Spotted Owl and Mountain Caribou Endangered in British Columbia

The Hon. Pat Bell, Minister of Forests, Mines and Lands, makes a poor apologist for forest certification (“Rigid environmental standards used in forest certification”, The Vancouver Sun, Letters, December 24, 2010). Under his watch the Spotted Owl population--I can see some of their former habitat from my kitchen window here in Coquitlam--went from 33 breeding pairs in 2003 to none in 2007.



Meanwhile, the Central Selkirk Mountain Caribou population in the mountains behind my cabin went from an estimated 265 in 1996 to 85 in 2006, while across Arrow Lake in the Monashees, 10 were counted in 1994 and seven in 2006. Mr. Bell and his colleagues have decided that the Monashee population, along with two others of the eight in the province, are not worth including in the recovery plan.

Spotted Owls and mountain caribou need old growth forests, but the recovery plans for both of these species begin with the premise that timber supply may not be affected. The national report on the state of the forests that Mr. Bell mentions speaks of “sustainability,” which means something that you can do forever, but two features of BC forest management are not sustainable: old growth forest is being cut and not replaced, and the annual cut is higher than the “long run sustained yield” level.

This level is calculated as the tree growth rate minus the natural decay and the losses due to insects and fire. In a 1994 federal report (Chapter 19 Threats to diversity of forest ecosystems in British Columbia. IN L.E. Harding and E. McCullum, editors, Biodiversity in British Columbia: our changing environment), I wrote that the forests were already being harvested above the sustained yield level, and that the losses due to forest fires and insects were likely to increase because of climate change. Since then, the annual cut has been reduced, but not to below the long run sustained yield level. Meanwhile, the insect losses have increased by an order of magnitude, and we have had several record years of forest fire losses. I also noted in 1994 that climate change could affect the tree growth rates, some stands declining because of drought, and some increasing because of higher temperatures or moisture. That this has since occurred is known, but not in enough detail to accurately revise the long run sustained yield calculations, which were rendered obsolete by the increasing insect and fire losses. Meanwhile, during Mr. Bell’s tenure, the Ministry of Forests inventory and research branches have been decimated. Sustainable? Not yet.

The voyage of the Beagle

What a pleasure it is to re-read Charles Darwin’s Researches* with resources before me that I had not had when I read it many years ago! –a good map of South America so that I can follow his travels, and a book of the birds of southern South America. Darwin usually mentioned animals by their Latin names, and if he gave a common name it was usually in Spanish or Portuguese. Yet, even when the taxonomy has changed, as is often the case after well more than a century and a half, I can always find the bird’s identity, and an illustration. So, too, for the mammals. Yet one of the best resources now available that was not when I first read it is the on-line resources, including the full text and illustrations of all of Darwin’s works. This includes the supplements to his original work, and, most importantly the Zoology with its colour plates of the animals.

Darwin’s first edition of the Voyage of the Beagle was published in 1836. The second, 1845 edition is the one to read because (1) he had time to reflect upon evolution and the mechanism of it (natural selection), and he therefore added a number of comments that presaged his 1859 Origin of the Species and show how his ideas were germinating well before he reached the Galapagos, especially in Argentina and Chile; and (2) the Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle was published in five parts by eminent scientific authorities for each group: 1 Fossil Mammalia by R. Owen (with a geological introduction by Darwin), 2 Mammalia by G. R. Waterhouse (with a geographical indroduction and notes on the habits and ranges of each species by Darwin), 3 Birds by J. Gould and G. R. Gray, 4. Fish by L. Jenyns, and 5 Reptiles [which included Amphibia] by T. Bell.

Since the five Zoology parts were published between from 1838 to 1843, in producing the 1845 edition of his Researches, Darwin could name each species and give details about its relationship to other species, living and extinct. This of course enabled a much fuller understanding of how species vary in time and space.

The Zoology contains beautiful colour plates that are artitistically, historically and taxonomically important. Since all of Darwin’s works are on-line (http://darwin-online.org.uk/contents.html), while reading his Researches, if you have a computer beside you, you can look up the pictures of animals he mentions.

