Another piece of the Atlantic Rainforest falls

Someone forwarded to me a video about Ford Motor Co.'s new, modern manufacturing plant in Brazil with a comment about globalization and what it means for American workers, but what caught my eys was the statement: “...amid the remnants of the Atlantic Rainforest...”. This is one of the world’s top 25 “biodiversity hotspots,” one of the most biodiverse ecosystems and most endangered and it’s just about gone. It hosts a huge number of species that occur nowhere else, including several monkey species. I have photo of two species, the Golden-headed Tamarin shown above, and others posted at http://picasaweb.google.ca/Lee.Coquitlam/Primates# that I took in the Lisbon Zoo. By 2003 the Atlantic Forest was down to about 5% of its original area (around 70,000 km2) and shrinking fast. It has (or had) 261 species of mammals, 73 of which occur no where else in the world. Species are still being discovered there, but it seems that it is being destroyed so fast that many of its species will be lost before they are ever “discovered” by scientists—although the local people who eat them know that they are there! I guess when they are gone, we can thank Ford for their small part in this environmental catastrophe.


I’ve never been there. Maybe I will one day, but I'd better hurry or it will be gone.

Globalization is bad, not just because it engenders poverty in the already-poor while enriching the already-rich. What it means for the environment is that as long as any country has resources left, another country will buy them, in many cases from the politicians and their friends, leaving their own people without productive land and resources. The economies of the rich countries can run as long as there are resources somewhere that they can buy, but every year fewer countries have resources left for sale, or for domestic use. The politicians haven’t noticed that the global economy has transitioned from one of producing countries competing for buyers for their resources, to consuming countries competing for access to dwindling resources. Meanwhile, the countries with no more resources for sale or local use often become “failed states” and a strategic threat to the interests of countries like the USA and Canada. It can’t last forever.

Self-awareness in humans and mammals: predators and prey

I just read Richard Leakey's 1992 book, Origins Reconsidered. He talks about self-awareness as being one of the hall-marks of human cognition, and it’s demonstrated by deception—if you can think to deceive someone, you must be able to imagine what he/she is thinking and how he/she will react to your own actions. The development of this went along with transitioning to a hunter-gatherer society. I remembered hunting (formerly with a rifle, now with a camera) and recalled how every hunter, when in sight of the quarry, will look away and pretend not to notice the quarry, while working closer enough for a shot. Especially, we never make eye contact with our prey. This is universal hunting behaviour. It seems innate: so obvious that it doesn’t have to be taught. Then I thought, wait a minute: the prey must have some self-awareness to observe the hunter and decide whether its intentions are dangerous or not.
One can extend this in many directions, e.g.: (1) On my morning walks, when I pass a house with a dog on the porch, if I don’t seem to notice it, it watches me casually, briefly, and then looks away. But if I stop and look directly at it, first I see the hackles rise, and within a second or two it’s on its feet in an agonistic posture, or barking. (2) I have a photo of 27 mature bighorn sheep rams sunning in a steep meadow and not one is looking directly at any of the others. I had read Val Geist’s book and easily recognized this confrontation-avoidance tactic. (3) Sheep “present horns” to each other during male-male competitions: one stands broadside and holds his head so his opponent can see the size of his curl. Once when I came upon a Dall sheep ram in the Yukon, at first I looked studiously away and pretended not to notice him, so I could get closer for a photo. But the terrain prevented a close approach, so I made myself into a threatening ram by holding my arm up beside my head in a curl, broadside to the ram, and he instantly reacted assertively, strutting back and forth presenting me his horns, and coming closer and closer until I decided that was close enough and took the photo—whereupon he went back to grazing. So in this case, I was humanly deceiving him and he was bovinely reacting, but he must have had some sort of self-awareness to determine my changing states of attention (and intention) towards him.
How many wildlife films have we seen of a wolf among caribou, or a lion among wildebeest, pretending to ignore them while the prey watch intently to try to determine their intentions? Are these hunters not practicing deception?
Probably Leaky could explain this, but didn’t go into the nuances because of space limitation, and to not bore his audience. When I get a minute, I'll look into the literature.

