Every spring and autumn billions of animals cross borders without passports, navigating oceans, skies and continents along routes older than human civilization. Millions of birds fly from Africa to Europe along the Great Syrian Rift and risk getting shot by owl hunters in Jordan who see them as superstitious and negative omans. Or songbirds turn into a pickled dish Cyprus. Sea turtles, dolphins and sharks are getting eaten in Gaza. Can you blame them?

With larger, land-bound animals human encroachment and Middle East warns make it more troubling for the survival of migratory animals on land, air and at sea. A new United Nations report released this week warns that the situation is getting worse, not better. Some of the causes for concern are poisonings, illegal fishing, and wind turbines.

Over the years we have reported on a Kuwaiti posing with dead wolves, the massacre of 12 flamingoes as well as thousands of endangered fruit bats which were gunned down in Lebanon. Whats more, despite laws to ban the ownership of exotic animals in the Gulf, we wouldn’t be surprised to see more pet cheetahs being paraded around.

According to the interim update to the State of the World’s Migratory Species, prepared under the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), 49 percent of migratory species populations protected under the treaty are now declining, up from 44 percent only two years ago. At the same time, 24 percent of listed migratory species now face extinction risk, a two-percent increase since the last assessment.

The findings arrive just weeks before governments gather in Brazil for the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the treaty, where conservation policies for migratory wildlife will be debated. The numbers matter, say UN officials, because migratory animals do more than travel. They also swoop in and pollinate plants, transport nutrients between ecosystems, regulate pests which are local and seasonal, and help store carbon in forests and oceans.

“The first global report was a wake-up call,” said Amy Fraenkel, Executive Secretary of CMS. “This interim update shows that the alarm is still sounding. Some species are responding to concerted conservation action, but too many continue to face mounting pressures across their migratory routes.”

Twenty-six species protected under the treaty have moved into higher extinction risk categories since the previous report. Among them are 18 migratory shorebird species, which rely on fragile coastal habitats that are increasingly lost to development, climate change and pollution.

Is there hope? Seven CMS-listed species have improved in conservation status thanks to coordinated international protection efforts, including the saiga antelope, the scimitar-horned oryx, and the Mediterranean monk seal, a marine mammal that once hovered near extinction.

Scientists have also made progress mapping the invisible highways animals follow across the planet. And some countries like Canada and Israel have built land bridges over highways so migratory species such as deer and moose can cross dangerous roads. We crossed under such bridges last summer in Canada.

Initiatives such as the Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration, the Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean (MiCO) system, and BirdLife International’s work identifying six major marine bird flyways are helping conservation planners understand how species move across landscapes and oceans. The report can be found here.

Still, many of the places these animals depend on remain unprotected. Researchers identified 9,372 Key Biodiversity Areas important for migratory species, yet 47 percent of the area they cover lies outside protected or conserved zones.

Two threats dominate the global picture: overexploitation of wildlife and the loss or fragmentation of habitats, which disrupt migration routes that may span thousands of miles.

“If we intervene only at the point of crisis, we risk acting too late,” Fraenkel said. “By strengthening governance, monitoring, legislation and community engagement upstream, we can reduce pressure on these remarkable animals and put them on the path to lasting recovery.”

Mediterranean and Middle East waters are a hotspot for threatened sharks

The report confirms that extinction risk for sharks and rays has risen sharply in several regions including the Mediterranean Sea and the Northern Indian Ocean.

• Populations of sharks and rays have declined by roughly 50% globally since 1970.

• Overfishing and bycatch are the main causes.

• Species such as the Oceanic Whitetip Shark (Carcharhinus longimanus) are now Critically Endangered.

• The Angelshark (Squatina squatina), once widespread in the Mediterranean, is now fragmented due to overexploitation.

These trends matter for countries around the Mediterranean basin including Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and Greece, where coastal habitat loss and fishing pressure are major issues.

Migratory birds in the Middle East

According to the report:

• 53% of raptor species monitored in the African-Eurasian region are declining.

