BADGER BADGER BADGER … Poof!

Have you ever seen that video called ‘Badgers’, solely featuring the words ‘Badger’, ‘Mushroom’ and ‘Snake’? I find it quite a catchy tune, perfect for a random laugh with friends over a beer. However, there isn’t anything at all funny about a recent incentive in the UK promoting the culling of wild badgers.

Firstly, if you do a search for ‘culling’ one may find it being defined as the process of removing (killing essentially) breeding animals of any species. This is done for a number of reasons, but is generally done in order to protect livestock and wildlife from a number of factors such as invasive species, diseases or other animals that can be pests. Good examples include the culling of thousands of chickens to prevent the spread of avian flu, and the ‘kill at will’ policy adopted by governments for invasive species – Florida recently enacted such a law to remove unwanted Burmese pythons from the Everglades National Park, even allowing ‘hunting contests’.

Burmese Pythons are an invasive species in Florida, increasing after the 1980s as a result of illegal release by irresponsible pet owners. These snakes, native to southeast Asia, have had disastrous impacts on native fauna in the Everglades, so this culling competition was launched. This is a picture taken at a media conference for the ‘Python Challenge’ Kickoff. (Photo credit: MyFWCmedia)

A recent addition to the culling repertoire of government has been enacted by the UK, who last March approved the culling of wild badgers. The need for the cull, the government and many farmers argue, is due to the fact that badgers carry tuberculosis which is being transmitted to cattle. Many people have opposed this cull however, as it is deemed an expensive project and will have a devastating impact on badger numbers.

Badgers spreading tuberculosis can cause huge losses for farmers, since if one of their cattle is found to have contracted the disease, the entire herd is generally slaughtered in order to contain the potential outbreak (yet another cull!). The idea of legalising such a cull has been tabled several years ago, but it is a very controversial issue that has split public opinions.

Members of Team Badger (members of the public who are against the cull, RSPCA, and the Badger Trust members) have been campaigning equally as hard for the cull not to go ahead.  They are using the slogan ‘cure not cull’ and want the government to organise a huge scale vaccination process, so that instead or eradicating the badgers, they are eradicating the disease.

You can sign the petition at the Team Badger website (Photo credit: Team Badger)

However, late February saw the first pilot badger culls being conducted, despite the large scale and passionate arguments put forward by Team Badger. These culls will take place in Gloucestershire and West Somerset, the Environment Secretary confirmed at the National Farmers Union (NFU) annual conference. This decision will be met with relief and approval by the farmers, but with disappointment and anger by those who were against the cull – especially the RSPCA who had even offered to help fund the vaccinations against tuberculosis.

The main reason why this contentious cull was approved was due to studies that have shown that bovine tuberculosis claimed 35,000 cattle in 2012 and cost £500m in the past 10 years, and is believed to rise to £1bn if action is not immediately taken. Despite 150,000 signatures petitioning against the cull, the government has repeatedly stressed to the public that the culling will be done in a humane way and will only happen every four years, since research has shown that such a plan will jeep the spread of bovine tuberculosis under control.

This culling policy is not unheard of, as it has been deployed in Ireland since 2004, following years of trials and smaller scale culling operations. A spokesman for the Irish Department of Agriculture indicated that:

“While we accept it is difficult to attribute trends to a single factor, we believe much of the improvement in the TB situation is due the badger removal programme which was significantly enhanced in 2004.”

Photo credit: Honey

The future looks quite grim for badgers in the UK, but one can never tell what the future holds. These preliminary culling operations have yet to provide significant data, and I personally would not underestimate the influence of pressure groups such as Team Badger.

Is our generation obsessed with Extinction?

As unfair and sad as it may seem, we often tend to forget that species extinction is a natural process like any other. While such a question may seem arbitrary coming from a nature lover, I have since come to appreciate that nature works in mysterious and (in our eyes) often cruel ways.

Extinction has been a process that has existed in tandem with evolution since the beginning of life. One process cannot exist without the other, and there is no way around this argument. In fact, the human race has evolved as a result of the mass extinction of reptiles millions of years ago, which allowed our ancestors and other mammalian species to flourish. It would be quite an unfathomable scenario in which we had cockroaches the size of side plates, sharks four times the size of great white sharks and pigeons that stood at 1m in height – not to mention to fast moving predatory dinosaurs with a mouth full of flesh ripping teeth.

The prehistoric Megalodon (in grey), is a gigantic extinct species of shark which preyed on whales (Photo credit: Scarlet23)

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) has recently raised questions around issues of extinction. Such is the result of decades of declines in the number of ‘high profile’ species such as rhinoceroses, elephants and tigers, which albeit showing promising rises in numbers for some species, are still exhibit critical rates of decline. These figures are imparting a sense of ‘hatred’ towards the process of extinction. It is argued by many that the attention given to these ‘high profile’ species is not contributing to an educated understanding of this process.

When we think of extinction, one associates this with the mass extinction event of dinosaurs, which wiped out around 90% of living species at the time. As mentioned, extinction is a natural process which in fact occurs on an annual and sometimes daily basis.

An artistic rendering of the asteroid impact which caused the mass extinction at the end of Cretaceous Period (Photo credit: Danielm)

There are ‘background’ extinctions that are recorded, with species fading out annually at the expense of other. This is a relatively routine occurring but it generally passes as undetected since the species lost are not as high profile. Only a handful of individuals in the world would be bothered if a species of plants, insects or worm would go extinct. Scientists estimate that mammalian species survive the least in the world, for an average of one to two million years, with leatherback sea turtles being the most persistent at over ten million years. The hard fact is that nothing is infinite, and every single species recorded so far has either gone extinct or will eventually suffer the same fate – this including humans!

