Noisy human neighbours affect where urban monkeys live

not terribly shocking but nice to have some solid data on it - thanks to Caro D for the link!

Citation
Duarte MH, Vecci MA, Hirsch A, Young RJ (2011) Noisy human neighbours affect where urban monkeys live. Biology Letters doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0529

Abstract

Urban areas and many natural habitats are being dominated by a new selection pressure: anthropogenic noise. The ongoing expansion of urban areas, roads and airports throughout the world makes the noise almost omnipresent. Urbanization and the increase of noise levels form a major threat to living conditions in and around cities. Insight into the behavioural strategies of urban survivors may explain the sensitivity of other species to urban selection pressures. Here, we show that urban black-tufted marmosets (Callithrix penicillata) living in noisy urban areas may select their home-range based primarily on ambient noise level. We have tested the hypothesis that the noise from vehicular traffic and visitors in an urban park in Brazil influences the use of home-range (space) by urban marmosets. Marmosets even avoided noisy areas with high food availability. In addition, they systematically preferred the quieter areas even with dynamic changes in the acoustic landscape of the park between weekdays and Sundays (no observations were made on Saturdays). These data provide evidence that the use of home-range by wild animals can be affected by a potential aversive stimulus such as noise pollution.

Toxic Avengers: Pollution Drove Fish Evolution

From NPR.org
by CHRISTOPHER JOYCE

Scientists have discovered a strange fish that lives in a soup of some of industry's worst pollutants. The fish, found in rivers in New York and New Jersey, survive because they've evolved to cope with dangerous chemicals. As one scientist who has heard about the fish says, "pollution has driven evolution."

These "toxic avengers" of the aquatic world — tomcod, which look like regular cod but are smaller — live in the Hudson and nearby rivers. The fish are up to their eyeballs in dangerous chemicals — PCBs and dioxins that General Electric companies dumped into the Hudson from 1947 to 1976. By the 1980s, about 95 percent of these fish in some areas had liver tumors.

But toxicologist Isaac Wirgin at New York University found that some populations of the exposed fish were doing OK.

"It turns out that the more we were dealing with these things, it became very apparent that they were very resistant to PCB and dioxin," Wirgin says.

Here's what had happened. In some fish, pollutants entered the nucleus of cells, where they distorted the DNA instructions from one particular gene. So the fish got sick. But some tomcod — just by chance — had a version of that gene that tolerates PCBs and dioxin. So over time, fish with the resistant gene did better than fish without it, and pretty much took over.

Technically they're not mutants — the chemicals just gave one genetic group an advantage over the rest. So some survived.

But Wirgin says there's a downside to that. "Normally, these levels of PCBs or dioxins would kill these types of organisms," he explains, "but here they survive and they're prime prey."

They're prey for bigger fish, which absorb the pollutants in the tomcods and pass them up to whatever, or whoever, eats them. Toxicologist Richard Di Giulio, who studies fish at Duke University, says it makes an important point — that pollution has driven evolution.

Di Giulio says it's happened in North Carolina too, with something called killifish. They evolved resistance to another pollutant, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, from wood preservatives that seeped into the Elizabeth River.

And there's another drawback to the evolution of chemical hardiness: "While they have evolved resistance to the pollution," he says, "they have lost some ability to cope with natural stressors," like low oxygen in the water or abnormally high water temperatures.

So survivors these peculiar fish may be, but a success story it is not.

The research appears in the journal Science.

REFERENCE
Isaac Wirgin, Nirmal K. Roy, Matthew Loftus, R. Christopher Chambers, Diana G. Franks and Mark E. Hahn (2011). Mechanistic Basis of Resistance to PCBs in Atlantic Tomcod from the Hudson River. Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1197296

ABSTRACT
The mechanistic basis of resistance of vertebrate populations to contaminants, including Atlantic tomcod from the Hudson River (HR) to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), is unknown. HR tomcod exhibited variants in the aryl hydrocarbon receptor2 (AHR2) that were nearly absent elsewhere. In ligand binding assays, AHR2-1 protein (common in HR) was impaired compared to widespread AHR2-2 in binding TCDD (2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin) and in driving expression in reporter gene assays in AHR-deficient cells treated with TCDD or PCB126. We identified a six-base deletion in AHR2 as the basis of resistance and suggest that the HR population has undergone rapid evolution probably due to contaminant exposure. The mechanistic basis of resistance in a vertebrate population provides evidence of evolutionary change due to selective pressure at a single locus.

Biodiversity film competition - deadline Nov 17th!

Thanks to Carol D for the link!



