The governor is promising to spend another $800,000 for outside legal help and he’s putting money into next year’s budget for a new attorney in the Alaska Department of Law. That attorney’s only job? Dealing with endangered species.
(Photo courtesy of the US Fish And Wildlife Service)
The Governor of Alaska plans to fight
the Endangered Species Act protection
of the polar bear. Rebecca Williams
reports the governor plans on hiring
more lawyers:
Transcript
The Governor of Alaska plans to fight
the Endangered Species Act protection
of the polar bear. Rebecca Williams
reports the governor plans on hiring
more lawyers:
Governor Sean Parnell is picking up where Governor Sarah Palin left off and suing the federal government over the polar bear. Polar bear protections could get in the way of drilling for oil.
He’s now promising to spend another $800,000 for outside legal help and he’s putting money into next year’s budget for a new attorney in the Alaska Department of Law. That attorney’s only job? Dealing with endangered species.
“We’re going to continue to take this fight to the mat to protect our jobs and our economy so that the ESA, the Endangered Species Act, is used to truly protect species and not lock up our opportunities here.”
The Governor says those opportunities are jobs and money connected to oil and gas drilling in the polar bear’s habitat.
Governor Parnell will have more than the polar bear to worry about. Environmental groups are also trying to get several other species on the endangered list – including three types of ice seal.
Some biologists worry the Asian Carp will destroy the four-billion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes if it gets in. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
There is a man-made canal that connects
the Mississippi River system with the Great
Lakes. The Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal
makes shipping cargo between the waterways
possible. It also makes it possible for invasive
pests in the water to invade both systems.
The big concern right now is a big, nasty group
of fish known as Asian Carp that’s already
invaded the Mississippi and some of its
tributaries. An electric barrier has been built
in the canal to try to stop the fish from getting
into the Great Lakes. Lester Graham talked with
Jennifer Nalbone about the problem. She’s the
Director of Navigation and Invasive Species with
the environmental group Great Lakes United:
Transcript
There is a man-made canal that connects
the Mississippi River system with the Great
Lakes. The Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal
makes shipping cargo between the waterways
possible. It also makes it possible for invasive
pests in the water to invade both systems.
The big concern right now is a big, nasty group
of fish known as Asian Carp that’s already
invaded the Mississippi and some of its
tributaries. An electric barrier has been built
in the canal to try to stop the fish from getting
into the Great Lakes. Lester Graham talked with
Jennifer Nalbone about the problem. She’s the
Director of Navigation and Invasive Species with
the environmental group Great Lakes United:
Jennifer Nalbone: They are just incredible eaters, and they get as big as 3 to 4 feet, 80 to100 pounds when mature. And they are just prolific. Some species, the females can produce over 1 million eggs in their lifetime. So the fear is, like they’ve done in the Mississippi River Basin, they’ll get so big, they’ll have no predators, they’ll eat so much food, and there’ll be so many that they’ll basically take over the ecosystem. In some areas, where they’ve invaded, upwards of 90% of the river’s biomass is carp.
Lester Graham: You’ve probably seen this fish on videos or something like that – they’re the ones that as a boat passes by, they’ll jump out of the river, and sometimes even hit the boaters.
Nalbone: I admit, the first time I saw a video of the jumping silver carp, I was so startled I laughed at it. But there’s nothing funny about 50, 60, 70 pounds of fish flying at you when you’re going 20 miles an hour. It could kill someone.
Graham: Now, there’s this electric barrier in place that actually shocks the water so the fish is discouraged from coming into the area. But now there’s concern that the fish has invaded a nearby river, the Des Planes River, that’s very close to this canal. So, why’s that a problem?
Nalbone: Our concern is with flooding. Just last year, we saw major floodwaters in the Des Planes River, where floodwaters connected the Des Planes and the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal in streams of water several feet deep. And carp could be carried into the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal in those floodwaters.
Graham: So, what are you proposing? How could we stop the fish from going any further?
Nalbone: Well, the long-term solution is hydrologic separation of the Mississippi River Basin and the Great Lakes Basin. Army Corps of Engineers has been authorized to study that problem, but that’s a multi-year project. Right now, what we’re concerned about are floodwaters this fall. We are pressing that the Army Corps of Engineers put in place sandbags or berms in the low points between the Des Planes and the Canal. And also fill in some of the culverts in the IMN Canal that connect to the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal.
Graham: Now, I’ve watched this situation for years – long before the Asian Carp invaded the Mississippi River system – and I’m wondering, even if further millions of dollars are spent, to try to put up barricades or stop this fish, whether it’s simply inevitable that this fish will get into the Great Lakes.