• Major threats include:

  • habitat loss

  • illegal hunting

  • poisoning

  • collisions with power lines and energy infrastructure.

The Steppe Eagle (Aquila nipalensis), which migrates through the Middle East from Central Asia to Africa, is now globally Endangered. The report notes that energy infrastructure — power lines and wind installations — is a significant cause of mortality for migratory raptors.

The upcoming COP15 meeting in Campo Grande, Brazil will test whether governments are ready to respond. Have the report ready to send to your local: “We have a baseline. We have better tools. And we have growing public awareness,” Fraenkel said. “The question before governments at COP15 is straightforward: will we match this knowledge with the political will and investment needed to secure the future of the world’s migratory species?”

For more on animal rights abuses in the Middle East see:

Kuwaiti Man Kills Wolf and Then Shows Off

Gulf Country Completely Bans Ownership of Wild Animals

Kuwaitis Use Shotgun to Kill 12 Flamingoes

Jordan’s Gray Wolves Are Hunted, Poisoned and Run Over

The post Nearly the half the world’s migratory species are declining, in new UN report for COP15 appeared first on Green Prophet.

Plants: They seem more resilient than we are. And there are so many wild places in the world that they can take over. But a new study reveals that along with large mammals, amphibian and creatures of the sea, plants are going extinct faster than we thought possible.

Time to start saving seeds. And not just in war times as Syria has been doing at the Svalbard Global Seed Bank in Norway. Every plant is a medicinal plant. Losing one could mean losing a universe of opportunities.
 
A new study reveals that 65 plant species have gone extinct in the continental United States and Canada since European settlement, more extinctions than any previous scientific study has ever documented.  Led by Wesley Knapp of the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, a group of 16 experts from across the United States collaborated to document the extinct plants of the continental United States and Canada for the first time in history.

Their report has been published by the international journal Conservation Biology. 

The team found that most plant extinctions occurred in the western United States, where the vegetation was minimally explored before widespread European settlement. Because many extinctions likely occurred before scientists explored an area, it is extremely likely the 65 documented extinctions vastly underestimate the actual number of plant species that have been lost.
 
Previous studies documented far fewer plant extinctions on the North American continent.

“Preventing extinction is the lowest bar for conservation success we can set, yet we are not always successful,” Knapp said. “This study started as an academic question but later developed into an opportunity to learn from what we have lost. By studying the trends and patterns of plants that have already gone extinct, hopefully we can learn how to prevent plant extinction going forward.”

Of the 65 documented extinctions in the report, 64% were known only from a single location. While conservation often focuses on protecting entire landscapes, this finding points to the importance of small-scale site protection in order to prevent extinctions.

Because plants serve as the foundation for most terrestrial ecosystems, the urgency for documenting plant extinctions is especially great if extinction rates rise as predicted over the next century. Anne Frances, lead botanist at NatureServe, states, “In most cases, we can stop plants from going extinct, we just need the resources and commitment to do so.”

Action items? What you can do? 
Read Braiding Sweetgrass to understand more about plant and human life
Read this New Times article on a man who is saving heirloom apples
Start by growing these healing herbs at home 

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The report predicts that worldwide coffee production will drop by half over the next three decades due to climbing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, rendering regions historically suited for coffee cultivation unable to meet global demand. Production may be forced to move away from low-level equatorial regions and higher up into forested mountains causing new negative ecological impacts. Significantly altered micro-climates will affect both coffee quality and yield sizes.

Climate change is creating more coffee plant disease

“It’s not just the heat, which is a big factor which is driving some of the regions where coffee is produced uphill,” John Connor, Climate Institute’s chief executive officer, told ABC. “We’re also seeing extra diseases increasing and being able to go up into those areas.”

The overall outlook is bleak, although earlier studies had indicated that Honduras, Indonesia and Vietnam are producing more coffee than usual. Mexican coffee fields will become “nonviable” first,  followed quickly by Nicaragua; both regions are expected to lose commercial productivity by 2050.

Brazil, the world’s largest coffee grower, has been crippled by heat waves since 2014, which have devastated harvests and prompted retail price hikes.

