The recovery of the European Bison is one of the recent successes in the fight against biodiversity loss. Despite some improvements, the UNEP report suggests efforts to address the loss of biodiversity need to be substantially strengthened.(Photo courtesy of Gil Wojciech, Polish Forest Research Institute, Poland)
Transcript
A new report finds an agreement among the world’s governments to protect nature is failing. Lester Graham reports on the assessment which finds more animals, forests and other habitats are being lost.
World governments signed the 2002 Convention of Biological Diversity, agreeing to protect more habitat and species that are at risk. An assessment of the progress has been published in the journal Science and it finds biodiversity is at greater risk than it was when the agreement was signed eight years ago. Matt Foster is with the environmental group Conservation International. He says despite some government efforts to protect habitat, there have been more pressures destroying habitat and biodiversity.
“And it’s a scary prospect, not just from a biodiversity side, but considering that there are so many vulnerable people around the world for whom the services provided by nature and biodiversity are essential such as for water, for food and all of us depend on nature and forests especially to try to mitigate climate change.”
Foster says much more needs to be done by governments and the private sector to preserve natural areas and protect species.
An island in the Upper Mississippi, not far from downtown Minneapolis, is home to many Great Blue Herons.(Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
Sharon Stiteler is a naturalist with the National Park Service and host of birdchick.com.(Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
Some people say robins are the first sign of spring. But there’s another bird that makes a dramatic entry in northern states. The Great Blue Heron soars in to make a nest… and guard it:
Transcript
Some people say robins are the first sign of spring. But there’s another bird that makes a dramatic entry in northern states. The Great Blue Heron soars in to make a nest… and guard it:
On an island in the Upper Mississippi River, a stand of cottonwood trees is silhouetted against a gray sky. The bare branches are festooned with big nests, made of twigs and branches. Next to the nests, like sentinels at the castle gate, stand Great Blue Herons. These birds are four feet tall. More than a hundred of them are claiming their domain in these trees, just upriver from downtown Minneapolis. When one takes off and glides away, its six-foot wing span dwarfs the ducks and songbirds sharing the island.
It’s hard to tell the males from the females because they’re the same blue and gray. Birder Sharon Stiteler is leading me on a tour of this rookery.
“The males arrive first, and they work out who’s going to take which nest. Where you see one bird standing up, that is most likely a male. He’s hanging out there because the other males who are still waiting to attract a female could come by and steal sticks out of his nest to make his nest look better.”
On some nests, you can see females already sitting on pale blue eggs the size of small mangoes. But Stiteler says herons are not always good parents.
“If the chick falls out of the nest and lands on the ground, that chick is toast: the parents will not continue feeding it. And oftentimes you’ll see turkey vultures hanging out at rookeries, and they’re waiting for the young to fall and starve, and then they’ll have a whole bunch of food.”
But at least on this island, there won’t be many predators like coyotes or foxes.
These birds were once threatened by humans. Their cousins the egrets were hunted for their beautiful white feathers, and both suffered disastrous population loss until the pesticide DDT was banned.
Now you can see them in streams and lakes all over. They breed in Canada and the upper midwest. They spend their winters wherever they can find food. Herons literally stalk their prey.
“They have a lot of patience, and they just stare at one spot for long time, and then they jab down and grab the fish. Their beak is shaped like a pair of super-sharp chopsticks. Sometimes they catch a huge fish and they have to juggle it around, especially if they have it perpendicular with their beak, they have to jostle it around, and the fish is wiggling, and eventually they get it just right so it’s straight in line with the bill, and you can watch this huge thing slide down that long slender neck.”
Sharon Stiteler is a part-time naturalist with the National Park Service, and she writes a blog called bird-chick-dot-com.
Today the herons are pretty quiet. But Stiteler has a Blackberry loaded with their sounds, including the prehistoric squawk they make when they’re startled.
And Stiteler says it can sound really strange when the young are clattering for food.
After the young are raised — at least the ones that survive — the herons will stay here on the river, until it freezes over and they can’t fish anymore. Stiteler says the birds decamp all at once.
“One day we have Great Blue Herons, and the next day they’re gone, and they migrate at night.”
They tuck back their long necks when they fly, forming an S-shape and hiding their true length.
Stiteler says the recovery of Great Blue Herons, along with pelicans, eagles, and other birds near the top of the food chain is a sign of a healthier ecosystem.
For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.
