Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Stop Using Chimps as Guinea Pigs
By ROSCOE G. BARTLETT
Washington

BEFORE I was elected to Congress, I was a physiologist at the Navy’s School of Aviation Medicine. For our successful missions to transport men to the moon and return them safely to Earth, I invented a series of respiratory support devices, which we tested on primates, including Baker, a squirrel monkey. Before humans were rocketed into space, Baker was the first primate to survive a trip into space and back; Able, her counterpart on the flight, died from an allergic reaction to an anesthetic during a procedure shortly after the landing.

At the time, I believed such research was worth the pain inflicted on the animals. But in the years since, our understanding of its effect on primates, as well as alternatives to it, have made great strides, to the point where I no longer believe such experiments make sense — scientifically, financially or ethically. That’s why I have introduced bipartisan legislation to phase out invasive research on great apes in the United States.

Today is the start of a two-day public hearing convened by the Institute of Medicine, which is examining whether there is still a need for invasive chimpanzee research. Meanwhile, nine countries, as well as the European Union, already forbid or restrict invasive research on great apes. Americans have to decide if the benefits to humans of research using chimpanzees outweigh the ethical, financial and scientific costs.

The evidence is mounting that they do not. For one thing, many new techniques are cheaper, faster and more effective, including computer modeling and the testing of very small doses on human volunteers. In vitro methods now grow human cells and tissues for human biomedical studies, bypassing the need for whole animals.

Such advances have led to a drop in primate research. Many federally owned chimpanzees were bred to support AIDS research, but later proved inferior to more modern technologies. As a result, most of the 500 federally owned chimpanzees are idling in warehouses. Ending chimpanzee research and retiring the animals to sanctuaries would save taxpayers about $30 million a year.

We also know more about the consequences of invasive research on the animals themselves. Biomedical procedures that are simple when performed on humans often require traumatizing restraint of chimpanzees to protect human researchers from injury, as chimpanzees are five times stronger than humans. For instance, acquiring a blood sample from a chimp can require a “knockdown,” or shooting it with a tranquilizer gun. If you’ve seen video of a knockdown, you know it is clearly frightening and stressful.

Moreover, even the mere confinement in laboratory cages deprives chimpanzees of basic physical, social and emotional sustenance. Numerous peer-reviewed studies of chimpanzees in sanctuaries who had previously been confined in laboratories have documented behavioral symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Chronic and traumatic stress harms chimpanzees’ health and compromises the results of experiments conducted on them.

There is no question that chimpanzees experience pain, stress and social isolation in ways strikingly similar to the way humans do. James Marsh’s recent documentary, “Project Nim,” chronicles the 27-year life of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a controversial research project that involved raising him as though he were a human. Nim was taught sign language — and he used those signs to tell his human interlocutors that he was traumatized by his living conditions.

Nim isn’t alone. In his book “Next of Kin,” Dr. Roger S. Fouts recounted his reunion with a chimp named Booee. After 13 years of separation, and after Booee was deliberately infected with hepatitis C, Booee recognized, signed and played with Dr. Fouts, to whom he had given the signed nickname of “Rodg.” Other visitors reported that Booee used the American Sign Language gesture for “keys,” indicating that he wanted to get out of his cage.

Stories like these, as well as my understanding of the state of biomedical research, persuaded me to sponsor the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act with Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington. The bill would phase out invasive research on great apes and retire the 500 federally owned chimpanzees from laboratories to sanctuaries.

Continuing innovations in alternatives to the use of invasive research on great apes is the civilized way forward in the 21st century. Past civilizations were measured by how they treated their elderly and disabled. I believe that we will be measured, in part, by how we treat animals, particularly great apes.

Americans can no longer justify confining these magnificent and innocent animals to traumatic invasive research and life imprisonment.

Roscoe G. Bartlett is a Republican representative from Maryland.

There is a retirement home for unwanted chimps in Shreveport, LA - only 50 miles from where I'm located. I think that's great..

Now that we have stem cell research we don't need to experiment on those poor animals - even humans.

A Polarizing Polar Bear Investigation
A modest scientific observation about a few drowning polar bears has enmeshed a government wildlife biologist in an investigation into whether he is guilty of scientific misconduct. The investigation has taken on symbolic importance in the debate over global warming.

Skeptics about global warming cite the investigation as evidence that shoddy science is raising undue alarms. The scientist’s defenders believe he is being scrutinized for honest observations that tend to support the scientific consensus that global warming threatens the planet.

In 2006, Dr. Charles Monnett and a colleague published a seven-page paper in Polar Biology, a peer-reviewed journal. The paper described a whale surveillance flight over Alaska’s Beaufort Sea in 2004, during which they spotted four polar bear carcasses floating in open water far from land or the receding ice pack. They speculated that as many as 27 bears in all might have died in the same stormy period in the entire relevant habitat. They urged scientists to consider whether such drownings are an overlooked cause of bear mortality that might become worse if Arctic ice continues to recede during part of the year.

