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There are more plants on the list in California than animals, including species of \u003ca href=\"https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp0/profile/speciesProfile?spcode=R005\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cypress\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp0/profile/speciesProfile?spcode=Q03I\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">manzanita\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp0/profile/speciesProfile?spcode=Q1Y1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">meadowfoam\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp0/profile/speciesProfile?spcode=Q0S7\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wild-buckwheat\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://desp.ucdavis.edu/people/mark-w-schwartz\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mark Schwartz\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a plant ecologist with UC Davis, said while the changes could impact listed plants and animals, they could also have grave consequences for species that are facing climate pressure but haven’t been considered yet. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The law identifies any species listed as “threatened” as one that is “likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future.” The “endangered” status is given to a species that faces extinction. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Critics say the Trump administration’s changes seek to alter how agencies interpret what constitutes “foreseeable future” by ignoring or downplaying the impacts of warming and climate change. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Altering language on foreseeable future to reduce the capacity to think about climate change is a threat to species that may face significant impacts,” Schwartz said. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Becerra’s suit challenges that the federal government’s changes are illegal under the Endangered Species Act and are “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act. 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"content": "\u003cp>[dl_subscribe]A miniature drama is playing out on the forest floor in California’s preeminent mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, at this time of year. As the sun sets, look closely and you might see a stream of red ants frantically climbing over leaves and rocks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They aren’t looking for food. They’re looking for other ants. They’re kidnappers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s hard to know who you’re rooting for in this situation,” says Kelsey Scheckel, a graduate student at UC Berkeley who studies kidnapper ants. “You’re just excited to be a bystander.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On this late summer afternoon, Scheckel stares intently over the landscape at the Sagehen Creek Field Station, part of the University of California’s Natural Reserve System, near Truckee, California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947461\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-1947461\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-1020x765.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-1200x900.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Graduate student Kelsey Scheckel and postdoctoral fellow Elizabeth Cash wait for a kidnapper ant raid to begin at Sagehen Creek Field Station. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The first thing we do is try to find a colony with two very different-looking species cohabitating,” Scheckel says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That type of coexistence is pretty rare. As soon as we find that, we can get excited.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After they locate a nest, Scheckel and other researchers plant a tiny flag so they can return to study the ants’ behavior day after day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The nest can be underground or in decaying wood. The researchers wait, using binoculars to look from a distance for the first signs of a raid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the last rays of sunlight trickle through the trees, the researchers spot a few red ants venturing out from the nest. They’re scouts, on the search for the nest of a different species of ant nearby. One of their favorite targets is a species of all-black ant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The red scout ants fan out and scour the forest floor. If one of them finds a suitable victim’s nest, it dashes back to its home nest to rouse the kidnappers to prepare for a raid. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947462\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_RaidRock.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947462\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_RaidRock.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kidnapper ants charge toward a neighboring ant’s nest at the start of a raid. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s a very busy, kind of messy collection of ants at their entrance at first, until a few of the scouts start the raid and everyone follows,” says Scheckel, who is part of Neil Tsutsui’s Lab, which focuses on the evolution, ecology and behavior of social insects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the assault begins, the kidnappers stream out and scurry en masse toward the victims’ nest. It’s an impressive sight. The stream of bright red ants can be hundreds, even thousands strong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It looks like a highway of ants,” Scheckel says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The black ants seem to know what’s coming. They rush to block the entrances to their nest with dirt, pebbles and tiny sticks. But it’s all for naught.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947463\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_RaidDigging.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947463\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_RaidDigging.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kidnapper ants dig their way into their target’s nest. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The kidnappers arrive and start digging. They excavate the blockage, piling the debris outside the entrance hole.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The black ants try to defend their nest, but they’re overwhelmed by the sheer number of the raiders. Some of the black ants put up a fight, and some try to flee, but many seem to simply panic in the face of the onslaught.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The kidnapper ants create this big mass at the entrance, almost like in a zombie movie,” says Scheckel. “It’s a very chaotic scene.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947469\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_Stealing-Pupae.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1947469 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_Stealing-Pupae.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kidnapper ants emerge from a Formica ant nest holding the stolen young, called pupae. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It doesn’t take long for the kidnappers to break into the nest. Once they’re inside, they go straight for the black ants’ young.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They target the black ants’ pupae, the last developmental stage before juvenile ants become adults.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The kidnappers emerge with these tiny white pupae that are about the size of a grain of rice, but maybe a little bit more plump,” says Scheckel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947470\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_PolyergusCarryingPupa.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1947470 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_PolyergusCarryingPupa.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A kidnapper ant returns to its nest with a stolen pupa in its mandibles. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Some of the pupae are still in their protective silken cocoons. Others that are more mature have had their cocoons removed and look like translucent white ants curled up and motionless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The kidnappers hold the pupae in their long-hooked jaws, called mandibles. The mandibles seem perfectly shaped to grasp the helpless juveniles without damaging them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The kidnapper ants’ jaws are really good for holding the pupae,” Scheckel says. “But they also happen to be very good in battle as well. Because they have pointy tips, they’re really good at piercing the exoskeleton of their rivals in a fight.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The kidnappers scamper back to their home nest holding their stolen prizes high.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As quickly as it started, the raid is over. But the story isn’t done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947471\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_StealingPupae_wide.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947471\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_StealingPupae_wide.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kidnapper ants carry pupae back to their nest. \u003ccite>(Elizabeth Cash/UC Berkeley)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Ants live in a chemical world,” explains Scheckel. “They primarily use their sense of smell for navigating their environment.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ants don’t have noses like we do,” she continues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To learn about the world around them, ants constantly tap their antennae — which are full of tiny holes — on every surface they come across. The behavior is called antennation. Ants antennate to find food and to tell their nest mates apart from strangers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ants also create their own odors. Each nest has its own specific smell, which is a combination of chemicals made by the ants themselves mixed with those from their food and surroundings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You can kind of think about it like going over to your friend’s house growing up,” Scheckel says. “You just walked in and that was kind of the smell of their home. You never forget it. That’s what ants have. It’s kind of a colony signature.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ants collect odors in glands located at the corner of their mouths. They’re like tiny sacs full of chemicals that come from everything the ant comes in contact with. When they groom themselves, they cover themselves in their colony’s signature “perfume.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a young ant emerges from its cocoon, it starts with a blank canvas. “It’s basically naked of smells,” Scheckel says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So when the raid hits, the young ant has no way to know it’s been kidnapped. It can’t tell that it’s being held captive and not in its home nest with its sisters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The kidnappers trick the stolen ant into thinking it belongs in this new nest by grooming it from top to bottom with the chemicals stored in those glands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947472\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_GroomingPupa.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1947472 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_GroomingPupa.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A kidnapper ant grooms a young captive ant, coating it in the kidnappers’ nest signature smell. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“They’re essentially bathing the stolen ants in the kidnappers’ nest odors,” says Scheckel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The young ants think they are home. It’s a form of chemical brainwashing. That’s why the kidnappers choose to steal pupae.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Adults are kind of already set in their ways, so it would be difficult to change their mind about what their identity is,” Scheckel says. “They are not as malleable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When they arrive in their new home, the newly enslaved ants get to work maintaining the nest, caring for the young and even leaving the nest to forage for food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike their captors, the kidnapped ants’ jaws are perfectly shaped for foraging and are serrated for processing food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inside the nest, a hungry kidnapper will approach a captive with its mandibles wide-open and its head tilted up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s kind of like a begging position,” explains Scheckel. “Almost like a baby bird.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947473\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_trophallaxis.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1947473 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_trophallaxis.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A captive ants regurgitates food into its captor’s mouth. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The kidnapper ants completely rely on the captive ants to feed them. Their pointy, curved jaws lack the serrations that would allow them to chew their own food. Without their slaves, the kidnappers would starve. For that reason they’re considered “obligate” kidnappers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two ants will meet mouth to mouth in a kissing pose. The captive ant regurgitates food directly into the kidnapper’s mouth. It’s a process called trophallaxis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s an incredibly altruistic behavior that is only reserved for nest mates,” says Scheckel. “So it’s very unusual to see members of different species doing that with one another. That’s what makes it so unique in the parasitic system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scheckel and her colleagues study these types of relationships in insects. In these unusual ants, the kidnappers are considered parasites and the ants they kidnap are called hosts. It’s an unusual system because the parasite brings the host into its own home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They’re not bloodsucking, but they’re definitely resource-sucking,” explains Scheckel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to any workers that die defending their nest from the invaders, the host species loses the next generation of its workers. Those that remain in the colony may struggle to get enough food to survive the winters when they’re snowed in and can’t leave their nest to forage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While quite familiar with the red kidnapper ants, Scheckel puts most of her attention on studying another species of kidnapper ant. Instead of being entirely red-colored, the species she studies has red heads and thoraxes, and black abdomens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947475\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-1947475\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-1020x574.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-1200x675.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-1920x1080.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Facultative kidnapper ants (Formica aserva) on a pile of stolen pupae. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The members of this red-and-black species have grinding mandibles and can feed themselves. But they still kidnap other species’ pupae and raise them as workers in a similar way to the all-red obligate kidnappers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These “facultative” kidnappers represent an evolutionary halfway point between free-living ants and obligate kidnappers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By studying these species, Kelsey and her colleagues say they hope to learn more about how kidnapping came to exist in these incredibly social insects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Studying ants isn’t without its risks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The danger is mostly getting bitten many, many times, and swarmed by very angry ants,” says Scheckel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These species don’t sting, but are able to spray formic acid from their backside that can even cause minor chemical burns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for Scheckel the pain is worth it to study such a complex social animal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can roll over a log and see an entire world,” she says. “And in the ants’ case, an entire society and community living right there at my fingertips.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Laura Shields contributed reporting. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Kidnapper ants raid other ant species' colonies, abduct their young and take them back to their nest. When the enslaved babies grow up, the kidnappers trick them into serving their captors — hunting, cleaning the nest, even chewing up their food for them. ",
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"title": "Kidnapper Ants Steal Other Ants' Babies — And Brainwash Them | KQED",
"description": "Kidnapper ants raid other ant species' colonies, abduct their young and take them back to their nest. When the enslaved babies grow up, the kidnappers trick them into serving their captors — hunting, cleaning the nest, even chewing up their food for them. ",
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"headline": "Kidnapper Ants Steal Other Ants' Babies — And Brainwash Them",
"datePublished": "2019-09-24T04:47:44-07:00",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>A miniature drama is playing out on the forest floor in California’s preeminent mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, at this time of year. As the sun sets, look closely and you might see a stream of red ants frantically climbing over leaves and rocks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They aren’t looking for food. They’re looking for other ants. They’re kidnappers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s hard to know who you’re rooting for in this situation,” says Kelsey Scheckel, a graduate student at UC Berkeley who studies kidnapper ants. “You’re just excited to be a bystander.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On this late summer afternoon, Scheckel stares intently over the landscape at the Sagehen Creek Field Station, part of the University of California’s Natural Reserve System, near Truckee, California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947461\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-1947461\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-1020x765.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-1200x900.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_KelseyScheckel_ElizabethCash.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Graduate student Kelsey Scheckel and postdoctoral fellow Elizabeth Cash wait for a kidnapper ant raid to begin at Sagehen Creek Field Station. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The first thing we do is try to find a colony with two very different-looking species cohabitating,” Scheckel says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That type of coexistence is pretty rare. As soon as we find that, we can get excited.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After they locate a nest, Scheckel and other researchers plant a tiny flag so they can return to study the ants’ behavior day after day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The nest can be underground or in decaying wood. The researchers wait, using binoculars to look from a distance for the first signs of a raid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the last rays of sunlight trickle through the trees, the researchers spot a few red ants venturing out from the nest. They’re scouts, on the search for the nest of a different species of ant nearby. One of their favorite targets is a species of all-black ant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The red scout ants fan out and scour the forest floor. If one of them finds a suitable victim’s nest, it dashes back to its home nest to rouse the kidnappers to prepare for a raid. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947462\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_RaidRock.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947462\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_RaidRock.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kidnapper ants charge toward a neighboring ant’s nest at the start of a raid. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s a very busy, kind of messy collection of ants at their entrance at first, until a few of the scouts start the raid and everyone follows,” says Scheckel, who is part of Neil Tsutsui’s Lab, which focuses on the evolution, ecology and behavior of social insects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the assault begins, the kidnappers stream out and scurry en masse toward the victims’ nest. It’s an impressive sight. The stream of bright red ants can be hundreds, even thousands strong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It looks like a highway of ants,” Scheckel says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The black ants seem to know what’s coming. They rush to block the entrances to their nest with dirt, pebbles and tiny sticks. But it’s all for naught.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947463\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_RaidDigging.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947463\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_RaidDigging.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kidnapper ants dig their way into their target’s nest. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The kidnappers arrive and start digging. They excavate the blockage, piling the debris outside the entrance hole.