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Where the Cattle Herds Roam, Ideally in Harmony With Their Neighbors
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, July 11, 2006
MALTA, Mont. — Dale Veseth slowly drives a pickup over dirt tracks studded with small boulders, across a prairie that the word expansive does not begin to describe. The blanket of spring-green grass stretches 40 or 50 miles in every direction, and there is not a tree in sight.
Birds are abundant, though. “That’s a long-billed curlew,” Mr. Veseth said, pointing to a large brown bird running along the ground with a long curled beak, “and look, a Western kingbird.”
Mr. Veseth raises cattle. But in a sense, he and his neighbors also raise curlews, sage grouse, prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets and other species. They are part of a program run by the Nature Conservancy to create what are called grass banks, which give ranchers rights to graze land beyond their own, in return for commitments to conserve species like the ferrets and curlews on land they already own.
Mr. Veseth hopes that by being part of the program he is doing well by doing good, conserving wildlife and assuring the future of his ranch out here on the mixed grass prairie of the Northern Plains.
The grass bank is one of several ideas to change the way beef is raised on the Western range. This historic way of life is in trouble. Across the West ranchers are raising buffalo, selling specialty beef and challenging the power of the packinghouses in an effort to make ranching more profitable.
The grass bank is an effort to save ranching and the prairie. At a meeting several years ago, conservationists concluded that temperate grasslands were the least protected ecosystem on the globe. The Northern mixed grass prairie here was among them, and as a result, birds that nested in the grass were, and are, in steep decline. “Phillips County is the epicenter of biodiversity for grasslands birds,” said Linda Poole, a bird biologist with the Nature Conservancy.
So in 2002, in the throes of drought, the conservancy bought the historic 60,000-acre Matador Ranch here, once part of a string of ranches from Texas to Montana. The conservancy allows 13 ranchers to graze cattle here at greatly reduced rates. In return, the ranchers agree to protect bird and wildlife habitat on their own ranches and to battle noxious weeds. A result is that the ranchers get more range than they could otherwise afford, and the conservancy protects more range than it could afford to buy.
Traditional ranching often uses all of the forage for cattle, which harms other species. “This land is adapted to grazers, and the wildlife is adapted to grazing,” said Ms. Poole, who grew up on a ranch and worries that the ranching way of life is in trouble. “What’s key to conservation is the time of year it’s grazed, how long the cattle are in there and when they come back.”
Ranchers must also agree not to plow up rangeland, the biggest threat to the prairie. It does not make much economic sense here, where soil is poor and the weather extreme, but it is encouraged by federal subsidies.
Ranching, when it maximizes the use of forage for cattle, reduces habitat diversity. But if cattle grazing is undertaken with other goals in mind, the range can maintain a diversity of habitats. The Baird’s sparrow, for example, requires long grass that has not been grazed, while the mountain plover lives on grazed land or in a prairie dog town where the grass is a quarter of an inch tall.
The sage grouse, which Mr. Veseth has on his land, need a lek, a piece of ground where it can perform an elaborate courting ritual. The program has helped ranchers, although it is not yet clear how much it helps conservation. “It helped us get our stocking rate down” during the drought, Mr. Veseth said. “It saved us the first year. And for the first time ranchers are benefiting from enhancing habitat for endangered species.”
Ms. Poole said she was drawn to the program because of a prairie bird. “Lark buntings are the inspiration for the grass bank for me,” she said. “If there’s a drought, they go elsewhere. Ranchers can’t do that.” At least until now, she said. “You can’t survive here unless you have a drought strategy.”
Prairie dogs are crucial to the conservancy’s mission here, and the most controversial. A methodical campaign by ranchers and the federal government nearly obliterated them. They are, however, key to a healthy prairie because they provide a rich food source for numerous other species.
Critics agree something needs to be done but wonder if this is the tool. Curt Freese is a biologist in Bozeman with the World Wildlife Fund, which has been studying the mixed grass prairie in northern Montana and helped create a 31,000-acre reserve near here, owned by the American Prairie Foundation. A grass bank is unlike a conservation easement, which protects land in perpetuity, Mr. Freese said. “Once you stop, there is nothing to keep the landowner from going back to harmful practices or plowing it,” he said.
George Wuerthner, an opponent of grazing and an author of “Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West,” believes that grass banks encourage overgrazing rather than force ranchers to reduce their stock according to limits of the range. “A grass bank is like going into more debt rather than living within your means,” Mr. Wuerthner said.
