@sumac,
g'day sumac - good to see you here again
rainy and cool here in Toronto - not especially pretty weather - but it's part of what happens in the winter to spring shift
clicking to do!
good stories there danon, hihi and stradee
@ehBeth,
Hi all --- Yep, Spring is on the way for sure, this coming Saturday in fact.
Stradee and all are right - it's damn cold even down south, especially in the mornings when I take the puppy out.
Wednesday is the day saluting the man who conquered Ireland single handed --- St Patrick. Even the Romans didn't take Ireland, but, a single English Catholic priest did a good job of changing things over there.
all clicked.
Going to go glick. Let's hurry up, spring!
@ehBeth,
today the weathers mild, sushine, and no wind!
hi sue n' dan
hope you all have a super day
http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674
@Stradee,
Sunny today!
The dogs have been enjoying going in and out and in and out as Set and I take the recycling out. In and out, in and out.
Clicked earlier - also sent more invites to the rainforest and food clicking sites through FB.
@ehBeth,
Thanks ehBeth. I've been noticing an increase in rainforest saved overall recently. Must be something you're doing.
Great tree saving Wildclickers!!!
@sumac,
Good Morning Sumac --- I am hoping you are above water. The E. Coast looks pretty wet to me.
Good morning Danon. My son up in NY got a lot of the wet but it was fine here in NC.
@sumac,
Ok, happy about that, sumac - we are all hoping that teeny - NJ is also Ok.
All saved another tree down here in TX land.
@Stradee,
Stradee, wrap a nice warm soft fuzzy cloth around your neck and take a cup of GREEN TEA with a touch of GINGER (to taste) and some SPLENDA to make it all well - THEN, place TWO DROPS of lemon juice into the cup and sip it warm and comfy.
That's all according to DR. OZ on TV. I've been giving it to Patti and she loves it.
Keep cozy and warm.
Great clicking all you WILDCLICKERS!!!!!
@Stradee,
G'day to danon and sumac and all the shy and demure WildClickers.
Gehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhsundheit to Stradee! Is it the sneezy season for you already?
We had a cleanup at the office yesterday - a lot of dust was disrupted and disturbed. I sit near a mini-library with references that probably hadn't been looked at in a couple of decades. I was achooing with the best of 'em.
Clickety!
@danon5,
ahhhhhh ginger
we just had a very nice little roast chicken that had been marinated in Newman's Own sesame-ginger dressing. So good. Love that ginger!
(next time I may sneak some freshly grated ginger inside the chicken along with a lemon and some garlic)
The sun finally came out again so spring is definitely on its way. Will go click now.
March 17, 2010
EditorialA Good Deal for the Everglades
The effort to restore Florida’s Everglades has been revived thanks to the efforts of President Obama and Florida’s Republican governor, Charlie Crist. The Obama administration has committed more than $300 million in new money, and construction on important projects " including lifting a section of the Tamiami Trail to bring freshwater to the Everglades " is under way.
Last week, the state agency that oversees the restoration voted unanimously to press forward with Mr. Crist’s controversial " but potentially game-changing " $536 million deal to buy 73,000 acres of land from the United States Sugar Corporation. The land would eventually be taken out of agricultural production, removing a major source of pollution, and converted into reservoirs and artificial marshes to store and clean water for later release into the Everglades during the dry season.
The agency " the South Florida Water Management District " had been under mounting pressure to kill the deal. Florida Crystals, another big and politically connected sugar company, lobbied ferociously against the deal with its rival. Some environmentalists complained that Mr. Crist paid too much and that the cost of the deal would crowd out other restoration projects.
But some of those projects " a string of underground storage wells, for instance " made little sense to begin with and none are as important as the land deal. The payout to United States Sugar and some other aspects of the deal seem excessive. But the agency can negotiate the price downward or cancel the arrangement if United States Sugar refuses to bargain or if the economy keeps tanking and the deal becomes unaffordable.
What the taxpayers need to remember is that this is a very good deal for the environment. Without an ample supply of clean, fresh water, the Everglades will never be restored to anything approaching their former vitality.
There is no shortage of rainfall in Florida. What’s in short supply is places to store it during the rainy season when Lake Okeechobee overflows, places from which the water can be released when it is needed during the dry season to nourish wildlife, prevent catastrophic fire and provide clean water to Florida Bay.