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The black ants try to defend their nest, but they’re overwhelmed by the sheer number of the raiders. Some of the black ants put up a fight, and some try to flee, but many seem to simply panic in the face of the onslaught.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The kidnapper ants create this big mass at the entrance, almost like in a zombie movie,” says Scheckel. “It’s a very chaotic scene.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947469\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_Stealing-Pupae.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1947469 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_Stealing-Pupae.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kidnapper ants emerge from a Formica ant nest holding the stolen young, called pupae. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It doesn’t take long for the kidnappers to break into the nest. Once they’re inside, they go straight for the black ants’ young.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They target the black ants’ pupae, the last developmental stage before juvenile ants become adults.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The kidnappers emerge with these tiny white pupae that are about the size of a grain of rice, but maybe a little bit more plump,” says Scheckel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947470\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_PolyergusCarryingPupa.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1947470 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_PolyergusCarryingPupa.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A kidnapper ant returns to its nest with a stolen pupa in its mandibles. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Some of the pupae are still in their protective silken cocoons. Others that are more mature have had their cocoons removed and look like translucent white ants curled up and motionless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The kidnappers hold the pupae in their long-hooked jaws, called mandibles. The mandibles seem perfectly shaped to grasp the helpless juveniles without damaging them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The kidnapper ants’ jaws are really good for holding the pupae,” Scheckel says. “But they also happen to be very good in battle as well. Because they have pointy tips, they’re really good at piercing the exoskeleton of their rivals in a fight.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The kidnappers scamper back to their home nest holding their stolen prizes high.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As quickly as it started, the raid is over. But the story isn’t done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947471\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_StealingPupae_wide.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947471\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_StealingPupae_wide.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kidnapper ants carry pupae back to their nest. \u003ccite>(Elizabeth Cash/UC Berkeley)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Ants live in a chemical world,” explains Scheckel. “They primarily use their sense of smell for navigating their environment.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ants don’t have noses like we do,” she continues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To learn about the world around them, ants constantly tap their antennae — which are full of tiny holes — on every surface they come across. The behavior is called antennation. Ants antennate to find food and to tell their nest mates apart from strangers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ants also create their own odors. Each nest has its own specific smell, which is a combination of chemicals made by the ants themselves mixed with those from their food and surroundings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You can kind of think about it like going over to your friend’s house growing up,” Scheckel says. “You just walked in and that was kind of the smell of their home. You never forget it. That’s what ants have. It’s kind of a colony signature.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ants collect odors in glands located at the corner of their mouths. They’re like tiny sacs full of chemicals that come from everything the ant comes in contact with. When they groom themselves, they cover themselves in their colony’s signature “perfume.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a young ant emerges from its cocoon, it starts with a blank canvas. “It’s basically naked of smells,” Scheckel says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So when the raid hits, the young ant has no way to know it’s been kidnapped. It can’t tell that it’s being held captive and not in its home nest with its sisters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The kidnappers trick the stolen ant into thinking it belongs in this new nest by grooming it from top to bottom with the chemicals stored in those glands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947472\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_GroomingPupa.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1947472 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_GroomingPupa.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A kidnapper ant grooms a young captive ant, coating it in the kidnappers’ nest signature smell. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“They’re essentially bathing the stolen ants in the kidnappers’ nest odors,” says Scheckel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The young ants think they are home. It’s a form of chemical brainwashing. That’s why the kidnappers choose to steal pupae.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Adults are kind of already set in their ways, so it would be difficult to change their mind about what their identity is,” Scheckel says. “They are not as malleable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When they arrive in their new home, the newly enslaved ants get to work maintaining the nest, caring for the young and even leaving the nest to forage for food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike their captors, the kidnapped ants’ jaws are perfectly shaped for foraging and are serrated for processing food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inside the nest, a hungry kidnapper will approach a captive with its mandibles wide-open and its head tilted up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s kind of like a begging position,” explains Scheckel. “Almost like a baby bird.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947473\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_trophallaxis.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1947473 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_trophallaxis.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A captive ants regurgitates food into its captor’s mouth. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The kidnapper ants completely rely on the captive ants to feed them. Their pointy, curved jaws lack the serrations that would allow them to chew their own food. Without their slaves, the kidnappers would starve. For that reason they’re considered “obligate” kidnappers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two ants will meet mouth to mouth in a kissing pose. The captive ant regurgitates food directly into the kidnapper’s mouth. It’s a process called trophallaxis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s an incredibly altruistic behavior that is only reserved for nest mates,” says Scheckel. “So it’s very unusual to see members of different species doing that with one another. That’s what makes it so unique in the parasitic system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scheckel and her colleagues study these types of relationships in insects. In these unusual ants, the kidnappers are considered parasites and the ants they kidnap are called hosts. It’s an unusual system because the parasite brings the host into its own home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They’re not bloodsucking, but they’re definitely resource-sucking,” explains Scheckel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to any workers that die defending their nest from the invaders, the host species loses the next generation of its workers. Those that remain in the colony may struggle to get enough food to survive the winters when they’re snowed in and can’t leave their nest to forage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While quite familiar with the red kidnapper ants, Scheckel puts most of her attention on studying another species of kidnapper ant. Instead of being entirely red-colored, the species she studies has red heads and thoraxes, and black abdomens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947475\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-1947475\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-1020x574.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-1200x675.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae-1920x1080.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL616_KidnapperAnts_FormicaAserva_Facultative-Kidnappers_pupae.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Facultative kidnapper ants (Formica aserva) on a pile of stolen pupae. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The members of this red-and-black species have grinding mandibles and can feed themselves. But they still kidnap other species’ pupae and raise them as workers in a similar way to the all-red obligate kidnappers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These “facultative” kidnappers represent an evolutionary halfway point between free-living ants and obligate kidnappers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By studying these species, Kelsey and her colleagues say they hope to learn more about how kidnapping came to exist in these incredibly social insects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Studying ants isn’t without its risks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The danger is mostly getting bitten many, many times, and swarmed by very angry ants,” says Scheckel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These species don’t sting, but are able to spray formic acid from their backside that can even cause minor chemical burns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for Scheckel the pain is worth it to study such a complex social animal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can roll over a log and see an entire world,” she says. “And in the ants’ case, an entire society and community living right there at my fingertips.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Laura Shields contributed reporting. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "‘There’s No Ambiguity. It Will Be Gone.’ How California's Animals Will Feel the Warming Climate",
"headTitle": "‘There’s No Ambiguity. It Will Be Gone.’ How California’s Animals Will Feel the Warming Climate | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp class=\"has-drop-cap\">A blue copper butterfly perches waist height on a buckwheat blossom blooming in the cloud dunes near Bodega Bay. In the thick fog its gossamer wings are folded, keeping its sky-blue hues to itself and the milk-white flower. Normally found at higher elevations in California’s Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains, this colony of blue coppers exists in this chilly coastal prairie because of the low clouds that drip with moisture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo.png\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1947420\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-1020x1019.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"245\" height=\"245\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-1020x1019.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-160x160.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-800x799.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-768x767.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo.png 1116w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 245px) 100vw, 245px\">\u003c/a>If the fog belt burns off permanently, this butterfly population will become extinct. “There’s no ambiguity. It will be gone,” said Arthur Shapiro, an evolution and ecology professor at University of California, Davis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Heat is threatening animals around the world. At a time when scientists are certain that human greenhouse gas emissions are warming ocean waters and raising temperatures, however, they are still sorting out how turning up the thermostat is affecting the specific ecosystems that plants and animals rely on – including the coastal fogs so critical to redwoods, these blue coppers and a host of other species. Researchers are also raising questions about the impacts of an additional 8 degrees Fahrenheit on California’s inland species, from the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada. While there is little doubt that changes in climate are shifting the habitats of virtually every living being on Earth, an examination of Northern California, one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet because of its mix of habitats, illustrates the challenges of trying to predict the future for evolving species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Clearly there will be losers. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>But there may also be winners, at least temporarily. As scientists wrestle with the impacts of global temperatures already 2.7 degrees hotter than pre-industrial levels, they are entering a phase of scientific inquiry without parallels, said Shapiro: “Climate change is leading to environments that have no analog in our modern world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947884\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1947884\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Cassins_Auklet-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Cassin’s auklet on the Farallon Island \u003ccite>(Duncan Wright, Wikimedia Commons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the San Francisco Bay Area, the effects of climate change on local species begin at sea. Like oceans around the world, the Pacific has warmed by as much as a half-degree Fahrenheit every decade since 1910. For Cassin’s auklets, the results have been devastating. These chunky fist-sized birds are common in the waters around the Farallon Islands. During the winter of 2014 more than 1,200 young Cassin’s auklets washed up dead – and tens of thousands are thought to have starved, said Shaye Wolf, a climate change scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. An enormous slog of warm water had developed off the Pacific coast. Known as the Blob, this marine heat wave caused massive die-offs and a 30 percent drop in the population of humpback whales.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The warming waters hit Cassin’s auklets, along with many other seabirds and marine mammals, through their food supply. The auklets feed on krill and copepods, small crustaceans found in most of the world’s oceans. Scientists believe the over-heated waters drastically reduced the numbers of the shrimp-like krill, depriving the birds of a dietary mainstay. Warm waters also drew southern copepods north. And while Cassin’s auklets will eat them, they are less nutritious than their fat northern counterparts, “a kind of junk food,” said Wolf.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists detected \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/2019/09/12/review-of-the-pacific-warm-blob-sequel-not-yet-a-phenomena-like-the-original/\">another heat wave developing this summer\u003c/a> in the same area of the previous Blob, this one already 4 degrees Celsius above normal in places. With warmer waters leading to less food, Cassin’s auklets suffered an alarming breeding failure this summer. “Parents abandoned nests and chicks just starved,” Wolf said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"has-drop-cap\">Warming waters are also taking a toll on salmon, threatening these cold-loving fish in several ways. Chinook, the largest of the salmon family, live in both ocean water and freshwater at different stages of their lifecycle. They are extremely resilient and have adapted to some of the warming, said Lisa Crozier, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration salmon researcher and lead author of a July \u003ca href=\"https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0217711\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">study\u003c/a> published in \u003cem>PLOS One\u003c/em>. Still, Chinook, already listed as a federally endangered species, are stressed by warmer temperatures in the Sacramento and other rivers. That makes them susceptible to parasites and disease. If stream temperatures rise beyond 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial era all bets are off, Crozier said. Chinook salmon in the Central Valley may be the first of the many salmon species to blink out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In inland California, butterflies at various elevations have shown mixed responses to record-setting temperatures. During the state’s five-year drought, researchers found the number of butterfly species and individuals observed per year increased at lower elevations but decreased at higher elevations. A 2018 \u003ca href=\"https://climatechangeresponses.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40665-018-0039-x\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">study\u003c/a> documented those at sea level reversing long-term declines, while butterflies in the Sierra Nevada were severely harmed, said Shapiro, the UC Davis professor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Butterflies generally do not do well in warm, wet winters, he said. During the drought, species at low elevation sites benefitted from hot sunny days and cold nights with minimal humidity. But the drought reduced the high-elevation snowpack that helps overwintering butterflies survive until spring. It may also have caused them to emerge earlier in the season, which could have put them out of sync with the flowers and other resources they depend upon. When ecosystems warm to the extent that they are no longer capable of supporting these and other species, “it’s bye bye,” Shapiro said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"has-drop-cap\">How animals will respond is not always straightforward. When \u003ca href=\"https://www.pointblue.org/employee_bios/jay-roberts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Jay Roberts, a Point Blue forest ecologist\u003c/a>, began a study of birds in the Sierra he assumed the five-year drought that killed 147 million trees would be analogous to the climate conditions predicted to occur in the future. He expected to find negative effects to the dusky flycatchers, golden-crowned kinglets and others among the 45 species he monitored. Instead, his \u003ca href=\"https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eap.1848\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">research\u003c/a> documented an overall abundance of birds. Nearly half of the species responded positively to higher temperatures; only 20 percent declined. As climate change continues to increase temperatures, Roberts believes many species may benefit, especially if it is coupled with an increase in precipitation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can’t conclude this trend will continue, Roberts said, but the birds’ response to a drastic shift in temperature over a very few years demonstrates that they are resilient. Like other species in the Sierra, birds have evolved to adjust to disturbances that include drought and fire. “These responses are in their DNA,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, if some of the effects of heat on animals are counterintuitive, the general results are not. Of the state’s 300 at-risk species, those already gone include two populations of the Bay Checkerspot butterfly. \u003ca href=\"http://www.climateassessment.ca.gov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment\u003c/a> predicts temperatures will climb another 5 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Glaciers will continue to melt. In the San Francisco area, where sea level is already 8 inches higher than a century ago, the 2018 assessment projects it will rise an additional 4.5 feet by 2100 – and possibly as much as 9 feet along the California coast. Northern California farmers will face water shortages of up to 16 percent in some regions. Winter storms will likely become more intense in a boom-bust cycle with very wet and very dry years. And in the Sierra Nevada, the snowpack will decline by two-thirds over the next century and temperatures will increase up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, according to an assessment led by David Ackerly, a biology professor at University of California, Berkeley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As scientists continue to document the sometimes surprising ways that animals respond to heat, blue coppers will continue to lay eggs and nibble on buckwheat as caterpillars before spreading their bright blue wings as butterflies. But for how long? These are uncharted times in a hot and entirely novel climate regime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/2019/09/20/theres-no-ambiguity-it-will-be-gone-how-animals-will-feel-the-warming-climate/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story\u003c/a> originally appeared in \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bay Nature\u003c/a>. It is republished here as part of \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/climate\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">KQED Science’s\u003c/a> partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"author-name\">\u003cem>Based in the northern Sierra Nevada, \u003ca href=\"https://www.janebraxtonlittle.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jane Braxton Little\u003c/a> is an independent journalist covering science and natural resource issues for publications that include Scientific American, National Geographic, Audubon, Discover, High Country News and, with this story, Bay Nature.