rise of slime” for at least a decade. As fish and other marine species are killed off by threats like overfishing, pollution and climate change, some say jellyfish—which have lived through Earth’s five mass extinctions—are taking over. Increasing jellyfish populations could be disastrous, hurting tourism, impeding shipping routes and crowding out the fish we typically rely on for food. But as dramatic as it sounds, experts are by no means in agreement. Among the small, tight-knit community of jellyfish scientists, the question of whether our oceans really are becoming a jelly-filled ooze is hotly debated.

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The Bob Marley brand: recyling lyrics to sell headphones and coffee

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 6:33 PM - 0 Comments

(from left) Bob Marley's granddaughter Donisha Prenderghast, 1Love.org's Donna Mastropasqua, wife Rita Marley, son Rohan Marley, daughter Sharon Marley

Bob Marley was a superstar and a revolutionary whose music circled the globe. Now he’s a brand. On Monday night, I attended the Canadian launch of the House of Marley’s new headphone line, a collection of eco-friendly products with names like Soul Rebel, Revolution, Conquerer, Positive Vibrations, Zion and Trenchtown Rock—which are sponsored by Future Shop. The House of Marley? Yes. It was created by the late singer’s family as a commercial enterprise to market merchandise under his name and siphon some of the revenues to charitable causes via an organization called 1Love.org.The pitch: “eco-conscious, innovative products that adhere to the Marley family core values: equality, unity authenticity.”

The launch, a bizarre mix of old time Rasta vibes and corporate chic, took place at the ultra-slick Ultra Supper Club—formerly the Bamboo, Toronto’s unofficial reggae clubhouse. And it was attended by an impressive contingent of Jamaican royalty, including Bob’s wife Rita Marley, who looked positively regal in a purple gown and turban. I was seated next to Bob’s son, Rohan Marley, the family’s official representative at the House of Marley—a dreadlocked Rasta who once  played in the Canadian Football League with the now-defunct Ottawa Rough Riders. Rohan, an exuberant pitchman and raconteur, was hilarious as he regaled us with stories of how he ended up playing ball in the Great White North. He didn’t set out to play football. It was soccer he loved. But there were no soccer scholarships, so he ended up as a star linebacker with the University of Miami Hurricanes. When he got an offer to play in the CFL, he refused at first (“I was retired from football.”) But as he tells it, Rita applied pressure: “Mama Rita, she said, ‘You really love football. You should give it another try. You should go to Canada!” Rohan reminisced about how he stoked his on-field energy with herb, how he used his energy and speed to run circles around much bigger opponents, and how he feuded with his intolerant coach. Continue…

Horny toads in Australia are being seduced to their death

By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 0 Comments

Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images

Australian researchers have concocted a new tactic in their ongoing battle against the hordes of cane toads infesting the countryside: dim the lights and lure them to their deaths with the promise of sex.

For years, toad trappers have used lights to attract insects that would in turn draw hungry toads into traps. James Cook University’s Lin Schwarzkopf has modified that method to include dimmer UV lights that will avoid the problem of scaring some of them away. She’s also added speakers that emit the deep drone of the male toad to attract females. “We know that females like low voices because that indicates a larger male,” Schwarzkopf told Britain’s Independent.

Schwartzkopf says this has led to a tenfold increase in the number of toads caught. She wants the traps to be mass-produced for the effort against the toad infestations that have plagued the country since the 1930s, when the species was introduced to kill beetles that were devouring sugar cane crops. Once the toads are caught, they’re either sprayed with a lethal chemical or placed in a freezer to die slowly from the cold. And all they wanted was some action.

Giving up to a U.S. invader in France

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 0 Comments

John Lawrence/The Travel Library/CP

The canopy of plane trees that guard the banks of France’s Canal du Midi have created such scenic vistas that UNESCO calls it a “work of art.” Now that beauty is under threat by an invasive fungus in what President Nicolas Sarkozy calls “a great tragedy.”

For five years, officials have tried to contain Ceratocystis platani—believed to have arrived on wooden American ammunition boxes during the Second World War—by cutting and burning diseased trees plus the surrounding healthy ones. But the disease kept spreading along the historic canal, a 360-km network of waterways built in the 17th century to connect the Mediterranean with the Atlantic.

