Leopard vs Crocodile: who would win?

Check out this amazing series of photos to find out.

Source: Hal Brindley

Another Awesome Kenyan Wildlife Blog

As a marine ecologist I have a serious fascination for terrestrial ecology blogs, and I've stumbled across another stunner - Notes From Kenya. It's a blog written by Michigan State University students in the Holekamp Lab, about their experiences in Kenya as they research spotted hyenas in the field.

Source: Brittany Gunther at Notes From Kenya

Brittany Gunther took this amazing photo last week of a fight between a group of spotted hyenas and a lioness. Note the fourth hyena visible under the lion's belly! The authors are currently on the spot for the annual Wildebeest migration (see photo below) which Kimojino is also blogging over at Mara Triangle (BTW fans of wildlife blogs should also check out Mara Triangle, it's amazing. Help them out if you can too - they could use your money right now).

Source: Notes From Kenya

Ballast Free Cargo Ship

Source: Conservation Magazine online. Illustration courtesy of University of Michigan.

The introduction of exotic species into new environments can pose a major threat to the integrity of natural communities, the existence of rare and endangered species, the viability of living resource-based industries and pose risks to human health.

In the marine environment, any mechanism that can rapidly transport organisms from shallow coastal waters across natural oceanic barriers has the potential to help exotic marine organisms invade new environments. International shipping provides such a mechanism . Modern international shipping practices transport marine and estuarine organisms faster and over longer distances than ever before. Marine pests are regularly transported via ballast water, or the hulls or anchor ropes of these vessels. Now, University of Michigan naval architect Michael Parsons has designed a ballast-free cargo ship that would stop most aquatic species from hitching rides around the world.

Ships take on ballast water for stability when they're not carrying cargo. When a vessel loads ballast water, it also takes up all minute the organisms contained in that water which may include planktonic species, the larvae of bottom dwelling invertebrates and fish, and pathogens. These organisms are released with the ballast water at another port when the vessel loads more cargo. It has been estimated that world-wide, over 3,000 species are transported in ballast water every day.

Instead of hauling contaminated water across the ocean, then dumping it in a foreign port, a ballast-free ship would create a constant flow of seawater through a network of large pipes running from the bow to the stern, below the waterline.

"In some ways, it's more like a submarine than a surface ship," Parsons said. "We're opening part of the hull to the sea, creating a very slow flow through the trunks from bow to stern. You're continuously sweeping water through the ship and out," he said. "So you're always filled with local sea water, not hauling water from one part of the world to the other."

Antarctic Fishing Pirates Identified

Source: www.NZHerald.co.nz

From the New Zealand Herald:

An international fishing company caught supporting Southern Ocean illegal fishing can now be named and shamed, after a failed attempt to gag the government in the High Court, Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said today.

"Illegal fishing is a serious threat to global fisheries and this case shines a light on the problem of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in the Southern Ocean," Mr Anderton said.

"The Namibian-flagged fishing vessel Paloma V wanted to unload toothfish in Auckland in May. Its owner, Omunkete Fishing (Pty) Limited took the government to court because it wanted to stop us reporting it to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR)," said Mr Peters.

The Mara Triangle - Best Wildlife Blog On The Web. Read It! Donate!

Kenyan ranger and blogger Joseph Kimojino. Source Wired Magazine.

Emily Meehan of Wired covered this story at the end of May. Basically as told by Wired the story goes like this:

A ranger in Kenya's acclaimed Mara Triangle wildlife park Kimojino is a member of the Masai tribe. He first learned how to click a computer mouse in November. Now he blogs about the Mara Triangle and posts wild animal photos on Flickr nearly every day. Kimojino's online outreach is an effort to raise awareness and money for the park, and it's urgent: Without the funds he raises online, his employer, the Mara Conservancy, would go broke. Admission fees from park visitors are the conservancy's primary source of revenue, but tourism dropped to almost zero during Kenya's post-election violence, and hasn't snapped back.

The thing is though, it's a really great read. Updates are frequent, and Kimojino posts some amazing wildlife shots almost every day. At the moment the Wildebeest are massing on the banks of the river as part of their famous migration (see photo). Earlier in the week they arrested poachers armed with AK47's in the park, and blogged it. Last month the Zebra were migrating and the Crocodiles were feasting.