Stephanie Gripne studied grass banks as part of a doctoral program at the University of Montana last year. She estimates that there are five or so in existence and five or six in various stages of start-up. But they have a fundamental problem, Ms. Gripne said: “They are cost ineffective.”
“It’s not a good strategy, but there aren’t a lot of other strategies,” she said. Grass banks can be cost effective, she said, if there is a way to avoid the capital outlay for a ranch, through donation or another source.
That is what the Quivira Coalition, a conservation group in Santa Fe, N.M., is trying to do. The group started the first grass bank, Rowe Mesa, in 1997 with grants. But grants are drying up, so it has bought a herd of cattle that it will graze. “It has all of the costs of a ranch but none of the income,” said Courtney White, director of the group. “We’re trying to make it pay for itself.”
Ms. Poole of the Nature Conservancy said: “It’s hard to raise money for the prairie because it’s subtle. For most people it’s a place to go 70 miles and hour and get someplace that matters.”
Racing to Know the Rarest of Rhinos, Before It’s Too Late
By MARK DERR, The New York Times, July 11, 2006
A two-ton rhinoceros measuring 5 feet tall and 10 feet long, with a fondness for browsing on low-lying shrubbery, hardly seems like a difficult animal to find. Unless there are fewer than 60 left on the planet.
That is the case with the Javan rhinoceros, often called the rarest large mammal on earth and perhaps the most endangered. Like its near — and larger — cousin the Indian rhinoceros, the Javan has only one horn, compared with two for Africa’s black and white rhinos and the Sumatran of Asia. The Javan, like the Indian, also has large plates of folded skin that resemble armor but do not protect against guns.
Because they lead solitary, secretive lives in remote forests in Indonesia and Vietnam, these rhinos are very hard to study: images of them come from “camera traps” activated by movement in the forest, and biologists get DNA samples from dung or from the horns and hides of dead animals.
“It is totally amazing how little we know about these animals, their mating habits and social behavior,” said Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando, director of the Center for Conservation and Research in Rajagiriya, Sri Lanka. “Till a decade ago people were debating whether the females have horns.” (They do.) Dr. Fernando was the lead author of a paper in the journal Conservation Genetics last month on the first detailed genetic study of the Javan rhino.
None of the rhinos exist in zoos. Without considerable luck and daring political leadership, the last Javan rhino will vanish from the Asian mainland in the next few years, leaving only those on the island of Java, whose forebears became isolated by rising sea levels 500,000 to a million years ago.
Even its island redoubt is no guarantee against extinction, say Dr. Fernando and his co-authors, an international team of scientists and conservationists. They estimated that populations might be too small to sustain: 40 to 50 animals in Ujung Kulon, an Indonesian national park on the western end of Java, and just 3 to 8 in Cat Tien National Park in southern Vietnam, half the number a decade ago.
The plight of the Javan rhino is a direct result of human actions, especially habitat destruction and hunting, Dr. Fernando said. For millions of years, the animal flourished in lowland forests from eastern India and Bangladesh all the way to the islands of Java and Sumatra, now part of Indonesia. During periods of glacial advance and low sea levels, those islands formed a land mass, Sundaland, that was connected to the mainland.
Unfortunately for the rhino, humans favored the same habitat and had little use for a large herbivore that raided their crops. Farmers regarded rhinos as agricultural pests and often killed them on sight. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the advent of colonialism and firearms drew hunters who slaughtered thousands. By 1934, the species was all but extinct on the Asian mainland.
Devastated by the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, the Ujung Kulon peninsula was later recolonized by rhinos and other animals but not by humans. It has since become a national park, and strong anti-poaching measures are in place. But perversely, the rhinos’ numbers have barely budged since 1980; the lack of human disturbance means that mature forests and exotic plants are replacing the shrubby lowland vegetation the animal prefers.
A further problem, the scientists say, is that the remaining rhino populations lack the genetic variation they need to combat disease, adapt to changing conditions and avoid the health and fertility problems that arise from inbreeding. The situation is especially desperate in Vietnam. But Dr. Fernando said in an e-mail message, “There is still detectable genetic diversity within the Ujung Kulon animals, which tells us we can still save this population.”
