We propose a Wildlife Conservation Stamp, comparable to the well-known Duck Stamp, to support the acquisition of habitat and the conservation of all wildlife in the National Wildlife Refuge system with an emphasis on non-game species. A Wildlife Conservation Stamp would allow birders, photographers, hikers, and other people who enjoy wildlife in a non-consumptive way to financially show their support of the National Wildlife Refuge system.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN

Bird watchers are numerous. Duck hunters are required to buy duck stamps before they hunt ducks, but lots of people, including birders and such, buy the stamps because they are pretty and they support habitat conservation. But more birds and conservation oriented people would buy something like a duck stamp but not a duck stamp if it was offered, thus more funds for conservation.

I imagine that the art on a Wildlife conservation Stamp would also be interesting. There would be loons. Trees. Frogs. Other non-duck things. Break the hegemony of the duck! So if you are a wildlife artist you should really want this.

The thing is, landcapes by their nature often bias human understanding, especially forested landscapes. Here is an example. Beyond the fringe of forest flanking a typical road is a lot more marsh and bogland, and for that matter, lake surface, than the average visitor can even see, and thus, more than she or he realizes. Across all of lake country, about 50% of the land is covered with lake surface or some sort of wetland (marshland in forest being the most common) but within lakes country this is unevenly distributed so there is much more than this percentage in some areas. This semi-randomly chosen satellite view of a part of Cass County that I’m pretty familiar with demonstrates this phenomenon nicely:

As you drive along the road shown here, you see woodland on either side. You don’t see the two lakes shown here from any point along the road and you don’t see any of the marsh flanking the river. The road actually follows along the river for about a half hour drive you never see it except at one point where it crosses, but even there the river is not labeled with a sign so it could be easily missed flowing under the small bridge. You see, the roads in northern Minnesota are placed to avoid the marshes and wetlands and, of course, the lakes, and conditions are good for the growth of trees along the roadside. Cabins are placed on high ground (usually), as are boat launches. You can drive up to Lakes Country with your boat in tow, launch it and spend the entire day on a lake, stay at a cabin for a night and go home without ever actually seeing a swamp or marsh up close and with the any wetland that comes within several hundred meters of you almost always screened by trees. If someone asked you how much marsh and how many bogs there are up in Lakes Country, you might quite honestly say “Some, I guess, but it is mostly forest. And, there are nice lakes. I caught a few 5 pound bass on one of those lakes just now!” You might be lying about the fish, but you would be telling what you think is the truth about the landscape. But you would be wrong.

People who either live in the north country or who hunt there may have a much better idea of the landscape, although I must say that hunters also use the roads I mentioned and rarely go that far from them to their blinds, so they may have a biased sense of the extent of wetlands. Of course, anyone who can read a map or interpret a satellite photo, or read a book or a website would know about the extensive wetlands. What I’m talking about here is what a person would come to think if all they did was observe the biased subsample of the world around them.

But knowledge isn’t just about what is there, the facts, the basis statistics, all that. It is also about how things work. For example, cormorants, a large-fish eating bird that literally swims underwater in pursuit of its piscine meals, have been “making a comeback” (meaning there are more and more of them now after an historical decline). There are scientists and wildlife managers who are not too concerned about the occasional cormorant flock nesting up on this or that lake, but the Outstaters who live in Lake Country generally dislike the predatory bird because they eat the fish we humans might otherwise catch. It looks like a simple case of interspecies competition. In such cases, when one of the species is humans, it often leads to emotional resentment and eventual local extinction because we humans tend to act like babies about these things, yet we are heavily armed. The truth is, a fish eating predator that only consumes fish in a narrow and small size range will increase the size of the fish humans catch (because the fish are also competing with each other for resources and space to grow!) so a certain amount of mid-range culling by birds is a good thing.

Also, wolves. Minnesota is the only one of the Lower 48 that has always had a native wolf population, although the Europeans and Euro-Americans that moved into Minnesota in the 19th and early 20th century did their best to exterminate them completely. There are plenty of people here in Minnesota that want to exterminate the wolves today. The wolves are regarded as dangerous because they have lost their “fear of man” and therefore can gobble us up. Plus they eat the deer, which we hunt. So, again, that interspecies competition thing pertains. The fact that more people are attacked by Otters (about once a year) than wolves (basically, never) and that most areas of the state have way too many deer does not seem to play into folk’s opinions about wolves any more than beneficial culling by fish eating birds plays into their attitudes about cormorants.