Go to tv/e for more info!

Choose a category from their three categories and think how you might make a 2-minute film. Send them a proposal about the film you would like to make using the online form before 23.00 GMT 17 November 2010. Pitches will only be accepted in English.

A judging panel will select the best 12 proposals and provide funding of US$300 to help you make your film. Funding will only be awarded on delivery of the film.

The deadline for the delivery of the final 12 films is 15 December 2010.

The 12 films will be uploaded to tve's YouTube channel and the three films with the most views by 31 January 2011 will each receive a US$1500 prize. You have until 23.00 GMT on 17 November 2010 to submit.

Go to tv/e for more info!

Did you know: Plastic bags have been banned in Rwanda since 2006!

This is from 2006 (!) but is still being heavily enforced as I just found out from a friend headed to Rwanda (thanks Chrissie E!) - amazing and progressive! I think it reflects how strong of a role the environment plays in Rwanda's GDP as the mountain gorillas in Volcanoes national park attracts tourists to the small country (there are four habituated groups open to tourists, allowing for a total of 32 permits per day, each permit is $500 USD, plus travel,food and accommodations). Would be great if this attitude of environmental protection spread across other areas of Africa, I just hope we don't have to habituate many more great apes or disturb other wildlife populations for people to see how wonderful Africa's wilderness truly is. -MA

Trader wrapping cakes in plastic bags.
Some traders continue to use the banned plastic bags

From the BBC
Rwanda gets tough on plastic bags

Rwanda is cracking down on the use of plastic bags by shoppers, the environment minister has told the BBC. Drocella Mugorewera said that anyone using plastic bags is breaking a recent law on environmental protection aimed at cleaning up cities. She says that people must use paper bags instead. Some shoppers, however, prefer cheaper reusable plastic bags. Some Rwandans accuse government militias of using the law to steal goods being carried in plastic bags. One woman told the BBC's Geoffrey Mutagoma in the capital, Kigali, that local defence staff had thrown the glasses she was carrying in a plastic bag onto the ground.

Some market traders complain that products such as fish and meat cannot be carried in paper bags. Our correspondent says paper bags are up to five times more expensive than plastic ones.
He says that despite the ban, some hawkers continue to secretly sell plastic bags, hiding them in their pockets.

The environment minister admits that it will be impossible to completely end the use of plastic bags but she believes the measure to stop traders from importing and selling them will go a long way to protecting the environment. "In Rwanda we have not yet reached the same level of development with other some countries which use plastic bags," she said. "They have factories that recycle used bags. Even their citizens understand that it's wrong to throw rubbish anywhere. In our case we are still teaching our citizens."

In 2004, thousands of people were encouraged to take the day off work to help pick up some of the plastic bags which littered the country. Thousands of Rwandans have taken the day off work to pick up plastic bags as part of a government attempt to clean up the environment. Shops have been banned from giving plastic bags to their customers and police are reportedly stopping plastic-bag users in the street. Some supermarkets have been closed down for flouting the ban, said environment minister Drocella Mugorewera. "We want people to use traditional baskets instead," she said.

The government has always been keen to keep Rwanda clean and correspondents say the capital, Kigali, is much cleaner than other African cities, where thin blue plastic bags can been seen in fields and on trees fluttering in the wind. "We have a real problem with plastic and we are linking this with our efforts to protect our rivers and lakes," Ms Mugorewera told Reuters news agency.

But some shop-owners feel the government is being too heavy-handed. "The government is being unfair to small business owners, some of us cannot afford expensive packing materials, our clients are running away," said one kiosk owner.

Using doggie poop to light park lamps

This is fabulous - I have had this big moral dilemma recently about picking up my dog's poop when he poops somewhere where there is no risk of anyone stepping in it: like in the bushes on the side of a street. It smells so i should pick it up, right? but even if i use biodegradable bags, I generally throw these in the trash at the first garbage can i see, so really im just filling landfills with dog poop that is totally biodegradable. This seems like a GREAT solution to me! Only problem i see is how to make people not throw other stuff in there or just poop directly into it, cuz folks can be nutty like that- MA

from TreeHugger.com via the Tree Hugger facebook page
New Design Turns Dog Poop into Gold- Well, Methane.
by ALEX DAVIES

Scenario A: You're in the park walking your dog. He sniffs around, finds the perfect spot, squats and poops. You, being the responsible owner, break out the biodegradable plastic bag you brought and pick it up, then throw the bag in the nearest trash can.