\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"has-drop-cap\">A blue copper butterfly perches waist height on a buckwheat blossom blooming in the cloud dunes near Bodega Bay. In the thick fog its gossamer wings are folded, keeping its sky-blue hues to itself and the milk-white flower. Normally found at higher elevations in California’s Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains, this colony of blue coppers exists in this chilly coastal prairie because of the low clouds that drip with moisture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo.png\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1947420\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-1020x1019.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"245\" height=\"245\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-1020x1019.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-160x160.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-800x799.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-768x767.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo.png 1116w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 245px) 100vw, 245px\">\u003c/a>If the fog belt burns off permanently, this butterfly population will become extinct. “There’s no ambiguity. It will be gone,” said Arthur Shapiro, an evolution and ecology professor at University of California, Davis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Heat is threatening animals around the world. At a time when scientists are certain that human greenhouse gas emissions are warming ocean waters and raising temperatures, however, they are still sorting out how turning up the thermostat is affecting the specific ecosystems that plants and animals rely on – including the coastal fogs so critical to redwoods, these blue coppers and a host of other species. Researchers are also raising questions about the impacts of an additional 8 degrees Fahrenheit on California’s inland species, from the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada. While there is little doubt that changes in climate are shifting the habitats of virtually every living being on Earth, an examination of Northern California, one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet because of its mix of habitats, illustrates the challenges of trying to predict the future for evolving species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Clearly there will be losers. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>But there may also be winners, at least temporarily. As scientists wrestle with the impacts of global temperatures already 2.7 degrees hotter than pre-industrial levels, they are entering a phase of scientific inquiry without parallels, said Shapiro: “Climate change is leading to environments that have no analog in our modern world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947884\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1947884\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Cassins_Auklet-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Cassin’s auklet on the Farallon Island \u003ccite>(Duncan Wright, Wikimedia Commons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the San Francisco Bay Area, the effects of climate change on local species begin at sea. Like oceans around the world, the Pacific has warmed by as much as a half-degree Fahrenheit every decade since 1910. For Cassin’s auklets, the results have been devastating. These chunky fist-sized birds are common in the waters around the Farallon Islands. During the winter of 2014 more than 1,200 young Cassin’s auklets washed up dead – and tens of thousands are thought to have starved, said Shaye Wolf, a climate change scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. An enormous slog of warm water had developed off the Pacific coast. Known as the Blob, this marine heat wave caused massive die-offs and a 30 percent drop in the population of humpback whales.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The warming waters hit Cassin’s auklets, along with many other seabirds and marine mammals, through their food supply. The auklets feed on krill and copepods, small crustaceans found in most of the world’s oceans. Scientists believe the over-heated waters drastically reduced the numbers of the shrimp-like krill, depriving the birds of a dietary mainstay. Warm waters also drew southern copepods north. And while Cassin’s auklets will eat them, they are less nutritious than their fat northern counterparts, “a kind of junk food,” said Wolf.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists detected \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/2019/09/12/review-of-the-pacific-warm-blob-sequel-not-yet-a-phenomena-like-the-original/\">another heat wave developing this summer\u003c/a> in the same area of the previous Blob, this one already 4 degrees Celsius above normal in places. With warmer waters leading to less food, Cassin’s auklets suffered an alarming breeding failure this summer. “Parents abandoned nests and chicks just starved,” Wolf said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"has-drop-cap\">Warming waters are also taking a toll on salmon, threatening these cold-loving fish in several ways. Chinook, the largest of the salmon family, live in both ocean water and freshwater at different stages of their lifecycle. They are extremely resilient and have adapted to some of the warming, said Lisa Crozier, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration salmon researcher and lead author of a July \u003ca href=\"https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0217711\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">study\u003c/a> published in \u003cem>PLOS One\u003c/em>. Still, Chinook, already listed as a federally endangered species, are stressed by warmer temperatures in the Sacramento and other rivers. That makes them susceptible to parasites and disease. If stream temperatures rise beyond 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial era all bets are off, Crozier said. Chinook salmon in the Central Valley may be the first of the many salmon species to blink out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In inland California, butterflies at various elevations have shown mixed responses to record-setting temperatures. During the state’s five-year drought, researchers found the number of butterfly species and individuals observed per year increased at lower elevations but decreased at higher elevations. A 2018 \u003ca href=\"https://climatechangeresponses.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40665-018-0039-x\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">study\u003c/a> documented those at sea level reversing long-term declines, while butterflies in the Sierra Nevada were severely harmed, said Shapiro, the UC Davis professor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Butterflies generally do not do well in warm, wet winters, he said. During the drought, species at low elevation sites benefitted from hot sunny days and cold nights with minimal humidity. But the drought reduced the high-elevation snowpack that helps overwintering butterflies survive until spring. It may also have caused them to emerge earlier in the season, which could have put them out of sync with the flowers and other resources they depend upon. When ecosystems warm to the extent that they are no longer capable of supporting these and other species, “it’s bye bye,” Shapiro said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"has-drop-cap\">How animals will respond is not always straightforward. When \u003ca href=\"https://www.pointblue.org/employee_bios/jay-roberts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Jay Roberts, a Point Blue forest ecologist\u003c/a>, began a study of birds in the Sierra he assumed the five-year drought that killed 147 million trees would be analogous to the climate conditions predicted to occur in the future. He expected to find negative effects to the dusky flycatchers, golden-crowned kinglets and others among the 45 species he monitored. Instead, his \u003ca href=\"https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eap.1848\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">research\u003c/a> documented an overall abundance of birds. Nearly half of the species responded positively to higher temperatures; only 20 percent declined. As climate change continues to increase temperatures, Roberts believes many species may benefit, especially if it is coupled with an increase in precipitation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can’t conclude this trend will continue, Roberts said, but the birds’ response to a drastic shift in temperature over a very few years demonstrates that they are resilient. Like other species in the Sierra, birds have evolved to adjust to disturbances that include drought and fire. “These responses are in their DNA,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, if some of the effects of heat on animals are counterintuitive, the general results are not. Of the state’s 300 at-risk species, those already gone include two populations of the Bay Checkerspot butterfly. \u003ca href=\"http://www.climateassessment.ca.gov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment\u003c/a> predicts temperatures will climb another 5 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Glaciers will continue to melt. In the San Francisco area, where sea level is already 8 inches higher than a century ago, the 2018 assessment projects it will rise an additional 4.5 feet by 2100 – and possibly as much as 9 feet along the California coast. Northern California farmers will face water shortages of up to 16 percent in some regions. Winter storms will likely become more intense in a boom-bust cycle with very wet and very dry years. And in the Sierra Nevada, the snowpack will decline by two-thirds over the next century and temperatures will increase up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, according to an assessment led by David Ackerly, a biology professor at University of California, Berkeley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As scientists continue to document the sometimes surprising ways that animals respond to heat, blue coppers will continue to lay eggs and nibble on buckwheat as caterpillars before spreading their bright blue wings as butterflies. But for how long? These are uncharted times in a hot and entirely novel climate regime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/2019/09/20/theres-no-ambiguity-it-will-be-gone-how-animals-will-feel-the-warming-climate/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story\u003c/a> originally appeared in \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bay Nature\u003c/a>. It is republished here as part of \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/climate\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">KQED Science’s\u003c/a> partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"author-name\">\u003cem>Based in the northern Sierra Nevada, \u003ca href=\"https://www.janebraxtonlittle.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jane Braxton Little\u003c/a> is an independent journalist covering science and natural resource issues for publications that include Scientific American, National Geographic, Audubon, Discover, High Country News and, with this story, Bay Nature.\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp class=\"has-drop-cap\">Something is amiss on Sherman Island, a whale-shaped swath of farm and grazing land at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. If you don’t know what ails the place, it might be hard to pinpoint the problem. The island, in the Sacramento Delta, is roughly 16 square miles. Its asphalt roads, cracked and sagging at the edges, look like cheese melted over a lumpy pizza. The telephone\u003cbr>\npoles, many of them kept erect by taut guy-wires, stand conspicuously at non-right angles. The landscape feels Dr. Seussian—a wacky, slightly absurdist version of farmland, right down to the exaggerated industrial backdrop: a steady stream of cars driving past on State Highway 160, which traverses the island; steaming smokestacks from the power plant across the river; the Antioch Bridge arcing dramatically over the San Joaquin River; enormous wind turbines turning lazily on a hill to the northwest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo.png\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1947420\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-1020x1019.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"251\" height=\"251\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-1020x1019.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-160x160.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-800x799.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-768x767.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo.png 1116w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 251px) 100vw, 251px\">\u003c/a>What’s wrong?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re standing 10 feet below sea level,” Bryan Brock, an engineer with California’s Department of Water Resources, told me during a visit in May. Brock, who has a white-blond goatee sprouting from his chin like tuft grass, evinced supreme calm as he explained: “None of these people realize it driving past, but they’re below sea level. And that’s a problem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The land here, and hundreds of thousands of acres elsewhere in the Delta, began to sink in the late 1800s as people started draining the region’s vast wetlands. As they walled off rivers and created dry islands from what was previously soggy marsh, they discovered incredibly rich soil. In contrast to other fertile regions like Iowa, where topsoil two feet deep was considered bounteous when farmers began plowing it in the 19th century, Delta peat soils—created over thousands of years, by wetland plants growing and dying and not quite decomposing—could be 50 feet deep. No one foresaw that this very bounty—soil rich with organic material—would, over time, become a curse of sorts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>River and marsh bottoms typically have low oxygen levels, which slows the decomposition of organic material that collects there. That organic material contains copious amounts of carbon. Once the waterlogged Delta soils dried out, microbes began to consume the organic detritus, transforming it into gas. Millions of tons of solid ground started going up into the air as microbial exhaust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the land began to sink.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In some places, including parts of Sherman Island, the land has now subsided 25 feet since the late 1800s—and continues to sink between half an inch and 1.5 inches yearly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These “islands” aren’t really islands at all anymore, Brock told me, but empty bathtubs whose bottoms are receding. The deepening cauldrons, now sitting well below sea level, are creating a situation that grows more precarious with each passing year. The more the islands sink, the greater the pressure on the aging mounded dirt levees that keep the water back, and the greater the likelihood that they’ll fail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This situation, called subsidence, worries the California Department of Water Resources and many others, not just because farmers could lose pasture and farmland, but because much of the water that irrigates the Central Valley, and that many Californians depend on for drinking water, is pumped through a sprawling network of canals from the Delta. A large enough breach of those levees—especially if it affected many of the Delta’s 57 islands simultaneously—could hamper the flow of fresh water to the Central Valley, leaving huge swaths of the state without usable water for months, even years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brock describes the mechanics of the threat as the “big gulp.” Water in the 1,100-square-mile Delta—nearly the size of Rhode Island—sits at sea level. Only the pressure of the fresh water flowing down the leveed Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers prevents salt water from the San Francisco Bay from pushing inland. If many levees fail at once, the fresh water that otherwise keeps the salt water away would rush to fill all those empty bathtubs. Brackish water from San Francisco Bay would then flow inland. The water used to irrigate the Central Valley and its $17 billion agricultural economy, and the drinking water for about 25 million people, could become salty and unusable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s Katrina on steroids,” Dennis Baldocchi, a professor of biometeorology at UC Berkeley who studies the Delta, told me. “We’re a $4 trillion economy. Think of shutting down water for 30 million Californians.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because the region is prone to earthquakes—and because faults pass right through the Delta region—an earthquake that could trigger a catastrophic levee failure, defined as 20 islands flooding at once, has a 62 percent chance of occurring in the next two decades if subsidence isn’t addressed, DWR’s own analysis suggests. The event would likely incur tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage and could take a year-and-a-half to repair. Nor is the flooding of Delta islands unprecedented. When Jones Tract, a Delta island, flooded in 2004, the damage cost $90 million to fix. In earlier times, several islands that were inundated were simply abandoned: Google Maps reveals lakes—the Mildred Tract, Franks Tract— where farmland once existed, discernible by the ring-shaped remains of levees rising, like coral atolls, from the Delta water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re not paying attention,” Baldocchi told me; the disaster-in-waiting, he asserts, has not drawn the concern it deserves. Action to address the problem has been stymied for years by, in part, the sheer number and variety of agencies, sometimes with competing agendas, operating in the Delta. Interagency rivalry and distrust have yielded what Ray Seed, a UC Berkeley professor of environmental engineering and an expert on the Delta, once described as a “60- to 70-year stalemate” in which “we will all lose together.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s truly a wicked problem,” agrees Campbell Ingram, head of the Delta Conservancy, a state agency tasked with ecosystem restoration in the area. Yet for the first time in his 13-plus years working on the issue, he says, the majority of stakeholders now concur that the subsidence issue needs to be addressed urgently. “We’re kind of in this weird space where we simultaneously can’t \u003cem>prevent\u003c/em> the Delta from failing, and we can’t \u003cem>allow\u003c/em> it to fail,” he adds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One solution is for the landowners, with some state funding, to keep repairing the levees, building them higher and wider. But as sea levels rise and the islands continue to subside, the costs of fortifying and maintaining the structures may exceed the value of the land and agricultural production behind them, says Alf Brandt, counsel to the State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. For some of the deepest islands, the conclusion of that cost-benefit analysis already looks unfavorable, he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For decades, DWR has been working on another more ecosystem-based fix. Since the 1990s, the agency has experimentally re-flooded pieces of land in the Delta, with the goal of reestablishing wetlands like those that created the soil in the first place. The reasoning is that once wet, the land will stop losing carbon and the sinking will come to a halt. Even if that doesn’t entirely resolve the problem, Ingram says, it prevents the situation from getting worse. And over the long term, marsh plants may, through photosynthesis, capture enough carbon from the atmosphere that the ground begins rising again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s through this last mechanism—plants’ ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere—that a project originally conceived to protect California’s water infrastructure has, over the years, evolved into something more interdisciplinary, and of potentially greater importance. Although they can produce powerful greenhouse gases, wetlands can also sequester and store immense quantities of carbon. Policymakers have historically ignored these places in discussions about greenhouse gas emissions, but that’s now changing as they come to appreciate the huge stores of carbon that wetlands already contain—and the large quantities of greenhouse gases they release when destroyed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An expanding body of research has prompted land managers to consider, for the first time, creating wetland carbon credits that might be traded in carbon markets. In California, at least, efforts to address one worsening disaster could enable prevention of another. Mounting anxiety over global heating may be what spurs creation of carbon credits that, by providing funding for Delta wetland restoration, also produce badly needed funds to protect California’s water infrastructure. “It would have been great to have done this 30 or 40 years ago,” Kristopher Tjernell, deputy director of DWR’s Integrated Watershed Management Program, told me. “But you know, it wasn’t ripe. And it’s ripe now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"has-drop-cap\">“Blue carbon” refers to carbon momentarily trapped—or slowed down, really—in waterlogged ecosystems. Because the microbes that break down carbon in wet conditions work much more slowly than those in more aerated environs and through different biochemical pathways, wetland ecosystems can accumulate and store far more carbon per acre than forests and savannas can. Scientists have known this in a roundabout way for a long time: After all, the coal and oil deposits that have fueled civilization since the Industrial Revolution come from ancient marsh and marine ecosystems that, after accumulating huge quantities of carbon, were buried and fossilized over millions of years. Fossil fuels, you might say, are an aged form of blue carbon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historically, policymakers and scientists have been daunted by the many variables involved in calculating the amount of carbon held in wetlands and, more broadly, in the web of living things we call the biosphere, according to Stephen Crooks, cofounder of Silvestrum Climate associates in San Francisco. It’s far more complicated than quantifying how much comes out of smokestacks and tailpipes, he says: “It was seen as more challenging and somewhat scary to include.” But the omission has always been, in his view, untenable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Worldwide, about 450 million tons of carbon dioxide enter the atmosphere yearly from wetland degradation—destroyed mangrove forests, drained marshes, and smothered seagrass beds. That’s equal to the yearly human-caused greenhouse gas emissions of France, the U.K., or California. “When your emissions are the size of California’s economy and you weren’t counting it,” he told me, “that’s a very big surprise.