These are two of a larger set of misconceptions that the people who “should” know better seem to hold. There are other issues, such as management of each of the several invasive plant and animal species, shoreline management, runoff and erosion problems, building construction, land clearance, deer herd management, moose herd management, game birds, raptor conservation, etc., which we could discuss. There is a thread that follows through some of these misconceptions: competition for resources or, in this case, game. That may well be the primary explanation for people who should know better getting it wrong. But, there is another thread which one could argue is about as important; The DNR. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has scientists and managers tasked with managing both the state’s wildlife and the state’s hunting and fishing related resources (these are overlapping but slightly different things). Here is the rule of thumb that seems to apply: If the DNR says something, believe the opposite to be true. The reason I say this is because if you talk to a person who either lives in Lakes Country or spends a lot of time there, and the conversation gets to cormorants or wolves or anything else related to hunting, fishing, wildlife, wetlands, or lakes, you will will hear people tell you that the DNR’s position is X and the Lake Country resident’s position is Y. It is more than a little obvious. The role of the DNR’s understanding of things shapes the opinions of Lake Country denizens much like President Obama’s positions shapes GOP policy. Now, if the DNR came out and said “ok, we were wrong, let’s exterminate the wolves” that would not turn all these folks into tree-hugging wolf lovers, but I am pretty sure they would still find fault with the DNR’s policy, how it is implemented, or their data.

Let me be blunt. It is the case, I think, that the average Minnesotan who lives in or heavily uses the natural resources of the North Country holds a steady and predictable disdain for those very resources, and that is mainly why they don’t like the DNR. Northern Minnesotans want to “enjoy” the natural resources in a Libertarian fashion without interference from the “outside” (the DNR is seen as an outside force), even if they are destroying those resources at the same time. The role of DNR policy in anti-nature attitudes is not to direct people’s opinion, but to give it the specific details helpful to implement it. For example, at the moment, there are posses forming up as we speak to illegally hunt out wolf packs in certain areas where the DNR claims there are only wandering wolves, or at least, that is the stated intention of many. The residents claim that there are active packs living in these areas and the DNR says no, there are not. So, not liking wolves is one thing, but creating a detailed and disdainful program of dislike where you actually pull the trigger and kill something may require some direction and in the absence of knowledge (the average person living or frequently visiting the region can not know the distribution of the wolves or observe the dynamics of the fisheries in the absence of scientific methods and instruments) one can simply watch for direction, bizarro backwards direction, from the DNR. The DNR says there are no packs here, so we will go and find the packs and exterminate them before they exterminate us.

The average person living full or part time up north loves the idea of having a home or cabin on a remote piece of land, enjoys the clarity of the lakes, and in general appreciates the natural setting. But most land owners will only do what is well known as the “right thing” on their property if there is a serious chance of getting caught or if they are tricked into it by some county or state program to “encourage” landowners to wreck the lakes they live on less quickly. I would be very surprised if more than a few percent (to be safe, say, 10%) of the residential cabin or lake home properties in the Lakes Country have zero or near zero violations of code designed to protect the lakes and nearby natural landscape they are on. That is a guess, and I may be very wrong; the biases I suggest that mis-shape people’s understanding of the landscape may well pertain to my understanding of development in the region. Still, I’m sticking to my story as a testable hypothesis.

The human presence in northern Minnesota is ruining the lakes and the landscape, which were previously severely damaged by the unfettered cutting of trees by an out of control lumber industry. (The two largest cities in Minnesota are Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and they sit next to each other in Hennepin and Ramsey counties. Those two counties combined are about 10% larger in land area than all the old growth, unlogged forest in Minnesota combined.) Very few acres of Minnesota is truly “wild” in that it has not been logged over, and the density of development around the thousands of lakes grows unchecked. People are building cabins that require a 100 foot or longer dock across marshland to reach water deep enough to put their noisy gas guzzling speedboat on lakes that are already pretty full of people. The lakes nearest the Twin Cities are, in some cases, continuous manicured lawn with suburban-style homes surrounding an increasingly turgid infilling body of water. The giant white pine, of which virtually none are left, provided along with brick the structure for the late industrial development in the regions’s cities. Urban wealth moved to the suburbs for all the usual reasons, and now two generations later the affluent leftovers of a period of growth and development have returned to take or sully what is left. And sometimes I think I’m the only person who sees this happening.

