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Safari Spotlight

Snakes in the Grass

Safari West is home to much more than the exotic animals in our collection. The preserve sits on 400-acres of pristine Mayacamas mountain habitat and our giraffes and cape buffalo wander within expansive oak woodlands. Stunning red and green manzanita, and smooth-trunked madrone dot the property, and cottonwoods shiver in the breeze, scattering fluffy seeds across our acreage. The property supports all manner of local wildlife as well, from the turkey vultures that sun on our south-facing slopes each morning, to the ever-present deer, to the river otters which seem to reappear from nowhere each autumn to fish and frolic in Watusi Lake.

Most of the time, our guests are excited by sightings of local fauna. Deer are always fun to spot in the wild and some of the less common animals, like the turtles, otters, hawks, and herons fascinate as well. Every so often we spot a true show-stopper like the occasional soaring bald eagle or stalking bobcat.

There are a few animals however, that when we encounter them, elicit not excitement, but fear and anxiety. If one slithers across the road in front of a truck, the usual responses range from squeals to screams. Sometimes, our guests want us to kill these sinuous creatures. On the whole, there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of love for snakes.

There are many, many species of snake to be found in this state, but today we’re only going to look at four. These are the four species most likely to appear on a safari tour and we’re going to talk about them because they’re amazing and beautiful creatures who deserve our admiration and respect rather than our revulsion and fear.

First up, let’s talk about garter snakes. There are several species of garter snake in our area, and telling them apart can be a little tricky (outside of color and pattern, there aren’t a whole lot of differentiating features on your average snake). For the most part, garter snakes are easy to identify based on three primary characteristics: they’re relatively small, they tend to be darkly colored, with long white or yellow striping, and they can move really, really fast.

In fact, many garter snake encounters wind up being little more than glimpses of black and yellow as the snake disappears through the grass beside a pond or stream. While not restricted to riverbanks, they are most frequently found in that kind of habitat and this probably has something to do with their preferred choice of prey. While they will eat virtually anything they can overpower, their small size means that for the most part, they stick to slugs, worms, frogs and tadpoles, and of course, the occasional rodent.

Garter snakes are among the least threatening of the local snake species. While they will certainly defend themselves if they feel threatened, their first response is always to flee the area.

In fact, that’s true of virtually all snake species including the next on our list, the California kingsnake. You may have heard the old snake-related rhyme, “red and yellow, kill a fellow. Red and black, venom lack.” There are about thirty different versions of this old mnemonic, but the message conveyed is the same throughout. If you’re looking at a red, black, and yellow banded snake, it’s probably either a kingsnake or a coral snake and which color borders which can tell you what kind. Kingsnakes are universally non-venomous while coral snakes are, and that wizened old rhyme came about so people would know whether or not what they were looking at had the capacity to kill them.

You can go ahead and disregard that rhyme if it’s something you’ve been living by. First of all, while it’s mostly true in the US, it is patently untrue south of the border and there are exceptions here as well. Secondly, one of the kingsnake species found in Sonoma County, completely lacks the red band and is a less flamboyant yellow-and-black-banded animal. Also, as a general rule, snakes in the wilderness are best appreciated at a distance and with respect, regardless of whether or not they could be venomous.

You are probably less likely to stumble across a kingsnake in the wild than the other snakes under discussion, if only because they’re very reclusive creatures. They like to hide out in the leaf litter or in rotting logs; generally staying out of sight as much as possible. If you do encounter one, you should know that alongside their absolutely beautiful coloration, the kingsnake is also relatively immune to rattlesnake venom. Care to venture why that might be?

Yes, kingsnakes are what we call “ophiophages,” meaning they eat other snakes, and rattlers are definitely on the menu. They accomplish this through constriction. Like the famous anaconda, the colorful kingsnake grabs its prey and wraps its strong body around it; squeezing it tightly enough to stop the flow of blood.

If you see a kingsnake out on safari with us or in your own backyard at home, leave it alone, it’s keeping the mice and rat population down, and helping keep the rattlers away at the same time.

Another local species that has a strange relationship to rattlesnakes is the ubiquitous gopher snake (If you, like me, grew up in the central valley, you may know them as bull snakes). The species looks very similar to our Northern Pacific rattlesnakes. They’re roughly similar in size and coloration and both present with patterned skin; something akin to brown or grey diamonds laid over tan. Further confusing the two species, the gopher snake will coil when threatened and flail its rattle-less tail while hissing. Being mistaken for a rattlesnake by a hungry predator can be a great way to stay alive. Unfortunately, exhibiting this rattlesnake-like behavior to startle and sometimes shovel-bearing humans get a lot of innocent gopher snakes killed.

Here’s a tip. If you see something that looks like it could be a rattler in the wild, there are a few key features to look for. First, while a gopher snake’s head will be wider that its neck, it won’t have the distinctive arrowhead shape of a rattlesnake’s. Second, rattlesnakes have very girthy, heavy bodies with a high, raised backbone, while gopher snakes remain relatively slender along their length. Third, and easiest to check: does it have a rattle? If it does, that’s definitely a rattlesnake.

Be aware that just like the tails of lizards, rattles can break off. Just because a snake doesn’t have a rattle doesn’t always mean it’s not a rattlesnake. Again, appreciating from a distance is the best bet for all parties.

This brings us to our last snake of the day, and the one most people are either excited or terrified to meet: the rattlesnake. While there are many species of rattlesnake slithering around these United States, only one can be found in Sonoma County. The Northern Pacific rattler is a beautiful animal with an amazing set of adaptations. Their famous (or infamous) patterned skin makes them difficult to see in the leaf litter, while the pits from which pit vipers get their name make it virtually impossible for their prey to hide. The pits in question allow the snake to detect body heat, which makes them superb nighttime hunters. Even on the blackest of nights, any warm-blooded animal will be in full view for the patient rattlesnake.

Once they’ve got a target, they simply need to strike and back away. Unlike the kingsnakes which have to restrain and constrict their dinner, the rattlesnake simply strikes once, injects a dose of its potent venom, and backs off. The animal (usually a rodent) will flee, but it’s only a matter of time before the venom kills it. In the meantime, the rattlesnake need only follow the scent of its victim. By the time it arrives, the struggle will be over and there’ll be nothing left to do but eat.

Quite often when our guides encounter a rattlesnake of the trail, the guests shriek and shift in their seats. It’s not uncommon to have somebody ask the guide to run the snake over (which of course they never do). It’s important to remember that while rattlesnakes can be very dangerous to us humans, it’s almost universally our fault when something goes wrong.

They have no interest in us. We’re too large to eat and so big and loud that we inevitably scare off anything the snake might be hunting. Anytime a rattler encounters a human, it wants one thing and one thing only: to get away. Rattlesnake bites are actually fairly uncommon and fatalities even more so (you’re five to six times more likely to be killed by lightning than by a snake bite). Well over half the time that humans are bit by rattlers, no venom is injected (again, why try to kill you? You’re too big to eat. They just want you to go away). It’s also interesting to note that the majority of rattlesnake bites happen to men, usually between the ages of 18 and 40, and about 80% of the time, alcohol is involved. Taking a look at those statistics, it’s not hard to imagine that most of those snakes made a good faith effort at getting away before they decided to strike at somebody.

All of this is to say that although snakes can be creepy and scary (and in one case, fairly dangerous), we really like and appreciate them here at Safari West. All of these species, from the garter snake on up, are playing a part in keeping a variety of pests under control. In turn, these snakes frequently become meals for a few other species we love to see; specifically our red-tailed hawks.

That said, we do have some snake-control policies in place here at Safari West. For example, we try to keep them away from the tent-camp and guest areas. The roving flock of guinea fowl are a big help in that regard. On the rare occasion that we do find a snake on the lower grounds, we simply collect them and relocate them up the hill into one of the large enclosures where they can do some good.

Next time you visit Safari West, keep an eye out. As we drive along the shores of Lake Watusi, or climb the slope of Christmas Hill, you may just see one of these unique and impressive reptiles hard at work. If you’re the squeamish type, try your best to fight that reaction, relax, and observe. You’ll be rewarded with a rare opportunity to watch an amazing player in the Sonoma County ecosystem in action.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Conservation Corner

Invest in the Nest

By: Jared Paddock

Something big is coming up this month and it’s kicking off on Wednesday the 17th. It’s called Invest in the Nest and it marks the very first collaboration between the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and that famous funder of everything from rock albums to the restoration of Neil Armstrong’s space suit. I’m talking of course about Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is a fairly recognizable company at this point, but the AZA is more likely to be unfamiliar. Essentially, the AZA is a national organization that serves as an accrediting board for zoos, aquariums, and wildlife preserves like Safari West.

The AZA is an association of zoological facilities that hold themselves to a higher level of care and quality and have a more noble aim than profit alone. Those of us in the AZA take pride in the fact that we provide the utmost in professional care for our animals and have as a primary mission, “the exhibition, conservation, and preservation of the earth’s fauna in an educational and scientific manner.” Essentially, it’s a grouping of facilities that want you to have an intimate experience with wildlife so that you’ll join us in trying to help conserve it.

That’s right, conservation is key in the AZA. So much so in fact that two years ago, the AZA instituted a program called AZA SAFE (Saving Animals From Extinction). AZA SAFE represents the realization that the zoos, aquariums, and wildlife parks scattered across this nation have a unique ability to interface with the public that other agencies can’t match. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, or the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) can declare the whooping crane endangered, but it’s the zoos and aquariums that can best introduce this delicate species to the public and direct grass-roots conservation action.

The AZA SAFE program started small, by looking at the long list of endangered species and selecting 10 to serve as AZA SAFE Signature Species. Once identified, we set to work rallying the communal force of all the AZA members with their animal care experts, veterinarians, biologists, conservationists, and animal lovers of every stripe. We also reach out to the vast array of related conservation agencies that our membership has developed relationships with over the years. AZA SAFE essentially crowd-sources the people and data needed to marshal action for the AZA SAFE species. It’s an amazing program.

Safari West is currently home to two of the ten AZA Safe species: the cheetah, of which three currently live at Safari West, and the western pond turtle, which is a native species found in several waterways around our vast preserve. We are directly involved in the work to improve the conservation status of both of these unique species. We also have a role to play with the AZA SAFE species that aren’t represented on property. For example, our gift gallery contains a Conservation Corner. Not only are the products sold there either of direct use in conservation action or produced by conservation agencies, but each fiscal quarter we dedicate 10% of the money brought in by the Conservation Corner toward a specific conservation aim. This quarter for instance, we are fundraising for the incredibly rare vaquita dolphin; perhaps the most endangered of the AZA SAFE signature species (there are likely less than 30 of them left).

One AZA SAFE species is about to be the center of the novel collaboration with Kickstarter that I mentioned at the outset: the African penguin. First of all, yes, there is such a thing as an African penguin. They’re found only along the coastlines of South Africa and Namibia. While they are not a species present at Safari West, they can be seen at the nearby California Academy of Sciences, as well as at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (in fact, some of their African penguins were involved in a “March of the penguins for science” march around the aquarium on Earth Day).

Over the last hundred years or so, African penguin populations have declined from somewhere near a million animals to an estimated 25,000 or less today. As with so many species, they have been negatively impacted by a variety of issues including climate change, food shortages, and catastrophic oil spills. One problem faced by the African penguins stands out as being fairly unique, and it has to do with penguin poop.

Historically, African penguins have bred in colonies on offshore islands. For thousands upon thousands of years, these penguins have been nesting, and pooping, on these islands. This penguin waste, called guano, piled up and piled up, eventually forming layers several feet in thickness. While this may sound pretty gross, it served a very valuable service and the penguins eventually came to rely on this ever-present layer of guano.

Each year, African penguins would burrow into the guano to build their nests. The burrows would provide them some protection from predators, and the insulating mass of guano worked as a highly effective insulator, keeping the penguin eggs and babies cool and comfortable. The problem arose when guano’s high value as a fertilizer was discovered. Suddenly, penguin poop became a valued commodity and was harvested on an industrial scale. This left the penguins to nest on exposed, barren ground. As a result of this, a disproportionate number of penguin nests now fail, with eggs and young lost to predators, the elements, and heat stress. The loss of the guano layer and the protection it affords seems to be the most influential factor contributing to the rapid decline of the African penguin.

All is not lost however, and this is where we begin to see the true value of the AZA SAFE program. The combined work of conservationists, scientists, and AZA facilities have led to the development of an artificial nest box. These artificial nests look a bit like little kennels and mimic the “hole-in-the-guano” dens preferred by the penguins. They’ve been carefully engineered to provide the necessary air circulation and spectacular insulation so critical for penguin nesting.

Already a great deal of work has gone into establishing a supply chain for these artificial nests and working out the logistics of how to place them where the penguins will use them. At the same time, several AZA facilities around the country continue to experiment with various prototypes to determine which models are most effective and popular among the penguins.

On May 17th, check in with AZA.org and kickstarter.com for details on what the next stage in this project entails and how you can be involved. Your support of this project will have a massive impact in the status of this vulnerable species, and since it’s Kickstarter, you can expect some awesome rewards as well.

On May 17th, join Safari West, AZA Safe, and our friend’s at Kickstarter and Invest in the Nest!

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Conservation Corner

Biomicry

By: Jared Paddock

Once upon a time the Wilbur and Orville Wright were hard at work inventing the airplane. Many of their fellow aviation pioneers imagined that controls for an airplane could and should work just like those of a carriage or ship. An aircraft, they imagined, should remain level and steady in the air while a rudder or some other structure directed its flight. This sounds strange to us now with the benefit of hindsight, but those early engineers were looking at the modes of transportation already mastered by man and taking their inspiration from that. The Wright brothers looked instead to the world of birds; specifically to how they flex their wingtips and bank—like you would on a bicycle—to enter a turn. This observation lead to “wing-warping” as a control mechanism. Though the technology has changed a bit over the years, the fact is that whether it’s in a small Cessna 152 or in the Boeing 787, every modern airplane shares that graceful, banking turn we’re so used to today.

What the Wright brothers did when they took inspiration from the birds was something we would now call biomimicry. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and developing a completely novel method of achieving flight, the brothers studied a naturally occurring predecessor for the technology they wished to develop. In the last decade or so, biomimicry has become an increasingly popular and structured philosophy centered around this simple idea: take inspiration from nature.

The driving logic of the biomimicry movement is quite compelling. The natural world is the oldest and most longest-running scientific experiment on the planet. When the Wright brothers became interested in aviation, humans had been tinkering with the idea for a handful of decades. Birds, bats, and insects on the other hand, had had it mastered for millennia. Whereas the brothers had rugged gliders and hot air balloons to look to in the library of human aerial accomplishments, the biological world offered up millions of species and a few millennia worth of proven mechanics and techniques.

There is a broader argument motivating the biomimicry movement as well; one which revolves around the idea of efficiency. The efficiency found in the natural world is orders of magnitude beyond that of even our most stellar designs. Consider how much fuel it takes for one of our jet planes to cross the ocean verses the energy consumed by a frigate bird making the same trip. Certainly, we can do things faster and on a larger scale than your average living thing, but we accomplish these feats at the cost of being horrendously wasteful. In order to accomplish what the frigate bird accomplishes with a room-temperature metabolism and an irregular food supply, we have to drill for crude oil and chemically refine it in massive quantities. Our most efficient turbines burn this refined fuel far less efficiently and with more detrimental and persistent waste than the digestive tract and muscular metabolism of that bird. And the bird’s fuel is unrefined fish!