The first version of Darwin’s Researches that I read was a modern Penguin Classics edition, a gift from a naïve colleague, that had been severely abridged by an editor trained in liberal arts, who had no appreciation for the science. I am using both meanings of “appreciation” here: she had neither understanding nor interest in Darwin’s description of the natural world. To make a “story” that to her was interesting and moderately succinct, she cut out large portions of the text, and these were invariably those describing flora, fauna, and geology. I regret that I gave my copy away in a book exchange, instead of burning it.

*Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world. London: John Murray. 2d edition, 1845. Often abbreviated simply as The voyage of the Beagle.

Buddhist Temples are Great for Birdwatching

Having to look up something related to Korea, I noticed how many photos I have of Buddhist temples there. I haven't been to Korea since 2005, but in the preceeding decade I went many times for conferences and to develop and teach training courses in marine environmental science. Each time I went, I took some time for myself to visit Buddhist temples. They are great for birdwatching, and the monks grow and serve the best tea I've found anywhere.

The South Seas Institute where I taught is on Goege Island, just off the south coast. Near it is the town of Tongyeong on the mainland, which lies in the lee of Miruksan, or Mt. Miruk, a great climb on good trails surrounded by natural beauty. The trail passes several temples, of which I will mention two.



The first photo shows Gwaneum-sa (sa means temple), part way up the mountain. You can see from the background that it is surrounded by bamboo and that is partly what attracts birds: some species live in the bamboo itself, and others just like the diversity. The monks planted the bamboo, in most cases centuries ago, so that they can use the stems for making furniture, pipes, and other utilities. Each temple also has a plot of tea plants and a garden plot. Most are beside a stream. It is the diversity of habitats around the temples that attracts so many birds--that and the karma, I suppose. This is where I saw my first Korean subspecies of Eurasian Jay, a much brighter and more colourful version.




The next photo shows Dosoram, not a temple so much as a hermitage for a couple of monks who live there. It lies just on the upper flank of Mt. Miruk where the trail begins its steep climb to the peak. The photo is of a shrine to a monk around 1100 years ago, it is said, who was hiding from enemies and was starving and wounded and took refuge in a cave, the entrance of which can be seen to the right of the shrine. He would have died, but a tiger took pity on him and nursed hime to health.



Next is Popki-sa (or Bopgye-sa), in Chiri-san (Chiri or Jiri Mountain) National Park, which is on the mainland. It is a long, unremittingly steep climb. At 1915 meters, Cheonhwang-bong (bong means peak) is the tallest in the South Korean mainland, making Popki-sa one of the highest temples, or the highest. I've been there twice: October 2004 when the mountain was a riot of fall colours, and May 2005 when the mountain and canyons were covered with pink, red, mauve and purple rhododendrons. The hike is worth it: this is were I saw and recorded the melodious song of my first Siberian Blue Robin, and dozens of other woodland and mountain songbird species.



I first noticed the bird life around temples in Suchow, China, "the Venice of the Orient" as Marco Polo called it, in 1993. It is an ancient city a couple of hours drive from Shanghai where one gets around by sampan through innumerable canals, passing under the same stone bridges that Marco Polo himself marvelled at. For hundreds of years, the beauty of this little city on the Grand Canal made it a place for rich people to retire, and many of their elaborate, formal gardens have been preserved. The old city of Suchow is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its diversity waterbirds is amazing: I saw a Cinnamon Bittern, three kinds of egret, herons, ducks too numerous to mention, and many others.







A few years later, Hannah and went to Qingdao on the Shandong Peninsula. The temples and monasteries, even in this bustling city of 4 million, where oases of peace and forested tranquility, though rather thinly blessed with birds, it must be admitted.







We took a ride up the coast to a Buddhist temple complex at Laoshan. Lao means old and shan means mountain, and these mountains look it: the sharp relief and wrinkled terrain pocked with granite outcrops look like the very bones of the Earth. As always, the monks at Taiqing-gong, a Taoist palace-temple complex, have a tea plantation and there were birds aplenty. Then we hiked up a mile or so to a little temple (above) carved into the rocks by a spring, with some buildings perched on stone terraces built out from the mountain. Again, a myriad of bird species greeted us.