Source: The Mara Triangle

But there is some bad news:

Working on a reduced budget for two months is starting to have an impact on the effectiveness of the Conservancy, and there are warning signs which indicate that the situation may deteriorate further. Our work is now threatened as a direct result of the collapse of tourism in Kenya. Due to lack of funds, all non-essential activities have been stopped since January, as well as the halting of the cattle compensation scheme and regular night patrols by rangers.

Tourist projection for the month of July and August is 50% occupancy. For the rest of the year it is expected to fall back to 20% like it has been up until now. This means that our situation will remain dire until 2009, however this is not an appeal for money (although if you have some it will help a lot) but instead we need ideas on how to fundraise for the long term. We thought that things would improve, which they have slightly, but unfortunately not as much as we had hoped.

So - what should you do?

1. Read the blog - it's great.
2. Follow Kimojino's photostream on Flickr - amazing photos.
3. Donate - make a difference. It's easy and rewarding.
4. Tell everyone you know to read the blog - it's really great. Really.

Beautiful Moray Shots

Source: Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice & Sunsets

Massachusetts Passes Oceans Act

Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Massachusetts’ 2300 kilometers of coastline and its 650 000 hectares of subtidal lands are an integral part of the Gulf of Maine — one of the most biologically productive marine ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean. It is delineated by Cape Cod at the eastern tip of Massachusetts in the southwest and Cape Sable at the southern tip of Nova Scotia in the northeast. It includes the entire coastlines of the U.S. states of New Hampshire and Maine, as well as Massachusetts north of Cape Cod, and the southern and western coastlines of the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia respectively.

For centuries, the Atlantic waters of the Gulf of Maine have been used for fishing, recreation and navigation. In recent years, proposals for other uses, from gas pipelines and liquefied natural gas facilities to desalinization projects and wind and wave energy projects have dramatically increased. These new proposals raise concerns about how to manage marine resources amidst diverse proposals and intensified development pressures. Historically, decisions about how to manage ocean resources have been handled on a resource by resource, case by case, reactive basis. However, this approach is inadequate to face the complexity of the proposals and challenges facing Atlantic waters in the 21st century. The Massachusetts Oceans Act, a comprehensive and holistic approach to ocean management and resource protection, will coordinate and monitor all ocean-related activity. The Oceans Act of 2008, signed into law by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick on May 28, 2008, is the first of its kind in the United States.

The culmination of the Oceans Act will be the Ocean Management Plan. The Plan will regulate many uses of the Massachusetts coastal waters—everything from wind farms to whale watching to cruise ships to the cod fishery. Specifically, it will:

• Give the Secretary of the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs the oversight, coordination and planning authority over ocean resources.


• Decisions would be based on an ocean management plan created by a broad-based, 19-member ocean management advisory board comprised of state agency representative, state legislators, a municipal official and environmental, fishing and marine industry stakeholders.


• The ocean resources management plan will be required to be based on the best available scientific understanding of marine and ocean resources. A 9-member ocean science advisory council will assist the Secretary in gathering and analyzing the best available science.
  
  
• All programs and permits for activities in ocean waters will be required to conform to the ocean management plan.


• Notably, commercial fishing will still be regulated by the Division of Marine Fisheries and will not be under the direct control of the Ocean Management Plan.

The MPA Inquiry in Bruny, Tasmania - part 1

A Case Study In MPA Planning and Implementation Difficulties

A key part of the Australian Government's marine conservation strategy, is developing a representative system of marine protected areas (MPAs) in Commonwealth waters by 2012. This will contribute to the National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas (NRSMPA), which is described in more detail in the Guidelines for Establishing the National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas.

The stated goal of the NRSMPA is to:

establish and manage a comprehensive, adequate and representative system of MPAs that will contribute to the long-term ecological viability of marine and estuarine systems, maintain ecological processes and systems and protect Australia's biological diversity at all levels.

Bioregions have been defined as 'assemblages of flora, fauna and the supporting geophysical environment contained within distinct but dynamic spatial boundaries'. The identification of these boundaries and comprehension of the functioning of bioregions is essential for enlightened ecological management. Distributional boundaries are the result of responses of organisms to boundaries between changing environmental factors and studies of species distributions can therefore help us better understand the dynamics of marine regions.

