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The Small African Fellowship for Conservation in Kenya needs a helping hand

Africa, Conservation

Sometimes something worthwhile doesn't have to cost millions. When blogger and avid twitcher Charlie posted some photos of an endangered Kenyan bird (Sharpe's Longclaw) he was contacted by Nature Kenya, a BirdLife International partner. After some emailing back and forth it was decided to raise money for a local conservation programme aiming to conduct surveys to find suitable longclaw habitat, and take an education/awareness programme about the longclaw and the need to conserve its habitat to local schools.

Dominic Kamau Kimani, the field assistant on the receiving end of the donations, has drafted an education proposal and -together with other volunteers- will perform large parts of the surveys.

Money! This is where we come in. Even with dedicated people like Dominic one still needs money to run the programme in a country as large as Kenya. Fortunately it seems that an American Dollar goes a long way in Kenya. A couple of thousand dollars is all that's needed to lift this programme of the ground and help not only the endangered Sharpe's Longclaw but also have a direct impact on the life of a fellow conservationalist / scientist / nature lover, researcher or treehugger (select what applies to you).

Over at the 10.000 Birds website an extensive page has been created describing the goals, methods and needs of Small African Fellowship for Conservation project. Their current goal is 2000 dollar. And yes that still is a fair bit of money, but if you split it over 400 people it's only five dollar each; barely noticeable and all goes to the project. Donate one dollar or a hundred, every bit helps and every donation is appreciated.

Africa!

Africa

Africa is an interesting place.. it must be, it's the second largest continent on the world, populated by a billion humans, and surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and finally the Atlantic Ocean. And it includes Madagascar, they got Coelacanths!

Over the next couple of months I will try to sneak in as much posts about this large and diverse continent as I can. They'll be labelled under Africa.

Note: The closest the author of this blog has ever been to the African continent was the archipelago of Malta (on the edge of the African tectonic plate, yay!). Anyone in need of a Livingstone? :D

Difficulties with the RSS feed

Sitenews

Public Service Announcement

One of you reader-peeps wrote (thanks!) to tell that whenever an article is edited (updated) after its first creation the publication date & time in the RSS feed will change as well. The date & time below the article do not change. As this apparently causes problems (disappearing feed, showing all items as unread) with some feed readers I'll see if I can fix this.

Mind the gap ... mind the gap ... mind the gap

This concludes the Public Service Announcement

Our Brave New Oceans and the Rise of Slime

Conservation

Jeremy B. C. Jackson's paper 'Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean' just made me sad. I'm afraid it will do the same to you. To guarantee this I'm including Table 1 ('percent decline (biomass, catch, percent cover) for fauna and flora from various marine environments.') in this post.

Clearly the table just nails it. The full article, however, is very informative. The US National Academy of Sciences has a PDF version available online.

Scripps News has a press release. ''The purpose of the talk and the paper is to make clear just how dire the situation is and how rapidly things are getting worse," said Jackson. "It's a lot like the issue of climate change that we had ignored for so long. If anything, the situation in the oceans could be worse because we are so close to the precipice in many ways."

Even if you're not the preacher type of person this might be the one piece of info to spread to your extended family, policy makers and friends.

If only MacGyver was into tofu and beans

Conservation, Fisheries, Marine Reserves

With a string of fishing line, an anchor, two trawl beams and a flounder sized cod-end our interpret hero would only need 25 minutes to construct one hell of a marine reserve. The sea critters would be in there, the fishing non-violent, and all would be fine.

Unfortunately we have to make do with the lesser -and unlikely if you just look at the name- heroes of the United States Department of Commerce. But boy! Did they come up with a great name for their reserve! To top it the managers of Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (seriously, awesome! this beats any Welsh train station) are using all the proper buzz words. There's for example ecosystem approach to management and effective regulatory framework, but also response and restoration and, well, many more. Ocean Conservation 2.0 for sure. Did I mention it's the "single largest conservation area under US flag"?

All might be lost without a real life MacGyver

Planktos Science tossing plankton about (senselessly)

Climate, Energy

Our favourite ocean / world saving investment opportunity saviour has been born again! Planktos, which was discussed before, has rechristened itself as Planktos Science. Way better of course, as now it really relays the joke to us.. it's a joke right? Please?