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wetland ecosystems comprise just 5 to 8 percent of the planet’s land area but contain between 20 and 30 percent of the world’s soil carbon. “When you destroy a wetland, you can release thousands of years of carbon in just a few decades,” Crooks says. On the flip side, by preserving wetlands, you can protect millennia’s worth of accumulated carbon with, in theory, relatively little effort. The Sacramento Delta, the largest estuary along the western edge of the Americas, has become a test case for this idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Delta may have once held the largest freshwater wetland carbon reserves on the West Coast. Since it was drained over a century ago, it has released an amount of carbon equal to one-quarter of California’s forests—all the redwoods, pines, and oaks in the nation’s third-largest state, according to Baldocchi and his colleagues. And it’s still emitting carbon. Although it comprises less than 1 percent of the state’s cropland, every year the Delta releases a quantity of carbon equal to one-quarter of all plant-related agriculture—all the tractors, plows, and combine harvesters operated in the state. “I’ve been making measurements my whole career, and I’ve never seen fluxes as large as what’s happening from these peat soils,” Baldocchi told me. The near-term goal in the Delta, and in any degraded wetland really, is to stop subsidence and emissions. The longer-term goal is to reverse them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crossing over the blue-gray San Joaquin River on the Antioch Bridge, you can just glimpse the glittering wetlands to the west on Sherman Island. They’re easy to miss at 60 miles an hour. But as I stood with Brock on a wooden walkway a few feet above them in May, the low roar of the semi-industrial landscape—cars speeding over the bridge and boats motoring by on the other side of the levee—receded as I watched birds flit acrobatically among the rustling tule reeds and dragonflies hover over the dark water. The wetlands, hemmed in as they are by levees, roads, and fields of grazing cows, look remarkably healthy. They represent the implementation phase of DWR’s ongoing project, which seeks to shore up the threatened levees by creating wetlands on their subsided “bathtub” sides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Isn’t it beautiful,” Brock said, looking out over the reeds. “Sometimes nature can do things better than humans.” Which is not to say the DWR restoration project was as easy as opening the floodgates and watching the cattails return. Before water was allowed back, he explained, the land had to be carefully sculpted to ensure the optimal water depth for marsh plants to grow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brock’s predecessors created the first experimental wetlands, on nearby Twitchell Island, in the 1990s. Not only did bringing water back halt the loss of carbon from the soil and stop subsidence, experts discovered, but the wetland plants grew so rapidly that, as they died and left tangled masses of roots and stalks, they raised the elevation of ground at an average rate of 4 centimeters per year. A common assertion among soil scientists is that an inch of topsoil takes a century to accumulate, maybe longer. But these wetland plants were turning carbon dioxide into solid earth at a rate observable by humans from one year to the next.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even so, given the magnitude of the subsidence problem, that rate of soil accretion can seem sorely inadequate. It will take roughly 150 years to get the most sunken areas of these islands back to sea level, Baldocchi told me. “People have trouble thinking in 100-year time scales,” he said. “We can’t get bored with these projects in 15 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet the long-term time frame doesn’t mean we have to wait till the end for the project to bear fruit. Campbell Ingram of the Delta Conservancy emphasizes the importance of “stopping increased risk”—of halting subsidence. What’s key to understand, he says, is that the risk of levee breach does not increase linearly with subsidence, but exponentially. So by halting subsidence, you prevent the ballooning probability of catastrophic failure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And if the ground regains just a few feet over the years, the risk of catastrophe declines non-linearly as well. Meaning you don’t need to grow the ground back to sea level to dramatically reduce the possibility of a calamitous breach. Some modeling suggests that just gaining half the lost ground back—about 50 to 75 years as opposed to 150—could bring the likelihood of widespread failure to nearly zero.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even so, the major challenge facing the project is how to reach a scale of wetland restoration that’s meaningful for the greater Delta. DWR has so far flooded about 1,700 acres in four separate wetlands. But altogether there are about 250,000 acres of deeply subsided land in the Delta, most of it owned by farmers. So success depends in part on convincing farmers to forgo cash crops and flood their land instead, something that’s unlikely to happen without adequate monetary incentive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ideally, Ingram says, the state would pay farmers to convert cropland to wetland. (There is also an intermediate option, a wetland that sustains a crop: rice in flooded fields. In experiments, rice paddies stopped subsidence, but they didn’t reverse it.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California does have a relatively new program, called the Healthy Soils Initiative, whereby state money goes to farmers who implement practices thought to benefit soil health. It’s a model of what’s possible, Ingram says, but regrettably no such program exists for Delta wetlands. Marsh provides critical habitat for various species, so other income sources for farmers might include duck clubs or federal and state programs that pay for creation of endangered-animal habitat. But for now Ingram is betting on carbon markets, particularly California’s cap-and-trade system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We want to get to a point where a farmer wakes up and says, ‘I can earn more flooding my land than growing corn,’” Ingram told me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Established in 2006 by the law AB32, the cap-and-trade system seeks to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by harnessing market forces. The state establishes an upper limit on greenhouse gas pollution—the cap—and then gives polluters a certain number of allowances to emit the offending gases. The quantity of allowances given out declines over time, forcing polluters to either clean up their operations or to purchase allowances from polluters who have a surfeit. Polluters can also buy a certain number of offset carbon credits from projects that either prevent the emission of greenhouse gases or remove them from the atmosphere. This is where restored Delta marshes might come in—as a source of offset credits for purchase.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ingram and Steve Deverel—one of the scientists who, when with USGS, conducted the original pilot projects on reversing subsidence in the Delta and is now with the consulting firm Hydrofocus—developed a Delta wetland carbon protocol that the American Carbon Registry approved in 2017. Meaning that they can sell offsets in the voluntary carbon market.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Approval for the state’s cap-and-trade system, where offset credits now trade for roughly double the rate seen on the voluntary market and might actually compete with earnings from crops, is likely a year-and-a-half away, Ingram says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And these are complicated carbon offsets. Freshwater wetland plants can pull carbon from the atmosphere at a spectacular rate—about 5.7 tons per acre per year in the Delta—but freshwater wetlands also emit the greenhouse gas methane, which has about 30 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. According to Baldocchi, the warming caused by the methane released from Delta wetlands about equals, in the short term, the cooling potential of the carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"entry-content\">\n\u003cp>Why go through all the trouble, then, if we end up right where we started? Think of it as preventive medicine. By re-flooding one acre of peatland in the Sacramento Delta, you prevent between 10 and 20 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere—via the organic material that microbes would have turned into gas if the land remained dry. That’s equivalent to between two and four years of driving your average car. In addition, you prevent worsening of the subsidence problem and its threat to the state’s water supply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lisamarie Windham-Myers, a scientist with USGS, thinks she may eventually be able to improve the climate-cooling potential of these wetlands by emulating what happens in certain marshes that \u003cem>don’t\u003c/em> produce greenhouse gases. Saltwater and brackish marshes don’t release nearly as much methane as freshwater wetlands, she explains. That’s because ocean water contains sulfate, which changes the biochemical pathways available to microbes that break down organic material. With sulfate present, instead of creating methane as a byproduct, microbes produce sulfide, which isn’t a greenhouse gas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Windham-Myers studies the Suisun marshes, not far from Sherman Island. She’s found that even trace amounts of sulfate in the water prevent those counterproductive methane emissions. In Suisun, the sulfate comes from the small quantity of seawater that pushes into the system from San Francisco Bay. But even freshwater systems, she emphasizes, can contain trace amounts of sulfate—or iron, which also prevents methane production. In fact, she has observed that methane emissions from different parts of the restored DWR wetlands vary greatly, likely because of how water moves through them—carrying tiny concentrations of sulfate or iron to some areas, but not to others. Once scientists better understand such dynamics, they may be able to control the flow of water through resurrected wetlands in a way that limits methane, increases the net climate benefit, and raises the value of the carbon credit sold against restored Delta wetlands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The role of hydrology is definitely emerging as a knob we can turn,” Windham-Myers told me. “Let’s fine-tune these wetlands to make them as amazing as possible.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/article/want-to-prevent-californias-katrina-grow-a-marsh/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story\u003c/a> originally appeared in \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bay Nature\u003c/a>. It is republished here as part of \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/climate\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">KQED Science’s\u003c/a> partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Moises Velasquez-Manoff is Bay Nature’s senior editor and the author of An Epidemic of Absence.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"has-drop-cap\">Something is amiss on Sherman Island, a whale-shaped swath of farm and grazing land at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. If you don’t know what ails the place, it might be hard to pinpoint the problem. The island, in the Sacramento Delta, is roughly 16 square miles. Its asphalt roads, cracked and sagging at the edges, look like cheese melted over a lumpy pizza. The telephone\u003cbr>\npoles, many of them kept erect by taut guy-wires, stand conspicuously at non-right angles. The landscape feels Dr. Seussian—a wacky, slightly absurdist version of farmland, right down to the exaggerated industrial backdrop: a steady stream of cars driving past on State Highway 160, which traverses the island; steaming smokestacks from the power plant across the river; the Antioch Bridge arcing dramatically over the San Joaquin River; enormous wind turbines turning lazily on a hill to the northwest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo.png\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1947420\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-1020x1019.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"251\" height=\"251\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-1020x1019.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-160x160.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-800x799.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo-768x767.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/Covering-Climate-Now-Logo.png 1116w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 251px) 100vw, 251px\">\u003c/a>What’s wrong?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re standing 10 feet below sea level,” Bryan Brock, an engineer with California’s Department of Water Resources, told me during a visit in May. Brock, who has a white-blond goatee sprouting from his chin like tuft grass, evinced supreme calm as he explained: “None of these people realize it driving past, but they’re below sea level. And that’s a problem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The land here, and hundreds of thousands of acres elsewhere in the Delta, began to sink in the late 1800s as people started draining the region’s vast wetlands. As they walled off rivers and created dry islands from what was previously soggy marsh, they discovered incredibly rich soil. In contrast to other fertile regions like Iowa, where topsoil two feet deep was considered bounteous when farmers began plowing it in the 19th century, Delta peat soils—created over thousands of years, by wetland plants growing and dying and not quite decomposing—could be 50 feet deep. No one foresaw that this very bounty—soil rich with organic material—would, over time, become a curse of sorts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>River and marsh bottoms typically have low oxygen levels, which slows the decomposition of organic material that collects there. That organic material contains copious amounts of carbon. Once the waterlogged Delta soils dried out, microbes began to consume the organic detritus, transforming it into gas. Millions of tons of solid ground started going up into the air as microbial exhaust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the land began to sink.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In some places, including parts of Sherman Island, the land has now subsided 25 feet since the late 1800s—and continues to sink between half an inch and 1.5 inches yearly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These “islands” aren’t really islands at all anymore, Brock told me, but empty bathtubs whose bottoms are receding. The deepening cauldrons, now sitting well below sea level, are creating a situation that grows more precarious with each passing year. The more the islands sink, the greater the pressure on the aging mounded dirt levees that keep the water back, and the greater the likelihood that they’ll fail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This situation, called subsidence, worries the California Department of Water Resources and many others, not just because farmers could lose pasture and farmland, but because much of the water that irrigates the Central Valley, and that many Californians depend on for drinking water, is pumped through a sprawling network of canals from the Delta. A large enough breach of those levees—especially if it affected many of the Delta’s 57 islands simultaneously—could hamper the flow of fresh water to the Central Valley, leaving huge swaths of the state without usable water for months, even years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brock describes the mechanics of the threat as the “big gulp.” Water in the 1,100-square-mile Delta—nearly the size of Rhode Island—sits at sea level. Only the pressure of the fresh water flowing down the leveed Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers prevents salt water from the San Francisco Bay from pushing inland. If many levees fail at once, the fresh water that otherwise keeps the salt water away would rush to fill all those empty bathtubs. Brackish water from San Francisco Bay would then flow inland. The water used to irrigate the Central Valley and its $17 billion agricultural economy, and the drinking water for about 25 million people, could become salty and unusable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s Katrina on steroids,” Dennis Baldocchi, a professor of biometeorology at UC Berkeley who studies the Delta, told me. “We’re a $4 trillion economy. Think of shutting down water for 30 million Californians.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because the region is prone to earthquakes—and because faults pass right through the Delta region—an earthquake that could trigger a catastrophic levee failure, defined as 20 islands flooding at once, has a 62 percent chance of occurring in the next two decades if subsidence isn’t addressed, DWR’s own analysis suggests. The event would likely incur tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage and could take a year-and-a-half to repair. Nor is the flooding of Delta islands unprecedented. When Jones Tract, a Delta island, flooded in 2004, the damage cost $90 million to fix. In earlier times, several islands that were inundated were simply abandoned: Google Maps reveals lakes—the Mildred Tract, Franks Tract— where farmland once existed, discernible by the ring-shaped remains of levees rising, like coral atolls, from the Delta water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re not paying attention,” Baldocchi told me; the disaster-in-waiting, he asserts, has not drawn the concern it deserves. Action to address the problem has been stymied for years by, in part, the sheer number and variety of agencies, sometimes with competing agendas, operating in the Delta. Interagency rivalry and distrust have yielded what Ray Seed, a UC Berkeley professor of environmental engineering and an expert on the Delta, once described as a “60- to 70-year stalemate” in which “we will all lose together.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s truly a wicked problem,” agrees Campbell Ingram, head of the Delta Conservancy, a state agency tasked with ecosystem restoration in the area. Yet for the first time in his 13-plus years working on the issue, he says, the majority of stakeholders now concur that the subsidence issue needs to be addressed urgently. “We’re kind of in this weird space where we simultaneously can’t \u003cem>prevent\u003c/em> the Delta from failing, and we can’t \u003cem>allow\u003c/em> it to fail,” he adds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One solution is for the landowners, with some state funding, to keep repairing the levees, building them higher and wider. But as sea levels rise and the islands continue to subside, the costs of fortifying and maintaining the structures may exceed the value of the land and agricultural production behind them, says Alf Brandt, counsel to the State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. For some of the deepest islands, the conclusion of that cost-benefit analysis already looks unfavorable, he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For decades, DWR has been working on another more ecosystem-based fix. Since the 1990s, the agency has experimentally re-flooded pieces of land in the Delta, with the goal of reestablishing wetlands like those that created the soil in the first place. The reasoning is that once wet, the land will stop losing carbon and the sinking will come to a halt. Even if that doesn’t entirely resolve the problem, Ingram says, it prevents the situation from getting worse. And over the long term, marsh plants may, through photosynthesis, capture enough carbon from the atmosphere that the ground begins rising again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s through this last mechanism—plants’ ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere—that a project originally conceived to protect California’s water infrastructure has, over the years, evolved into something more interdisciplinary, and of potentially greater importance. Although they can produce powerful greenhouse gases, wetlands can also sequester and store immense quantities of carbon. Policymakers have historically ignored these places in discussions about greenhouse gas emissions, but that’s now changing as they come to appreciate the huge stores of carbon that wetlands already contain—and the large quantities of greenhouse gases they release when destroyed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An expanding body of research has prompted land managers to consider, for the first time, creating wetland carbon credits that might be traded in carbon markets. In California, at least, efforts to address one worsening disaster could enable prevention of another. Mounting anxiety over global heating may be what spurs creation of carbon credits that, by providing funding for Delta wetland restoration, also produce badly needed funds to protect California’s water infrastructure. “It would have been great to have done this 30 or 40 years ago,” Kristopher Tjernell, deputy director of DWR’s Integrated Watershed Management Program, told me. “But you know, it wasn’t ripe. And it’s ripe now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"has-drop-cap\">“Blue carbon” refers to carbon momentarily trapped—or slowed down, really—in waterlogged ecosystems. Because the microbes that break down carbon in wet conditions work much more slowly than those in more aerated environs and through different biochemical pathways, wetland ecosystems can accumulate and store far more carbon per acre than forests and savannas can. Scientists have known this in a roundabout way for a long time: After all, the coal and oil deposits that have fueled civilization since the Industrial Revolution come from ancient marsh and marine ecosystems that, after accumulating huge quantities of carbon, were buried and fossilized over millions of years. Fossil fuels, you might say, are an aged form of blue carbon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historically, policymakers and scientists have been daunted by the many variables involved in calculating the amount of carbon held in wetlands and, more broadly, in the web of living things we call the biosphere, according to Stephen Crooks, cofounder of Silvestrum Climate associates in San Francisco. It’s far more complicated than quantifying how much comes out of smokestacks and tailpipes, he says: “It was seen as more challenging and somewhat scary to include.” But the omission has always been, in his view, untenable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Worldwide, about 450 million tons of carbon dioxide enter the atmosphere yearly from wetland degradation—destroyed mangrove forests, drained marshes, and smothered seagrass beds. That’s equal to the yearly human-caused greenhouse gas emissions of France, the U.K., or California. “When your emissions are the size of California’s economy and you weren’t counting it,” he told me, “that’s a very big surprise.