On 6 June 2005, the Tasmanian Minister for Environment and Planning issued a directive to the Resource Planning and Development Commission (RPDC) to conduct an inquiry and make recommendations on the establishment of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in the Bruny Bioregion, in south-eastern Tasmania.

Of the nine Tasmanian bioregions the Bruny Bioregion stands out as being the most complex and diverse in terms of ecosystems and human activities and uses. It is notable amongst the Australian bioregions for its very high number of species with very limited distributions. Alongside this ecological significance is the economic significance of the Bruny Bioregion to Tasmania, particularly for commercial fishing, marine farming, tourism and recreation, urban and industrial development and shipping.

At the beginning of the Bruny MPA inquiry the RPDC stated that:

A number of key characteristics will define MPAs established in Tasmania, including:

• being established for the conservation of biodiversity;
• able to be classified into one or more of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) protected area management categories;
• having secure status that can only be revoked by a Parliamentary process; and
• contributes to the representativeness, comprehensiveness or adequacy (CAR) of the Tasmanian MPA system.

The scope of the inquiry outlined in the terms of reference was for the Commission to:

• use the identification and selection criteria contained in the Tasmanian Marine Protected Areas Strategy to assess and select those areas of public land in the Bruny Bioregion that are suitable for declaration as Marine Protected Areas; and
• identify potential boundaries and management arrangements for those areas suitable for declaration as Marine Protected Areas.

The RPDC produced an Background Report in June 2006. This Background Report was placed on exhibition and public comment invited. The Commission received 42 submissions on the Background Report. Key issues raised in submissions were:

• threats and pressures to coastal ecosystems, including overfishing and climate change;
  
• existing status of the marine environment;
  
• nature and location of important and unique aspects of marine habitats and communities;
  
• the need for MPAs;
  
• inadequacies of existing Marine Nature Reserves;
  
• potential for economic impacts on commercial fisheries;
  
• areas of high recreational interest and usage;
  
• management and resourcing arrangements for MPAs; and
  
• nominations of potential areas and natural features that would benefit from protection within an MPA.

As a result of the response to the Background Report the Commission considered that further public input was required before a Draft Recommendations Report could be prepared. Accordingly, an Interim Report was published in March 2007 and placed on public exhibition. The Interim Report focused on the identification stage of the process, i.e. the presentation of areas that may be suitable for inclusion within MPAs based on their meeting identification criteria in the Strategy. The Interim Report also identified threats to the marine environment in the Bruny Bioregion, and assessed the comprehensiveness and representativeness of habitats in existing MPAs. Interested persons and groups were invited to make written submissions on this phase of the process.

The Commission received 24 submissions on the Interim Report. Submissions broadly canvassed issues similar to those raised on the Background Report. Additionally, submissions at this stage:

• provided further information on values of identified areas;
  
• commented on the Commission’s analysis of the identification criteria; and
  
• flagged areas they viewed as best candidates for MPAs.

The Commission then prepared a Draft Recommendations Report. The Draft Recommendations Report presented the priorities applied by the Commission to reduce in number the 45 identified areas in the Interim Report to 21 priority identified areas, from which the draft MPAs were selected. The main content of the Draft Recommendations Report was the presentation of areas that were considered suitable for declaration as marine protected areas, following application of the identification and selection criteria of the Strategy. These areas were identified using information from the Background Report and Interim Report, written submissions and submissions made at the Hearing held in September and November 2006. In August 2007, the Draft Recommendations Report was placed on public exhibition and public comment invited. The Commission received 191 submissions on the Draft Recommendations Report.

Key issues raised in submissions included:

• Many MPA-specific issues, concerns and additional information: largely addressing social and economic impacts, and including safety and compensation issues;
  
• Views on a broad range of considerations for management of MPAs (e.g. levels of protection, boundaries, enforcement, resourcing), and allowable activities within MPAs;
  
• Views on threatening processes to the marine environment, with fishing getting considerable attention;
  
• Uncertainty as to why MPAs are needed and what benefits they can provide;
  
• Expressions of endorsement or non-endorsement across the recommendations broadly and also MPA-specific;
  
• Concerns about the process of the inquiry and the level of consultation; and
  
• Concerns about whether the Commission had adequately addressed the selection criteria in the Strategy.

