Condor games

In elementary school they made boys play my least-favorite-except-dodgeball game. It consisted of everyone chasing after whoever had the ball, trying to mug them so that everyone could then violate the new ball-carrier. I was mortified by the aggression of it more than afraid of the assaults, as I made only transparently symbolic attempts to even catch the riot.

Over a decade later (December 2011) on a California mountain, I stepped out of a US government SUV to watch the world's largest flock of North America's biggest land birds playing this same game. The US Fish and Wildlife Service releases captive bred California Condors at Hopper Mountain Wildlife Refuge. Huge, ugly, smelly, fascinating, beautiful, precious birds, they are highly endangered and carefully managed. I was an intern on the Condor Recovery Program, and first thing every morning my assignment was to make sure we knew where they were. This morning I found them up Hopper Mountain with a Coke can. Condors, carrion eaters, are drawn to red, and prone to swallowing (and dying from) garbage. The Refuge is closed to the public, but trucks heading to oil wells in the mountains have to pass though, and we often found litter along those roads.

I radioed Mike Stockton, the flamboyant hippy cowboy biologist in charge. "Morning Mike, I'm looking at the whole flock standing on the road. They found a Coke can, and they all want it."

"You'd better just take it," was his only reply. "Roger that," I said, girding up.

This particular crumbling road, like many of those on the Refuge, had steep slopes up and down on either side. The condors, each four feet tall and armed with a beak that could disembowel a mastodon, were gathered at a bend in the road, a peninsula that ended in a cliff. Condors are too heavy to fly with anything in their beaks or feet, so R7, the dominant male, was cornered. Normally the whole flock was scared of him, but now his armament was full of Coke can. Several other condors charged him. He dropped it, jumped off, spread his ten foot wings and lifted skyward. He flew so close over my head I could almost taste his foulness, and could feel the heavy flapping of his wings. While I concentrated for a moment on not wetting myself, another condor grabbed the can and ran straight toward me. Fifteen birds, each incredibly important for this species' survival, each reeking of carrion and looking every bit like carnivorous dinosaur zombies prone to projectile vomiting, came running after the can and thereby towards me.

I took a step towards them and they stopped. I took a few more steps, and the lead bird, the one with the can, turned, ran right through the thicket of snapping beaks, and was back at the cliff's end, surrounded. I continued slowly forward.  A few more steps forward and most of the condors had jumped. Two more steps, the air filled with giant birds and their aroma, and it was just me and the condor with the can, still on the cliff's edge.

He hissed and flushed his face purple, trying to scare me off. "Boo!," I replied in kind, and he fled. Lunging after the can, I lay on my belly and examined my prize, a beat-up Coke can with one beak-tip-shaped bite snipped from its middle. I got to my feet, realizing I was now the one surrounded at cliff's end. I stuffed the can inside my jacket and tried to look fierce. We all stood there for a while. One condor after another stepped off the edge and floated into the morning sky. I finally won that god-awful game.

Evolution in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Put some sand grains in a round bowl of water, then twirl the water neatly, so that the water rotates cleanly around the inside of the bowl. You will observe most of the sand settle out of the water in the center of the bowl. Do the same thing with tiny bits of floating plastic, and you will get the same result. Now do the same thing to the Pacific Ocean with all the floating trash we throw into it, and you get the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A large portion of the North Pacific naturally rotates in a current called the North Pacific Gyre. Take a boat to the center of rotation, and you will find enourous quantities of floating junk, especially plastic. Wave action and UV gradually break this plastic down into microscopic bits, which become part of the local ecosystem along with the water, plankton, fish and so forth. But nothing eats plastic, right?
This is where my current pondering comes in. Imagine that one of the hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, of plankton in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch had a mutation that allowed it to gain some slight advantage from plastic. It would surely find some tiny scrap of plastic, and would have a slight advantage over its competitors. If that helps it reproduce successfully, and its offspring carry that same mutation, then we have more plankton who gain a competative advantage from plastic. At the rates plankton reproduce, it is not long before the GPGP is full of plankton who can make some use of plastic. Now suppose another mutation in one of those plastic-loving plankton makes it even better at using plastic. Able to slowly digest some component of it or incorporate it into its protective covering. The larger plankton that eat those little plankton will also have to evolve to deal with plastic. Sooner or later, in the crazy fast generations of open ocean plankton, someone is going to start evolving down a path that leads to the ability to digest plastic. And when that happens, when the plastic in the North Pacific Gyre starts myseriously disapearing, don't expect the little plastic eaters to stay there. There are far to many ecosystems with far to much plastic available for plasticovores to be contained. Plastic is, after all, an organic substance with a high energy content. Sure it isn't biodegrable. Not yet.