In 2003, Hannah and I went to Japan were we visited many temples, often climbing high mountains, such as the one pictured, a temple near Gifu Castle, overlooking the city of Gifu. This is where I saw my first Blue-and-White Flycatcher.



This next two photos are of a large garden in Hanoi dedicated to Confusius and to learning. Filled with birds: laughing thrushes, babblers, and so on.





Not "best for last" but this last one is one great temple for birding: Angkor Wat. I had a birding guide who brought tea and a banana-leaf wrapped breakfast and showed me so many birds: Coppersmith Barbet, Lineated Barbet, Hill Mynah, 2 species of parakeet, Forest Wagtail, Black Baza, Cotton Pygmy-goose, Indian Roller, Common Iora, Ashy Minivet, Rufous-tailed Rock-thrush, drongos, flycatchers, Brahminy Kite, and on and on.

Invasive Species Really Don't Belong Here

In September my brother and I drove through 12 ecozones from the Forest/Savannah Transition in Wisconsin through Tall Grasslands to the Western Short Grasslands in Colorado, my first time to see the American Prairie. For decades, I had read about conservationists’ efforts to restore its ecological integrity. At Blue Mounds State Park in Minnesota, we walked along a ridge at sunrise, saw bison in Northern Short Grasslands, and then stopped at the park office to chat with two conservation officers.

They described a 20-year long campaign against weeds in their bison range, but mentioned misgivings. They gave me a copy of an article about researcher Mark Davis of Macalester College, St. Paul. His research shows that exotic species often fit well into native ecosystems and contribute to ecosystem function and biodiversity.

Of course, some exotics are fine (e.g., exotic game birds and honeybees), but many are seriously ruinous to terrestrial or aquatic ecosystems or agriculture. Here in British Columbia, ranchers spend millions of dollars trying to limit the spread and reduce the density of knapweeds, for example, and farmers work hard to keep alien weeds out of their crops, as they do in Minnesota. Our aquatic biologists have likewise spent a small fortune trying to limit the growth of damaging aliens, such as the milfoil that fouls beaches in the Okanagan. But, although I have enjoyed hunting chukars and ring-necked pheasants in North America, it was much more of a thrill to see chukars in their native habitats in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and ring-necked pheasants in the Peoples’ Republic of China. Clearly, aesthetics and values are valid components of the debate, if there is one. Some species just don’t belong here.

I agree with Davis that scientists have become more sanguine about the issue and it is usually non-specialists who have such an anti-invasive fervour. I don’t mind their zeal. In 1994, when I published the first comprehensive analysis of invasive species in this province , there was virtually no government or public attention to the damage caused by invasives. Now there are new laws to restrict importation and government staff, stakeholder committees, and citizens’ groups in every region that sponsor research, conduct campaigns to limit the spread of invasives, and mobilize volunteers to eradicate infestations in certain situations. This is all good for the environment.

Leaving Minnesota, we drove through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado, stopping at state parks and National Grasslands all along the way. We saw pronghorn antelope, more bison, desert cottontails, prairie dogs, and other prairie wildlife in four more short-grass ecozones. Without conservation efforts like those at Blue Mounds State Park, these would have been degraded habitats empty of wildlife.

References
Harding, L.E, P.R. Newroth, R. Smith, M. Waldichuk, P. Lambert and B. Smiley, 1994. Exotic species in British Columbia. In: L.E. Harding and E. McCullum (eds.), 1994. Biodiversity in British Columbia: our changing environment. Environment Canada, Delta, B.C. p. 159-223.
DAVIS, M. 2003. Biotic globalization: does competition from introduced species threaten biodiversity? Bioscience 53:481-489.
World Wildlife Fund 2000, Terrestrial Ecoregions

Grooming and the Evolution of Language

Robin Dunbar’s interesting book, Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language (Dunbar 1996) proposes that language evolved in our primate progenitors as a social bond to promote group cohesion, essentially replacing social grooming. I’m not so sure.

