Fantastic Bloody Pigeon! (Or Hitchcock Nightmare)

Bloody pigeon (Photo: Wellcome Images/Scott Echols)

The Wellcome Trust presents an annual award for scientific imagery, and two of this year’s winners (above and below) caught my eye for the new ways in which they reveal the natural world.  Think of the one above as new insight into the cardiovascular system of living (and extinct) dinosaurs.  Or just a bloody pigeon.

Here’s how The Guardian‘s Nicola Davis describes it:

Open-beaked against a jet-black background, the image of a bird leaps forth, a frenzy of red-and-white squirming lines hinting at its form. It looks like a still from a Hitchcockian nightmare. “It looks so cross, sort of squawking at you,” says Catherine Draycott, head of Wellcome Images.

In fact, the eerie shot is the product of

An American Catfish En Route to Extinction

The last of a North American heritage (Photo: William Radke)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

It’s the simple declarative starkness of the sentence that catches the eye: “Extinction in the United States is predicted by 2018.” The species in question is the Yaqui catfish, which few Americans have ever heard of, much less seen (or eaten). It is, however, the only native catfish west of the Continental Divide, capable of growing up to 2 feet in length, with the familiar whiskery barbels drooping down from its chin and the flattened underside characteristic of the bottom-dwelling catfish way of life.

The remaining U.S. population, in and around the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Arizona, has been declining by 15 percent a year, according to a new study in the journal Biological Conservation. That decline has continued even as a cooperative restoration effort by federal officials and private landowners has proved highly successful at protecting other aquatic species there. But for the catfish, with population recruitment “essentially zero” (meaning no younger generations surviving), the co-authors conclude that the last few elderly individuals still hanging on represent the end of the species in this country.

Moreover, the threat of U.S. extinction coincides with trouble for the larger Yaqui catfish population in northern Mexico. Its extensive habitat running southwest from the border down to the Gulf of California is now experiencing the same damming of rivers and draining of aquifers that occurred earlier on the U.S. side of the border. Introduction of nonnative channel catfish throughout the Mexican range also threatens to hybridize the last remnants of the Yaqui catfish into oblivion.

The threat to survival of the species coincides with a move in the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress to “modernize” the Endangered Species Act, under which

The Hunger Gains: Calorie Restriction Shows Anti-Aging Benefits

Note: Almost 40 years ago (!) I wrote a piece on anti-aging research.  Part of it was about the fasting diet (aka severe calorie restriction or CR).  The article featured Roy Walford, a pioneer of that research at UCLA. Walford did not merely research CR, he also practiced it, and he looked emaciated to me. He later became part of the Biosphere 2 experiment of the early 1990s, which turned into a prolonged CR experiment for everyone. Walford came out of it with his health broken, and died in 2004 at 79, about normal life expectancy then. So I came to the latest research on CR with a lot of caveats in mind.

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

The idea that organisms can live longer, healthier lives by sharply reducing their calorie intake is not exactly new. Laboratory research has repeatedly demonstrated the anti-aging value of calorie restriction (or CR), in animals from nematodes to rats—with the implication that the same might be true for humans.

In practice though, permanently reducing calorie intake by 25 to 50 percent or more sounds to many like a way to extend life by making it not worth living. Researchers have also warned that what works for nematodes or rats may not work—and could even prove dangerous—in humans, by causing muscle or bone density loss, for example.

But now two new studies appear to move calorie restriction from the realm of wishful thinking to the brink of practical, and perhaps even tolerable, reality. Writing in Nature Communications, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the National Institute on Aging reported

Here’s an Eyeful About Why We Need Wildlife Sanctuaries

Two young tuskers play-jousting in the Corbett Tiger Reserve, Uttarakhand, India (Photo: Anuradha Marwah)

Wildlife refuges and sanctuaries are the best hope for many wildlife species in a world that is rapidly being overwhelmed by humans.  The Sanctuary Asia web site holds an annual photo contest and these are

How Nations Wreck their Natural World Heritage Sites

Aerial view of the Great Barrier Reef. (Photo: Michael Amendolia/Greenpeace)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

By any standard, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is one of the wonders of the blue planet, half the size of Texas and home to 400 types of coral, 1,500 fish, and 4,000 mollusks. When UNESCO named it a Natural World Heritage Site in 1981, it praised the reef not just for “superlative natural beauty above and below the water,” but also as “one of a few living structures visible from space.”

