By Dawn Stover

January-March 2009 / Vol. 10 No. 1

Read the article>>

Discussion Questions

1.    Define the term soundscape. What is the soundscape of your classroom? Your home? The “ecosystem” in which you live?
2.    What background noise do you hear when people are not talking or otherwise making noise in your classroom? What non-human natural sounds do you hear? What non-human species might be affected by the human-induced noise in these areas?
3.    What is an acoustical niche? How might a better understanding of this concept affect our everyday actions?
4.    In this article, researchers hypothesize that human-induced noise may affect evolution, specifically in driving the evolution of new sub-species of birds. If some species can adapt to noises in this way, might human-induced noise be a good thing by increasing the amount of biodiversity on earth?
5.    Define “biophony” and “anthrophony.” Are there fundamental differences between them and, if so, what are these differences?

Websites for Further Information

•    Cornell Lab of Ornithology Bioacoustic Research Program

•    Right Whale Listening Network

•    Wild Sanctuary Archive of Natural Sound

•    US National Park Service natural soundscape program

Bioacoustics in the News

•    A Listening Party for Nature (Wired, September 11, 2008)

•    Radio program “Pulse of the Planet” (updated regularly)

Peer-reviewed Literature (in addition to the citations listed in the article)

•    Schaub, A., J. Ostwald, and B.M. Siemers. 2008.  Foraging bats avoid noise. Journal of Experimental Biology 211(19): 3174-3180.

•    Smith, T.B., and L.S. Bernatchez.  2008. Evolutionary change in human-altered environments. Molecular Ecology 17(1): 1-8.

•    Warren, P.S., M. Katti, M. Ermann, and A. Brazel. 2006. Urban bioacoustics: it’s not just noise. Animal Behaviour  71: 491-502.

Key Concepts

•    Urban soundscapes
•    Acoustical niche
•    Bioacoustics

By Tali Woodward

January-March 2009 / Vol. 10 No. 1

Read the article>>

Discussion Questions

1.    According to Oliver Pergams, how might economic growth have been miscast as a panacea?  What might be misleading about simply characterizing economic growth as “good” or “bad”?  What are some of the possible consequences of thinking about economic growth as being equivalent to economic health?
2.    What does the Kuznets Curve predict? What do the data actually show about the relationship between per capita Gross National Product (GNP) and species endangerment?  What does this suggest about the possible relationship between models and reality?
3.    What is the goal of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI)? What goes into its calculation? From its description in the article, can you identify any assumptions that it makes? How might the calculation (and reporting) of an EPI stimulate conservation action?
4.    What is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? How does the Genuine Progress Indicator relate to GDP?  How does the concept of “inclusive wealth” differ from GDP?  How can the measurement of inclusive wealth be used to assess sustainability?
5.    Why did China and the World Bank “give up” on valuing nature? Do you think that those were appropriate or defensible responses?

Websites for Further Information

•    Environmental Performance Index
•    Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare
•    Genuine Progress Indicator
•    Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

Environmental Economics in the News

•    Russia and China blame capitalists (New York Times, January 28, 2009)
•    Chinese premier injects note of optimism at Davos (New York Times, January 29, 2009)
•    World Bank still not lending with environment (and disasters) in mind (New York Times, July 22, 2008)

Key Concepts

•    Environmental economics
•    Environmental health
•    Environmental attitude
•    Gross Domestic Product
•    Gross National Product
•    Economic growth
•    Economic health
•    Environmental Performance Index

By John Weier

January-March 2009 / Vol. 10 No. 1

Read the article>>

Discussion Questions

1. Why are old growth forests so important for understanding the services provided by fungi? Why does Paul Stamets say “We can make the argument that we should save old growth forests as a matter of national defense”? What diseases might mushrooms like Agarikons help to prevent?

2. What ecological processes do fungi engage in that make them a good candidate for use in consuming toxic waste such as petroleum spills? What do you think soils would be like without fungi? What policy barriers are there to “mycorestoration”? Do you think it would be a good idea for the government to give it a new try? Why or why not?

3. The article portrays Paul Stamets as a contrarian, a private entrepreneur, an inventor, and a scientist of sorts. Why all of these characterizations? What makes Stamets different from an academic or government scientist? Why was this article written? What is the role of privately funded research in conservation?

4. How did Stamets use the sensory limitations of ants to design a fungal system to control ants? What did the Texas A&M professor point out as weaknesses of Stamets’ approach? What kind of research would you design to address Dr. Gold’s concerns?

5. What is the “life box”? How do fungal mycelia fit into the plan to mitigate climate change using these cardboard panels? Would you plant one? Are there any risks to spreading these seeds and spores around that you might envision?

6. Do you know of any visionaries, similar to Stamets, who have changed the course of society? What motivates or influences visionaries? What makes them successful? What role has science played in Stamets’ vision?

Websites for Further Information

• Fungi.com – the website for Paul Stamets’ business Fungi Perfecti LLC including mushroom kits, plug spawn and other intriguing products
• Urban Entomology – website of university professor Roger Gold

Fungi in the News

• How mushrooms will save the world (Salon.com, November 25, 2002)
• Fungus lessens serious grapefruit-drug reaction (ScienceDaily, February 5, 2009)
• Out on a limb: Global warming may be killing old-growth forests (Scientific American, January 22, 2009)

Peer-reviewed Literature (in addition to the citations listed in the article)

• Maser, C., J.M. Trappe, and R.A. Nussbaum. 1978. Fungal-small mammal interrelationships with emphasis on Oregon coniferous forests. Ecology 59: 799-809.
• Komonen, A., R. Penttila, M. Lindgren, and I. Hanski. 2000. Forest fragementation truncates a food chain based on an old-growth forest bracket fungus. Oikos 90: 119-126.

Key Concepts

• Fungal-soil relationships
• Bioremediation of toxic spills
• Privately-funded research

Click here to read John Weier’s feature story on Paul Stamets.

Click here to read more about The Atlas of the Real World, published by Thames & Hudson

The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live

By Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman, and Anna Barford

Thames & Hudson, 2008

Open The Atlas of the Real World and you’ll find pages and pages of maps that look like reflections from clown mirrors. On one page, Africa fills up half of the flattened globe; on another, the entire continent nearly disappears. Using principles from physics, the authors run raw data through a computer program to create cartograms in which the size of a landmass is proportional to any given variable, from forest growth and loss to meat exports to the gender balance among illiterate adults. The result is both aesthetic and informative. Click here to see a slide show of maps from The Atlas of the Real World

The Elephant’s Secret Sense: The Hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa

By Caitlin O’Connell

University of Chicago Press, 2008

The Elephant’s Secret Sense brings together the scientific, the personal, and the political into one elegant narrative. Caitlin O’Connell, assistant professor at Stanford University, details her years studying elephants in southern Africa and her eventual discovery of a unique form of communication used by the giant mammals: seismic listening. Elephants use their feet to “hear” vibrations traveling through the ground. Scenes from the African wilderness are interspersed with accounts of the conflict between elephants and humans throughout Africa. ❧

Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World

By Amy Seidl
Beacon Press, 2008

Part nature journal, part personal narrative, Amy Seidl’s Early Spring documents the changes in climate—both those observed and those predicted to come—altering life in a small Vermont community. As the weather warms, it’s becoming more and more difficult to predict when the sugar maple harvest will occur. And longtime New England traditions, like ice fishing and pond hockey, may be gone forever. ❧

Becoming Good Ancestors: How We Balance Nature, Community, and Technology

By David Ehrenfeld

Oxford University Press, 2009

In a collection of essays on topics from genetic engineering to standardized testing, David Ehrenfeld takes a hard look at how quality of life in America has deteriorated along with our environment. If we want a future brighter both for us and the earth, Ehrenfeld believes we must turn away from rampant materialism and the pseudocommunities of the Internet and start strengthening our relationships with each other and with nature. The writing is sometimes cantankerous, often contemplative, and always entertaining. ❧

- Reviews by Judy Wexler

The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World

By Joel Berger

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Review by Florence Williams

It’s been said that some scientists unconsciously take on the characteristics of the wildlife they study. I know a grizzly biologist who lumbers through the woods, picking edible berries with his lips.