The task of saving the rhino is even more complicated because the Java and Vietnam populations represent different subspecies and should be managed separately to preserve any unique adaptations and mutations, said Don J. Melnick, a biologist at Columbia University and the project leader of the first Javan rhino genetic study through the university’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation. But Dr. Melnick added that it might be too late to preserve a distinct subspecies in Vietnam.
“Unless more individuals are brought into the Vietnam population,” he said, “it is hard to see how it survives.”
Gert Polet, a co-author of the Conservation Genetics paper and an adviser to the World Wide Fund for Nature’s program to protect Asian rhinos and elephants, says all may not be lost in Vietnam. Security there has improved, Mr. Polet said, and government officials and local residents are more sensitive to the rhinos’ needs.
“It is not unthinkable that there is a male and breeding is taking place,” he wrote in an e-mail message. Moreover, he added, the rhinos used to venture out only under cover of darkness; “recently daytime pictures have been taken (the first ever as far as we know), indicating that the rhinos feel more at ease than before.”
The Ujung Kulon rhinos face different problems, the scientists say, mainly habitat decline. But increasing the population is still their foremost aim. “We have got to get to 100 animals in the Ujung Kulon population, as a short-term goal, to stabilize the erosion of genetic variation,” Dr. Melnick said.
The Indonesian forestry department has decided to improve rhino habitat in Ujung Kulon by keeping out or removing competitor species, like the banteng, a wild cow, and invasive, exotic plants that crowd out the rhino’s preferred food, Adhi Rachmat Hariyadi, site manager for the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Ujung Kulon National Park project, wrote in an e-mail message.
The department is also proceeding with plans to establish a second rhino population in a site to be determined, he said. No program is planned to breed rhinos in captivity, but new genetic analyses by Dr. Melnick’s team, now under way, will be used to identify good candidates for relocation.
Dr. Fernando, Dr. Melnick and their co-authors also discuss more active proposals to encourage reproduction, including establishing managed breeding centers in natural settings, a plan endorsed in 1997 by a specialist group of IUCN, also known as the World Conservation Union.
Nico J. van Strien, a coordinator for the International Rhino Foundation and a co-author of the IUCN report, said the Javan rhino recovery effort had been set back by the failure of a costly captive breeding program for the imperiled Sumatran rhino, in the 1980’s and 90’s.
Occupying much the same range as the Javan rhino but preferring uplands to lowlands, the Sumatran rhino has two horns and hair and is slightly smaller. Although more numerous than the Javan, the Sumatran rhino is often considered more endangered, Dr. van Strien said, because its remaining habit is less secure from poachers and encroaching humans.
It is, he said, a fine and dubious distinction, since the goal is to save them both.
“Part of our purpose in writing this article was to call attention to the plight of the rhino,” Dr. Fernando said. He and his colleagues hope conservation groups worldwide will help the local authorities deal with the conflicts and economic dislocation that will inevitably arise as efforts are made to expand rhino habitat in some of the most densely peopled parts of the world.
To his mind, those groups have no choice.
“Allowing a species such as a rhinoceros to go extinct in the 21st century,” he writes, “would be tragic and unpardonable.”
Findings: As the World Wobbles
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, July 11, 2006
Late last November, as a big low-pressure system built over Europe and Asia and high pressure settled in over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the shifts in the atmosphere caused the earth to jiggle ever so slightly, like a hiker adjusting to a shifting load in a backpack.
As a result, the North Pole and its southern counterpart moved about four inches by one measure. (There are several ways to define the poles.)
Despite its diaphanous appearance, the atmosphere weighs about 5,000 trillion metric tons, and its mass is unevenly distributed. All those ridges and troughs on a weather map reflect differences of billions of tons of gases.
Scientists have long known that as the atmosphere shifts, it influences the earth’s rotation. The recent advent of satellites’ global positioning systems made it possible to confirm even the tiniest movements.
There were well-known, regularly occurring wobbles in the earth’s rotation that could shift the poles 30 feet over a year or more. These shifts blocked the detection of subtler, quicker movements caused by day-to-day changes in the atmosphere and the oceans.
Now, these small shifts are being measured by institutions devoted to tracking the planet’s behavior, including the earth orientation department of the United States Naval Observatory and the “time, earth rotation and space geodesy section” of the Royal Observatory of Belgium.
Experts at the Belgian observatory and the Paris Observatory found the November polar shift and a series of other little loops by looking particularly closely at a period from last November through February, when two of the larger regular wobbles in the axis canceled each other out.
