QUEST Community Science Blog

Why do Moon Bears need you to knit?

Once upon a time in the far away land of Hong Kong, a woman named Jill Robinson discovered that beautiful moon bears where being held captive in tiny cages in China and farmed (through their bellies) as a living source for bear bile, which is used in traditional medicines. She decided to do something heroic about the issue and founded the Animals Asia Foundation. Animals Asia became a thriving organization, dedicated to ending cruelty and restoring respect for all animals in Asia.

For many moon bears, their stories have a happy ending. Jill and the AAF crew have rescued 500 bears, releasing them into their idyllic sanctuary in Chengdu China. Newly rescued moon bears tentatively step on fresh grass, slowly learn to climb, socialize, scamper through bamboo, wrestle and eat honey, finally becoming a real bear.

Of course, the bears can’t go from cages to sanctuary directly; they must endure urgent veterinary care and often surgery to remove the bile equipment from their bodies. Bears must be anaesthetized to receive this care and it is important that they stay warm and comfortable during the process. Just as with humans, the bears’ extremities are the first things to get cold and that is where knitters on the West Coast of the United States, worlds away, come in. They must knit giant bear mittens!

The Oakland Zoo is hoping to have some mittens knitted in order to hand them directly to Jill Robinson on May 21, when she speaks at the Oakland Zoo. We will have a knitting party at the zoo on Friday, May 9, from 1pm-3pm. However, mittens can be turned in to the Oakland Zoo at anytime and mailed to China in the hopes that the thousands of moon bears still in captivity will need them soon.

The mitten pattern allows for several weights of yarn and includes instructions for knitting in the round with one circular, two circulars, double-pointed needles, or knitting flat. Finished mittens are about 7″ wide (14″ circumference) with a 12″ foot and 6″ cuff. The pattern is intended to be beginner level, but if you have any questions about the techniques mentioned, you might find the website knittinghelp.com helpful.

Click here for the pattern and try it yourself:

bearbooties.pdf

The Oakland Zoo will be working with Article Pract in Oakland on more mittens for bears.

Find out more about Moon Bears and their plight, and meet Jill Robinson on Wednesday, May 21 at 6:30 for the lecture entitle, “From Prison to Paradise: Rescuing the Endangered Asian Moon Bear. Bring the family to Bear Day at the Oakland Zoo on Saturday, May 17.

Some of this information is thanks to Twisted, the Knit Shop in Oregon who is helping the Oregon zoo knit mittens.


Amy Gotliffe is Conservation Manager at The Oakland Zoo.

Genetically, we’re all pretty much the same. A massive volcanic eruption 75,000 years ago may be why.

Lake Toba is all that is left of the volcano
that nearly wiped out mankind.Last blog I talked about how East Africans are genetically more diverse than Asians. Who are genetically more diverse than Native Americans.

From all of this you might have concluded that people are pretty different from each other. They aren’t.

People are surprisingly similar at a genetic level. For example, any two people from anywhere on Earth are more similar than two chimps from the same troop. Why are we all so alike?

One possible explanation is that something in our collective past nearly wiped us all out. And we all come from the few survivors who were left.

A likely candidate for this near annihilation event is the Toba volcanic eruption that happened in Indonesia 75,000 or so years ago. This eruption was huge.

It was equivalent to around 1 billion tons of dynamite and was about 3000 times more powerful than the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980. It also may have reduced the average global temperature by 5 degrees Celsius, darkened the world for 5 or 6 years, and plunged the world into a new Ice Age.

As you might imagine, this eruption had dramatic effects on species around the world including our own. Estimates of how many people were left range from around 1000-10,000 breeding pairs. The theory is that we are all so alike because we share these survivors’ DNA.

Whether true or not, a bottleneck in our past would not make us unique. Lots of species go through these near death experiences.

Scientists think cheetahs went through one around 10,000 years ago. Cheetahs are all so similar genetically that veterinarians can do skin grafts with “unrelated” cheetahs.

And of course, people have created bottlenecks in species too. For example, in the late 1890’s there may have only been 20-100 elephant seals left in the world because of hunting. Now there are at least 150,000 spread across the west coast.

Species are in danger long after they go through a bottleneck. They have a pretty limited gene pool which means they may not be particularly healthy and are in danger of being wiped out by, for example, a single disease. Humans are probably OK in this regard (consider natural resistance to HIV for example) but elephant seals, bison, and cheetahs, and many other species may not be.

Fortunately for us we successfully came through our bottleneck. Hopefully, the animals that we’ve nearly wiped out will too.

Dr. Barry Starr is a Geneticist-in-Residence at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA.

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

As the sun shines and the air warms in the Bay Area, take a moment to consider a place where it’s always cold–the South Pole. Thanks to some local folk, we can get a taste of the science at the bottom of the earth without leaving balmy San Francisco.