Scenario B: You're in the park walking your dog. He sniffs around, finds the perfect spot, squats and poops. You, being the responsible owner, break out the biodegradable plastic bag you brought and pick it up, and throw it the Park Spark Methane Digester. The methane in Fido's poop is then piped to another location, where it is burned for energy to light the lamps in the very park your dog just pooped in.

The Park Spark is the brainchild of Matthew Mazzotta, the creator of the TreeHugger approved Buscyle. The idea of the human and animal waste digester is hardly new, but Mazzotta's design takes it to an interesting new place, seeking to make it part of our everyday lives, not just a love of Ed Begley Jr.'s. Digesters work using the natural process of anaerobic decomposition. Organic matter sealed in an air-tight container produces methane, which can then be separated from the rest of the matter and used as fuel.

The goal of the Park Spark is to make people rethink the idea of waste- epitomized by bags of dog poop- by turning it into something useful. Mazzotta imagines that upon installation, the methane produced by the Park Spark will burn as a sort of "eternal flame" for everyone to see. The idea is that once everyone sees the energy that comes from dog waste, someone will be bound to propose a more practical use for it.

It's an idea that's a bit of a long shot to catch on nationally or internationally, but that's not saying we're pessimistic. Even one Park Spark will go a long way towards changing common perceptions of waste and energy, which is a great start.

Wild lions (and other scavengers) being poisoned by Kenyans with Furadan pesticide

from Mongabay.com
East Africa's lions falling to poison
by Jeremy Hance

Eight lions have been poisoned to death in a month in Kenya, according to conservation organization WildlifeDirect. Locals, frustrated by lions killing their livestock, have taken to poisoning the great cats using a common pesticide in Kenya called carbofuran, known commercially as Furadan.

Last month in Amboseli National Park an entire pride of lions—five in total—died after eating bait that had been laced with carbofuran. A hyena was poisoned as well in what is believed to be a revenge-killing. Later in April three additional lions were poisoned to death in the Masai Mara Park. In this case, the perpetrator was caught and arrested. But he has since been released.

The Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS) estimated that 1,970 lions survive in Kenya while stating that "poisoning is perhaps the greatest threat to predators and scavenging birds." Scavenger birds also succumb to the poison when farmers or herders lace a livestock corpse with it. It is believed that birds may have died by the millions from the pesticide, because farmers spread it over their fields which birds subsequently feed off. Farmers have even been known to use it to kill birds they consider pests, some will eat the birds or sell them for food.

The toxicity of carbofuran was brought home tragically to the Kenyan public last year when a three-year-old boy consumed the poison and died. Her father, a primary school teacher, had bought the pesticide for his garden.

"The future of tourism in Kenya is at risk if dangerous pesticides like carbofuran (sold locally as Furadan) remain on the market. Time and again, we've seen these substances used to slaughter our national heritage and destroy one of our greatest economic assets. Yet the authorities continually fail to follow up cases of abuse and prosecute the culprits. The Kenyan government must show that it is serious and take swift action to ban deadly pesticides like Furadan and enforce the law," said chairman of Wildlife Direct and renowned conservationist, Dr. Richard Leakey. "If we fail to put a stop to poisonings, our lions could go extinct in a matter of years; a catastrophic loss for anyone who cares about our national heritage, but also a devastating blow to the tourism industry that currently brings in hundreds of millions of dollars to our economy."

WildlifeDirect has long been campaigning against carbofuran in Kenya. The Kenyan government is currently considering a ban, alhough WildlifeDirect warns it may be years before it is approved.

While all forms of carbofuran have been banned in the US and the EU, the pesticide is manufactured in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by Farm Machinery and Chemicals (FMC).

Although beloved animals to many, lion populations have been falling precipitously over the last century, down from over 100,000 lions at the beginning of the century to approximately 39,000 in 2002. Poisoning, spearing, habitat loss, decline in prey, and even climate change are thought to be behind the species' decline. The lion is currently listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List.

Last year the KWS warned that 'the king of the jungle' could vanish entirely from Kenya in 20 years, if action isn't taken to better protect the cat.

environmentally conscious graffiti

From treehugger.com

In Berkeley, California, where even the vandals are environmentally conscious:

Banksy in London:

Brooklyn, NY, cyclists re-paint removed bike lanes:

Do the Evolution - Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam - Do The Evolution (Official Music Video)

I don't think I fully appreciated this music video when it came out, so here it is again.