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wetland ecosystems comprise just 5 to 8 percent of the planet’s land area but contain between 20 and 30 percent of the world’s soil carbon. “When you destroy a wetland, you can release thousands of years of carbon in just a few decades,” Crooks says. On the flip side, by preserving wetlands, you can protect millennia’s worth of accumulated carbon with, in theory, relatively little effort. The Sacramento Delta, the largest estuary along the western edge of the Americas, has become a test case for this idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Delta may have once held the largest freshwater wetland carbon reserves on the West Coast. Since it was drained over a century ago, it has released an amount of carbon equal to one-quarter of California’s forests—all the redwoods, pines, and oaks in the nation’s third-largest state, according to Baldocchi and his colleagues. And it’s still emitting carbon. Although it comprises less than 1 percent of the state’s cropland, every year the Delta releases a quantity of carbon equal to one-quarter of all plant-related agriculture—all the tractors, plows, and combine harvesters operated in the state. “I’ve been making measurements my whole career, and I’ve never seen fluxes as large as what’s happening from these peat soils,” Baldocchi told me. The near-term goal in the Delta, and in any degraded wetland really, is to stop subsidence and emissions. The longer-term goal is to reverse them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crossing over the blue-gray San Joaquin River on the Antioch Bridge, you can just glimpse the glittering wetlands to the west on Sherman Island. They’re easy to miss at 60 miles an hour. But as I stood with Brock on a wooden walkway a few feet above them in May, the low roar of the semi-industrial landscape—cars speeding over the bridge and boats motoring by on the other side of the levee—receded as I watched birds flit acrobatically among the rustling tule reeds and dragonflies hover over the dark water. The wetlands, hemmed in as they are by levees, roads, and fields of grazing cows, look remarkably healthy. They represent the implementation phase of DWR’s ongoing project, which seeks to shore up the threatened levees by creating wetlands on their subsided “bathtub” sides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Isn’t it beautiful,” Brock said, looking out over the reeds. “Sometimes nature can do things better than humans.” Which is not to say the DWR restoration project was as easy as opening the floodgates and watching the cattails return. Before water was allowed back, he explained, the land had to be carefully sculpted to ensure the optimal water depth for marsh plants to grow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brock’s predecessors created the first experimental wetlands, on nearby Twitchell Island, in the 1990s. Not only did bringing water back halt the loss of carbon from the soil and stop subsidence, experts discovered, but the wetland plants grew so rapidly that, as they died and left tangled masses of roots and stalks, they raised the elevation of ground at an average rate of 4 centimeters per year. A common assertion among soil scientists is that an inch of topsoil takes a century to accumulate, maybe longer. But these wetland plants were turning carbon dioxide into solid earth at a rate observable by humans from one year to the next.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even so, given the magnitude of the subsidence problem, that rate of soil accretion can seem sorely inadequate. It will take roughly 150 years to get the most sunken areas of these islands back to sea level, Baldocchi told me. “People have trouble thinking in 100-year time scales,” he said. “We can’t get bored with these projects in 15 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet the long-term time frame doesn’t mean we have to wait till the end for the project to bear fruit. Campbell Ingram of the Delta Conservancy emphasizes the importance of “stopping increased risk”—of halting subsidence. What’s key to understand, he says, is that the risk of levee breach does not increase linearly with subsidence, but exponentially. So by halting subsidence, you prevent the ballooning probability of catastrophic failure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And if the ground regains just a few feet over the years, the risk of catastrophe declines non-linearly as well. Meaning you don’t need to grow the ground back to sea level to dramatically reduce the possibility of a calamitous breach. Some modeling suggests that just gaining half the lost ground back—about 50 to 75 years as opposed to 150—could bring the likelihood of widespread failure to nearly zero.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even so, the major challenge facing the project is how to reach a scale of wetland restoration that’s meaningful for the greater Delta. DWR has so far flooded about 1,700 acres in four separate wetlands. But altogether there are about 250,000 acres of deeply subsided land in the Delta, most of it owned by farmers. So success depends in part on convincing farmers to forgo cash crops and flood their land instead, something that’s unlikely to happen without adequate monetary incentive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ideally, Ingram says, the state would pay farmers to convert cropland to wetland. (There is also an intermediate option, a wetland that sustains a crop: rice in flooded fields. In experiments, rice paddies stopped subsidence, but they didn’t reverse it.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California does have a relatively new program, called the Healthy Soils Initiative, whereby state money goes to farmers who implement practices thought to benefit soil health. It’s a model of what’s possible, Ingram says, but regrettably no such program exists for Delta wetlands. Marsh provides critical habitat for various species, so other income sources for farmers might include duck clubs or federal and state programs that pay for creation of endangered-animal habitat. But for now Ingram is betting on carbon markets, particularly California’s cap-and-trade system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We want to get to a point where a farmer wakes up and says, ‘I can earn more flooding my land than growing corn,’” Ingram told me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Established in 2006 by the law AB32, the cap-and-trade system seeks to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by harnessing market forces. The state establishes an upper limit on greenhouse gas pollution—the cap—and then gives polluters a certain number of allowances to emit the offending gases. The quantity of allowances given out declines over time, forcing polluters to either clean up their operations or to purchase allowances from polluters who have a surfeit. Polluters can also buy a certain number of offset carbon credits from projects that either prevent the emission of greenhouse gases or remove them from the atmosphere. This is where restored Delta marshes might come in—as a source of offset credits for purchase.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ingram and Steve Deverel—one of the scientists who, when with USGS, conducted the original pilot projects on reversing subsidence in the Delta and is now with the consulting firm Hydrofocus—developed a Delta wetland carbon protocol that the American Carbon Registry approved in 2017. Meaning that they can sell offsets in the voluntary carbon market.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Approval for the state’s cap-and-trade system, where offset credits now trade for roughly double the rate seen on the voluntary market and might actually compete with earnings from crops, is likely a year-and-a-half away, Ingram says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And these are complicated carbon offsets. Freshwater wetland plants can pull carbon from the atmosphere at a spectacular rate—about 5.7 tons per acre per year in the Delta—but freshwater wetlands also emit the greenhouse gas methane, which has about 30 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. According to Baldocchi, the warming caused by the methane released from Delta wetlands about equals, in the short term, the cooling potential of the carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"entry-content\">\n\u003cp>Why go through all the trouble, then, if we end up right where we started? Think of it as preventive medicine. By re-flooding one acre of peatland in the Sacramento Delta, you prevent between 10 and 20 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere—via the organic material that microbes would have turned into gas if the land remained dry. That’s equivalent to between two and four years of driving your average car. In addition, you prevent worsening of the subsidence problem and its threat to the state’s water supply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lisamarie Windham-Myers, a scientist with USGS, thinks she may eventually be able to improve the climate-cooling potential of these wetlands by emulating what happens in certain marshes that \u003cem>don’t\u003c/em> produce greenhouse gases. Saltwater and brackish marshes don’t release nearly as much methane as freshwater wetlands, she explains. That’s because ocean water contains sulfate, which changes the biochemical pathways available to microbes that break down organic material. With sulfate present, instead of creating methane as a byproduct, microbes produce sulfide, which isn’t a greenhouse gas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Windham-Myers studies the Suisun marshes, not far from Sherman Island. She’s found that even trace amounts of sulfate in the water prevent those counterproductive methane emissions. In Suisun, the sulfate comes from the small quantity of seawater that pushes into the system from San Francisco Bay. But even freshwater systems, she emphasizes, can contain trace amounts of sulfate—or iron, which also prevents methane production. In fact, she has observed that methane emissions from different parts of the restored DWR wetlands vary greatly, likely because of how water moves through them—carrying tiny concentrations of sulfate or iron to some areas, but not to others. Once scientists better understand such dynamics, they may be able to control the flow of water through resurrected wetlands in a way that limits methane, increases the net climate benefit, and raises the value of the carbon credit sold against restored Delta wetlands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The role of hydrology is definitely emerging as a knob we can turn,” Windham-Myers told me. “Let’s fine-tune these wetlands to make them as amazing as possible.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/article/want-to-prevent-californias-katrina-grow-a-marsh/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story\u003c/a> originally appeared in \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bay Nature\u003c/a>. It is republished here as part of \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/climate\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">KQED Science’s\u003c/a> partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>It’s a big feat to get 65,000 people to do anything, let alone spend three hours picking up soiled trash.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet, state officials are expecting around that number to turn out Saturday for the 35th annual \u003ca href=\"www.coastalcleanupday.org\">Coastal Cleanup Day\u003c/a>. The event attracts volunteers who spread out across more than 1,000 coastal beaches, rivers and parks in 55 of California’s 58 counties. Merced, Sutter, and Trinity counties do not participate. \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThe cleanup is the state’s largest volunteer event and one of its longest-running. The first beach cleanup took place in 1985. Last year, almost 72,000 people showed up to collect nearly a million pounds of trash and debris in just three hours, said Eben Schwartz, manager of marine debris programs at the California Coastal Commission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s really a huge impact from this one-day event because we’re able to spread our reach so far into inland California, where much of the trash that is entering the ocean starts,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state estimates that over the last three decades, more than 1.5 million people have removed 25 million pounds of trash during the annual cleanups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To commemorate the anniversary, the commission built a \u003ca href=\"https://coastalcomm.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=de6a98eb91a24bd3ab51826f5e8eb7d2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website\u003c/a> describing the event’s history, impact, and photos going back two decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent years, volunteers have taken \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11692763/coastal-cleanup-day-takes-aim-at-manufacturers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">aim\u003c/a> at plastic coffee lids, to-go boxes, silverware and other items that people typically use once before tossing out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Such items don’t fully decompose but will break down into tiny bits that are consumed by ocean creatures, entering the food chain. The \u003ca href=\"http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/ioc-oceans/focus-areas/rio-20-ocean/blueprint-for-the-future-we-want/marine-pollution/facts-and-figures-on-marine-pollution/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">United Nations\u003c/a> estimates that more than 1 million marine mammals die every year due to microplastic debris.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A UC Santa Barbara \u003ca href=\"https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782.full\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study\u003c/a> conducted in 2017 found that half of all the plastic ever produced was manufactured in the previous 13 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cleanup event on Saturday, Sept. 21 will begin at 9 a.m. and end at noon in most places.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state keeps a list of event coordinators \u003ca href=\"https://www.coastal.ca.gov/publiced/ccd/Coord_info_for_web.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>, instructions for what to bring \u003ca href=\"https://www.coastal.ca.gov/publiced/ccd/byo.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>, and answers to frequently asked questions \u003ca href=\"https://www.coastal.ca.gov/publiced/ccd/bring.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>It’s a big feat to get 65,000 people to do anything, let alone spend three hours picking up soiled trash.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet, state officials are expecting around that number to turn out Saturday for the 35th annual \u003ca href=\"www.coastalcleanupday.org\">Coastal Cleanup Day\u003c/a>. The event attracts volunteers who spread out across more than 1,000 coastal beaches, rivers and parks in 55 of California’s 58 counties. Merced, Sutter, and Trinity counties do not participate. \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThe cleanup is the state’s largest volunteer event and one of its longest-running. The first beach cleanup took place in 1985. Last year, almost 72,000 people showed up to collect nearly a million pounds of trash and debris in just three hours, said Eben Schwartz, manager of marine debris programs at the California Coastal Commission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s really a huge impact from this one-day event because we’re able to spread our reach so far into inland California, where much of the trash that is entering the ocean starts,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state estimates that over the last three decades, more than 1.5 million people have removed 25 million pounds of trash during the annual cleanups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To commemorate the anniversary, the commission built a \u003ca href=\"https://coastalcomm.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=de6a98eb91a24bd3ab51826f5e8eb7d2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website\u003c/a> describing the event’s history, impact, and photos going back two decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent years, volunteers have taken \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11692763/coastal-cleanup-day-takes-aim-at-manufacturers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">aim\u003c/a> at plastic coffee lids, to-go boxes, silverware and other items that people typically use once before tossing out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Such items don’t fully decompose but will break down into tiny bits that are consumed by ocean creatures, entering the food chain. The \u003ca href=\"http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/ioc-oceans/focus-areas/rio-20-ocean/blueprint-for-the-future-we-want/marine-pollution/facts-and-figures-on-marine-pollution/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">United Nations\u003c/a> estimates that more than 1 million marine mammals die every year due to microplastic debris.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A UC Santa Barbara \u003ca href=\"https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782.full\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study\u003c/a> conducted in 2017 found that half of all the plastic ever produced was manufactured in the previous 13 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cleanup event on Saturday, Sept. 21 will begin at 9 a.m. and end at noon in most places.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state keeps a list of event coordinators \u003ca href=\"https://www.coastal.ca.gov/publiced/ccd/Coord_info_for_web.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>, instructions for what to bring \u003ca href=\"https://www.coastal.ca.gov/publiced/ccd/byo.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>, and answers to frequently asked questions \u003ca href=\"https://www.coastal.ca.gov/publiced/ccd/bring.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "North America Has Lost 3 Billion Birds, Scientists Say",