Here’s a better example of the natural world versus the human one. Mollusks—like snails or abalone—are able to produce protective shells with a very low energy cost that are durable, non-toxic, and at the end of the day, imminently bio-degradable. The human analogs of this biotechnology typically involve plastics, which are far more energy intensive to produce and so non-biodegradable that their buildup in our oceans now impacts the food web at every level. The philosophy of biomimicry argues that to achieve a more sustainable global ecosystem, we need processes and policies that are derivative of, or at the very least, inspired by those that occur naturally.

This is where biomimicry begins to butt up against conservation. The world of conservation is, at it’s core, the work of building a sustainable world. On a fundamental level, biological processes tend to be inherently sustainable. Thanks to the complexities of the food web, all the waste material our bodies can’t make use of are excreted and capitalized upon by other organisms. This “one man’s trash” style system eventually comes full circle in the food chain we learn about tin elementary school.

Our waste (and eventually ourselves) become food for the decomposers, the bacteria, fungi, and worms. What they breakdown is put to use by the plants, which are eaten by the animals (including us), which are in their turn, food for the decomposers again. Ingenuity that takes its cues from these sustainable natural processes tends not to result in toxic waste, non-biodegradable detritus, and harmful pollution.

Now let’s take this abstract system into the world of the practical. There are several projects currently underway that exemplify the promise of biomimicry in design and engineering.

The classic story in the world of biomimicry comes from the world of Japanese bullet trains. The high-speed trains would compress air in front of them as they rocketed into tunnels. The result of this compression would be a deafening sonic-boom-like explosion at the far end of the tunnel as that air decompressed. Engineers tasked with resolving the issue wound up modeling a new nose for the train inspired by the king fisher bird, which dives into the water with nary a splash. The new nose did solve the booming problem. As a side-effect of adopting a design a few million years in the making, the trains also experienced a significant increase in fuel-efficiency and their top speed. This result garnered a great deal of attention and got a lot of people interested in the prospects of biomimicry.

Another promising prospect in development comes out of the study of whale flippers. If you’ve ever seen footage of humpback or gray whales, you may have noted how agile they are for their bulk. As it turns out, the scalloped leading edges on their flippers are the keys to this mobility. Those bumpy edges are an ingenious trick of anatomy that drastically reduces the force of drag on the flipper. This has implications for aviation and wind energy as well. An experimental wind farm was recently set up using turbine generators with scalloped blades. Not only were these turbines able to turn and generate power at much lower wind speeds, but with winds at 17 miles per hour, were able to produce nearly twice as much electricity as their non-scalloped contemporaries.

The really cool thing about this concept is that it isn’t limited to industrial labs and well-funded research facilities. Observing and learning from the natural world can be an everyday adventure, after all, the Wright brother’s insight into aircraft wings came from watching birds in their own backyard. In fact, here at Safari West, we’re doing a little biomimicry of our own.

Between our flamingo lagoons, the various ponds in the aviaries, and the koi-filled moat that surrounds lemur island, we have several very special water features on property. Like nearly all man-made water features, they require attention and filtration. Traditional pond-upkeep involves bulky mechanical filters, hazardous chemicals, and a lot of work. Filters become fouled and have to be replaced regularly and the chemicals designed to kill the algae and pathogens in a pond can also be harmful to the desirable plants and animals. Why is this system so complex and inefficient? Because most ponds comprise only one component of an ecosystem and we’re left trying to make up for those missing parts with machinery and medicines. If we can find ways to incorporate more of the naturally occurring ecosystem services, we can improve efficiency, reduce chemical use and waste, and make the whole thing more beautiful to boot.

A feature the Safari West ponds and lagoons I’ve mentioned have in common are flowing streams and at least two pools each. Water is pumped into an upstream pool and then flows down a stream-bed to a second pool. From there it is pumped back up to the top. When the water reaches the top, it burbles up through a gravel bed in which trillions of microscopic bacteria make their homes. These bacteria thrive on the waste of birds, fish, and decaying vegetation. They are the first stage of our biological filter and unlike manmade filters, they are microscopic and invisible.

Now these bacteria also produce waste, much of which is immediately consumed by other species of bacteria. At the end of the day, the final waste product of the various species is a phenomenal fertilizer. In an environment of standing water, this fertilizing food source is capitalized on by algae, which results in murky water and mats of green on every exposed surface. Oftentimes, the default solution to this problem is chemical, which kills the algae. The dead algae fall out of the water column and become food for those very same waste producing bacteria. So in a way, the chemicals used to kill the algae simply wind up turning that algae into food for more algae. The pond clears briefly and then, once the bacteria have had their meal, gets even murkier than it was before, creating an oftentimes escalating cycle of chemical intervention and frustration.

Another solution is to run all that bacteria filtered water down a meandering stream filled with plants. These plants compete with the algae for the same resource and thereby reduce the algal load and clarify the water. The end result is a beautiful water garden that takes advantage of natural processes to cycle waste through the system.

We currently have four such biofilters up and running at Safari West and the largest and newest of them is currently clearing the water at lemur island. If you’ve been to Safari West before, you’ve no doubt seen the massive koi who live in that circular lagoon. Come by again and you’ll be stunned. Although the biofilter is new and the plants and bacteria are still growing to fill their respective niches, the water has already cleared to the point you can see nearly to the bottom. The numerous red and gold koi school en masse around the lagoon, their supple shapes crisp and visible. Upstream, in the cascade coming from the freshly constructed upper lagoon, leggy water plants stretch toward the sun while their roots dip into the nutrient rich waters. It’s beautiful and growing more lush by the day. All of this accomplished, not with some novel chemical process, but simply by taking a page from nature’s book. Come visit us and see for yourself. The natural world is a beautiful thing, especially when you get out of the way and let it do what it already knows how to do best.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Safari Spotlight

Lesser Flamingo

Flamingos, in my opinion, are the most overlooked and under-appreciated of the exotic birds. Sure, they’re beautiful and flamboyantly colored, but we seem to have become accustomed to, and perhaps even bored of the creatures. Most zoos around the country have at least one flamingo species in their collection and they’re often positioned right near the entrance like long-necked bellhops welcoming you to the facility. I’ve visited lagoons across the country and while the birds have their fans, you’ll never find a crowd at the flamingos like you will around rhinos, giraffes, or monkeys. I blame the lawn ornaments. Those plastic lawn decorations, lurching haphazardly from overgrown hedges and patchy lawns, have cost real live flamingos much of their gravitas and appeal.

But the familiar and under-appreciated flamingo is hiding an unexpected and amazing secret; one that goes far deeper than their startling plumage. The most amazing thing about flamingos is this: they are extremophiles.

Flamingos, left to their own devices, don’t make their homes on lawns, or golf courses, or along the shores of pristine and idyllic ponds. They prefer to take advantage of the places the rest of us avoid. Like camels, penguins, and the giant tube worms that thrive near sulphur-spewing ocean vents, flamingos worldwide live their lives where most other creatures simply cannot. Though all flamingo species are pretty extreme, the smallest of them, the species we call the lesser flamingo, is likely the most extreme of all.

The lesser flamingos at Safari West live an easy lifestyle in a clean clear pond with a steady supply of food and free security. Their wild cousins on the other hand, live an altogether more unpredictable lifestyle and spend much of their lives flying from one water source to another in an unending quest for food. The wild birds must also contend with predators; primarily hyenas and Maribou storks (imagine a cross between a cartoon stork and a vulture and you’re halfway there). One way they defend themselves from these opportunistic hunters is by hanging out in large flocks. Safety in numbers is a tried and true technique for many prey species.

Flamingos of all species flock, and groups of several thousand are not uncommon. The lesser flamingos however take it to a whole new level. When they gather in the Great Rift Valley in east Africa (specifically in Lake Natron, their most famous watering hole), lesser flamingos can form super-flocks or up to a million and a half birds.

This is where the extremophile part comes in. Lake Natron is no average lake. You know, the kind with clear blue waters and ducks and fish and whatnot? Lake Natron is a chemical stew with water that is both salty and caustic. It also gets extremely hot; sometimes approaching temperatures of 140-degrees (that’s about the temperature in a medium-grilled steak). As you might imagine, not much lives in Natron. Fish are virtually non-existent and those that do survive there are hyper-specialist extremophiles like our flamingos and even so, they tend to stick to the clearer, cooler areas. Likewise, the lake is avoided by most other forms of life since it’s waters would be pretty poisonous to drink or bathe in (famously, some animals that die in the lake eventually wash up on shore, virtually fossilized by accreted calcium. If you Google Lake Natron you’ll be rewarded with some amazing photography and some controversy over how the photos are understood).

This lake—and others like it in the rift—are primarily home to a few varieties of cyanobacteria. Also called blue-green algae, these little organisms use the chemicals in the water and the light of the sun to survive. Despite the name, this blue-green algae is neither blue nor green but actually a vibrant red. When Natron experiences a algal bloom, the lake appears incredible, like a lake of lave, or if you’re feeling macabre, blood. Again, you can find some incredible images online. These blooms, in a lake with little competition for resources can be enormous. Enter our lesser flamingos. They are among the few creatures capable of braving the hostile environment of the lake to capitalize on this calorie-rich and abundant food supply.

How then, does a bird consume microscopic, free-floating algae? At this point you may be recalling a page from a high school biology text showing different kinds of bird beaks and their uses. The eagle has a hook-like beak for tearing into prey while the woodpecker has a straight and narrow one for drilling and collecting treats. What kind of beak is needed to survive on pond scum? Take a look at the flamingo beak and then think back to the last documentary you saw about humpback or gray whales. You might notice these very different creatures share a distinct and similar frown. There’s a spectacular reason for that. Both baleen whales and all flamingos survive by filter-feeding. In whales, there’s a comb-like structure inside the mouth called baleen. A similar feature can be found in the flamingo beak. The inside of a flamingo bill is lined with sturdy hair-like structures called lamellae. When they feed, flamingos use their tongue as a pump, sucking in algae rich water and pushing it back out through a filter of lamellae. This allows them to trap all those delicious little cyanobacteria while minimizing the amount of chemically intense water they swallow. This remarkably efficient filtering system allows each flamingo to consume 60 grams worth of invisibly tiny particles out of the water each day. When you tally up the totals for a flock of a million or more, it equates to approximately 60 tons (120,000 pounds) of cyanobacteria being filtered out of the lake each and every day the flamingos are in it.

There are about a million other reasons why flamingos in general, and lesser flamingos in particular, are some of the most amazing birds on the planet. For instance, the way they produce their remarkable color, the mystery of their one-legged posture, the wonder of their system for rearing young (look up “crop milk” some time). The point being that the next time you’re visiting Safari West or anywhere else that is home to a flock of flamingos, don’t overlook these impressive creatures. Not only are they capable of surviving in a super-saline, caustic environment on nothing but algae, they’re able to do it while looking fabulous. Show them some respect.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Conservation Corner

They Can’t All be Pandas

By: Brian Eberly

As a safari guide at Safari West, one of the questions I am most often asked is: what is my favorite animal? There are two ways to interpret this question: what’s my favorite animal within the Safari West collection or what is my favorite species in the world? I usually answer the latter and I tend to lead with, “whatever animal I most recently learned something incredible about.” This answer is both honest and useful in my tour as I then get to segue to an educational and entertaining topic. Recently, my follow-up to this answer has been, “Currently, my favorite species is one that lives at Safari West, but is not in our collection: the California ground squirrel.” If you are familiar with ground squirrels, it’s possible that you count yourself among those who do not like them. They aren’t the most popular of animals however, when you begin to learn about wildlife, ecosystems and conservation, native life forms like the ground squirrel turn out to be critically important. Many, if not most, of the more unpopular species of the world are actually pretty awesome when you examine their survival strategies or role in the ecosystem.

Ground squirrels are often loathed by farmers and ranchers as their burrows present hazards for livestock and they can be quite destructive to crops: eating vegetables and damaging trees by either girdling the base (eating the bark all the way around the tree) or burrowing beneath the tree and drying out roots. Be that as it may, one cannot deny how hardcore ground squirrels are when it comes to the ever-important challenge of avoiding predation. While ground squirrels make a pretty nice meal for most of the larger snakes in their range, they have adapted an effective defense against rattlesnakes. Rattlers do prey on squirrels, mostly the pups, but the adults are quite ready to handle a rattlesnake attack. First, unlike the babies, adult ground squirrels are resistant to rattlesnake venom (to varying degrees throughout their range). Rattlesnakes tend to bite prey and back off, allowing their venom time to work. In the case of a ground squirrel, that means dinner gets away. But waiting for a predator to attack you and then hoping your anti-venom-super-power does the job isn’t necessarily a great survival strategy, so these squirrels also offer up a very sophisticated defense. They basically get dangerously close to a rattler, stare it in the face like a bad movie protagonist daring a much larger opponent to a fight, and wave their tail back and forth. While they are waving said tail, they increase blood flow to it, thus heating it slightly. As rattlesnakes can perceive in infrared, they see the hot, swinging tail very clearly. Tail waving or tail flagging is still being studied, but it does appear to deter snake strikes. The most convincing idea on why this works is that the tail flagging sends a message. It seems to say “I see you. Look how fast I can move, I’m paying really close attention and if you strike I will probably dodge it.”

Another really amazing animal that inhabits the Safari West property and the surrounding mountains, is the grey fox. Full disclosure, I’ve only seen fox scat and tracks at Safari West, but I have seen them running about in the neighborhood just beyond our boundaries. Like the ground squirrel, foxes get a bad rap–preying on chickens, digging in garbage or compost, harassing house cats–but they are amazing (and in the spirit of learning, what the fox says does not involve “rings” or “dings” as the pop song suggests. Their vocalizations mostly sounds like a cross between a hacking cough and a bark). Grey foxes are the only canine in north or south American that can climb trees. They are reported to be able to climb limbless tree trunks dozens of feet off of the ground. For a fairly small animal–roughly the size of a typical house cat–they can jump fairly well too. I’ve seen one casually leap a six foot fence from a standstill (after I startled it out of my compost pile) as though it were hopping up a curb. Grey foxes are skilled hunters preying mostly on rodents and to a lesser degree lagomorphs (rabbits/hares/etc) but they are also omnivores and opportunistic, meaning they will eat what they can get when they can get it. In Sonoma County, this is evident during the times of year when manzanita and madrone trees are producing berries, because fox scat will often appear to be mostly berries.

Aside from being skilled hunters and climbers, having foxes around could potentially be a good thing if you are worried about Lyme disease. As mentioned earlier, foxes eat small rodents and small rodents are the primary vector for carrying the ticks that spread Lyme. While the science on this is far from settled, there does seem to be a negative correlation between fox population and Lyme disease (but remember that correlation is not causation). It stands to reason that more foxes means fewer rodents means less Lyme. Lyme disease notwithstanding, if you have a rodent problem, and don’t want to introduce a subsidised predator that would also kill a bunch of birds (ie an outdoor cat. See last month’s post) encouraging, or at least not discouraging your local fox population could help keep the rodent population at bay.

Another amazing animal that catches a bad rap is the turkey vulture. Their bald, wrinkly, bright red heads are usually enough for any casual observer to call them ugly. If aesthetics are your primary concern however, you may be happy to learn that turkey vultures have beautiful eggs. They are a delicate pale purplish color with brown blotches; like a naturally occurring Easter egg. Pretty eggs aside, turkey vultures are a super important part of the ecosystem. They are carrion eaters–meaning they eat dead things–hence the feather-free head. When your meal plan includes sticking your head inside a carcass, having bloody head feathers until your next bath is a little maladaptive. Eating dead animals makes these vultures nature’s cleaning crew, cleaning up the carcasses left when other animals die. While you might get past the gross factor of eating dead animals, another incredible adaptation turkey vultures have, which you might not let slide, is called urohidrosis, where they basically defecate/urinate on their feet so when the excrement evaporates, it cools them. I do encourage you to get past the gross factor, because they are quite elegant birds.  Watching them soar effortlessly on thermal updrafts is an incredible sight, especially considering they are usually about as long from wingtip to wingtip as I am from head to toe. Take a moment to enjoy their grace the next time you see them circling overhead or sunning their wings in the morning. They are not an omen of death, just a convenient and critical clean-up crew.