From Wikipedia:
Pearl Jam has stated that the novel Ishmael influenced the writing of the album Yield, and according to the novel's writer, Daniel Quinn, this song comes the closest to expressing the ideas of the book. Vedder stated:

This Daniel Quinn book, Ishmael...I've never recommended a book before, but I would actually, in an interview, recommend it to everyone....But this book, it's kind of the book of my ... My whole year has been kind of with these thoughts in mind. And on an evolutionary level, that man has been on this planet for 3 million years, so that you have this number line that goes like this [hands wide apart]. And that we're about to celebrate the year 2000, which is this [holds hands less than one inch apart]. So here's this number line; here's what we know and celebrate. This book is a conversation with a man and an ape. And the ape really has it all together. He kinda knows the differences between him and the man, and points out how slight they are, and it creates an easy analogy for what man has done, thinking that they were the end-all. That man is the end-all thing on this earth. That the earth was around even so much longer before the 3 million years. Fifty million years of sharks and all these living things. Then man comes out of the muck, and 3 million years later he's standing, and now he's controlling everything and killing it. Just in the last hundred! Which is just a speck on this line. So what are we doin' here? This is just a good reminder...And I'm anxious to see what happens. You know, I've got a good seat for whatever happens next. It'll be interesting.

Do the Evolution Lyrics from PearlJam.com:

I'm ahead, I'm a man
I'm the first mammal to wear pants, yeah
I'm at peace with my lust
I can kill 'cause in God I trust, yeah
It's evolution, baby

I'm at peace, I'm the man
Buying stocks on the day of the crash
On the loose, I'm a truck
All the rolling hills, I'll flatten 'em out, yeah
It's herd behavior, uh huh
It's evolution, baby

Admire me, admire my home
Admire my son, he's my clone
This land is mine, this land is free
I'll do what I want but irresponsibly
It's evolution, baby

I'm a thief, I'm a liar
There's my church, I sing in the choir:
(hallelujah, hallelujah)

Admire me, admire my home
Admire my son, admire my clones
'Cause we know, appetite for a nightly feast
Those ignorant Indians got nothin' on me
Nothin', why?
Because... it's evolution, baby!

I am ahead, I am advanced
I am the first mammal to make plans, yeah
I crawled the earth, but now I'm higher
2010, watch it go to fire
It's evolution, baby
Do the evolution

Seriously Disturbing

From ChrisJordan.com

Click on this link to see more photographs of albatross chicks that were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Human Pollution & Wildlife Cancer

From newsweek.com
The Wild’s Creeping Killer
The great outdoors is a dangerous place for animals, who often die from hunger, predator attacks, or infections. But cancer can also be a culprit, and human pollution may be making it worse.
By Daniel Heimpel | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Jul 27, 2009

In 1999, wildlife disease specialist Thierry Work looked over the bow of his small whaler as it cut through a lagoon on the south side of Molokai, an island in Hawaii. On an emergent rock he saw a listless sea turtle, waiting to die.

"This guy was so weak that he just let us pick him up," says Work, who runs the National Wildlife Health Center’s Honolulu field station. "He was so emaciated that his ventral was completely disked in. You could fill him up with water and use him as a bowl." Like more than quarter of the green turtles Work has plucked from the water or found stranded on Hawaii's beaches, this one was covered with tumors on its eyes and mouth, dying from a poorly understood form of cancer.

Work's turtle is one of a wide array of species afflicted by a range of cancers, according to a paper published in the July edition of Nature Reviews Cancer. "Wildlife Cancer: a conservation perspective," summarizes mounting evidence of human's contribution to carcinogenesis in wild-animal populations across the globe, thanks to man-made toxins dumped into wildlife's natural habitats.

"I am concerned that we as humans continue to impact the environment quite significantly," says Denise McAloose, the report's lead author and chief pathologist for the Wildlife Conservations Society's (WCS) Global Health Program. "As the human population continues to grow and utilize resources and damage the environment, I do believe that we will continue to see the emergence of disease, including cancer in wildlife."

On San Francisco's touristy Pier 39, the incessant barking of male sea lions and their harems of smaller females fills the air. Periodically Frances Gulland, the director of veterinary science at the Marine Mammal Center in neighboring Sausalito, receives calls from the pier reporting a sea lion crippled by tumors. Despite huge swelling on and around their hind flippers and anus, Gulland says the animals "mask their pain" in a last ditch effort to elude opportunistic predators. "You see that they have been struggling and struggling."

According to Gulland, 17 percent of the sea lions brought to the center die of renal failure or paralysis, caused when tumors linked to Otarine herpesvirus-1 travel up the genital tact and push against the kidney and spine. According to the Nature Reviews Cancer article, sea lions that died of genital carcinoma had an 85 percent higher concentration of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in their system than other sea lions. (PCBs are toxic compounds used in coolants and electrical transformers.) Gulland points out that blubber samples of sea lions who died of cancer also show high concentrations of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), in part because many are born near the Channel Islands where 1,700 tons of the toxin were dumped prior to its ban in 1972.

