Trophy Fish–And A Chain of Species Destruction at Yellowstone

Stocked fish are often home-wreckers for native species

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

Recreational fishing is a pastime in which people have come to expect the fish they want in the places they happen to want them. That is, they want their fish stocked and ready to catch, even in places those fish never originally lived. This practice can seem harmless, or even beneficial. But the introduction of one “beneficial” species in Yellowstone National Park suggests how rejiggering the natural world for human convenience can cause ecological disaster for almost everything else.

All it took at Yellowstone Lake, the 136-square-mile centerpiece of the park, was the introduction of lake trout, a fish originally found mainly in the Northeast and Canada and beloved by anglers everywhere. The federal government had transplanted them to smaller lakes within the park in the 1890s, a time when adding fish to remote fishless lakes seemed like a smart way to spread around America’s amazing abundance. But a century later, in 1994, the introduced species turned up in Yellowstone Lake, which was already celebrated for its own native Yellowstone cutthroat trout. Park managers theorized that an angler illegally introduced the fish, either by accident or in the misguided belief that it would improve a big lake with plenty of potential for further sportfishing. One result is that anglers now catch 20,000 lake trout a year there.

But the lake trout went on to gorge on the young of the cutthroat trout, and the population of the native subspecies

Sniffing Out the Deadliest Disease on Earth

Anopheles mosquito taking a blood meal.

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

One of the more disturbing things about parasites is their ability to manipulate the behavior of a host, sometimes to suicidal extremes.  The classic example is the liver fluke. It infects an ant as an intermediate host, then manipulates the ant to climb onto a blade of grass, where it is likelier to get eaten by the parasite’s definitive host, a cow or other grazing ruminant.

Over the past few years, scientists have come to recognize that something similar happens to humans under the influence of one of the deadliest pathogens in our history as a species:  The human Plasmodium parasite not only causes malaria, but also makes victims more attractive to mosquitoes, which then transmit the parasite to other victims with every bite. New research suggests, however, that this manipulative behavior could

50 Years After Silent Spring, Herbicides Are Everywhere

In a stand of phramites (Photo: Michigan Technological University )

by Richard Conniff/Takepart.com

As I write this, I’m looking out at a salt marsh that requires regular spraying with the herbicide glyphosate (sold by Monsanto as Roundup) to keep it from being smothered under dense, eight-foot-high stands of an invasive grass called phragmites. At a nearby lake where I’m a member of a rowing club, the aquatic vegetation is now so dense that it’s being treated with another herbicide called flumioxazin. And along the roads back and forth, even more herbicides get applied, to keep down weedy vegetation along the edges.

More than 50 years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring first raised the alarm about their uncontrolled use, herbicides are everywhere in North American life. Use of glyphosate alone has increased 15-fold since the introduction of genetically modified Roundup Ready crops in the 1990s. In 2014, that worked out to 250 million pounds of the stuff—eight-tenths of a pound for every acre of U.S. cropland. And it’s not just about agriculture.

A new study in the Journal of Applied Ecology attempts for the first time to add up herbicide use on North American wildlands. “The numbers are much less than those for croplands, but they are astonishing,” said lead author Viktoria Wagner, a plant ecologist at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. She and her coauthors found reliable information on just 1.2 million acres of wildlands, a fraction of the U.S. government’s 640 million acres of parks, forests, refuges, and rangelands. But in a single year, that sample was sprayed with

Animal Music Monday: “Cantus Arcticus”

This is a good one to listen to at dawn, with your coffee. It’s also known as “Concerto for Birds and Orchestra.”  It’s a classical piece, about 16 minutes long.  Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote it in 1972. It features the calling of birds that Rautavaara taped around the Arctic Circle and in the marshlands

Yes, You Can Restore Rivers with Wildlife in Mind

Ran across this brief video in the course of some research. It’s short, and worth a look. I’ll be back with more on this topic soon.

 

The Broken Promise of Ecological Restoration

Fake herons stand by the concrete-lined Los Angeles River–a candidate for restoration to its natural state. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Not long ago in the New Jersey Meadowlands, a private company took a 235-acre chunk out of an existing 587-acre protected area and turned it into a “mitigation bank.” The company running the deal paid $6 million for a lease and $25 million for restoration work, altogether about $132,000 an acre. The work involved removing tall, dense stands of phragmites (an invasive grass), knocking down berms along the Hackensack River, cleaning up contaminated soil, and replanting with native species. The idea was to create a bank of mitigation credits for sale at a profit to developers wanting to fill wetlands elsewhere.