"headTitle": "North America Has Lost 3 Billion Birds, Scientists Say | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Over the past half-century, North America has lost more than a quarter of its entire bird population, or around 3 billion birds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s according to a \u003ca href=\"https://science.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaw1313\">new estimate\u003c/a> published in the journal \u003cem>Science \u003c/em>by researchers who brought together a variety of information that has been collected on 529 bird species since 1970.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We saw this tremendous net loss across the entire bird community,” says \u003ca href=\"https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/staff/ken-rosenberg/\">Ken Rosenberg\u003c/a>, an applied conservation scientist at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/\">Cornell Lab of Ornithology\u003c/a> in Ithaca, N.Y. “By our estimates, it’s a 30% loss in the total number of breeding birds.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rosenberg and his colleagues already knew that a number of bird populations had been decreasing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But we also knew that other bird populations were increasing,” he says. “And what we didn’t know is whether there was a net change.” Scientists thought there might simply be a shift in the total bird population toward more generalist birds adapted to living around humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To find out, the researchers collected data from long-running surveys conducted with the help of volunteer bird spotters, such as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/\">North American Breeding Bird Survey\u003c/a> and the \u003ca href=\"https://www.audubon.org/conservation/science/christmas-bird-count\">Audubon Christmas Bird Count\u003c/a>. They combined that data with a decade’s worth of data on migrating bird flocks detected by 143 weather radar installations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Their results show that more than 90% of the loss can be attributed to just a dozen bird families, including sparrows, warblers, blackbirds and finches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Common birds with decreasing populations include meadowlarks, dark-eyed juncos, horned larks and red-winged blackbirds, says Rosenberg. Grassland birds have suffered a 53% decrease in their numbers, and more than a third of the shorebird population has been lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bird populations that have increased include raptors, like the bald eagle, and waterfowl.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The numbers of ducks and geese are larger than they’ve ever been, and that’s not an accident,” says Rosenberg. “It’s because hunters who primarily want to see healthy waterfowl populations for recreational hunting have raised their voices.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Applied ecologist \u003ca href=\"https://sites.google.com/a/ncsu.edu/simons/\">Ted Simons\u003c/a> of North Carolina State University says that trying to enumerate bird populations and tracking them over time is a daunting task with a lot of uncertainty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People are doing a wonderful effort to try and understand our bird populations, but the actual systems that we have in place to try and answer really tough questions like this are really far short of what we need,” says Simons. “We’re certainly far from having the tools and having the resources to have real high confidence in our estimates of these populations.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, he says, “I think it is very likely that we are seeing substantial declines in our bird populations, particularly migratory birds.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other researchers say this continent wide decrease in bird numbers is about what they expected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that I buy the magnitude of loss,” says \u003ca href=\"https://sites.google.com/rams.colostate.edu/ruegglab/people?authuser=0\">Kristen Ruegg\u003c/a>, a biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “Overall, the conclusions weren’t necessarily surprising. I mean, they were depressing but not surprising,”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ruegg says there have been hints that the loss was this large from a variety of sources over the past few decades. But in most cases, these were species-specific accounts of local extinctions or models of projected losses resulting from things like climate change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This study, she says, “really sort of wakes people up to the idea that this is happening.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://msu.edu/user/ezipkin/lab-members.html\">Elise Zipkin\u003c/a>, a quantitative ecologist at Michigan State University, says the loss of individuals can be a big problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Just because a species hasn’t gone extinct or isn’t even necessarily close to extinction, it might still be in trouble,” she says. “We need to be thinking about conservation efforts for that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers cite a variety of potential causes for the loss of birds, including habitat degradation, urbanization and the use of toxic pesticides, notes Zipkin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And so I think this kind of lays the gauntlet,” she says, “for people to be thinking about ‘All right, how can we estimate maybe the relative contributions of these things to individual populations and their declines.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=North+America+Has+Lost+3+Billion+Birds%2C+Scientists+Say&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Over the past half-century, North America has lost more than a quarter of its entire bird population, or around 3 billion birds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s according to a \u003ca href=\"https://science.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaw1313\">new estimate\u003c/a> published in the journal \u003cem>Science \u003c/em>by researchers who brought together a variety of information that has been collected on 529 bird species since 1970.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We saw this tremendous net loss across the entire bird community,” says \u003ca href=\"https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/staff/ken-rosenberg/\">Ken Rosenberg\u003c/a>, an applied conservation scientist at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/\">Cornell Lab of Ornithology\u003c/a> in Ithaca, N.Y. “By our estimates, it’s a 30% loss in the total number of breeding birds.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rosenberg and his colleagues already knew that a number of bird populations had been decreasing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But we also knew that other bird populations were increasing,” he says. “And what we didn’t know is whether there was a net change.” Scientists thought there might simply be a shift in the total bird population toward more generalist birds adapted to living around humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To find out, the researchers collected data from long-running surveys conducted with the help of volunteer bird spotters, such as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/\">North American Breeding Bird Survey\u003c/a> and the \u003ca href=\"https://www.audubon.org/conservation/science/christmas-bird-count\">Audubon Christmas Bird Count\u003c/a>. They combined that data with a decade’s worth of data on migrating bird flocks detected by 143 weather radar installations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Their results show that more than 90% of the loss can be attributed to just a dozen bird families, including sparrows, warblers, blackbirds and finches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Common birds with decreasing populations include meadowlarks, dark-eyed juncos, horned larks and red-winged blackbirds, says Rosenberg. Grassland birds have suffered a 53% decrease in their numbers, and more than a third of the shorebird population has been lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bird populations that have increased include raptors, like the bald eagle, and waterfowl.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The numbers of ducks and geese are larger than they’ve ever been, and that’s not an accident,” says Rosenberg. “It’s because hunters who primarily want to see healthy waterfowl populations for recreational hunting have raised their voices.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Applied ecologist \u003ca href=\"https://sites.google.com/a/ncsu.edu/simons/\">Ted Simons\u003c/a> of North Carolina State University says that trying to enumerate bird populations and tracking them over time is a daunting task with a lot of uncertainty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People are doing a wonderful effort to try and understand our bird populations, but the actual systems that we have in place to try and answer really tough questions like this are really far short of what we need,” says Simons. “We’re certainly far from having the tools and having the resources to have real high confidence in our estimates of these populations.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, he says, “I think it is very likely that we are seeing substantial declines in our bird populations, particularly migratory birds.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other researchers say this continent wide decrease in bird numbers is about what they expected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that I buy the magnitude of loss,” says \u003ca href=\"https://sites.google.com/rams.colostate.edu/ruegglab/people?authuser=0\">Kristen Ruegg\u003c/a>, a biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “Overall, the conclusions weren’t necessarily surprising. I mean, they were depressing but not surprising,”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ruegg says there have been hints that the loss was this large from a variety of sources over the past few decades. But in most cases, these were species-specific accounts of local extinctions or models of projected losses resulting from things like climate change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This study, she says, “really sort of wakes people up to the idea that this is happening.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://msu.edu/user/ezipkin/lab-members.html\">Elise Zipkin\u003c/a>, a quantitative ecologist at Michigan State University, says the loss of individuals can be a big problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Just because a species hasn’t gone extinct or isn’t even necessarily close to extinction, it might still be in trouble,” she says. “We need to be thinking about conservation efforts for that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers cite a variety of potential causes for the loss of birds, including habitat degradation, urbanization and the use of toxic pesticides, notes Zipkin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And so I think this kind of lays the gauntlet,” she says, “for people to be thinking about ‘All right, how can we estimate maybe the relative contributions of these things to individual populations and their declines.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=North+America+Has+Lost+3+Billion+Birds%2C+Scientists+Say&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "How About a Burger With Everything - Except the Animals?",
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"content": "\u003cp>Someday you could slice into a steak from a Petri dish, or savor sashimi from a test tube. By growing meat in labs, a slew of Bay Area startups promise a future of tasty dishes for carnivores without making billions of animals suffer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ju.st/en-us\">Just Inc.\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://finlessfoods.com/\">Finless Foods\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.memphismeats.com/\">Memphis Meats\u003c/a> are making beef, pork, poultry and seafood by harvesting cells from muscle tissue instead of living animals. Others like \u003ca href=\"https://www.clarafoods.com/\">Clara Foods\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://geltor.com/\">Geltor\u003c/a> ferment yeast cells to make egg whites and collagen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, teams from many of these companies gathered to discuss this trend at the \u003ca href=\"https://goodfoodconference.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Good Food Conference \u003c/a>in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Process\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To make cultured meat, companies use techniques very similar to what doctors do to help burn victims heal. Physicians take skin grafts, replicate the cells outside the body and add the new cells back to the wound. The biggest difference with growing cultured meat is the result. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Scientists begin with a biopsy of animal muscle tissue. Technicians collect stem cells from the tissue, multiply them dramatically and allow them to differentiate into fibers that eventually bulk up and form muscle tissue. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Voila! Sirloin without a slaughterhouse. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, not yet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For now, companies focus on ground products like chicken nuggets, sausages and hamburger. This first line of offerings will likely include fillers, flavors and additives to help lab grown meat look, taste and feel the way people expect it to. Before scientists can create pork chops and filet mignon, they must learn how to design and replicate blood vessels. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>From Yuck…to Yum!?!\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Customers’ aversion to genetic engineering and artificial flavors in food could make it tricky to market lab-grown meat. Cultured meat companies are quick to point out that labs allow much more control over flavor and food safety than farms do. Also, their products could save farm animals from enormous suffering and help the planet by reducing the number of methane-producing cattle and other livestock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farms generate a hefty carbon footprint. Raising animals in California \u003ca href=\"https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/data/tables/ghg_inventory_sector_sum_2000-17.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">emits 8 percent\u003c/a> of the state’s total greenhouse gases. That’s more than all the state’s oil refineries combined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In theory, lab-grown meat is a sensible solution because it removes the need for vast acres of land to grow cattle, chickens and pigs. Not to mention chemical fertilizers that pollute air and water. That said,\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the environmental reality is much less certain. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00005/full\"> new study\u003c/a> suggests lab-grown meat could accelerate climate change more than regular beef does. The claims, pro and con, are based on theoretical models. We won’t know what cultured meat on a commercial scale requires until labs are able to feed large populations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>When Can I Order a Lab-Grown Burger?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Area CEOs promise their products will be ready for public consumption in a year or two. Industry buzz suggests that’ll happen in Asia first. In countries like Singapore and Japan – where land is limited and meat imports are very expensive – excitement is brewing. Asian cultures tend to embrace, instead of scoff, novel foods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the industry faces significant scientific, regulatory, manufacturing, economic and cultural hurdles before it catches on in the U.S.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s no proof that producing meat in labs could endanger human health, but the federal Food and Drug Administration would need to regulate an entirely new industry. There’s also pushback from traditional farmers and ranchers who argue vehemently against labeling these products as meat. Marketers will have to coax consumers past the gross-out factor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, companies need to create a commercially viable product. Mark Post, the co-founder of Mosa Meat, developed the first lab-grown burger in 2013. That patty cost $300,000. Prices have dropped a lot since then, but not to a level that can compete with U.S. beef on the hoof. For all these reasons, food industry skeptics suggest it will be at least a decade or even two before diners can order cultured meat on local menus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Someday you could slice into a steak from a Petri dish, or savor sashimi from a test tube. By growing meat in labs, a slew of Bay Area startups promise a future of tasty dishes for carnivores without making billions of animals suffer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ju.st/en-us\">Just Inc.\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://finlessfoods.com/\">Finless Foods\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.memphismeats.com/\">Memphis Meats\u003c/a> are making beef, pork, poultry and seafood by harvesting cells from muscle tissue instead of living animals. Others like \u003ca href=\"https://www.clarafoods.com/\">Clara Foods\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://geltor.com/\">Geltor\u003c/a> ferment yeast cells to make egg whites and collagen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, teams from many of these companies gathered to discuss this trend at the \u003ca href=\"https://goodfoodconference.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Good Food Conference \u003c/a>in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Process\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To make cultured meat, companies use techniques very similar to what doctors do to help burn victims heal. Physicians take skin grafts, replicate the cells outside the body and add the new cells back to the wound. The biggest difference with growing cultured meat is the result. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Scientists begin with a biopsy of animal muscle tissue. Technicians collect stem cells from the tissue, multiply them dramatically and allow them to differentiate into fibers that eventually bulk up and form muscle tissue. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Voila! Sirloin without a slaughterhouse. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, not yet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For now, companies focus on ground products like chicken nuggets, sausages and hamburger. This first line of offerings will likely include fillers, flavors and additives to help lab grown meat look, taste and feel the way people expect it to. Before scientists can create pork chops and filet mignon, they must learn how to design and replicate blood vessels. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>From Yuck…to Yum!?!\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Customers’ aversion to genetic engineering and artificial flavors in food could make it tricky to market lab-grown meat. Cultured meat companies are quick to point out that labs allow much more control over flavor and food safety than farms do. Also, their products could save farm animals from enormous suffering and help the planet by reducing the number of methane-producing cattle and other livestock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farms generate a hefty carbon footprint. Raising animals in California \u003ca href=\"https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/data/tables/ghg_inventory_sector_sum_2000-17.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">emits 8 percent\u003c/a> of the state’s total greenhouse gases. That’s more than all the state’s oil refineries combined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In theory, lab-grown meat is a sensible solution because it removes the need for vast acres of land to grow cattle, chickens and pigs. Not to mention chemical fertilizers that pollute air and water. That said,\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the environmental reality is much less certain. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00005/full\"> new study\u003c/a> suggests lab-grown meat could accelerate climate change more than regular beef does. The claims, pro and con, are based on theoretical models. We won’t know what cultured meat on a commercial scale requires until labs are able to feed large populations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>When Can I Order a Lab-Grown Burger?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Area CEOs promise their products will be ready for public consumption in a year or two. Industry buzz suggests that’ll happen in Asia first. In countries like Singapore and Japan – where land is limited and meat imports are very expensive – excitement is brewing. Asian cultures tend to embrace, instead of scoff, novel foods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the industry faces significant scientific, regulatory, manufacturing, economic and cultural hurdles before it catches on in the U.S.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s no proof that producing meat in labs could endanger human health, but the federal Food and Drug Administration would need to regulate an entirely new industry. There’s also pushback from traditional farmers and ranchers who argue vehemently against labeling these products as meat. Marketers will have to coax consumers past the gross-out factor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, companies need to create a commercially viable product. Mark Post, the co-founder of Mosa Meat, developed the first lab-grown burger in 2013. That patty cost $300,000. Prices have dropped a lot since then, but not to a level that can compete with U.S. beef on the hoof. For all these reasons, food industry skeptics suggest it will be at least a decade or even two before diners can order cultured meat on local menus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dl_subscribe]Sure, cows are important. But next time you eat ice cream, thank a bee. Without them, there would be no cones, milkshakes or sundaes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every summer, alfalfa leafcutting bees pollinate alfalfa in an intricate process that gets them thwacked by the flowers when they release the pollen that allows the plants to make seeds. The bees’ hard work came to fruition last week when growers in California’s Kings, Fresno and Imperial counties finished harvesting the alfalfa seeds that will be grown to make nutritious hay for dairy cows.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947154\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_LANDS_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER_500.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947154\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_LANDS_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER_500.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An alfalfa leafcutting bee lands on a cluster of alfalfa flowers in a field in Fresno County, California. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The bees’ work “is ice cream in the making,” said Shannon Mueller, who helped introduce the pollinators to California in the early 1990s and recently retired as director of the University of California Cooperative Extension in Fresno and Madera counties. “A vast majority of the forage goes to dairy cows.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alfalfa hay is also fed to beef cattle, sheep, goats and horses. California is the top alfalfa hay and dairy producer in the U.S., as well as the country’s top alfalfa seed grower. This year’s crop of approximately 18 million pounds of seeds will be sold in California and Arizona and to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Argentina, which have similar climates to the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947155\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_AT_NEST_HOLE_500.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947155\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_AT_NEST_HOLE_500.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An alfalfa leafcutting bee peeks out from her nest hole in a field in Fresno County. Farmers provide the bees with nesting holes in Styrofoam boards. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Alfalfa leafcutting bees are second only to honeybees in their value as crop pollinators, said biologist Theresa Pitts-Singer, who studies the bees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Logan, Utah. And when it comes to pollinating alfalfa, they leave honeybees in the dust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is how it works.