Nalbone: Well, this is a battle against time right now. If we can block the future floodwaters from the Des Planes – which is probably our biggest hole in our defense right now – and plug the culverts in the IMN, we can buy ourselves some good time. But we won’t be out of the woods until we separate the Mississippi and the Great Lakes Basin. But we can’t let this invasion happen. It would be, perhaps, the greatest anticipated ecological tragedy of our time. So, I don’t think that inevitable is an option. We have to get it done.
Graham: Jennifer Nalbone is with the group Great Lakes United. Thanks, Jennifer.
A little girl holds a minnow in her hands. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
For decades now, we’ve been pushing
the limits on how much fish we can
catch. Mark Brush has been looking
at the recent trends:
Transcript
For decades now, we’ve been pushing
the limits on how much fish we can
catch. Mark Brush has been looking
at the recent trends:
If you look at the news, you get the picture. Declining salmon runs in British Columbia. Herring season cancelled along the West Coast. And tuna populations nearing collapse.
Over-fishing and damage to the environment are big problems in the world’s oceans, but you see declining fish stocks in the nation’s freshwater bodies as well.
Bill Carlson’s family has been fishing the Great Lakes since the 1870s. They catch fish called chub. But the chub are in serious decline.
“The chub population has just taken a real plunge, but we’re not sure what we’re experiencing is just a change in their habitat.”
These fish go through boom and bust periods. But since the chub’s main food source has disappeared, some biologists think the chub will have a tough time making a comeback.
So between over-fishing and environmental damage, the only good news seems to come from areas where there are strict rules in place – giving these fish stocks a chance to bounce back.
A close view of salmon eggs and developing salmon fry. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
A federal judge says the Obama
Administration soon has to come
up with a plan to restore endangered
salmon runs to the Pacific Northwest’s
biggest rivers. Ann Dornfeld went
gill net fishing on the Columbia
River to find out what’s at stake:
Transcript
A federal judge says the Obama
Administration soon has to come
up with a plan to restore endangered
salmon runs to the Pacific Northwest’s
biggest rivers. Ann Dornfeld went
gill net fishing on the Columbia
River to find out what’s at stake:
(sound of a boat moving through water)
Gary Soderstrom is a fourth-generation Columbia River salmon fisherman. Even though it’s his work, on a sunny summer day there are few places he’d rather be than casting a gill net on this tranquil bay near the mouth of the Columbia.
“Just being this far from the dock, it’s just a whole different world! All the nights and the days I’ve put out here, I still feel good when I get out here.” (laughs)
Soderstrom – or Suds, as he’s better known – says gillnetters today catch salmon pretty much the same way his great-great-grandfather caught them. The main difference today is motors help fishers lay out and reel in their nets.
(sound of reel squeaking as net is laid)
“See how he’s layin’ up the bank here, and then he’s gonna go across. That’ll create a trap for the fish if he leads ’em over to the beach, and they might get confused.”
The technique might not have changed much. But this river has. These days, a dozen species of salmon and steelhead on the Columbia are listed as endangered. One of the biggest factors is the hydroelectric dam system that provides most of the power to the Pacific Northwest. Those dams keep young salmon from making it to the ocean. Suds says that’s why his son won’t be a fifth generation fisherman.
“There used to be several thousand fishermen on the Columbia at one time. Now there’s a couple hundred of us that are still active. Most guys like my son and them have went and got other jobs to try and raise families on.”
Federal law requires the government to restore the endangered salmon runs. For years, fishers and environmental groups have been calling for the removal of four dams on the Snake River, a tributary of the Columbia.
But the Clinton and Bush Administrations backed other plans to restore salmon runs. Those plans ranged from spilling a small portion of water through the dams to trucking baby salmon around the dams. Federal courts rejected those plans as insufficient. Now a federal judge has told the Obama Administration it has until mid-September to come up with a plan that goes far beyond the scheme President Bush proposed last year.
Ann Dornfeld: “What do you think is the chance that they’re gonna take out the dams?”
Gary Soderstrom: “Well, about like me winnin’ the Powerball! (laughs) I mean, don’t think it’s ever gonna happen, but realistically, it’d work.”
Suds says he’d also like to see tougher restrictions put on farmers who irrigate their crops with water from the Columbia.
“Irrigation systems, a lot of them are still water hogs. I think they should be forced into using the least amount of water they can get by with.”
It’s been about 15 minutes, and it’s time to reel in the nets.
(sound of reeling in nets)
We’ve brought in one 17-pound coho.