Reptile Friendships

I'm sure that reptiles haven't been studied socially enough to make any statements about their social behaviour repertoir, but I think they form "friendships" like mammals and birds. This is because our son Andrew had a variety of lizards for several years and it was easy to see that they were comfortable with him and with each other, and to a lesser extent with the rest of us. If the lizards happened to be loose (he often let them out to roam around), upon entry of a strange human or reptile or dog, they would flee to Andrew and run up his body and cringe hiding on the side of his head that was away from the stranger. He often suffered multiple scratches from their sharp claws when a strange visitor would reach out to try to touch or pet the reptile. They didn't flee to a dark corner or to their terrarium; they chose Andrew. Well, it doesn't prove anything, except that reptiles are a lot more perceptive of individuals than we give them credit for, and can differentiate between known "friends" and strangers who are obviously potential foes.

The Jordan Tourists Never See 5: Burqu'

Leaving at dawn from a research station in the eastern desert, about 140 km east from Azraq on the straight highway to Baghdad, we passed through the village of Safawi, where we filled our water and gasoline containers and bought groceries for lunch. After another 90 km we passed a military checkpoint, Muqat--but no town--about 50 km before the Iraq border. The desert was flat and featureless and the 4 x 4 droned on. After hours of this, Hannah was absently watching miles of nothing pass by, listening to Lebanese music on the radio while Dr. Saad, an ecologist, and I chatted about our project (see December 31, 2009 post: Trek of the Al Kuwaiti). Suddenly Dr. Saad braked, turned off the pavement and began driving in the soft sand perpendicular to the highway. This got Hannah's attention: There was no road. "What...?" she asked, not a little dismayed.

"We have no further need of roads," I said, grinning. "This is the way to Burqu'."

I had been to Burqu’ before, but it was Hannah’s first time. Burqu’ is astonishing, not so much for the Roman/Byzantine/Islamic fortress, or even the lake, but for where it is. It is the only permanent water supply south of Syria, west of Iraq, north of Saudia Arabia, and east of Azraq Oasis (see my January 6 note on Azraq). The Bedu (Bedouins) have watered thelr livestock there since ancient times. Nabateans (no, their culture was not limited to Petra, as you might gather from the tourist literature there) had created the lake by damming a permanent spring around 300 BCE (Before the Common Era). Later, the Romans built a "castle" fortress to house a garrison, one of the most remote of their realm. Still later, Byzantine monks used it as a monastery. In 700 CE the Caliph’s son, Prince Al-Walid, built a wall enclosing the castle in a courtyard. On its walls are Roman and Kufic (an early form of Arabic) inscriptions. Throughout recorded history, Bedouin tribes have fought over it and travelling caravans stopped there to water their camels. In recent years, the government enlarged the pond into a reservoir by building a new dam further along the wadi.

Burqu' is as important to wildlife as to people. Being the only water source in a vast stretch of the great Syrian Desert, it is a crucial stopover for migrating waterfowl, shorebirds and raptors. For all the birds migrating between Eurasia and Africa, there are only two routes: one down the Jordan Valley and across the northern end of the Red Sea, and the other across the Syrian Desert and across the southern end of the Red Sea. They need water, and Burq'u is the only source for hundreds of kilometers. In winter and during migration, Burqu’ hosts millions of birds of more than 200 species. It is one of the Middle East’s most important sites for raptors, and the basalt desert surrounding it is also the last refuge for gazelles, small mammals such as hares, jerboas and girbils, and a considerable diversity of predators: red fox (Vulpes vulpes), sand cat (Felis margarita) Syrian jackal (Canis aureus syriaca), Arabian wolf (Canis lupus arabs), Ruepelli’s sand fox (Vulpes rueppelli), caracal (Caracal caracal), wild cat (Felis sylvestris tristrami), and Syrian hyaena (Hyaena hyaena syriaca) have been detected there in recent surveys.

Dr. Saad continued navigating the trackless desert. After a while, Hannah said, “I see the oasis!” Our colleague smiled conspiratorially, leaving it to me to tell her that it was only a mirage. After another hour, we crossed a rise and saw an eight metre tall black castle looming over a 2 km long lake. Flocks of ducks and shorebirds flew up, watched intently by hawks and eagles—I counted five species—while hoopoes, larks, wheatears, warblers, flycatchers and other birds sang among the bushes. A shepherd watched her sheep grazing in a grassy meadow on the far side. Hannah waited a moment before saying, “Okay, that’s not a mirage.”

The rough surrounding terrain limits hunting, providing a natural refuge for rare wildlife. A 700 km2 nature reserve is proposed. If Arabian oryx, Persian onagers, blue-necked ostriches, and cheetahs are ever reintroduced to Jordan, it will be here.