The issue gained prominence when Al Gore, in his 2006 book about global warming, cited the study as showing, for the first time, that polar bears had been drowning in significant numbers while swimming to distant ice.

Five years later, the paper became the initial focus of an investigation by the Interior Department’s inspector general, based on allegations that have not been made public. Last month the investigation broadened to include questions about Dr. Monnett’s management of other research. He was placed on administrative leave, with full pay and benefits, pending completion of the investigation.

Whatever the ultimate verdict on Dr. Monnett, the controversy over his observations is a minor sideshow in the global warming debate. A broad array of evidence suggests that polar bear populations — and the health of the planet — will be threatened by climate change in future decades even if not a single additional polar bear drowns while swimming far from shore.

A Little Knowledge Could Go a Long Way
Sacha Vignieri


CREDIT: ISTOCKPHOTO
The hunting of wild animals for meat is a threat to many species. Hunting of large fruit bats occurs throughout the Paleotropics, with some estimated harvest rates nearing 75% in a single season. Tropical bat populations are especially vulnerable to high harvest levels because of their low reproductive rates. Fruit bats are the primary pollinators and seed dispersers for many tropical forest trees, including several with high economic importance; thus, their loss could have substantial ecosystem effects. Harrison et al. estimated the influence of hunting on fruit bats within a large area of Indonesia, by interviewing bat hunters and sellers about hunting practices and consumer demand. They found evidence that bat populations are declining in the face of unregulated and aseasonal harvest and that hunting and demand are not abating, despite the apparent declines. Moreover, responses indicated that the practice may endanger the lives of humans involved in the bat trade: both hunters and vendors reported being bitten but were largely unaware that fruit bats can carry Nipah viruses. The authors suggest that educating local people about both the risks of fruit bat consumption and the ecological importance of bats, in addition to more formalized protections, could benefit not only the bats and the forest but the people of the region as well.
Biol Conserv. 144, 10.1016/j.biocon.2011.06.021 (2011).

Danon, The weather reports appear to indicate that you have cooled some, and that you might even have rain nearby. ???

The Center for Biological Diversity and partners this morning filed another challenge to the congressional budget rider approved in April that stripped Endangered Species Act protection from wolves in Montana, Idaho and parts of Oregon, Washington and Utah. Last week, a federal judge reluctantly upheld the rider, saying he would have ruled it unconstitutional if it hadn't been for an earlier precedent set by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

So today, the Center took our fight to the Ninth Circuit in an appeal of the judge's decision. The reason: Although wolf numbers have grown in parts of the northern Rocky Mountains, their road to recovery remains long. And scientists, not politicians, should decide when species can come off the endangered list.

Thanks for the interesting articles, sumac. I saw many fruit bats in the SE Asia area. They are big animals.

Thanks to all clickers who click to save a little bit of our spaceship.

Going to go click now. No nice articles today. I can sense fall now.

We are way too hot down here in TX to think of Fall. However, there are bare trees everywhere because of the heat. It's really hot - all over 100's each day for a loooooong time now.
Thanks for dropping by.

And, all good Rain Forest clickers - Keep on clicking.

We just broke a one hundred and thirty something year record for days in a row over 100 degrees - and, it's still going.

Thanks all for the tree asmiling.

Finally, better weather here in TX. Fewer hundreds and changing to 98 to 99 during the day. yea.

Thanks all for the clicks.

Have been offline for a while but will return to clicking now.

‘Smart Collar’ in the Works to Manage Wildlife Better
By KIRK JOHNSON
FORT COLLINS, Colo. — The collar of the wild is coming.

And in the same way that the smartphone changed human communications, what might be called the “smart collar” — measuring things that people never could before about how animals move and eat and live their lives — could fundamentally transform how wild populations are managed, and imagined, biologists and wildlife managers say.

The collars, in development in academia and intended for commercial production in the next few years, use a combination of global positioning technology and accelerometers for measuring an animal’s metabolic inner life in leaping, running or sleeping. From the safari parks of Africa to urbanized zones on the edge of wildlands across the American West — places where widespread interest in the devices has already been voiced, scientists said — the mysteries of the wild might never be the same.

“What you end up with is a diary for the animal, a 24-hour diary that says he spent this much time sleeping, and we know from the GPS where that was,” said Terrie Williams, a professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of three co-investigators on the project. “Then he woke up and went for a walk over here. He caught something over here. He ate something and we know what it was because the signatures we get for a deer kill vs. a rabbit kill are very different.”