They reported their analysis in the July 1 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
Really? The Claim: Your Diet Can Bring on an Acne Outbreak
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, July 11, 2006
THE FACTS Despite what parents everywhere have long insisted, most people know by now that chocolate and greasy foods will not cause acne. But can other foods?
According to dermatologists, what largely determines whether a person develops acne are genetics and hormonal fluctuations, hence the tendency for it to occur during puberty, pregnancy and menopause.
But recent studies have pointed to one or two exceptions, most notably dairy products. One of the largest studies to demonstrate this was published last year in The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology by a team at Harvard.
The researchers analyzed the habits and diets of nearly 50,000 people, looking especially at what they ate while in high school.
Those who drank three or more cups of milk a day, the researchers found, were 22 percent more likely to experience severe acne compared with those who drank one serving a week or less.
Skim milk had the greatest effect. Cream cheese and cottage cheese were also associated with outbreaks, while chocolate and greasy foods were not. The researchers attributed the effect to hormones in milk; other studies have had similar findings.
Dr. Diane S. Berson, an assistant professor of dermatology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, said foods that contain iodides, like shellfish and soy sauce, might also exacerbate acne. Iodides are thought to play a role in inflammation.
THE BOTTOM LINE Certain foods, in particular dairy products, have been shown to exacerbate acne.
Paper: Climate Change Threatens Wineries
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, July 10, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Climate warming could spell disaster for much of the multibillion-dollar U.S. wine industry. Areas suitable for growing premium wine grapes could be reduced by 50 percent -- and possibly as much as 81 percent -- by the end of this century, according to a study Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The paper indicates increasing weather problems for grapes in such areas as California's Napa and Sonoma valleys.
The main problem: An increase in the frequency of extremely hot days, according to Noah Diffenbaugh of the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University.
Grapes used in premium wines need a consistent climate. When temperatures top about 95 degrees they have problems maintaining photosynthesis and the sugars in the grapes can break down, Diffenbaugh said in a telephone interview.
''We have very long-term studies of how this biological system (of vineyards) responds to climate,'' said Diffenbaugh, and that gives the researchers confidence in their projection. Diffenbaugh is a co-author of the paper.
Scientists and environmental experts have become increasingly alarmed in recent years by accumulating gasses such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of the burning of fossil fuels.
A panel of climate scientists convened by the National Academy of Sciences reported last month that the Earth is heating up and ''human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.'' The scientists said average global surface temperatures rose by about 1 degree in the 20th century. While that may not sound like much, many blame it for melting glaciers, weather changes -- perhaps even more hurricanes -- and threats of spreading diseases.
James A. Kennedy, a professor of food science and technology at Oregon State University, said he was shocked by the report on the potential effects on wine grapes.
''We're definitely, in the wine industry, starting to be concerned about global warming,'' said Kennedy, who was not part of the research team.
''The lion's share of the industry is in California, so it's a huge concern from a wine quality standpoint,'' he said. For people in the industry ''this paper is going to be a bit of a shocker.''
While problems are seen for California wine country, the paper suggests grape-growing conditions might improve in parts of the Northwest and Northeast.
However, the researchers note that the Northeastern and Northwestern states have higher humidity levels than the current top wine regions.
High humidity is associated with fungus outbreaks and other potential growing problems, Diffenbaugh said, ''so it could be very expensive to produce premium wines in those areas.''
''Our simulations suggest that the area suitable for the production of premium wine grapes will both contract and shift over the next century,'' the researchers concluded.
''Production potential was almost completely eliminated in the Southwest and central United States; only high elevations were marginally suitable in the Intermountain West,'' they reported.
Some favorable regions remain in coastal California, Oregon, Washington and New England.
A thousand years ago when Viking explorers arrived on the coasts of eastern Canada and New England they named the region Vinland, a designation that has perplexed many historians since grapes are uncommon there now.
The weather was warmer then, however.
In Medieval times there were vineyards in England that were later knocked out by a colder period known as the Little Ice Age, Diffenbaugh recalled. Now, wine grapes are being grown in England again.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
On the Net: PNAS: http://www.pnas.org
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, July 11, 2006
MALTA, Mont. — Dale Veseth slowly drives a pickup over dirt tracks studded with small boulders, across a prairie that the word expansive does not begin to describe. The blanket of spring-green grass stretches 40 or 50 miles in every direction, and there is not a tree in sight.