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To produce alfalfa seeds, farmers let their plants grow until they bloom. They need help pollinating the tiny purple flowers, so that the female and male parts of the flower can come together and produce fertile seeds. That’s where the grayish, easygoing alfalfa leafcutting bees come in. Seed growers in California release the bees – known simply as cutters – in June and they work hard for a month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alfalfa’s flowers keep their reproductive organs hidden away inside a boat-shaped bottom petal called the keel petal, which is held closed by a thin membrane that creates a spring mechanism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947156\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947156\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alfalfa flowers hide their reproductive organs in a boat-shaped keel petal sealed by a thin membrane. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Cutter bees come up to the flower looking for nectar and pollen to feed on. When they land on the flower, the membrane holding the keel petal breaks and the long reproductive structure pops right up and smacks the upper petal or the bee, releasing its yellow pollen. This process is called “tripping the flower.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947161\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_TRIPPING_THE_BLOOM_Edwards_500.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947161\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_TRIPPING_THE_BLOOM_Edwards_500.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">When an alfalfa flower is tripped, a column holding its reproductive organs pops up and pollen sprays out as it hits the upper petal. \u003ccite>(Joan Edwards and Nora Mitchell/Williams College)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When the flower is tripped, pollen falls on its female reproductive organ and fertilizes it; bees also carry pollen away on their hairy bodies and help fertilize other flowers. In a few weeks, each flower turns into a curly pod with seven to 10 seeds growing inside.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cutters were “game changers” in the alfalfa seed business because they’re much better at pollinating alfalfa than honeybees are, Mueller said. Cutters trip 80 percent of flowers they visit, compared to honeybees, which only trip about 10 percent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Honeybees don’t like to be flipped in the face, but it doesn’t bother the leafcutter bees,” said Chuck Deatherage, a grower who uses both kinds of bees to pollinate about 1,000 acres of alfalfa seed fields that he farms with two business partners in the Fresno area.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Honeybees sip nectar from the side of the flower rather than from the front, where they would trigger the keel petal, said Pitts-Singer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947168\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947168\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A honeybee drinks nectar from an alfalfa flower. Honeybees avoid getting thwacked by the blooms by sticking their mouthpart into the side of the flower, rather than the front. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And honeybees will visit alfalfa flowers that have already been tripped by cutters; by doing this they help spread pollen around.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The honeybees follow the leafcutters to get the nectar,” said Deatherage. “That’s my theory.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because they work well together, growers release both honeybees and cutters. In an alfalfa seed field, you might see 10 to 20 honeybees and 20 to 50 cutters in a 3-foot radius, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Deatherage buys the bees in Styrofoam nests and keeps them refrigerated for most of the year so that they don’t fully develop. As his alfalfa fields get near to blooming, he warms up the developing bees in their nests to close to 85 degrees. When they start hatching two to three weeks later, he stacks the boards into rectangular structures that sit inside trailers in the alfalfa fields and have the appearance of bee apartment buildings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947172\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEES_FLY_AT_NEST_BOX_500.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947172\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEES_FLY_AT_NEST_BOX_500.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alfalfa leafcutting bees fly at the entrance to a nest box. The patterns and textures on the box help them find their way back after collecting leaves and pollen. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Alfalfa leafcutting bees are solitary — each female builds its own nest. But unlike other solitary bees that like to work in isolation, cutters don’t mind working side by side with other bees, said Mueller.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947170\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947170\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nest boxes made up of Styrofoam boards rest on a trailer in an alfalfa field in Fresno County. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“This is to our advantage,” she said. “We can put large populations of leafcutter bees together in the field.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bees carefully cut out discs of alfalfa leaves or other leaves or petals they can find nearby. They fly with the piece curled up under their abdomen, held between their legs, to a nest hole in one of the Styrofoam boards and maneuver their way in. But it’s tricky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947171\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_ENTERS_NEST_HOLE_W_LEAF_PIECE_500.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947171\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_ENTERS_NEST_HOLE_W_LEAF_PIECE_500.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tucked between its legs, an alfalfa leafcutting bee carries a leaf piece into its nest. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“You’ll see piles of debris in front of the nest opening where they’ve dropped a leaf piece,” said Mueller. “I used to think, ‘Oh, all the work that went into all these dropped leaf pieces.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inside its nest hole, the bee shapes several leaf pieces into a cell, where she lays a single egg on a ball of pollen she has collected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947159\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947159\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A bee has shaped leaf pieces into two cells of its nest. The cells are connected by overlapping leaf bits. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They look like a medicine capsule made of leaf pieces,” said Mueller, “and inside each of those capsules there is a developing bee.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Next time you eat a cone or sundae, thank an alfalfa leafcutting bee.",
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"title": "This Bee Gets Punched by Flowers for Your Ice Cream | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Sure, cows are important. But next time you eat ice cream, thank a bee. Without them, there would be no cones, milkshakes or sundaes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every summer, alfalfa leafcutting bees pollinate alfalfa in an intricate process that gets them thwacked by the flowers when they release the pollen that allows the plants to make seeds. The bees’ hard work came to fruition last week when growers in California’s Kings, Fresno and Imperial counties finished harvesting the alfalfa seeds that will be grown to make nutritious hay for dairy cows.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947154\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_LANDS_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER_500.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947154\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_LANDS_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER_500.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An alfalfa leafcutting bee lands on a cluster of alfalfa flowers in a field in Fresno County, California. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The bees’ work “is ice cream in the making,” said Shannon Mueller, who helped introduce the pollinators to California in the early 1990s and recently retired as director of the University of California Cooperative Extension in Fresno and Madera counties. “A vast majority of the forage goes to dairy cows.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alfalfa hay is also fed to beef cattle, sheep, goats and horses. California is the top alfalfa hay and dairy producer in the U.S., as well as the country’s top alfalfa seed grower. This year’s crop of approximately 18 million pounds of seeds will be sold in California and Arizona and to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Argentina, which have similar climates to the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947155\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_AT_NEST_HOLE_500.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947155\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_AT_NEST_HOLE_500.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An alfalfa leafcutting bee peeks out from her nest hole in a field in Fresno County. Farmers provide the bees with nesting holes in Styrofoam boards. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Alfalfa leafcutting bees are second only to honeybees in their value as crop pollinators, said biologist Theresa Pitts-Singer, who studies the bees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Logan, Utah. And when it comes to pollinating alfalfa, they leave honeybees in the dust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is how it works.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To produce alfalfa seeds, farmers let their plants grow until they bloom. They need help pollinating the tiny purple flowers, so that the female and male parts of the flower can come together and produce fertile seeds. That’s where the grayish, easygoing alfalfa leafcutting bees come in. Seed growers in California release the bees – known simply as cutters – in June and they work hard for a month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alfalfa’s flowers keep their reproductive organs hidden away inside a boat-shaped bottom petal called the keel petal, which is held closed by a thin membrane that creates a spring mechanism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947156\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947156\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_KEEL_PETAL_1080-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alfalfa flowers hide their reproductive organs in a boat-shaped keel petal sealed by a thin membrane. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Cutter bees come up to the flower looking for nectar and pollen to feed on. When they land on the flower, the membrane holding the keel petal breaks and the long reproductive structure pops right up and smacks the upper petal or the bee, releasing its yellow pollen. This process is called “tripping the flower.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947161\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_TRIPPING_THE_BLOOM_Edwards_500.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947161\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_TRIPPING_THE_BLOOM_Edwards_500.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">When an alfalfa flower is tripped, a column holding its reproductive organs pops up and pollen sprays out as it hits the upper petal. \u003ccite>(Joan Edwards and Nora Mitchell/Williams College)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When the flower is tripped, pollen falls on its female reproductive organ and fertilizes it; bees also carry pollen away on their hairy bodies and help fertilize other flowers. In a few weeks, each flower turns into a curly pod with seven to 10 seeds growing inside.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cutters were “game changers” in the alfalfa seed business because they’re much better at pollinating alfalfa than honeybees are, Mueller said. Cutters trip 80 percent of flowers they visit, compared to honeybees, which only trip about 10 percent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Honeybees don’t like to be flipped in the face, but it doesn’t bother the leafcutter bees,” said Chuck Deatherage, a grower who uses both kinds of bees to pollinate about 1,000 acres of alfalfa seed fields that he farms with two business partners in the Fresno area.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Honeybees sip nectar from the side of the flower rather than from the front, where they would trigger the keel petal, said Pitts-Singer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947168\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947168\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615-AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_HONEY_BEE_ON_ALFALFA_FLOWER2_1080-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A honeybee drinks nectar from an alfalfa flower. Honeybees avoid getting thwacked by the blooms by sticking their mouthpart into the side of the flower, rather than the front. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And honeybees will visit alfalfa flowers that have already been tripped by cutters; by doing this they help spread pollen around.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The honeybees follow the leafcutters to get the nectar,” said Deatherage. “That’s my theory.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because they work well together, growers release both honeybees and cutters. In an alfalfa seed field, you might see 10 to 20 honeybees and 20 to 50 cutters in a 3-foot radius, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Deatherage buys the bees in Styrofoam nests and keeps them refrigerated for most of the year so that they don’t fully develop. As his alfalfa fields get near to blooming, he warms up the developing bees in their nests to close to 85 degrees. When they start hatching two to three weeks later, he stacks the boards into rectangular structures that sit inside trailers in the alfalfa fields and have the appearance of bee apartment buildings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947172\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEES_FLY_AT_NEST_BOX_500.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947172\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEES_FLY_AT_NEST_BOX_500.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alfalfa leafcutting bees fly at the entrance to a nest box. The patterns and textures on the box help them find their way back after collecting leaves and pollen. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Alfalfa leafcutting bees are solitary — each female builds its own nest. But unlike other solitary bees that like to work in isolation, cutters don’t mind working side by side with other bees, said Mueller.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947170\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947170\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_BEE_BOXES_ON_TRAILER_1080-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nest boxes made up of Styrofoam boards rest on a trailer in an alfalfa field in Fresno County. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“This is to our advantage,” she said. “We can put large populations of leafcutter bees together in the field.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bees carefully cut out discs of alfalfa leaves or other leaves or petals they can find nearby. They fly with the piece curled up under their abdomen, held between their legs, to a nest hole in one of the Styrofoam boards and maneuver their way in. But it’s tricky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947171\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_ENTERS_NEST_HOLE_W_LEAF_PIECE_500.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947171\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_ALFALFA_LEAFCUTTING_BEE_ENTERS_NEST_HOLE_W_LEAF_PIECE_500.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tucked between its legs, an alfalfa leafcutting bee carries a leaf piece into its nest. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“You’ll see piles of debris in front of the nest opening where they’ve dropped a leaf piece,” said Mueller. “I used to think, ‘Oh, all the work that went into all these dropped leaf pieces.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inside its nest hole, the bee shapes several leaf pieces into a cell, where she lays a single egg on a ball of pollen she has collected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947159\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1947159\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/DL_615AlfalfaLeafcuttingBees_NEST_MADE_OF_LEAVES_1080-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A bee has shaped leaf pieces into two cells of its nest. The cells are connected by overlapping leaf bits. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They look like a medicine capsule made of leaf pieces,” said Mueller, “and inside each of those capsules there is a developing bee.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "California Is First State to Ban Commercial Fur Trapping",
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"content": "\u003cp>California on Wednesday became the first state to ban commercial fur trapping, ending the practice nearly 200 years after animals like beavers and otters introduced the American West to international trade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947097\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1947097 size-complete_open_graph\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/PottertheOtter-1200x900.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced his signing of the fur trapping ban on Twitter that included a reference to the governor’s childhood pet, an otter he’d named ‘Potter.’ \u003ccite>(California Governor's Office)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday he had signed a bill into law making it illegal to trap animals for the purposes of recreation or to sell their fur. It is still legal to trap animals for other purposes, including pest control and public health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before the gold rush put California on the map, it was fur traders who first flocked to then far-flung Mexican territory in search of the area’s plentiful population of beavers, minks and badgers. The so-called fur rush made fur trappers a recognizable symbol of the Old West.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in recent years, California licenses for fur trappers have declined considerably. In 2018, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said it sold 133 licenses, leading to the harvest of 1,568 animals and the sale of 1,241 pelts. A legislative analysis of the bill noted most furs are sold outside of California, with data suggesting there have been no fur sales in the state for the past three years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the state has issued about 500 trapping licenses a year for pest control and other uses. People who trap animals for those purposes are not required to report how many animals they capture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Fur trapping is a cruel practice that has no place in 21st century California,” said bill author Lorena Gonzalez, an assemblywoman from San Diego.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Newsom’s office announced the bill signing on Twitter by referencing the governor’s childhood pet, an otter he named “Potter.” The announcement included a photo of what appeared to be an otter puppet exclaiming: “My friends & I should not have to live in fear of being trapped & our fur being sold!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, have opposed fur trapping as contributing to declines animal populations, including sea otters and beavers. But other groups, including the California Farm Bureau Federation, opposed the bill, arguing ranchers and farmers hire commercial trappers to control wildlife and protect their crops. They say banning trapping and the sale of fur would end that practice.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>California on Wednesday became the first state to ban commercial fur trapping, ending the practice nearly 200 years after animals like beavers and otters introduced the American West to international trade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1947097\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1947097 size-complete_open_graph\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/09/PottertheOtter-1200x900.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced his signing of the fur trapping ban on Twitter that included a reference to the governor’s childhood pet, an otter he’d named ‘Potter.’ \u003ccite>(California Governor's Office)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday he had signed a bill into law making it illegal to trap animals for the purposes of recreation or to sell their fur. It is still legal to trap animals for other purposes, including pest control and public health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before the gold rush put California on the map, it was fur traders who first flocked to then far-flung Mexican territory in search of the area’s plentiful population of beavers, minks and badgers. The so-called fur rush made fur trappers a recognizable symbol of the Old West.