And Mischief, a 10-year-old captive female mountain lion here in Colorado, may have provided a crucial link in the chain of research. The 121-pound cat, orphaned shortly after birth when her mother was shot by an elk hunter and raised by the state as a study animal, paced on a modified treadmill on Monday morning while munching venison morsels hand-fed in reward by her trainer, Lisa Wolfe, a veterinarian at Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

“We got the data point,” Professor Williams said, looking up from her laptop, which was measuring Mischief’s oxygen intake while the cat moved at three kilometers per hour. She said the accumulation of data points for mountain lions — what she called “a library of signatures” for every kind of movement — was the first phase of the project. One of her graduate students is developing the next iteration of the collar for wolves and coyotes, two other animals that live in proximity to people across wide swaths of the nation.

That mountain lions do not normally eat and walk at the same time is just one of the wrinkles that will require a fine calculation, in adjusting for the added calories that Mischief burned in gulping her treats. Training her and her brother Rascal to accept the treadmill at all, which scientists said was also a first for adult mountain lions, took eight months of acclimation and reward at the state research station 65 miles north of Denver.

“At first, it was the classic walking-and-chewing-gum-at-the-same-time problem — they’d take a bite, then stop,” said Michael W. Miller, a senior wildlife veterinarian at Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

The lions here, since their capture, have been actively trained in a research project on the effects of a neurological disease, chronic wasting, which infects many of the deer, elk and moose that lions eat. They have been fed mostly on infected animals donated by hunters, and trained— in balancing, recognizing geographic shapes, and now on treadmills — as a way of assessing their mental and physical health. Dr. Wolfe said that so far no ill-effects had been detected. Professor Williams said she searched for two years for any lions that might be trainable for her motion tests before finding Rascal and Mischief.

But the goal of the project, which was financed by about $800,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation, is not just to gain knowledge about animals that might be captured and fitted with the devices. What the researchers are aiming for is no less than a platform for predicting wild behavior, a human dream since the first hunter-ancestors ventured onto the African savannah.

Most wild animal collars now in use can tell where an animal is, using radio or satellite technology, but not much more. “We want to know what they’re doing,” Professor Williams said. “This is resting, this is walking, this is running, this is really tearing after something.”

The data stream from a smart-collared animal would show, for example, when the animal had last eaten, and how likely it was to go beyond its normal range in searching for food.

“We want to get to a stage where we can say, ‘We’ve got a lion that, for whatever reason, is really hungry out there and chances are you should put your dog indoors and shouldn’t go hiking in this area’ — that there’s a higher likelihood that this animal is going to go after something,” Professor Williams said.

If a sampling of animals that lions or wolves prey on, like deer or elk, could be added into the mix with monitoring collars of their own, scientists said they envision a new way of thinking about landscapes in general. With data flowing about both predators and prey, national park or wilderness managers might one day be able, over morning coffee at their desks, to predict a kind of calorie-budget that might unfold that day for the ecosystems they oversee: who might eat and be eaten, and where both sides might go, driven by survival instinct or hunger.

Colorado’s Parks and Wildlife commissioner, Robert G. Streeter, who was here for Monday’s treadmill tests, said that social networking sites might be incorporated into the new human-wild interface as well, with data from the collars posted online as it comes in.

“We could put up a Facebook account for each animal,” he said.

Hi sumac........... Glad to see you. And great article.

The thing that worries me about the collar to track the animals is that it's electronic and can easily be seen by hunters as well as everyone else. That would spell disaster for the animal.

I recently said to one of the "deer hunters" here in TX, "Sitting in a tree and killing a deer from there isn't hunting --- it's an ambush." The man went away without saying anything else.

Thanks and good clicking to you and all........................

AUGUST 30, 2011, 10:27 PM
Profits Before Environment

By MARK BITTMAN
Mark Bittman on food and all things related.

Tags:

barack obama, Genetically-modified food, Keystone XL pipeline extension, Monsanto

I wasn’t surprised when the administration of George W. Bush sacrificed the environment for corporate profits. But when the same thing happens under a Democratic administration, it’s depressing. With little or no public input, policies that benefit corporations regardless of the consequences continue to be enacted.

No wonder an April 2010 poll from the Pew Research Center found that about only 20 percent of Americans have faith in the government (it’s one thing upon which the left and right and maybe even the center agree). But maybe this is nothing new: as Glenda Farrell, as Genevieve “Gen” Larkin, put it in “Gold Diggers of 1937,” “It’s so hard to be good under the capitalistic system.”

But is anyone in power even trying? Last winter, the Department of Agriculture deregulated Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa, despite concerns about cross-pollination of non-genetically modified crops. It then defied a court order banning the planting of genetically modified sugar beets pending completion of an environmental impact study.

Monsanto engineers these plants and makes Roundup, the herbicide they resist. But Roundup-ready crops don’t increase long-term yields, a host of farmers are now dealing with “superweeds” and there is worry about superbugs, nearly all courtesy of Monsanto. In fact, this system doesn’t contribute to much of anything except Monsanto’s bottom line. Yet Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack gave Monsanto the nod, perhaps yielding to pressure from the White House.