(sound of salmon hitting the floor)
But like most of the other fish caught on the Columbia these days, it was raised in a hatchery upstream.
Suds says for years he’s been volunteering his time on advisory councils and boards throughout the state to try to restore the habitat that once brought millions of salmon down the river the natural way. But what he’d really like to do is meet with President Obama and explain the river’s history to him firsthand.
“But in my situation, being a peon fisherman, you’ll never get to talk to a guy like him. Y’know, if you could bring him out here and show him what I’ve shown you today, maybe he’d have a clearer understanding of what’s going on out here.”
Suds Soderstrom says he wants the president to make good on his promise to let science dictate his policies, rather than politics – which always seem to favor development.
“Sooner or later you’re either gonna have fish or people. And the people seem to be winning.”
The new Administration has until September 15th to propose its plan to save endangered salmon. The federal judge who’s been overseeing the process for years has made one requirement: this time, the plan has to work.
Idaho Fish and Game sold 1,825 wolf tags in the first hour. By mid-afternoon the first day, about 4,000 tags had been sold. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
It’s open season on wolves starting
today. Lester Graham reports
Idaho has issued tens of thousands
of hunting permits for the first
wolf season since the animal was
taken off the endangered species
list:
Transcript
It’s open season on wolves starting
today. Lester Graham reports
Idaho has issued tens of thousands
of hunting permits for the first
wolf season since the animal was
taken off the endangered species
list:
This is the first time a state has allowed an open hunting season on the wolf since it was protected by federal law.
Jon Rachael is state game manager for Idaho’s Fish and Game. He says there are about 1,000 wolves – far more than the original plan when the wolves were reintroduced.
So, hunters can kill as many as 220 of them.
“The intent of that is to reduce the population slightly. But that would leave us in the neighborhood of about 800 wolves at the end of the year.”
A Montana hunting season would allow another 75 wolves to be killed.
Environmentalists say it’s outrageous to kill so many wolves in the northern Rockies so soon after they were taken off the endangered species list.
The Environmental group Defenders of Wildlife sued to stop the wolf hunting season. A federal judge has not yet ruled on whether to stop the hunt.
Oliver Pergams used a tiny caliper to measure the mice, tracking changes in size over the years. (Photo by Gabriel Spitzer)
The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has a hundred years of dead mouse specimens stored in
white metal cabinets. (Photo by Gabriel Spitzer)
Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:
Transcript
Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:
Tall Trees Park is a little patch of green in Glenview, Illinois – a
northern suburb of Chicago. About a hundred years ago, a lot of this area
looked a lot like this. It was mostly farms and pasture and forest. And now
of course it’s a lot of strip malls and subdivisions and stuff. And the
population has grown seventyfold. The climate has changed, too. It’s
gotten a little warmer, a little wetter.
And all this has made life a lot different for the northern white-footed
mice who live here. It’s actually not just made life different for the
mice, it’s changed the mice themselves.
That gets back to a guy named Oliver Pergams. He’s an ecologist, and in
the mid-90s, he was looking at deer mice who live on the Channel Islands
off the coast of California. And he was taking these mice and comparing
them to museum samples of the same kind of mice from the same place, but
decades earlier.
“And I found something kind of strange – that the older specimens were
larger than the newer specimens, so they shrunk in size over a period of
about 30 or 40 years.”
That got him wondering if those relatively quick changes are happening in
other places. So years later, now on the faculty at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, he gathered up some of those White Footed Mice from
the Chicago suburbs. And he went to the Field Museum of Natural History…
(sound of a cabinet opening)
… where they have a hundred years of dead mouse specimens stored in
white metal cabinets.
“Here we have trays and trays of the northern white-footed mouse.”
With a tiny caliper, he’d measure their skulls, their feet, the distance
from their eyes to their noses.
“So this one here was collected by Aikley in 1903.”
And he compared mice from before and after 1950.
“Here are some skulls, this one was collected in 1989.”
Lo and behold, these mice had grown: by more than 10% on some measures.
This phenomenon goes way beyond Chicago. Pergams measured more than 1,300
rodents from four different continents – Alaskan lemmings, Mexican
gophers, Filipino rats. Some of them got bigger, some smaller. But across
the world, most of the animals have changed over time spans thought to be
mere evolutionary eyeblinks.
The next step is to figure out why.
“You can’t get in a time machine and go back and look to see what
actually happened. So the next best thing is to see if there’s
associations or correlations with big factors.”
