The EPA report says the findings of many studies raise particular concerns about the health risks to children. (Photo courtesy of Stephen Cummings)
A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency links health problems to flame retardants. Lester Graham reports the EPA finds children are most at risk.
Transcript
A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency links health problems to flame retardants. Lester Graham reports the EPA finds children are most at risk.
Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, are flame retardant chemicals used in all kinds of household consumer products. Sofas, computers, babies’ funiture. The report finds kids are getting a higher dose of PBDEs. That’s bad because the chemicals have been linked to many different developmental and reproductive health problems.
Arlene Blum is a chemist at the University of California Berkeley. She says the report notes PBDEs migrate from foams and plastics into household dust.
“Eighty to ninety percent of the human dose is from dust. So, toddlers, you know, they crawl in the dust, put their hands in their mouths. So, that’s why toddlers have such a high level at such a vulnerable time.”
The EPA report says the findings of many studies raise particular concerns about the health risks to children.
The almost-finished tower awaits its new residents on the grounds of the Orono School District's nature center next to Lake Claussen. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
There’s one American bird that has an unusual habitat problem. Chimney Swifts have adapted in the past as humans encroached on their territory. But now changes in human behavior are presenting new problems for the birds. And some people are trying to help them adapt again. Stephanie Hemphill reports.
Transcript
There’s one American bird that has an unusual habitat problem. Chimney Swifts have adapted in the past as humans encroached on their territory. But now changes in human behavior are presenting new problems for the birds. And some people are trying to help them adapt again. Stephanie Hemphill reports.
In his dad’s window-and-door warehouse in the Minneapolis suburbs, Derek Meyer is supervising the boys in his scout troop as they build a wooden tower for Chimney Swifts.
They’re using rough plywood to build a narrow box twelve feet high with an opening about a foot square.
Derek is doing this project to earn the rank of Eagle Scout. In the process, he’s learned a few things about the lives of Chimney Swifts.
“They originally lived in hollow trees but when the settlers from Europe came over they started destroying the trees, so they decided to live in the chimneys, and then people started putting wire over their chimneys, so over the last 40 years they’ve lost half of their population.”
Not just wire, but rain caps and other devices to keep moisture and critters out of chimneys.
The new home these boys are building for Chimney Swifts is destined for the nature center next to a nearby school. The school district was planning to tear down an old brick chimney as part of a remodeling project. Rebecca Field found out about that, and she tried to stop it.
“I said, wait a minute, I’m sure there are Chimney Swifts in there and they’re really good birds because they eat about 2,000 insects a day, each of those birds. And their favorite insect is the mosquito.'”
Field is on the board of Audubon Minnesota, and she’d been watching the swifts hanging around the chimney in the evenings. Individually they look like fat cigars with wings, but when they get ready to swoop down into the chimney for the night, there are so many of them, they look like a funnel cloud.
“How they communicate I have no idea, how they put the brakes on when they dive into that chimney so quickly, it’s a mystery but it’s a fun thing to watch.”
In the end the school district decided to leave the chimney up.
So now, a few weeks later, and just in time for the Chimney Swifts to fly back up from the Amazon, the tower is standing on a concrete pad at the school’s nature center.
School naturalist Marleane Callaghan has already brought all her classes, grades three-through-five, to check it out.
“We’ve talked about the bird, what it looks like, the dimension of it, I’ve invited them to come back with their parents to watch in the school parking lot in the evening up at the high school where they’ve left the chimney, and then to walk on down, to be able to identify them.”
This project is part of an effort by Audubon groups all over the country to raise awareness of Chimney Swifts and their need for homes.
In Minnesota, project director Ron Windingstad wants to convince homeowners to make existing chimneys more welcoming. He says people can take the caps off their chimneys during the summer, or just raise them high enough so the birds can fly in from the sides.
Soon these school kids will be able to see the amazing acrobatics of the Chimney Swifts. Windingstad says they hardly ever stop flying, from morning til night. They’ll even sip water and take a bath in a nearby pond, without stopping.