I don’t know whether Joel Berger acts like a carnivore, but his unconventional field tactics include mimicking the scents and sounds of wild animals. A former high-school baseball player, he “pitches” snowballs scented with predators’ urine at caribou, moose, and bison. He has also been known to don a Hollywood-designed moose suit in the name of science.

In The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World, Berger mixes field-experiment anecdotes from 15 years of globetrotting with musings on the predator-prey dynamic and the future of conservation. His central mission is to examine how the loss of predators from certain ecosystems changes their prey’s behavior. Do the animals forget fear? If so, can their descendants recover fear (or, at least, appropriate fight-or-flee responses) if the predators eventually get reintroduced?

Berger, a University of Montana professor who advocates returning wolves and other Pleistocene-era creatures to parts of North America, is bold in his opinions but more cautious when it comes to explaining how the world got to be the way it is. When Neolithic humans, the most powerful predators of recent times, crossed the land bridge to North America, did they cause the mass extinctions of clueless New World mammals in what some theorists call the Pleistocene blitzkrieg? Berger doesn’t know, but he thinks it entirely plausible. Unlike their African cohorts, which co-evolved with human hunters and developed strategies to survive, the mammals of the Americas were “draped in innocence” when humans arrived.

So were the mammals of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem when wolves returned; Berger recounts watching two unsuspecting elk get ambushed. Was this a sign that elk and moose populations would be decimated because they had forgotten their fear of the big dogs with the sharp teeth? Or did the fact that their recent ancestors knew wolves mean they could quickly adapt?

Berger knows as well as anyone else the current dynamic between Yellowstone wolves, moose and elk. He’s had the distinct privilege of studying the moose before, during, and after the historic reintroduction of wolves. His fascination is infectious. Before wolves arrived in the Tetons in1997, Berger learned the moose did not react—fearfully or otherwise—when he exposed them to wolf scents and recorded howls. But rather than thinking the “predator-naïve” moose would be wiped out, Berger predicted the wolves would prefer the easier and more numerous elk. He was right. But he also wanted to understand how moose and other prey animals might grow savvy over time. Was a “culture” of learning passed between generations? And if so, how long would this process take? The question has implications for scores of reintroduction efforts across the globe, including those of otters, lynx, grizzlies, and lions. We are no longer just the most effective predators around; we are now the architects of ecosystems, trying to rehabilitate at least some of them.

Questions, though, are easier to ask than they are to answer. At times, this read is unsatisfying on both an academic and a personal level. Berger wants to let us in on snippets of his own life, but he never fully delivers. A new wife shows up; we’re never told what happened to the old one. But in the field, Berger proves an engaging guide, taking readers on a tour of how he learned that moose mothers in the Tetons teach their offspring what to fear. Relearning fear in populations that once knew predators, he says, can occur “within a single generation,” helping them stay viable in the face of reintroductions.

Of course, we also need to understand the cascade of effects that follows when large carnivores are permanently removed from landscapes, a much more common scenario. Berger argues that the fear sparked by predators is essential to a pure and healthy world, and he has spearheaded efforts to establish wildlife corridors that keep predator populations healthy. “[W]hen our hearts no longer quicken for fear of a wild animal, and when all that is left behind are the haunting memories of a distant but more glorious past,” he writes, “we will all be poorer.” ❧

To feed, humpback whales round up prey into nets of bubbles, then blast through the trapped swarm, mouths agape, to catch the feast. Believing bumps on the humpbacks’ flippers aid the underwater maneuver, scientists, in an unlikely twist, are now mimicking the design for a next-generation wind turbine.

The connection between whales and wind was made by Frank E. Fish, a biologist at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and cofounder of a new company called WhalePower. Intrigued by the bumps on humpback flippers, Fish placed similar protrusions on a plastic blade. By testing the design in a wind tunnel, Fish discovered that the bumps control the flow of water around the flipper, preventing whales from stalling during precise maneuvers.

Fish’s research also showed that the bumps, called tubercles, have the same effect on windmills. Tubercle-lined windmill blades can tilt at a much steeper angle before stalling, allowing the blades to harvest more power from the wind. Preliminary tests show the tubercles boost the power output of small windmills by a whopping 20 percent.

Blades for low-watt windmills could hit the market soon, but Fish says it could take years to perfect a design for the larger turbines used on wind farms. ❧

—John Roach

Inspired by plankton, researchers from the University of Genoa, Italy, are developing tiny robots that drift through the ocean and collect data along the way. Dubbed “smart plankton,” the gadgets would keep track of everything from temperature to pollution; thanks to an ingenious design that harvests power from the ocean, they could provide a high-efficiency alternative to current sensors.

Many of today’s underwater monitoring systems are either anchored in a single location or rely on expensive underwater vehicles. In contrast, the faux plankton are meant to be dropped into the ocean and then dispersed by the waves and current, allowing them to cover large areas of open water. And while current systems rely on batteries that can be difficult to replace or recharge, the plankton would be equipped with small flags that generate power as they are agitated by the water. What’s more, the devices could be released in swarms, forming a wireless network that transmits data back to a central buoy.

Davide Brizzolara, a doctoral candidate on the development team, believes the devices could give researchers a valuable new tool to monitor climate change or pollution spills. And if you’re worried that hungry fish might end up with a gut full of robots, Brizzolara’s team has a solution for that, too: they’ll deter predators by coloring the gadgets like poisonous plankton.  ❧

—Rachel Tompa

As sea temperatures rise, the abnormally warm water kills off colorful algae that help coral survive—a process known as coral bleaching. Kithil believes his pumps could prevent this by cooling the water surrounding reefs. The pumps themselves are surprisingly low-tech: a single pump consists of a long, plastic tube positioned vertically in the ocean, then held in place by a weight at the bottom and a buoy at the top. As the buoy bobs in the waves, the entire apparatus rises and falls, forcing cool, deep water up the tube and onto the surface.

Tests have shown that one pump can reduce surface temperatures by as much as four degrees Celsius. But that result covered only a small area; to see whether the method works on a larger scale, Kithil’s company, Atmocean Inc., will arrange several pumps around a test reef this summer. If effective, the system could be deployed as soon as Kithil finds investors to cover the cost.

At thousands of dollars per pump, the cost could be hefty, but Kithil says it might not be such a hard sell. That’s because the water pumped to the surface is not only cool, it’s rich in nutrients. This triggers plankton blooms that in turn absorb CO2. Kithil believes this will generate carbon offsets that can be sold on the open market, creating revenue, saving reefs, and delivering proof-of-concept for Kithil’s larger scheme: a rapid-response system that could drop swarms of pumps in hurricanes’ paths. ❧

­

—Justin Matlick

It takes plenty of water to farm fish, and West Virginia aquaculturists have tapped into an unlikely source: abandoned coal mines. But if the thought of eating food grown in mine runoff makes you queasy, consider that the water is perfectly clean and that fish raised in it are safe to eat.