In other words, many extinction events probably involve plain old bad luck, which happens to come along when a population was already depleted. But, still working backwards, how did the population become so vulnerable by being numerically small to begin with? This is more complicated and it is impossible to generalize. While it is reasonable to assign the final one or two stages of extinction to expected bad luck owing to normal fluctuations in numbers and randomness of events, it is not so easy to list the reasons why a population of some animal would become unsustainably small to begin with. Because there are many.

Famine or pestilence are on the list of possible causes. Invasive species can do significant damage to previously healthy populations causing numbers to decline to the dangerously low level that allows for random bad luck to do them in. Or, there can be an ecological shift owing to the demise of a keystone species. For instance, go back to our faux Yellowstone park. Normally, there would be a healthy population of wolves and a few coyotes straggling around the edges (the latter preferring plains and prairies, the former, woodlands). Where wolves dominate, coyotes are rare, because canids tend to compete through exclusion. I.e., the wolves beat up, kill, chase off the coyotes. But, wolves don’t eat little furry or scurry ground animals like bunnies, lizards, mouse-like creatures and so on. (Well, not often, anyway). So these smaller animals worry about hawks and snakes while the wolves run around above them eating big things like elk and moose and bison.

Now, hunt out the wolves and coyotes come in to take their place. Coyotes, for a period of time, will play the role of small-critter vacuum cleaners. In the absence of wolves, they will scour the landscape of bunnies and lizards, mouse-like creatures and other small things. Locally, these animals would go to very small numbers in some cases. If, previously, habitat loss due to ranching had decimated the numbers of some lagomoroph, like B. bunnii, the coyotes might do them in.

As you might imagine, estimating the expected extinction of species is a difficult process, because so many things are involved. Added to this is the problem that there are certainly many, many species of animals and plants that have not been identified by science, but are going to go extinct for one reason or another. So, the problem of estimating species extinction rates even requires estimating the extinction of species that we don’t even know exist. One way to do that is to go looking for new species under certain conditions, and use the rate at which you find them to estimate how many unknown species there are out there, and use information about known species loss to estimate how many of the estimated unkowns will go extinct. And so on. Rather complicated.

A paper just out in Nature (see reference below) makes the claim that the method of estimating species extinction rate is flawed, and that the actual rate of extinction is considerably less than what we have heard in recent years. However, the paper itself is flawed at two levels, as far as I can see, and checking with colleagues on the blogosphere (see below) I’m pretty sure others people agree with these critiques.

The paper makes the following point: Species extinction rates are estimated by reversing the findings of a widely known method of estimating species discovery … the species-area curve method … and in so doing underestimates the amount of habitat loss required to make a species go extinct.

Species area curves work like this. Let’s say that I want to know how many insects live in the canopy of a large rain forest preserve in the Amazon. One way to do this is to gas (using a harmless sleeping gas, of course) all the insects up in the canopy in 10 hectares so they fall on a big sheet where I can observe them. We then identify and count the number of insects. If the reserve has 10,000 hectares, and I found ten different species in 10 hectares, then there must be 10,000 species there, right?

Well, no, because there will probably be species elsewhere in the forest that I already found. We can’t just multiply the number of species by the number of unsampled units of land! So, let’s try a different estimate: The number of species is 10. I found ten, I assume this bit of forest is just like the rest of the forest, so my work here is done here. There are 10 insect species living in the canopy over this 10,000 hectares.

