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An expedition to Millennium Atoll, a remote coral atoll in the Central Pacific, has uncovered an almost completely undisturbed underwater ecosystem that could serve as an important reference for restoration projects throughout the Pacific Ocean.

The survey findings, published recently in the journal PLoS One, describe an abundance of giant clams (Tridacna maxima) within the atoll lagoon, as well as large populations of blacktip reef sharks and Napoleon wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus).
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The expedition findings highlight the importance of protecting the atoll, which belongs to the Republic of Kiribati and is a member of the Southern Line Islands chain. Although relatively abundant at present, the sharks, clams, sea turtles, lobsters and Napoleon wrasse of Millennium Atoll are vulnerable to exploitation by fisheries; therefore, protecting the atoll and regulating any fishing in the area is crucial for the preservation of this unusually pristine ecosystem.
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Additional information from oceandots.com.

Millennium (formerly known as Caroline Island) is located in the southern group of the Line Islands, being the easternmost island in the Line Islands chain. The islands of Vostok and Flint are located 232 km to the west and 230 km to the southwest, respectively; Kiritimati is situated around 1,500 km to the northwest. Millennium is an atoll formation with an elongated, slightly crescentic, shape measuring 9.7 km in length and 2.3 km in width.

On the reef rim there are 39 islets — South Island (104 ha), the 4.2 km-long Long Island (76 ha) and Nake Islet (107 ha) being the largest — with a combined area of 3.9 km². They enclose a 9 km long, shallow lagoon that is 5-7 m in depth and up to 500 m across. Within the lagoon are numerous coral heads and patch reefs — some of which form east-west barriers across the lagoon. The surrounding reef flats — averaging 500 m in width — are continuous around the perimeter of the atoll with no reef-crossing passage connecting the interior waters of the lagoon with the surrounding ocean. Instead water exchange takes place via numerous spillways as the tides rise and fall.

Coral Restoration Foundation

CRF is a non-profit conservation organization dedicated to to develop coral nurseries and reef restoration programs for critically endangered Acroporid corals at the local, national and global level. Their mission is to develop affordable, effective strategies for protecting and restoring coral reefs and to train and empower others to implement those strategries in their coastal communities.

mongabay.com

Twenty years of research has led Dr. Graham Jones of Australia’s Southern Cross University to discover a startling connection between coral reefs and coastal precipitation. According to Jones, a substance produced by thriving coral reefs seed clouds leading to precipitation in a long-standing natural process that is coming under threat due to climate change.

“Coral reefs produce a volatile substance called dimethylsulphide or DMS which oxidizes in the atmosphere to produce cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). These are tiny sulphur aerosol particles around which water vapor condenses to form clouds,” Jones explained to mongabay.com, adding that, “water vapor cannot form clouds without these tiny aerosol particles being present.”

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Yet, in his studies, Jones has discovered that even a slight rise in ocean temperatures could affect this natural process, making climate change a significant threat to clouds (and precipitation) seeded by coral reefs.

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Jones says that the Australian government has a number of policies in place to protect coral reefs, but “what we don’t have is funding of basic reef processes such as this one, which significantly can affect regional climate in the Great Barrier Reef.”

Research into how ecosystems, such as coral reefs and forests, may be involved in regional climate patterns has been gaining steam over the years. Two Russian scientists have published a number of studies on a controversial theory that forests actually ‘pump’ rain from the coast to continent’s interiors.

If such theories withstand the test of time, and science, they could have widespread implications for the conservation of both forests and coral reefs, adding a new and vital ecosystem-service provided by these two threatened environments: the ‘makers’ and ‘movers’ of precipitation.

BBC

cloudedleopard.org

The Sundaland clouded leopard, a recently described new species of big cat, has been caught on camera.

The film, the first footage of the cat in the wild to be made public, has been released by scientists working in the Dermakot Forest Reserve in Malaysia.

The Sundaland clouded leopard, only discovered to be a distinct species three years ago, is one of the least known and elusive of all cat species.

Two more rare cats, the flat-headed cat and bay cat, were also photographed.

Details of the discoveries are published in the latest issue of Cat News, the newsletter of the Cat Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

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a tourist is thought to have taken a 30 second video of a wild Sundaland clouded leopard in 2006, but that video has never been made public.

Until 2007, all clouded leopards living in Asia were thought to belong to a single species.

However, genetic studies revealed that there are actually two quite distinct clouded leopard species.

As well as the better known clouded leopard living on the Asian mainland (Neofelis nebulosa), scientists determined that a separate clouded leopard species lives on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

The two species are thought to have diverged over one million years ago.

This leopard is now known as the Sunda or Sundaland clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi), though it was previously and erroneously called the Bornean clouded leopard.

Since 2008, it has been listed as vulnerable by the IUCN.

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During the surveys, the research team also discovered a juvenile samba deer (Cervus unicolor) which had been killed by a clouded leopard.

The scientists suspect a large male clouded leopard made the kill, and had removed part of the front right leg.

