Can Galapagos Corals Predict the Future of Reefs Worldwide?

"This summer, a major coral survey found that some of the islands’ coral communities are showing promising signs of recovery," the Environment News Service reported last week. The article provides a pretty good overview of how climate change, ocean acidification, and warmer currents affect coral reefs.

Ocean Acidification Threatens Sea Snails

Sea snails' shells are being eaten by increasingly acidic ocean waters, the first evidence that the changing chemistry of the oceans threatens marine habitat.

Read more on CNN:

The amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere is increasing, mainly because of the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, according to the World Meteorological Organization. That means that the planet's oceans, natural carbon storage facilities, are absorbing more and more of the gas, which makes them more acidic.

Compounding the potential loss of sea snails is the fact that decreased biodiversity leaves coastal environments less resilient in the face of climate change.

The study is here.

Central America’s Hidden Turtles

In the newest issue of WildHope Magazine, SEEtheWILD Director Brad Nahill writes about his adventures with sea turtle researchers from the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Initiative (ICAPO) and Fauna & Flora International.

Our friends, operating in El Salvador and Nicaragua, are working to protect perhaps the world’s most endangered population of sea turtles. 

Read the article here: http://bit.ly/ForgottenTurtleshttp://bit.ly/ForgottenTurtles

On page 10, you'll find an update on our jaguar project.

The Dark: Nature’s Nighttime World - TV review

This synopsis of the new nature show The Dark makes us wish our cable package included BBC2:

Advanced thermal imaging cameras and motion sensitive cameras enabled the team to unearth the secrets of nocturnal animals in south and central America.

And researchers spent long hours making sure they were in the right place at the right time. It made for thrilling viewing.

Jaguars were shown moving stealthily, hunting nesting turtles by the dark of night.

...
There was remarkable footage of pumas with fresh kills but the finest sequence, however, was of a jaguar prowling at night.

The large male big cat walked past a number of turtles before revealing his real interest – the scent of another jaguar.

The breathtaking footage was captured with remarkable precision.

Another jaguar joined the parade before walking towards the camerawoman’s hide for an inspection. The footage was quite incredible and the male and female cats eventually walked away into the night, so as to breed. Later, the same camera woman found herself inches away from a jaguar, which walked up to her hide out of curiosity.

Remarkably, she didn’t scream; which probably helped to save her life.

Nicaragua: Land of 100 Bat Species

Carol L. Chambers, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Northern Arizona University, has an article about the bat survey she did with us in the new Bats magazine.

The Paso del Istmo is a narrow strip oflow mountains sand- wiched between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean. This isthmus is only 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide, but it is a critical passageway for wildlife migrating between North and South America or moving locally among forests of Central America. 

And it contains an important tract of tropical dry forest - one of the most endangered forest ecosystems in the world. This forest is rapidly being replaced by croplands of beans or rice or by non-native commercial trees such as teak. Surviving old growth is often reduced to isolated patches, with dire consequences for forests and wildlife. My colleagues and I came to Nicaragua to study how forest fragmentation impacts bat communities. That research continues, but we've already made some exciting discoveries. 

I had visited this area previously with Suzanne Hagell, a former graduate student at Northern Arizona University. Using genetic analysis, she discovered that black-handed spider monkeys (Ateles geojfroyi) were significantly inbred, largely because of their limited ability to move among the few large, disconnected forest patches remaining on this landscape. Bats, however, are more mobile than monkeys so their genetic diversity may be less affected by forest fragmentation. 

So instead of collecting DNA as Suzanne did, I "captured" the bat community using mist nets to intercept bats flying along forest corridors and bat detectors to capture their echolocation calls in forest patches of different sizes and levels of isolation. Bat Conservation International and the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund helped fund this project and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management loaned us the Anabat detectors.

... 

I spent December 2011 and January 2012 in the Paso del Istmo. Paso Pacifico, a Nicaraguan organization run by women dedicated to restoring and conserving ecosystems of Central America's Pacific slope, helped me locate a field station, guides and landowners willing to collaborate. We set nets across shal-low streams and rivers and quickly began capturing bats. 

Sixteen colleagues and friends from the United States and Canada helped with the mist-netting. Nicaragua's premier bat biologist, Arnulfo Ramon Medina Fitoria, also joined us. He taught me how to distinguish especially tricky species, such as those in the genus Carollia, that are identified by the shape and size of their incisors or color-banding patterns of their fur. 

Biology students Jose Gabriel Martinez Fonseca and Marlon Francisco Chaves Velasques of the Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Nicaragua became our acoustic specialists. After on-site training by Chris Corben, designer of the Anabar, and Kim Livengood ofTitley Electronics, Martinez and Chaves de- ployed bat detectors, rotating them weekly among more than 100 forest patches from January to May. 

... 

By January 26, just five days before I was due to return to the United States, we had "bagged" 40 ofNicaragua's 99 known bat species. On our 34"' night ofnetting, we felt that we had thoroughly de- scribed the bat community in our study area. On this night, our nets across a stream and along forest paths were snagging dozens of bats per hour and had even added two new species to our count. 

Then I removed a large bat from one of our nets. The bat's wing tips looked bleached white, and I wondered if the bat had an injury. I took it to the processing table and, to my great surprise, our field guides showed it to be a pale-faced bat (Phylloderma stenops). And our already-exciting evening became absolutely thrilling. 

Arnulfo pointed to the goose bumps on his arms. Although he spoke only Spanish and I only English, I was beginning to understand that this large bat in my hands, with her short brown fur and long gray wings, was, in fact, the most amazing capture of our two months of mist-netting. In Fiona Reid's Mammals of Central America and Southeast Mexico, the range map for this rare, forest-dwelling species showed only a question mark for Nicaragua. We had established the first record in the country of the pale-faced bat, a species Arnulfo had been hoping to capture for 11 years. As Arnulfo held her gently, we took pictures, documented her white wing tips and a small gland under her throat, then released her. 

That wonderful addition and yet another new capture later that night (the hairy big-eyed bat, Chiroderma villosum) brought our species count for the project to 44. And it increased the confirmed number of bat species in Nicaragua to exactly 100. I didn't even care that during our next - and last - night of netting, more than 60 percent of our captures were Jamaican fruit-eating bats that shredded my handling glove.

Messaging Ecosystem Services

From the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation blog:

People HATE the terms "ecosystem services" and "natural capital"; the very concept that nature "serves" us is unappealing; abstract cases for markets are off-putting, and; while Americans across the political spectrum are deeply and strongly committed to valuing nature, dollars are the least preferred way of doing so.

"The language surrounding ecosystem services is a jargon-rich, dense amalgam of scientific, financial, regulatory and conservation parlance. Those working to advance ecosystem services projects struggle to articulate what they're trying to do, and why their approach is more effective and efficient."

This poses a challenge for those of us working in poor areas to finance environmental conservation. We look forward to having discussions with our partners and friends in the conservation community about finding new ways of communicating our message.

International Barcode of Life

Via the ArtScience Nexus:

An interactive art show at the San Diego Natural History Museum interpreting the work of biodiversity scientists who use DNA barcoding to identify species.