Mining leaves behind a vast honeycomb of caverns and shafts, and those spaces fill with rainwater and snowmelt once the mine shuts down. While some of that water is polluted and must be treated, testing has shown that water from mines in southern West Virginia is as clean as can be—and just the right temperature for salmon and trout.

To capitalize on this surprising resource, half a dozen fish-farming facilities have sprouted up near abandoned mines, using the runoff to fill tanks and ponds where fish are raised. Together, the farms have the capacity to produce 1 million pounds of fish each year. Some of those become stock for recreational fishing, while others are meant for restaurants and grocery stores. West Virginia Salmon and Trout, for instance, is raising its first batch of “eco-trout”—fish farmed without growth hormones or antibiotics—in mine water that’s mostly recycled.

With fish populations buckling under the world’s appetite for seafood, the mine technique is part of a larger push to use aquaculture to reduce pressure on wild stocks. And William Martin, president of West Virginia Salmon and Trout’s parent company, Blue Ridge Aquaculture Inc. sees the new method as a cost-effective use of what could be the next high-priced global commodity. Of water he says, “At some point, it’ll probably be more valuable than coal.” ❧
—Rebecca Kessler

One freezing day in February 2006, physicist Andreas Mershin huddled with others around a tree on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus to watch an unlikely demonstration. An engineering company claimed it could produce electricity simply by wiring a nail in the tree’s trunk to a metal rod in the ground. Sure enough, the demo worked—but nobody knew exactly why.

Two years later, Mershin and MIT undergraduate Christopher Love have not only figured out the source of the tree’s electricity, they’ve joined a new company—Voltree Power—that wants to use that energy to power wireless networks of environmental sensors.

As reported in PLoS ONE, the electricity stems from an acidity difference between trees and soil. The area that is more acidic contains a higher concentration of positively charged hydrogen ions. Those ions attract electrons, generating a tiny current that travels between the tree and the ground.

Using a device that extends probes underground, Voltree’s invention harvests the energy and uses it to continuously recharge a battery, which in turn powers radio-equipped sensors. Voltree is now working to assemble a wildfire alert network that can feed sensor data to a central location. The devices could also monitor climate conditions or even detect illegal radioactive materials at the border.

While other monitoring tools have been hampered by the need for costly solar panels or frequent battery replacements, tree-powered sensors could be deployed over vast areas with little maintenance. And not to worry, Mershin says: the amount of energy harvested is so tiny that the trees won’t feel a thing.❧

—Roberta Kwok

*Featured in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010*

By Dawn Stover

January-March 2009 (Vol. 10, No.1)

A male European blackbird was terrorizing the neighborhood. For several months, he started singing at around 5 a.m. each day, but this was no ordinary song. The bird imitated the sounds of ambulance sirens and car alarms at a jarringly life-like volume. It even produced cell-phone ring tones that went unanswered for hours.

The tale of the annoying blackbird in Somerset, U.K., was not unique. Hans Slabbekoorn, an assistant professor of behavioral biology at Leiden University in The Netherlands, had heard similar stories—but he was skeptical that such bizarre reports could be true. So he started asking people to send him recordings of the off-kilter blackbirds. Sure enough, what he got back was pitch-perfect imitations of urban noises, including not just sirens and car alarms but even the distinctive sound of a golf cart backing up—mimicked by blackbirds living near a golf course.

While the sounds seemed artificial, the reason birds were making them was surprisingly natural. Living amid a growing cacophony of man-made noises, the blackbirds started incorporating human sounds into their repertoire. And Slabbekoorn says the unusual strategy might actually help the birds: song variety indicates maturity in male blackbirds, and female blackbirds prefer older guys.

Blackbirds aren’t the only animals changing their tunes. As human noise intrudes on nature—from freeway traffic noise to jets screaming over the rainforest—scientists are starting to believe the acoustic environment is far more intricate and fragile than they ever imagined. Long regarded as a random collection of bird songs and animal cries, the natural soundscape might actually be a coordinated symphony, with animal calls spread carefully across the acoustic spectrum. Now, researchers are getting the first glimpses of what happens when humanity’s choir drowns out whole sections of that spectrum. Animals ranging from blackbirds to beluga whales are changing their calls or switching them to new frequencies. Others are adapting in ways so powerful that they may be triggering the first steps in an evolutionary shakeup. And some animals are disappearing altogether.

Scientists have traditionally studied animal sounds by focusing on individual species and their vocalizations. Bernie Krause, a bio-acoustician who has spent 40 years recording the calls of the wild, has hatched a radically different approach and, in turn, a revolutionary vision of the relationship between animals, their environment, and the sounds they emit.

It all started in 1968 when Krause, then a musician, was having lunch with Van Dyke Parks of the Beach Boys. Parks suggested that Krause “do an album on ecology.” Krause and his musical partner had introduced the Moog synthesizer to pop music and had contributed to hundreds of albums and movie soundtracks, but Krause knew little about ecology beyond his recent reading of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Intrigued by Parks’s suggestion, Krause went alone with his equipment to Muir Woods, north of San Francisco. “I was so intrigued by what I heard that I made a decision that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” he recalls.

Overtaken by his newfound passion for ecology, Krause eventually sold his music company, enrolled in graduate school, and got his doctorate in bioacoustics. But his musical training never left him. In fact, it helped spawn a startling notion that came to him early one morning while camping in Kenya’s Masai Mara reserve. Krause had been up for 30 hours, recording the sounds of insects, owls, hyenas, bats, and elephants. Exhausted and “completely out of it,” Krause was suddenly struck by the idea that the animal sounds around him were … orchestral. “These critters are vocalizing in relationship to one another,” he thought to himself.

Back in his studio, Krause examined sonograms of the recording session. It was clear to him that what he had heard was a sequence of sounds so carefully partitioned that they read like a musical score. Different species vocalize at specific frequencies or times so they can be heard above the other animals—in the same way you can make out the individual sounds of the trumpets, violins, and clarinets as Beethoven’s Fifth builds to a crescendo. Krause dubbed the spectrum of animal sounds “biophony” and distinguishes them from human sounds, which he calls “anthrophony.”

Krause wasn’t alone in his conclusions. More than a decade later, in a laboratory far away from Krause’s California headquarters, Hans Slabbekoorn picked up on the same distinction. And, taking Krause’s work a step further, he started piecing together its startling implications.

Before studying blackbirds, Slabbekoorn worked in the tropics of Cameroon, testing a theory that habitat constraints can drive birds to sing at different frequencies. Sounds that mask birdcalls may cause difficulty or ambiguity in communication, and Slabbekoorn thought he could get to the bottom of this by comparing the songs of birds living in dense rainforest with those in more open habitats.

His test subject was a bird called the little greenbul. He discovered that little greenbuls in the dense forest sang more often at lower frequencies than their relatives living in open areas, probably because lower frequencies transmit more effectively through thick vegetation—and also because the dense forest is filled with the sounds of high-pitched insects. “It was often so noisy in these habitats that I could hardly make good recordings,” Slabbekoorn recalls.

After returning to The Netherlands, Slabbe-koorn suspected a similar dynamic was taking place in the city. Most urban noise comes from cars, trucks, buses, and trains, whose sounds are concentrated at low frequencies. If the rainforest’s high-frequency noise drives birds to use lower frequencies, Slabbekoorn reasoned, then the low-frequency sounds of the city should pressure birds to use higher frequencies. As his research progressed, Slabbekoorn found that great tits and European blackbirds are indeed switching to higher frequencies to be heard.