Since then, half the reef’s coral cover has died, a victim of bleaching, predatory starfish, cyclones, and human disturbance. You might expect its World Heritage status, marking it as one of the crown jewels of the Earth, would elicit a worldwide campaign to protect and conserve it. Instead, in the face of intense lobbying by an Australian government intent on avoiding embarrassment, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee declined in 2015 even to add the reef to its list of sites that are “in danger.”

That failure to make much difference to conservation may be more the rule than the exception for Natural World Heritage Sites, a new study

The Deadly Myth of Clean Coal

With Donald Trump promising to promote “clean coal,” this piece from 2008 is timely again. Profitable lies, like cats, seem to have multiple lives. Not coincidentally, much of China and Europe are both now struggling with heavy pollution due in large part to coal burning.

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

You have to hand it to the folks at R&R Partners. They’re the clever advertising agency that made its name luring legions of suckers to Las Vegas with an ad campaign built on the slogan “What happens here, stays here.” But R&R has now topped itself with its current ad campaign pairing two of the least compatible words in the English language: “Clean Coal.”

“Clean” is not a word that normally leaps to mind for a commodity some spoilsports associate with unsafe mines, mountaintop removal, acid rain, black lung, lung cancer, asthma, mercury contamination, and, of course, global warming. And yet the phrase “clean coal” now routinely turns up in political discourse, almost as if it were a reality.

The ads created by R&R tout coal as “an American resource.” In one Vegas-inflected version, Kool and the Gang sing “Ya-HOO!” as an electric wire gets plugged into a lump of coal and the narrator intones: “It’s the fuel that powers our way of life.” (“Celebrate good times, come on!”) A second ad predicts a future in which coal will generate power “with even lower emissions, including the capture and storage of CO₂. It’s a big challenge, but we’ve made a commitment, a commitment to clean.”

Well, they’ve made a commitment to advertising, anyway. 

Dollars for Duck Penises: Why Taxpayer-Funded Basic Science Matters

(Photo: Michal Cizek/Getty Images)

I’m re-publishing this piece from 2014 because it seems relevant to the current war on scientific research.

by Richard Conniff/Takepart.com

In 2009, a presidential wannabe named Bobby Jindal stood before the cameras to denounce the federal government for frivolous spending, and he got off what passes among politicians for a clever sound bite, targeting a $140 million science program to monitor volcanoes: “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.”

Jindal was apparently too young to remember the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980, which flattened a blast zone 19 miles out from the volcano, killed 57 people, and caused $2.7 billion in damage. (Oh, it happened in some place called Washington. Never mind.) Though he is governor of Louisiana, Jindal also seemed to be unaware that studying potential natural disasters is a good way to save lives and minimize destruction.

This is how it always seems to go with lamebrain politicians and the scientists struggling to understand the natural world. But nobody gets it worse than

In Beijing and Washington, A Breath of Foul Air

Airport ad for a way to breathe in Beijing. (Photo: Richard Conniff)

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

When friends cautioned me about Beijing’s notorious air pollution recently, ahead of my first visit there, I brushed it off. It was an old story, and having grown up in northern New Jersey in the era of unregulated industrial air pollution and open garbage burning on the Meadowlands, I figured I could handle it. But I began to have second thoughts on the flight in from the north, when we crossed a mountain ridge and the clear air turned instantly to dense smog. It was still 20 minutes to touchdown.

After a day or two in the city, I felt as if I had taken up cigarettes. Same burned-out feeling at the back of the throat, with bits of airborne grit catching on the epiglottis. Same clearing of the throat by soft coughing. It got worse over the weekend, when regulations limiting cars on the road don’t apply. Coming back into the city on a Sunday afternoon was like a slow apocalypse. The air was a filthy brownish gray, and pedestrians, many of them wearing white face masks, walked hunched over as if through a rainstorm. Buildings emerged ghostlike from the haze a half-mile ahead and vanished again behind.

But I was a novice. It turned out that this was a relatively normal winter day for Beijing, with the air quality index at just 269. That’s rated “very unhealthy” by the World Health Organization, and many times worse than the maximum safe exposure level, but nowhere near those headline-making, sky-darkening days when the Beijing index has topped 700.