As captivated as one can be by often disenfranchised animals that are either gross, ugly or a nuisance, it is worth considering that public appreciation for species can be the difference between continued existence and extinction.

While many are aware of the plight of some of the iconic primates in Africa (ie chimpanzees and gorillas) there are many African primate species that are threatened or endangered that people never hear about.  Take the aye-aye, a small lemur (around five pounds) that has the oddest way of finding food and is quite odd looking as well.  While they have the primate standard five fingers per hand, two of these digits are highly specialized.  Their middle finger is different from the rest, and used to tap on trees.  The tapping works like sonar, allowing them to find insect larva inside the tree.  They then chew a hole in the tree and and use their extra long ring finger to fish the larva out of the hole. It’s pretty cool that they fill the same niche as woodpeckers.

These unique creatures tend to catch a bad rap from the locals. They are often considered to be omens of evil and are frequently killed on sight. It is however, worth pointing out that not all populations hold this negative belief and some consider the aye-aye a symbol of good luck.  All the same, they are listed as endangered by the IUCN, with a reduction in their population of over 50% in the last 30 years.  Their numbers are dropping for many reasons including habitat destruction and hunting as a nuisance animal (to protect crops) or for food (in some populations). The IUCN lists the practice of hunting due to the “evil omen” stigma as one of the influential factors in the species’ declining numbers.

Just like we have vulture species living around Safari West, there are vulture species that live in Africa too.  Unlike our turkey vultures (which are a species of least concern according to the IUCN), many of the African vulture species have declining populations and are listed as threatened. A large factor in the global decline of vultures is bioaccumulation; the process through which toxic substances build up in the animal faster than their bodies can clear it out. With vultures, this bioaccumulation tends to be of manmade toxins like pesticides and such.

Many African vultures also face an additional, well-known threat, but one not usually associated with vultures; the illegal ivory and rhino horn trades. The connection is that poachers dislike the way vultures will quickly smell a kill and circle, enmass, overhead, thus alerting anti-poaching patrols to a potential incident. To combat this natural alarm system, when rhino and elephant poachers are finished removing the horns or tusks, they will often poison the carcass. This kills the vultures that feed on it (and many other scavengers too). We hear about the plight of the rhinos and the elephants because they are large, charismatic species and their deaths hit us hard. Often ignored are the “gross”  and unpopular vultures.

To those involved in wildlife conservation, it is quite obvious the cute, charismatic, popular, or well known animals get the bulk of conservation attention.  Case in point, the average guest at Safari West tends to be super excited to see our plains zebras and are usually bummed if they happen to be hiding that day. Rarely do those same guests know what a waldrapp ibis is, let alone get excited to see one on tour.  This is unfortunate, since compared to the three quarters of a million or so zebras in the wild, the waldrapp ibis numbers just a couple of hundred. That’s like comparing the population of San Francisco (zebras) to the population of a small high school (waldrapp ibis).  The Waldrapp Ibis is a critically endangered species and it’s not that people don’t care, it’s just that most of them don’t even know that they exist in the first place.

Some species have been able to bridge that gap and move from disliked or obscure to well known and beloved. Orcas (ie killer whales), for example, were once a largely unknown and unpopular animal, now, ironically, people love them so much, they are being phased out of the aquariums and aquatic parks that initially introduced the species to the public. Pangolins–purported to be one of the most heavily poached species on earth–have seen a recent rise to fame (possibly due to viral social media attention), leading to an increase in public awareness of their plight. Even the grey wolf, once considered a grave threat to the ranching industry and nearly wiped out, has made a recovery and achieved increased popularity

The world of conservation is making great strides in trying to bring attention to the less famous or photogenic species of the world. We do our part at Safari West, but we’re far from alone. There is an incredible project called the Photo Ark, being put together by National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore. His project aims to give every animal species in captivity studio-quality treatment. He is roughly half way through photographing the 12,000 or so species living in zoos or other human-managed settings worldwide, giving equal treatment to every species, be it cute or ugly, charismatic or gross, popular or obscure. In a recent interview, Jartore said, “A mouse is every bit as glorious as an elephant, and a tiger beetle is every bit as big and important as a tiger.” Just because animals are annoying or unpopular, does not mean they are not a wonderful part of our world with something amazing to share.  They can’t all be lovable, iconic species and while I do not want to live in a world without elephants, lions, pandas or rhinos, it would be a shame if those species were the only ones we work to conserve.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Conservation Corner

In Your Own Backyard

By: Brian Eberly

Conservation is a critical part of what we do at Safari West.  As a tour guide, I talk a lot (probably too much) about conservation. I am also very aware of the massive scope of wildlife conservation and how it can either be too big or too sad for most people to remember, let alone incorporate into their day-to-day lives. Realistically, we can’t all quit our jobs and move to Africa to defend elephants from poachers. So while it is really important for the general public to be aware of the plight of our iconic (and not so iconic) African species, we wanted to highlight today several projects or movements that one might be able to fold into one’s lifestyle which will have a direct impact on wildlife conservation and do not require uprooting to Mozambique.

Clean Oceans

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has an entire program dedicated to reducing the amount of trash that ends up in the oceans. While I could fill this post describing why trash-in-the-ocean is a bad thing (degrading habitats, killing sea-life, and introducing non-native species), I think it more constructive to focus here on small lifestyle changes that help keep these waters clean. The above links offer a comprehensive outline of ocean pollution.

NOAA reports that the largest category of land-based ocean pollution is food and beverage containers. To curtail this problem they have partnered with Clean Water Action on the ReThink Disposablescampaign, asking people reduce the amount of single-use products they purchase/use. Reducing the amount of plastic bags, soda bottles, food containers and other such items stops this pollution at the source. You might be the most vigilant recycler but once your bins go curbside, you are no longer in control. Anything from industrial irresponsibility to neighborhood teenage pranksters can undermine your attempts at social responsibility. Remember, there are two other “R’s” before you get to Recycle, Reduce and Reuse, in that order. If you don’t buy it, it won’t get made and you don’t need to discard it. While by no means exhaustive, here is a manageable list of things you can do to help:

Get reusable cloth bags, keep them in your car and bring them everywhere you go.

Bring your own “doggie bag” containers when you go to a restaurant, so you can bring home your leftover linguine without styrofoam on the side.

Get reusable produce bags for your lettuce and apples or wash and reuse the plastic ones.

Bring your own cup to the café; not only will you be reducing waste, but many coffee businesses give a little discount when you bring your own cup. (You can even get one with an ironic saying on it so you can be more of a hipster). According to Clean Water Action, the average to-go coffee cup is only used for 12 minutes.

Keep a set of reusable flatware with you, so you don’t need a plastic fork, knife, or spoon

Skip the straw (or get a reusable one and keep it with your reusable flatware)

Use a refillable water bottle (this saves money too).

Safari West is taking many steps to help reduce the amount of single-use items we generate: our restaurant and deli are working to eliminate condiment packets, we have increased the price of bottled water to discourage staff and guests from purchasing them.  We sell reusable flatware, straws and water bottles in the gift shop. Check out the ReThink Disposable website for more ideas, info, and to take the pledge.

Bird Safety

I began this post by stating that we would focus on conservation topics close-to-home, but clean oceans can seem as removed from some of us as the Serengeti. Luckily nothing is closer to home than our actual houses and some simple household adjustments can have some positive impacts on wildlife. According to the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), 988 million birds are killed each year in the United States by colliding with windows. That is nearly a billion (with a “b”). Ironically, a nature lover is probably someone who has a lot of windows in their home for natural lighting. These glass panels are great for both energy use reduction and from an aesthetic perspective but the more windows a building has, and the larger the windows are, the more likely that a bird will think they can fly right through it and…THUMP, feathers everywhere!

Fortunately, one does not need to completely give up their beautiful views to save some local birds. There is a trade-off between window obstruction and cost. For just a few dollars, one can purchase simple decals that stick on a window, partially obscuring the glass and deterring birds. Apart from this simple step, bird-proofing can become complicated and/or expensive. Bearing aesthetics in mind, more appealing modifications can include anything from simple string-like curtains and textured decals to the more elaborate specially textured glass designed to prevent bird strikes. The general idea here is to enable birds to see your windows so they don’t die by flying into them. To help, the ABC has a specific directory with different deterrents that have been shown effective in reducing bird-window collisions.

Another issue championed by the ABC and the National Audubon Society involves outdoor cats. One of my few marital disputes concerns whether a theoretical pet cat would be indoor or outdoor. As both ABC and the Audubon Society point out, domestic cats kill between 1-4 billion birds each year in the USA.  I’m very immobile on the no-outdoor-cat side while my wife thinks it is cruel to keep a cat inside. Therefore we have no cats. You might love your cats, but an outdoor cat is a well-fed predator killing a lot of birds every year. Thus, other steps to making your home more bird-friendly are to rethink getting a cat, keep your existing cat inside, or consider a way to make your cat bad at hunting. Anecdotally, I have had experience with cats learning how to walk so a bell-collar doesn’t make any sound. There are other options, however, for the cat and bird lovers alike. Here an avian ecologist describes an effective method for reducing her cat’s hunting abilities.

Backyard Wildlife

Not all acts of conservation are as reactionary as the topics discussed above. As we come into the Spring season and start thinking about developing front and back yards again it might be nice to know a couple of extra ways to contribute to your environment. When one pictures local wildlife, they often imagine a large, iconic animal posing in front of a backdrop of pristine wilderness. While these iconic settings certainly exist, most of us could be encountering some amazing critters on a daily basis in our own urbanized environment. If, for instance, you take a moment to really consider your yard you may realize that it is not as isolated (or somewhat mundane) as you previously thought.

Urban and suburban yards host dynamic ecosystems easily overlooked by “nature” enthusiasts. For example, I am lucky enough to live in a small pocket of habit for the elusive red bellied newt (Taricha rivularis). These slender amphibians come out after a rain and amble around the leaf litter only occasionally stopping to show off their bright red bellies (informing me how poisonous they are in case I was considering eating one).  The emergent newts are a seasonal, weather-dependant event at my house and I get as excited about them as I would at seeing bald eagle or a mountain lion.  If you don’t happen to live in the country as I do, and are more urban, worry not, you can still find wonder in the creatures that call your yard home.  It doesn’t matter if your yard is a twenty acre pasture or a window-box on a balcony, there will be animals there.  And if you do it right you can encourage all sorts of wildlife to move in, which may be fun for you but it is even better for the animals.

Having a wildlife friendly garden/yard can be readily accomplished by taking a few easy steps when planning your area.  The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) has a Garden for Wildlife program offering information on how to create a wildlife-friendly garden and will even certify your garden as an official “Wildlife Habitat”. According to the NWF, the four factors to encouraging animals to move into your yard are Food, Water, Cover, and a place for animals to raise their Young.

Obviously nothing will move into your yard if there isn’t anything for it to eat, but this doesn’t necessarily require putting up a bird-feeder. Planting native plants provides a food source of nectar when in bloom and fighting the urge to “deadhead” flowers that have passed their prime leaves the seeds as a meal for a variety of animals.  Even dead trees and logs can invite insects as well as allow fungi and plants to grow, which in turn feed animals.

Of course we all need water to live, so NWF recommends having at least one source of fresh, clean water.  While this could be an elaborate pond or water garden, a simple bird-bath will give a place for birds to drink and clean their feathers. It will also provide drinkable water for the other animals too.  If you have space for a more natural water feature, go for it! Many amphibians, insects and reptiles need water for part or all of their life cycle.

Most animals don’t need a house, per se, but most of them need some form of shelter.  Shrubs can serve as a multipurpose place to get out the sun or rain and also to hide to avoid predators or help sneak up on smaller prey. Other forms of cover could be a rock pile, a wooded area, a pond, roosting boxes, or a meadow.

Lastly, animals often seek out places to raise their young, so a wildlife-friend garden/yard should strive to offer that. Mature trees, meadow, and wetland all offer a natural setting but in a limited area you can offer simple simulated spaces to rear offspring such as nest boxes, host plants (think milkweed for monarch caterpillars), dead trees/logs and water gardens.

One last important consideration promoted by the NWF is to make your area sustainable. This usually means conserving water and soil, managing exotic species, and eliminating chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Such efforts are easily managed by simply paying attention to the products you buy and the means by which you tend to your plants.

It is worth pointing out that the NWF is not the only organization promoting wildlife friendly gardening. There are a number of resources available to provide guidelines and detailed projects to make your yard friendly to wildlife. Google may be your primary tool but I will highlight one other local organization, the Sonoma County Beekeepers’ Association. Obviously they have their focus on bees, but many of the practices they promote will help all pollinators, be it honey-bees, native bees, or butterflies. Not only will this attract cool insects to your space (and the animals that eat those insects), but encouraging pollinators will help your crops if you happen to have a vegetable garden.

In closing, it is important to all of us here at Safari West to spread the word about conservation. While we work hard to protect large animals such as Rhinos and Cheetahs, we also strive every day to make an effort to reduce our footprint and contribute to conservation on the whole, even in our own 400 acre backyard. We hope that you will join us in this effort.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Safari Spotlight

The Bongo

Perhaps the most striking and unusual of the many antelope species on display at Safari West is the Bongo. These creatures are surprising in many ways, not the least of which are their startling coloration and striping. Bongos are large, heavy bodied creatures with vibrant, chestnut-colored coats. While the females tend to remain reddish-brown throughout their lives, the males gradually darken, becoming nearly black in some cases. The rich coloration of their coat is offset by bright and clearly defined vertical stripes—usually twelve to fourteen in number—that run along their chests and flanks.

Within this species, both males and females sport large spiral horns. In both sexes the horns are angled backwards and can be held close against the shoulders when the animal is on the run. This is an important characteristic as the bongo is an inhabitant of deep, dense tropical forests and a laid back horn is less likely to snag on a branch or vine. It may be surprising to many to learn that such a large, round-bodied animal makes its home in dense vegetation but these surprisingly nimble creatures thrive in the tropical rainforests of equatorial Africa.

Within their natural habitat, bongos are known to be most active at night and in the twilight hours. During the day they frequently retreat into deep cover, only emerging along the forest edges or in clearings under cover of darkness. Bongos are known to prefer new growth vegetation that colonizes areas of disturbance. It’s most common to see bongos in the cleared areas that result from logging, elephant disturbance, rock slides, or the burning of fields. Like the forest elephants that create many of these clearings, bongos are also known to make use of naturally occurring mineral salt licks to supply needed trace minerals.

In the modern era, bongo numbers appear to be diminishing, however the extent of their decline remains a bit of a mystery. These creatures exemplify some of the difficulties of contemporary conservation as their shy nature, vast distribution, dense natural habitat, and wide-ranging habits make it all but impossible to conduct an efficient census of the population. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) there are between 15,000 and 25,000 bongos left in the forests of equatorial Africa. The large margin of error in that estimate is a further indicator of how little is known about wild bongos.

Beyond their surprising size, these animals are also unusual in that they form herds; a rare trait among forest dwelling antelope. While these congregations of bongo are usually limited to five to ten individuals, they have been seen gathering in groups of up to fifty. As yet, this behavior remains poorly understood as bongos seem not to be territorial nor heavily hunted by local predators, two factors thought to be related to herding behavior.