Well, no, actually, that’s not good enough either. There are likely to be species out there I’ve not found because they weren’t where I was sampling! This is where Species Area Curves come in. I pick a small area, small enough that if I look in one, the number of species will be under-represented, such that if I look in other areas the same size, I’m likely to find more species. As I add units to my study I’m likely to keep finding new species over time. Say I look at 2 hectares and find 5 species. I then lookin 2 more hectares and find a few of the same ones, plus three new ones. And so on. The way a species area curve works is that you accumulate the numbers of species across an accumulating region until you run out of time or mostly stop finding species. So, 2 hectares got me 5, 4 hectares got me 7 (in total), perhaps 6 hectares gets me an accumulated total of 8, 8 hectares gets me (still) 8 because I didn’t find any new ones that time, 10 gets me 9 because I found only one more, and then after that no matter how hard I look I don’t get any new ones. Until, like, a week later after searching the entire forest and I find one more on the last day. Typical.

What is happening is this: As the area over which I search gets larger, I add species, until at some point in time the rate of adding species goes to what seems to be (but almost certainly is not) zero. At this point or some time just before this point, I stop and while I know there must be some species I’ve not found yet, I can estimate how many there will be using the curve. Individual animals (or plants or whatever) are found at a reasonably constant rate (with some variation) but NEW species are found at a diminishing rate. So the curve looks like this, an example from a study of fish:

So the number of species is approximated by using a combination of known and unknown relationships between area and frequency of occurrences of both individuals and categories of individuals. And there’s a whole bunch of math and methodology involved in this approach to counting things in the wild (or in your thought experiments). And, if you want to estimate how many species of animals would go extinct as habitat is destroyed, you could use similar models and math. Think about that. How many species might you wipe out if you destroyed 10 hectares of that Amazonian reserve? Well, it’s not easy to calculate because even though you might impact, say 5 species because a given 10 ha area has about 5 unique species in it (using the data from our thought experiment: In an actual rain forest the number would be much larger) but you can use the logic of more area = more impact along with the data from species-area curve estimates of speciosity to estimate extinction.

The paper in Nature makes the following correct observation (or at least I think it is correct): While we can estimate, extrapolating from a species area curve, how many species there are in a given habitat and region, reversing the numbers underestimates how much habitat would have to be destroyed in order to kill off every individual in a given species. Therefore, the estimate of species extinction based on habitat loss as a direct cause of extinction, using the reverse of a species area curve, gives a pessimistic view of species extinction rates.

This is probably correct, but the overarching point, that we have underestimated the rate at which species are going extinct, is not correct at all, for at least two reasons. First, you don’t need to kill off the last individual to make the species go extinct. All you need to do is to kill off a certain number and the rest will go extinct on their own, most likely. Second, habitat loss is not the only way to make a species go extinct. You know this by now because we discussed above, but let’s hit the horse a few more times for good measure.

Say, for instance, you reduce habitat in our hypothetical wolf-inhabited Yellowstone-like park to the extent that the wolves become so rare that a local outbreak of rabies kills them all off. Notice that they went extinct even though you did not destroy the amount of habitat necessary to make them go extinct as a direct result of habitat loss. Now, coyotes move in and take over what is left of the habitat. As you know, coyotes are small-animal vacuum cleaners (see above) and pretty soon there is no more B. bunnii, and a lot of other small mammals are gone as well. Crashes caused by shifts in keystone species, extinction due to small population size, the effects of disease on populations that had crashed and are coming back but with insufficient genetic variation, and so on and so forth are not considered in the paper.

Here is the abstract of the paper in question:

Extinction from habitat loss is the signature conservation problem of the twenty-first century1. Despite its importance, estimating extinction rates is still highly uncertain because no proven direct methods or reliable data exist for verifying extinctions. The most widely used indirect method is to estimate extinction rates by reversing the species-area accumulation curve, extrapolating backwards to smaller areas to calculate expected species loss. Estimates of extinction rates based on this method are almost always much higher than those actually observed2-5. This discrepancy gave rise to the concept of an ‘extinction debt’, referring to species ‘committed to extinction’ owing to habitat loss and reduced population size but not yet extinct during a non-equilibrium period6,7. Here we show that the extinction debt as currently defined is largely a sampling artefact due to an unrecognized difference between the underlying sampling problems when constructing a species-area relationship (SAR) and when extrapolating species extinction from habitat loss. The key mathematical result is that the area required to remove the last individual of a species (extinction) is larger, almost always much larger, than the sample area needed to encounter the first individual of a species, irrespective of species distribution and spatial scale. We illustrate these results with data from a global network of large, mapped forest plots and ranges of passerine bird species in the continental USA; and we show that overestimation can be greater than 160%. Although we conclude that extinctions caused by habitat loss require greater loss of habitat than previously thought, our results must not lead to complacency about extinction due to habitat loss, which is a real and growing threat.

