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East Coast fisheries struggle as warming waters drive fish northward
The lobster fisherman can’t tell the fish to stop moving north. They can’t tell warmer seas to stop. It’s a mess.
—Beth Casoni, executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen's Association, discusses how warming seas are shifting fish migration patterns and disrupting the East Coast's commercial fisheries.
World Health Organization releases list of world's most polluted cities
Zabol, Iran, has replaced New Delhi as the world's most polluted city in terms of PM 2.5. India, however, is still home to 10 of the 20 cities with the unhealthiest air. Four Chinese cities also made the list. Global air pollution grew 8 percent in the last five years, with the bulk of the increase (and associated health effects) in the world's poorest cities. Mashable
Can two shipping containers turn the tide against a fungal frog plague?
Plectrohyla exquisita
Jonathan E. Kolby
Frogs are interstitial beings. They are born of water yet spend much of their lives on land. The amphibians transform from gelatinous orbs to tiny-tailed swimmers to land-hopping predators. Some burrow deep into the earth, Gollum-like, while others climb trees and spend their lives in the canopy. And these days, too many frog species straddle the line between extirpation and complete extinction. They're still around in zoos, but they've lost their homes in the wild.
Take the Panamanian golden frog. Yellow with black polka dots, these beautiful amphibians are a national symbol of Panama though they are thought to have disappeared from the wild sometime in 2007. The culprit? A nasty fungal infection known as chytridiomycosis, commonly known as chytrid for the species of fungus that causes the disease.
Over the past two decades, scientists have watched chytrid rip its way through frog populations across the Western Hemisphere. The disease’s impact appears to depend on the species it affects, with some, such as the common toad, suffering minor symptoms and others croaking by the score. A few species, like the African clawed frog, even seem to be immune to the fungus. But to all too many, chytrid might as well be the Black Death.
The good news, says Jonathan Kolby, a Ph.D. candidate at James Cook University, is that we’ve found a few ways to fight chytrid in captivity. One method involves applying enough heat to the frogs’ skin to kill the fungus and its spores; another employs the antifungal agent itraconazole. The bad news? Even if you cure a handful of frogs and toss them back into the wild, chytrid will still be out there waiting.
In fact, the threat looms so large that the San Diego Zoo has successfully bred almost 500 Panamanian golden frogs but doesn’t plan to reintroduce them to the Central American jungle until chytrid conditions improve, if they ever do.
Kolby, who is also a National Geographic Explorer, wants to try a different approach. “We have to accept the fact that chytrid will never go away,” says Kolby. “The long-term solution is getting frogs to survive in the wild despite the disease.”
A few weeks ago, through a partnership with Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium, Kolby had two 20-foot ocean shipping containers delivered to Lancetilla Botanical Garden in Tela, Honduras, to save the frogs of Cusuco National Park in the mountainous cloud forests of Honduras. In one container, frogs already infected with chytrid will be “cleaned”(either with antifungals or heat); then they'll be released back into the wild. The other container will serve as an on-site captive breeding colony—a fail-safe in case sudden tragedy, fungal or otherwise, occurs in the wild. They’re calling it the Honduras Amphibian Rescue & Conservation Center (HARCC).
The basic premise behind HARCC is to play a numbers game against the fungus. Kolby has set out to save three species—the exquisite spike-thumb frog (critically endangered), the Cusuco spike-thumb frog (critically endangered), and the mossy red-eyed frog (endangered). In each of the populations, chytrid typically kills off about 80 percent of tadpoles and metamorphs (which are frogs fresh out of the water from metamorphosis). That means some young frogs (about one in five) do make it to adulthood. The hope is that, given enough generations of survivors, the frogs might be able to develop a population-wide resistance to the disease.
It’s tough to win a numbers game, however, when your team has really, really low numbers. Kolby discovered these unfortunate odds when he surveyed Cusuco National Park in 2007. As he swabbed literally every amphibian he could get his latex-gloved hands on, he learned that the species hit hardest by chytrid also tended to be those that were already endangered.
That’s why the herpetologist wants to get on the ground in Honduras and start pumping out as many frogs as possible from his shipping containers among the clouds. Ideally, he hopes to raise enough money, through this Indiegogo campaign, to sustain the operation for a couple of decades, during which he’ll continue to capture and clean several hundred sick baby frogs—say, 200 for each of the three species—and release several hundred healthy adults each year.
Cusuco Cloud Forest
Jonathan E. Kolby
“Our vision is that if we do this as quick as we can and get going for 5, 10, 20 years, eventually we might be able to walk away,” says Kolby.