While bongos do suffer a great deal of persecution by humans, most of this is unintentional. Among many local people, there are taboos against the consumption of bongo meat and so targeted hunting of the animals has been rare. Unfortunately, snaring is an increasingly common practice in the countries that constitute the bongos range and snares are indiscriminate killers.

A further complication is the bongos’ popularity among trophy hunters. The economic driver of trophy-hunting tourism coupled with lax or nonexistent regulation in many regions has led to population declines of some significance. On the other hand, hunting has created an economic incentive to ensure that bongos survive in sustainable numbers. This factor is driving some regions to protect bongo habitat and craft regulations that may actually help conserve the species in the long term.

Currently there are two types of bongo recognized and while they aren’t separate species, they do form two distinct and isolated populations. The more common subspecies, the lowland bongo, resides in the tropical belt stretching from Sierra Leone to Togo and Benin. There’s a gap in their range in Nigeria, but then it picks up again and runs through the tropical forests of Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo as well as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and part of South Sudan. The other subspecies, the mountain bongo, can be found only in four fragmented and isolated populations on a few mountains in Kenya. Were the mountain bongo considered a separate species from its lowland brethren, it would be classified as critically endangered.

As it stands, the bongo is currently assessed as near threatened. Their numbers are decreasing as a result of indiscriminate trapping, trophy hunting, and increasing habitat loss and fragmentation. Current estimates are that the total population has declined by 20% in that last twenty-four years. That said, they remain firmly entrenched in a largely impenetrable habitat and seem to do quite well when left to their own devices.

To this day, the bongo remains one of the most mysterious and least understood of the African antelope. They are rare in the wild and uncommon in captivity. Safari West prides itself on our small but growing family of bongos. Come to Safari West and treat yourself to the rare sight of this amazing and unusual species.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Conservation Corner

Vulnerable! The New World of the Gentle Giraffe

By: Jared Paddock

Have you been following the news lately? If so, you may have heard that giraffe were recently declared “vulnerable”. This unwelcome news is shocking to many. It may also be a little confusing. What is “vulnerable” exactly? Is it the same as endangered? And perhaps most important of all, what happened to bring us to this point?

The answers to these questions are both complex and surprisingly simple. To be vulnerable is to be endangered, or at the least, to be in the early stages of endangerment. As to how it happened? It happened the same way it always happens; a combination of factors mostly having to do with conflict with human populations and our widespread impacts.

First off, it’s important to understand that when it comes to discussions of endangered species, there are many bureaucracies and agencies in play, ranging from non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) to national institutions like the United States Department of Fish and Wildlife. Each of these entities has their own specific designations and processes used to assess when a given species is in danger of extinction. Among these varied organizations, there’s one agency in particular that has become the primary arbiter of assessing species sustainability: the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The IUCN maintains a database of plant and animal species. Within this database, they utilize carefully researched and tabulated data to determine the overall vitality of individual species. Once the IUCN has assessed a species, they assign it a classification. Species in no real danger of extinction are declared to be species of “least concern” (think human beings, raccoons, and rats). From there the ranking descends through the categories of near threatened (American bison), vulnerable (giraffe and elephant), endangered (ring-tailed lemur), critically endangered (black rhinoceros), extinct in the wild (scimitar horned oryx), and finally, extinct (dodo birds).

The recent development in the world of giraffe was a downgrading from “least concern” to “vulnerable.” It is terrible to learn that giraffe are doing so poorly in the world, but this is actually good news for the species for the simple reason that with a change in conservation status comes the possibility of beneficial regulation and legislation.

Prior to this momentous down-listing from “least concern” straight through “near threatened” to “vulnerable,” the giraffe was a species largely ignored by the conservation community. As big, fairly visible animals, they are easier to find on safaris and game drives than the elusive and rare predators like lions and leopards. They are seldom targeted by poachers like elephants and rhinos. They’ve been common spectacles on African game drives for a long time and for these reasons and more, we’ve been largely blind to their nearly universal decline.

But decline they have. As of 1985, the total giraffe population was estimated at somewhere between 151,000 and 163,000 animals. Today the number is closer to 97,000. That’s a nearly 40% decline in three decades! To provide some context to these numbers, let’s compare to another megafauna species; the heavily poached African elephant. African elephants face tremendous persecution across their range and are also classified as “vulnerable” and yet as of mid-2016, they number roughly 352,000. That’s nearly four wild elephants for every wild giraffe left in existence. This leaves us with two questions: what has been happening, and why didn’t we know it was happening earlier?

The second question is the easier to answer. We did know earlier. While much of the world has been blind to the decline of the giraffe, there have been canaries in the coal mine. One of the most strident voices in trying to wake the world up to the decline of the giraffe has been that of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation and its founders Dr. Julian and Stephanie Fenessey. The GCF has been working on giraffe conservation for years and has been sounding the alarm for the majority of that time. They’ve done amazing work but as with any large scale issue—from cigarettes to climate change—the world has been slow to respond.

In order for an organization like the IUCN to reclassify a species, there must be a reservoir of empirical data driving the change. This means that scientists must first be interested in the species in question and capable of gaining funding for research. Data must be collected, analyzed, and published; a process that can take years or decades. Only once a suitable amount of data has been compiled can the IUCN begin reassessment. The recent down-listing of the giraffe marks the first reassessment by the IUCN of this species since 2010 and the first change in conservation status since 1996.

The complexities of trying to count animals and determine the challenges affecting their survival across a continent and national borders can be extreme. Inference and approximation come into play and this effects the IUCN assessment as well. While the down-listing of the giraffe may be long overdue, it’s not something that could have been rushed without sacrificing scientific integrity. This fact more than any other illustrates why it is important for policy makers and concerned citizens to pay attention to current events in concert with organizations like the IUCN when it comes to conservation practices. The “endangered” appellation is a bit like declaring a disaster after the fire or earthquake has struck. It’s reactionary rather than proactive.

The reasons why giraffes have declined so dramatically is another complex, yet fairly straightforward story. There are four primary factors limiting the survivability of the species. The first is habitat loss. Deforestation and land conversion for agriculture and mining are occurring across the range of the giraffe. As forests disappear, so too do the giraffe. As large animals, they are disproportionately affected by this habitat loss. They are specialized creatures that rely heavily on acacia trees for their food. While they eat over 100 species of plant, acacia makes up the majority of giraffe diet and when these trees go, the animals do too.

A second factor affecting the giraffe is overall climate change. Many parts of Africa are growing drier which leads to a higher incidence of brush and forest fires. This leads to increased habitat loss on top of the acreage lost to human development. Likewise, as drought causes human dislocation, populations on the move frequently relocate to protected areas or regions where giraffe are already living. When there’s conflict or competition for resources between human beings and giraffe, the humans inevitably come out on top.

The third factor relates to widespread civil unrest and war taking place across much of Africa. In regions with roving militias or refugees on the move, a large, generally slow moving giraffe makes for an excellent source of needed calories.

The closely related fourth factor is poaching. An increasing number of giraffe are shot illegally, their bodies left largely intact but for their tails. The tails are removed and sold either as good luck charms or status symbols, much like the lucky rabbit’s feet of western tradition, except that unlike rabbits, giraffe take four to five years to reach sexual maturity and produce at most one new giraffe every two to two-and-a-half years. Long-lived, slow breeding animals like giraffe simply cannot sustain losses on this scale for long.

On the whole, these factors add up to one overarching problem; conflict with humans. As our population increases across the globe, the populations of our wild neighbors necessarily decreases. But the issues coming to light with giraffe can be instructive and ultimately, hopeful. While we lament their decline, they’re not gone yet. We still have time to act, to provide policies to protect the species and establish places for them to thrive. As ecotourism continues to grow and develop throughout Africa, it becomes more and more compelling to establish reserves in which many species can live and reproduce largely free of human interference. Likewise, developments in agriculture and land use are helping to mitigate conflicts between farmers, ranchers, and miners, and their long-necked neighbors.

The news about the reassessment of giraffes also gives us cause to hope because it is being framed, not only as a tragic example of yet another animal that’s in danger of extinction, but as a discussion about the process of classification and meaning of the word “endangered.” As a population, we appear to be growing more sophisticated and nuanced in our understanding of the natural world and its patterns. With focus and determination, we will continue to improve our ability to recognize population declines and preemptively act to conserve species before they experience thirty or forty percent losses.

The bad news for giraffe are that they’re now classified as vulnerable, but the good news is that with that classification comes increased attention and conservation action. The even better news is that giraffe are already universally recognized and popular, meaning that widespread support and efforts toward their conservation shouldn’t be as difficult to motivate as it is with more obscure species.

To show your support for these beautiful and graceful creatures, consider making a donation to hard-working organizations like the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. The best hope for giraffe lies in our communal concern and interest in their well-being. Please join us in working to conserve this unique and irreplaceable species.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Conservation Corner

Looking Back, Moving Forward

By: Jared Paddock

It’s a festive time of year; a time of holidays and office parties, of family and feasting. The year’s end is a time for celebration, but also a time to step back and take stock. As the New Year approaches, we are encouraged to set free the past and level our sights on the future. We make our resolutions and lay out our hopes and goals for the year to come. This tradition is an important one, especially when it comes to the work of conservation.

The goal of Conservation Corner has always been to introduce readers to topics and ideas that aren’t yet part of the national discourse. We want to illuminate ongoing issues in the world and hopefully, incite some critical thinking and discussion on these topics. When it comes to conservation, progress only takes place when demanded by an informed public.

To that end, we try to cover a broad spectrum of topics. While we often write about specific events such as the death of Nola the white rhinoceros, we’ve also been known to delve into more esoteric fare, like migratory adaptation. Regardless of the topic, we always try to drive the conversation deeper and to explore the broader ramifications of the concept under discussion.

The death of Nola was perhaps the biggest news item so far covered by Conservation Corner. When she passed away at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, the number of northern white rhinos left on the planet was reduced to three. The story blew up online and on TV for all the usual reasons; it was dramatic, it was traumatic, and it illuminated a gigantic and obvious conservation problem. People responded in droves and that can only be counted as a win for the forces of wildlife conservation.

In our coverage of the loss of this beautiful animal, we tried to refrain from focusing on the depressing and macabre and instead investigated what her species’ decline had meant for the particular ecosystem.

That article led directly to our opening piece of 2016, entitled “Settling for Second: The Evolutionary Cost of Trophy Hunting”. This piece focused on a frequently unnoticed side-effect of human hunting. While it’s well-documented that such pressures can eliminate a species (as seen in the dodo, Stellar’s sea cow, and others). What has been largely ignored is the effect it can have even on well-managed target populations; such as those of bighorn sheep or mule deer. Whereas standard predatory practice targets the old, the sick, and the weak thereby weeding out undesirable genetic traits, trophy hunting specifically targets idealized specimens. This has the side-effect of leaving less-qualified individuals to reproduce and carry on the species.

From there we covered another topic related to anthropogenic over-hunting; a novel reintroduction project enacted by the Sahara Conservation Fund and their partners, Environment Abu Dhabi, and the Government of Chad. This ambitious project aims to reintroduce into the deserts of Chad, a species of antelope that has been extinct in the wild for nearly three decades. The scimitar horned oryx (which roam in the enclosures here at Safari West) are one of the many victims of unrestricted human hunting discussed above. Luckily, forward-thinking conservationists were able to establish functional captive breeding programs before the last wild individual was shot in 1989. Thanks to that foresight and the ongoing work done by so many, including our own hoofstock keepers, the species is now getting a second chance to thrive in their natural habitat.

This is not to say however, that the re-wilded scimitars are being released into an Edenic, human-free environment. Quite the opposite in fact. They will be competing for resources with domesticated goats and cattle. They will need to contend with roadways and vehicles. Undoubtedly, hunters, human and otherwise, will also be a concern.

We explored this intersection of humanity and our wild neighbors deeper in a piece focused on the ways in which animals are adapting to us. In the long history of this planet, life has always had to evolve to deal with challenges; climate change, sea level rise and fall, the invasion of novel species, and natural disasters galore. While the ubiquity and industry of the human species may be unprecedented in nature, life appears to be up to the challenge.

In that article we focused primarily on the fascinating and mysterious monarch butterfly. This world-famous pollinator makes the longest migration of any insect species, traveling up and down the United States; from the border of Canada to the forests of northern Mexico. Although they’ve always been forced to fly around the Gulf of Mexico—sticking doggedly to the coastlines along the way—they’ve recently begun to make surprising use of offshore oil rigs. Normally a symbol of environmental exploitation and degradation, these machines of industry are increasingly becoming stopover points, allowing millions of delicate but determined butterflies to rest their weary wings as they make the arduous trip south.

Discussion of this migration must’ve stuck in our minds because the very next edition of Conservation Corner furthered the discussion. Dovetailing into the centennial of the National Parks Service, we discussed their incredible success at protecting specific areas of the wilderness and the sedentary species that make their homes there. What the park system has been less successful at is creating safe havens for migratory animals like the monarch. Their focus as they move into their second century is centered on how to address the needs of migrating birds, pronghorn antelope, salmon, butterflies, and more.

The National Park Service is one of the world leaders in human management of the ecosystem, but the example they’ve set is being followed by others. The Pepperwood Preserve—Safari West’s neighbor to the east—is among those pioneering forces. Earlier this year they held a prescribed burn. They intentionally set fire to a portion of their vast acreage. This technique is increasingly used to reduce the potential for wildfires across the world, but Pepperwood’s experiment had a different aim. They were hoping to reduce the spread of an invasive grass. Medusahead grass has exploded beyond its original range and continues to flood into novel environments at an alarming rate. The Pepperwood experiment is part of an increasing trend toward utilizing natural processes rather than synthetic ones—like toxic herbicides—to help control and restrict environmentally destabilizing invasive species.

Ecosystem engineering of this sort is looking more and more like it will be a necessity in the world of tomorrow and further exploration of the idea lead us to explore the kind of bioengineering that takes place even without our intent. We looked into how species like beavers can transform an entire forest with their teeth and tails as effectively as we can with chainsaw and bulldozers. This exploration revealed how ecosystems that have adapted to the activity of bioengineers like beavers suffer at their loss, whereas ecosystems that experience novel engineering, such as that so frequently brought about by human industry, tend to suffer.

Tying into this idea of environmental resilience, we then discussed invasive species more directly. Invasive species have become one of the largest conservation issues dealt with by facilities like Safari West. The term “invasive species” is one that has established itself in the common discourse and is familiar to any farmer, rancher, any boater, or any traveler who’s crossed a state line. They’ve become the boogeymen of modern conservationist thought which is a bit of a mixed blessing. While public awareness of the problems of invasive is by all accounts a good thing, the underlying fact is that invasive species are also critical to the process of evolution. Ecosystems are by their very nature dynamic and novel influences help keep populations healthy and strong. To an extent. In isolated ecosystems like those found on many islands, the much slower pace of invasion leaves them vulnerable to extreme disruption when something new appears. As with the bioengineering article, our exploration of invasive species revealed a concept in which frequency or intensity made the difference between what is a stabilizing influence, and what is catastrophically destabilizing.

That article brought us into back-to-school season and so we came out of the deep weeds on conservation philosophy and presented a targeted piece that aspired to illuminate the vast and growing problem of rampant consumerism. We now live in a culture that constantly tells us that every occasion requires a purchase and that last year’s model can’t compare to this year’s. In a world of more frequent buying, products must be cheaper and more disposable. This leads inevitably to exploding waste, primarily of cheap and easy to produce plastics.