Despite being a commercial forest that is sustainably logged for wood, the Dermakot Forest Reserve in Sabah, which is an area of approximately 550km square kilometres, holds all five wild Bornean cat species.

[Photo: Alain Compost/WWF-Canon, cloudedleopard.org]

reefvideo.net

coralsforconservation.com

Coral Gardening from Jonathan Clay on Vimeo.

Many reef aquarium owners get their corals by trading them with nearby reefkeepers. Once corals get to a certain size it’s pretty easy to propagate (or frag) them by cutting off a branch here or a a few polyps there. It’s usually cheaper and easier than buying from a local dealer and the corals tend to do much better in the long run, because they haven’t gone through so much shipping stress. It’s also a good way to “insure” your corals because if anything ever happens to a coral you in your aquarium, you can just go back to your friend and ask him to cut you off a piece of the coral you gave him. The hobby has begun to depend on tank raised corals so much that many places that sell corals are beginning to change their stock to include more corals that are grown inside aquariums.

In this video by Jonathon Clay, locals and resort owners who live around large reefs are propagating corals in a similar fashion as reef hobbyists. A group called Corals for Conservation teaches people to preserve declining reefs and fish populations by coral gardening. The idea is that by preserving and regrowing reefs, fish will come back to the area and help replenish areas that have been over-fished.

The methods they use are very similar to that of the common aquarium keeper. The main difference is that it is on a larger scale and they use the ocean as their aquarium. It is a genius idea, promotes conservation, educates, creates jobs and supports the local community. Hopefully we will see more of these projects popping up throughout the world.

This is a sequence from the film “Fragile Paradise“, part of the BBC’s documentary series “South Pacific.“

nationalgeographic

WWF

A rare pangolin fetus floats in soup in Indonesia in 2008. Some practitioners of Asian traditional medicine believe pangolin-fetus soup increases a man’s virility.

But because pangolin mothers typically produce just one pup per litter, the soup comes laced with a deadly irony. Whatever the soup purportedly does for individual humans, its popularity could be helping to squelch the reproductiveness of an entire species.

Because of growing demand for pangolin meat and scales, the toothless creature is now being hunted to the edge of extinction, according to a July 14 report by the international conservation group WWF and the wildlife-trade watchdog group TRAFFIC, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Native to the Indian subcontinent, Asia, and Africa, the pangolin, or scaly anteater, is especially coveted in China, where it has been overhunted, WWF says. China’s reduced supply fuels pangolin hunting in Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, says the report, which was funded in part by the National Geographic Society’s Conservation Trust. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)

Center for Biological Diversity

Pint-sized rabbit relatives, pikas live in high-elevation boulder fields surrounded by mountain meadows throughout the western United States. Specially adapted to cold alpine conditions, they cannot tolerate high temperatures. Rising temperatures and drier conditions in summer can expose the animals to heat stroke, reduce food in mountain meadows, and make conditions too hot for them to find food. In winter, because they remain active rather than hibernate, pikas rely on insulating snowpack and their dense coats to keep them warm – but the loss of winter snowpack due to climate change exposes them to deadly winter cold snaps.

Rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gas pollution have already caused drastic losses of lower-elevation pika populations. More than a third of documented pika populations in the Great Basin mountains of Nevada and Oregon have gone extinct in the past century as temperatures warmed. In California, pikas have moved upslope in Yosemite National Park over the past century, and they have largely disappeared from the Bodie Hills in the Sierra Nevada mountains in recent decades. Scientists project that global warming will virtually eliminate suitable habitat for the pika in this century if greenhouse gas emissions are not drastically reduced.

It’s not too late to prevent the extinction of the pika, but we must act quickly to slow global warming. The Fish and Wildlife Service needs to hear from you. Please use the form below to support the listing of the American pika and urge the government to reduce greenhouse gas pollution to levels that will protect the pika and other wildlife species from extinction.

Click here for the form.

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WWF

The American pika, a small flower-gathering relative of the rabbit, may be one of the first mammals in North America known to fall victim to global warming if heat-trapping emissions are not reduced soon.
American pikas are typically found in rocky areas, called talus, within alpine regions of the western United States and southwestern Canada. Many hikers, while passing through pika habitat in these rocky areas, have heard these shy creatures call and whistle to each other.

Since food is difficult to obtain in winter in the alpine environment, pikas cut, sun-dry, and later store vegetation for winter use in characteristic ‘hay piles.’ They are often called ‘ecosystem engineers’ because of their extensive haying activities.

BBC

The world’s most important coral region is in danger of being wiped out by the end of this century unless fast action is taken, says a new report.

The international conservation group WWF warns that 40% of reefs in the Coral Triangle have already been lost.

The area is shared between Indonesia and five other south-east Asian nations and is thought to contain 75% of the world’s coral species.

It is likened to the Amazon rainforest in terms of its biodiversity.

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“In the last 40 years in the Coral Triangle, we’ve lost 40% of coral reefs and mangroves – and that’s probably an underestimate. We’ve fundamentally changed the way the planet works in terms of currents and this is only with a 0.7 degree change in terms of temperature.