That’s not the only way birds cope with human noise. In 2007, Richard Fuller and two other scientists at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. discovered that European robins living in noisy urban areas have radically departed from their normal behavior of singing during the day. (1) Now, they sing almost exclusively at night, presumably to evade interference from the human din. If you hear a bird singing on your way home from a night at the pub, it’s probably a robin, Fuller says.

In Berlin, nightingales have taken a different approach, raising their singing volume in response to traffic noise, according to a study by Henrik Brumm of that city’s Free University, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology. (2) In what is known as the Lombard effect, where a singer or speaker raises his voice to be heard, the nightingales try to counteract rush-hour clamor by singing louder on weekday mornings than on weekend mornings.

Most research on the impact of human sounds has focused on birds, but there is growing evidence that what’s happening in the avian world is playing out across the animal kingdom, even in remote places that might seem impervious to human sounds—places like the deep ocean.

Cities are getting louder, but underwater noise is increasing even faster. There are about twice as many ships plying the world’s oceans now as in the 1960s, and these ships are faster, more powerful, and collectively far noisier than their predecessors. When scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Colorado-based company Whale Acoustics compared sound levels west of California’s San Nicolas Island in 2003 and 2004 with measurements made during the 1960s at the same site, they found that ambient noise levels had increased about tenfold. And this area may be representative of the entire northeast Pacific, the scientists say in a report published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. (3)

Instead of containing this noise within shipping lanes or coastal areas, the ocean’s unique dynamics actually help the sounds travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. The so-called “deep sound channel” is a layer of water where sound travels slowly but encounters little resistance or interference. Some scientists suspect that humpback whales dive down to this channel and then sing into it, communicating with other humpbacks hundreds of kilometers away. And when noises from commercial shipping, offshore drilling, and other human activities get caught in the channel, they too are carried far from the original source.

Researchers have only just begun investigating these sounds’ exact impacts, but a few studies suggest man-made noise is forcing marine mammals to respond in much the same way as birds do. Scientists at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, Canada have shown that beluga whales change their vocal patterns in response to the presence of icebreakers, whose systems interfere with the belugas’ preferred frequencies. Belugas also switch the frequencies of their echolocation clicks when background noise increases. Elsewhere, orcas in the Pacific Northwest have changed their calls, perhaps in response to increased traffic by commercial ships and whale-watching boats.

In more extreme cases, human sounds have forced whales to abandon their preferred habitat. For instance, gray whales have long used Baja California’s Guerrero Negro lagoon as a calving ground. But when construction on a nearby salt factory spurred increases in ship traffic and dredging activities, the whales stayed away from the lagoon for several years, returning only after construction ebbed.
Some researchers interpret these adaptations as a heartening sign, pointing out that some animals will simply change along with the soundscape. But Slabbekoorn cautions that some species could be wiped out by the human din.

Because low-frequency traffic noise accounts for most of humans’ clamor, animals that use low-frequency calls and can’t switch to higher frequencies are threatened most. Slabbe-koorn says birds such as orioles, great reed warblers, and house sparrows fit this category. Populations of house sparrows are declining throughout Europe; researchers haven’t pinpointed the cause, but Slabbekoorn suspects human noise is a factor.

Bernie Krause has witnessed a similar phenomenon among spadefoot toads in the Mono Lake basin east of Yosemite National Park. Using its big front claws, the toad buries itself one meter below the desert floor and can survive there for up to six years. When rain finally comes, the toad emerges and joins others to sing in chorus, which makes it harder for predators such as owls and coyotes to get a bead on where the sound is coming from.

The problem is that, during nighttime periods when the toads do their singing, military jet planes often use the basin for training. Flying only 100 meters above the ground, the planes are so loud that the toads can’t hear each other. Even after the planes leave, it takes 20 to 45 minutes for the toads to resume their synchronized chorus, and in the meantime they’re vulnerable to predators. Krause believes the noise is partly responsible for a precipitous decline in spadefoot populations, which he has studied since 1984.

Even adaptable species may be altered in fundamental ways. For instance, if changing calls or switching frequencies helps male birds be heard, they could earn an advantage when it comes to attracting female mates. Over time, this dynamic could force evolutionary changes, splitting populations of birds into localized species with specialized reactions to the sounds in their vicinity.

Slabbekoorn and his colleague Erwin Ripmeester think these noise-driven evolutionary forces may already be separating European blackbirds into urban and rural subspecies. (4) The two researchers have even begun testing whether rural birds can recognize their urban brethren’s hip new calls. If Slabbekoorn and Ripmeester’s hunch is correct, it could mean that humans, already powerful conductors of the material world, may be extending their fierce control to the audible one. ❧

Dawn Stover is an editor at large for Popular Science magazine and has also written for Earth 3.0, New Scientist, and Outside. She lives in White Salmon, Washington.

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Literature Cited
1. Fuller R.A. et al. 2007. Daytime noise predicts nocturnal singing in urban robins. Biology Letters 3(4):368-70.
2. Brumm, H. 2004. The impact of environmental noise on song amplitude in a territorial bird. Journal of Animal Ecology 73(3):434-440.
3. McDonald, M.A. et al. 2006. Increases in deep ocean ambient noise in the northeast Pacific west of San Nicolas Island, California. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 120(2):711-718.
4. Slabbekorn, H. and Ripmeester, E.A. 2008. Birdsong and anthropogenic noise: implications and applications for conservation. Molecular Ecology 17(1):72-83.

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Related reading

To be released in April, One Square Inch of Silence documents the journey of acoustic engineer Gordon Hempton to preserve the country’s natural sounds and silences. Starting with the monitored protection of one square inch of Washington state’s Olympic National Park, Hempton hopes to start a movement that will safeguard what he calls one of the nation’s fastest vanishing natural treasures – its soundscapes.

For more information about the project, go to http://onesquareinch.org/

One Square Inch of Silence

by Gordon Hempton and John Grossman

Free Press

http://www.amazon.com/One-Square-Inch-Silence-Natural/dp/1416559086

By Tali Woodward

January-March 2009 (Vol. 10, No. 1)

As economic prospects turn grim, conservationists are locked in a familiar, highly polarized debate over the downturn’s potential costs. On one side are those who believe the recession may trigger dramatic environmental setbacks because only wealthy, growing nations are willing and able to fund conservation initiatives. Standing opposed are those who say a slowdown could benefit the environment by reducing consumption and, in turn, pressure on natural resources.

The problem is, these viewpoints rest on shaky assumptions about the relationship between economic growth and environmental health. Research on this relationship is scant—and what little there is presents a more complicated picture than you might expect. To sort through this quandary, Conservation presents a sampling of the leading-edge thinkers, provocative ideas, and seminal research shaping the conversation about economics and environmentalism.

Yes, wealthy nations direct more resources toward conservation—but, environmentally speaking, poor nations can outperform their richer brethren. Developed nations see greater numbers of threatened species in some taxonomic categories but not others. The U.S. is made up of ravenous consumers, but its citizens prize environmental protection over economic growth.

Philanthropic Crumbs from the Fiscal Table

Conservation finances are in lockstep with economic indicators, but relying on donations may leave the environment in a precarious spot

Oliver Pergams left his job as chief executive of a commodity-options firm to get a doctorate in conservation biology. But as he worked on environmental issues at the University of Illinois and at Chicago’s Field Museum, his mind kept returning to his earlier career. Pergams wondered how economic trends, including recessions like the one we’re in now, affect conservation.

Pergams had a hunch that conservation is a luxury people forgo during lean times. But his search for evidence turned up little interdisciplinary research on the question. Ecologists study the environment, economists look at markets—and the two rarely meet.