Ecosystems may be able to adapt to a novel species in their midst, but thus far, no system has come up with a cure for plastics. Plastic polymers persist almost eternally, don’t biodegrade, and are detrimental to virtually all forms of life. We are filling our planet with plastics and most of the human race is so far unaware that there’s a problem.

The last two articles of the year continued the theme of illuminating largely invisible problems. The first piece focused on palm oil; an ingredient nearly as ubiquitous as plastic and one which has an equally detrimental impact. The oil palm is an amazing plant that produces—quite efficiently—a product which has found use in everything from food to cosmetics. Many studies have suggested that over fifty percent of all products on store shelves contain palm oil derivatives. The problem with palm oil is that it grows best in the same places that tropical rain forests do and coincidentally, those tend to be the very same locales that have the least amount of legal protection. The high and growing demand for palm oil has led to unrestrained deforestation on an apocalyptic scale. Slash-and-burn land clearing techniques and unrestricted persecution of local wildlife has led to precipitous declines in hundreds of irreplaceable species like orangutans, Sumatran rhinos, and elephants. Luckily, there is progress even on this front and it is now easier than ever to track you palm oil usage and direct your dollars toward companies that supply it sustainably.

The most recent issue of Conservation Corner focused on yet another widely unknown but absolutely critical conservation issue; that of our seafood supply. Fish arrive in our supermarkets daily and almost none of us question where they come from. The oceans are vast and fished by massive fleets representing hundreds of nations. The difficulties in regulation, the loopholes in labeling, and a complete and utter lack of transparency have all helped to lead us where we are today. Worldwide, fishing stocks have been depleted by anywhere from seventy to ninety percent. Our oceans are becoming deserts and the vast majority of us don’t even know there’s a problem.

Over the last year we’ve covered a long list of topics that range from land to sea, and from practical to philosophical. We’ve made an effort to be illuminating rather than depressing and to offer solutions wherever possible. As we close out this year, and in case we failed in that goal, I’d like to point out a few of the bright rays of hope that have 2016 shine.

Safari West became partners with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program. This program is one of the leaders in combating the issues with our seafood supply. Simply by downloading their app onto your phone, you become instantly equipped to make informed choices in your seafood purchases, whether in a restaurant or at the grocery store. Experience has shown again and again that industry follows the money. If we’re buying sustainable supplied products, they will shift to capitalize on that trend.

On a similar note, the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo has an app that accomplishes the same thing with palm oil. The app includes a bar code scanner that will tell you at a glance whether the ice cream in your hand is produced by a member of the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil. It’s a great tool for identifying sustainability-minded companies that you may want to support.

This was also a year which saw the meeting of nearly two-hundred nations in Johannesburg, South Africa to discuss and regulate trade in endangered species. This conference of parties to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) not only shut down several proposals to re-legalize trade in ivory and rhino horn, but also established new protections for many species including elephants, rhinos, pangolins, and numerous species of sharks and rays. The conference was a big step forward for many endangered species and ecosystems.

Lastly, I want to take a moment to mention some of the practical things that’ve been accomplished right here at Safari West. We updated the plumbing system throughout our luxury tent camp. While this update in no way impacted guest experience, it did reroute all grey water (water draining from sinks and showers) to be used in our landscaping. Thousands of gallons that would otherwise have drained away wastefully are now being put to use among our vegetation. In a state stricken by drought, this is a valuable conservation action.

We’ve also initiated a brand new wildlife monitoring project. Our enclosures aren’t only home to our exotic collection, but also to all manner of local wildlife. At Safari West our safari guides and keeper regularly encounter hawks, vultures, snakes, turtles, deer, otters, and countless other member species of the Mayacamas Mountains biome. This wildlife monitoring program will help us to better understand how these species are adapting to our presence and how to make the environment of Safari West more welcoming to them.

As we close out this chapter and begin the next, it is with a palpable sense of excitement and motivation. Many challenges await—both those we know about and the inevitable surprises waiting in the wings—but every year, our species gets smarter and more ambitious. We figure out what we’re doing right and how to correct what we’re doing wrong. We continue to improve our ability to live effectively within our ecosystems, rather than struggling to dominate them. Progress is being made and it’s thanks to people like you. We at Conservation Corner thank you for your support throughout this year and we look forward to working with you to make the next one even better.

Happy Holidays to you and a very Happy New Year!

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Safari Spotlight

The Hamerkop

This month we are spotlighting a very special and under-appreciated bird; the hamerkop. The hamerkop is an African bird slightly smaller than a raven and a uniform brown in color. The name “hamerkop” comes from Afrikaans and translates to “hammer-head”. As the name suggest, the hamerkop’s head is in fact hammer shaped. They have long, dark brown bills that are straight and sturdy and end in a hook. The bill is countered by a long crest of feathers protruding from the back of the birds head.

Other than the oddly shaped head, hamerkops are not the most striking of birds. Our hamerkop, here at Safari West, is easily overlooked. He lives in the walk-through Amani Oasis Aviary where he has to compete for attention with brilliant scarlet ibises, vibrant blue crowned pigeons, and the magnificent Lady Amherst’s pheasant. Amongst such colorful company, our little brown hamerkop is a bit underdressed. Though he may be easy to miss, our industrious little hamerkop’s nest is not.

Hamerkops construct some of the largest and most elaborate nests in the world. Ours is no exception and his current masterpiece is located in a tree on the south side of the enclosure. When he started construction, it looked like he was building a broad platform nest like those used by many storks and eagles. Soon however, high walls curved up from all sides of the platform. As the walls rose it became clear that he was building an opening in one side of the nest; a round portal into what would become a completely enclosed chamber. After four to five weeks of construction, he began to put a roof on the structure. The roof is typically the sturdiest part of a hamerkop nest and is visibly thicker than any other portion. When he completed the basic construction, our hamerkop went to work plastering the interior of the nest with collected mud and leaves. It’s quite a lovely home he’s built.

In the wilds of sub-saharan Africa where hamerkops are found, these massive nests tend to average four to five feet in diameter and are incredibly resilient. They are nearly always built in the crook of a sturdy tree although occasionally some nontraditional hamerkop will construct their nest along a cliff ledge instead.

There hasn’t been much study done on the hamerkop and so the purpose of this fortress of a nest is to date, poorly understood. Surprisingly however, in spite of the labor-intense nature of building such a structure, hamerkops are relentless carpenters. They tend to form long-term pair-bonds and on average, each pair will construct three to five of such nests in a given year. In one study a single pair of hamerkops constructed eleven nests in four and a half years. They moved regularly between two old nests and the eleven new ones and in that same span of time relocated a total of seventeen times. This behavior is also not well understood.

With such a hectic and relentless pace of nest-building, it may come as no surprise that hamerkops abandon many nests half-built and many of those they do complete they never occupy. Which is not to so that nobody else does. Several bird species, ranging from barn owls to Egyptian geese are known to take up residence in hamerkop nests. Other common squatters include genets, monitor lizards, mongooses, a whole variety of snakes (including spitting cobras), and swarms of bees. These sturdy nests can persist for years even without the regular maintenance of their original builders.

Hamerkops are found across and immense range and are common throughout the entirety of sub-saharan Africa and Madagascar. They don’t seen too concerned about the overall environment—whether tropical forest, scrubby grassland, or semi-desert—so long as there is a shallow water source nearby. The hamerkop is an avid fisher and their diet consists almost entirely of fish, amphibians, shrimp, worms, insects, and perhaps the occasional small mammal.

The combination of their wide-ranging distribution, generalists diet, and the fact that they aren’t normally persecuted by humans means that these birds are abundant in the wild and their population is currently under no threat. The reasons why they aren’t persecuted by humans are both fascinating and mysterious. There is a great deal of mythology and folklore surrounding the bird. Anecdotes abound relating the bird’s role in the traditional beliefs of many African cultures and tribes. These stories are largely apocryphal and unattributed, but they paint a broad picture of a bird that is widely revered in tropical regions and widely feared in much of the south of the continent. Among the stories told are many painting the hamerkop as an omen of evil or death. Others describe the hamerkop as symbolic of human vanity and futility.

The birds are often seen standing in the shallows raking at the mud with their clawed feet. They do this to drive out prey species hidden in the mud, but some anecdotes claim they’re actually stirring up visions of the future and prophesizing tragedy and death. The long and short of it is that across the continent, most cultures advocate leaving a hamerkop to its own devices; either out of reverence or fear. The birds benefit tremendously from the general lack of conflict with the humans they live alongside.

These are exciting times at Safari West as we have recently introduced a newly arrived female to our once lonely hamerkop male. They are highly gregarious birds and so the introductions went quite smoothly. Since meeting one another, the two birds have been spending a great deal of time together. They’re highly vocal and seem to have adopted the male’s pre-built nest. There appears to be some courtship behavior happening, but in truth, it’s not always easy to tell with hamerkops. The mounting behavior that usually signifies breeding in birds is also part of a common hamerkop social display. Among wild hamerkops, “false-mounting” is common and includes not only males mounting females, but females mounting males as well as same-sex mounting displays. As with so much of hamerkop life, the motivations driving this behavior are not well understood.

It’s much too soon to know whether or not these two will breed or reproduce successfully, but simply having the two of them together opens up opportunities for observation and study that weren’t possible with just our stalwart male. Join us at Safari West as we watch these two fascinating birds interact, court, and live out their lives in our open-air aviary.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Conservation Corner

Seafood Watch

By: Jared Paddock

There is a major problem in our oceans. Once seemingly inexhaustible in number, the fish in our seas are somehow vanishing. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. Once giant schools of mackerel and sardine, shoals of tuna, magnificent sailfish and marlin, even sharks; all of these and more are disappearing fast. What could have such a major impact on an environment that covers over 75% of the surface of the Earth? The simple answer? Us. Fish are disappearing and they’re disappearing right into our mouths.

I recently watched “The End of the Line” an award winning documentary about the overfishing crisis. In it the opposing claims of two respected scientists were debated. The first, Dr. Boris Worm of Dalhousie University conducted a study with results that indicate a 90% decline in populations of virtually all commonly targeted fish. That’s species like tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, all the fish you see in the supermarket, all of them with populations barely 10% of what they were just a hundred or so years ago. A conflicting view was proposed by Professor Ray Wilborn of the University of Washington who took exception to Worm’s methods and results. “Totally wrong,” he rebutted. “There’s just no question, that’s totally wrong.”

If you’re like me this all sounds pretty familiar. Over the last decade or two we’ve seen countless debates play out between climate scientists and climate change deniers. Before that it was between lung cancer specialists and the scientists employed by tobacco companies. It seems as though any scientific whistle-blowing has it’s contingent of ardent opposition. I assumed that once Prof. Wilborn finished picking apart the work of Dr. Worm he’d move on to explain how fish stocks remain healthy and abundant. I was wrong. His argument was simply that a more accurate measure of global decline would be 70%.

I was stunned. When it comes to fish, the argument isn’t about whether or not there’s a problem. The debate among academics is merely about exactly how catastrophic the problem is. As it turns out, global overfishing may be the most pressing conservation issue facing us today. It is for this reason that Safari West recently became a Conservation Partner of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. As a facility specializing in terrestrial mammals and birds, it might seem like Seafood Watch is a bit outside our wheelhouse. The truth however, is that the situation faced by species like bluefin tuna is eerily similar to that faced by our own white rhinos.

Like rhinos, bluefin have been hunted by humans for centuries. Also like rhinos, advances in technology, staggering increases in human population and demand, and economic pressures valuing short-term gain over long-term sustainability have lead to nearly insurmountable devastation within the population. The northern white rhino in particular serves as a poignant example as there are now only three left in existence.

The plight of fish in our seas has many variables—climate change, ocean acidification, pollution—but Seafood Watch is specifically concerned with overfishing. How on earth could human beings in boats have overfished something as massive as the ocean?

First of all, bear in mind that for most of our history the seas have been like the vending machines that stand in many of our offices and break rooms. We usually can’t see into the office Coke machine, but we take for granted that if we drop in some change, we’ll be rewarded with a refreshing beverage. The sea has always been the same. We’ve generally been unable to tell how many fish are swimming off our shores but we could safely assume that if we dropped in a hook, we’d eventually pull out a fish.

For much of human history that technique has served us beautifully. In pre-industrial times the ocean kept us supplied with nutrition and our take was insignificant enough to not overly disrupt the system. Even as we took to the seas in boats designed for fishing, our impact remained relatively unchanged. We’d drop in hooks and pull out fish, but at a rate that went seemingly unnoticed by the oceans at large. It wasn’t until fishing became a large-scale commercial venture that our efforts began to have a significant impact.

A good example of this is Georges Bank, one of the most famous fisheries in the world. Situated off the north east coast of the United States, the bank used to teem with cod and halibut. It was such a profoundly fertile source of fish that in the 16th century, over half the fish consumed in Europe originated from Georges Bank. New England’s history as a commercial fishing center is based on its proximity to the bounty of Georges Bank. For hundreds of years the Bank was fished by ships dropping hooks. Even with this simple technique, the scale of the of Georges Bank catch was such that by 1850 halibut populations were nearing collapse.

But the worst was yet to come as technology improved and new gear revolutionized the fishing industry. Single hooks developed into long lines, which are literally miles-long lines of filament dangling thousands of baited hooks. With the advent of steam power drag nets came into play. Eventually, we saw the invention of the bottom-trawler; a tremendous net dragged behind a boat and scraping against the sea floor. Bottom-trawlers made it to Georges Bank by the 1920’s and were able to catch in an hour or two what the old hand-reel fishermen could catch in a month. The impact was devastating.

Bottom-trawlers—with their unfortunate side effect of demolishing the sea floor—were the worst offenders, but other commercial fishing devices were devastating as well. Gill nets and longlines are exponentially more efficient at bringing in fish that single hooks but at the cost of being completely non-discriminatory. A ship trawling for cod will inevitably haul aboard a lot more than the fish of choice including other fish species, sea birds, dolphins, sea turtles, and even sharks and rays. All this extra stuff is called “bycatch” and generally speaking, it goes right over the side and is usually dead or dying when it happens.

Let’s compare this style of fishing to some of our terrestrial hunting techniques. A single human fishing with a single baited hook or harpoon is roughly analogous to a single human hunting with a bow or spear. The take is minimal and relatively non-disruptive.

As fishing gear advanced from hooks and lines to shrimp boats and trawling nets, so too did our bows and arrows give way to high powered rifles. When it comes to the mass-capture capabilities of fishing nets however, there are few terrestrial analogues. Possibly the closest comparison we can make between hunting and our current fishing capabilities is the method of driving stampeding animals off cliffs once employed to hunt herds of American bison. By panicking an entire herd and driving them toward a precipice, hunters were able to save tremendous amounts of time and effort and kill hundreds of bison in one go. The trade off to this bounty was incredible waste since the method usually killed more animals than could be effectively used. The simultaneous annihilation of entire herds—young and old alike—had major ramifications for the long-term stability of the bison population as well.

The American bison is now the national mammal of the United States and yet relatively few Americans have ever seen one because their range is so drastically reduced. Marked declines like that of the bison have been instructive to us on land and their complete extinction was avoided in part because we were occupying the same space and could see the decline in real time. The opposite is true of our aquatic prey species. We are generally much less aware of what is happening beneath the surface of the sea. Fishing records have long suggested a decline in returns as well as a general shrinking in the size of specimens caught, but this data has gone largely unrecognized and ignored. As a species, we’ve simply been unable to imagine that there won’t always be plenty of fish in the sea.