To be continued...

Global Warming Bill Blocked in Senate

On Friday United States Senators from the Republican Party blocked a global warming bill that would have required major reductions in greenhouse gases, after a bitter debate over its economic costs and whether it would substantially raise gasoline and other energy prices.

The Environmental Law Prof Blog has a good run down of what the bill proposed, including:

• Capped annual US greenhouse emissions at 5775 million tons in 2012, reducing the cap every year until it reaches 1732 in 2050 -- a 70% reduction from projected 2012 emissions
• An advanced clean fuel efficiency standard
• A carbon duty or tariff placed on covered goods from countries that don't make a comparable effort to the United States
• A Climate Change Worker Training and Assistance Fund
• A Consumer Assistance Fund
• A Transportation Emission Reduction Fund
• A Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program
• An Efficient Energy Use Program
• A Zero or Low Carbon Generation Technology Fund
• A Carbon Sequestration and Storage Early Deployment Program

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a prominent coal-producing state, argued that the bill was a huge tax increase. He maintained that the proposed system of allowing widespread trading of carbon emissions allowances would produce "the largest restructuring of the American economy since the New Deal." Supporters of the bill accused Republicans of muddying the water with misinformation.

Even as this bill died however, other approaches to federal climate action had already begun to appear. James Hansen, the NASA climate expert who has long been a leader and spokesman for global warming campaigners, has strongly endorsed a variant on the “cap and dividend” system for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions (different from the “cap and trade” mechanism in the blocked bill, which would invest revenue in various programs, with little money returning directly to taxpayers.)

“Carbon tax and 100% dividend” is spurred by the recent “carbon cap” discussion of Peter Barnes and others.... A tax on coal, oil and gas is simple. It can be collected at the first point of sale within the country or at the last (e.g., at the gas pump), but it can be collected easily and reliably....

The entire carbon tax should be returned to the public, with a monthly deposit to their bank accounts, an equal share to each person (if no bank account provided, an annual check — social security number must be provided). No bureaucracy is needed to figure this out. If the initial carbon tax averages $1,200 per person per year, $100 is deposited in each account each month....

The worst thing about the present inadequate political approach is that it will generate public backlash. Taxes will increase, with no apparent benefit. The reaction would likely delay effective emission reductions, so as to practically guarantee that climate would pass tipping points with devastating consequences for nature and humanity.

Carbon tax and 100% dividend, on the contrary, will be a breath of fresh air, a boon and boom for the economy. The tax is progressive, the poorest benefiting most, with profligate energy users forced to pay for their excesses. Incidentally, it will yield strong incentive for aliens to become legal; otherwise they receive no dividend while paying the same carbon tax rate as everyone.

It seems clear that some sort of emissions capping mechanism is urgently needed to force the industry to embrace clean energy technologies. Implementing whatever carbon-pricing mechanism we settle on may make the technological challenges seem trivial by comparison however. An interesting looking recent book by Krupp and Horn recounts a conversion with Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, in which he senator was explaining why he votes for such ludicrous subsidies to corn-based ethanol, despite its drawbacks a clean fuel. The response? "It's 28 votes, the strongest lobby in the nation."

Alaska: Polar Bears Are Fine, It's The Oil Industry That Needs Protection

The state of Alaska will sue the U.S. government to stop the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species, arguing the designation will slow development in the state, Gov. Sarah Palin said on Wednesday.
"We believe that the listing was unwarranted and that it's unprecedented to list a currently healthy population based on uncertain climate models," said Alaska Assistant Attorney General Steven Daugherty.

US Interior Secretary Dick Kempthorne went out of his way to undermine the legal effects of the law by "precluding any new restrictions on oil and gas operations as a result of the listing." Either Alaska isn't paying attention, or it knows that invoking exemption 4(d) won't stand up in court, because the Endangered Species Act specifically requires decisions be based exclusively on science, not economics.

James Hrynyshyn at The Island Of Doubt suspects that it is the latter in a really good post this morning.