Stuart Pimm, blogging at National Geographic, notes:

The paper’s title was emphatic enough: “species-area relationships always overestimate extinction rates.” With modesty, they told the media that it had taken eight years of hard work to come to that stunning conclusion. It took me eight seconds to know the paper was a sham — and I am slow reader.

Stuart uses the example of a forest near his home near Washington D.C. that includes many bird species. He asks what would happen if every forest in the east but this one was wiped out overnight … how many of these species would be extinct? The answer is, obviously, none of them, because they are all in the one remaining patch of forest. But, this is …

…not the relevant answer…

How many species would eventually become extinct? The answer is very much higher. The populations of the species that survived the initial deforestation elsewhere would eventually die out.

…

One pair of (say) pileated woodpeckers or great-horned owls may have plenty of food in the Park. But, if one pair produces just one pair of young that survive to adulthood then you don’t need elegant mathematics to work out the answer. There’s a 50-50 chance that both those young will be the same sex — both female or both male.

Even if they are different sexes, they will be brother and sister.

Simply, small populations suffer from the vagaries of sex and death and, on top of that inbreeding, that doom them in the long term.

Sheril Kirshenbaum also discusses the story, and both she and Stuart (oh, and me too) are concerned that this paper, which may or may not have an interesting result regarding the statistics of one part of the process of understanding species-count dynamics, will be interpreted as saying what it can’t say: That the problem of species extinction is not as big as we thought. In fact, the paper does say that, but on further prodding from colleagues, one of the main authors backs off that position. Stuart Pimm reports …

In writing to me about the fuss his paper had caused, author Fangliang He, an ecologist at Sun Yat-sen University in China, said:

“I have followed up some of the media and felt there is a danger of misinterpreting our work, which I would like to clarify here. … All we have said is that the backward SAR is flawed and overestimates extinction rates, not anything more than that.”

Well, of course, that wasn’t what the paper said and it wasn’t what the authors said to the media. If the paper had had “backward SAR” in the title, the media wouldn’t have commented. And one wonders whether Nature would have published it.

So, it is an interesting statistical study that will have he effect of clouding public and policy-maker understanding of science, not so much because of the study (though there is that too) but because of how it has been marketed and how it is being hawked by the science press. SNAFU.

ADDED: Here’s a nice new blog post on the topic: Species-area relationships don’t overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss

He, F., & Hubbell, S. (2011). Species-area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss Nature, 473 (7347), 368-371 DOI: 10.1038/nature09985

Check this out:

Exelon, a nuclear giant that recently backed away from building new nuclear plants, is moving into wind.

The inside story on giant sharks at Tetrapod Zoology.

And if not, and if this keeps going for, say, a total of one year, this is what we can expect:

That animation is from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

The possible spread of the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig over the course of one year was studied in a series of computer simulations by a team of researchers from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Eight million buoyant particles were released continuously from April 20 to September 17, 2010, at the location of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The release occurred in ocean flow data from simulations conducted with the high-resolution Ocean General Circulation Model for the Earth Simulator (OFES). “The paths of the particles were calculated in 8 typical OFES years over 360 days from the beginning of the spill,” says Fabian Schloesser, a PhD student from the Department of Oceanography in SOEST, who worked on these simulations with Axel Timmermann and Oliver Elison Timm from the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), also in SOEST. “From these 8 typical years, 5 were selected to create an animation for which the calculated extent of the spill best matches current observational estimates.”

Read the rest here.

Oh.

Hey, what do you say, the next person who says “environmentalists have always made these extreme predictions and they never come true” gets a boot. Somewhere. Somewhere deep.

The dozens of dolphins and the sperm whale trapped in the oil, dead or near death, start at around 6:20.

The end is a little strange.

I think it’s funny that I enraged people with my comments on Florida being full of stupid people the other day. And I explained why I said those things (click here), but none of you managed to click on the link (click here) to understand the bigger picture. Apparently, you are even less smart than I was giving you credit for. (click here)

At this point, I should probably point out the obvious because it may … well, it may not be obvious to you.