Pergams decided to bridge this gap. He put together a research team and gathered historical data on measures of economic growth: gross domestic product, personal income, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Standard & Poor’s index of large-cap stocks (the S&P 500). When they charted each one against conservation trends, the same pattern emerged: when the economy grows, more resources are channeled toward conservation. It was true whether they were looking at donations to conservation nonprofits or at the acreage of national parks.

Conversely, when the stock market crashed in 1987 and took a less dramatic dive in 1999, the negative impact on conservation was immediate. Donations to NGOs like the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund declined substantially. “Our results suggest that yearly corporate income may be the most important predictor of conservation effort, with individual income next in importance,” the researchers reported in a 2004 paper. (1)

The obvious conclusion might be that growth is essential to conservation. But Pergams thinks that’s only part of the story. He argues that conservationists are misguided if they believe growth—and the environmental efforts it funds—can preserve enough biodiversity to keep the planet healthy. The reason: economic growth increases human pressures on limited natural resources. And no matter how much an economy expands, Pergams says, the donations it spawns can never be enough to counteract this.

As a solution, Pergams favors placing caps on growth, forcing society to live within tight economic boundaries. It’s a controversial viewpoint with many naysayers but raises an intriguing question: has growth been miscast as a panacea? Rising gross national product is generally assumed to be good, and it certainly helps alleviate critical human problems. But growth also carries an environmental toll that at some point could outweigh its benefit. ❧

The Nonhuman Toll of Economic Growth

As gross national product rises, so do extinctions—but some animals are more resilient than others

In the past few years, economists and ecologists have been taking a closer look at questions at the intersection of their fields. They’ve started to take on a particularly prickly topic—whether there is evidence that economic growth leads to biodiversity declines. People on both sides of the debate might assume the answer is obvious, but the research tells a murkier story.

Take the “environmental Kuznets curve,” a hypothesis that, in the long run, economic development is good for the environment. Shaped like an inverted U, the curve plots development against indicators of environmental health. Early in an industrialized nation’s life, problems such as air and water pollution rise steeply. Then, the curve reaches an apex as citizens accumulate wealth and come to value a clean environment. From there, environmental health improves.

The curve has a growing number of skeptics. Robin Naidoo and Wiktor Adamowicz of the University of Alberta were among the first researchers to try to find out whether the theory applied to biodiversity. They did a study comparing per capita gross national product (GNP) with data on threatened species in more than 100 countries. They tracked seven taxonomic groups: plants, amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds, mammals, and invertebrates. According to their study, published in Conservation Biology, five of the groups showed the opposite of a Kuznets pattern: the number of threatened species in those categories increased as GNP rose. (2) “If these relationships hold,” the researchers concluded, “it appears that much of the world’s biodiversity will be threatened with extinction should countries reach levels of consumption . . . equal to those of developed nations.”

But a closer look at Naidoo and Adamowicz’s work reveals that the case against economic growth isn’t entirely clear. Birds did follow a Kuznets pattern, and there was no clear relationship between GNP increases and numbers of threatened mammals. Other researchers have reached similar conclusions. (3,4, 5)

If GNP causes other taxa to suffer, why aren’t birds or mammals similarly affected? Naidoo and Adamowicz speculated that birds may receive greater conservation attention because people find them more attractive than “small and slimy” critters. When people have the wealth and values to support conservation, birds are one of the first taxa to be protected.

Naidoo, now at the World Wildlife Fund, suggests that understanding exactly how this relationship works could provide a roadmap for how to protect other taxonomic groups. ❧

Is Wealthy Healthy?

Rich nations get greener marks than poor countries—but true environmental health lies in the details

Researchers have made modest strides mapping out the overall relationship between economic growth and environmental health, but this broad research provides few concrete lessons to countries that want to craft eco-friendly policies. Daniel Esty has spent nearly a decade trying to change that. A lawyer by training, Esty directs the Yale University Center for Environmental Law and Policy and is the driving force behind the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), a cutting-edge ranking system that not only helps countries formulate policy goals but also shows that a country needn’t be wealthy to be a true environmental steward.

There have been other attempts to construct similar indices, but Esty’s—which is produced in collaboration with institutions such as Columbia University and the World Economic Forum—may be the most comprehensive. To compile the 2008 EPI, researchers identified 25 indicators of environmental health, such as water quality and pesticide use, then established targets countries should aim for. For instance, the EPI’s benchmark for habitat protection is that nations should protect ten percent of each major biological community within their borders. Countries are awarded points based on their proximity to these goals.

The final report, which Esty presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, ranks nations by their overall score. Make no mistake: the rich countries are clustered at the top, and poorer countries are heaped at the bottom. But that’s only a small part of the story; the EPI shows that a commitment to environmental health can make up for a lack of financial resources. Of the 149 countries ranked in 2008, Costa Rica landed in fifth place, even though its per capita GDP is only $9,600—thanks to its robust ecotourism industry and its willingness to experiment with innovative conservation programs such as paying farmers when they leave forested land intact.

By holding up these countries as paragons of environmental health, Esty thinks, the EPI will give other nations ideas on how to improve their performance. In fact, the EPI has already spurred reform. For instance, when the United Arab Emirates ranked last in the 2002 report, it responded by launching an extensive program to monitor its environmental impacts. Believing this is only the beginning, Esty is now getting the chance to put some of the EPI’s lessons into action. A former official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Esty was one of Barack Obama’s environmental advisors—and could remain influential as the new president formulates his policies. ❧

Kicking the GDP Habit

Is there a better way to judge whether an economy is moving forward?

In the early 1990s, Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta began to focus on a single intimidating question: “How do we judge whether an economy is moving forward?” The standard answer for decades now has been gross domestic product (GDP)—defined as the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. GDP has been the king of all economic indicators since it was first developed to measure production during World War II. Yet GDP is beset with a gaping hole: it takes no account of nature, despite the fact that natural resources are integral to how we live and to future economic performance. “Even today natural capital has not entered our common economic language,” Dasgupta wrote in a paper published this year in Environmental and Resource Economics. (6)

GDP’s missing piece has been well known yet largely ignored for decades. A handful of reform attempts have sprouted over the years, but none has taken root. One of the more notable efforts in the mid-1990s came from Redefining Progress, a U.S public-policy think tank. Building on Herman Daly and John Cobb’s earlier work on an Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), a group of economists devised the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). The GPI essentially starts with a standard GDP and makes a number of adjustments, including adding values such as volunteer work and subtracting for others such as pollution and resource depletion. The result is a predictable “things are getting worse” picture of the economy.

More recently, China has taken a more ambitious stab at an alternative to GDP. In 2004, Chinese officials dispatched a team of economists to come up with a quantification of the costs of pollution and natural resource depletion across the entire country. This figure would then be deducted from China’s regular GDP, resulting in the world’s first green GDP. The first green GDP figures were announced in 2006, but they fell far short of expectations—their calculations of environmental damage amounted to only about three percent of the country’s GPD. Even this low figure set off a political firestorm, and the project was shelved indefinitely.

Enter Partha Dasgupta. He’s a leader in a loose international network of economists and ecologists (including the likes of Paul Ehrlich, author of the Population Bomb, and Kenneth Arrow, winner of a Nobel Prize in economics) who are tackling the GDP problem from a very different angle. (7) Instead of simply subtracting negatives from positives to judge a nation’s economic progress, Dasgupta has worked out an entirely different sort of framework, which he calls “inclusive wealth.”