Here’s the other piece of it; just like bison, tuna, marlin, and other large fish species aren’t born large. They’re born tiny and vulnerable and during this stage in their lives they need a place to hide. Kelp stands, beds of seagrass, coral reefs; all of these seafloor environments act as nurseries for fish fry that may one day grow to become our sashimi. When a bottom-trawler scrapes across them, these nursery habitats are heavily damaged or completely destroyed. I the most fecund of commercial fisheries, the same areas can be trawled over and over again within a single year, leaving the seafloor a sterilized wasteland.

Another misconception about how sea life works is a widespread belief that fish breed readily and often. We ate nearly all of the orange roughy before someone discovered that it takes them two decades to reach sexual maturity. We gobbled them like Thanksgiving dinner without ever realizing how long it would be before the next generation came along. In another spectacular blunder, we developed an incredibly efficient method of catching salmon as they struggled upstream by the thousands. They practically threw themselves into our nets and it wasn’t until the population completely collapsed that we realized we were catching them just before they laid the eggs that would’ve replaced them. So our practices have been ignorantly short-sighted for a long time, and now the oceans are emptying.

This is not an issue of luxury. It’s not just that we won’t be able to enjoy sushi or blackened halibut as much. Over one billion humans (that’s a full seventh of the global population) depend on fish to survive. Beyond strict necessity, fish make up over 20% of the animal protein intake for half the humans on the planet. Currently, as a species, we’re consuming at least 95 million tons of wild caught fish each year (plus an addition 75-80 million tons of farmed fish). That’s approximately 375-Billion pounds of fish! Meanwhile the bycatch—the dead and dying bystander organisms we catch by accident—we throw about 7-million tons of them back into the sea every year. Calling that amount of waste colossal doesn’t even come close.

Luckily there’s quite a lot that can be done, and from what we’ve seen the ocean appears to be both strikingly resilient and quick to rebound when given a chance. The best first step, which it seems most every scientist agrees on, is a massive scaling up of our establishment of marine protected areas (MPAs). These are essentially our national parks but in the ocean. Protected areas free of fishing are as effective than preserves on land. Without us netting them, many fish populations recover quickly.

Unlike our national parks which are usually bordered by urban development, MPAs are usually bordered by nothing but open ocean. This means that as fish populations expand, they naturally spill out of protected reserves. Many MPA advocates describe them like banks. The reserve is the initial investment and the overflow fish are the compounding interest. This methodology already has proven results. Blue Ventures (please link to www.blueventures.org), has already recorded tremendous successes with this system in Madagascar.

Over a decade ago, Blue Ventures teamed up with the people of a fishing village in southern Madagascar to close off a portion of the offshore reef in which the locals fished for octopus. After a relatively short period of time, the area was reopened with staggering results. As news of this techniques spread, other villages mimicked the technique. Eventually this lead to the first locally managed marine area (LMMA). Today there are 64 LMMAs in Madagascar which combine to protect a full 11% of the Madagascar sea floor.

In 2010, over 200 nations gathered in Japan and set a goal of protecting 10% of the entire ocean by 2020. This is an important first step toward the 30% protection determined by scientists to be a requirement for comprehensive, ocean-wide sustainability. Progress is being made but it is unnervingly slow. Numbers vary depending on the source but we’re currently only at 3-4% protection. There’s a lot of work left to be done.

There are a number of things us average citizens can do to help with this situation. Support the creation of more MPAs and pressure your leaders to that end. Another thing you can do that’s more immediate and ongoing is to join us on the Seafood Watch. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has built a useful downloadable app that highlights seafood that’s caught sustainably and that which clearly isn’t. It’s a simple to use feature on any phone and it can help you avoid buying fish that’s endangered or was caught in a destructive way. Pausing to check if the salmon at your store is a good buy or not may add a minute or two to your trip, but this truly is the most impactful thing we can do to help. Ever heard of dolphin safe tuna? Dolphins had been dying in droves as a form of bycatch and public pressure on retailers and suppliers from consumers like us changed the industry. Regulations, MPAs, and policing are important, but consumer demand shapes the market. Help us and help the seas. Pay attention to what you buy and let your grocers and restaurants know that you’re paying attention. If we each do that, we change the tide.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Safari Spotlight

The Ring-Tailed Lemur

One of the first species spotted by visitors to Safari West are our ring-tailed lemurs. Just west of the front office four of them leap, scamper, and sunbathe on their island home. The island is a fitting place for a ring-tail to live since all the wild lemurs in the world live on Madagascar, the fourth largest island on the planet.

In case you’ve never seen a ring-tailed lemur, imagine a fox-faced monkey with a long and thin, black-and-grey banded tail. Alternatively, you might imagine a very slender raccoon. They are relatively small, normally no more than 5-7 pounds in weight and behave much in the same way we think of monkeys or squirrels behaving. In the wilds of Madagascar they are typically found in groups of five to maybe thirty individuals capering about on the ground or leaping through the trees. They are quick, agile, and able to disappear into the forest with relative ease. Though they have large, bulbous eyes, they are actually among the most scent-dependent of the lemurs and in fact sport specialized scent glands on their wrists and chests.

These scent glands come into play in disputes and ring-tails are famous for stink-fights in which the males will rub their scent glands along their long tails and then aggressively waft their personalized stinks at one another. The scent glands are also useful for marking territory although, oddly, ring-tails aren’t known to be all that territorial. While they do maintain home ranges, there is a large degree of overlap between lemur troops. It should be noted that the females are typically more territorial than the males; not surprising considering that these primates are fundamentally matriarchal.

Ring-tailed lemurs are the most famous but hardly the only species of lemur to be found on Madagascar. In fact, currently there are roughly 100 or so lemur species scattered across the island. Though endemic to Madagascar and found nowhere else in the world, lemurs are a type of primate just like monkeys, tarsiers, apes, and of course, us. They’re known as “prosimians” and word which translates as “before apes” and are typically described as a more ancient order of primate. Don’t be confused into thinking that chimpanzees and humans evolved from lemurs however, they’re more like our very distant cousins.

Madagascar has long been isolated from the rest of Africa, and indeed from anywhere else in the world. Current theory postulates that the earliest proto-lemur likely floated the several hundred miles from mainland Africa to Madagascar some 40-65 million years ago (the 25-million year margin of error is the result of competing theories and the difficulties of placing much of anything that far in the past). On the mainland these proto-lemurs had to share the world and its resources with ancestral monkeys and apes. These simian competitors were apparently far more adaptable than the proto-lemurs and eventually drove (or at least helped to drive) them to extinction. The expatriate proto-lemurs that managed to establish themselves on far off Madagascar on the other hand, found themselves on an unexploited island ecosystem entirely free of their simian cousins. Settling in, this proto-lemur population thrived and grew. Had humans been present on Madagascar in this long-ago time, we may have considered the little creatures an invasive species. Over time the proto-lemurs began to radiate from their initial niche. They specialized, evolved, and eventually diversified into the many lemur species capering about the island today.

Part of the reason why the ring-tailed lemur is the most famous of the lemur species has to do with their social lives. No other lemur is found in groups rivaling the sizes of those among the ring-tails. This has resulted in highly structured social behaviors including complex vocalizations, dominance hierarchies, and communal grooming behaviors (they have a really cool “tooth-comb” used for grooming each other. Basically their four bottom incisors point forward and are uniformly spaced, like, well, a comb. Look it up, it’s pretty neat).

Another potential reason why we are so much more familiar with the ring-tails than any of their cousins may have to do with their role as ecological generalists. Unlike some of their more specialized relatives (The five species of bamboo lemur who like giant pandas, survive almost exclusively on a diet of nutrition-poor and cyanide-rich bamboo), ring-tails aren’t picky about what they eat. They are largely herbivorous, feasting on leaves, fruit, and other plant parts. That said, they are also known to snap up all manner of insects, lizards, and bird eggs. Using their nimble little hands they will snatch up spiders and aren’t above eating spiderwebs or even dirt when the impulse strikes.

Alongside their generalized diet, they also tend not to be too picky about where they live. The ring-tailed lemur can be found in gallery forests much like the rainforests you might find in other parts of Africa, however they are also commonly found in the spiny forests of southern Madagascar. If you’ve never heard of a “spiny forest” basically imagine a cactus garden complete with 10-15 foot tall spiny trees called Alluaudias, Euphorbias, and giant baobob trees (big, barrel-shaped trees made famous in movies like The Lion King). Ring-tailed lemurs are as comfortable in ecosystems resembling the Congo as they are in desert-like regions of spiny forest and in fact will move regularly between the two.

Madagascar today is a biosphere like no other and one in deep crisis. Thanks in large part to its isolation, the nation of Madagascar is among the poorest nations on Earth and the people who live there have few options when it comes to survival. Virtually every lemur species known is endangered to some degree and indeed, in 2014 the ring-tail was upgraded from near threatened to endangered; a bad sign indeed. The primary factors contributing to these plummeting populations are habitat loss and hunting.

Lemur habitat is disappearing in several ways, most of which are related to land conversion for human use. Fire is often utilized to clear ground for agriculture or to produce charcoal; both critical components of life in Madagascar. Likewise, mineral extraction is a growth industry and it’s virtually impossible to extract titanium or cobalt from ground with forest growing atop it. Among the people of Madagascar, known as the Malagasy, not only is slash-and-burn agriculture both common and necessary, subsistence hunting is as well. Lemurs are among the larger prey animals to be found on Madagascar and make for an excellent source of protein.

A typical stance to take among the conservation-minded is to establish protections for endangered species and their environments, but in the case of lemurs, the situation is complicated by the needs of the humans involved. In America and other industrialized nations, national parks can protect vulnerable ecosystems with only moderate costs to the surrounding human populations. That is certainly not the case in Madagascar. Learning how to work with local people to provide practical solutions to environmental problems will be key to the future not just of the ring-tailed lemur but to all the unique lemur species found on that island.

Since humans first arrived on Madagascar some 2,300 or so years ago, the forest has diminished by 80-90%. Some experts claim that the entire island will be deforested by the end of the next decade. These are grim predictions, but a great deal of work is being done to push back against this decline much of it sponsored by places like Safari West, organizations like the Lemur Conservation Foundation, and millions of caring supporters like you. Come to Safari West and meet the ring-tailed lemurs. Our four ambassadors of a fragile species are fascinating to watch, whether they’re posing like tiny buddhas in the morning sun, calling from the tops of their island trees, or waving their long tails playfully at us and one another. One visit will make you a fan, and a strong network of supporters are what these animals truly need.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Conservation Corner

Palm Oil Problems

By: Jared Paddock

Thanks to the glut of candy that appears on the shelves of every large retail chain this time of year, there is no better time than now to discuss the problem of palm oil. Palm oil, like corn syrup, has become a bit of a dirty word and coincidentally, both tend to pop up regularly in our Halloween candy. The real problem of palm oil is in the production. We simply produce too much of it and in a manner that is completely unsustainable. Every acre of cultivated oil palms occupies land that used to be covered by tropical rainforest. Rapid and ongoing deforestation for the sake of palm oil production continues to devastate populations of unique wildlife. The cost of our ravenous palm oil consumption comes in the form of disappearing orangutans, rhinos, tigers, and elephants.

Vegetable oils of all kinds have long been integral to human existence. People all across the globe use vegetable oils in cooking. Whether we’re talking about deep-frying some extra crispy chicken or sautéing a wok full of shrimp and veggies, vegetable oils are a key ingredient. Less famously, it turns out that vegetable oils are useful in the formulation of non-edibles as well. Many well-known soaps, shampoos, detergents, and cosmetics also contain vegetable oils, of which palm oil is the most common. Palm oil makes your bar of soap harder and helps it lather up when wet. Palm oil in your shampoo helps restore the natural oils stripped from your hair during washing. Palm oil in your lipstick or lip balm helps hold color, prevent melting, and as an added benefit has virtually no taste. Palm oil is in your ice cream, your pizza crust, your bread and pastries. Palm oil is a major source of biodiesel. And of course, it’s in your candy. Palm oil is everywhere. In fact, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), palm oil is found in nearly half of the products lining the shelves of your neighborhood supermarket.

You would think that a product that ubiquitous would be easy to identify. You would think that you could wander the aisles scanning ingredient labels and find palm oil everywhere, but you’d be wrong. Palm oil, as it turns out, is a master at hiding in plain sight. We modify palm oil chemically depending on its use and because of various loopholes and vagaries of current labeling laws; it’s often identified as something less obvious. The following is an incomplete list of palm oil pseudonyms commonly used in labeling (compliments of the WWF):

Vegetable Oil, Vegetable Fat, Palm Kernel, Palm Kernel Oil, Palm Fruit Oil, Palmate, Palmitate, Palmolein, Glyceryl, Stearate, Stearic Acid, Elaeis Guineensis, Palmitic Acid, Palm Stearine, Palmitoyl Oxostearamide, Palmitoyl Tetrapeptide-3, Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Sodium Kernelate, Sodium Palm Kernelate, Sodium Lauryl Lactylate/Sulphate, Hyrated Palm Glycerides, Etyl Palmitate, Octyl Palmitate, Palmityl Alcohol.

As Americans we don’t typically use palm oil for cooking and it’s virtually impossible to find in its raw form here; yet as a nation, we consume it in tremendous volume, and it’s in volume that the problem lies. Oil palms have been grown for centuries. Native to west and southwest Africa, oil palms were cultivated specifically because you can extract a tremendous amount of oil from their fruit. Historically used in traditional medicine and for cooking, it wasn’t until the industrial revolution that people began to discover its many additional uses. As oil palms grew in popularity and became a cash crop, they were exported to Malaysia, Indonesia, and other tropical environs where it has been a roaring success. Malaysia spent ages as the globally dominant force of palm oil production and only gave up its crown to Indonesia in 2006. Today Indonesia is the true powerhouse of palm oil.

The situation with palm oil in Indonesia today is not unlike what we Americans went through in the Midwest during the lead up to the dust bowl era. Like our wheat farmers of years past, today’s palm oil producers have a product that thrives in their climate more so than just about anywhere else. There also happens to be a voracious and growing market for that product. This rampant demand has led to an out of control explosion in the cultivation of oil palms.

In the case of the Midwest, the rampant over-cultivation of wheat and other grain crops in the early decades of the twentieth century degraded the topsoil and created the dust bowl. Mass erosion and the failure of the nutrient cycle transformed the verdant great plains into a swirling storm of choking, fine-particle dust famously recorded in photographs of the time. In Indonesia today, the ancient and expansive rainforest ecosystem is being similarly devastated.

The most efficient method of transforming chaotic natural rainforest into orderly and profitable oil palm plantations is through the tried and true technique we call “slash-and-burn.” Slash-and-burn consists of hacking down the rainforest, letting the vegetation dry and then burning it where it fell. This clears the earth and provides it with some degree of short-term fertilization. The freshly exposed and ash-covered soil is then planted with oil palms and the monoculture is off and running. To date, an area over twice the size of Belgium has been converted from interconnected forest containing thousands of species of flora and fauna to a monoculture orchard all with the effort of a few bulldozers and chainsaws.

This rampant deforestation is devastating to the local ecology of Indonesia which has been identified as being second only to Brazil in terms of its native biodiversity. As plants and animals lose habitat the food web collapses. Habitat loss and fragmentation result in widespread population declines across species. The remaining members of the impacted species are forced to seek alternative methods of survival. Just as wolves and coyotes in our country will turn to cattle and sheep when their traditional prey species decline, so too do the elephants, tigers, and orangutans of Indonesia venture onto these increasingly prominent palm oil plantations. As recently as 2004, some of the companies growing oil palms were offering bounties on the wild species deemed by them to be a “nuisance”. Already highly endangered animals including Sumatran rhinos, tigers, and orangutans are only growing more so as this industry grows and expands.