“What’s going to happen when we exceed two or four or six?”

Climate change consequences

Avoiding a worst-case scenario would need significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and better controls on fishing and coastal areas, says the report.

The Coral Triangle covers 1% of the earth’s surface but contains a third of all the world’s coral, and three-quarters of its coral reef species.

If it goes, an entire eco-system goes with it – and that, says Prof Hoegh-Gudberg, has serious consequences for its ability to tackle climate change.

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Indonesia is hosting the World Ocean Conference this week because, it says, oceans have been neglected so far in global discussions on climate change.

It wants the issue to have a bigger profile at UN climate talks later this year.

biologicaldiversity.org

The federal National Marine Fisheries Service today took the first steps towards protecting critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act for the Cook Inlet beluga whale in Alaska. In October 2008 the Fisheries Service listed the whale as endangered. The listing occurred following petitions and litigation by the Center for Biological Diversity and other organizations.

However, rather than designate critical habitat for the beluga at the time of listing as required by the Endangered Species Act, the Fisheries Service stated that it would defer habitat protection for a year. The Fisheries Service finally began the overdue process of protecting Cook Inlet beluga critical habitat by publishing a notice in the Federal Register requesting public comment on what areas should be protected. The Fisheries Service has stated that the habitat rule will be finalized by October 22, 2009.

Studies have shown that species with critical habitat are twice as likely to be recovering as species without any habitat designated.

“If we quickly act to designate and protect the critical habitat of the Cook Inlet beluga, this highly imperiled whale has a real chance of recovery,” said Brendan Cummings, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Unfortunately, the federal government has been lackadaisical about protecting the beluga, while the state of Alaska has been outright hostile to the species.”

In January, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin announced that the State of Alaska would sue the federal government to overturn endangered species protections for the beluga. That lawsuit has yet to be filed.

The Cook Inlet beluga whale is a genetically distinct and geographically isolated population whose numbers have plummeted in recent decades. Recent surveys show the Cook Inlet beluga whale’s population now hovers around 375 animals, down from an estimated population of approximately 1,300 whales in the 1980s. The Cook Inlet beluga whale is one of five populations of beluga, or white whales, in Alaska.

The original decline of the Cook Inlet beluga was likely caused by overhunting, but the population has failed to rebound since hunting was curtailed in 1999, indicating that other factors are interfering with its recovery. Most likely the whale is being harmed by noise and pollution from industrial activities in Cook Inlet.

Cook Inlet is the most populated and fastest growing watershed in Alaska, and is subject to significant proposed offshore oil and gas development in beluga habitat. Additionally, the proposed Knik Arm Bridge, a billion-dollar boondoggle that would provide little benefit other than to shorten the governor’s commute from Wasilla to Anchorage, will directly affect some of the whale’s most important habitat. Port expansion and a proposed giant coal mine and coal export dock would also destroy key beluga habitat.

A recently completed Conservation Plan for the beluga specifically identified essential habitat areas for the beluga, as well as threats to that habitat, and will likely form the basis for the critical habitat designation.

“If we do what is necessary to protect the critical habitat of the Cook Inlet beluga whale, by extension we will also be protecting water quality, salmon fisheries, and the health of the entire Cook Inlet ecosystem,” added Cummings.

More information on the Cook Inlet beluga whale can be found at http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/mammals/Cook_Inlet_beluga_whale/index.html

AP

A hatchling of a rare reptile with lineage dating back to the dinosaur age has been found in the wild on the New Zealand mainland for the first time in about 200 years, a wildlife official said Thursday.

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Tuatara are the last lizard-like descendants of a reptile species that walked the Earth with the dinosaurs 225 million years ago, zoologists say.

There are estimated to be about 50,000 of them living in the wild on 32 small offshore islands cleared of predators, but this is the first time a hatchling has been seen on the mainland in about 200 years.

The New Zealand natives were nearly extinct on the country’s three main islands by the late 1700s due to the introduction of predators such as rats.

Empson said the hatchling is thought to be about one month old and likely came from an egg laid about 16 months ago. Two nests of eggs — the size of pingpong balls — were unearthed in the sanctuary last year and tuatara were expected to hatch around this time.

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The youngster faces a tough journey to maturity despite being in the 620-acre (250 hectare) sanctuary and protected by a predator-proof fence. It will have to run from the cannibalistic adult tuatara, and would make a tasty snack for the morepork (native owl), kingfisher and weka (New Zealand’s endemic flightless rail), Empson said.

“Like all the wildlife living here, he’ll just have to take his chances” Empson said.

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About 200 tuatara have been released since 2005 into the Karori Sanctuary, which was established to breed native birds, insects and other creatures.

Tuatara have unique characteristics, such as two rows of top teeth closing over one row at the bottom and a pronounced parietal eye — a light-sensitive pineal gland on the top of the skull that gives the appearance of a third eye.