Marine researcher Marcus Eriksen says the plastic packaging that wraps nearly all consumer products is killing some marine animals.(Photo courtesy of the NOAA Marine Debris Program)
A giant field of plastic debris is floating in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean. Now researchers are finding more of these garbage patches in other Oceans. Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
A giant field of plastic debris is floating in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean. Now researchers are finding more of these garbage patches in other Oceans. Mark Brush has more:
Researchers say there are ocean currents that sort of swirl around like water in a toilet bowl. There called oceanic gyres.
The Algalita Marine Research Foundation was one of the groups that documented the problem in the North Pacific Ocean. This year they sailed to the gyres in the North Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean.
They found miles and miles of plastic fishing line, milk crates, spoons and forks, and bits of plastic bags.
Marcus Eriksen is with the group:
Eriksen: I challenge you to walk into Wal-Mart or a K-Mart and find a product that’s not made from plastic, packaged or labeled with plastic. And we’re finding more and more of this debris being lost onto the ground washing down rivers and streams out to sea.
Eriksen says the plastic is killing some marine animals. Fish, birds, turtles, and whales get tangled up in the mess – or they mistake it for food.
Filmmaker John Schmit says he wanted to make this film to show how even the smallest invader could mess up the delicate balance of life in the lake. (Photo courtesy of the NOAA GLERL)
You might call Lake Huron the forgotten Great Lake. There are no major cities on its shores. It doesn’t get the media attention the other four Great Lakes do. But its problems are just as bad or worse. Rebecca Williams reports a new documentary tells the story of Lake Huron’s struggle with dozens of alien invaders… and the biologists and fishermen who are trying to reclaim their lake:
Transcript
You might call Lake Huron the forgotten Great Lake. There are no major cities on its shores. It doesn’t get the media attention the other four Great Lakes do. But its problems are just as bad or worse. Rebecca Williams reports a new documentary tells the story of Lake Huron’s struggle with dozens of alien invaders… and the biologists and fishermen who are trying to reclaim their lake:
The documentary Lake Invaders is a cautionary tale about opening the door to strangers. It tells how Lake Huron was opened up to alien invasive species. The film paints fish biologists as the heroes rushing in.
“Seems like it always has to wait until it’s at a disaster level before you know, we can start fixing it… we’re constantly putting out these biological fires, running from fire to fire, to try to keep them under control. We have to find another way to approach this.”
More than 180 non-native species have gotten into the Lakes… and some of them have turned everything upside down. Long, slithering, blood-sucking parasites called sea lamprey were the first to get in. They slipped through a canal that connects the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes. Lamprey killed off most of the big predator fish in the Lakes.
Then… came the alewife. Since the lamprey had taken out the top predators… there was nothing to eat the invading alewives. In the film… biologist Jeff Schaeffer explains how the small fish took over the lakes.
“At that time over 90% of the fish biomass of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron was probably dominated by the exotic alewife. One of my colleagues refers to the Great Lakes at that time as alewife soup.”
Suddenly… there was a major stinking mess. Each spring, hundreds of millions of dead alewives washed up on shore and rotted. Not the best thing for tourism.
Filmmaker John Schmit says he was surprised to learn what happened to the lakes next.
“The funny thing about the Great Lakes is there’s Pacific salmon in them.”
Schmit says biologists brought in millions of salmon from the Northwest to control the alewives. The crazy thing is… it worked. In the film we see how a 4 billion dollar sport fishing industry was born. And the native fish of Lake Huron were pretty much forgotten about.
The salmon fishery boomed for decades. Until the alewives crashed in 2003.
Fisher Doug Niergarth says then… the salmon started starving.
“Two years ago we saw some monster salmon heads that were sitting on little dwarfed bodies. And it was the ugliest thing and rather nasty. Just skinny and withered away. It was the nastiest thing you ever done seen.”
The fishing industry started slipping away. Marinas just scraped by. Tackle shops and motels closed. People finally realized there was something wrong with the lakes.
John Schmit says he wanted to make this film to show how even the smallest invader could mess up everything… both the delicate balance of life in the lake and the people who fish it and depend on money from tourism.
“Lake Huron has been the most impacted by the newest invaders. My personal concern, my investment in the Great Lakes and making this documentary is for people to be aware of the kind of damage invasive species can do to these huge lake systems.”
He says his film Lake Invaders is an example of what invasive creatures can do… not just to Lake Huron… but any ecosystem.
