What's In A NAME - Biodiversity vs Global Warming

"Tis but thy name that is my enemy" says Juliet to Romeo, and as it turns out, she's right, while Romeo ('that which we call a rose by any other name...') is dead wrong.

A LOT of people know what 'Global Warming' or 'Climate Change' is all about. At the same time, very few people have a clue that such a thing as 'biodiversity' even exists.

Not surprisingly, the percentage of people that have never heard of biodiversity is over 30% of a well educated population - the English.

I think it's a tragedy. Both GW (or 'climate change') and BD are important concepts. Both signify huge changes that are taking place right now on our planet.

But, to my mind, the impact of loss of biodiversity is a much, much bigger problem. Certainly more dangerous in the short term, and yet it is the area where individual humans can make an immediate change.

 With GW, while the awareness is good, and individuals can and should try to do their bit, the forces at work really do require global action. Individuals can have little direct impact.

On the popular level, it turns out that fully 30% of the respondents to the recent DEFRA survey thought “there is nothing I can do personally to help protect the UK's biodiversity.”

Looking locally, in India what we do deservedly see getting huge publicity, is the loss of our tigers. And that IS certainly of great importance. 

But, have you ever considered that we are concentrating on the species that sits at the very top spot of a huge ecological pyramid?   The land, the plants, the herbivores, the insects, the germs - entire ecosystems consisting of hundreds of thousands of individual species have to function perfectly and together to allow even a single tiger to survive in the wild. 

And we are blind to the loss of all these stepping stone species. 

It is mind boggling to imagine, but we are losing our biodiversity.

As we lose our biodiversity, so we will also lose our tigers... and it's not only the tigers we will lose!

The LOSS of biodiversity (and that's four words to describe a phenomenon) is so, so deadly. It's happening right now, all around you. But before we will start to do something about it, we need to understand and acknowledge that it is REAL.

Yet, sillily enough, I do wish there were a ONE WORD name for this phenomenon.

I really believe that a better name for biodiversity, something catchier, simpler to remember, unique, and meaningful, will make a huge difference to the amount of awareness. The fight to save the world's BD is of the utmost importance.

Please lend a hand, let's rename this thorny rose, let's start winning back our biodiversity - before it is too late - and we end up with only this...

P.S. I've tried BIOINVERSITY and that only adds to the confusion. Then there's ECOCIDE, but that seems too broad... so, what'll it be? 

You can do better, start now, find a word, or create one, and the whole world and all the creatures that now still inhabit this world will thank you!

A quick link via @greenroofsuk (Dusty Gedge) Michael McCarthy in the Independent "Nature Studies: Our generation has seen a great thinning that we can’t quite name" 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/nature-studies-our-generation-has-seen-a-great-thinning-that-we-cant-quite-name-8426019.html

And if you have any doubts at all about the Earth now undergoing the sixth mass extinction in its history – the first since the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago, then please read:

How Humans Cause Mass Extinctions

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mass-extinction-human-cause-by-paul-r--ehrlich-and-anne-h--ehrlich-2015-08#vGlkvtRrX1vHKDjW.99  

http://bit.ly/1TyiNRe

by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich - Project Syndicate

BIODIVERSITY versus Global Warming

A lovely new tool for comparing up to three different blogworld variables is available on icerocket and I used it to see how biodiversity was doing in comparison to global warming in the blogosphere.

The result was disheartening. Folks are much, much more worried about a crisis that is yet to come than they are about an ongoing and potentially much more devastating one - loss of BIODIVERSITY!

I AM A BIT AT A LOSS. How does one convince people that we are losing species permanently on a daily basis? Once stable ecosystems are endangered and will be irrecoverably lost if we don't start taking immediate action. Once a species is lost it will never be regained and once an ecosystem is damaged by species loss, that ecosystem is doomed!

Here are the actual stats as of May 18th, 2007:

GW = Global Warming, B = Biodiversity and E = Endangered Species

Trend Terms......Posts per day..........Average %.......Total posts

GW.....................1,353.91................. 0.1791.............121,852

B..........................53.16....................0.0069...............4,784

E..........................96.30....................0.0127...............8,667

That's at present something like 25 times as much activity on GW than it deserves and biodiversity needs to get 50 times stronger...

Any Bright Ideas?

The minute you start getting concerned about bioinversity and start blogging on it and doing something about it, these stats will surely improve.

Biodiversity - The Inverse Main Point

The blogosphere is full of much talk of environmental issues.

GW (or global warming) seems to take the cake for popularity. The fear factor and much media hype are partly responsible for the focus on GW even though one admits that the overall concern may be a very valid one.

But, for the biosphere, what are the real issues and environmental concerns?