Coffee has grown increasingly gimmicky in our lifetime. It’s earned faux foreign-language drink names and secret drinks menus at top franchises. We can sip coffee crapped out of a marsupial’s bum and crunch edible coffee cups.

Lady Gaga donned a dress made from coffee filters and Green Prophet even brought you 15 #LifeHacks using coffee grounds. But all that spin-off is done if the beans disappear.

Beans most affected have been popular Robusto and Arabica, the latter requires sequential rainy and dry seasons to mature. This is noteworthy since Arabica beans, which originated in mountainous regions of Ethiopia and Yemen, are the basis for 75 percent of the world’s coffee. Robusta – so named as it is more tolerant of climactic differences – is expected to become extinct in the Congo (its birthplace) by 2050.

Currently, according to the folks at Climate Institute, we drink about 2.25 billion cups of coffee daily, and global demand is rising. The report concludes that unless climate change is addressed, wild coffee could become extinct worldwide by 2080.

“We have a cloud hovering over our head. It’s dramatically serious. Climate change can have a significant adverse effect in the short term,” Mario Cerutti, a director at Lavazza, one of Italy’s top coffee roasting companies, told Think Progress. “It’s no longer about the future; it’s the present.”

Industry officials have been issuing warnings for years. In 2011, Starbucks director of environmental affairs, Jim Hanna told the Guardian, “What we are really seeing as a company as we look 10, 20, 30 years down the road — if conditions continue as they are — is a potentially significant risk to our supply chain.”  Hanna pointed out that farmers were already seeing how climate change was creating severe hurricanes and more resistant bugs.

While big business forms coalitions to press governments to tackle a changing climate, what can the individual coffee drinker do? The report urges consumers to choose carbon-neutral brands and also demand action from companies and governments to ensure all products, business models, and economies are carbon neutral or carbon negative. Green Prophet suggests you also cultivate an appreciation for plain water.

“Our concern is primarily for the 25 million farmers out there whose entire livelihoods depend on this incredibly important global commodity,” Molly Harriss Olson, chief executive of Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand, which commissioned the report, told ABC. “We’ve got to build a new economy that doesn’t threaten things in our lifestyle such as our coffee.”

Consider coffee brand Maxwell House and its iconic slogan, Good to the Last Drop!, which may turn out to be the world’s most prescient advertising motto. Download the full report – link here. 

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A favorite animal

Each night after her bedtime story my daughter would quiz me. “What is your favorite animal?” She would ask, hoping that I would agree that we absolutely must adopt a dog, a cat or a pony. “Dolphin.” I would answer.

The next night I would choose a different animal. It had to be something cute but completely unsuitable as a pet. I moved from cetaceans to insects to endangered species and finally to extinct animals. “Brachiosaurus, woolly mammoth, passenger pigeon.”

That last one piqued my interest. This one didn’t die of an asteroid sixty-five million years ago. This was recent history. John Muir, Charles Darwin, even my own grandparents were alive when these birds flocked over Midwestern American skies. They lived during the enlightenment and the age of scientific discovery. Surely someone must know what caused them to go extinct.

Martha’s big family
A quick internet search told me that passenger pigeons lived in Eastern North America and were at one time the most populous bird species on earth, numbering as many as five billion.

The famous ornithologist John James Audubon wrote that they had darkened the skies for days as during a total eclipse. Their weight had caused trees to collapse. Naturalist A.W. Schorger wrote that a single nesting site in the state of Wisconsin contained 136 million breeding adults. For comparison, the stockier mourning dove which bears the closest resemblance to passenger pigeons, number only about 250 million worldwide.