Book Review: The social behaviour of older animals

Before Diane Fossey, even before Jane Goodall, there was Anne Innis Dagg. Anne went to Africa in 1956 to study wildlife, possibly the first foreigner of either gender to do so, except for colonialists who were posted there. She earned her PhD studying the gaits of large mammals, including the giraffe, and had a raft of publications, including the giraffe species account in Mammalian Species (the apex achievement, for a mammalogist), and books that are still the definitive references on giraffe and camels. She became an expert on mammalian (mainly ungulate) locomotion and gaits. In 1973 she and a female colleague set off with a guide and camel driver into the Sahara (it was no safer then than now!) to study camels and their books and papers are still key references. As sort of a sideline to her research and teaching, she began challenging gender bias in biology – and who better to do so than one who had to masquerade as a man just to be accepted onto the property of a South African farmer whose wild giraffe population would be the focus of her first study? In scholarly articles and books, she destroyed gender stereotypes and challenged sociobiological theories (for example, that lion and leaf monkey males always kill young that are not their own so they can have sex with their mothers and pass on their genes; and females living past reproductive age are a useless drain on resources and contrary to evolutionary theory).

“The social behaviour of older animals” (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 2009) is scholarly (and should be on the reading list of every biology student), but written in a very readable style accessible to the lay public. In it, she explores the contributions of older, and especially post-reproductive, animals to their families and societies in an evolutionary context. She shows why, for a wide range of animals, but concentrating on mammals and especially primates, the resources consumed by post-reproductive males and females are more than balanced by their roles as teachers, leaders and mediators; and how their knowledge and wisdom increase the survival chances of their families and societies.

Dagg and other researchers have largely dispelled the ideas of the sociobiologists (although many don't know it yet), which define human behaviour in terms of self-interest. Selfishness is only part (and often wrong, at that) of a much broader view that is not yet in focus. The overthrow of sociobiology has left a sort of vacuum in our understanding of us, from which a new paradigm must soon emerge. Biologists are beginning to explore the evolutionary basis for such human qualities (I'm not saying they are exclusively human) as altruism, compassion, ethical behaviour, moral values, and appreciation of art and beautify in all of its forms. Their results will be most enlightening.

Selected books and key papers by Anne Innes Dagg

Dagg, A. I. 1971. Giraffa camelopardalis. Mammalian Species 5:1-8.
Dagg, A. I. 1973. Gaits in mammals. Mammal Review 3:135-154.
DAGG AI and JB Foster (1976): The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behavior and Ecology. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York
Gauthier-Pilters, H., and A. I. Dagg. 1981. The camel. Its evolution, ecology, behavior, and relationship to man. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Dagg, A. I. 1978. Camel quest: summer research on the Saharan camel. Otter Press, Waterloo, Ontario.
Dagg, A. I. 1983. Harems and other horrors: sexual bias in behavioral biology. Otter Press, Waterloo, Ontario.
Dagg, A. I. 1998. Infanticide by male lions hypothesis: A fallacy influencing research into human behavior. American Anthropologist 100:940-950.
Dagg, A. I. 2000. The Infanticide Hypothesis: A Response to the Response. American Anthropologist 102:831-834.
Dagg, A. I. 2005. Love of shopping is not a gene: problems with Darwinian psychology. Black Rose Books, Montreal.
Dagg, A. I. 2006. Pursuing giraffe: a 1950s adventure. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario.
Dagg, A. I. 2009. The social behavior of older animals. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