Back in New Jersey, the air quality index was generally under 50, and it reminded me how lucky we are to have relatively strong laws and regulations to protect our air. These are the same protections that President Donald J. Trump loudly promised during his campaign to undo on his first day in office. Indeed, the new Republican-dominated House of Representatives this month passed a Regulatory Accountability Act, which will give the new president power to roll back an array of governmental regulations, including 50 years of environmental protections — with as little public notice as possible. It could undermine even the Clean Air Act of 1972 and for the first time oblige regulators to put corporate profits ahead of public health.

The disingenuous logic of this attack

The Master of Nonsense and Wonder

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal

‘The first owl to lodge in my memory,” the naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough confesses in his foreword to “The Natural History of Edward Lear” by Robert McCracken Peck, wasn’t the short-eared owl, say, or any of Britain’s four other native species. It “was the one that went to the sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.” Like so many other children, Mr. Attenborough was enchanted not just by Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” but also by his Jumblies on their perilous voyage to “the hills of the Chankly Bore” and by “the Dong with the luminous nose” wandering by night “over the great Gromboolian plain.”

Lear, born in 1812, the 21st child of a London stockbroker and his unfortunate wife, became the great 19th-century master of nonsense and wonder. We tend to remember him first for the ingenious loopiness of his language—an imagined world of “torrible zones” and “runcible spoons” and, of course, that “ombliferous person of Crete” who “dressed in a sack, / Spickle-speckled with black.” Lear’s fanciful line drawings—the man “on whose nose, / Most birds of the air could repose,” or the old lady “whose folly / Induced her to sit in a holly”—take a whimsical second place.

Lear, however, saw himself first as an artist. Raised by his doting eldest sister after their parents suffered a financial reversal, he began drawing “for bread and cheese” at the age of 15, making what he called “morbid disease drawings for hospitals and certain doctors of physic.” His sister seems wisely to have steered him to plants and animals instead, and he flourished at it. Mr. Peck, a historian of scientific discovery and art at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, ranks him “among the best natural history painters of all time,” though that phase of his career lasted barely a decade.

The opening of the London Zoo in 1828 gave the young artist ample material to work with. The zoo was then an exclusive, members-only society, and Mr. Peck notes that it denied access to an older and far better known artist and animal dealer named William Swainson. But Lear was adept enough as a bird artist, and sufficiently socially acceptable, that the zoo allowed him at the age of 18 to make paintings in its menagerie for what would become his first book. Surprisingly, for those who know Lear only as a children’s author, it bore the title “Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots.”

This project soon immersed Lear in the work of finding subscribers and learning to draw backward on rented slabs of limestone. He called lithography “this lampblack & grease work,” and the economics of the enterprise obliged him to erase each precious image after just 175 prints and start over again. But it was a labor of love. He wrote to a friend that “the whole of my exalted & delightful upper tenement” is overflowing with sketches and lithographs, “and for the last 12 months I have so moved—thought—looked at,—& existed among Parrots—that should any transmigration take place at my decease I am sure my soul would be very uncomfortable in anything but one of the Psittacidae.”

Sorry, Cat Lovers, TNR Simply Does Not Work

“Cat eating a rabbit” (Photo: Eddy Van 3000)

While this site is on a bit of a hiatus, I am re-posting this 2014 piece on the feral cat fight.

by Richard Conniff

Various estimates say that anywhere from 20 to 100 million feral cats roam the United States. Together with pet cats that are allowed to wander free, they kill billions of birds, mammals, and other animals every year.

Every time I write about the need to deal with this rapidly worsening problem, certain readers argue for a method called TNR, which stands for “trap, neuter, and release,” or sometimes “trap, neuter, and return.” So let’s take a look at how it might work.

TNR is an idea with enormous appeal for many animal welfare organizations, because it means cat shelters no longer have to euthanize unwanted cats: They just neuter and immunize them, then ship them back out into the world. It’s a way to avoid the deeply dispiriting business of putting animals down, not to mention the expense of feeding and caring for the animals during the usual waiting period for a possible adoption. And it enables animal shelters to put on a happier face for donors: “We’re a shelter, not a slaughterhouse.”

TNR advocates generally cite a handful of studies as evidence that this method works. The pick of the litter is a 2003 study that supporters say shows TNR enabled the University of Central Florida to reduce the feral cat population on its Orlando campus by 66 percent. On closer examination, though, what that study showed was that