Now France has admitted defeat. It will fell all 40,000 trees. The chopping and replanting with resistant varieties, costing an estimated $300 million, will be carried out gradually to avoid leaving bald spots on the waterway’s banks. However, it will be decades, if not centuries, before the new trees are mature enough to recreate the magical views.

The race to go rat-free

By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 4 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

From time immemorial, humankind has been bothered by rats. They gnaw on energy cables, scratch through walls, spread disease, devour and desecrate agricultural goods and decimate endangered species—not to mention the constant urinating and defecating. Recently in a suburb of Johannesburg, an elderly woman died in hospital after rats chewed her eyelids. “They bite our children and leave them scared for life,” local resident Sheila Hlavangwani told the Look Local news agency. “Even our cats are afraid of them.”

For governments and organizations across the globe, enough is enough. From Dubai to the Haida Gwaii, South Africa to Saskatchewan, eradication campaigns are under way to beat back rat infestations. The battle lines are drawn across geography, ranging from remote unpopulated islands to bustling urban centres like Copenhagen, where officials promise the city will be rat-free by 2015.

Gregg Howald, North American regional director of California-based Island Conservation, works to eradicate the rodents from far-flung islands. “Eradication is a tool for something bigger, which is preventing extinctions,” says Howald, who has participated in over 20 rat eradications on islands all over the world. “You’ll see distribution of rats from subarctic conditions and subantarctic conditions all the way through to the deep tropics,” he says. “They can survive on virtually anything that has any degree of protein and nutrition.”

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Choking the oil sands

By Chris Sorensen and Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 9:21 AM - 18 Comments

Jiri Rezac/WWF/Polaris

Over the next few weeks, as many as 2,000 climate change protesters are expected to descend on Washington in an effort to draw more Americans into the debate over Alberta’s oil sands—one of the most carbon-intensive sources of fossil fuel on the planet. But this time, anti-oil sands groups aren’t focusing on the vast open pit mines near Fort McMurray, which one activist memorably compared to J. R. R. Tolkien’s fire-spewing and charcoal-covered realm of Mordor, but on a major pipeline project that the industry needs to move forward with its expansion plans.

Supported by such high-profile environmentalists and left-leaning luminaries as David Suzuki and Naomi Klein, the protesters, who will risk arrest during their White House sit-in, hope to stop President Barack Obama’s administration from approving the proposed 2,673-km Keystone XL pipeline that is being built by TransCanada Corp. and would move crude oil from northern Alberta to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, north of the border, anti-pipeline rallies are scheduled to take place over the next few months in Vancouver and Ottawa. In addition to the Keystone XL project, the Canadian rallies will also focus on a proposed 1,170-km pipeline, built by Enbridge Inc., that would connect northern Alberta to an oil-shipping terminal in Kitimat, B.C., running through an area that opponents claim is pristine wilderness and the habitat of a sacred species of bear.
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Death in Costa Rica’s rainforest

By Anthony A. Davis and Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 8 Comments

Anthony A. Davis

The body of 53-year-old Canadian Kimberley Ann Blackwell was discovered on the morning of Feb. 2, high in the lush, hot, tropical rainforests of Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, where she had lived for almost 20 years. She had been shot the night before, execution-style, and lay sprawled on blood-soaked dirt near the gate to her home and cocoa farm. Maurico Valerin Jimenez, a 25-year-old warden with the Ministry of Environment and Energy, found her. “It was the first time I’d ever seen a body,” says Jimenez, who had arrived on Blackwell’s remote jungle property with several other wardens to begin a 15-km patrol of adjacent Corcovado National Park, a wonderland preserve of jaguars, monkeys, parrots and pumas.

Many locals here—especially campesinos, Costa Rica’s poor subsistence farmers—loathe the wardens, who interfere in a rural tradition of poaching and eating bush meat. “It’s Deliverance out there,” an expat friend of Blackwell’s says of the area, a densely treed, hilly region strung together by badly rutted roads and dotted with cattle, coffee and cocoa farms. For wardens like Jimenez, Blackwell’s property was a sanctuary. The animal lover had moved to the Osa, located just above Panama in southwest Costa Rica, 18 years earlier from the Yukon, and regularly let the wardens camp on her land, serving them coffee and soups. “It was like going to a restaurant,” says Jimenez.