“They’ll scoop down, lower their bill, and fly across it and drink in the water. They’ll use some of these shrubs around here to break off little twigs about the size of a wooden matchstick or toothpick actually, and use that to build their nests, and they do that while flying as well. They are marvelous creatures.”
For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.
Researchers find, for example, being a green shopper might lead to some not so green behavior. (Photo courtesy of USDA)
We might think it’s virtuous to
buy things that are environmentally-
friendly: recycled paper saves trees,
natural cleaners cause less pollution.
But new research finds that when we’re
good, we sometimes use that to excuse
being bad. Julie Grant reports:
Transcript
We might think it’s virtuous to buy things that are environmentally-friendly: recycled paper saves trees, natural cleaners cause less pollution. But new research finds that when we’re good, we sometimes use that to excuse being bad. Julie Grant reports.
Nina Mazar wants more people to buy green products. She’s a marketing professor at the University of Toronto business school. And she thinks people should spend money on things that aren’t harmful to the environment.
But Mazar had some concerns. Research in other areas shows that if people do one thing they define as moral or virtuous – say, helping others or being politically-correct – they are more likely to transgress in other areas.
Mazar wanted to see if the same was true for buying green products.
“In our society, it seems at least, that green consumption is being moralized. And we thought, well, if it’s being moralized, maybe it can have some negative effects.”
That’s the key: if we moralize one behavior, Mazar says, we’re more likely later to do something negative.
So, first they did a survey, and found that, yes, people believe that consumers who buy environmentally-friendly and organic products are more likely to be ethical, cooperative and altruistic.
Then they tested it. They gave money to two groups of college students – one group was asked to buy products in a regular grocery store, the other in a store with mostly green products.
Afterwards, Mazar and her team set up a computer game. The students could see how much money they were making as they played – and they could easily cheat . When the game was over, they were told to take the amount they’d won out of an envelope.
“And what we found was that people who purchased in the green store, as opposed to the conventional store, cheated more on that particular subsequent task, and they actually took out more money out of the envelope than they were supposed to. So not only did they cheat, they also stole money from us.”
If students were totally accurate, they could have won $2.07. Those who had purchased green products went home with $2.90 in their pockets.
Mazar says this finding about green consumption fits right in with the theory called moral regulation or licensing.
“Whenever we engage in virtuous behavior, whenever we had done a good deed, we get a boost in our moral self worth, which will license us further down the road to transgress.”
This has been studied for years in the opposite direction. People who do something bad subsequently do good things to cleanse themselves.
But researcher Sonya Sachdeva says lots of new evidence is coming in that moral cleansing works both ways. She’s a PhD student at Northwestern University. And says she noticed this in herself when she started taking the bus to school.
“And at first, when I would take the bus, it took forever and I just wasn’t used to it. But the fact that I thought that I was doing this really good thing made me feel morally licensed.”
Sachdeva says each person has different things that make them feel this way.
Everyone in the green consumption study was a college student. Sachdeva says they might not be used to buying green products, so they get a boost of self worth when they do. And then might feel morally licensed to transgress: to cheat and steal.
But she says people who buy green and organic products all the time might not get that same boost of self worth and so might not have the backslide. In the same way her attitude toward riding the bus has changed.
“But over time, now that I’ve been taking the bus regularly for the past couple of years, I no longer get that same kind of warm glow feeling, because I’m used to it and my reference point has changed.”
The researchers say there is something practical we can learn from this. If we want people to be more environmentally friendly, the message should not be that be that this will make us better, more virtuous people. But it’s simply what we should do.
The program is supposed to identify new viruses in animals before they spread to humans.
(Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
A new coalition wants to set up an
early warning system for diseases
that pass between animals and humans.
Samara Freemark reports
some research institutions and conservation
groups are launching the PREDICT program:
Transcript
A new coalition wants to set up an
early warning system for diseases
that pass between animals and humans.
Samara Freemark reports
some research institutions and conservation
groups are launching the PREDICT program:
Organizers hope the program will help prevent the spread of diseases like avian flu, ebola, and swine flu. PREDICT researchers will work in disease ‘hotspots’ overseas.