Birds are abundant, though. “That’s a long-billed curlew,” Mr. Veseth said, pointing to a large brown bird running along the ground with a long curled beak, “and look, a Western kingbird.”
Mr. Veseth raises cattle. But in a sense, he and his neighbors also raise curlews, sage grouse, prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets and other species. They are part of a program run by the Nature Conservancy to create what are called grass banks, which give ranchers rights to graze land beyond their own, in return for commitments to conserve species like the ferrets and curlews on land they already own.
Mr. Veseth hopes that by being part of the program he is doing well by doing good, conserving wildlife and assuring the future of his ranch out here on the mixed grass prairie of the Northern Plains.
The grass bank is one of several ideas to change the way beef is raised on the Western range. This historic way of life is in trouble. Across the West ranchers are raising buffalo, selling specialty beef and challenging the power of the packinghouses in an effort to make ranching more profitable.
The grass bank is an effort to save ranching and the prairie. At a meeting several years ago, conservationists concluded that temperate grasslands were the least protected ecosystem on the globe. The Northern mixed grass prairie here was among them, and as a result, birds that nested in the grass were, and are, in steep decline. “Phillips County is the epicenter of biodiversity for grasslands birds,” said Linda Poole, a bird biologist with the Nature Conservancy.
So in 2002, in the throes of drought, the conservancy bought the historic 60,000-acre Matador Ranch here, once part of a string of ranches from Texas to Montana. The conservancy allows 13 ranchers to graze cattle here at greatly reduced rates. In return, the ranchers agree to protect bird and wildlife habitat on their own ranches and to battle noxious weeds. A result is that the ranchers get more range than they could otherwise afford, and the conservancy protects more range than it could afford to buy.
Traditional ranching often uses all of the forage for cattle, which harms other species. “This land is adapted to grazers, and the wildlife is adapted to grazing,” said Ms. Poole, who grew up on a ranch and worries that the ranching way of life is in trouble. “What’s key to conservation is the time of year it’s grazed, how long the cattle are in there and when they come back.”
Ranchers must also agree not to plow up rangeland, the biggest threat to the prairie. It does not make much economic sense here, where soil is poor and the weather extreme, but it is encouraged by federal subsidies.
Ranching, when it maximizes the use of forage for cattle, reduces habitat diversity. But if cattle grazing is undertaken with other goals in mind, the range can maintain a diversity of habitats. The Baird’s sparrow, for example, requires long grass that has not been grazed, while the mountain plover lives on grazed land or in a prairie dog town where the grass is a quarter of an inch tall.
The sage grouse, which Mr. Veseth has on his land, need a lek, a piece of ground where it can perform an elaborate courting ritual. The program has helped ranchers, although it is not yet clear how much it helps conservation. “It helped us get our stocking rate down” during the drought, Mr. Veseth said. “It saved us the first year. And for the first time ranchers are benefiting from enhancing habitat for endangered species.”
Ms. Poole said she was drawn to the program because of a prairie bird. “Lark buntings are the inspiration for the grass bank for me,” she said. “If there’s a drought, they go elsewhere. Ranchers can’t do that.” At least until now, she said. “You can’t survive here unless you have a drought strategy.”
Prairie dogs are crucial to the conservancy’s mission here, and the most controversial. A methodical campaign by ranchers and the federal government nearly obliterated them. They are, however, key to a healthy prairie because they provide a rich food source for numerous other species.
Critics agree something needs to be done but wonder if this is the tool. Curt Freese is a biologist in Bozeman with the World Wildlife Fund, which has been studying the mixed grass prairie in northern Montana and helped create a 31,000-acre reserve near here, owned by the American Prairie Foundation. A grass bank is unlike a conservation easement, which protects land in perpetuity, Mr. Freese said. “Once you stop, there is nothing to keep the landowner from going back to harmful practices or plowing it,” he said.
George Wuerthner, an opponent of grazing and an author of “Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West,” believes that grass banks encourage overgrazing rather than force ranchers to reduce their stock according to limits of the range. “A grass bank is like going into more debt rather than living within your means,” Mr. Wuerthner said.
Stephanie Gripne studied grass banks as part of a doctoral program at the University of Montana last year. She estimates that there are five or so in existence and five or six in various stages of start-up. But they have a fundamental problem, Ms. Gripne said: “They are cost ineffective.”