Almost seven months after Blackwell’s death, authorities have still laid no charges in the slaying, even as rumours about why she was murdered and by whom multiply. The mystery of her death only deepens Blackwell’s mystique as a maverick among mavericks in the Osa, a gathering place for off-the-grid nonconformists who scrape refuge out of the untamed jungle and wild surf. Sir Francis Drake, the 16th-century privateer, once buried treasure here. Among locals, Blackwell is every bit as much a legend—a fiery, uncompromising hippie who inspired deep loyalty in her friends despite a penchant for decking them during fits of rage.

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The Russians are coming

By Cynthia Reynolds - Thursday, August 11, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 5 Comments

Jim Todd/OMAFRA; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Stephen Gregory

In southwestern Ontario, in the middle of farm country, there’s a field that appears to have a major weed problem—but they’re not your typical garden-variety weeds. They’re Russian dandelions, and scientists believe they hold the answer to a seldom-discussed problem: the mounting worldwide shortage of natural rubber, a material that comes from a single tree (the Hevea brasiliensis—a.k.a. the Brazilian rubber tree), grown almost exclusively in one region (Southeast Asia), and which is crucial to our tire market. “We don’t view it as a strategic commodity like oil,” says the University of Guelph’s David Wolyn, one of a handful of Canadian scientists working to create natural rubber from the dandelions. “But there are 800 million cars on the road. Where’s all that rubber going to come from?”

The rubber-bearing properties of the Russian dandelion—which is actually endemic to Kazakhstan—have been known to Western scientists since the Second World War, when the U.S. was forced to search for an alternative source of rubber after the Axis powers seized control of the world supply. While synthetic rubber proved a useful substitute, it didn’t have the necessary chemical properties to completely replace natural rubber in tires, and it was entirely unsuitable for the heavy-duty tires of large vehicles, such as airplanes and military transports. (The general rule remains today: the larger the tire, the more natural rubber it requires.) However, research showed that the rubber fibres contained in the roots of Russian dandelions could serve as a viable—and domestic—alternative for these critical applications. When the war ended, the cheap source of rubber became available again and the science was shelved.

Now, precarious conditions affecting this US$20-billion market have hastened the retrieval of that decades-old research. Rapid development throughout China and India has caused demand for natural rubber to spike. Not only is supply failing to meet demand, it’s shrinking, as rubber farmers switch to more economical crops, particularly palm oil trees, and skilled rubber tappers migrate to the cities. Scientists also suspect climate change is altering growing conditions in Southeast Asia, resulting in poorer rubber harvests. As natural rubber prices have increased fivefold over the last decade, reaching an all-time high this April, and analysts estimate the global stockpile of tires at just 69 days’ worth of demand, efforts to cultivate the Russian dandelion are energizing. “It’s the best candidate we have to replace the Hevea tree,” says an industry expert who works with Penra, a U.S. consortium of scientists studying the dandelion and funded by government agencies and corporations such as Ford and Bridgestone. “It’s entirely feasible it can satisfy the North American market.”

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In the company of whales

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 5:35 PM - 0 Comments

Eric Cheng/Barcroft Media/Getty Images

Tourist brochures refer to Dominica, a tiny Caribbean island between Guadeloupe and Martinique, as “the Nature Island” for its lush vegetation, its postcard-perfect waterfalls, and its plant and animal life. The indigenous Carib Indians called it Waitukubuli (“tall is her body”), which might be a better name: the island’s volcanic peaks jut sharply upwards before falling away into the sea, leaving a deep oceanic basin on its Western side that’s sheltered by the mountainous island.