40,000 Senegalis or My Building

The building I work in has a yearly energy bill of over $1,000,000 dollars a year. That translates to about 10 Million Kilowatt-Hours per year, the same as about 100 average American houses or 40,000 Senegalis. Granted, it is a big building, with a greenhouse on the roof, four elevators, large water dionization systems, lots of -80C freezers, class rooms, laboratories and offices. Still, that seems like a lot of electricity for one building. The building manager emailed everyone to ask if we had ideas for cutting that down some. I suggested getting a smaller autoclave. The building has three autoclaves, each big enough to park a Mini in. Hundreds of different people use these, each setting them to their own specifications, usually to autoclave one or two bottles or one tray of equipment. A machine with 1/100 of the internal volume would work for most of these jobs, and get it done faster. I emailed to suggest installing a smaller autoclave, and the building manager wrote back that, "buying and installing one would cost over $50,000, which is about $50,000 more than is available at the moment." I am sure he is right, still I can't help thinking that if we saved even 0.1% of the building's energy usage, the thing would pay for itself in five years. Different budget line though.

Public warned that lead bullets make meat toxic

In an extremely important, despite being obvious, revelation, the government of North Dakota has ordered the destruction of tons of venison, after being presented with evidence that deer shot with high velocity lead bullets are not fit for eating because of microscopic lead fragments spread throughout the body of the deer.

While the science is not new, the difference this time is that the study was done by a hunter from North Dakota, rather than by the Peregrine Fund.

Note to hunters: If you shot a deer with a lead bullet and you are planning on feeding it to your family, you are poisoning them. Throw that meat out, buy some copper bullets, go shoot another deer.

Chemicals of Science

A very kind scientist at McGill sent me samples of four different strains of rotifers, along with the formula for the medium he keeps them in. The rotifers look so lively and healthful that I decided to buy the chemicals and mix up some of his medium. The problem is that while I need a few milligrams of this and a couple of grams of that, nobody sells the stuff in quantities smaller than 500 grams of this and 1kg of that. So at the end of the project, I have almost the entire container left over, and because it came in a form that is so concentrated as to be toxic if swallowed, it all has to be treated as toxic waste. Iron-chloride is not very toxic, but if you swallow 500g you would be very unhappy. So what I will probably end up doing is mixing lots of extra solution, basically making artificial pond water, because that does not need to be disposed of as toxic waste.
I was complaining about all this to some colleagues, who replied that this is a perennial problem, and that almost any time one does lab work, one has to budget for disposal of the left over chemicals, because one can't buy them in small enough quantities. The College of Chemistry on campus has a chemical reuse library for this purpose (drop off unused chemicals with out paying for disposal, pick up extra chemicals without buying a whole container) but they don't allow people from other departments to participate, even if we ask real nice.
I looked through the various suppliers and ordered the smallest quantities possible, even when it cost more.
How thoroughly wasteful and silly this whole system is.

Deer Populations and Ecological Illiteracy

The New York Times this week has an article about deer overpopulation in New Jersey (although the problem is just as bad throughout the forested northeast) and efforts to control it through culls.

The problem, and reactions to it, demonstrate the deep ecological illiteracy informing both sides of the debate. Groups that value the deer see them as a natural and beautiful part of the landscape. They are beautiful, and individually they are natural, but their populations are much higher than they would ever have been naturally. This is partially because of removal of predators (deer evolved to breed faster than the wolves and mountain lions could eat them) and partially because we have created so much high quality feeding habitat for them. Deer find the easiest and best food at forest edges, and because of human land use there is so much more forest edge than there has ever been before. Somebody or other, maybe Audubon, said that a squirrel could travel from Maine to Louisiana without ever having to come down from the trees. These were big trees with their leaves way up where deer can't reach, and very few breaks. The forests of the east are now young and fragmented; basically an all you can eat for the deer. And we can no longer rely on long snowy winters to cull deer populations every year. As a result, the effects that deer are having on the forest is very far from natural.