Inclusive wealth is an attempt to assign monetary values not just to the manufactured economy but also to critical cogs such as nature, human welfare, and human knowledge. It’s inclusive because, among other things, it treats ecosystems as capital assets that, like roads or buildings, depreciate if they are misused or overused. The goal is to manage those assets so they don’t diminish over time.

As Dasgupta explains it, inclusive wealth is not a “flow” like GDP but rather a quantification of an economy’s entire productive base. If GDP is analogous to a person’s annual salary, inclusive wealth is more like a year-end statement of total assets—including real estate, investments, and even hard-to-quantify assets such as education. “An economy enjoys sustainable development if and only if, relative to its population, its inclusive wealth (at constant prices) does not decline.”

Not surprisingly when viewed through this new lens, the world’s economies look very different than they do through a standard GDP scope. In fact, there are some surprising twists. Speaking to a roomful of biologists at the annual meeting of the British Ecological Society, Dasgupta demonstrated how the inclusive wealth concept works.

He started by looking at the eco-nomic performance of a handful of poor, middle-income, and wealthy countries from 1970 to 2000—first through traditional GDP measures and then in terms of inclusive wealth. By simple GDP standards, Pakistan’s economy grew at a respectable rate of 2.2 percent annually during the 30-year period. The U.S. grew by half as much at 1.1 percent per year. But Pakistan’s population during that period grew at a high rate of 2.7 percent, and its productive base (including human and natural capital) was insufficient to compensate. As such, the productive base per capita fell at an annual rate of 0.7 percent. In contrast, low population growth in the U.S. meant that the productive base per capita grew at an average annual rate of 1 percent. In other words, economic development in the U.S. was barely sustainable from 1970-2000, while Pakistan was unsustainable. It is possible for a country’s productive base to shrink during a period when GDP grows.

Another sobering result from Dasgupta’s calculations was that the economies of all the poor countries on his list were either unsustainable or barely sustainable. Emphasizing that he doesn’t want to deny that the standard of living has gone up in most poor countries, Dasgupta adds, “The question is: do we pay a price for that?”

Dasgupta’s arguments are based on rough estimates because the methods for calculating inclusive wealth still must be worked out. “It’s very sad that we’re in 2008 and we’re still so far behind that we have to use such crude measures,” he says. As economists figure out how to do these calculations, they are likely to start with smaller, local economies. Dasgupta told his audience that, in the meantime, he hopes his framework demonstrates that ecological truths can be introduced without fuss into economic reasoning. He also hopes entities like the World Bank will think more broadly about what constitutes economic health. “The World Bank lends 20 or 30 billion dollars a year, but gave up on doing valuation exercises,” says Dasgupta. “And of course the one thing that gets neglected is the valuation of nature.” ❧

When Push Comes to Shove: Green vs. Growth

Even in tough times, financial worries don’t eclipse environmental values

For 20 years, Gallup’s annual poll on the environment has asked respondents whether they believe environmental protection should be prioritized over economic growth. Their answers might surprise you.

Sure, environmental concern is stronger when the economy is expanding. During the dot-com boom, at least 65 percent of respondents consistently favored protection over growth, while no more than 30 percent placed the economy on a higher tier. Not surprisingly, that gap narrowed sharply as the economy fell into recession; by January 2003, 47 percent of those polled came down on the environment’s side, while 42 percent preferred growth.

What’s striking is that, over a 20-year period, that was the closest the economy ever came to supplanting environmental worries—the data never show a majority preference for economic growth. Environmental preferences were even stronger in Canada and the U.K., where polls have shown that roughly two-thirds of citizens consistently favor the environment.

Of course, polls gauge attitudes, not behavior, and it’s unclear whether the current downturn will shift the equation. There’s already some evidence the recession is affecting consumer choices: the Nielsen Company reports that sales of organic products, recently growing at 20 percent a year, slowed considerably last fall. On the other hand, some analysts expect consumer belt-tightening to bolster recycling efforts. Either way, it seems that Americans’ support for conservation is more entrenched than many suspect. ❧

Tali Woodward is a freelance writer based in New York. She has written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and for National Geographic.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Literature Cited

1. Pergams, O.R.W. et al. 2004. Linkage of conservation activity to trends in the U.S. economy. Conservation Biology 18(6):1617-1623.

2. Naidoo, R. and W.L. Adamowicz. 2000. Effects of economic prosperity on numbers of threatened species. Conservation Biology 15(4):1021-1029.

3. Clausen, R. and R. York. 2008. Economic growth and marine biodiversity: Influence of human social structure on decline of marine trophic levels. Conservation Biology 22(2):458-466.

4. Lantz, V. and R. Martínez-Espiñeira. 2008. Testing the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis with bird populations as habitat-specific environmental indicators: Evidence from Canada. Conservation Biology 22(2):428-438.

5. Raymond, L. 2004. Economic growth as environmental policy? Recon-sidering the environmental Kuznets curve. Journal of Public Policy 24(3):327-348.

6. Dasgupta, P. 2008. Nature in economics. Environmental and Resource Economics 39:1-7.

7. Arrow, K.J. et al. 2004. Are we consuming too much? Journal of Economic Perspectives 18(3):147-172.

By John Weier

January-March 2009 (Vol 10, No. 1)

Bearded and burly, Paul Stamets searches the forest on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula like a bloodhound, peering under fallen trees and sniffing inquisitively at the air. The object of his quest is the Agarikon mushroom—so rare that it can take Stamets, who has spent more than 30 years researching fungi, weeks to locate just one. And when he does—by bushwhacking for hours through untrammeled wilderness until he finds the beehive-shaped mushroom growing on a log or hanging from a towering Douglas fir— it’s worth the effort, Stamets says. For the Agarikon is the Holy Grail in his crusade to prove that fungi can be used to treat health problems ranging from high blood pressure to cancer. And his vision doesn’t end there.

Stamets believes fungi can clean up fuel spills, provide a nontoxic (and more effective) alternative to insecticides, and be the source of a powerful new biofuel. Listen to him talk, and it’s tempting to dismiss the 53-year-old as just another wild-eyed devotee of natural solutions—especially when he describes the web of mycelia (thread-like tendrils beneath the forest floor that form the foundation underlying fungi) as being eerily similar to the structure of the universe and says mycelia form an intelligent network that can sense human footsteps. But one thing sets Stamets apart: many of his ideas have proven scientifically credible.

Stamets is best known as the owner of Fungi Perfecti, a booming mail-order business outside Olympia, Washington, that peddles everything from grow-your-own mushroom kits to mushroom-based dog biscuits. But he considers this a side job that gives him freedom to conduct serious research. Stamets developed an Agarikon strain that University of Illinois researchers say could treat tuberculosis. He has engineered a fungus that wipes out carpenter ants, has used fungi to remove pollution from streams, and has helped the Department of Defense investigate whether fungi can counteract biological weapons. It’s all part of his quest to harness mushrooms as a solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems.

1. Homeland Security

Two thousand years ago, a Greek pharmacist named Dioscorides described a mushroom that was highly effective in treating consumption. Stamets stumbled upon those first-century writings and began a personal mission to track down Fomitopsis officinalis, agarikon. The Agarikon mushroom is thought to be extinct in Europe and Asia but, fortuitously, still grows in isolated pockets of Stamets’s backyard, the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwestern United States. So far, Stamets has painstakingly located dozens of the mushrooms, established more than a dozen Agarikon strains, and sent hundreds of cultures to scientific labs—including several doing research as part of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Project BioShield.