Shane Gero came here in 2005 looking for sperm whales. There had been reports of sightings around Dominica (pronounced “Domin-eek-a”), including families with multiple babies, but still, he wasn’t too sure what he’d find. “When we got there, they were everywhere,” says Gero, 31, a Ph.D. candidate at Dalhousie University. That year, Gero spent 41 straight days following one family of sperm whales; he’s returned every year since, splitting his time between Dominica, Halifax and his hometown of Ottawa. By now, Gero has spent literally thousands of hours following over 20 families of sperm whales. He knows some of them so well that he can recognize them by sight when they surface, lingering about 15 minutes to breathe and socialize before diving again. He’s even got names for them, like Pinchy, Fingers and Spoon.

Sperm whales are some of the most mysterious animals on Earth. The largest of all toothed whales (males can be 18 m long, and weigh up to 60 tonnes), they have the biggest brains of any known creature. They “see” through dark ocean water using echolocation, emitting a series of clicks that enables scientists to track them with an underwater microphone. (Dolphins and killer whales also use echolocation, detecting a nearby object by bouncing sound off its surface.) Sperm whales’ heads are filled with a waxy substance called spermaceti; some scientists think this serves as an amplifier when whales emit sonar—the most powerful in the world—to find prey. They can dive underwater for up to 90 minutes before surfacing to breathe, and feed on giant squid, which live up to 1,000 m deep. Sperm whales have been found with circular scars on their bodies, wounds from a giant squid’s suction cups.

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Mosquitoes are eating us alive

By Cigdem Iltan - Friday, July 22, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 13 Comments

Photographs by Cole Garside

There is a buzz in the air in Parkhill, Ont. It’s a picturesque town of about 1,700—that is, if you don’t count the mosquitoes. Nestled partway between Lake Huron and London in North Middlesex County, the town’s residents have spent the summer living through what reads like the plot to a B movie. In the time it takes to swat through clouds of mosquitoes on the path between the front door and the car door, it’s not uncommon for people to get 10 or 12 bites, North Middlesex Mayor Don Shipway says. “Kids can’t even go outside,” he told Maclean’s. “People are frustrated; it is going to be a health hazard if we don’t get it under control.”

The mosquitoes have always been bad in Parkhill, but this year is different. The numbers are staggering: less than 30 km away in Strathroy, a mosquito trap attracted 800 of the insects in four weeks. In the same time period in Parkhill, the same type of trap caught 51,000. “I’ve been involved in mosquito control for 10 years and it’s the worst I’ve ever seen it,” says Middlesex-London Health Unit vector-borne disease coordinator Jeremy Hogeveen.

Parkhill isn’t the only community with residents spending their summer covering themselves in DEET. Mosquito populations in parts of the Prairies have exploded this summer after heavy spring rainfall and flooding. The Edmonton Eskimos moved their practice inside last week after general manager Eric Tillman likened the roofless Commonwealth Stadium to the jungle. And in Regina, councillors voted to add $200,000 to the fight against the bugs this summer, bringing the city’s total mosquito suppression budget to $500,000. The latest count puts the number of mosquitoes in Saskatchewan’s capital at more than double the historical average.

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Madagascar: Island of earthly delights

By Kate Lunau - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

Harald Schuetz/WWF Madagascar

Madagascar is one of Earth’s last great tropical wildernesses and, in the past decade, scientists have found an incredible 615 new species there, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Among these discoveries—including 385 plants, 42 invertebrates, 17 fish, 69 amphibians, 61 reptiles and 41 mammals—some sound almost too fantastic to be believed. The cork bark leaf-tailed gecko, for example, looks like a crawling piece of bark, with its craggy tan-coloured skin. The massive tahina palm flowers only once in its life, producing a spectacular bloom before it dies. And Berthe’s mouse lemur, the smallest known primate, is so tiny it can fit in the palm of your hand.

The fourth largest island in the world, Madagascar is home to five per cent of our planet’s animal and plant species, and more than 70 per cent of them can’t be found anywhere else. Its landscape is widely varied, from tropical rainforest to volcanic mountains, broad plains and desert; surrounding waters are home to some of the world’s largest coral reef systems. With better sampling techniques and DNA analysis, scientists are finding species there they’d never previously observed.