European Tuna Fisheries Screwed, Pacific Fisheries Less So.

Source: Time magazine

The WWF announced this week that since the Mediterranean tuna fishing season opened at the beginning of May, over 10 000 breeding bluefin tuna are being caught every day by the european industrial fishing fleet.This means that over 27 000 tonnes of bluefin tuna will have been taken by the end of this month - almost double the amount considered sustainable by fisheries scientists. The total allowable catch allocated to the EU for the entire year is 29 500 tonnes.

European Union fisheries regulators pledged to ban trawling in a matter of days if they saw overfishing of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean next month. The EU's fishing capacity is so large and activity so concentrated in June that the fleet could exhaust the EU quota in just two days of fishing. The EU's overall bluefin tuna catch is administered by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), a global body overseeing the rules for tuna fishing.
One ICAAT official said "We need daily monitoring of catches. If the scenario is anything like last year, we need ultra-quick mechanisms". Currently catches are only inspected by ICCAT when they are landed in port or if the fishing company requests an onboard observer from ICAAT. ICAAT states: "Planning for and executing an observer deployment can be complex and time-consuming".

ICAAT also says however that"Poor compliance with existing measures remains one of the main root causes of overfishing in bluefin tuna fisheries".

In 2007, overfishing by the seven main EU countries that trawl for bluefin tuna -- Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain -- caused the EU to exceed its international catch quota by 25 percent.

In the same week that this bad news came from the EU though, eight Pacific Island nations have signed an agreement to stop foreign fishing fleets taking their tuna. The move came out of the Palau Nauru Agreement (PNA) group meeting in Palau this week. The meeting of 17 Pacific countries, including Australia, announced the plan to stop boats from fishing for tuna in two large areas of international waters. Foreign fishing vessels licensed to fish in the waters of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu will be banned from operating in two regions of the Pacific Commons adjacent to these countries. Since most Pacific tuna stocks - valued at US$3 billion a year - come from the waters of these countries, this will be a major contribution towards the protection of Pacific tuna. Greenpeace says that it also represents a giant stride towards making these areas into marine reserves. The meeting also announced a requirement for vessels fishing for tuna to retain their full catches, regardless of whether or not they are tuna stocks and a ban of the use of Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs).

These measures are designed to explicitly cut the tuna catch in the pacific. The retention of full catches, for example, is intended to cut the time fishing boats spend at sea. At present they throw away non-tuna stocks, allowing them to spend a much longer time at sea. "By adopting this measure, they will spend less time at sea, which means less fishing for tuna," PNA officials said.

Because Pacific island nations do not have enough money to properly protect their waters, pirate fishing is rife in the region. Globally pirates steal up to US$9 billion worth of fish from the region every year. A review carried out in 2006 of the Japanese market confirmed that there have been significant levels of unreported catches of Southern Bluefin Tuna for at least the past 20 years. It is estimated that up to 178 000 tonnes of unreported Southern Bluefin Tuna have been caught in that time.

Undersea Mining in the South Pacific

A black smoker hydrothermal vent. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

"Black smokers" are hydrothermal vents that lie hundreds of metres below the ocean surface. These are areas where the seafloor is actively spreading due to movement of the earth's crust. In these areas fractures in the earth's crust release streams of geothermally heated water that are rich in dissolved metals. When these hot fluids hit the cold sea water, metals precipitate out of solution and form mounds and chimneys of mineral rich sulphides known by mining companies as Seafloor Massive Sulphides (SMS). The metal sulphides that are deposited can become massive sulphide ore deposits over time. Since the 1977, when the first one was discovered by researchers from the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, hydrothermal vents have been identified in scores of locations around the world, including in the Manus Basin off the coast of Papua New Guinea, the Kermadec Ridge in New Zealand waters, and along several other fissures around the Pacific Rim.

A sulphide deposit. Source: Nautilus Minerals.