If I had to pick the one greatest concern it would be the growth of

bioinversity / the loss of biodiversity.

I prefer the previous term as more descriptive of what is actually happening - species of all sorts are disappearing once and for all.

It is frightening. Bioinversity means that ecosystems will die, for
the interdependencies are huge.

We won't notice the changes
overnight but our children,
and theirs in turn, will curse us as
the blindest of fools!

PREMEDITATED OCEAN RAPE

The Gulf of Mannar lies just East and South of the temple town of Rameshwaram on the S.E. coast of India. The region has been declared a biosphere of great importance to the entire Indian Ocean and was the very first declared UNESCO recognised biosphere reserve (1989). It may well qualify as the world's richest area of marine biological resource. There is a particularly rich diversity of ecological niches including 21 uninhabited islands, with estuaries, beaches, forests of the nearshore environment, with marine algal communities, sea grasses, coral reefs, salt marshes and mangroves!

The sea cow, Dugong dugon (related to the manatee), with child - a very rare sight these days

There is a combined flora and fauna of more than 3,600 species represented here within an area of 10,500 sq km. Many of these species are endemic to this particular area of shallow ocean and include a number of critically endangered species (see the Red List). Just one example on the island of Kurusadai, less than a kilometre from the Indian mainland, is the world's one and only outpost of a subspecies of Ptychodera - a hemichordate ('acornworm') found nowhere else! New species and subspecies are constantly being 'discovered' in this area while simultaneously a number of previously common endemics seem to have completely disappeared.

The area also traditionally provides a rich and renewable source of food and livelihood to over 3 million native fisherfolk along our Indian coastline. Over the last decade, mechanised trawlers and biodegredation have been driving many of these families into penury.

Right through the heart of this precious and already highly stressed zone, our wise government proposes to carve out a channel, wide and deep enough to allow large, ocean going vessels easier access to India's ports. The ships will therefore be able to completely bypass the trip around Sri Lanka.

The Tsunami did its share, coming as a boon to the promoters of the 'S' project because the native fisherfolks, who were the most vociferous objectors, have been effectively driven from their villages and are reduced to living off handouts. And this does not take into account the coastal population on the other side of the gulf where lies Sri Lanka (Ceylon), who are even worse off due to the ongoing civil war there that compounds the devastation left by the Tsunami.

The Sethusamudram project further calls for continuous dredging of this canal which will result in huge quantities of silt continuously being spread throughout, destroying not only sea grass but corrals and algal growth also. The algae,plants, and corrals are the backbone of the whole food chain - with all opposition silenced we are staring at a scenario of total destruction of entire livelihoods, habitats and ecosystems.

The fact is that organised overfishing and almost no protection for the fragile reserve has already resulted in massive destruction of corral and mangrove, the two most precious ecosystems, which together account for 90% of the area's biodiversity. Unrestrained blasting and harvesting of corral to feed hungry cement plants, overfishing mainly due to the extensive use of trawlers by multnationals (for export) and specific destruction such as the targeting of sea cucumbers, ornamental fish, crustaceans (prawns, lobsters, crabs), turtles and sharks (both for soup!), have all taken a heavy toll on this unique and irreplaceable "biosphere".

Perhaps most shocking is the studied silence of the U.N. and almost all organisations involved in promoting conservation / biodiversity. Our government claims to have extensively studied the project's environmental impact but in the face of their winking at the daily destruction one wonders what it is that they have been claiming to conserve!

The fact is that mega projects like this one mean mega bucks for all the private and governmental players. In the face of such gross shortsightedness (not to mention greed), the world's bioinversity can only multiply apace.

After carefully studying the issues I urge you to

OBJECT TO THE SETHUSAMUDRAM PROJECT!

PLEASE JOIN TOGETHER TO OPPOSE THE RAPE OF THE GULF OF MANNAR and of any of our oceans in whichever corner of this globe you may happen to be...

Posts that contain Sethusamudram per day for the last year.

Get your own chart!

Stunted Palm, Hefty Fern? No, it's a CYCAD!

We were so excitedly lucky to see a stand of native Indian cycads - Cycas circinalis - in the Anamalais Hills recently (top).

My second year at college and I was in a quandary. The unlikely result was a course in plant morphology! I thought I knew a lot about plants and thought them much less interesting than animals but soon discovered the depths of my ignorance.

One of the fascinating groups of plants that Dr. Jerry A. Snider introduced to us was the Cycadales. Cycads, as they are commonly known, seem to have been around for at least 300 million years! They were an important part of the flora of the Carboniferous and Permian periods and formed a portion of the vast forests that we now mine as coal. The dominant plants back then included the Lycopsids (club ferns - some small relatives still survive), and other 'fern allies' including the Seed Ferns (now extinct, illustrated here, left and right) along with early relatives of the Gymnosperms (Pines and connifers).