He found the variations correlate with changes in climate and human
population density. The exact reasons aren’t clear – more people might
mean more yummy trash for the mice to eat, for example. That’s going to
take more research to figure out, and these critters might be overdue for
some extra attention.
“One of the questions is, well, why didn’t anybody notice this before?
And I think the answer is, they haven’t looked.”
Larry Heaney curates the Field Museum’s mammal collection. He says
Pergams’s research opens up new questions about how animals respond to
changes driven by humans.
“The implication is, these animals are changing very, very rapidly. So in
a sense, it’s good: they can change. But the other side of the coin is,
they’re having to change.”
Now, the question is, is this happening in other species, too? What about
birds or bugs or plants?
“There’s been this default attitude that if you go to one place and you
capture or you observe animals or plants, that essentially there’s going
to be the same animals or plants 50 years or 100 years later. I don’t
think that’s possible to assume at all. We have to include the fact of
this change in all of our decisions, from ecology to evolutionary biology
to conservation.”
Pergams’s findings show that even the most common creatures have more to
teach us – when we ask the right kinds of questions.
Environmental scientist Rachael Pierce and her team travel on airboats into the marshes around Lake Okeechobee. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Rachael Pierce has to shuffle her feet when she checks her snail traps... just to be sure she doesn’t surprise any alligators. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Pierce measuring an apple snail. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
We’ve spent billions of dollars
just trying to partially restore
the Everglades in Florida. Now,
there’s a struggle to save a bird
there that’s close to extinction.
It’s a raptor called the snail kite.
It’s becoming one of the symbols
for saving the Everglades. Rebecca
Williams has more:
Transcript
We’ve spent billions of dollars
just trying to partially restore
the Everglades in Florida. Now,
there’s a struggle to save a bird
there that’s close to extinction.
It’s a raptor called the snail kite.
It’s becoming one of the symbols
for saving the Everglades. Rebecca
Williams has more:
The snail kite eats pretty much only one thing – a snail called the apple snail.
The apple snail’s been disappearing – partly because of people messing with water levels in the Everglades for farming and cities.
Scientist Rachael Pierce and her team have raised apple snails in the lab and let them go in a marsh at the edge of Lake Okeechobee. Now they need them to stick around and have babies.
“It’s unlikely the snail kites will come back here to this marsh because we haven’t released that many snails. But in the future when we scale this up we do hope to start seeing snail kites.”
The survival of the snail kite depends on this working. And, some people say, if the snail kite goes extinct, things won’t look good for the restoration of the Everglades.
A company called ArborGen is working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily. (Photo courtesy of the National Biological Information Infastructure)
There’s already a lot of genetically
modified corn and soybeans out there.
Now, Mark Brush reports, one company
is working on genetically modifying
trees:
Transcript
There’s already a lot of genetically
modified corn and soybeans out there.
Now, Mark Brush reports, one company
is working on genetically modifying
trees:
The company is called ArborGen. And it’s working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily.
Eucalyptus is native to Australia and New Zealand.
But ArborGen has already got 330 acres of these genetically altered trees planted scattered across the South.
And now it wants the government to allow these trees to flower. And that has people like George Kimbrall worried.
He’s an attorney with the International Center for Technology Assessment. He says if they spread they’ll be bad for the environment.
“They’re water suckers. They don’t allow for much undergrowth. They’re poisonous to most animals. The leaves, the animals can’t eat them. Why would we want the south covered in Eucalyptus trees?”
When eucalyptus was brought over to California – it did become invasive. And there are some reports that it’s invasive in Florida too.
ArborGen says it’s altering these trees so they won’t spread in the wild.
More people are feeding dolphins and getting too close to them in their boats. (Photo courtesy of Mote Marine Laboratory)
This cartoon depicts a dolphin in rehab, talking to a bear and a raccoon about being addicted to handouts from humans. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)
The effects of dolphins getting too close to fishing boats: an injury to a dolphin's tail fluke caused by fishing line. (Photo courtesy of Mote Marine Laboratory)
Television dolphins like Flipper
and the performing dolphins at
Sea World can trick people into
thinking it’s okay to feed and
swim with wild dolphins. But
Rebecca Williams reports dolphin
researchers say our behavior can
hurt and even kill dolphins:
Transcript
Television dolphins like Flipper
and the performing dolphins at
Sea World can trick people into
thinking it’s okay to feed and
swim with wild dolphins. But
Rebecca Williams reports dolphin
researchers say our behavior can
hurt and even kill dolphins:
(sound of a shorebird crying out)
Fort Myers beach is packed with tourists. I meet a guy named Justin who’s here in Florida from Cleveland. He’s already gotten close to wild dolphins.