Russ George, founder as well as president of Planktos Science (-International?) deemed me worthy of a spam mail. Thanks Russ! Unfortunately Russ seems to be as shoddy a writer as myself (as CEO of Planktos Science International he should get himself a copywriter), and therefore I won't bother you with the complete letter. Instead some excerpts to give an idea:

• 
  If you are a religious person you might liken what we need to do as seeking absolution for our sins of emission by our acts of contrition and ecorestoration, otherwise the path to perdition is that of dissolution of those sins into dying oceans.
• 
  So as our reef beauties cry out and dissolve like Dorothy's wicked witch in our acidifying oceans, the acidification will certainly continue for at least another century unabated even if we never emit another molecule of fossil CO2 into the air. At the same time as the oceans suffer this chemical shock treatment, like those we give our swimming pools, they will continue as well to lose their photosynthetic capacity to counter this onslaught.
• 
  So where is there a source of emission free terrawatts of curative power we can devote to saving the oceans and help restore the balance of Nature? It is of course ONLY available from photosynthesis and therein lies the course we must chart to restore our oceans as we must surely not simply imagine the damage we've prescribed can simply be ignored and start from the present mortally wounded state. No mere conservation ethic or effort will suffice, we are far to far over the tipping point for that to work.

Eat your heart out Charles Dickens!

(Jenna seems to have a nice time though.)

Mapping extinct marine animals

Weird and Funny

I'm putting together a Google Earth layer of marine animals gone extinct.

As of now I've set up the basic thing and added seven thirteen (yes I made an update) animals (Steller's Sea Cow, Great Auk, Caribbean Monk Seal, Japanese Sea Lion, Labrador Duck, Tasman Booby, Yangtze River Dolphin, Pallas's Cormorant, Guadalupe Storm-petrel, Small St Helena Petrel, Eelgrass limpet, New Zealand grayling, and the large St Helena Petrel). Feel free to have a look. Google Earth will automatically load the latest version if you go to Extinct_Marine_Animals.kmz.

Some of the ones still to add are the St. Helena Petrel (two species apparently), Pallas's Cormorant and the Guadalupe Storm-petrel. The layer includes all extinct species mentioned in the IUCN Red List. I'm sure there's more to find though. Some fish maybe?

So. I'm calling on you dear reader: Extinct animals please! Extinction between 1900 and now would be grand,.. for doability sake let's say from 1500 till today. The idea is not to get a huge list but rather to get a list of interesting animals; if we already have 21324234 species of seal the next one is not that interesting, but a Cladocera (water flea) gone the way of the dodo by human causes certainly is. Ideally we end up end with something people can toy around with & accidentally learn some interesting facts from.

(ps. I first filed this under "conservation" but removed that tag as apart from dusting the occasional stuffed specimen there isn't much to conserve here)

Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki

Law and Legislation

The second post today. Just want to point your attention to the plight of Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki. These two Japanese men are being held without charge by the Japanese government. The full story can be found elsewhere, but basically they made the mistake of exposing clear evidence of wide-scale corruption at the heart of the Japanese Southern Ocean "scientific whaling programme".

Instead of going for the real culprits the public prosecutor decided to publicly criminalize the messengers. A very unwelcome & nasty thing to do in a democracy.

EU to actively ban IUU vessels

Fisheries, Law and Legislation

An interesting article appeared on the overfishing.org news aggregator. It discusses how Tuesday European Union ministers agreed to tighten inspections on illegal fishing in EU waters and impose "stiff" fines on lawbreakers. Starting in 2010 EU vessels or any non-EU vessel (third countries) trying to land a catch at an EU port will be hit with a maximum fine of five times the market value of the catch. For a repeat offence, that fine is set at eight times the value. This is irrespective of where they carry out their fishing.

It's to be seen if this works as a deterrent. The fines are not that high while potential profits are sky-high. More effort put into regulating and inspections never hurts though. But I hope it won't become a "bluewash" excuse for not putting in place better management systems and quotas based on scientific recommendations.

The Reuters article can be found on theInternational Herald Tribune website.

Two simple graphs featuring blue marbles

Marine Reserves, Sustainability

Here are two graphs I put together in early 2007. Not much has changed.

Percentage of the world's oceans designated as a protected area of some sort. Included are Marine Protected Areas and Marine Reserves (see definition in graph).

Population growth and the number of square kilometres of ocean available to every individual on Earth.

Info from both graphs should be taken as an indicator (especially the first graph) and should, of course, be used in proper context... Posted per request by the lovely Dalia, hope they're useful :)