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in recent years, California licenses for fur trappers have declined considerably. In 2018, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said it sold 133 licenses, leading to the harvest of 1,568 animals and the sale of 1,241 pelts. A legislative analysis of the bill noted most furs are sold outside of California, with data suggesting there have been no fur sales in the state for the past three years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the state has issued about 500 trapping licenses a year for pest control and other uses. People who trap animals for those purposes are not required to report how many animals they capture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Fur trapping is a cruel practice that has no place in 21st century California,” said bill author Lorena Gonzalez, an assemblywoman from San Diego.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Newsom’s office announced the bill signing on Twitter by referencing the governor’s childhood pet, an otter he named “Potter.” The announcement included a photo of what appeared to be an otter puppet exclaiming: “My friends & I should not have to live in fear of being trapped & our fur being sold!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, have opposed fur trapping as contributing to declines animal populations, including sea otters and beavers. But other groups, including the California Farm Bureau Federation, opposed the bill, arguing ranchers and farmers hire commercial trappers to control wildlife and protect their crops. They say banning trapping and the sale of fur would end that practice.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Slather on the sunscreen, line up some some bait, and bring your tackle box – Saturday, August 31st is Free Fishing Day across California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You won’t need a sport-fishing license to cast a line that day at dozens of lakes, reservoirs and creeks throughout the state. The Department of Fish and Wildlife waives the usual fees – $16.20 for a day, $49.94 for annual licenses – two days a year. July 4th is the other, so this’ll be your last chance in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not a free-for-all, you can’t just go fish for anything and however many you want anywhere,” says Jennifer Benedet with the department. People will have to obey the same rules that apply the rest of the year. You can read up on those regulations online at \u003ca href=\"https://www.wildlife.ca.gov\">wildlife.ca.gov\u003c/a> . The site also includes a Fishing Guide to the best spots to try.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New anglers can join \u003ca href=\"https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Fishing-in-the-City\">Fishing in the City\u003c/a>, a program that offers free fishing clinics in Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area, the South Bay, Los Angeles, and other urban areas. Participants can reel in their catch and learn how to prepare it for dinner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re hooked after your first fishing expedition, you can join the \u003ca href=\"https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Fishing/Passport\">California Fishing Passport\u003c/a>. That interactive program challenges you to fish 150 different species in the state’s waters. It even awards a certificate for catching your very first fish!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Slather on the sunscreen, line up some some bait, and bring your tackle box – Saturday, August 31st is Free Fishing Day across California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You won’t need a sport-fishing license to cast a line that day at dozens of lakes, reservoirs and creeks throughout the state. The Department of Fish and Wildlife waives the usual fees – $16.20 for a day, $49.94 for annual licenses – two days a year. July 4th is the other, so this’ll be your last chance in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not a free-for-all, you can’t just go fish for anything and however many you want anywhere,” says Jennifer Benedet with the department. People will have to obey the same rules that apply the rest of the year. You can read up on those regulations online at \u003ca href=\"https://www.wildlife.ca.gov\">wildlife.ca.gov\u003c/a> . The site also includes a Fishing Guide to the best spots to try.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New anglers can join \u003ca href=\"https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Fishing-in-the-City\">Fishing in the City\u003c/a>, a program that offers free fishing clinics in Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area, the South Bay, Los Angeles, and other urban areas. Participants can reel in their catch and learn how to prepare it for dinner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re hooked after your first fishing expedition, you can join the \u003ca href=\"https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Fishing/Passport\">California Fishing Passport\u003c/a>. That interactive program challenges you to fish 150 different species in the state’s waters. It even awards a certificate for catching your very first fish!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are proliferating at an alarming rate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the gist of an \u003ca href=\"http://queimadas.dgi.inpe.br/queimadas/portal/situacao-atual\">announcement this week\u003c/a> by the country’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE. According to the agency, there have been 74,155 fires in Brazil so far this year — most of which erupted in the Amazon. That represents an astonishing leap of more than 80% over last year and by far the most that the agency has recorded since it began compiling this data in 2013.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About half those fires, or nearly 36,000 of them, have ignited in just the past month. That’s nearly as many as in all of 2018. Smoke from the fires has darkened the skies over major Brazilian cities, such as São Paulo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/shannongsims/status/1163632818221719558?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has signaled unconcern about the situation. The far-right leader, who took office in January, has repeatedly lambasted Brazil’s environmental regulations as an impediment to economic development, and under his tenure environmental agencies have seen diminished staff and funding. That includes INPE itself, whose leader, Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão, was \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/mctic/status/1157321742840467466?s=12\">canned this month\u003c/a> because — according to Galvão — he questioned how Bolsonaro was using his agency’s data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Asked about the fires \u003ca href=\"https://g1.globo.com/google/amp/politica/noticia/2019/08/21/bolsonaro-diz-que-ongs-podem-estar-por-tras-de-queimadas-na-amazonia-para-chamar-atencao-contra-o-governo.ghtml?__twitter_impression=true\">by local media\u003c/a>, Bolsonaro baselessly suggested that nongovernmental organizations have been setting the fires themselves as retaliation for the scaling back of Brazil’s usual funding support for them. He posited that these groups are trying to increase international pressure on his government — but when reporters pressed him on the point, he didn’t name any specific NGOs or offer any proof for his assertion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So, there could be … I’m not affirming it, criminal action by these ‘NGOers’ to call attention against my person, against the government of Brazil. This is the war that we are facing,” he said Wednesday in a Facebook Live video, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49415973\">translation by the BBC\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/GlobalEcoGuy/status/1164226424405762048?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He added that his government is “not insensitive” to the fires and that his government may look into measures to combat them. In a \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/rsallesmma/status/1163990341361553415\">tweet Tuesday\u003c/a>, Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, attributed the fires to “dry weather, wind and heat” and said federal officials and equipment are available to help and “already in use.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But a lot of deforestation has less to do with natural factors and more to do with human activities. INPE says the amount of land that was deforested last month alone represented a nearly 300% surge over deforestation in June 2018.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As NPR \u003ca href=\"http://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/brazil/\">reported in 2015\u003c/a>, deforestation such as this is often tied to subsistence farming and ranching, which uses more than two-thirds of Brazil’s deforested land — and which has tripled the number of cattle in the country in the past three decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We estimate that the forest areas in the Brazilian Amazon have decreased something between 20 and 30% compared to the last 12 months,” Carlos Nobre, a researcher at the University of São Paulo, \u003ca href=\"https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-forest-fires-rage-as-farmers-push-into-the-amazon/a-50116455\">told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fluvio Mascarenhas, who works at a government agency called the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/19/752529425/brazils-amazon-rainforest-is-disappearing-under-president-jair-bolsonaro\">told NPR’s Philip Reeves\u003c/a> that operations that the agency usually carries out against illegal loggers and ranchers have been drastically scaled back this year. And that, he says, together with Bolsonaro’s comments, only encourages further illegal activity in the rainforest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that has him afraid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every time you look at a satellite image of the forest,” he tells Reeves, “you see another little piece missing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Tens+Of+Thousands+Of+Fires+Ravage+Brazilian+Amazon%2C+Where+Deforestation+Has+Spiked&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are proliferating at an alarming rate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the gist of an \u003ca href=\"http://queimadas.dgi.inpe.br/queimadas/portal/situacao-atual\">announcement this week\u003c/a> by the country’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE. According to the agency, there have been 74,155 fires in Brazil so far this year — most of which erupted in the Amazon. That represents an astonishing leap of more than 80% over last year and by far the most that the agency has recorded since it began compiling this data in 2013.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About half those fires, or nearly 36,000 of them, have ignited in just the past month. That’s nearly as many as in all of 2018. Smoke from the fires has darkened the skies over major Brazilian cities, such as São Paulo.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has signaled unconcern about the situation. The far-right leader, who took office in January, has repeatedly lambasted Brazil’s environmental regulations as an impediment to economic development, and under his tenure environmental agencies have seen diminished staff and funding. That includes INPE itself, whose leader, Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão, was \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/mctic/status/1157321742840467466?s=12\">canned this month\u003c/a> because — according to Galvão — he questioned how Bolsonaro was using his agency’s data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Asked about the fires \u003ca href=\"https://g1.globo.com/google/amp/politica/noticia/2019/08/21/bolsonaro-diz-que-ongs-podem-estar-por-tras-de-queimadas-na-amazonia-para-chamar-atencao-contra-o-governo.ghtml?__twitter_impression=true\">by local media\u003c/a>, Bolsonaro baselessly suggested that nongovernmental organizations have been setting the fires themselves as retaliation for the scaling back of Brazil’s usual funding support for them. He posited that these groups are trying to increase international pressure on his government — but when reporters pressed him on the point, he didn’t name any specific NGOs or offer any proof for his assertion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So, there could be … I’m not affirming it, criminal action by these ‘NGOers’ to call attention against my person, against the government of Brazil. This is the war that we are facing,” he said Wednesday in a Facebook Live video, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49415973\">translation by the BBC\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>He added that his government is “not insensitive” to the fires and that his government may look into measures to combat them. In a \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/rsallesmma/status/1163990341361553415\">tweet Tuesday\u003c/a>, Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, attributed the fires to “dry weather, wind and heat” and said federal officials and equipment are available to help and “already in use.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But a lot of deforestation has less to do with natural factors and more to do with human activities. INPE says the amount of land that was deforested last month alone represented a nearly 300% surge over deforestation in June 2018.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As NPR \u003ca href=\"http://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/brazil/\">reported in 2015\u003c/a>, deforestation such as this is often tied to subsistence farming and ranching, which uses more than two-thirds of Brazil’s deforested land — and which has tripled the number of cattle in the country in the past three decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We estimate that the forest areas in the Brazilian Amazon have decreased something between 20 and 30% compared to the last 12 months,” Carlos Nobre, a researcher at the University of São Paulo, \u003ca href=\"https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-forest-fires-rage-as-farmers-push-into-the-amazon/a-50116455\">told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fluvio Mascarenhas, who works at a government agency called the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/19/752529425/brazils-amazon-rainforest-is-disappearing-under-president-jair-bolsonaro\">told NPR’s Philip Reeves\u003c/a> that operations that the agency usually carries out against illegal loggers and ranchers have been drastically scaled back this year. And that, he says, together with Bolsonaro’s comments, only encourages further illegal activity in the rainforest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that has him afraid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every time you look at a satellite image of the forest,” he tells Reeves, “you see another little piece missing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Tens+Of+Thousands+Of+Fires+Ravage+Brazilian+Amazon%2C+Where+Deforestation+Has+Spiked&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Seven environmental and animal protection groups teamed up to file the first lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s rollback of the Endangered Species Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice filed the lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Parks Conservation Association, WildEarth Guardians and the Humane Society of the United States. The lawsuit comes after the federal government earlier this month announced a series of \u003ca href=\"https://www.apnews.com/9bf4541d89e6444783814e53302ce479\">changes\u003c/a> to weaken the Endangered Species Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6310713-ESA-Complaint-FINAL.html\">filing\u003c/a> , the groups argue that the Trump administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to analyze the effects of the new rules. They also charge that the administration unreasonably changed requirements to comply with part of the Endangered Species Act that would have prevented any changes that could threaten the existence or habitat of any listed species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In the midst of an unprecedented extinction crisis, the Trump administration is eviscerating our most effective wildlife protection law,” Rebecca Riley, legal director of the nature program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “These regulatory changes will place vulnerable species in immediate danger — all to line the pockets of industry. We are counting on the courts to step in before it’s too late.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nicholas Goodwin, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of the Interior, criticized the lawsuit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is unsurprising that those who repeatedly seek to weaponize the Endangered Species Act — instead of use it as a means to recover imperiled species — would choose to sue,” Goodwin said. “We will see them in court, and we will be steadfast in our implementation of this important act with the unchanging goal of conserving and recovering species.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Christina Meister, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, declined to comment. Spokespeople for the National Marine Fisheries Service did not immediately respond to requests for comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under the enforcement changes, officials for the first time will be able to publicly attach a cost to saving an animal or plant. Blanket protections for creatures newly listed as threatened will be removed. Among several other changes, the action could allow the government to disregard the possible impact of climate change, which conservation groups call a major and growing threat to wildlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A United Nations report released in May warned that more than 1 million plants and animals globally face extinction, some within decades, because of human influence, climate change and other threats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Endangered Species Act is credited with helping save the bald eagle, California condor and scores of other animals and plants from extinction since President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1973. The act currently protects more than 1,600 species in the United States and its territories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the act has also led to legal and political fights between animal protectors and industries and opponents. Republicans have long pushed to change the law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The states of California and Massachusetts have also vowed to sue to block changes in the law.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Seven environmental and animal protection groups teamed up to file the first lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s rollback of the Endangered Species Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice filed the lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Parks Conservation Association, WildEarth Guardians and the Humane Society of the United States. The lawsuit comes after the federal government earlier this month announced a series of \u003ca href=\"https://www.apnews.com/9bf4541d89e6444783814e53302ce479\">changes\u003c/a> to weaken the Endangered Species Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6310713-ESA-Complaint-FINAL.html\">filing\u003c/a> , the groups argue that the Trump administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to analyze the effects of the new rules. They also charge that the administration unreasonably changed requirements to comply with part of the Endangered Species Act that would have prevented any changes that could threaten the existence or habitat of any listed species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In the midst of an unprecedented extinction crisis, the Trump administration is eviscerating our most effective wildlife protection law,” Rebecca Riley, legal director of the nature program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “These regulatory changes will place vulnerable species in immediate danger — all to line the pockets of industry. We are counting on the courts to step in before it’s too late.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nicholas Goodwin, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of the Interior, criticized the lawsuit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is unsurprising that those who repeatedly seek to weaponize the Endangered Species Act — instead of use it as a means to recover imperiled species — would choose to sue,” Goodwin said. “We will see them in court, and we will be steadfast in our implementation of this important act with the unchanging goal of conserving and recovering species.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Christina Meister, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, declined to comment. Spokespeople for the National Marine Fisheries Service did not immediately respond to requests for comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under the enforcement changes, officials for the first time will be able to publicly attach a cost to saving an animal or plant. Blanket protections for creatures newly listed as threatened will be removed. Among several other changes, the action could allow the government to disregard the possible impact of climate change, which conservation groups call a major and growing threat to wildlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A United Nations report released in May warned that more than 1 million plants and animals globally face extinction, some within decades, because of human influence, climate change and other threats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Endangered Species Act is credited with helping save the bald eagle, California condor and scores of other animals and plants from extinction since President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1973. The act currently protects more than 1,600 species in the United States and its territories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the act has also led to legal and political fights between animal protectors and industries and opponents. Republicans have long pushed to change the law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The states of California and Massachusetts have also vowed to sue to block changes in the law.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"soldout": {
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