Madagascar’s rampant biodiversity can be partly explained by its unique geological history, says Richard Hughes, the WWF’s regional director in Madagascar, reached over the phone from the capital of Antananarivo. The island split off from the African continent about 165 million years ago, and broke free from India over 80 million years ago; human settlement there, he notes, “only dates back around 2,000 years.” As a result, plants and animals have had a long time to evolve in isolation, inspiring some scientists to call Madagascar the eighth continent.

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Save the earth, kill a camel

By Stephanie Findlay - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 5 Comments

Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

A dead camel in Australia may soon pay off in carbon credits. Down under, where feral camels are running rampant in the rangelands and producing unholy amounts of methane, the government is proposing an official camel cull to help combat climate change. There are 1.2 million feral camels in Australia, and with few natural diseases and no natural predators, the population is expected to reach two million by 2020. One camel emits an estimated 45 kg of methane a year—the equivalent of a metric tonne of carbon dioxide. (In contrast, a passenger car emits about 5.2 metric tonnes annually.)

Under the proposed new regime, expected to become law this summer, accredited marksmen will be able to shoot the animals for carbon credits. “Potentially it has tremendous merit, because feral camels are a dreadful menace across the whole of arid Australia,” said Mark Dreyfus, Australia’s parliamentary secretary for climate change. Camels were first introduced to Australia in the late 1800s to work in the outback. Today, in the age of planes, trains and automobiles, the humped beast is just an exotic pest—albeit a gassy one.

A world of 10 billion

By Charlie Gillis and Kate Lunau. - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 10 Comments

For the world, as for his family, the birth of Adnan Nevic was cause for celebration. No less an eminence than the secretary-general of the United Nations attended his arrival, posing with the swaddled child as camera strobes lit a maternity room in central Sarajevo. He was born four minutes past midnight on October 12, 1999, and Kofi Annan had made his way to the hospital like a wise man following a star. There were 5.999999999 billion people on the face of the planet, depending on whose “population clock” you went by. The time had come to designate a six billionth.

The challenges that lay before this infant reflected those of human populations around the globe. His parents, Jasmin and Fatima, were poor. The family lived cheek by jowl in a bleak apartment. His father needed work. Ethnic conflict remained a dormant but ever-present threat to their country. The UN chief offered words of hope, saying this “beautiful boy in a city returning to life should light a path of tolerance and understanding for all people.” But a long and happy life? For that, Adnan Nevic would need a few breaks.

Today, as demographers look ahead to a 10-billion-strong global population, the future of No. 6,000,000,000 is no less clouded. By day, he is an apple-cheeked sixth-grader who loves dogs and cheers on the fabled Spanish soccer team, Real Madrid. At night, he watches over a father stricken by bowel cancer, and sleeps in the same bedroom as his parents in their two-room flat in Visoko, a run-down town 28 km outside Sarajevo. Adnan’s plight could never really stand in for that of all humanity. But it does, to borrow the UN boss’s trope, illuminate the road we will travel over the course of his life.

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Agents of extinction

By Brian Bethune - Monday, May 30, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 6 Comments

Oleg Kozlov/istockphoto

To kill the rats or not to kill the rats? That is a burning question in contemporary conservation efforts to preserve indigenous island life. Although oceanic islands form only five per cent of the planet’s land mass, they are home to a full 20 per cent of its animal species; and, because of island creatures’ vulnerability to new predators or habitat destroyers, they are home also to a bleak two-thirds of the extinctions racked up during human history. Rats, of course, aren’t the world’s only invasive species—in that regard, as in all other ecological massacres, the apex predator is us. There are also feral cats, pigs and goats, zebra mussels and Asian long-horned beetles.

But humanity aside, none match rats—prodigious breeders and capable of turning almost anything into food—as agents of destruction. As detailed in Rat Island, William Stolzenburg’s gripping account of the war conservationists have been waging for the last two decades—some 800 island eradications of invasive mammals—scientists now link the “big three” rat species (brown, black, Pacific) to the extinction of more than 100 island species, from birds to worms to shrubs. Two archaeologists have even challenged the prevailing wisdom that greedy humans decimated the forests of Easter Island, leading to the environmental and social destruction described in Jared Diamond’s 2005 bestseller, Collapse. They persuasively pin the forest over-exploitation on an exploding population of rats brought by Polynesian settlers.