A living example

The European starling is North America’s most prolific living bird. It numbers only 200 million. Starlings disappeared from the skies over Jordan and Israel in the 1990s and just as mysteriously returned in recent years. Watch this murmeration of about 100,000 Starlings flying over Istanbul Turkey and imagine their number multiplied by 30,000. That’s what a mile wide, 300 mile long cloud of more than three billion birds would have looked and sounded like as it darkened the skies of southern Ontario for fourteen hours in 1866:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IT9HTXmURM&feature=player_detailpage#t=6[/youtube]

From great multitudes to Zero

Seventy years later, a childless 29 year-old passenger pigeon named Martha, died in an Ohio zoo. She was the last of her kind. If you didn’t feel a chill run down your spine or hear some swear words escape from your lips at that thought, maybe you should read that again.

From five billion to zero over the course of a short human lifetime. What the #*^% happened?! There are people living today who might have seen one in a zoo or standing on a telegraph wire. We have witnesses we even have photographs. But for an extinction that happened after Charles Darwin published “Origin of the Species” and after the world’s first national parks were founded, we know remarkably little.

Why so many?

To discover why the passenger pigeon’s numbers dropped to zero we should first investigate why their numbers rose to such– dare we say, unsustainable numbers. In fact there are relatively few vertebrate species who thrive in such large numbers. During their heyday, more than than one fifth of all birds in North America belonged to this single species. Where were their predators?

The Predators

One theory is that passenger pigeons were an outbreak species with Native Americans as their primary predator. Flocking in such large numbers, they were easy to hunt. Their young could be picked from the ground. Migrating flocks were caught with nets or clubbed from the sky. Native Americans killed just enough to keep their population under control until…

The outbreak

The arrival of Europeans led to the death of millions of Native Americans which led to an explosion in the population of passenger pigeons until– Europeans developed a taste for these birds. They were used as cheap food for slaves.

The collapse

Waves of hungry immigrants soon created a passenger pigeon economy. They used guns and nets. They set trees on fire. They used blinded and tethered “stool pigeons” as bait. A single hunter could take in 5000 birds in a day. Hunters in Michigan collected 7.5 million passenger pigeons in 1869. Their haul increased each year until it peaked at between 10 and 15 million birds in 1878.

Then, following the same pattern as peak whale oil, peak fish  and peak oil, their numbers began to collapse. The ecosystems which supported these multitudes were poorly understood and before we knew it we were past the point of no return. Passenger pigeons usually laid only one egg per year and so they were unable to recover their numbers.

A 14-year-old boy shot the last wild passenger pigeon with a BB gun in 1900 and Martha died alone in captivity, one hundred years ago this week.

Of luck and Lyme Disease

Naturalist John Muir once said that if you tug at any little part of nature you find that it’s hitched to the whole universe. We were lucky that passenger pigeons didn’t fill an irreplaceable niche in our food chain. Martha’s family died at a time when industrialization allowed humans to more efficiently produce food. A similar extinction of honeybees or cod would have disastrous economic and social effects today.

Martha’s death did have a human impact. Passenger pigeons fed primarily on tree nuts such as acorns and chestnuts. The four billion chestnut trees which once covered much of eastern North America were been wiped out by an invasive fungus. But enough acorns and other nuts remained to support a large population of deer mice. And deer mice are host to a wood tick which carries Lyme disease. It is possible that MERs or Ebola outbreaks are caused or amplified by similar environmental disasters caused by our “destroy now ask questions later” approach to nature.

Martha’s legacy

Martha’s death taught us that it is possible for humans to have a devastating impact on what seemed to be an inexhaustible natural resource. By revealing this truth, she may have helped spark the environmental movement which saved the American bison, the bald eagle, the grey wolf and numerous other species from a similar fate and led to conservation laws and the national park system.

Photo of starling mumeration by shutterstock
Photo of Martha the last passenger pigeon by Wikipedia

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The Arabian Gulf marine ecosystem took a devastating hit this week after a pregnant great hammerhead shark was landed and forty-five pups gutted out of it in a Dubai fish market. Despite a shark fishing ban from January to April, endangered shark species are being put at risk by fishers who continue to hunt them down in the United Arab Emirates. The horrific find was recorded by shark researchers monitoring the decline of the species in the region and Thomas Vignaud, working with the Shark Quest project, along with Julia Spaet discovered the forty-five dead pups after an inspection of the female hammerhead.