The slash-and-burn technique has a secondary and in some ways worse impact as the burning releases captured carbon into the atmosphere. A growing tree constantly pulls carbon from the atmosphere and fixes it into the structure of its branches and leaves. The burning process releases this carbon in the same way our cars do when we burn gasoline. Furthermore, tropical forest soil in many places in Indonesia is actually something called peat soil. Due to the abundance of moisture and the never-ending growth season of the tropics, there is more buildup of fallen organic matter in tropical forests than we see here in our temperate forests. Rather than decomposing to rich fertile topsoil, the forest floor is often instead composed of dense layers of partially decayed organic matter. You may have heard of well-preserved mummies being discovered in peat bogs in Europe. That mummification is possible because the consistently wet, compressed environment of the peat layer restricts decomposition. The thick Indonesian peat soils can represent hundreds or even thousands of years of ancient vegetation and accordingly, fixed carbon.

Peat does burn, quite well. Like a compressed fire-starter log, peat burns eagerly and is difficult to extinguish. If a forest fire in Indonesia ignites the peat layer, it can continue to burn, quietly, almost unnoticeably for months or even years. It does this by burning slowly and largely underground. In this respect, it’s just like the coal mine fires still cooking in some places in the United States.

In 2015 a drought in Indonesia highlighted the extent of the problem. The unusual dryness made the peat soil even more susceptible to ignition. As a result, over the course of several months, many hundreds of intentional and often illegal clearing fires ran out of control. They spread to the broader forest further decimating thousands of acres of delicate habitat. The abundant compressed biomass of the peat soils exacerbated the fires and exponentially increased the amount of pollution and particulate released. At the peak of the disaster, pillars of smoke could be seen from space climbing from the archipelago and blanketing not only Indonesia, but Malaysia, Singapore, and even parts of Thailand.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency recommends considering school closures whenever the air quality index (AQI) reaches 150 and becomes insistent once the AQI climbs above 300. In Jakarta, the massive metropolis serving as Indonesia’s Capitol, the worst day of 2016 so far had a AQI of 167. The AQI in Indonesia during the fire season of 2015 spiked to 3,000. For much of September of that year, the daily carbon emissions caused by the Indonesian wildfires surpassed the daily emissions of the entire US economy.

-NASA image by Adam Voiland (NASA Earth Observatory) and Jeff Schmaltz 

The tragic irony of the devastation rooted in the palm oil industry is how much of it is the result of really well-intentioned ideas. When we realized the devastating health impacts of trans fats and began to remove them from the American diet, in most cases they were replaced with cheap, abundant palm oil. When the European Union mandated that a certain percentage of their transportation fuels be composed of biologically derived ingredients, cheap, available palm oil became the substitute of choice. While vegetable oil derived biofuels release less carbon than petroleum while burning, when you factor in the production costs and deforestation, their carbon footprint is three times the size of their petroleum forebears.

So what do we do? Boycott palm oil? That may not be the best course of action for several reasons. Firstly, it would be nearly impossible; palm oil is simply too ubiquitous. Secondly, that wouldn’t solve the issue but merely push the demand onto another crop, likely soy or canola. While vegetable oil can be derived from many plants, as it turns out, none of them produce oil as efficiently or at lower ecological cost than oil palms. To replace the oil palm plantations with any other oil producing plant would actually make the problem worse. The problem isn’t the plant, it’s the production.

The way forward isn’t a boycott but rather a reformation. Monoculture farming is a bad idea in an ecosystem as dynamic as that of a tropical forest. Unfettered deforestation to make way for monoculture farming is an even worse idea as it destabilizes the broader ecosystem and can lead to catastrophic wildfires and dust bowls. The key to sustainable palm oil production is in regulation of clearing practices and modernization of cultivation policies.

Luckily for us, this is already underway. In 2004 the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil began a discussion between palm oil producers, their customers, conservation agencies, and other concerned parties. They established a certification program and standards of practice to help rein in the industry. While the RSPO is far from perfect, they are at least beginning to right the ship. Unilever, one of the largest users of palm oil has taken the lead in pushing for change. Not only have they been a driving force in establishing the RSPO, they’ve even gone so far as to blacklist RSPO certified producers who violated the pledge. Unilever produces Dove, Ben and Jerry’s, Axe, and Lipton to name a few. This massive multinational conglomerate took action not because of legislation or government mandate but because a relatively small number of concerned citizens pressured them.

Progress is taking place but it’s moving too slowly to be called a solution right now. The RSPO must be kept accountable, and every producer of palm oil must be pushed to sustainability if we don’t want the Sumatran tiger to follow its Balinese cousin into extinction. All it takes is pressure and it’s never been easier to apply that pressure. The main thing we common citizens can do is pay attention to our purchases and the easiest way to do that is to follow RSPO recommendations and to download the app produced by the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo which will help you identify products made with RSPO certified palm oil.

When you’re stocking up for Halloween this year, take a moment to question the candy that winds up in your cart. There are several guides out there to RSPO certified or orangutan friendly products. In fact, you can find one of them here. Our indifference as consumers allows for the unrestricted deforestation, rampant CO2 emissions, and increasingly endangered species seen throughout Indonesia. If we’re all just a bit more considerate in our purchases, we can turn this industry around. It’s happening already. This Halloween, let’s join together to make it happen a little faster.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Safari Spotlight

Vultures!

There’s no better time than Halloween time to throw a bone to the unappreciated vulture. Few birds are less loved than vultures. We use songbirds to symbolize springtime and romance, and we’ve assigned doves to represent the peace and tranquility of marriage. The majestic eagle soars and scowls, representing our democracy and heritage, perching proud and golden atop our flagpoles. But the vulture? The vultures are always portrayed lurking and skulking, hunching on tombstones and peering balefully from the blackened branches of dead trees. Very, very few of us look on the bald-headed, hunch-backed buzzard with love. This Halloween, let’s try to change that.

There are two species of vulture to be found here at Safari West. One you are practically guaranteed to see and another you almost certainly won’t. These are the turkey vulture and the hooded vulture. One is local to Sonoma County and the other hails from far Africa. They’re both scavengers, feeding on the dead. They both rely on sharp beaks and strong stomach acids to survive. They seem like they’d be cousins but as it turns out, they’re not. Their similarity in form and function is the result of what we call convergent evolution. Although they’re not actually related, they live similar lifestyles and so have evolved strikingly similar traits.

Let’s start with the former. The turkey vulture is our local vulture here in northern California. While they occasionally share airspace with the California condor, condors are vanishingly rare while thankfully, the turkey vulture is not. If you’ve ever been driving down the road and seen a large, ominous looking black bird on a telephone pole glaring down with wings outspread, that was a turkey vulture. If you’ve looked up at a column of slowly rising black spots, soaring unsteadily in summer updrafts, those are turkey vultures. They’re not classically attractive birds with their black plumage and bald heads. They’re frequently missing a few flight feathers, lending their appearance a raggedy air. They’re often spotted lumbering into unsteady flight as your car approaches a recently squished squirrel, skunk, or raccoon on the roadside. Bare red skulls and sooty black plumage; these are our beautiful turkey vultures.

We have turkey vultures all over Safari West for good reason. Our wildlife preserve is located in the foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains which means that as the sun hits our slopes each morning, it generates thermal updrafts; rising columns of heated air. The vultures, refreshed from a night’s sleep use those thermals like elevators, riding the currents of air to tremendous heights. If you’re ever on property between nine and eleven in the morning, look up and you’ll see them drifting overhead.

The amazing thing about turkey vultures (and indeed all vultures found in the Americas) is that they actually smell for food from that altitude. Unlike the vulture species found elsewhere in the world, new-world vultures depend more on scent than sight when it comes to finding a delicious corpse. Even at high altitudes, the scent of corruption and decay is detectable to them and, like an airborne bloodhound; they can track the scent to its source.

The other species of vulture to be found at Safari West is the hooded vulture. Hooded vultures are native to sub-Saharan Africa. Ours are quite shy and aren’t on display so don’t expect to see them during a visit here. The reason we have them here is because the hooded vulture is a critically endangered species and we are a conservation breeding facility. Like vultures the world over, hooded vultures are experiencing a shocking decline in population. As of 2009, they were considered a species of least concern. Fast forward less than a decade and they are at the most extreme level of endangerment. What happened?

Hooded vultures are part of the family we call Old-World vultures; vulture species found in Europe, Africa, and Asia. One trait shared by old-world vultures is absolutely incredible eyesight. Like our local turkey vultures, the hooded vultures float aloft on thermals and then cruise around in search of a recently deceased meal. Unlike the turkey vultures, they’re not sniffing for bodies but scanning for the distinct shape of something deliciously dead. When they spot a body, or just as often, another vulture descending with purpose, they drop down to feast.

The naked head and hooked beak of the vulture species is perfect for prying apart dead flesh. The beak is a fantastic tool and the nude head and neck keeps mess to a minimum. Hooded vultures tend to wait for the bigger vulture species to eat and leave before they take over a corpse. They’re among the smaller of vulture species, and weaker as well, so they benefit from the rending and tearing done by their larger cousins. Their smaller size also makes it easier for them to get the juicy bits left in crevices.

There are several problems faced by vultures in Africa. One is that they are hunted for food as well as for body parts used in traditional medicine. There’s also some evidence that poachers will kill vultures so the circling birds don’t give away the location of an illegally killed elephant, rhino, or lion. Some of the more pressing and widespread concerns however, have to do with habitat loss and poisoning. Habitat loss is a fairly standard culprit when looking at endangered species, but poisoning is something else entirely.

What typically happens is that a rancher will poison the corpse of one of their flock or herd with the hope that that poison will be consumed by the painted dog, cheetah, leopard, or lion who’s been preying on their animals. This is discouraged in the first place because of the endangered status of all of those primary predators, but is further problematic because any corpse will draw vultures from miles, sometimes hundreds of miles around. While this kind of poisoning will occasionally rid a shepherd of a bothersome leopard, it also decimates the local scavenger population.

When the scavengers aren’t there to clean up the dead, microbes takes over the work instead. Microbes can cause disease to spread among other local species, including us. We may not instinctively love vultures but we certainly should. Their super senses serve to keep huge areas of terrain free of rotting corpses. Their stomach acids are so strong that they’ll wolf down rancid meat riddled with the pathogens that cause anthrax, botulism, and rabies without batting an eye. This incredible cleaning capacity means that vultures play a key role in reducing disease vectors. The next time you see a black colored V soaring over your home, take a moment to thank it for the work its doing. This would be a much grosser place without them.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Conservation Corner

The Trapper Keeper Trap

By: Jared Paddock

Remember the Trapper Keeper? If you had or were a child in the 80’s or 90’s you almost certainly do. That’s when the Trapper Keeper was in its prime. I’m told the stylish plastic binders still exist but if so, they’re a bit lost amid the million interchangeable items in your local stores Back to School section. I have a theory about Trapper Keepers. They were awesome, they were hip, they were in fact useful, but they were also fragile, disposable, and potentially the harbingers of a destructive and ongoing ecological problem.

I asked my dad once what back-to-school was like when he was a kid. He talked about the disappointment of the end of summer and the drudgery of returning to class. He mentioned having to make covers for his assigned text books out of paper bags. “We had to cover them because the same books had been used for years, maybe decades.” He couldn’t remember ever carrying binders and wasn’t sure that he’d ever even owned a backpack.

I am a product of the eighties and nineties and my back-to-school memories are a bit different. I remember begrudgingly following my parents into K-mart or Target. I remember shopping carts loaded with a sea of “necessary” supplies. I have emotionally charged memories of Jansport backpacks, erasable pens, plastic protractors, mechanical pencils, and of course, I remember my Trapper Keeper. Or, more accurately, I remember Trapper Keepers, because cool though they were, they rarely lasted long and almost always wound up getting tossed by the end of the school year.

I dug up the history of this particular item because of all the items purchased each August, the Trapper Keeper is the one that has the most pop-culture relevance and nostalgia (and this isn’t just for me personally, there’s a vibrant market out there for “vintage” Trapper Keepers). In case you’re unfamiliar, the Trapper Keeper is at its heart, little more than a stylish variation on the standard three-ring binder, invented by Mead Corporation employee E. Bryant Crutchfield in the late 70’s. There’s a fascinating write-up about this history at mentalfloss.com but the long and short of it is that students in the 70’s were struggling with organization and Crutchfield discovered a way to exploit a previously untapped market.

Every high school movie ever made has a scene in which a bully knocks the hero’s stuff out of his or her hands resulting in a fluttering cascade of paperwork. The Trapper Keeper neatly solves this problem. The binder itself closes securely with a flap. The rings hold onto the individual folders, and the folders have angled vertical pockets so even when held upside down, the papers contained within can’t fall out. At its core it is a profoundly useful device.

Now here’s where my theory comes in. The difference between the Trapper Keeper and the various three-ring binders it competed with is that the Trapper Keeper was aggressively marketed. There was television commercials for the Trapper Keeper and even at the outset, there were options as far as appearances went. The folders came with pictures printed on them and eventually the binders did as well. This had two immediate and important consequences. Firstly, kids wanted the things. The same way we wanted specific toys, we now wanted specific folders. When I was in third grade, my folders had to have Ninja Turtles on them. For some of my friends it was football, or Transformers, or cars. We nagged our parents, pleaded in the aisles of the stores, traded with one another on the playground.

The second major consequence of the Trapper Keepers appearance was a sudden shift toward disposability. While TV dinners, instant coffee, and paper plates were already well-entrenched by the early eighties, the disposability of school supplies was something new. It’s not that the Trapper Keeper was specifically designed to be disposable; it’s just that it was designed to be cheap. Rather than sturdy metal rings, the binder sported a plastic sliding mechanism that (at least in my case) never survived the school year. Likewise the thin plastic cover heat-sealed around the binder inevitably split and tore. In the rare case that the binder actually made it through the year, it was practically a guarantee that by the start of the next grade a new model would be out. A young me, horrified by the idea of starting fourth grade with something as childish as a Ninja Turtle folder would clamor for the newer model on display at the store.

I’m picking on the Trapper Keeper because it’s the most famous example but it’s hard to ignore the changes that came in its wake. In my day, Jansport backpacks also carried a must-have cachet. The cool kids had Jansports and if you wanted to be one of them, you needed something similar. The backpacks were popular, useful, relatively cheap, and, at least in my case, almost always wore out or broke before the next summer vacation.  Around this same time, there was also a surge in totally unnecessary accessories for the elementary school crowd. We had pencil grips that slid over your trusty #2 pencil because apparently pencil-slippage had been an ongoing crisis. Initially, these were simple rubber sleeves but I have clear memories of ergonomically designed grips that were supposed to teach you how to correctly hold your pencil as well.

By the fifth grade, I was taking not only pencils and pens to school, but also erasable pens, the much demanded middle ground between the permanence of ink and the correct-ability of graphite. I also had a compass that I used maybe once or twice a year but inevitably replaced the next year, a plastic protractor (usually stored in a plastic pencil box that still contained the shards of the previous protractor) and defying all logic, a cheaply made, manual three-hole punch that could be stored in my three-ring binder to prep non-hole-punched papers for storage. This device barely worked, broke almost immediately, and competed for space in the binder with hole-punched folders which could just as easily have held the non-hole-punched papers.