"The more we contaminate the environment, the more we will see problems," Gulland says. "If you dump a pollutant, it doesn't just go away."

In the icy waters of Canada's St. Lawrence Estuary, where researchers have been studying the local population of Beluga whales for decades, the connection between contamination and cancer is stark. The Saguenay River, which flows into the St. Lawrence Estuary, is lined with the smoking stacks of aluminum smelters, heavy producers of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs are toxic compounds formed by the incomplete burning of anything carbon based, and are long-proven carcinogens in both man and beast. Not surprisingly, the humans working the smelters along the river have shown high rates of lung cancer, while those in the vicinity who drank from taps supplied with surface water developed stomach and intestinal cancer.

Out in the estuary, researchers note a similar trend among the dead Belugas found beached or drifting out to sea. Research published in a 2002 edition of Environmental Health Perspectives found that the second leading cause of death (in 18 percent of the Beluga carcasses) was cancer, largely of the gut. That fits with the animal's feeding patterns. Belugas run their wide mouths along the sandy estuary floor, eating invertebrates like the blue mussel. The concentration of the PAH benzo[a]pyrene was 200 times higher in blue mussels in the Sanguenay River portion of the Beluga habitat than in adjacent areas.

The Belugas of Quebec are considered an endangered species, brought down by environmental pollution. The devils of Tasmania are similarly at risk, but for much different reasons.

A contagious cancer and the Tasmanian devil's penchant for fighting may be the species' death knell. In the 1990s the devil population was estimated at 150,000; by 1996 the population had been halved. The killer: devil facial tumor disease (DFTD), which affects 65 percent of the remaining population and has an unflinching mortality rate of 100 percent.

Devils, the largest marsupial carnivore, are notoriously territorial and temperamental. During their riotous, squeal-infused battles, they bite and scratch each other's faces, which dislodge microscopic bits of cancerous tissue in infected animals. Those bits are thought to seed the skin of the uninfected devils through a rare process called allograft transmission. The result is a fast-metastasizing cancer that attacks the face and neck and quickly spreads into the lymph nodes and lungs.

"Animals with large tumors can be severely disfigured, with complete erosion of the jaw and eye sockets," says Hamish McCallum, head of the Griffith School of Environment in Australia and a lead researcher of DFTD. "The tumors are an angry red color."

Researchers attribute the cancer partly to a loss of genetic diversity, thanks to the animals limited, island habitat. In the "multi-hit theory" of carcinogenesis such a lack of diversity could be one of many reasons for the cancer's aberrant and uncontrollable cell reproduction, along with other factors like viruses and, yes, the presence of man-made contaminants. The only recourse is drastic mitigation: culling the infected, isolating the healthy and hoping for a vaccine.

The good news for animals suffering from pollution-induced cancer is that when contaminants are taken out of the environment, some species have shown marked drops in carcinogenesis. For example, catfish living in Ohio's Black River had cancer rates ranging from 22 percent to 39 percent in the early 1980s. The disease killed virtually all fish before they reached five years of age. After a steel plant's coking facility closed in 1983, PAH levels dropped significantly; cancer rates dropped 75 percent and the amount of fish living past five years has tripled.

Despite these spectacular and telling cases, animal cancer is still largely a mystery.

A key reason for the dearth of scrutiny is biologists' difficulty in performing animal autopsies before the jackals, crows and maggots destroy the carcasses. "When animals die they simply disappear," says William Karesh, director of WCS's Global Health Program. When specimens are found, cancer ranks much lower in mortality rates than the trauma, predation or infectious diseases so rife in the wild.

McAloose, like many wildlife pathologists, sees the study of the intersection between the environment and cancer in wild animals as a clear way to better understanding how cancer affects humans. "Now we need collaboration and cooperation across conservation organizations, public-health communities, as well as governments to make changes that have positive outcomes for animals and the planet," she says. "Because that will have positive impacts on the human population."

For the turtles of Hawaii, which like California's sea lions suffer from tumors linked to a herpes-associated virus, such collaboration may someday mean relief.

In Molokai, Thierry Work had little choice. "With such heavily tumored animals, surgery would be like butchering the turtles alive," Work says. Instead he euthanized the turtle, and like he has done with hundreds of turtles since, he conducted a necropsy, hopefully bringing scientists one step closer to figuring out the riddle of cancer—animal and human.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/208917