The project did not create a single new acre of wetlands. While it did restore stands of spartina grass and other native species, says Erik Kiviat, an ecologist with the conservation nonprofit Hudsonia Ltd., the restoration effort also turned the habitat of a rare plant into an equipment parking lot, killed the last remnant of bluejoint grass wet meadow in the region, and destroyed what had been the state’s only known habitat for a globally rare invertebrate, Mattox’s clam shrimp. Moreover, the mitigation credits for this work require the company to monitor the restored acreage for just 15 years. After that, almost anything can happen. But the wetlands being filled thanks to mitigation credits will remain filled forever.

In the public imagination, there’s always been something tantalizing about the idea that we can restore trashed ecosystems, or—as Joni Mitchell never put it—take a parking lot and put up paradise. But the reality is that too often, ecological restoration projects

Don’t Look Now, But You’re Probably Swimming With Dinosaurs

Richard Conniff and hostile friend.

The other night, I was out working on the dunes near my house on Long Island Sound when I noticed strange widespread footprints, with a tail mark slashing back and forth down the middle.  It mystified me for a moment, and I stopped what I was doing to follow the track down to where it started in a creek coming out of the salt marsh.

Then I remembered.

It’s June. The snapping turtles are emerging from the water to lay their eggs. There was a second trail 10 feet away from the first, presumably where Big Mama headed back to the creek after covering her nest. I didn’t hunt for the nest itself. The 35 or so eggs laid by a typical snapping turtle need to incubate until they hatch in early August. They’ll have enough trouble till then avoiding careless beachgoers and hungry raccoons and foxes.

A few years ago, I showed a British visitor a big female snapping turtle wandering on this exact spot, and his eyes fell out of his head. The Brit was the guy who produces the TV series River Monsters. So you’d figure he’d be a little jaded. But

Attack of the Killer Journalists

Jan Mol and friend (Photo: Richard Conniff)

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

In the languid news week after Christmas, hungry media outlets swarmed with gnashing teeth over a report of piranhas attacking swimmers on a river in Argentina.  “Massive Piranha Attack ,“ cried The New York Post.  “70 Christmas Day Bathers Are Savaged,” added The (UK) Daily Mail, promising “the truth about the fish with a bite more powerful than a T-rex.”

Otherwise semi-sober outlets took a happy holiday from facts.  Discovery News attributed the “feeding frenzy” to “the Palometa jack (Trachinotus goodei), a species of piranha.” Readers may have been impressed by the use of the scientific name, unless they happened to recall that jacks are saltwater fish, unrelated to piranhas, and in any case not known to visit the site of the incident, 190 miles upriver from Buenos Aires.

But piranhas, or piranha-like entities, have always been among our favorite objects for sheer sputtering nonsense.  Theodore Roosevelt indulged, on a 1913 expedition in South America, glorying in the notion that piranhas were “the most ferocious fish in the world.”  And the “Piranha” movie franchise has repeatedly taken it to the bank, most recently with 2012’s “Piranha 3DD,” in which, if we can believe the plot summary on IMDB, “the piranha in Shelby’s vagina bites Josh’s penis, forcing him to wrestle with it round the room before finally having to chop the organ off with a knife.”

Good gracious, this is an awful lot for piranhas to live up to and, predictably, they disappoint.   Over the years, I have gone out of my way to test the colorful mythology of the ferocious piranha. At the Dallas Aquarium, for instance, I once climbed into a tank of hungry red-bellied piranhas. (They fled to the opposite corner.) In the Peruvian Amazon, I stood waist-deep in the Rio Napo while catching and releasing piranhas on a hook-and-line. (The nibbles were strictly of the usual kind.) In the flooded grasslands of Venezuela, I drove around tossing a chicken carcass into various bodies of water to time how long it took for the flesh-maddened swarms to strip it to feathers. (There was enough chicken left at the end of the day to feed a family of four.)

The point of this exercise, recounted in my book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time, was that piranhas do that swarming, blood-crazed, flesh-ripping thing only in