It is the unique mix of what is in those solid undersea deposits that is driving two publicly traded mining companies: Neptune Minerals of Sydney and Nautilus Minerals of Vancouver to claim large tracts of seafloor over and around these black smoker sites. If all goes to plan for these companies the first mining of these deposits will occur in 2009 with a brand new ship designed specifically for this purpose. The first deep-sea mining machines — designed to extract gold, silver and copper deposits — are currently being built for Nautilus Minerals. A £33 million ($A68.5 million) contract for two sea-floor mining tools, capable of working at depths of more than 1700 metres, was awarded last December to a Newcastle-upon-Tyne firm, Soil Machine Dynamics. The mining machinery is the hardware behind an emerging mineral extraction industry which has taken off rapidly in the last few years. Nautilus is an Australian-dominated but Toronto Stock Exchange listed company investigating undersea mining at a number of sites around the South Pacific.

According to Nautilus CEO David Heydon in 2006 Nautilus had “17,500 km² of mineral claims covering what you call on land a ‘mining camp.’” He added that the project had enormous potential because the company could place claims over “the whole mineral belt.” Latest figures suggest that at the end of 2007 Nautilus had approximately 154,000 km² of granted tenements and 210,000 km² of tenement applications pending in PNG, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Fiji and New Zealand

Neptune Minerals has lodged three prospecting applications over a total area of 84,880 km² in New Zealands territorial waters near the undersea Monowai volcano on the Kermadec Arc and along the Colville Ridge. Neptune currently has exploration licenses covering 278,000 km² in the territorial waters of New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Federated States of Micronesia and Vanuatu, and has further license pending covering 436,000 km² in the territorial waters of New Zealand, Japan, Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, Palau and Italy.

So what is undersea mining? How would it work?

According to David Heydon the set-up proposed by Nautilus for the Solwara Project in Papua New Guinea involves four main components:

1. The material will be "disaggregated" from the seabed with a seabed crawler that has a cutter section and dredge head. This unit is operated from the ship via an umbilical cable.


2. The cut material will then sucked in and pumped through a 300mm wide pipe. Five pumps spread along the pipe at different depths move the material 1,700 metres to the ship above.


3. The material is then collected on the ship in a cargo hold and then transferred to a barge by very large excavators fixed on the ship.


4. The material is then processed and refined on shore.

The proposed Nautilus mining technique. Source: Nautilus Minerals

Nautilus estimates that it will be able to mine 6000 tonnes a day from its target site and there is concern from many environmental campaigners and marine biologists that the unusual ecosystems around these sites might be destroyed by mining, as has happened so often on dry land. 'These sites have limited physical integrity and great biodiversity,' says Simon Cripps, director of the WWF's global marine programme.

What environmental effects might subsea mining have?

Nautilus have funded a large Environmental Impact Assessment Study as part of their plan to convince the Papua New Guinea Government to allow the proposed mining to go ahead, however this document is not yet available for viewing by interested environmentalists.

The mining operations will use a strip-mining approach to remove deposits within the top 20 metres of the seafloor. These strips would be located approximately 500 metres to two kilometres from the active vents, but scientist Jochen Halfar of the University of Toronto argues that the cutting and pumping process will disgorge considerable amounts of fine sediment into the water column—a serious problem for vent organisms that feed by filtering the water in their habitat.

Halfar suggests that the mining process could also raise concentrated nutrients from the deep sea to the relatively nutrient-poor surface waters of the ocean, causing algal blooms and potentially contaminating waters that support Papua New Guinea’s commercial fishing industry, as well as local subsistence fishers. Depending on ocean currents, these nutrients could drift widely, disrupting the food chain and potentially damaging ecosystems that lie within other countries’ economic zones or in international waters. This poses additional problems, because while a state has the right to exploit its own resources, international environmental law decrees that it cannot damage the environment beyond its boundaries.

Opponents also point out that mining vessels, designed to extract pure metals from their ores, will also carry thousands of tonnes of sulphurous waste that could cause potentially devastating acidification if dumped back into the sea, whether deliberately or accidentally. Craig Cary, a marine biologist at the University of Delaware in Newark, says "If I was in charge of reviewing permit requests there would be some serious questions to answer. Metal sulphides are nasty substances - how are they going to deal with that?" he says.

One clear Nautilus talking point is that undersea mining is far less environmentally damaging than terrestrial mining.


Scott Trebilcock, vice-president of business development:

Trebilcock believes the operation will cause far less environmental damage than a similar-sized onshore mine. He says: "There's no disturbance to the site around the mine. We'll have no waste rock. Everything we take up will be smelted.