Berkeley graduate student Michaelangelo D’Agostino blogs about his trip south for the Economist. D’Agostino chronicles the stages of his journey, from New Zealand to the station, and what day-to-day life is like at -24 degrees Celsius.

SF’s own Exploratorium brings Antarctic scientists, live, to your computer monitor. In the webcasts, archived so you can watch any time,
scientists explain their research on everything from penguins and glaciers to neutrinos. The also have dispatches, updates from the scientists as they go about their work.

Amber Dance is the Quest Intern and a science communication student at UC Santa Cruz.

latitude: -90, longitude: 0

View our original YPOQ pilot
featuring photographer Russ MorrisDo you love photographing Science, Environment and Nature in Northern California? Would you like to collaborate on a 2-minute QUEST TV short about your photography for an audience of over 100,000 viewers?

We’re launching a call for submissions for our new series of TV shorts, “YPOQ: Your Photos on QUEST.” These are broadcast alongside our feature stories. Our pilot YPOQ broadcast in Season 1 featured local photographer Russ Morris.

We’re looking for more than stunning nature photography. We seek to collaborate with a local photographer who is inspired by science, environment and nature in Northern California, and uses innovative approaches to express their unique vision of our region.

Key Dates

Submissions due: February 27th, 2008
Selection announcenment: March 3rd, 2008.
TV Broadcast : May 20, 2008.

Although we can only broadcast one photographer’s work on the air on May 20, we also plan to feature selected submissions here on the KQED QUEST Community Science Blog.

We are running this call through Flickr, a website for sharing photos and much more. It’s free to join and participate. See our discussion topic on Flickr for details!

Craig Rosa is the Interactive Producer for QUEST.

Why cell phones are bad for gorillas and how Eco-Cell is helping.

Got a cell phone? Then in your pocket or stuck to your ear is a metallic ore called Coltan, short for Columbite-tantalite, a vital component in the capacitors that control current flow in cell phone circuit boards.

Your i-pod, laptop, DVD player and game console most likely also contain Coltan. This highly desired ore lives in the soils of the rain forest. 80% of Coltan comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The main area where Coltan is mined contains the Kahuzi Biega National Park, home of the highly endangered Mountain Gorilla. In the Park, ground-clearing for mining operations has reduced food and habitat for the gorillas, cutting their numbers nearly in half. Mining has also displaced the local people, leading them to kill gorillas and sell the “bush meat” to the miners and rebel armies that control the area.

Within the Dem. Rep. of Congo as a whole, the number of Eastern Lowland Gorillas in eight national parks has declined by 90% over the past 5 years, leaving only 3000 gorillas total.

There is hope. Companies that use Coltan are beginning to demand that their Coltan only comes from a legitimately mined source and for that fact to be verified on the packaging, much like Dolphin Safe Tuna.

What you can do currently is reduce and recycle. Reduce the amount of electronics, including cell phones, that you buy and recycle them when you are definitely done with them. Recycling these items helps
eliminate the need for more mining and keeps them out of the landfill.

The Oakland Zoo is happy to take your old cell phone and recycle it through companies such as Cartridges for Kids or Eco-Cell.

Eco-Cell, a Kentucky based company, works to help gorillas by encouraging cell phone recycling, educating about the issues and donating funds to support gorilla conservation.

You can also help gorillas by attending a family friendly event at the Oakland Zoo, Gorilla Doctors: Saving Endangered Great Apes, featuring children’s author Pamela Turner and epidemiologist Dr. Lynne Gaffikin on February 6, 2008. Bring in a cell phone to recycle for a free raffle ticket.

Amy Gotliffe is Conservation Manager at The Oakland Zoo.

latitude: -4.03833, longitude: 21.7587

Can you imagine what San Francisco Bay looked like 15,000 years ago?

Actually at that time– during the last ice age– San Francisco Bay wasn’t a bay at all. Instead, it was a valley dotted with grazing antelope. Hills jutted up here and there (destined to become the Bay’s islands). The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers of the Central Valley joined forces in the vast marshy Delta, flowed west through a 300-foot deep gorge in the Coast Range (now the Golden Gate), and across a broad coastal plain to the ocean. California’s coastline was out past the Farallon Islands.

With the end of the ice age and the melting of the great ice sheets, the oceans began rising. By about 10,000 years ago, the rising Pacific had intruded through the Golden Gate and begun to form the Bay. (This wasn’t the first Bay, by the way. During the Pleistocene, as the ice sheets alternately retreated and advanced, San Francisco Bay was alternately flooded and drained as sea levels rose and fell.) By 6,000 years ago, tidal influence had extended to the Delta.