The Jordan Tourists Rarely See 4: The Sirhan Cyprinid

Azraq Oasis (see January 17 post; photos at the Picasa URL in the Header) used to be a 1250 ha permanent, freshwater marsh way out in the Jordanian desert (the "Badia") that in winter swelled to 12,000 ha or more. It has a huge, not-quite flat catchment basin, so that the annual rain--there's usually only one, in winter, and it's a deluge, but only occurs in a small and random part of the basin--fills a shallow aquifer. Also, a creek (Wadi Rajil) runs in from Syria, bringing more water in winter, so that the aquifer was recharged enough annually to produce two springs that actually flowed all year. Villages grew up since ancient times around each of these springs, which are a few km apart. Nabateans built water control structures to raise the water level and make sort of a boat launch, later Romans built a castle, Byzantines built other structures, and Ottoman Turks controlled it for awhile, until T.E. Lawrence "of Arabia" lived in the old castle while rallying the Arabs to defeat Turkey in WW I. Then the new Jordan government starting pumping water all the way to Amman through a 48" diameter pipe, some 500 illegal wells were dug or drilled for date palms and other farms, the Syrians dammed off Wadi Rajil, and the marsh went dry in 1990 for the first time ever. This was part of my study. The government claimed that it went dry because of the Gulf War in Kuwait, when the 1.4 million immigrants who fled the war forced the government to increase its pumping rate for Amman's water and sewage. But the case didn't hold water (!). Meanwhile, a small cyprinid fish endemic to the marsh (Aphanius sirhani , family Cyprinodontidae, after the Sirhan tribe of Bedouin that still roam that part of Jordan and Saudi Aribia in search of pasture for their sheep and camels), went extinct. Or so they thought. Turns out a fish biologist at the Jordan University had a few in an aquarium. Plus, in a 2001 survey, biologists found a handful still living at Azraq. International donors provided funds to pump some of the water from the aquifer back into the marsh, re-flooding about 30 ha. Just when I arrived to begin studying wetlands and terrestrial ecosystem in 2002, they returned the Sirhan fish to the marsh, and now it has a thriving, though small and still threatened, population. Successful reintroduction to the wild will depend on removing the alien Tilapia Sarotherodon galileus, maintaining pumping into the marsh, and eliminating the illegal wells.

In 2010, International Year of Biodiversity, primates are going extinct

Okay, that’s it. Although never a fan of Communism, since my first scientific meeting there in 1993, I used to defend some of China’s environmental policies to my friends. Alone among countries, its one-child policy has prevented untold privation, poverty, death, and concomitant environmental destruction by preventing unchecked population growth. After massive deforestation during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, since the 1980s it has sustained the most massive tree-planting program on the planet. Yes, its water and air quality are bad throughout the populous eastern provinces, but the Ministry of Environmental Protection has greatly improved its laws and is planning more. But I’m done defending China’s environmental record.
Two recent scientific papers caught my eye: First, after years of warnings, a species of gibbon, the Lar or White-handed Gibbon, was confirmed extirpated from China and more species are likely to follow soon. Second, a 2009 report showed a photograph of forearm bones from another species, the White-cheeked Gibbon, being used as chopsticks in Guangnali, China.
The former is endangered globally, and the latter is critically endangered. In fact, all of the 12 to 15 (scientists aren’t even sure) gibbon species are either endangered or critically endangered except for the eastern Hoolock, which is merely vulnerable. The most endangered live in the mountains bordering Vietnam, Laos and China. The Hainan Black-crested Gibbon and four other primates (langurs and snub-nosed monkeys) of China and Vietnam are among the 25 most endangered primates in the world, each with not more than a few hundred individuals. Why? Although deforestation is a deplorable cause everywhere, when populations get down to low levels in fragmented habitats, poaching hastens their destruction. Rampant and uncontrolled hunting is the most immediate threat for the most endangered primates throughout Southeast Asia. Such is the demand in China that illegally poached primates or their parts are imported from as far away as Borneo, Sumatra, and Peninsular Malaysia. But poachers in Vietnam and Laos can walk across the border. This is 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity!
I had already known about the huge demand in China and Vietnam for monkey meat, other parts, and the pet trade. In Hanoi, one can purchase an elixir made from their blood. But chopsticks!
Gibbons, the “lesser apes,” are in the same superfamily as Humans, the Hominoidea, and branched off from our family line about 17 million years ago. Compared with other apes, gibbons are small, slender, and agile, exhibit no sexual dimorphism, and have very long arms adapted for a spectacular arm swinging locomotion called “brachiation.” Like us, the males of mated pairs care for infants. Gibbons have been called the “poster child for monogamy” among the primates. I put more on their biology in my last post.
Canada and China signed the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992; Vietnam followed in 1993 and Laos in 1996. We are all members of the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (Canada 1975, China 1981, Vietnam 1994, Laos 2004). This means our bureaucrats meet together at least annually to manage implementation of the treaties. Outside of these conventions, China and Canada have a long history of environmental cooperation. For just one example, Canada’s Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has always been the “lead” donor for the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, established in 1992. Its secretariat office, in the Simon Fraser University David Lam Centre for International Communication, is funded for the current phase (2006–2012) at $9,277,657. Is it too much to expect, for all of this effort over all this time, that some progress might be made in protecting some of our nearest relatives from extinction?

References Cited (available on request)