A new Washington state law bans heavy metals in brakes and requires phasing out copper that's contributing to water pollution and harming fish. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
States are considering laws to phase out a material used in brake pads on cars and trucks. Lester Graham reports… it’s contributing to water pollution that’s affecting fish.
Transcript
States are considering laws to phase out a material used in brake pads on cars and trucks. Lester Graham reports… it’s contributing to water pollution that’s affecting fish.
There’s a fair amount of copper in brake pads. Every time you put on the brakes… some of brake pad and the copper in it is worn off. It ends up on the pavement and eventually is washed into a stream or lake. That’s been causing some concern in the state of Washington where too much copper is hurting the salmon. A new state law bans heavy metals in brakes and requires phasing out copper.
Curt Augustine is with the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. He says they worked with lawmakers and environmentalists to come up with the plan. Other states might adopt it.
“Bills have been introduced in California and Rhode Island and likely similar bills will end up in some of the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay states.”
The Washington law calls for brakes to contain no more than five percent copper by 2021 and then consider using even less in later years.
DNR hydrologist Jeff Green consults a high-resolution topographic map to figure out which sinkhole is ahead of him. The trees and grass that grow up around the sinkhole form a buffer, allowing water to soak into the soil and filtering any pollutants before it reaches the aquifer.(Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
DNR hydrologist Jeff Green placed a charcoal sampler, or "bug," in this spring before pouring dye in a sinkhole a mile away. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
Spring in the north is a time of melting snow and running water. It’s the best time of year for people who study underground water flows. Those underground rivers are important, especially where surface water easily drains into bedrock. It can quickly carry pollution long distances. Hydrologists try to map these underground rivers to help protect fragile ecosystems. As Stephanie Hemphill reports, the first step in making these maps is a process called dye tracing.
Transcript
Spring in the north is a time of melting snow and running water. It’s the best time of year for people who study underground water flows. Those underground rivers are important, especially where surface water easily drains into bedrock. It can quickly carry pollution long distances. Hydrologists try to map these underground rivers to help protect fragile ecosystems. As Stephanie Hemphill reports, the first step in making these maps is a process called dye tracing.
When the snow is melting in the woods and fields, Jeff Green wants to know where it’s going.
“We’re going to hike back to two springs.”
Green is a hydrologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and an expert in the limestone geology of Southeast Minnesota.
Green climbs a fence and splashes through a stream that’s flooding a pasture. The stream is bordered by a natural wall of limestone.
Melting snow seeps into the limestone. It runs down vertical cracks to bigger horizontal openings that look like miniature caves. Jeff Green calls these “conduits,” and some are three inches wide.
“You can imagine a pipe that big — water would move very fast, like we’re seeing. So these conduits are what we’re dye tracing.”
Green has traipsed out to this pasture to put what he calls a “bug” in a spring. The ‘bug’ is a small mesh bag about the size of a cellphone, packed with charcoal. The charcoal will capture a dye that he’ll pour into melting snow in a sinkhole a few miles away. He’ll do this in several different spots.
By tracing the paths of different colors of dye, he’ll learn the sources of the water that feeds each spring. That will help him make what he calls a springshed map.
We slog across a corn field that’s dotted with small groves of trees. They’re growing around miniature canyons, about 20 feet deep. Here, you can see how this honeycombed water highway works, and this is where Jeff Green will pour the first dye.
“This is a place where there was a conduit, an opening in the limestone.”
Green climbs down carefully into the crevasse.
“Listen! … All right!”
He’s found some running water.
“Water’s running right here. I don’t know where it’s going but it’s going someplace. So I’m going to try pouring dye here.”
He pours a cup or so of a bright red fluorescent dye into the snow.
Green marks the spot with a GPS unit. This is a place where surface water and groundwater meet.
“That snow-melt is surface water, it’s going into this sinkhole and it’s becoming groundwater as you’re listening to it.”
That means what happens here on the land directly affects the quality of the groundwater.
“In this case, it’s pretty good, you’ve got conservation tillage, lots of corn stalks left to keep the soil from eroding, and then you’ve got grass, permanent cover, around the sinkholes. So this is actually really good.”
There are wonderful trout streams around here. The map Green is making will help protect those streams by pinpointing the source of the water that feeds them.
In a day or two, Green will check the “bugs” he put in the springs, and find out exactly where the dye from this sinkhole went.
He usually finds water traveling one-to-three miles underground before it surfaces.
When the springshed map is finished, he’ll share it with local governments, farmers, and people who want to protect the water in this landscape.
For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.