Around the shallow margins of the newly formed Bay, tidal marshlands began to form. Between Vallejo and Novato about 55,000 acres of cordgrass and pickleweed took hold. In the south Bay was another wetland tract totaling about 50,000 acres and due south of where the city of Fairfield now resides were another 60,000 acres. As enormous as these expanses of marsh were, they were dwarfed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Delta. Forming a jagged triangle with apexes at Sacramento, Antioch, and Tracy, the Delta spanned a massive 345,000 acres. For 4,000 years, the wildlife of these wetlands thrived in the rich waters of the Estuary.

More recently, the Bay landscape has undergone further radical change– though on a much shorter time scale and due to man-made rather than natural forces. What had existed for four millennia was destroyed in the geologic blink of an eye. In about 100 years beginning in the mid-1800s, 92% of the Estuary’s wetlands were drained. Of San Francisco Bay’s original 196,000 acres, only 35,000 acres remained by 1960. The devastation of the Delta was even more complete, with only 10,000 acres left by mid-century.

Some of those drastic man-made changes are now beginning to be changed back, with a goal to restore 100,000 acres of the Bay’s lost wetlands in the coming decades– the largest coastal wetland restoration project in the United States.

The Bay Institute’s Bay Restoration Program Manager Marc Holmes recently spoke with “Your Wetlands” about the Bay’s changing landscape and current restoration efforts. You can learn more by listening to the podcasts:

Changing landscapes

Restoring the landscape

Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”

When it comes to alternative energy, most people think of solar or wind. But the hills just north of Sonoma wine country are a world leader in another kind of clean power, and under an ambitious new project, they are about to produce even more.

You may listen to the “Geothermal Heats up” radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also see additional photos for this radio report.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

Using sound and laser technology, researchers have begun to reveal the secrets of the ocean floor from the Sonoma Coast to Monterey Bay. By creating complex 3-D maps, they’re hoping to learn more about waves and achieve ambitious conservation goals.

You may view the “Sea 3-D: Charting the Ocean Floor” TV story online, as well as find additional links and resources.


Joan Johnson is a Segment Producer and Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

It’s the holy grail for geologists. Can earthquakes be predicted? Northern California researchers are now identifying the slow-moving clues that may foreshadow violent quakes and studying active faults below the earth’s surface. Their work may provide even a few seconds of warning, which in earthquake country can give a vital warning to open elevator doors, slow down trains and alert firefighters.

You may view the “Earthquakes: Breaking New Ground” story online, as well as find additional links and resources.


Sheraz Sadiq is a Segment Producer and Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

Credit: P.D. Gingerich, Univ. Michigan.This past week, fossil whales made it into the newswires again. This time, the news wasn’t strictly about a new discovery or new insight — instead, it has to with accusations of vandalism.

About 150 km south of Cairo lies a huge expanse of desert, called Wadi Al-Hitan. Unlike the classic desert of dunes upon dunes, Wadi Hitan preserves large exposures of rocks from the late Eocene through the early Oligocene (~40-30 million years ago). The first fossil whales– from beasts like the large, eel-like Basilosaurus, which reached over 50 feet long — were found in 1905. For the subsequent 100 years, paleontologists have recovered a trove of other marine mammals including severalspecies of fossil whales (archaeocetes) and sea cows. Rocks from higher up in the Wadi Al-Hitan sequence, near the Qasr El Saga temple, have also produced some of the oldest primates in the world. Over 390 whale skeletons have been found in the area, earning it the nickname “Valley of the Whales.” Detailed studies of the rocks in which the fossil whales are embedded indicate a lagoon-like environment when the whales lived, and, possibly, a calving ground for these early whales.

Aside from the supreme paleontological importance of the site, the Wadi Hitan is also full of important archeological remains as well. Together, this led UNESCO to recognize the area as a Natural World Heritage Site, a rare accolade for a fossil site. One of the problems with designating such places (especially in a remote area) is ensuring resource protection, not only from the elements but also human activity. Enter Egyptian officials, who last week formally accused Belgian diplomats of driving 4WD vehicles over key fossil sites this summer. Egyptian officials estimate that the alleged vandalism caused USD 325,000 worth of damage, while Belgian officials
deny the charges.

Even with UNSECO’s name, true protection is a matter of money (park rangers and guards), and also vigilance — and getting both is as hard in Egypt as it is in the US. As a whale paleontologist, the disregard for their fossil remains infuriates me, but as a citizen, I find wanton damage to any heritage site shameful. How would you feel if someone dynamited the top of Half Dome in Yosemite, or spray-painted George Washington’s nose at Mt. Rushmore? Like one of the Egyptian officials said, “The financial value doesn’t really matter. What matters is the historical value.”

Nick Pyenson is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the department of integrative biology and the museum of paleontology.