In the South Pacific, scientists have watched rats swarm nesting albatrosses, eating and killing them—in that order. At the other end of the globe, on Alaska’s Kiska Island, rats have met a million-strong super-flock of least auklets, the smallest of all seabirds. The auklets have evolved in the absence of ground predators and sit quietly on their nests as a rat approaches. The rodent bites the bird in the back of the head, eats its brains and eyeballs and stashes the rest. The rats, too, have no experience of this prey—one that refuses to defend itself or run away—and thus just keep attacking. A single rat has been known to have stashes of up to 150 auklet corpses, most of which will simply rot.

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A greener future

By Kate Lunau and Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 4:00 PM - 1 Comment

Will Pryce; Atelier CMJN

Having an environmental edge goes a long way with employees. Surveys show that people expect their organizations to take the environment into account when making business decisions—and most don’t feel enough is being done. Top companies, however, are responding by going green in every way, from making their manufacturing processes more efficient to backing local and global sustainability projects. The following pages feature some of the ways the companies on Aon Hewitt’s 2011 Green 30 list have made the environment a big part of business. But first, here’s a look at some environmentally friendly ideas that could revolutionize the workplace in the not-so-distant future.

Skyscrapers made of wood?

The construction and management of buildings around the world accounts for more than 30 per cent of climate change, according to Michael Green, founding principal at McFarlane Green Biggar Architecture + Design Inc. While some predict everyone will be working from home in the future, others say greater levels of urbanization will bring us closer to the workplace than ever. So it’s no wonder billions of dollars are being poured into making sustainable offices—and the greener, the better. Some of the concepts are outlandish: the winner of eVolo’s recent Skyscraper Competition, for example, looks like a giant Ferris wheel made from recycled cars, and filters air through a series of greenhouses as it spins. Green, who’s based in Vancouver, has a more practical idea. Instead of building skyscrapers from steel and concrete, he says, its time to start making them out of wood.

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Canada's greenest employers

By Kate Lunau and Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 4 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

The Green 30 is based on how employees perceive their employer’s environmental efforts. We asked each organization that made the 2011 list, compiled by Aon Hewitt, to highlight some of the key programs and practices that they think earned them high marks. Here are some of the highlights:

Baxter Corporation
Medical products and services, Mississauga, Ont.

•    Has published an annual Global Sustainability Report, measuring the company’s progress on nine sustainability priorities, including reductions in its carbon footprint and a green supply chain, since 1999.

•    Less reliant on natural resources by reclaiming cooling water from its manufacturing process; decreases energy use through gas and electricity reduction efforts.

•    Since 2002, the facility in Alliston, Ont., has diverted more than 1.7 million lb. of packaging from landfills, and recycles more than 90 per cent of non-hazardous waste.

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Baby, it’s awful outside

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 2:54 PM - 4 Comments

Daniel Munoz/Reuters

Being a billionaire mayor in a city like New York means never having to say you’re sorry. That is, until your snow plows leave millions of residents stranded and they have to strap on skis to navigate the streets of Manhattan. And so it was that three days after a raging, thundering snowstorm dumped half a metre on the Big Apple over Christmas—the heaviest snowfall in decades—Mayor Michael Bloomberg fessed up that the city had botched the cleanup job.

It didn’t help that this was the second December in a row the city, along with the U.S. Northeast, has been hammered by wild weather. But the region was far from alone. The same massive storm system plunged 50,000 homes in Atlantic Canada into darkness as snow, wind and floods devastated beaches, parks and tourist sites. The deluge followed a series of brutal storms and Atlantic hurricanes over the past few months that have already heaped misery on residents in the region.

Mother Nature’s fury was felt everywhere. The United Kingdom is suffering the coldest winter since 1683, which along with snowstorms in New York and Moscow forced the cancellation of 6,000 flights. In California a barrage of winter storms caused flash floods and mudslides, while Los Angeles has been buffeted by hurricane-strength winds. Queensland, Australia, is drowning beneath the worst floods in half a century. Continue…

The butterfly effect

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

“A lot of people view butterflies in a way analogous to the canary in the coal mine,” says Arthur Shapiro, an entomologist at the University of California at Davis. “If butterflies are going downhill, something is wrong.” Well, something must be terribly wrong, because butterfly populations are plummeting around the globe. The graceful fluttering of the marsh fritillary and delicate beauty of the Grecian copper could soon be squashed out, and the large tortoiseshell, a spotted orange butterfly once ubiquitous in England, is now classified as regionally extinct.