You live in low lying country. Sea level rise is far more of a threat to all of you than to any of us. One of your main industries is tourism, and your tax base is increasingly based on retiree movements. Both of these are related to there being a good environment that is protected and secure.

So, and this is especially for you, Floridians, the anti-global warming environmental candidate runs for office, and instead of voting for him, you vote for the oilman Bush.

Yes, yes, yes, I heard you when you whined that fifty percent of Floridians voted for Bush. Sorry, but the fact is, plain and simple, IT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN THAT CLOSE!!!! Low lying land reliant on a clean environment. Gore should have won by a landslide.

Anyway, the latest news is infuriating and proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the voting populous of the Gulf States put together would not be able to think their way out of a paper bag.

All of the gulf states have been provided with large numbers of national guard troops to help in the cleanup.

All of the gulf states have, apparently, decided to interfere with the cleanup for political reasons and not accept this important help.

Which. Is. Being. Paid. For. By. BP.

Hey, it is not just your gulf. Stop fucking with it. Make your lame governors govern. And, next election, throw them out. Grow balls. Grow brains. Take your minds off your guns and your gods and your cheap-ass beer and start being real citizens. The rest of the country wants its shrimp and you are ruining it for everybody.

Morans…

Oh, the story is here. Read it, and weep. Because this really should make you cry.

Did you ever wonder what those bumps and nodules growing on the leaves are? Some trees or bushes have them here and there, others seem to have them on every leaf. Those trees have gall: Well, gall-eeee!! (brought to you by The Little House in the Not-So-Big Woods blog.

My parents retired to Las Vegas several years ago, and my sister who lives out west has a place there as well. So I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the vicinity and a good part of that in the Mohave Desert or other wild habitats within driving distance (There are some good mountains, and Death Vally isn’t really that far away). Anyway, The Watcher of Salt Lake City and the Watching the World Wake Up blog apparently had a similar idea, and here chronicles a number of aspects of a trip to Vegas, as it were: Vegas Boondoggle Part 1: Daggers & Moths This post is loaded with videos and some great pictures of some interesting plants, focusing on Spanish Dagger (Yucca schidegera).

The Watcher also has an interesting post on Peas, Palms Pines and Dorks in Mexico, and a trip to an acid swamp. Also, this item: City Creek Part 3: Rocks, Global Warming, and Pooping in Wells

How, when, and in what form did terrestrial plants evolve? In other words (dare I say it?) What are the “links” from sqishy water algae plant-things to the first land plants, to the first land vascular plants, and eventually to the first plants with plant naughty bits (seeds and pollen)? Suite101.com: Sequence of Terrestrial Plant Evolution.

Woodwardia fimbriata is the Giant Chain Fern, and it truly is giant. “Apparently its fronds have been known to reach 8 feet in length (!). This species is native to the west coast and up into Canada…” and you can read all about it and see some amazing photographs of it at the No seeds, no fruits, no flowers: no problem blog, which focuses on ferns: Woodwardia fimbriata

Beetle’s in the Bush’s Friday Flower is the Red Buckeye:

Red buckeye is native to the southeastern U.S., just reaching Missouri in the southeastern Ozarks (though cultivated further north). This makes it less well-known than the more widely distributed Ohio buckeye…

Read about the Red Buckey here!

Grrrl Scientist has a great shot of Purppura Päivänkakkaraa here, and along with it an interesting linguistic side story. Grrl also has this post with a stunning closeup of a pink ranunculus.

What is the actual range of Claytonia caroliniana? JSK of Anybody seen my focus? blog has evidence to suggest it is a little farther south than previously suspected. Have a look at Carolina Springbeauty (Claytonia caroliniana)? for detailed descriptions and links to background resources. Let’s see if the blogosphere can come up to the plate and answer this question.

I grew up in Albany, NY, which was famous for it’s Tulip Festival and the diversity of trees in its main park (Washington Park). The mayor in those days liked trees, so there were trees. And naturally, given the whole tulip thing, many of those trees were “tulip trees.” On which, by the way, tulips do not grow. Anywqay, A Digital Botanic Gardin blog has a post with amazing photos: Tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera

Check this out:

At night, when the ram was roasted, a major carousing began. One of the men in the caravan, who usually kept somewhat apart from the rest of the members, became especially violent. He decided to untie the hobbles of the mules and allow them to run free. Attempts to persuade him to stop were to no avail. A scuffle began, which continued into the night. The uproar threatened to disrupt the entire caravan.