Far more will have to happen to restore the water flows that once sustained the Everglades. But the United States Sugar lands are a critically important first step.
Divide and Diminish
By OLIVIA JUDSON
Olivia Judson on the influence of science and biology on modern life.
Tags:
animals, biodiveristy, environment, islands
Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC In Indonesia, the smallest islands are home to many fewer species than the largest.
This week, I want to dust off my crystal ball and make a prediction: in the future, the biggest land animals will be smaller than they are now.
Here’s why I think so. As a rule of thumb, larger animals need more food than smaller animals; they also need more space. Obviously, it takes more land to grow 100 rhinoceroses than it does to grow 100 rabbits. One hundred tigers require more land than 100 foxes. Indeed, meat-eaters, being higher in the food chain, need even more space than plant-eaters. For land mammals, every kilogram of prey supports just 9 grams of carnivore. So to feed one tiger of 180 kilos, you need 20 tonnes of prey. To support a breeding population of tigers, you need rather more. (For non-metric types, 2.2 pounds of prey feeds one third of an ounce of carnivore; a tiger weighs about 400 pounds and needs 22 tons of prey.)
When we break up rainforests or steppes, or build roads through pristine landscapes, we start to fray the fabric of nature.
Which has the following consequences. On islands, there’s a relationship between the size of the island and the size of the largest animals that live there. Enormous animals don’t live on tiny, or even medium-sized islands " they can’t. Moreover, an island of a given size will be home to more large herbivores than large carnivores. The pattern even extends to continents: the biggest animals on big continents outsize the biggest animals on small continents. (In general, large animals that find themselves on islands either go extinct " or shrink. For example, continental tigers are bigger than those on large island of Sumatra, which are, in turn, bigger than those on the small island of Bali.)
As a corollary of this, smaller islands are also home to fewer species than larger islands; hence, the ecosystems tend to be simpler. There are fewer niches for organisms to occupy, and fewer organisms of other species to interact with. Predators may be few, or entirely absent, for example.
O.K., fine. But what does this have to do with the future of large animals?
A lot. Although “island” tends to conjure images of small bodies of land surrounded by water, such as Bermuda, or the Falkland Islands, this is not the only kind of island out there. Lakes are islands of water surrounded by land. Caves are islands of darkness surrounded by light. Oases are islands of fertility surrounded by sand. In short, an island is any self-contained patch of habitat within some larger sea. Looked at this way, the garden outside my window is an island of parkland in an ocean of bricks and concrete.
For we humans are island makers. We routinely fragment former “oceans”" be they tracts of forest or prairie, or some other vast ecosystem " leaving remnants here and there. These remnants are, from a biological point of view, islands.
Before humans began building roads and cities, damming rivers, and hacking down forests, islands formed in one of two ways. The first is exemplified by Hawaii. Here, volcanic activity in the middle of the ocean has created islands where, before, there was nothing but water. On islands like this " call them Clean Slates " the ecosystem gets assembled from scratch by the various organisms that arrive there.
Alternatively, islands form when, say, sea levels rise so that pieces of land that were previously connected become separated. For example, as recently as 12,000 years ago, much of what is now Indonesia was part of the Asian mainland. Then, the glaciers retreated, sea levels rose, and what had been one large landmass became an archipelago of separate islands. Human-made islands tend to be of this second type " let’s call them Splinters.
Islands of both kinds are famous for being home to weird and wonderful organisms found nowhere else: isolation on an island allows the evolution of new and distinct forms " such as the marine iguanas of the Galápagos. But three things are worth pointing out. The first is that the evolution of new forms takes time " the island needs to remain isolated for thousands of years.
Second, the relative simplicity of island ecosystems means that they are vulnerable to disruption by competitors that have evolved in the more intense environments of the mainland. Third, many of the most spectacular episodes of island evolution " finches on the Galápagos, cichlid fishes in the Great Lakes of central Africa, bees and snails in Hawaii, and so on " occur on the Clean Slate type of island. This makes sense: the combination of few competitors plus empty niches presents massive evolutionary opportunities.
More by Olivia Judson
•Breezy Love, or the Sacking of the Bees, March 9, 2010
•Evolution by the Grassroots, March 2, 2010
•All previous columns »
A different process goes on when an island forms by splintering. Here, the ecosystem is pre-existing: the island is created with a set of residents already in place. But it is now too small to support them all.