“It’s not a good strategy, but there aren’t a lot of other strategies,” she said. Grass banks can be cost effective, she said, if there is a way to avoid the capital outlay for a ranch, through donation or another source.
That is what the Quivira Coalition, a conservation group in Santa Fe, N.M., is trying to do. The group started the first grass bank, Rowe Mesa, in 1997 with grants. But grants are drying up, so it has bought a herd of cattle that it will graze. “It has all of the costs of a ranch but none of the income,” said Courtney White, director of the group. “We’re trying to make it pay for itself.”
Ms. Poole of the Nature Conservancy said: “It’s hard to raise money for the prairie because it’s subtle. For most people it’s a place to go 70 miles and hour and get someplace that matters.”
Racing to Know the Rarest of Rhinos, Before It’s Too Late
By MARK DERR, The New York Times, July 11, 2006
A two-ton rhinoceros measuring 5 feet tall and 10 feet long, with a fondness for browsing on low-lying shrubbery, hardly seems like a difficult animal to find. Unless there are fewer than 60 left on the planet.
That is the case with the Javan rhinoceros, often called the rarest large mammal on earth and perhaps the most endangered. Like its near — and larger — cousin the Indian rhinoceros, the Javan has only one horn, compared with two for Africa’s black and white rhinos and the Sumatran of Asia. The Javan, like the Indian, also has large plates of folded skin that resemble armor but do not protect against guns.
Because they lead solitary, secretive lives in remote forests in Indonesia and Vietnam, these rhinos are very hard to study: images of them come from “camera traps” activated by movement in the forest, and biologists get DNA samples from dung or from the horns and hides of dead animals.
“It is totally amazing how little we know about these animals, their mating habits and social behavior,” said Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando, director of the Center for Conservation and Research in Rajagiriya, Sri Lanka. “Till a decade ago people were debating whether the females have horns.” (They do.) Dr. Fernando was the lead author of a paper in the journal Conservation Genetics last month on the first detailed genetic study of the Javan rhino.
None of the rhinos exist in zoos. Without considerable luck and daring political leadership, the last Javan rhino will vanish from the Asian mainland in the next few years, leaving only those on the island of Java, whose forebears became isolated by rising sea levels 500,000 to a million years ago.
Even its island redoubt is no guarantee against extinction, say Dr. Fernando and his co-authors, an international team of scientists and conservationists. They estimated that populations might be too small to sustain: 40 to 50 animals in Ujung Kulon, an Indonesian national park on the western end of Java, and just 3 to 8 in Cat Tien National Park in southern Vietnam, half the number a decade ago.
The plight of the Javan rhino is a direct result of human actions, especially habitat destruction and hunting, Dr. Fernando said. For millions of years, the animal flourished in lowland forests from eastern India and Bangladesh all the way to the islands of Java and Sumatra, now part of Indonesia. During periods of glacial advance and low sea levels, those islands formed a land mass, Sundaland, that was connected to the mainland.
Unfortunately for the rhino, humans favored the same habitat and had little use for a large herbivore that raided their crops. Farmers regarded rhinos as agricultural pests and often killed them on sight. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the advent of colonialism and firearms drew hunters who slaughtered thousands. By 1934, the species was all but extinct on the Asian mainland.
Devastated by the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, the Ujung Kulon peninsula was later recolonized by rhinos and other animals but not by humans. It has since become a national park, and strong anti-poaching measures are in place. But perversely, the rhinos’ numbers have barely budged since 1980; the lack of human disturbance means that mature forests and exotic plants are replacing the shrubby lowland vegetation the animal prefers.
A further problem, the scientists say, is that the remaining rhino populations lack the genetic variation they need to combat disease, adapt to changing conditions and avoid the health and fertility problems that arise from inbreeding. The situation is especially desperate in Vietnam. But Dr. Fernando said in an e-mail message, “There is still detectable genetic diversity within the Ujung Kulon animals, which tells us we can still save this population.”
The task of saving the rhino is even more complicated because the Java and Vietnam populations represent different subspecies and should be managed separately to preserve any unique adaptations and mutations, said Don J. Melnick, a biologist at Columbia University and the project leader of the first Javan rhino genetic study through the university’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation. But Dr. Melnick added that it might be too late to preserve a distinct subspecies in Vietnam.