Dr. Steven Scott, a geologist at the University of Toronto who does a lot of work with Nautilus:

It's a transformation that he says has evoked a knee-jerk reaction over the possible environmental impacts of this mining, which he believes could be less destructive than terrestrial mining.

Dr Samantha Smith, formerly of the University of Toronto, now of Nautilus:

The assessment is led by Smith, recently converted to the cause of underwater mining. 'Environmentally, sea floor mining is a better alternative to terrestrial mining,' she argues. 'Mining on land leaves a substantial footprint. It leaves polluted waterways, carbon emissions from heavy machinery and millions of tonnes of waste rock that has to be dumped somewhere.'

The WWF remains sceptical. 'It isn't a useful argument to say that this is less harmful than mining on land, since terrestrial mining is already extremely harmful,' says Cripps. 'Making such a comparison is a counter-productive argument. What we're interested in is seeing a thorough assessment of the real impact that this will have.' If the Solwara Environmental Impact Assessment is ever released perhaps it will go some way towards answering some of the question that independent scientists have regarding the project impacts.

Polar Bears To Be Protected.

The U.S. Department of the Interior declared the polar bear a threatened species on Wednesday, saying the species must be protected because of the recent massive decline in Arctic sea ice caused by global warming. According to the World Wildlife Fund, some polar bears are already starving as a result of these changing Arctic conditions. The U.S. Geological Survey published a prediction in September that 2/3 of the worlds polar bear population would be extinct by 2050.

The ruling marks a victory for a coalition of environmentalists - the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) - which sued to force the Department of the Interior to decide whether to protect the hoary Arctic predators under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Listing the polar bear guarantees federal agencies will be obligated to ensure that any action they authorise, fund, or carry out will not jeopardise the polar bears' continued existence or adversely modify their critical habitat, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be required to prepare a recovery plan for the polar bear, specifying measures necessary for its protection.

While the listing is a good start to begin protecting the polar bear, it's clear that there is nothing, under the ESA at least, that the Bush Administration intends to do to slow down warming and reduce sea ice loss. In making the announcement, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne said, “I am also announcing that this listing decision will be accompanied by administrative guidance and a rule that defines the scope of impact my decision will have, in order to protect the polar bear while limiting the unintended harm to the society and economy of the United States.”

Last month President Bush said, “The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act were never meant to regulate global climate change.”

He said, “There is a right way and wrong way to approach reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The American people deserve an honest assessment of the costs, benefits and feasibility of any proposed solution. Discussions with such far-reaching impact should not be left to unelected regulators and judges but should be debated openly and made by the elected representatives of the people they affect.” Kempthorne said, “This Administration has taken real action to deal with the challenges of climate change.”

It is not clear what these actions are.

Another former laggard, Australia, has at last moved in the right direction, committing $2.3 billion over five years to reduce carbon emissions in the annual federal budget announced yesterday.

Shark Attack!!

A shark attack at Albany, Western Australia on the weekend was the sixth attack this month globally. It follows shark attacks in San Diego,Mexico and Florida.

Interestingly New Smyrna Beach where the latest Florida incidents occurred has had more recorded incidents per square mile than any beach on Earth. So far this year there have been 10 attacks on surfers, including the three in three days that occurred last week. Yet still people swim there...

Of the attacks this month only the San Diego and Mexico incidents proved fatal to the humans involved. In comparison, the Shark Specialist Group at the IUCN (The World Conservation Union) estimates that around 100 million sharks are killed in shark fisheries and as bycatch around the world each year.

20% of the elasmobranch (shark and ray) species assessed for the IUCN 2006 redlist were considered to be in danger of extinction. Six species found in Australian waters are listed as threatened under the EPBC Act.

There are no catch limits in international waters and existing bans on “finning” are ineffective. Spanish fishing fleets in particular have been targeting sharks in recent years. In December the United Nations passed a resolution calling for catch limits and true shark-finning bans, and the European Union is currently drawing up a plan of action.

People love to hear about shark attacks, but it's a shame we don't hear more about the effects people are having on shark populations. We are driving them to extinction.