What happens next is a kind of unraveling, a fraying, a disassembling such that the ecosystem becomes simpler, so as to fit the space that is now available. On those recently-created islands of Indonesia, for example, the smallest islands are home to many fewer species than the largest islands. And, as you’d expect, you don’t find big animals on the smallest islands either.
When we humans burn tracts of forest, or make islands in some similar way, the immediate impacts depend on a suite of factors, including how many islands there are, how big they are, and how close they are together. It also matters what is between them. Fields may be more hospitable to wildlife than roads or water; under some circumstances, life forms may be able to flit from one fragment to another, and the “island” nature of the fragments will be reduced. Perhaps we can use such patterns to shape how we use land, to try and minimize the impact we have.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps we should stop getting mired in details, and reflect on what we know: small islands are simpler, less ecologically interesting places than big islands. When we break up rainforests or steppes, or build roads through pristine landscapes, we start to fray the fabric of nature. We may not see the full impact today, tomorrow, or next year. But we know what the long-term effects will be. By fraying nature we make the planet a simpler, duller, diminished place.
Notes:
For the tonnage of prey that carnivores need, see Carbone, C. and Gittleman, J. L. 2002. “A common rule for the scaling of carnivore density.” Science 295: 2273-2276. For the relationship between body size and island size, see Marquet, P. A. and Taper, M. L. 1998. “On size and area: patterns of mammalian body size extremes across landmasses.” Evolutionary Ecology 12: 127-139. For a fascinating paper on the relationship between big animals and continent sizes, see Burness, G. P., Diamond, J., and Flannery, T. 2001. “Dinosaurs, dragons, and dwarfs: the evolution of maximal body size.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 98: 14518-14523. I took tiger body sizes from page 825 of Nowak, R. M. 1999. “Walker’s Mammals of the World.” Sixth edition; volume 1. Johns Hopkins University Press.
The study of islands has a long history in evolution and ecology. See, for example, “Island Life: or, The Phenomena and Causes of Insular Faunas and Floras”, by Alfred Russel Wallace, which was first published in 1880. Another landmark book, about ecological processes on islands, is MacArthur, R. H. and Wilson, E. O. 1967. “The Theory of Island Biogeography.” Princeton University Press. For the formation of Hawaii, and the evolutionary history of its animals, see, for example, Cowie, R. H. and Holland, B. S. 2008. “Molecular biogeography and diversification of the endemic terrestrial fauna of the Hawaiian Islands.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 363: 3363-3376. The greater simplicity of island ecosystems has been well documented; the size effect is well known. It is my observation that the most flamboyant evolutionary radiations happen on Clean Slate islands; however, this needs testing.
For disassembly on Indonesian islands, see Okie, J G. and Brown, J. H. 2009. “Niches, body sizes, and the disassembly of mammal communities on the Sunda Shelf islands.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 106 (supplement 2): 19679-19684.
Habitat fragmentation is the subject of a voluminous literature, much of which is devoted to analyzing specific cases. But for the possible importance of the “matrix”"the kinds of habitat that lie between different habitat fragments"see Prugh, L. R. et al. 2008. “Effect of habitat area and isolation on fragmented animal populations.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 105: 20770-20775. For an excellent, and sobering, analysis of the ecological and evolutionary trajectories of human-created fragments, along with an analysis of the vulnerability of fragments to invasive species, see Leigh, E. G. Jr, Vermeij, G. J. and Wikelski, M. 2009. “What do human economies, large islands and forest fragments reveal about the factors limiting ecosystem evolution
@sumac,
Good day sumac and Cllickers. Happy St Patricks Day.
Clicked.
Friend purchased a hybrid vehicle. gets fifty plus miles per gallon. When you stop at a stop sign, or red light, or drive thru or any stop, the car motor shuts off and it switches to electric. Quiet. Feels like it stalls.
Good day
@danon5,
Sounds sooooooooo good! Maybe a spot of ginger tea with lemon?
anything to stop the ahchoooooooezes (along with Claritin)
Thanks Dan and tell Patti howdy from the wildclickers.
@ehBeth,
g'day Beth n' all our happy wildclickers
Yep, Spring arrived....cool mornings...warm afternoons...dust..........
Cleaning carpets will be great for a day, unless i place kittens in basket with baloons, pollen from paws and dander... sniffle ahchoooooooooo
Gardening and Spring cleaning = lots of Claritin.