In Europe, where there’s a wealth of data thanks to a decades-long culture of professional and hobbyist butterfly monitoring, scientists are reporting a 70 per cent reduction in populations across the board. Four of Britain’s 62 species of butterflies have gone extinct in recent years, while a further 19 are threatened and 11 near threatened. North American scientists report similar numbers.

Intensive farming is believed to be the primary culprit in England and Western Europe, where subsidies from governments and the EU support mega-farms that strip grasslands, the habitat for many species of butterfly. “Europe has been inhabited for thousands of years and the natural environment adapted to that,” says Chris Van Swaay, a spokesperson for Butterfly Conservation Europe.

Climate change is also taking its toll, pushing many species of European butterflies north to cooler weather and forcing the mountain butterflies of North America into higher elevations. But, says Shapiro, they can’t keep running forever, and many species require too specialized a climate to run at all.

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When the sea goes silent

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 8 Comments

45 dolphins beached themselves in shallow water off the coast of Australia | Reuters

When weakened by disease, starvation or injury, dolphins succumb to an instinctual fear of drowning. Seized with panic, they swim to shallower and shallower water to keep breathing, and often wind up stranded on a beach, where the sun, sand and wind quickly end their lives.

Now, thanks to new research from the University of Southern Florida (USF), scientists have discovered one of the elusive root contributors to whale and dolphin strandings—deafness.

“Whales and dolphins are acoustic animals. They use sound to feed, they use sound to breed, they use sound to fulfill every biologically important goal of their existence,” says Michael Jasney, an ocean-noise expert with the National Resources Defense Council, an international environmental group. “If you take away their ability to hear, you take away their link to the world.”

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Trees falling from the sky

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 11 Comments

Getty Images

Massive planes, once used to blanket the earth in land mines, could soon be dropping a very different kind of bomb—pointed containers with saplings inside. “There is renewed interest in massive reforestation and shrub planting,” says Moshe Alamaro, an MIT researcher. “Aerial reforestation is the way to go.”

Alamaro collaborated with U.S. aerospace company Lockheed Martin in the late ’90s to replace the tedious and back-breaking work of manually planting trees by dropping saplings from the sky. The idea, which could see nearly one million trees planted per day, was based on research done at the University of British Columbia in the 1970s. The concept involved using a small fertilizing plane to drop saplings in plastic pods one at a time from a hopper. But it wasn’t very fruitful—most pods hit debris during pilot tests and failed to actually take root.

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Shh . . . they can hear us

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

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In the basement of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Md., researcher Aran Mooney spent much of the last year lowering squid into metre-long tanks, attaching electrodes to them and blasting noise through the water. “Squids are fun little animals to work with because they’re so basic and primitive,” he says. “They’re almost like little wind-up toys. If you put one in a tank, it will just keep swimming and hitting its head on the wall of the tank over and over again.”

Primitive they may be, but Mooney’s research has settled the debate over whether Loligo pealii (think calamari) are sophisticated enough to hear. For decades, marine biologists wondered about that, but no one knew of a sedation method that could keep the animals alive long enough for in vivo tests to prove it. Squid don’t respond to dolphin clicks, so it was assumed they could not hear at all. It turns out dolpin clicks are just at the wrong frequency.

Squid may not be as good at hearing as humans (who can hear up to 20,000 hertz), but Mooney has shown they can detect low frequencies (up to 500 hertz) like the wave of a hungry whale swimming at them. And although the squid “ear” doesn’t likely share a common ancestor with our own, it works similarly enough that Mooney believes the research can have human applications. (Squid are already used to research human neurology, simply because they have large, primitive structures.) Mooney says hair cell loss is a key reason we as humans lose hearing. “We could look in squid and maybe find a way to maintain or regenerate them,” he says.