Experiments with deer exclosures (basically large fenced areas, chosen randomly in the forest to see what happens without deer) are fairly unambiguous. I've seen these experiments first hand in the old growth forest of upper Michigan. Working for ecologist Dr. Kerry Woods the summer after I graduated from college, one of my tasks was to revisit exclosures he'd built three years earlier. Outside the exclosures, where the deer can get, extremely few seedlings make it. The forest has an open, park like feeling, no understory. The deer population is so dense everything gets mowed. Inside the exclosures, dense hedges of rapidly growing saplings compete for light, but any branch that reaches outside the enclosure is quickly nipped off. This forest that had never been cut by humans was being kept from replacing itself by the deer overpopulation. The same pattern is being found all over the north-east.

But if the people who see the deer as wonderful parts of nature are ignoring ecology, they are not alone. Those who see deer overpopulation as a problem generally ignore the same ecological facts. Governments organize huge one time culls in limited areas, and are then surprised when deer from next door are attracted by the unexploited greenery. Deer populations with plenty of food and few predators can double every two years or so. Shoot 1500 out of 2000 deer in your county and four years later you are back where you started, even if you don't have deer moving in from adjoining counties.

Basic arithmetic tells us that until White Tailed Deer mortality rates exceed birth rates throughout the northeast, the regional population will not decline. Birthrates are unlikely to decline, unless the structure of the current forest changes so much that the deer are nutritionally limited. Not likely. And plans to control the wild regional population through some sort of sterilization program strike me as ludicrously expensive and incredibly unlikely to work.

So what causes mortality? Disease, winter, cars, predators, hunters. Disease we don't want to encourage, especially considering that many diseases that affect deer can also fell horses, sheep, cows and such. Winters are tending weaker. Sever storms are increasing, but to really knock back the deer population, one needs a winter that is very cold and snowy for months over a large area. Not likely. Few would advocate increased car-deer collisions. Hunters are limited in where they can hunt by the danger of bullets carrying to nearby houses, roads and such. And hunting seasons are limited, in part to make forests safe for other uses the rest of the year. There is also mounting evidence that deer hunters regularly dose themselves and their families with lead when they bring the carcass home. Natural predators are few and far between in the northeast, although coyotes are becoming both more common and larger, making it easier for them to bring deer down. The traditional predators, wolves and mountain lions, are unlikely to be restored to populations in the northeast sufficient to keep the deer in check.

So if reducing deer populations is important and none of our current strategies seem promising, what do I suggest? Integrated pest management. Look at the problem on a broad geographic scale, understand the demography in as much detail as we can, and figure out what the vulnerable point in the demographic cycle is. As an example, hunting seasons were traditionally in the fall and winter, exactly because hunting then reduces the deer herd the least. Fewer winter deaths, no pregnant does, few dependant young. If we really want to keep deer populations down, hunting should be done in the spring. Hunters have traditionally hoped for a buck. But killing a buck does basically nothing to reduce the population in the long term. Some other buck will be happy to inseminate all the does. One buck and a hundred does will produce just as many fawns as one hundred bucks and one hundred does. If our goal is to bring the population down, we need to target does, and let hunters take as many as they please, perhaps requiring the donation of excess meat to charitable food pantries. And we should do it with non-lead ammunition, so we don't poisoning ourselves in the process. And we should be honest enough to admit that we are going to have to do this every year in perpetuity, until the ecology of the northeast changes enough that deer populations are regulated naturally.

20,000,000 years of evolution, killed as bycatch

" First human-caused extinction of a cetacean species?"

Abstract from Biology Letters:
"The Yangtze River dolphin or baiji (Lipotes vexillifer), an obligate freshwater odontocete known only from the middle-lower Yangtze River system and neighbouring Qiantang River in eastern China, has long been recognized as one of the world's rarest and most threatened mammal species. The status of the baiji has not been investigated since the late 1990s, when the surviving population was estimated to be as low as 13 individuals. An intensive six-week multi-vessel visual and acoustic survey carried out in November–December 2006, covering the entire historical range of the baiji in the main Yangtze channel, failed to find any evidence that the species survives. We are forced to conclude that the baiji is now likely to be extinct, probably due to unsustainable by-catch in local fisheries. This represents the first global extinction of a large vertebrate for over 50 years, only the fourth disappearance of an entire mammal family since AD 1500, and the first cetacean species to be driven to extinction by human activity. Immediate and extreme measures may be necessary to prevent the extinction of other endangered cetaceans, including the sympatric Yangtze finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides asiaeorientalis)." (emphasis mine)

BBC coverage