Natural World

Your Happening World (12)

Internet, Linky Linky, Media, Natural World, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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A quick look at the more interesting stories found today.

  • Inconcievable! The Press Complaints Commission has actually ruled in favour of a complaint — and against Rod Liddle’s goat curry rant.
  • The rant in question: “The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.” Fucker.
  • More on ACTA. Scariest part: the whole treaty will be in force once five member states ratify it!
  • The Randstad as positive example for other dense conurbations. The Randstad (Edge City) is the Dutch name for the western part of the Netherlands, roughly between Rotterdam and Den Haag in the South and Amsterdam and Utrecht in the North. This is the most densely populated part of the Netherlands and the unique thing about it is that the most dense parts are at the edge of this region, surrounding what’s called the Green Heart (het Groene Hart. Instead of huge single core megacity therefore we got several bigish centres growing towards each other, with smaller satellite cities and towns surrounding them. There’s a continuing and decades old struggle between this drive and the desire to protect the agricultural heart of this area.
  • Obcomix: Paul Gravett: In search of the Atom Style part 1 and part 2.
  • Something worthwhile at the Daily Mail? Yep! Wonderful pictures of unearthly beauties.
  • Also at the Daily Mail: Newspaper astounded to discover that area woman has tits.

Wave goodbye to bluefin tuna

Green politics, Life under Capitalism, Natural World
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Fuck. No fishing ban on bluefish tuna — species expected to die out:

The conference of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which closed in Doha on Thursday, could not agree to a ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna. No limits will be set for the fish to end up in Japanese sushi.

The rejection in the Qatari capital has already been dubbed “Tunapocalypse Now”. Five species of hammerhead shark suffered a similar fate at the summit in Doha. They didn’t make it onto CITES’ ‘Appendix I’, the list of species in which international trade is banned. Fins of these sharks are a common ingredient in Asian soup, but the rest of their body is often tossed overboard.

Japan, which annually spends hundreds of millions of euros importing bluefin tuna, emerged as the victor in Doha. North African nations such as Libya and Tunisia, whose regimes profit from the tuna trade, were also satisfied with the convention’s outcome. The big losers are the US and the EU, even if some European countries, namely France, Spain and Malta, are home to sizable tuna industries that will doubtlessly have celebrated the convention’s results.

Everybody loses

All things considered though, everybody loses. Scientists now regard, as a real possibility, the extinction of the Atlantic blue fin tuna and some species of shark. They have predicted a sudden and irreversible drop in population levels in the coming years. This happened to the, once immense, Atlantic cod population that used to live off the North American coast in the 1990s.

Emphasis mine. It’s no good just cursing the Japanese for this; as the article points out, the same sort of thing happened to cod, through the greed of American, Canadian, British etc. fishers. To be honest, even if the ban had gone through it would still have been like slapping a plaster on a gaping chest wound. Fishing in general is just not sustainable as we’ve known for decades.

Save the bluefin tuna!

Green politics, Life under Capitalism, Natural World
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Bluefin Tuna

Over at Environment 360, marine biologist Carl Safina explains why a fishing ban on bluefin tuna is sorely needed:

Twenty years ago, I first proposed a ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna. The population that breeds in the Gulf of Mexico was down by about 80 percent. The population that breeds in the Mediterranean was down by half. Now, things are worse, and the principality of Monaco has made another proposal to ban international trade in this species. It is gaining momentum, and on March 3 the United States announced its support for the initiative. The European Union, which has been wavering in the face of pressure from its fishing industry and Japan, should now end its fence sitting and get behind this proposal.

Such a trade ban is enacted under a treaty called CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). CITES is why, for instance, there’s a ban on ivory (which is why there are still elephants in Africa).

So why is it that the danger to the bluefin tuna populations has been known for decades, yet nothing yet has been doen about it? Money:

Because bluefin tuna fishing worldwide is driven by prices paid in Japan, where individual fish have sold wholesale for up to $175,000, every population is depleted. A population in the tropical Atlantic, which in the 1960s had yielded the highest-ever catches of bluefin anywhere in the Atlantic Ocean, appears extinct. Formerly thriving fisheries in the North Sea are gone. In some recent years, U.S. boats have landed only about 15 percent as many fish as two decades ago. The European population is now in a plummeting tailspin.

Driving all this, remember, is prices paid in Japan. An international trade ban would quell the intensity of the fishing. But a lot of money is at stake.

You would expect an industry that depends on the bluefin tuna for its existence would be careful not to overexploit it, but the irony of the situation is that the closer it is driven to extinct the more valuable it becomes, as long as there are loons willing to pay such absurd prices for a single fish. Sure, once the tuna is extinct the industry will crash, but until then somebody will make huge profits, which is why it was worth it to delay a ban for two decades and still oppose it now.

It’s a dynamic you see time and again in environmental issues, with immediate profits trumping less immediate but clear dangers. It’s why it took two decades to get the bluefin tuna ban back on the agenda again, but also why it took a similar timespan to get an ozone layer treaty, why we’re still trying to get proper CO2 treaties, and so on ad infinitum. In all these examples the danger is clear and understood, the science behind it is uncontroversial, but vested interests (industrial users of CFK gasses in the case of the ozone layer, the fishing industry in the case of the bluefin tuna) are powerful enough to thwart implementation for years or even decades.

This is why we’re currently flooded with newspaper articles throwing doubt on the IPCC reports on climate change –when you look into the accusations there’s little meat to them, but as long as they sow some doubt in the casual reader they help reduce the demand for action. Here in the Netherlands we’ve had the environment minister herself throw doubt on the IPCC and get angry with the scientists to “get the science right”, based on no more than a few minor errors in the reports, but errors which got a lot of media attention.

I for one welcome our new cephalopod overlords

Natural World, Video
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Octopuses discover tool use:

A team led by biologist Julian Finn of Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, was observing 20 veined octopuses (Amphioctopus marginatus) on a regular basis.

The researchers noticed that the animals were frequently using their approximately 6-inch-long (15-centimeter-long) tentacles to carry coconut shells bigger than their roughly 3-inch-wide (8-centimeter-wide) bodies.

An octopus would dig up the two halves of a coconut shell, then use them as protective shielding when stopping in exposed areas or when resting in sediment.

This, on its own, astonished the team. Then they noticed that the octopuses, after using the coconut shells, would arrange them neatly below the centers of their bodies and “walk” around with the shells—awkwardly.

“I’ve always been impressed by what octopuses can do, but this was bizarre,” said study co-author Norman, senior curator for mollusks at Museum Victoria.

To carry the shells, a veined octopus has to stick its arms out and over the edges of the coconut and walk around as if on stilts—making the octopus, while in motion, more vulnerable to predators—study leader Finn explained.

“An octopus without shells can swim away much faster by jet propulsion,” he said. “But on endless mud seafloor, where are you fleeing to?” In other words, a coconut-carrying octopus may be slow, but it’s always got somewhere to hide.

If/when we finally fuck up the world enough to become extinct, they will be our succesors.