“We were out here swimming and dolphins got within a foot of us. It was amazing. I’ve never seen that.”
In this case, he wasn’t doing anything wrong – because the dolphins came up to him. But swimming with wild dolphins can actually be considered harassment if you approach them or touch them.
That’s bad for the dolphins because it can change their behavior. It can disturb their feeding and resting behavior. And it can separate dolphins from their babies.
So it’s illegal to swim with or harass dolphins. You can get fined and even end up with some jail time. And that’s just the beginning of the dolphins’ problems.
Dolphin encounters are getting more common in Florida and Hawaii and a lot of other places. There’ve been more tourists and more boaters in the water… and more commercial operations that promise you’ll get a chance to feed or swim with dolphins.
As cool as it might be for us, it’s actually terrible for dolphins. When people feed them they can get addicted to human handouts.
Cartoon Dolphin PSA: “For me it started with one hit of sardines, oh sardines… that’s where I learned to beg. It was easy to score free fish… with this dolphin smile? Yeah it’s illegal but no one cares…”
That’s a cartoon dolphin in rehab with a bear, a raccoon and a seagull. All those other animals we’ve gotten into some bad habits with.
It’s a message put out by the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota.
(sound of dolphin playing in tank at the Marine Lab)
Randall Wells is the head of dolphin research at the lab. He’s spent almost four decades studying dolphins.
He says, in recent years, there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of dolphins getting into trouble with people. More people feeding them and getting too close to dolphins in their boats.
“And we’ve seen an increase in mortality from these kinds of interactions – from people luring animals in towards boats, in towards fishing gear. Dolphins have begun to take bait from lines getting tackle including hooks and lures in their bodies and killing them or seriously injuring them.”
He says, if you feed a dolphin, it’ll often start begging for food from people. And that dolphin will teach its babies or other dolphins to beg.
Sometimes they’ll even eat things that aren’t food. One dead dolphin had a plastic snake in its stomach.
If dolphins get closer to boats, they can get snared in fishing line. It can slice through their flippers. Once, Randall Wells rescued a dolphin that had a Speedo on its head. And because it couldn’t shake it off, the suit was cutting into the dolphin’s flesh.
Wells and his team have been doing a lot of outreach to stop people from getting too close to dolphins. And he says most of the time, it works.
“But there’s still a half percent of people that, by their own admission, insist on interacting with these animals – feeding them and approaching them in ways that are illegal, just because they can and they’ve never seen the negative consequences of doing that.”
If you want to go on one of those dolphin viewing tours, there are some ways to make sure the tour operator’s not adding to the problem.
Stacey Horstman helps run a program called Dolphin Smart. It certifies dolphin tours as responsible.
Right now there are only four businesses in Key West and one in Alabama that’ve gotten certified. But, she says, if you’re in a place without Dolphin Smart tours, you can still ask questions.
“Just to make sure that feeding is not being promoted in any way, that they’re promoting responsible viewing from a distance.”
That means staying at least 50 yards away from dolphins.
She says any ad that shows people swimming with dolphins or handing them fish is usually a sign of an irresponsible business. So those are ones to stay away from.
Dolphins might look cute and friendly, but Horstman says they are wild animals and they need their space.
The Black-and-White Ruffed Lemur, threat category: Critically Endangered (Photo by Jean-Christophe Vié, courtesy of the IUCN)
There’s a new report out on the
state of the world’s creatures.
It’s called the Red List of Threatened
Species. And, as you can imagine,
the Red List is not a good list to
be on. Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
There’s a new report out on the state of the world’s creatures. It’s called the Red List of Threatened Species. And, as you can imagine, the Red List is not a good list to be on. Mark Brush has more:
This report is put out by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They cataloged about 45,000 species worldwide. They say about 38% of those are threatened with extinction.
Species sometimes naturally go extinct. But, the researchers say, today’s extinction rates are happening a lot faster – mostly because people are destroying habitat.
Jean-Christophe Vié is the senior editor of the report.
“If you think of nature as a company, it’s the largest in the world. So now we are in this economic crisis, if there was one company to save, it’s not the car industry, or saving a bank – it’s saving nature, because it’s for the benefit of all of us.”
Vié says they were only able to report on about 3% of all the known species around the world.
But, they still feel they have a pretty good idea of the overall trend. And it’s not a good trend.
The governor is promising to spend another $800,000 for outside legal help and he’s putting money into next year’s budget for a new attorney in the Alaska Department of Law. That attorney’s only job? Dealing with endangered species. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish And Wildlife Service)