Program director Stephen Morse is an epidemiologist at Columbia University in New York. He says the program will identify new viruses in animals before they spread to humans.
“We don’t even know how may emerging viruses, let alone other infectious organisms there are out there in nature, but the number must be large.”
The PREDICT program will also create better global disease warning systems.
“This is really essential to our survival as well as something very important to understand if we want to be able to control infections in the future.”
Morse hopes the program will help governments stop local outbreaks before they become global pandemics.
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.
Some zoos have stopped keeping elephants, because they feel they can’t provide the best care for them any more.
(Photo by Lauren Humphries, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)
News of a zoo being investigated and fined has reignited the debate over keeping elephants in captivity. Rebecca Williams reports:
Transcript
News of a zoo being investigated and fined has reignited the debate over keeping elephants in captivity. Rebecca Williams reports:
It’s just been revealed that the Los Angeles Zoo was fined for the death of an elephant back in 2006. The zoo does not admit any wrongdoing.
But some people believe keeping elephants in zoos is wrong.
Suzanne Roy is with the group In Defense of Animals. She says elephants in captivity often have foot problems from standing on hard surfaces.
“It’s just incredible the level of suffering these elephants are put through before they eventually literally can’t stand on their own feet or legs anymore.”
But the Association of Zoos and Aquariums says its zoos have to meet high standards of care for elephants.
Paul Boyle is the group’s senior vice president for conservation.
“There are no people more committed to keeping elephants in good health and humor than those professionals at zoos across the country.”
Some zoos have stopped keeping elephants. Some, because they feel they can’t provide the best care for elephants any more.
Beluga Whales along the Canadian Atlantic coast developed tumors after they came in contact with chemicals from aluminum smelters. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)
A new report in the journal Nature Reviews
Cancer looks at cancer in wildlife. Mark
Brush reports, the disease in animals is
sometimes caused by pollution:
Transcript
A new report in the journal Nature Reviews
Cancer looks at cancer in wildlife. Mark
Brush reports, the disease in animals is
sometimes caused by pollution:
The authors of this paper looked at a lot of research on cancer in wild animals. Some of these studies linked the cancer cases to pollution.
Beluga Whales along the Canadian Atlantic coast developed tumors after they came in contact with chemicals from aluminum smelters. And some fish and clam species have developed cancers after being exposed to pollution.
Denise McAloose is a veterinarian with the Wildlife Conservation Society. She’s the lead author of the paper.
“People should care about cancer in wildlife because, especially in those cancers that are driven by environmental factors, those environmental factors affect not only the animals, but people as well.”
For example, the people who worked in those aluminum smelters also had higher rates of cancer.
She says more research into the link between pollution and cancer in animals needs to be done. Because looking at how the disease affects wildlife might help us treat or prevent cancer in people.
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.
A one day snapshot of wastewater from 96 cities and towns in Oregon shows that meth was found in many samples - not just larger urban areas (Photo courtesy of the journal Addiction)
A new report tracks illegal drug use by looking at wastewater. Rebecca Williams has more:
Transcript
A new report tracks illegal drug use by looking at wastewater. Rebecca Williams has more:
A lot of studies have found prescription drugs people take end up in wastewater, and now researchers are also tracking illegal drugs that way.
Caleb Banta-Green is the lead author of the report in the journal Addiction.
He studied a one day snapshot of wastewater from 96 cities and towns in Oregon.
He says cocaine and ecstasy were much more likely to be used in larger urban areas. But they found meth everywhere, even after a crackdown to make it harder to get the ingredients to make it.
“That sort of appetite or interest for methamphetamine has been built up in those rural areas and it looks like that use is continuing and it’s also being found in urban areas.”
He says it’s not clear if trace amounts of these drugs might eventually end up in drinking water. But previous studies indicate other kinds of legal drugs can be detected in sources of drinking water.