Cycads are considered to be "living fosssils" along with Gingko, Araucaria and fern allies like the club ferns, horsetails, Sellaginella and so on...

Cycads seem somewhat in-between the ferns and the connifers / flowering types, which we often think of as 'higher' plants.

Most wild Cycads are rare, even in tropical lands but especially so in temperate areas, so it was a great pleasure to see healthy Cycas circinalis in these forests.
The commonest Cycad is a gardener's favourite, Cycas revoluta.

Odd looking creatures that resemble stunted palm trees, the cycads are often mistaken for palms. They have male plants and female plants that produce the most fascinatingly unusual male and female 'cones' for reproduction.

Another strange feature is that the fronds (leaves) unfurl very much like a fern's fronds do - what botanists call circinate vernation. It is beautiful to see little shoots like stumpy fiddleheads slowly unrolling into magnificant full-scale fronds. Supposedly a sign of 'primitivity', such unfurling is also shared by some connifers like Araucaria (Newfoundland Island Pine) and the ferns allies.

Along with other rare and beautiful species (like tree ferns - see Cyathea, below) that occupy the understory of 'old' forests, the cycads are dying out due to deforestation.

Bioinversity marches on!

The cycads are even more endangered as they are very, very slow growing. Something a meter high may be 100 or more years old! Once a few are destroyed they will take literally centuries to regrow!

Wonders of God's creation and signposts of biodiversity, these are creatures to be treasured!

Treetops and Topslip

Getting into the forest is the most rejuvenating experience possible!

Topslip is the main outpost of the Indira Gandhi Wildlife Sanctuary, A national park administered by the Tamil Nadu Forest Department in the Western Ghats Catchment area of the state, bordered on the West by the Parambikulam sanctuary in Kerala and on the East by the Anamalai hills.

The entire complex is a very precious reservoir of biodivarsity for an ecosystem that includes one of the only remaining regions of tropical rainforest, truly unique shola forests and medium montane grasslands. The last real populations of the Nilgiri Tahr (a type of mountain sheep/goat - Nilgiritragus hylocrius) are to be found in the upper reaches of these very habitats in isolated pockets of the Western Ghats biosphere.

Arriving on Wednesday, we spent one night at the Chital Forest Lodge and the next morning were given a rare oportunity to experience the newly built Treetops Suites. These are real treehouses placed, seemingly precariously, on stilts of living teak trees, the suites are comfortable and include functioning bathrooms and even hot water!

The evenings were misty and with the onset of the monsoons, we had periods of heavy rain followed by intervals of light drizzle. The spotted deer and wild boar were out in force and the population of the Nilgiri Langurs (Trachypithecus johnii) seems to be very healthy in this forest but they are endangered due to habitat loss and poaching as it is rumoured that their flesh has aphrodisiac properties.

We were surprised by a herd of the endangered Kaattu Erumai (Gaur, Indian 'Bison' - Bos gaurus) who wandered through the camp on the second day. These are massive beasts with the bulls weighing in at over a ton, beautifully marked, generally shy and found only in deep forests, it was a treat to watch them calmly walking through.

The nights were very special. A serenade of insect, tree frog and barking deer calls, with lowering mists and very faint moonlight filtering through. The barking deerMuntiacus muntjak) were obviously tracking larger predators, either leopards or tigers.

Oh, the smells! Delightful wafts of wildflowers, honey, ripe fruits and spices; clean healthy air to relish breathing.

All of our attempts to enter the Karian Shola were dashed by the spells of pelting rain. This patch of Shola is very special as it is one of the last resorts in India for the Ceylon Frogmouth (Batrachostomus moniliger) a fascinating bird that mimics dead leaves so perfectly that it is hard to spot even from a few feet away!

Just as we were getting ready to leave, Sellamuthu, the Treetops' Forest Guide, pulled us out to watch a pair of giant malabar squirrels (Ratufa indica) gambolling in the tops of the nearby teak trees. They were having fun chasing each other around and making incredible leaps from branch to trunk completely oblivious to the fact that they were a good 100 ft up.

Even in these aparently rich forests man's ravages are very evident. Large plantations of teak tree monocultures have replaced a highly diverse forest ecosystem. Attempts to propagate the forest species of trees have been failures and it is becoming obvious that climate change is inimical to the original habitats. The planted seedlings simply don't survive.

In oder to try to promote diversity, species of bamboo have been introduced but introduced species usually create their own imbalances.

We are witnessing bioinversity in action.

So, we take our children to these forests, knowing that our grandchildren will not see anything resembling them at all.

Thanks to Pandiyan for the nilgiri langur pic.