The United States exerts that same kind of pressure abroad. WikiLeaks cables show that U.S. “biotechnology outreach programs” have promoted genetically modified crops in Africa, Asia and South America; they’ve also revealed that diplomats schemed to retaliate against any European Union countries that oppose those crops.

Sacrificing the environment for profits didn’t stop with Bush, and it doesn’t stop with genetically modified organisms. Take, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline extension. XL is right: the 36-inch-wide pipeline, which will stretch from the Alberta tar sands across the Great Plains to the Gulf Coast, will cost $7 billion and run for 1,711 miles — more than twice as long as the Alaska pipeline. It will cross nearly 2,000 rivers, the huge wetlands ecosystem called the Nebraska Sandhills and the Ogallala aquifer, the country’s biggest underground freshwater supply.

If Keystone is built, we’ll see rising greenhouse gas emissions right away (tar sands production creates three times as many greenhouse gases as does conventional oil), and our increased dependence on fossil fuels will further the likelihood of climate-change disaster. Then there is the disastrous potential of leaks of the non-Wiki-variety. (It’s happened before.)

Proponents say the pipeline will ease gas prices and oil “insecurity.” But domestic drilling has raised, not lowered, oil prices, and as for the insecurity — what we need is to develop wiser ways to use the oil we have.

They say, too, that the pipeline could create 100,000 new jobs. But even the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Transport Workers Union oppose the pipeline, saying, “We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil.”

Sounds as if union officials have been reading the writer and activist Bill McKibben, who calls the pipeline “a fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent,” and NASA scientist Jim Hansen, who says the oil Keystone will deliver “is essentially game over” for the planet.

Game over? No problem, says the State Department, which concluded that the project will have no significant impact on “most resources along the proposed pipeline corridor.” The Sierra Club quickly responded by calling the report “an insult to anyone who expects government to work for the interests of the American people.”

I do expect that, and I am insulted. President Obama can deny Keystone the permit. A truly environmentally friendly president (like the one candidate Obama appeared to be) would be looking for creative ways to leave fossil fuels underground, not extract them. Perhaps he doesn’t “believe in” global warming at this point, like many Republicans?

When government defends corporate interests, citizens must fight. McKibben has helped organize protests at the White House against Keystone, and he’s one of hundreds who’ve been arrested in the last couple of weeks. These people are showing that the role of government as corporate ally must be challenged.

As it will be in the fight against carte blanche for genetically modified organisms: From Oct. 1 to Oct. 16, there will be a march from New York City to Washington to demand that genetically modified foods be labeled, something a majority of Americans want. This small, perfectly reasonable request has run into joint opposition from the biotech industry and (here we go again) the Food and Drug Administration.

Why are most of us are filled with mistrust of the government? Maybe because we, like Gen Larkin, know it’s so hard to be good under the capitalistic system.

Please visit my blog and join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.

A version of this column appeared in print on Aug. 31, 2011.

That's so true - an ambush. Saving those few wolves we finally got from Canada after murdering all of ours is an ongoing battle - now they're being blamed for being imports! As opposed to what, the original locals, pitilessly exterminated down to last terrified animal? They're great beauties, Canadian or not:
http://www.economist.com/node/21526773

HS, thanks and I certainly agree with you.....................

A Bad Call on Ozone
President Obama’s decision not to proceed with stronger air-quality standards governing ozone is a setback for public health and the environment and a victory for industry and its Republican friends in Congress.

In a terse, three-paragraph statement Friday morning, the president said he did not want to burden industry with new rules at a time of great economic uncertainty, and he pledged to revisit the issue in two years. But since the proposed rules would not have begun to bite for several years, his decision seemed driven more than anything else by politics and his own re-election campaign.

Ozone is the main component of smog, a leading cause of respiratory and other diseases. The standards governing allowable ozone levels of ozone in communities across the country have not changed since 1997. In 2008, the Bush administration proposed a new standard that was a good deal weaker than the recommendations of the E.P.A.’s science advisers and were promptly challenged in courts by state governments and environmental groups.

This summer, Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, sent a new and stronger standard to the White House — igniting a fierce lobbying campaign by industry groups asserting that the standards would require impossibly costly investments in new pollution controls and throw people out of work. Industry has made these arguments before. They almost always turn out to be exaggerated.

The president sought to assuage Ms. Jackson by reminding her that a host of other environmental rules approved or in the works — including mandating cleaner cars and fewer power plant emissions of mercury and other pollutants — would do much to clean the air. All true. But there is still no excuse for compromising on public health and allowing politics to trump science.

Yeah, I understand his position though --- the budget/job problem is tied to business.

Gotta wait it out - thanks to "W" Bush. During the first three months of his time in office he pulled out all the stops from the EPA concerning business.