Now that surrogate moms raise the otters, the goal is for
the pups to never see or hear a human. To get up close to the pup, Ann had to put on a
Darth Vader costume of sorts. (Photo by Angela Hains)
An aquarium exhibit otter bonds with a pup, behind-the-scenes at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (Photo courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation)
A sea otter mother and pup pair. Animals that can rejoin the breeding population get top priority in the aquarium stranding program. (Photo by Doc White, courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation)
For animals in most zoos and
aquariums, the door from freedom
to captivity only swings one way.
But at the Monterey Bay Aquarium,
sea otters from its exhibits teach
wild sea otter orphans how to
survive in the ocean. Ann Dornfeld
has the story:
Transcript
For animals in most zoos and aquariums, the door from
freedom to captivity only swings one way. But at the
Monterey Bay Aquarium, sea otters from its exhibits teach
wild sea otter orphans how to survive in the ocean. Ann
Dornfeld has the story:
Rosa has her baby in a headlock. That’s actually how
southern sea otters hold their young.
“The pup is essentially unconscious – it’s very much
asleep, and Rosa is holding it as a female would in the
wild: she’s got it sort of teed off to her side with a paw
around its neck.”
Andy Johnson is the director of the Monterey Bay
Aquarium’s Sea Otter Research and Conservation
program.
By the end of the19th century, sea otters had been hunted
to extinction in some parts of the Pacific.
Lilian Carswell is with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
She says these days, pollution and disease are sea otters’
biggest threats. And she says a lot of other species
depend on otters’ survival.
“Sea otters are important for a number of reasons. One is
that they’re a top predator in the nearshore marine
ecosystem and they play an important role in structuring
what that ecosystem looks like.”
Hungry sea otters keep sea urchin populations in check.
When urchins overpopulate an area, they can mow down
entire kelp forests that provide food and shelter for
hundreds of species.
So to help conserve the otter population, Andy Johnson
and his team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium pair orphaned
pups from the wild with the female exhibit otters. The goal
is for the surrogate mother to not only care for the pup, but
also to teach it all the skills it will need to be released back
into the wild at about six months old.
A volunteer has just tossed some food into the pool where
Rosa and the orphaned pup are swimming. Rosa grabs
the live crab as the pup watches.
“Rosa’s quite skilled with those, so she’ll pretty much take
that apart in a few minutes. We’ll have to watch the pup
and see if the pup approaches the crab without getting
pinched. I have to admit it’s quite amusing to see these
young animals confronting these crabs ’cause these crabs
are pretty formidable on their own.”
Rosa ends up breaking off a leg for her adopted pup, who
decides the shell is too much work. Before long, though,
the pup will learn some of the same impressive skills that
adult sea otters have – like how to use tools to open clams
and sea urchins.
Before the surrogate program began, workers and
volunteers used to hand-rear these pups. They’d even
take the pups swimming in Monterey Bay to acclimate
them to their future home.
But that made the released otters expect food from
boaters and other people they encountered in the bay.
Now that surrogate moms raise the otters, the goal is for
the pups to never see or hear a human. We’ve been
watching the sea otters interact from a TV monitor near
the pool. To get up close to the pup, I have to put on a
Darth Vader costume of sorts – starting with a huge black
nylon poncho.
(sound of the poncho)
Ann: “This is a welding mask?”
Andy Johnson: “A very cheap welding mask.”
Rosa isn’t fooled. As I approach the pool, she shoots over
to see whether I have food.
(sound of the otter sniffing around)
Rosa was a rescued pup. She was hand-reared before the
surrogate program began. After she was released into
Monterey Bay, she had to be recaptured because she was
jumping on kayaks and divers.
“We found that with the sea otters, putting them with an
adult female in a fairly shallow pool for six months far
outweighs whatever we were doing trying to raise these
pups.”
Sea otter populations are recovering at a slow pace in
California. But this program is contributing to the
population.
Johnson says the apparent survival rate of the re-released
pups is now about as good as that of newly-weaned pups
in the wild. Some have even successfully raised their own
pups, using skills they picked up from an exhibit otter at
the aquarium.
The EPA report says the findings of many studies raise particular concerns about the health risks to children. (Photo courtesy of Stephen Cummings)
