pfk

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.

I’m sure many have read the news about this move winning the Oscar award and such. How many have really watched it? If u have not, I’ll highly recommend watching it.
thecovemovie.com

Dolphins and whales definitely do not like captivity. The recent Seaworld case is yet another reminder.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/24/killer-whale-florida

Capturing them for captivity for $150 000 is one thing. Why did they have to kill the rest that are trapped by them? For their meat? Dolphins meat are proven to be mecury toxic! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cove_(film)

Since 2000, Japanese researchers such as Tetsuya Endo, a professor at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido, have found high concentrations of mercury, which can cause mercury poisoning, in the whale and dolphin meat sold around Japan. In their studies Taiji residents who eat whale/dolphin meat had high levels of mercury in their hair.[37]  Whale meat contaminated with mercury is commonly eaten in the town, and residents have been found to have 10 times the level of mercury in their hair when compared to average Japanese citizens. [38]  Although the film argued that the Japanese government and media were trying to conceal the facts, in actuality the Japanese Ministry of Health has issued warnings on the consumption of some species of fish, whale and dolphin since 2003.

The reason could well be what was discuss later in the movie about Japanese pride and such against Westerner telling them what to do and not. Pls dun make dolphin suffer for human pride.
http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Asia/Story/STIStory_512905.html

Its mind bobbling why the japanese ppl in Taiji are doing to these intelligent animals. More than 20 thousand are killed yearly!

Take action. Take part. http://www.takepart.com/thecove

BBC

A proposal to ban international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna, which is a sushi mainstay in Japan, has been rejected by a UN wildlife meeting.

Thursday’s decision occurred after Japan, Canada and many poor nations opposed the measure on the grounds it would devastate fishing economies.

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Scientists and campaigners working with conservation organisations were disappointed with the outcome.:

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The US, which supported and lobbied for the ban, also described the outcome as “disappointing”.

“Today’s vote was a setback for the Atlantic bluefin tuna,” said Tom Strickland, head of the nation’s CITES delegation.

“But we will keep fighting to ensure that the fishery is managed sustainably, so that future generations may see it return to health.”

US officials said they would be pressing governments to live up to promises to control fishing through Iccat.

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Japan – the principal bluefin-consuming nation – had made its opposition to the proposal clear before the CITES meeting started.

It argues that commercial fisheries should be managed through bodies such as Iccat.

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The vote on the original motion then went down by 68 votes to 20.

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Sue Lieberman, director of international policy with the Pew Environment Group, suggested lobbying from the fishing industry was ultimately responsible for the defeat.

“This meeting presented a golden opportunity for governments to take a stand against overfishing, and too many governments failed to do so,” she said.

“The market for this fish is just too lucrative, and the pressure from fishing interests too great, for enough governments to support a truly sustainable future for the fish.”

CITES votes can be reviewed on the meeting’s final day, but the substantial margin of defeat suggests this one will not be.

Earlier in the day, a US-sponsored motion seeking to ban international trade in products made from polar bears was also defeated.

Opponents argued that the species’ main threat was not trade, but climate change. Some conservation groups – including Traffic – did not support the proposal, therefore.

There were also concerns that banning the trade might hurt indigenous peoples around the Arctic who sometimes hunt the bears for meat.

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]

www.bytr.nl

In the Jan van Lieshoutstraat in Eindhoven (NL) – a mainly pedestrian street adjacent to a shopping mall – BYTR suggested that public space be cleared of lampposts and small planters, which were forming obstacles. The design – called the GREENSPOTLIGHT – combines these two elements, greenery and street lighting, into one integrated design: a special green public light where living plants form the shade. In the bottom of the shade, a ring of integrated planters are situated. The lights are hung from cables between the street walls. This low-key intervention raised the quality of the street from a back alley to a shopping street.

The project is part of a larger commission called ‘Greenspots Eindhoven’ in which Eindhoven municipal council has asked BYTR to look for opportunities to realise green projects in the city centre. While statistics show Eindhoven to be one of the greenest cities in the Netherlands, this is not particularly apparent walking through the city centre, which was principally built after the Second World War and comprises mainly large-scale concrete structures. In the coming years, the city will develop a series of projects in which greenery is the key element, thus trying to upgrade biodiversity in the city at the same time.

<Click on link for pictures>

BBC

More than a third of species assessed in a major international biodiversity study are threatened with extinction, scientists have warned.

Out of the 47,677 species in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 17,291 were deemed to be at serious risk.

These included 21% of mammals, 30% of amphibians, 70% of plants and 35% of invertebrates.

Conservationists warned that not enough was being done to tackle the main threats, such as habitat loss.

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The Red List, regarded as the most authoritative assessment of the state of the planet’s species, draws on the work of thousands of scientists around the globe.

The latest update lists amphibians as the most seriously affected group of organisms on the planet, with 1,895 of the 6,285 known species listed as threatened.

Of these, it lists 39 species as either “extinct” or “extinct in the wild”. A further 484 are deemed “critically endangered”, 754 “endangered” and 657 “vulnerable”.

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“In our lifetime, we have gone from having to worry about a relatively small number of highly threatened species to the collapse of entire ecosystems,” observed Professor Jonathan Baillie, director of conservation programmes at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

“At what point will society truly respond to this growing crisis?”

The updated data from the 2009 Red List is being made publicly available on the IUCN website on Tuesday.

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.“

www.ageofstupid.net

‘The Age of Stupid’ is the new cinema documentary from the Director of ‘McLibel’ and the Producer of the Oscar-winning ‘One Day in September’. This enormously ambitious drama-documentary-animation hybrid stars Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching ‘archive’ footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change while we had the chance?