If this all sounds a little off-the-hip, that’s because it is. We have yet to find a chytrid cure-all, prompting many scientists and conservationists to err on the side of caution—much as the San Diego Zoo is doing with its captive golden Panamanian frogs. Other potential solutions include isolating chytrid-fighting probiotics found on the skin of other amphibians and somehow introducing these helpful microbes to the species in need. Manipulating the environment by pruning vegetation may also help, as areas with increased sunlight and airflow may be less hospitable to the deadly fungus. But Kolby’s catch-cure-and-release plan also has some precedent. Just this month in Australia, conservation planners are setting thousands of eggs from the critically endangered corroboree frog in the wilds of New South Wales in an attempt to boost the population beyond its current 50 individuals. So far, the releases seem to be working—some adult corroborees are being found where the frogs were once considered extinct.
That Kolby is willing to spend years of his life working in a shipping container on a remote mountain speaks to his dedication to frogs, but his approach, if successful, may be the salvation for more than just a few species of hoppers. “The more we can learn about what’s happened to frogs,” he says, “the quicker we can respond to the next wildlife disease.” As an example, he points to how white-nose syndrome in bats is similar to chytrid. (Each is a fungal epidemic that spreads rapidly and kills by attacking the skin.) “These things keep happening over and over.”
Snake fungal disease, seastar wasting disease, Bsal in salamanders—when diseases like these take hold, they can very quickly lead to extinctions. We need to get better at responding to wildlife pathogens before they reach the crisis levels chytrid has. Otherwise, we’ll arrive too late and be forced to to engage in ever more labor-intensive and expensive solutions. Like disinfecting frog legs one by one, by hand, in the Honduran cloud forest.
onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Conservationists and ranchers are teaming up to drain the swamp (literally) so they can kick these invasive croakers out and save the state’s leopard frogs.
Oil companies have forfeited $2.5 billion worth of Arctic drilling rights
Shell, ConocoPhillips, and others have abandoned 2.2 million acres of drilling rights in the Chukchi Sea as crude oil prices drop. Environmentalists are pushing the government to seize the opportunity to cancel any future lease sales in the fragile ecosystem. Bloomberg
Between April 2015 and March 2016, beekeepers lost 44 percent of their colonies, an increase of 3.5 percent over the previous year. Some winter losses are normal, but it was the second consecutive year that summer loss rates were also high, which experts say is a particularly alarming sign. Huffington Post
Global carbon dioxide levels poised to pass 400 ppm
No matter what the world’s emissions are now, we can decrease growth but we can’t decrease the concentration.
—David Etheridge, an Australian atmospheric scientist from CSIRO, comments on the news that global CO2 concentrations are poised to permanently sit above 400 parts per million.
The steady rise of the earth’s temperature as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere and trap more and more heat is sending the planet spiraling closer to the point where warming’s catastrophic consequences may be all but assured.
That metaphoric spiral has become a literal one in a new graphic drawn up by Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. The animated graphic features a rainbow-colored record of global temperatures spinning outward from the late 19th century to the present as the earth heats up.
“The pace of change is immediately obvious, especially over the past few decades,” Hawkins, who has previously worked with Climate Central’s extreme-weather attribution team, wrote in an e-mail.
The graphic is part of Hawkins’ effort to explore new ways to present global temperature data in a way that clearly telegraphs the warming trend. Another climate scientist, Jan Fuglestvedt of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo, suggested the spiral presentation.
The graphic displays monthly global temperature data from the U.K. Met Office and charts how each month compares to the average for the same period from 1850 to 1900, the same baselines used in the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
At first, the years vacillate inward and outward, showing that a clear warming signal had yet to emerge from the natural fluctuations that happen from year to year. But clear warming trends are present in the early and late 20th century.
In the latter, it is clear how much closer temperatures have come to the target the international community has set to keep warming within two degrees Celsius (four degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by the end of the 21st century. An even more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees Celsius (three degrees Fahrenheit) has increasingly become a topic of discussion and is also visible on the graphic.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who created the famous Hockey Stick graph of global temperature records going back hundreds of years, said that the spiral graphic was “an interesting and worthwhile approach to representing the data graphically.”
He said that using an earlier baseline period would have better captured all the warming that has occurred, as there was some small amount already in the late 19th century.
Just how much temperatures have risen is clear in the first few months of data from 2016, its line clearly separated from 2015—which was the hottest year on record—and edging in on the 1.5-degree Celsius mark.
Every month of 2016 so far has been the warmest such month on record; in fact, the past 11 months have all set records, the longest such streak in the temperature data kept by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Each agency that keeps such a temperature record handles the data slightly differently, which can lead to small differences in monthly and yearly values, though the overall trend is in broad agreement for all such agencies.)
The record-setting temperatures of 2016 have seen a small push from an exceptionally strong El Niño, but they are largely the result of the heat that has built up in the atmosphere over decades of unabated greenhouse gas emissions—as the spiral graphic makes clear.
“Turns out that this version [of temperature records] particularly appeals, maybe because it doesn't require much interpretation,” Hawkins said.
onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC.Learn moreor follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Germany generated 90 percent of its electricity on Sunday from renewable energy
The world’s fourth-largest economy briefly hit the milestone, proving that wind and solar power can keep up. All the better, Germany’s shift towards clean energy is taking place as its economy continues to grow. Climate Progress