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Green eggs and ham

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Enviropig; University of Guelph

“When I look at the Enviropig,” says professor Richard Moccia, associate vice-president of research at the University of Guelph, “I’m in awe and amazement at the ability of humans to create this technology.” Though the pink mammals look, oink and act like regular Yorkshire pigs, they were created in a lab. In 1999, scientists at Guelph added an E. coli gene and mouse DNA to a normal pig embryo. The result: the “greener” Enviropig pig. Though no one has ever tasted an Enviropig, testing on its internal organs and meat cuts revealed it’s identical to a regular oinker. Except that this transgenic animal may solve an environmental problem, namely pollution caused by pig farming.

We know all about eating local foods, recycling and carpooling to reduce our environmental footprints. But how about opting for animal products genetically modified to be greener? A number of researchers in Canada and around the world are working at the frontiers of genetic modification to create animals—from pigs to trout—that they claim are less injurious to the environment.

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Meet your kids' new roommate: The Bedbug

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, October 9, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

David P. Hall/Corbis/ Mark Rightmire/Zuma/ Keystone Press

Imagine you’re a bedbug—a creepy nocturnal creature, maybe no bigger than an apple seed, that craves human blood. Times are good for you right now in North America. DDT once rendered your species a distant memory, a revolting relic found only in children’s rhymes. But you’ve evolved immunity to the short-lived, environmentally friendly insecticides of today, and you’re on the march. So where would you prefer to nest and spread your progeny? You’d look for a communal setting, one where people are frequently moving and swapping furniture. Tidiness is a minus; substance-induced inertia a plus. The ideal host population would include sheltered young people who have never seen a bedbug or learned to recognize its excreta.

“Universities are in the line of fire,” declares Don McCarthy, president of Braemar Pest Control in Bedford, N.S., and board member of the Canadian Pest Management Association. “You’ve got transient populations. You’ve got a lot of the social aspects that come with being at university—your buddies come over and sleep over; everybody’s going back and forth to parties and study sessions. There is not a major university anywhere in North America that does not know this is a major problem, whether or not they have it.”

There is no evidence bedbugs can transmit disease, and their whole modus operandi is to be noticed as little as possible. But news of their presence can ward off visitors and clients as effectively as any plague—as retailers are discovering in New York City, where flagship stores for franchises such as Niketown and Victoria’s Secret have had to close temporarily to address infestations, and as Toronto learned in August when a mere Internet whisper had Toronto International Film Festival organizers double-checking venues.

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Building a better bee

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Jon Rowley/SWNS.COM

Every morning at about nine, Ron Hoskins slips into his white beekeepers outfit, pulls trays out from beneath 17 of his 50 buzzing apiaries in a conservation park in Swindon, England, and painstakingly sorts through the contents with a magnifying glass. He goes home at five, and he’s often up until 2 a.m. examining his finds under a microscope. “It keeps me going,” says the 79-year-old retired heating engineer. Hoskins, who has a “beekeepers do it better” sign in his office, took up apiculture during the Second World War when he was evacuated to a country school. He’s done it ever since. His current research started when worldwide bee populations began to collapse in the mid-’90s; since then numbers have fallen by up to 60 per cent in some countries. With a full third of our diet derived from insect-pollinated plants, the decline in bee populations could be devastating to global food security. But, after more than a decade of careful breeding, Hoskins thinks he’s got the answer.

He’s hopeful because of what’s lying in the bottom of his trays: dead varroa mites, tiny parasites that latch onto the necks of bees, feeding on their blood and transmitting diseases in the process. The mites usually destroy any hive they infect and, since they started to spread from Asia in the 1960s, have arguably become the biggest threat to bee populations around the globe. “It’s quite scary,” says Chris Deaves, an executive with the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA). But Hoskins has managed to naturally make 17 of his 50 colonies mite-resistant, an achievement scientists such as Leonard Foster, a biologist at the University of British Columbia, are calling a major breakthrough. “If the bees are able to deal with varroa mites to a level where they need no human intervention,” Foster says, “they have the potential to reverse the decline in numbers.”

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