“Unless more individuals are brought into the Vietnam population,” he said, “it is hard to see how it survives.”
Gert Polet, a co-author of the Conservation Genetics paper and an adviser to the World Wide Fund for Nature’s program to protect Asian rhinos and elephants, says all may not be lost in Vietnam. Security there has improved, Mr. Polet said, and government officials and local residents are more sensitive to the rhinos’ needs.
“It is not unthinkable that there is a male and breeding is taking place,” he wrote in an e-mail message. Moreover, he added, the rhinos used to venture out only under cover of darkness; “recently daytime pictures have been taken (the first ever as far as we know), indicating that the rhinos feel more at ease than before.”
The Ujung Kulon rhinos face different problems, the scientists say, mainly habitat decline. But increasing the population is still their foremost aim. “We have got to get to 100 animals in the Ujung Kulon population, as a short-term goal, to stabilize the erosion of genetic variation,” Dr. Melnick said.
The Indonesian forestry department has decided to improve rhino habitat in Ujung Kulon by keeping out or removing competitor species, like the banteng, a wild cow, and invasive, exotic plants that crowd out the rhino’s preferred food, Adhi Rachmat Hariyadi, site manager for the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Ujung Kulon National Park project, wrote in an e-mail message.
The department is also proceeding with plans to establish a second rhino population in a site to be determined, he said. No program is planned to breed rhinos in captivity, but new genetic analyses by Dr. Melnick’s team, now under way, will be used to identify good candidates for relocation.
Dr. Fernando, Dr. Melnick and their co-authors also discuss more active proposals to encourage reproduction, including establishing managed breeding centers in natural settings, a plan endorsed in 1997 by a specialist group of IUCN, also known as the World Conservation Union.
Nico J. van Strien, a coordinator for the International Rhino Foundation and a co-author of the IUCN report, said the Javan rhino recovery effort had been set back by the failure of a costly captive breeding program for the imperiled Sumatran rhino, in the 1980’s and 90’s.
Occupying much the same range as the Javan rhino but preferring uplands to lowlands, the Sumatran rhino has two horns and hair and is slightly smaller. Although more numerous than the Javan, the Sumatran rhino is often considered more endangered, Dr. van Strien said, because its remaining habit is less secure from poachers and encroaching humans.
It is, he said, a fine and dubious distinction, since the goal is to save them both.
“Part of our purpose in writing this article was to call attention to the plight of the rhino,” Dr. Fernando said. He and his colleagues hope conservation groups worldwide will help the local authorities deal with the conflicts and economic dislocation that will inevitably arise as efforts are made to expand rhino habitat in some of the most densely peopled parts of the world.
To his mind, those groups have no choice.
“Allowing a species such as a rhinoceros to go extinct in the 21st century,” he writes, “would be tragic and unpardonable.”
Findings: As the World Wobbles
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, July 11, 2006
Late last November, as a big low-pressure system built over Europe and Asia and high pressure settled in over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the shifts in the atmosphere caused the earth to jiggle ever so slightly, like a hiker adjusting to a shifting load in a backpack.
As a result, the North Pole and its southern counterpart moved about four inches by one measure. (There are several ways to define the poles.)
Despite its diaphanous appearance, the atmosphere weighs about 5,000 trillion metric tons, and its mass is unevenly distributed. All those ridges and troughs on a weather map reflect differences of billions of tons of gases.
Scientists have long known that as the atmosphere shifts, it influences the earth’s rotation. The recent advent of satellites’ global positioning systems made it possible to confirm even the tiniest movements.
There were well-known, regularly occurring wobbles in the earth’s rotation that could shift the poles 30 feet over a year or more. These shifts blocked the detection of subtler, quicker movements caused by day-to-day changes in the atmosphere and the oceans.
Now, these small shifts are being measured by institutions devoted to tracking the planet’s behavior, including the earth orientation department of the United States Naval Observatory and the “time, earth rotation and space geodesy section” of the Royal Observatory of Belgium.
Experts at the Belgian observatory and the Paris Observatory found the November polar shift and a series of other little loops by looking particularly closely at a period from last November through February, when two of the larger regular wobbles in the axis canceled each other out.
They reported their analysis in the July 1 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
Really? The Claim: Your Diet Can Bring on an Acne Outbreak
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, July 11, 2006
THE FACTS Despite what parents everywhere have long insisted, most people know by now that chocolate and greasy foods will not cause acne. But can other foods?
