Good News for Elephants: China Losing its Taste for Ivory
By Simon Denyer/The Washington Post
Photo by flickrfavorites/flickr
China will close 67 ivory carving factories and retail shops, roughly one-third of the total, as it moves to implement a pledge to end all domestic ivory sales by the end of the year.
The news is likely to foster hopes for an eventual end to the elephant poaching crisis in Africa, especially since a new study shows that prices of ivory in China are continuing to plummet.
Reducing demand from China, the world's biggest ivory market, is probably the single most important factor that could help end the widespread poaching of elephants in Africa.
In a report,
Save The Elephants
said the average wholesale price of tusks in China was $2,100 per kilogram in early 2014, but had fallen to $1,100 by late 2015, before reaching $730 in February 2017.
The conservation group credits a combination of an economic slowdown, an official anti-corruption campaign, a government commitment to ending the trade and growing public awareness.
Conservationists heralded the Chinese government's pledge to close its domestic ivory industry as a "game-changer" and welcomed evidence it was being implemented.
"These closures prove that China means business in closing down the ivory trade and helping the African elephant," said Peter Knights, chief executive of WildAid, a San-Francisco-based group that has played a leading role in raising public awareness in China about the link between ivory and poaching.
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The Future of Fishing Depends on Clean Water
By Kristyn Brady/TRCP
Photo by Tomas Gomez/flickr
The future of our fishing access and opportunity is directly tied to clean water and healthy habitat. But there are increasing concerns for bass anglers as water quality issues, like toxic algal blooms, arise across the U.S. This threatens not only our recreational fishing opportunities, but also the local economies that depend on sportsmen dollars.
That's why we gathered reporters, fisheries experts, and policy leaders over the weekend at the 2017 GEICO Bassmaster Classic, hosted on Lake Conroe in Houston. Conroe itself is a recovered fishery-a public-private partnership allowed local volunteers to restore hundreds of acres of shoreline habitat that was critical to rebuilding stocks over the years. The fact that we were sitting ringside at one of the most exciting events of the bass tournament circuit, discussing collaborative conservation solutions like this, was fitting.
When it comes to water quality, explained panelist Bill Frazier, the conservation director for North Carolina B.A.S.S. Nation, many of our lakes and reservoirs have a "nebulous management problem" caused by a thing you can't see with the naked eye. But in large quantities it manifests in a very serious way. "I've seen algae thick enough for critters to walk on," said Frazier.
Toxic algae gets a boost from nutrient input,
and controlling nutrients depends on what's upstream-so each case of rampant algae needs a customized solution.
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Buzz Kill:
Cereal Company's Plan to Save
Bees Backfires
By Darryl Fears/The Washington Post
Cheerios had its heart in the right place. It wanted to help save America's imperiled bee populations because, after all, the animated "pitchman" for its Honey Nut variety is a honeybee.
But like every tasty toasted oat in every Cheerios box, the rescue plan had a hole.
Cheerios, owned by General Mills, stuck 1.5 billion packaged wildflower seeds in boxes so that patrons could plant them. It was part of the company's
Bring Back the Bees campaign, complete with its own hashtag, which sought to create habitat that bees are losing to development, farms and insecticides.
But some of the seeds on the list are invasive species that kill native plants and take over the places where they grow.
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Dam Busters' Mission: Save
Rivers and the Fish that Live in Them
By Paul Greenberg/Hakai
Photo by US Fish and Wildlife Service/flickr
In staid New England, if a younger man drives onto the property of an elderly woman and threatens to knock something down, you expect pushback: an argument, a call to the authorities, and the subsequent removal of the man from the premises. But on a cool November morning in Colchester, Connecticut, quite the opposite is occurring.
Here, on the banks of a midsized watercourse called the Jeremy River, Steve Gephard, a fisheries biologist with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environment Protection, has arrived with Sally Harold of the Nature Conservancy and a backhoe-mounted jackhammer. They direct workmen to rip down a dam on the property of 84-year-old Yankee matriarch Nan Wasniewski.
As the jackhammer bashes through the concrete, and water begins flowing unimpeded downstream for the first time in almost three centuries, Wasniewski, dressed in a crisp blue windbreaker, can only shake her head at the spectacle. She sold the dam to the town for a dollar. In return, she earned the chance to bring a river back to life.
The oddball demolition team of Gephard, Harold, and Wasniewski came about as part of a nascent environmental movement to free America's rivers from the scourge of dams. In New England, this effort is subtle and often invisible to the larger community. Indeed, most of the dam fights that garner public attention focus on giant Pacific waterways-the mighty Columbia River and its Grand Coulee Dam, for instance-that were impounded and robbed of their salmon during the Great Depression era of public works.
But the rivers and fish that may have suffered the greatest damage from dams are modest in size and distributed up and down North America's Atlantic coast.
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How Do Ducklings Survive Their Leap from the Nest?
By Barbara Lee/Montana Outdoors
Photo by Scott Costello/flickr
"Both parents called from below, and one by one the goslings jumped from the nest and fell at least 40 feet, ricocheting off tree limbs on the way down," says Kim Pennington, an administrative assistant at Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge south of Missoula. As six newly hatched Canada geese, perched high in their nest in a dead tree, tuned into calls from their parents to make the leap of a lifetime, Pennington says her hands tightened on the spotting scope.
"I knew they would jump, but I kept asking myself, how can this possibly work? How can they make it? They weren't even 24 hours old, and they dropped from a tall platform nest generally used by ospreys. A couple of the goslings hesitated for a long moment, peering over the edge before tumbling off," she says.
Pennington was describing geese "calling down" their young, a behavior of waterfowl that nest in tree cavities and on cliffs. Calling offspring to the ground is a powerful illustration of the connection between imprinting-a kind of "follow me" programming-and the ability of ducklings and goslings to travel soon after hatching.
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