The problem with this situation is not just that I wasted time and energy packing around unnecessary products or even that so much money was (and is) wasted by parents across the country. The real problem is that almost all of these needless products are made out of cheap, easily manufactured, mass-produced plastic. And all of that plastic, from my very first Trapper Keeper to my last stupid hole-punch, do you know where it is now…In a landfill. All of it is still sitting quietly, patiently, resolutely in a landfill somewhere. And alongside my collection of discarded Trapper Keepers are the 75-million others that had been sold by 2013. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade, doesn’t rot, doesn’t break down and disappear. The polymer strands that make up most plastics persist, sometimes for decades, centuries, or more.

As it turns out, plastics are far worse than we once knew. They essentially never go away and there is mounting evidence that plastics are complicit in a number of medical and ecological issues, from endocrine disorders to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It’s a giant swirling gyre of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean. If you’re like me, you’re probably imagining a floating landfill of plastic bottles, old Nikes, and swollen black bags of trash. In reality the patch is virtually invisible. While plastics don’t typically biodegrade, they do break down into smaller and smaller pieces eventually becoming what is called “microplastics”. These nearly invisible particles of plastic polymer congregate in the garbage patch and turn the water into a milky soup. Fish, turtles, and other sea life readily consume these near microscopic particles. Resulting problems can range from the infamous entanglement deaths of sea turtles and whales to sea bird starvation resulting from gut space being taken up by indigestible plastic rather than food. While the problems associated with plastics extend far beyond school supplies, the culture of back-to-school over-consumption is nonetheless a largely unrecognized culprit.

The Back-to-School season is a time when our economy and ecology collide in a fairly dramatic way. According the to “Backpack Index” put together by Huntington Bank for the last decade, the average cost to equip an elementary school child for the year has gone up by 88% since 2007 with similar numbers for middle and high-school aged students. They estimate that the average family can expect to spend $659, $957, and $1,498 for elementary, middle, and high-school aged students respectively. These costs can be crippling for some families and much of what those dollars go to buy can be devastating for the environment. While much of what shows up on back-to-school shopping lists is obviously necessary for a student to have, clearly not all of it is. Inflation and the increasing intensity of the education system alone simply cannot account for an 88% cost increase in less than a decade.

There’s no doubt that kids these days need much more for school than my parents, or even I myself did. We had to have calculators but today’s generation needs flash drives and tablet computers. These things are inevitably expensive and alongside them, even basic items like pencils have grown pricier. Even with that taken into account however, it has never been easier than it is today to limit your impact on the environment. We know now that disposable plastic is a problem and can easily avoid mechanical pencils, plastic rulers, and garbage products. Notebook paper may still be a necessity but it’s now simple to find stuff made of recycled product. These items may be more expensive at the outset, but by avoiding unnecessary expenditures like my series of hole punches and pencil-grips, and by investing in long-lasting products as opposed to the more disposable, many of these costs can be deferred over the long term.

Ten years ago, I bucked a lifelong trend and purchased a truly high-quality backpack. One produced by a company known for taking an environmentally conscious stance in its manufacturing practices and advocating quality above cost. It cost me significantly more than the JanSports and EastPacks I loved so much as a kid, but it has also survived a decade of daily use and abuse. It’s been dropped, kicked, dragged, tossed, worn through rainstorms, left out in the snow, and chewed on by a succession of dogs and yet, it’s still going strong. The cost for the eight to ten cheap backpacks I’d have gone through since 2006 far outweighs the cost of the one on my back today.

Like the generations that preceded us, my generation has a lot to answer for. When it comes to the rampant waste of our school supply consumerism, we can duck behind the defense of “we didn’t know better”. Alternatively, we can take the lessons of a culture of disposability and waste and turn them into teaching points for the future. When you go to the store to load up on supplies, whether for you children or for yourself, take a moment to consider what is necessary and what isn’t. Take a moment to consider what becomes of these minor conveniences after they’ve broken or outlived their usefulness. In the long run, none of us are going to save the world simply by buying quality products, but if we can at least stop burying it under mounds of non-degrading, non-essential garbage, we’re making a start.

[safari-west-rec-blog]

Conservation Corner

INVASION!

By: Jared Paddock

Killer bees. Kudzu. Glassy-winged sharpshooters. Zebra mussels. White-nose syndrome. Lionfish. Medusahead grass. This laundry-list of organisms is one small sample of a long and ever-growing compilation titled “invasive species”. It’s an ominous sounding term and for good reason. Invasive species can wreak havoc on an ecosystem, causing widespread disruption and even the extinction of other species. They can also wreak havoc on the economy, disrupting agriculture and industry and costing us humans a fortune.

According to the National Wildlife Federation, “approximately 42% of threatened or endangered species are at risk primarily due to invasive species.” Equally as scary, the US Fish and Wildlife Service puts the annual cost of invasive species to the United States at somewhere around $120 billion. Have I made my point? These things, whatever they are, are a big deal.

So then what exactly is an “invasive species”? Is it simply an organism from somewhere outside the state? The county? The neighborhood? How foreign does a species have to be to classify as invasive?

As it turns out, not all species that are alien to an ecosystem are commonly considered to be invasive in it, and in fact, the terminology might well be more political than it is ecological. Several factors have to come into play in order for a species to earn this dubious moniker. First, the species must be introduced to a novel environment (the alien component). Once there it has to survive, which is no guaranteed thing (imagine a crocodile introduced to Antarctica). After surviving in its new home, the alien species must then multiply and thrive, eventually outcompeting one or more species native to the ecosystem. At this point, when the alien becomes damaging, that’s when we tend to term it invasive.

Let me give you an example. Recently, ornamental lionfish have become a bit of a news item. These striped, long-finned tropical fish are a favorite of aquaculturists and fish enthusiasts world wide. The slender, barbed, poisonous lobes that make up the lionfish’s “mane” are gorgeous and look amazing in a salt-water tank. This flamboyant species hails from the western Pacific where it occupies coral reefs and preys on smaller fish. Somehow in the mid-1980’s, the species was introduced to the waters off of Florida. In all likelihood, a pet-owner released his or her collection in a misguided attempt to liberate the captive pets. Florida is a long, long way from the western Pacific. Often in this situation, the newly freed pets are quickly killed. Either simple environmental factors do them in (again, crocs in Antarctica) or else they fall prey to predators and pathogens they’ve never experienced before. In this particular case, something close to the opposite occurred. The lionfish survived. The coastal waters off Miami are not all that different from the lionfish’s native habitat so factors like water temperature worked in their favor. Likewise, there are no predators in the Caribbean eager to eat lionfish and no diseases hanging about that proved fatal to them. In the absence of these population-limiting factors, the fish not only survived, they thrived. They quickly established a position as an apex-predator, feasting on reef fish who’d never seen a lionfish before and had no means of defending themselves. Those introductory lionfish grew healthy and strong and bred prodigiously. Before long, the coast of Florida became the site of a lionfish explosion.

For the first decade or so following introduction, the population remained restricted to the coastal waters off Miami. In 2000, lionfish sightings began to pop up further along the Atlantic seaboard. By 2007, the fish had become true colonists; expanding their range New York to Cuba and Haiti. According to the US Geological Survey, the fish can now be found in coastal water throughout the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and as far north as Rhode Island as indicated by this beautiful animated map. The lionfish is now firmly designated as an invasive species because as its range grows, the populations of other reef fish has declined. They are causing widespread shifts and changes in their ecosystem.

Florida faces a nearly identical invasive problem with burmese pythons; another pet species released into the Everglades. As with the lionfish, the pythons find the environment comfortable and thrive in the absence of python-hungry predators or competitors for resources. Their population has exploded and hungry snakes are decimating once relatively stable populations of small mammals and birds. Florida is also exporting invasive of its own. As detailed in the month’s Safari Spotlight, the red-eared slider, a turtle native to Florida and other southern states, has invaded California. Fast-breeding and larger than our native turtles, they are dominating our local freshwater habitats and wreaking havoc on our local turtle populations. In all the cases outlined above, the designation of invasive was applied once it became clear that the successes of the alien species were coming at the expense of the natives.

Although it’s certainly a big contributor, the pet trade isn’t the only source for problematic invasive species. Glassy-winged sharpshooters, innocuous looking insects from the Southeastern US made it into Southern California in the late 80’s; likely by traveling on a shipment of nursery plants. The little insects feed on the vital fluids of vascular plants and carry something called Pierce’s Disease; a pathogen which decimates grape vines. Zebra mussels were introduced into the Great Lakes (again in the late 80’s) from the ballasts of Russian and eastern European tankers. The fingernail sized bivalves produce between 100,000 and 500,000 eggs per year and are spreading through American waterways at a terrifying rate. They frequently congregate in concrete-like masses which block plumbing and infrastructure, costing us millions in damages. The list goes on and on and though the individual species may differ, the pattern is the same. An alien species appears and changes things to the extent that it becomes ecologically or (and this is what tends to get our attention) economically damaging.

When framed like this, it become readily understandable why invasive species tend to be categorized as implicitly negative. Like acid rain or global warming, they are often thought of as a purely human-caused phenomenon having purely negative consequences. This is a gross oversimplification of the facts.

In truth, while human-caused invasions are almost universally the source of ecologic turmoil including dramatic population shifts and extinctions, what we have done is not to invent of new phenomenon but to rapidly accelerate an existing one. Since the dawn of life on this planet, invasions have been taking place. Species from the sea invaded the land, colonizing and claiming as they went. Since then species that have thrived in one location have spread to others, competing with and pushing out other species as they’ve moved.

Without invasions, the Hawaiian islands would likely be little more than sterile heaps of lava sprouting from the mid-Pacific. Throughout the history of the islands, birds, reptiles, plants, and the occasional mammal have found their way across thousands of miles of ocean to colonize those tropical shores. Prior to human discovery of the island chain, the rate of invasion was approximately one novel species every 100,000 years. In spite of these ongoing invasions, the term “invasive species” hasn’t often been used in describing historic Hawaii. In part, this is because these invasions happened before humans were on the scene. We tend not to concern ourselves with the shifts and extinctions that led to what is. We’re far more worried about shifts and extinctions changing what exists now into something new. The other reason why we don’t often consider these ancient invasions in the same manner that we consider today’s is because they were less apparently damaging.The key word there is “apparent”. While the interspecies conflicts and occasional extinctions that likely occurred whenever a new plant or bird arrived on the islands are of no concern to us today, they would have been a very big concern for the species being edged out at the time.

While these natural invasions are most dramatic and obvious in island ecology, they happen across the planet in every ecosystem. From the intermixing of North and South American ecologies that occurred when the Isthmus of Panama rose above sea level, to the widespread changes that both led to and resulted from human beings crossing the Bering Strait from Eurasia, the globe has always been a melting pot of advancing and retreating populations. It’s not the act of invasion that’s the problem, it’s the frequency. They’re happening too fast for our comfort and population shifts that would normally have taken centuries or longer are happening on the scale of years or decades. While not unprecedented in geologic history, this is certainly unprecedented in human history.

The other conception about invasives that must be challenged is this idea that all of them are inherently detrimental and fundamentally negative. This is where the politics of terminology reveals itself. An invading species that is economically beneficial usually escapes the label whereas those that hit us in the wallet wind up on roadside billboards. The mistake made by the glassy-winged sharpshooter was to invade Napa Valley and destroy grapes rather than poison oak. An invasive insect that doesn’t impact our agriculture usually escapes our notice.

As proof of this, consider the ubiquitous earthworm. Prior to European colonization of North America, this continent had few earthworms. Worms had been largely extirpated from North America during the ice ages; carved away and crushed by the movement of glaciers across the terrain. These days, you can’t turn a spade without revealing at least a few of the wriggling annelids. It is common knowledge that these helpful creatures aerate our soil and aid in decomposition. We add them to our gardens to gain beautiful flowers and vegetables. We keep them in our compost bins to turn our trash into fertilizer They are an unexamined boon to our agriculture and productivity.

So most earthworms are definitely invasive though we rarely call them that, and though there is increasing scientific evidence that their presence in north-eastern forests is in fact detrimental, it’s not detrimental to us. Even though they are virtually everywhere, the wriggling masses of earthworms beneath our feet are viewed positively while the quiet colonies of zebra mussels in our waterways are viewed as the advancing enemy horde. Both species are virulently invasive and tend to dominate their respective ecosystems. So what’s the difference? Zebra mussels cost us money while earthworms help us make it.

The long and short of this whole discussion is this; invasive species are nothing new. From the dawn of time, ecosystems have had to deal with newcomers, whether it was a palm nut riding ocean currents to a far off island, or the opossum walking up the isthmus of Panama to a brave new North American world. In all cases, an established community has had to adapt to something novel. Now that we humans are part of the status quo, we’re very concerned. We tend not to see the long view. From our perspective, the current arrangement of species and habitats is the correct one and we shudder to see it change. We see news items about deserts expanding and forests shrinking. We wait in line at roadside border security checkpoints or agriculture screening stations in airports. There is increasing focus on gardening with native plants and removing invasive weeds from the neighborhood. We are trying to preserve what is and fend off what might be.

This concern is more than anything, a value judgement. Sure, invasives change systems and sure, the introduction of the lionfish to the Caribbean may cause widespread changes, but there’s a larger view to consider. Will lionfish end the Caribbean? Will sharpshooters turn the Napa Valley into a sterile moonscape? Not likely. The systems will adjust and adapt, transforming themselves into the newest version of that system. This is life in motion. This is how new species are born and old species are edged out. This is all part and parcel of the great process of life.

So how should we think about invasives? It’s a balancing act. Trying to maintain sterile, unchanging environments is not only impossible, it’s unwise. As we see in New Zealand, Hawaii, Madagascar, Australia, and numerous other isolated communities, strict separation tends to lead to ecological precariousness. Island communities typically have fewer species overall and much of what they do have are highly specialized. While these ecosystems do fine while isolated, exposure to novel species is often devastating. Consider that Madagascar lemurs and Australian koalas aren’t invading new territories. Rather, they are struggling to maintain position against an influx of rodents, cane toads, cats, and other novel species. The ebb and flow is important to ecological health.

What is equally important to recognize is that pacing matters. While some colonization and expansion is expected and healthy, the rampant transplanting of species brought about by human expansion is unprecedented. While the Hawaiian Islands used to experience a novel species once every 100,000 years or so, in the modern era, they’re being swamped with novelty. In recent history, not only did our species invade, but we have brought with us the great plethora of life from across the globe; rats and bees, snakes and lizards, cats and dogs. This is the very definition of “too much of a good thing”. We’ve accelerated the process beyond healthy standards and must do what we can to mitigate the damage.

Going forward, we will have to take a firm objective look at alien species that pop up in our neighborhoods. We’ll have to ask ourselves, is this change happening because life is doing what it does best? Or because, somebody down the road didn’t wipe their boots before flying back from vacation? We’ll have to consider whether the shifts made by the ecosystem to accommodate the new arrival are fundamentally detrimental, or simply changes that don’t serve our self-interest. Conservation done right demands that we look beyond our own concerns and try to determine what works best for the world at large.

For now, continue wiping down your boat and draining the bilge to keep zebra mussels from spreading too quickly. Don’t release your exotic pets into the city park. Be aware of what you plant in your yard and whether or not it’ll soon be growing in your neighbor’s. Do what you can to limit invasions, but do so understanding that these species aren’t bad just because they don’t fit with our plan. They are remarkable examples of life doing what life does best. They’ve outcompeted their rivals and found ways to piggy-back on the unprecedented mobility of humanity. While we want to limit their expansion and mitigate their invasions, we also want to recognize that we owe our lives to invasive predecessors who fought, scrabbled, and competed to forge the living world we take for granted today.