According to dermatologists, what largely determines whether a person develops acne are genetics and hormonal fluctuations, hence the tendency for it to occur during puberty, pregnancy and menopause.
But recent studies have pointed to one or two exceptions, most notably dairy products. One of the largest studies to demonstrate this was published last year in The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology by a team at Harvard.
The researchers analyzed the habits and diets of nearly 50,000 people, looking especially at what they ate while in high school.
Those who drank three or more cups of milk a day, the researchers found, were 22 percent more likely to experience severe acne compared with those who drank one serving a week or less.
Skim milk had the greatest effect. Cream cheese and cottage cheese were also associated with outbreaks, while chocolate and greasy foods were not. The researchers attributed the effect to hormones in milk; other studies have had similar findings.
Dr. Diane S. Berson, an assistant professor of dermatology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, said foods that contain iodides, like shellfish and soy sauce, might also exacerbate acne. Iodides are thought to play a role in inflammation.
THE BOTTOM LINE Certain foods, in particular dairy products, have been shown to exacerbate acne.
Paper: Climate Change Threatens Wineries
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, July 10, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Climate warming could spell disaster for much of the multibillion-dollar U.S. wine industry. Areas suitable for growing premium wine grapes could be reduced by 50 percent -- and possibly as much as 81 percent -- by the end of this century, according to a study Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The paper indicates increasing weather problems for grapes in such areas as California's Napa and Sonoma valleys.
The main problem: An increase in the frequency of extremely hot days, according to Noah Diffenbaugh of the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University.
Grapes used in premium wines need a consistent climate. When temperatures top about 95 degrees they have problems maintaining photosynthesis and the sugars in the grapes can break down, Diffenbaugh said in a telephone interview.
''We have very long-term studies of how this biological system (of vineyards) responds to climate,'' said Diffenbaugh, and that gives the researchers confidence in their projection. Diffenbaugh is a co-author of the paper.
Scientists and environmental experts have become increasingly alarmed in recent years by accumulating gasses such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of the burning of fossil fuels.
A panel of climate scientists convened by the National Academy of Sciences reported last month that the Earth is heating up and ''human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.'' The scientists said average global surface temperatures rose by about 1 degree in the 20th century. While that may not sound like much, many blame it for melting glaciers, weather changes -- perhaps even more hurricanes -- and threats of spreading diseases.
James A. Kennedy, a professor of food science and technology at Oregon State University, said he was shocked by the report on the potential effects on wine grapes.
''We're definitely, in the wine industry, starting to be concerned about global warming,'' said Kennedy, who was not part of the research team.
''The lion's share of the industry is in California, so it's a huge concern from a wine quality standpoint,'' he said. For people in the industry ''this paper is going to be a bit of a shocker.''
While problems are seen for California wine country, the paper suggests grape-growing conditions might improve in parts of the Northwest and Northeast.
However, the researchers note that the Northeastern and Northwestern states have higher humidity levels than the current top wine regions.
High humidity is associated with fungus outbreaks and other potential growing problems, Diffenbaugh said, ''so it could be very expensive to produce premium wines in those areas.''
''Our simulations suggest that the area suitable for the production of premium wine grapes will both contract and shift over the next century,'' the researchers concluded.
''Production potential was almost completely eliminated in the Southwest and central United States; only high elevations were marginally suitable in the Intermountain West,'' they reported.
Some favorable regions remain in coastal California, Oregon, Washington and New England.
A thousand years ago when Viking explorers arrived on the coasts of eastern Canada and New England they named the region Vinland, a designation that has perplexed many historians since grapes are uncommon there now.
The weather was warmer then, however.
In Medieval times there were vineyards in England that were later knocked out by a colder period known as the Little Ice Age, Diffenbaugh recalled. Now, wine grapes are being grown in England again.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
On the Net: PNAS: http://www.pnas.org
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-11 12:44 pm (UTC)Have you read that we're getting close to the next pole shift? Probably not in our lifetime, but in the next few hundred years!
That wine/climate article is a good one, too.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-11 12:50 pm (UTC)The wine one struck me because so many people don't even have climate change on their radar but say things like "this year is so much/less _____ than before" or "we haven't seen as many _____ as we used to" and don't think that it's relevant.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-11 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-11 01:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-11 03:26 pm (UTC)