Among other things, Project BioShield investigates drugs and compounds that could provide new treatments for tuberculosis, smallpox, and other viruses that could be weaponized. Of the thousands of compounds tested, only a tiny percentage have been effective enough to be approved for more comprehensive research, including animal testing. At least two of Stamets’s Agarikon strains have cleared that hurdle; scientists at the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, have shown that the extracts selectively attack cowpox and vaccinia viruses, which are closely related to the smallpox virus.

Researchers at the Institute for Tuberculosis Research at the University of Illinois, Chicago, got similar results when they placed Agarikon extract and tuberculosis samples in close quarters. The extract actually stopped the tubercle growth and, in separate tests, was shown to be harmless to mammal cells—an important indicator that it wouldn’t hurt people. For now, that’s happened only in a test tube, but institute director Scott Franzblau says researchers are working to identify the extract’s active compounds and understand exactly what makes the remedy tick. Until then, they won’t know how to compare it to other TB drugs or whether it will make an effective drug at all.

Stamets believes the Agarikon is only the beginning. He’s convinced that mushrooms can cure everything from avian flu to cancer. But to extend his research, Stamets needs to keep generating new extracts from an increasingly diverse array of fungi, which explains why his quest is entangled in another cause: preserving old-growth forests. With Agarikons already rare (it recently took Stamets’s team 20 trips into the forest to find just one), he believes habitat conservation should be a vital part of the effort to cure deadly diseases such as smallpox or bird flu. “We can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forests as a matter of national defense,” Stamets says.

2. A Cultivated Taste for Diesel

In the late 1990s, Stamets and researchers from Battelle Marine Sciences Laboratory in Sequim, Washington, conducted an experiment to see whether mushrooms could clean up pollution. They grew oyster-mushroom mycelia on wood chips, then sprinkled the chips onto a pile of soil drenched in diesel and other petroleum waste. For comparison, they coated two similar piles with pollution-fighting enzymes and bacteria and used a fourth pile as a control. After leaving the mounds alone for six weeks, Stamets returned to find a result so profound that it led to what he calls “an epiphany of my life.”

“All the other piles were dead, dark, and stinky,” Stamets said in a recent lecture. “Our pile was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms.”

The remarkable transformation was spurred by a natural process that lets fungi consume even the most toxic pollutants. When certain fungi are introduced to a new patch of soil, they release a shower of digestive enzymes. After detecting which ones do the best job breaking down the soil compounds, the fungi mass-produce those enzymes.

To capitalize on this process, Stamets and Battelle’s Jack Word gave fungi petroleum products as their only food source. They then cloned the fungi that did the best job digesting the contaminants and used them in the soil test. The fungi flourished—and that was just the beginning. The mushroom spores attracted insects, which laid eggs that became larvae. The larvae attracted birds, which brought in seeds. Soon, plants were sprouting up across the previously polluted mound. “Our pile became an oasis of life,” Stamets said in his lecture.

Stamets has used similar methods to show that fungi can remove everything—from pesticides to nerve gas—from soil and water. For example, he developed a novel way to clean coliform bacteria from streams contaminated by cattle farms. He simply fills burlap bags with wood chips covered in mycelia, then stacks those bags in the streams. As the water filters through the bags, the mycelia release enzymes that digest the bacteria. According to one of Stamets’s patent applications, the method can reduce coliform bacteria by as much as 97 percent; in one test, the mushrooms reduced bacteria from 900 colonies per 100 milliliters of water to just 30 colonies per 100 milliliters.

Stamets now wants to make this natural process part of a national cleanup system. He envisions a network of “mycorestoration” hubs where mycelia are grown before being moved to contaminated land. For this to become reality, the Environmental Protection Agency and other government bodies would have to approve it as a standard cleanup practice. And that might be a tall order.

Word says public agencies have been skittish about fungal solutions since the late 1970s, when several highly publicized attempts to use white rot fungi to clean up contaminants ended in failure. “We have an uphill battle when we try to convince others that [our methods are different from] that process,” Word says.

3. Ants on ’Shrooms

When carpenter ants invaded Stamets’s home, he didn’t call Terminix. Instead, he went to his lab and engineered an insect-eradicating fungus.

His experiment rested on a long-known fact: certain fungi can infect and kill ants and termites. But, to protect their colonies, these insects have devised morbid ways of preventing fungal poisons from spreading. Ants, for example, will identify an infected individual, then decapitate it or isolate it in a side tunnel. Companies have tried for years to come up with fungal killers that subvert these defenses. Those efforts were largely unsuccessful—until Stamets developed an ingenious solution reminiscent of the Trojan horse.

Stamets developed a fungus that is not only deadly to ants but also waits to form spores. Since ants don’t see spores when they encounter the fungus, they don’t identify it as poison. Rather, they actually mistake it for food and carry it back to their queen. By the time the fungus sporulates, it’s too late to fend it off. The fungus has already spread throughout the colony’s ants.

Stamets has received several patents for the fungal pesticide and says just five grams of the stuff can wipe out a home infestation. Even better, he claims the nontoxic solution is harmless to humans. Still, Stamets has to work out a few kinks before the product can hit the mass market.

Roger Gold, professor of urban etymology at Texas A&M, points out that it’s hard to maintain unique fungal strains over long periods of time, which could make it hard to scale up production. Stamets will also need to navigate the EPA’s approval process, an enterprise that can cost millions of dollars. He says he’s had interest from investors who might foot the bill, but he admits that some of them become hesitant once they take a closer look. Ever the contrarian, Stamets interprets those doubts as reassurance that he’s on the right course. “The fact that there are people who say this will never work is proof I’m onto something unique and novel,” he says.

4. Mail Fertility

One of Stamets’s newest schemes would use mushrooms, plants, and the U.S. Postal Service to mitigate climate change. Stamets has developed a cardboard panel dubbed the “Life Box” that’s impregnated with seeds and spores. Once planted in the ground, the panels will give rise to urban forests that soak up CO2, Stamets predicts.

Each panel contains an assortment of tree or vegetable seeds, and mycelia are added to help the seeds flourish. (Many mycelia have symbiotic relationships with plants, providing them with nutrients and water. The plants return the favor by delivering shade and food.) Sized to fit in the bottom of a standard mailing package, the panels can easily be added to mail-order shipments; whenever someone orders a copy of Stamets’s book Mycelium Running, a panel is dropped into the shipping box.

Stamets envisions recipients running out to plant the panels in their yards, giving rise to trees. It might be optimistic to think all Life Box recipients will automatically stick the panels into the ground—people can be pretty picky about their landscaping—but Stamets thinks his invention has a bright future. He has already sent the panels to refugee camps, where they could sprout corn, beans, or other food crops, and he hopes big-name retailers will someday include panels with all their shipments. “We get all these cardboard boxes in the mail,” Stamets says. “Why not turn them into food or habitat?”

5. Fungus Fuel

If Stamets’s utopian solutions ever become reality, the world will face a problem far less appetizing than the ’shrooms themselves: mountains of stinky mushroom waste. That’s because mass-producing fungal extracts would require large-scale facilities to grow mycelia on wood chips and other organic matter. Once the enzymes and other beneficial compounds were harvested, thousands of tons of the organic matter would be left to rot, and this is where Stamets’s quirky vision completes its circle. He even has a plan for how to use what would be the smelly byproduct of his success: use it to solve the global energy crisis.

When fungal sugars are mixed with yeast and other active ingredients, they turn into “myconol”—a fuel no different from the ethanol now being blended with gasoline to power cars. Stamets is working to perfect the conversion process and estimates that it takes about 48 kilograms of mycelia-laced material to produce 3.5 liters of fuel. He says myconol will be his research facility’s sole fuel source within two years. As usual with Stamets, that’s just one small step toward an earth-changing goal: he also intends to sell myconol conversion kits on his Web site, building grass-roots support for a nationwide program to fuel everything from factories to cars—not with coal or oil, but with fungus. ❧

John Weier is a freelance writer based in San Francisco, California.