What happened next? Well, they settled down for some coffee, according to vaviblog: Give ’em wild coffee, that’ll sober ’em up

The one phrase parents live in dread of hearing from their child, but eventually always do, is: “Daddy, where do mangoes come from?” For help in answering this question, visit Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog blog and read The birthplace of the Dashehari mango. I was surprised. What is even more surprising, from the same blog, is this: The Three-hundred-variety mango of Malihabad.

Foothills Fancies blog has some great photographs of spring: The Green Scene, and a Spring Surprise.

My own contribution to this month’s summary of plant blogging is a set of photos of various plants and plant parts mainly from southern and East Africa (with a few animals thrown in) accumulated under the archive category “Random Photograph“.

As you may have guessed, you have just finished reading the 28th edition of the Berry Go Round web carnival. If you have an interest in nature blogging, science blogging, plants, or anything related, please support blogging in these areas by actually clicking through to the posts linked to above. All of them if you can. If not, please at least visit a selection of them.

In fact, you can think of this as a sort of r-strategy vs. K-strategy decision. Click on each link and glance at each page (r-srategy). Or, click on a hand full of them, read the posts carefully and leave a thoughtful comment there. Or a mixed strategy: Click through to half of them and leave a short comment like “great post” or “sucky post” or whatever.

The reason I’m asking you to pay special attention to the carnival is that we (the people who usually write this carnival and/or contribute to it) have been discussing the value of this sort of enterprise.

In my opinion, carnivals are useful but underused. Teachers should be telling their students about appropriate carnivals when asked general questions about some topic or another. If you read blogs and have a friend or relative of like interests who does not, sending a link for a recent carnival to that person is a great way to introduce her or him to the part of the blogsphere of interest.

And, if you are engaged in social networking in any way (Facebook, Twitter, Whatever) please send this carnival out on that network, and at least a selection of the blogs linked herein.

And, of course, if you are listed in this carnival, please put up a blog post pointing your readers to it, and share the carnival on Facebook Twitter, iWhatever.

The home page of the Berry Go Round web carnival is here.

The most recent edition prior to this one was at A Neotropical Savanna.

The next edition (late June, 2010) of the carnival will be held at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

You may now submit your favorite plant post to a Berry Go Round carnival by sending the post’s URL directly to berrygoround@gmail.com. Or, you may add a link to the diigo Berry Go Round group. Of course, you may also continue using the automatic Blog Carnival submission form.

Your submissions are welcome, no matter how you get it to us. If you would like to host a BGR carnival, let us know at the BGR email address: berrygoround@gmail.com.

There is now an effort to have the Saba Bank designated as an internationally recognized sensitive area, but one thing standing it the way of this effort is a lack of scientific knowledge of the region.

Open Access Publishing to the rescue!

PLoS ONE Launches the Biodiversity of Saba Bank Collection

Researchers from Conservation International and its partners have completed a collection of rapid assessment biodiversity surveys of the Saba Bank. The Biodiversity of Saba Bank collection, which publishes in PLoS ONE on May 21st, represents the first ever peer-reviewed open access cross-taxonomy collection of Conservation International’s Marine Rapid Assessment Program (RAP).

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The rapid assessment biodiversity research included in the PLoS ONE Biodiversity of Saba Bank collection provides critical information on the highly diverse benthic communities and reef fish that inhabit the Saba Bank. The results of Conservation International’s innovative Marine Rapid Assessment Program (Marine RAP) included several species potentially new to science that were collected from one of the largest coral reefs in the Caribbean.

The collection includes six research articles written by collaborators from Conservation International’s Science and Knowledge Division, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Department of Environment & Nature of the Netherlands Antilles, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and University of Alabama among others.

The release of the PLOS ONE Biodiversity of Saba Bank collection comes on the eve of The International Day for Biological Diversity (IDB) on May 22, proclaimed by the United Nations to increase understanding and awareness of biodiversity issues.

source: PLOS press release.

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