So why is there such hype about extinction? The reasons are purely selfish and stem from an economic agenda. Taking the decline of fishery stocks of tuna as a recent example, an eventual extinction spells losses for companies that run in the tens of millions. Furthermore, that is why conservation bodies tend to focus on charismatic species like big cats, elephants, pandas and other mammals – these species bring in considerable income from animals enthusiasts who are willing to spend money to see them. Efforts are also focused on the preservation of ‘keystone’ species, which keep in check certain food chains which if unregulated could mean losses for governments (example, the Thai government does not want to lose Tigers since these act as a control for deer populations which would otherwise decimate natural vegetation).

An Indochinese tiger (Panthera togris corbetti) is an endangered subspecies found in asian countries. Picture above is a tourist at the Tiger Temple in Thailand, a popular toursitic attraction where people can interact with these majestic animals (Photo credit: Doug Beckers)

There is also a moral reason why we are aware of extinction. We have thankfully reached a stage where we feel obligated to conserve nature after neglecting it for so long. It is well known that extinction rates are occurring at an accelerated rate as a result of human interference. So we can find some comfort in the fact that we have finally understood our impacts on the environment, and we are ready to mitigate these to restore some much needed order to the natural process of extinction.

Is elephant conservation backfiring?

African elephants (Loxodonta africana) are the largest living terrestrial animals in the world, located in dense forests, miombo woodlands and deserts across Eastern, Western and Southern Africa.

Photo credit: Derek Keats

This animal has been historically poached for the ivory trade, decimating numbers that once swelled to over a million to a few thousands by the late 20^th century. Conservation programmes, coupled with stringent regulation on illegal poaching and black market trade of ivory have managed to give these majestic animals a fighting chance for survival. However, a surprising new threat is placing elephants at risk, this time a direct result of these conservation efforts.

WARNING! The following video contains some graphic images of dead/dying elephants

Full article can be found at Frontier’s Gap Year Blog:

http://gapyearblog.org.uk/science-club/2013/3/4/is-elephant-conservation-backfiring.html

Unlikely BFFs!

Given the fact that we do not have squirrels in Malta, I always stop and admire them scurrying along parks. However, the grey squirrel has a much deeper and sinister agenda than its cute and fuzzy exterior lets on…

 

The Eursian Red Squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) is species of tree squirrel native to Northern European and Asian countries. This animal was especially prominent in Great Britain, being of notable importance to humans as a source of fur. However, the peculiar Victorian fashion of introducing non-native species in the 19^th Century has resulted in devastating results for this species.

Photo credit: Peter G Trimming

Full article can be found at Frontier’s Gap Year Blog:

http://gapyearblog.org.uk/science-club/2013/2/27/unlikely-bffs.html

Whale Fall

A post looking at whale falls, inspired by the first episode of a BBC Nature Documentary  series entitled “The Blue Planet”, narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is the largest known animal to have ever existed, this being very understandable with an average 30 meters in length and 180 tonnes (or more) in weight. These majestic animals pose several questions about their behaviour and biology, but they also raise questions about what happens to their bodies when they die.

Full article can be found at Frontier’s Gap Year Blog:

http://gapyearblog.org.uk/science-club/2013/2/7/whale-fall.html

Mini Elephants

I’m sure that most Maltese have heard of Għar Dalam, a notable paleontological site in the south of the island of Malta discovered in the late 19th Century. As a child, I remember visiting this site and the adjoining museum, and found it quite cool to discover that elephants, hippos, deer and other interesting mammals once roamed the vast ‘plains’ of our tiny island. The actual scientific importance of this phenomenon became clear to me during an ecology lecture at UoM, when Insular Dwarfism was mentioned.

Għar Dalam, photo credit: Jean-Christophe BENOIST

 Generally when we mention creatures such as elephants and hippos, we think of enormous beings that live in vast open spaces. The idea of having mini versions of these animals seems almost impossible, but there is paleontological evidence from several places across the world that dwarf versions of these current living animals once existed or still exist.

The process causing such organisms to become small in size is called dwarfism, and in the case of such animals it is called insular dwarfism. While there is no clear indication on what leads to this phenomenon, there are many proposed explanations. One of the most popular theories is associated to a selective process that occurs when such animals become trapped on an island. In order to survive, smaller animals thrive while larger ones die off as food levels decrease and would not be enough to sustain them. Smaller animals naturally require less amount of food to survive, so they out-compete larger ones. This results in the species to become smaller and eventually it becomes a different species on its own given enough time.

Photo credit: fry

There are many well documented cases of dwarf elephants across Mediterranean Islands such as Malta, Crete, Sicily and Cyprus. It is believed that when the Mediterranean Sea dried up some 6 million years ago, the ancestors of the Asian elephant migrated west, but became stranded on these islands when the sea flooded again. Fossils of dwarf elephants have subsequently been found in Cyprus (Palaeoloxodon cypriotes), Malta (P. melitensis), Crete (P. creutzburgi) and other Mediterranean islands. At a standard adult height of only 90 cm, these extinct creatures are a far cry from their modern descendants. Insular dwarfism was also observed in the descendants of the extinct European hippopotamus (Hippopotamus antiquus), which ranged the Europe continent before the last Ice Age. It then migrated south and became stranded on the same Islands to give fossilized dwarf hippos: Malta (H. melitensis), Cyprus (H. minor) and Crete (H. creutzburgi).

Insular dwarfism can also be used to explain the size of a few living animals as well. It is believed that this process has also resulted in the evolution of the Channel Islands Fox (Urocyon littoralis), Mindoro Dwarf Buffalo (Bubalus mindorensis) and the Key Deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium).

Tea cup elephant anyone?