Froese, D.G. et al. 2008. Ancient permafrost and a future, warmer Arctic. Science 321(5896):1648.

At northern latitudes, buildings are collapsing and roads are buckling as the permafrost beneath them thaws. But the frozen ground further below the surface is proving remarkably stable. A new study in Science reports the discovery of a 740,000-year-old ice wedge in Canada’s Yukon Territory. It’s the oldest-known ice in North America, and it remained in deep freeze throughout two geological periods that were warmer than today. This partially assuages one of climatologists’ worst fears: that thawing permafrost will cause troves of organic material to decompose, unleashing a “carbon bomb” that accelerates global warming.

The ancient, eight-meter-long ice wedge is buried just a few meters underground and was discovered by gold miners in the late 1990s. When the study’s lead author, geologist Duane G. Froese of the University of Alberta, checked it out in 2000, its shallow location led him to guess the ice was fairly young—maybe 50,000 years old. But colleagues at the University of Toronto determined that a layer of ash above the ice settled some 740,000 years ago. Anything below it must be older, which means the ice wedge survived two interglacial periods, including the latest, 120,000 years ago—when all the region’s permafrost was thought to have melted.

While shallow permafrost will likely melt and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, Froese’s research indicates the scale of this melting could be far smaller than current models predict. Froese contends that the ice he studied is probably not unique; it was found near the southern limit of permafrost in North America, in a zone where permafrost tends to be patchy, thin, and just a few degrees shy of melting. Since most permafrost is buried at least as deep as Froese’s ice, the bulk of the stuff may be far hardier than scientists had feared.  ❧

—Rebecca Kessler

Marlon J.R. et al. 2008. Climate and human influences on global biomass burning over the past two millennia. Nature Geoscience 1(10):697-702.

When Jennifer Marlon and her team charted out the rate at which vegetation has burned over the past 2,000 years, they ended up with a wildly fluctuating graph that resembled a roller-coaster ride. To get to the bottom of these surprising gyrations, the researchers set out to disentangle the gnarly mix of human and climate variables that impact burning. Their study provides the first-ever comprehensive history of burning and recently appeared in Nature Geoscience. Here’s a snapshot of what it found:

Part 1: Small Bumps, Slow Drop From 1 to 1750 A.D., biomass burning declines as the global climate gradually cools.

Part 2: Uphill Beginning in 1750, fires spike sharply. With the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, increased CO2 fertilizes plant growth, adding fuel to the flames. Slash-and-burn agriculture also contributes.

Part 3: The Big Drop In 1870, burning reaches its peak and then falls precipitously. Reduced forest cover, land fragmentation, and fire-suppression policies may be the cause.

Part 4: Another Climb The authors cannot resolve records from recent decades, but other reports show an uptick in forest fires—and this time, climate change may be at fault. With each passing summer, blazes in the West are becoming more devastating. And the trend may not stop until cooling resumes or, more ominously, there’s little left to burn. ❧
—Jessica Leber

Burkepile, D.E. and M.E. Hay. 2008. Herbivore species richness and feeding complementarity affect community structure and function on a coral reef. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(42):16201-16206.

The loss of algae-eating fish and invertebrates can decimate coral reefs, but researchers haven’t been sure which species best stop reefs from being taken over by macro-algae (a.k.a. seaweed). A new paper in PNAS suggests the answer might be a diverse collection of herbivores.

Deron Burkepile of Florida International University and Mark Hay of the Georgia Institute of  Technology tested the effects of different algae consumers on reef habitat in the Florida Keys.  They isolated individual fish and combinations of fish in cages around sections of coral to see which ones best kept algae in check.

On their own, redband parrotfish, princess parrotfish, and ocean surgeonfish limited the growth of certain algae types. But after one year, overall algae cover was higher. In the multiherbivore enclosures, however, algae growth was held in check and coral mortality was zero. ❧
—Scott Norris

Sundqvist, A., H. Ellegren, and C. Villà 2008. Wolf or dog? Genetic identification of predators from saliva collected around bite wounds on prey. Conservation Genetics 9(5):1275–1279.

Although wolves frequently shoulder the blame for raiding livestock pens, a study in Conservation Genetics proves that, in at least one case, they were framed. Researchers from Sweden’s Uppsala University analyzed saliva DNA from the bite wounds of two sheep to determine whether a wolf or dog had attacked them. That it’s hard to tell which animal robbed the farm, based on visible evidence alone, presents a public relations problem for wolves—especially if, as it turned out in this instance, they are wrongly accused. The culprit was a domestic dog, the scientists found. Worldwide, predation is used as a reason to control wolf populations or weaken programs that aim to conserve their populations. Using this forensic method could help determine whether a perceived wolf problem may be exaggerated. The study demonstrates that
this technique, which had previously been used only for coyotes, can successfully differentiate between broader groups of predators, even ones as genetically similar as wolves and dogs. ❧
—Jessica Leber

Campbell, G. et al. 2008. Alarming decline of West African chimpanzees in Côte d’Ivoire. Current Biology 18(19):R903-R904.

For years, Côte d’Ivoire has been regarded as one of the last havens for endangered West African chimpanzees. A 1990 survey found that the country was home to 8,000 to 10,000 of the animals; while that was precipitously lower than earlier population estimates, it meant a significant number of chimps nonetheless remained. But a new study in Current Biology finds that chimpanzee numbers have plunged yet again.

Led by Geneviève Campbell of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the authors repeated the 1990 survey with jarring results. The number of chimpanzee nests encountered had dropped by 90 percent.

Campbell’s team attributes some of the decline to human population growth. In the last 18 years, the number of people in Côte d’Ivoire jumped from 12 million to 18 million, spurring increased poaching and deforestation. Meanwhile, an eight-year-old civil conflict has disrupted chimp conservation efforts.

While the decline is obvious, the solution is unclear. Campbell and her colleagues call for intensified surveillance of the remainingchimpanzees, with hopes this will pinpoint the steps necessary to thwart a complete chimp
collapse. ❧

—Judy Wexler

Sax, D. and S.D. Gaines. 2008. Species invasions and extinction: The future of native biodiversity on islands. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105:11490-11497.

Conservation biologists typically view invasive species as a scourge that drives native plants and animals to extinction. But Brown University’s Dov Sax isn’t sure exotic plants deserve their bad reputation.

Sax looked for patterns in hundreds of years’ worth of data on plant and vertebrate extinctions on the world’s islands. He confirmed that invasive animals sometimes devastate native species. But he found that exotic plants usually live alongside natives quite peacefully. Consider this contrast: In New Zealand, more than one-third of native land birds have gone extinct. During the same period, only three of more than 2,000 plant species have been eliminated, even as the island has become home to thousands of exotics.

“It’s not to say that plant extinction isn’t happening, but it doesn’t appear to be because of invasives,” Sax says.

Sax’s research, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that oceanic islands absorb a massive number of exotic plants with little effect on native botanicals. In fact, these islands seem able to take on almost as many new species as they had starting out, thereby doubling plant richness.

The paper is controversial, and Sax agrees that scientists need to better understand the mechanisms of extinction. He says it’s particularly important for scientists to learn whether there is a significant lag between extinctions and the events that trigger them. In the meantime, he says, this investigation demonstrates that “sometimes the stereotypes are wrong.” ❧
—Tali Woodward