Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Fracking Away the Wildlife

August 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Pronghorn

The population of Wamsutter, Wyoming may have grown four times over in the last three years, but the town on the southeastern edges of some of the largest natural gas fields on the continent is still a dusty pit stop off Interstate 80. The augmented volume of trucks flowing through this isolated interchange only affirms the energy boom of the Intermountain West—and the fracturing of the habitat of the American pronghorn. Once ubiquitous on the Great Plains and high deserts of the American West, these antelope rely on thousands of miles of unspoiled ranges to avoid their predators, and to ... Read More

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Can Monk Seals Find a Berth on Noah’s Ark?

July 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Monk seal

The “extinction vortex” is all too familiar in the world of endangered species: Extremely small populations often become vulnerable to new threats, precipitating a downward spiral toward extinction. But in a world of limited resources, I wonder about society’s obligation to intervene where there is little chance for reversing downward trends. A case in point is the critically endangered monk seal, which is declining toward extinction in one of the most pristine marine wilderness areas on earth. The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the northwest Hawaiian Islands is the ... Read More

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Conservation’s Earnest Message Could Use Levity

January 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In a move that stunned environmentalists across the globe: the Coalition of Financially Challenged Countries with Lots of Trees (CoFCCLoT) recently recommended reforesting G8 nations back to pre-industrial levels in the hopes of countering the ravages of climate change. The coalition also has called for reintroducing gorillas into Spain and lions into Greece with the goal of revitalizing the ailing Eurozone economies. OK, the CoFCCLot doesn’t really exist, despite the press release cited above sent out last April 1. But the ersatz organization’s founders, Erik Meijaard and Douglas ... Read More

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Ecosystems Secretly Protect Against Lyme Disease

September 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Every year, tens of thousand of people in the United States contract Lyme disease, a malady that can cause permanent damage to the brain, heart, and other organs in the worst cases. Lyme disease is most common in the Northeast, even though the bacteria that causes the disease and the ticks that spread it around are commonly found across much of the nation. What keeps most people in the U.S. safe from Lyme disease? According to Dr. Cherie Briggs, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the answer is lizards. In the podcast, Briggs discusses western fence lizards, ... Read More

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New Answers to Whale of a Mystery

August 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

There are around a hundred species of whales all over the world, from the mighty 200-ton blue whale to the tiny 100-pound vaquita. How did the whales evolve so diversely? In the podcast, Graham Slater, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, explains how the tiny land-based ancestor of all mammals evolved into the multi-ton whales that we see today. Slater discovered that whales experienced an explosion of evolutionary activity 35 million years ago. Far earlier in their evolutionary history than scientists had previously imagined, whales had already evolved into the basic forms that are found ... Read More

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Building Cities With Sustainability in Mind

April 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

A leading ecologist says if we want to build sustainable cities, we need to start with our money on our minds, and our minds in the gutter. William Patrick Lucey, an aquatic ecologist and special adviser to the British Columbia government on water policy, says little has changed in the way we have built cities in the 2,000 years since the Roman empire. Aside from some notable improvements in sanitation, and perhaps civility, our infrastructure still follows the Roman model; centralized water works, all-weather roadways with engineered drainage, and municipal sewers to whisk away our ... Read More

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Nuclear Weapons and Conservation: Connecting the Dots

February 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Hydrogen bombs and environmental conservation are two things that do not go together. Except at a nuclear site in South Carolina, where ecologist Nick Haddad has constructed one of the biggest ecological experiments in the world. Taking advantage of a large forest that has grown up around the Savannah River nuclear facilities, he has carved massive islands of grassland into the forest, through clear cutting, and connected some of the islands together, through yet more clear cutting. Why do this? One of the major priorities in conservation today is to connect together protected areas ... Read More

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Life Under Constant Pressure

February 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Feeling under pressure? Try being a mile underwater. More than 70 percent of the earth is ocean floor, an environment as lethal to human life as outer space. With pressures hundreds of times stronger than on the surface, no sunlight, and near freezing temperatures, it is hard to imagine that anything could survive on the bottom of the ocean. Dr. Craig McClain, a marine biologist at the National Center for Evolutionary Synthesis, has taken robot submersibles to the ocean floor. He discovered an astonishing number of species thriving on the seafloor: a comparable number of animals to what ... Read More

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Spiderman on Broadway? ‘Been There, Done That,’ Say Ants

January 24, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Manhattan skyline

Most people think of cities as the opposite of nature, but the truth is that urban areas are teeming with life. Crows, dandelions, and squirrels - to name just a few - are not most people's idea of wild life, but all sorts of species are found in cities. We see the pigeons and the house sparrows all around us on a daily basis, but because biologists have generally avoided studying the species found in cities, we actually know next to nothing about the ecology of urban species. In many ways, the Brazilian rainforest is better known to ecologists than the concrete jungle. Dr. Rob Dunn, an ... Read More

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Why Are There So Many Species in Tropical Rainforests?

December 10, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

One of the great mysteries of the world is why tropical rainforests contain so many species. In one spectacular example, a tiny area of the Ecuadorian rainforest, about 100 acres in size, contains more tree species than all of North America. But just how do so many species coexist? Dr. Simon Queenborough, a tropical ecologist and postdoctoral associate at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, discusses the hidden factors that keep even the strongest species from dominating. In a recent paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, he discovers that ... Read More

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