Recent studies show about a third of all sea grasses have disappeared worldwide.(Photo courtesy of NOAA/Heather Dine)
The Gulf of Mexico is losing sea grass beds at an alarming rate. According to a new aerial survey, Mobile Bay has lost nearly 14-hundred acres of sea grass beds in the last few years. And as Tanya Ott reports, that could affect your dinner plate:
Transcript
The Gulf of Mexico is losing sea grass beds at an alarming rate. According to a new aerial survey, Mobile Bay has lost nearly 14-hundred acres of sea grass beds in the last few years. And as Tanya Ott reports, that could affect your dinner plate.
Americans love shrimp. And shrimp love sea grass beds. But as Tanya Ott reports sea grass beds are dying at an alarming rate.
Each American eats on average four pounds of shrimp a year. But a new aerial survey of the Gulf of Mexico finds the place where shrimp, crab and a lot of different fish find their food is disappearing. Scientists say agricultural runoff and sediment from development are killing off sea grass beds. Dauphin Island Sea Lab scientist Ken Heck says part of the problem is PR. Sea grass beds just are’t as sexy as some other ecosystems.
“Many people know about coral reefs and they know about tropical rain forests. But sea grass habitats are a bit under-loved and under-appreciated.”
Sea grass decline isn’t just a problem in the Gulf of Mexico. Heck is part of team doing a global sea grass census. He says worldwide a third of sea grass beds have disappeared.
Healthy Reef Systems May Be a Thing of The Past(Photo courtesy of Mikael Häggström)
Some scientists think we might be headed for a mass extinction event
in the oceans. When carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere,
a lot of that CO2 soaks into the oceans. That makes the water more
acidic. When the pH gets too low, it dissolves the skeletons of
animals like coral and mussels. Ann Dornfeld reports:
Transcript
** The story as originally broadcast incorrectly referred to the publication as “Natural Geoscience.” It should be “Nature Geoscience.”
Some scientists think we might be headed for a mass extinction event
in the oceans. When carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere,
a lot of that CO2 soaks into the oceans. That makes the water more
acidic. It can dissolve the skeletons of
animals like coral and mussels. Ann Dornfeld reports:
Fifty-five million years ago, a mass extinction happened when the
oceans became too acidic.
Richard Feely is a chemical oceanographer for the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. He says that today’s ocean acidification
is happening too quickly for many species to adjust.
“Over the last 200 years we’ve seen a 30-percent increase in acidity
of the oceans, and about six percent of that increase of acidity of
the oceans has been in the last 15 years.”
Researchers at the University of Bristol in England ran simulations of
the acidification processes 55 million years ago and today. They found
that acidification is happening ten times faster these days than it
did before the prehistoric mass extinction.
That could mean that if we don’t slow our release of CO2 into the
atmosphere, life in our oceans could crash within a century or two.
The study is published in the journal of Nature Geoscience.
Some suspect that in Copenhagen, rich countries might agree to pay poor countries to stop cutting forests.
(Photo by John J. Mosesso, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)
World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen,
Denmark next month to begin dealing with
global climate change. A firm treaty is
off the table for now, but one idea they’re
thinking through is to preserve forests
and have them absorb heat-trapping carbon
dioxide. Shawn Allee reports,
some scientists want all this forest talk
to include animals, not just trees:
Transcript
World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen,
Denmark next month to begin dealing with
global climate change. A firm treaty is
off the table for now, but one idea they’re
thinking through is to preserve forests
and have them absorb heat-trapping carbon
dioxide. Shawn Allee reports,
some scientists want all this forest talk
to include animals, not just trees:
Stuart Pimm is a biologist at Duke University. He says in Copenhagen, rich countries might agree to pay poor countries to stop cutting forests. Pimm says that’s great but not all forests are equal.
“Some forests have more carbon in them than others, and some forests have more species in them than others.”
Pimm and other biologists say carbon pricing alone might mean carbon-poor forests get cut – even if they’re home to lots of animal species. They want negotiators to somehow tweak any climate agreement.
“So we should be encouraging countries not to burn their forests, but we should encourage them not to burn the forests that are so biologically rich.”
Climate negotiators could take up Pimm’s idea next month in Copenhagen.
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.
The recovery of the European Bison is one of the recent successes in the fight against biodiversity loss. Despite some improvements, the UNEP report suggests efforts to address the loss of biodiversity need to be substantially strengthened.(Photo courtesy of Gil Wojciech, Polish Forest Research Institute, Poland)