Shark fishing has skyrocketed in the UAE in recent years and according to figures from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FOA), the gulf state is one of the main Middle East exporters of shark fins to Hong Kong.

Speaking to Gulf News, Jonathon Ali Khan who is an expedition leader for sharks in the region and director of Shark Quest Arabia explained that the importance of the region for the survival of certain shark species needed to be better highlighted so that birthing sharks are protected. “When a slow-reproducing shark is found at the market with 45 pups something needs to be done for the welfare of the species,” he added.

Great hammerhead sharks are an endangered species and the forty-five pups that were found were almost ready to be born. “If even half of these shark pups had survived, it might have made a significant contribution to the survival of this species at least in this region,” Khan told the Gulf News.

It is believed that the shark may have been caught in the waters of Oman and brought to the UAE for sale to make a better profit although it is impossible to tell for sure. In Oman, shark fining at sea is banned and in the UAE shark fining and shark hunting between January to April was banned in 2008. Even so FOA figures show that from 1998 to 2000, around 400-500 tonnes of shark fins were exported from the UAE annually. Latest findings also reveal the growing popularity of shark-hunting as they indicate that the shark catch in the UAE shot up in 2003 to 3,060 tonnes a year.

These statistics are particularly worrying as sharks are extremely sensitive to fishing at they mature quite late and produce few offspring. As such, the death of forty-five great hammerhead pups is a serious blow to their future existence in the Arabia Gulf.

Photo courtesy of Julia Spaet- KAUST PhD student researching shark populations in the Red Sea.

For more on Sharks and the Middle East see:

Kuwaiti Sharks, Ecosystems and Exxon

Shark Attacks Up 25% Worldwide

25 Shark Species In Persian Gulf Need Urgent Protection

The post Dubai Marine Life At Risk After Devastating Shark Catch appeared first on Green Prophet.

Birds accustomed to breeding and rearing their young in healthy wetlands are being pushed out as lakes dry up and agricultural and industrial activity take precedence. And reptiles. And mammals.

Even humans are being displaced as accelerated drought and fire sweep through Israel, rain floods Brisbane, Australia, and snow suffocates the UK and North America. In the last thirty years, 1/3 of all species have already gone extinct. And according to a Professor of Biology Ankara’s Hacettepe University, 70% of Turkey’s birds may be heading down the same devastating path.According to Mr. İlhami Kiziroğlu, who also heads the University’s Environmental Education and Bird Research Center, roughly 502 bird species have been observed in Turkey.

Of those, only 437 are observed regularly, while the others are either migratory species or difficult to spot. Mr. Kiziroğlu estimates that in the past twenty years, many species have lost fifty percent of their populations while others may have lost as much as seventy five percent.

The Oriental Darter that used to breed near Lake Amik in Hatay, which dried up in the 1960s, have not been seen since. They’ve disappeared. While bred in captivity by the Environment and Forestry Ministry, the Bald Ibis has not been seen in Turkey’s wild since 1988, World Bulletin News reports.

The White-headed Duck was displaced by industrial waste near Lake Burdur in the country’s Mediterranean region, and raptor birds, such as the majestic Imperial Eagle, are also at risk.

Migratory, mountain, island, wetland, Arctic, Antarctic and seabirds are expected to suffer most from the effects of climate change, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) since they have a narrow environmental range. Birds that can survive in a variety of conditions will be more resilient as weather patterns continue to alter their habitat.

Birds are not the only species vulnerable to extinction. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced that up to 35% of birds, 52% of amphibians, and 71% of reef-building corals have traits that are likely to make them particularly susceptible to climate change.

Although extinction continues despite expanded protection, species have responded favorably to conservation efforts that now deserve to be redoubled.

:: World Bulletin

More on bird conservation efforts in the Middle East:
Birds Help Jordan, Israel, And Palestine Flock Together
Iran And Qatar Make Bio-lateral Ties For Birds
Dubai Is For The Birds (And The People Who Love Them)

Image via es.treknature

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