His idea was that social grooming (which in primates goes well beyond that needed for health, for example, to remote ticks and fleas) evolved as societal “glue,” but became inadequate when group sizes became too large. Primate societies are based on relationships, which are usually hierarchical: whom you groom, who grooms you, both determine and demonstrate your place in society, which in turn determines your personal and consequently reproductive success. Hence, it is an evolutionary adaptation. But you can only groom and be groomed by so many partners. Beyond a certain group size, grooming becomes inadequate. Dunbar showed, based on a variety of paleontological, anthropological and physiological data and modern and extinct primates, including humans (for example, predicted group size based on ratio of group size to neocortex in primates) that group sizes grew from about 60 in australopithecines, to 80 in H. habilis, 100-120 in H. erectus, 110-130 in archaic humans, and 120-160 in modern humans. Modern human group size, whether as hunter-gatherers, military legions, or corporate operating units, is amazingly consistent and seems related to the number of people that anyone can know personally.

Anthropologist do generally agree that our brain size grew to primarily accommodate the memory and analytical processing power needed to keep track of all the relationships in increasingly larger groups: from 450 cm3 in A. africanus to 750 cm3 in H. habilis, 1050 cm3 in H. erectus, and 1350 cm3 in H. sapiens (Pilbeam and Gould 1974). However, absolute size is not the whole story: in modern humans, body size was reduced somewhat, while the brain stayed the same or grew a little, meaning that relative brain size continued to increase and the biggest jump in relative brain size was only 100,000 years ago (Kappelman 1996). By Dunbar’s reasoning, therefore group size should have reached its peak then, not in archaic humans. This is, not surprisingly, around the time that most anatomists (if not linguists, who favour a later date) that language with complex evolved.

Dunbar reasoned that since gossip and other social commentary forms the bulk of human conversation—more, for example, that practical matters such as where to hunt kudu or when to propose a corporate merger—that it must have evolved as a replacement for grooming. He dismissed the previous notion, still held by many anthropologists, that language began as a way to communicate practical matters essential to survival, such as how to stalk a dangerous prey or warning of a predator.

But humans have a very different vocalization apparatus, including the shape and position of the hyoid bone, that lets us make a much wider range of sounds than any other primate, and this must have evolved much longer ago than the last 100,000 years. And even monkeys make a sufficiently wide range of vocalizations combined with commonly understood meanings, to give and distinguish among different warning calls for different predators. For example, vervet monkeys (pictured above) and many other colobine monkeys have give warning calls that distinguish among snakes, eagles, and leopards; in mixed species groups, all species of monkeys recognize and respond appropriately to each of the warning calls that the other species give. Surely, the roots of human language are much older than the beginning of larger group sizes.

Here’s how I think language started, and why I think it. Early in my career as a wildlife biologist, I worked with several Inuit and Dene (First Nations aboriginal people of Canada) hunters and trappers and at times camped with their families, few of whom could speak English. But our work required communication, and it was not long before, in each situation, my native counterparts and I knew each other’s words for the common animals we encountered, a few other nouns such as “track”, and a few verbs such as “hunt” and “follow”. Because I could write and kept notes, I perhaps learned these words more quickly than a hunter-gatherer who could not write. But that we learned, and quickly, shows how important in was for us, and how important it must have been for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But there is more. My colleagues had a lot of gestures that they used to indicate different animals and verbs such as “hunt,” “track.” and “follow.” And the gestures were different from tribe to tribe. For example, Cree men from the Beaver Indian tribe of northwestern Alberta often pointed with their lips. To indicate where a caribou had gone, they would turn their face in that direction and pucker their lips, as if trying to kiss the direction. Clearly, hunters need non-verbal “words” so that they can coordinate a hunt without alerting the prey.

Archaeological evidence suggests that, since both H. neandertalensis and H. sapiens could speak, then their common ancestor, H. heidelbergensis, could, too. Rudimentary speech as described above: nouns describing everyday objects, no doubt dates from that time. Experts are divided as to when grammatical language with syntax developed, but estimates range from 300,000 to 50,000 years ago (see review in Ambrose 2001). This happened long before the development of modern humans.

Recent genetic evidence shows that we lost our hair at least 1.2 MYA(Rogers et al. 2004) , while archaeological evidence shows that we began using scraped hides as clothing about 300,000 years ago, and adopted sewn, well-fitting clothing around 20,000 years ago (see review in Rantala 2007). Language therefore coincides roughly with adoption of clothing, but not with nakedness. Since grooming would have been basically unnecessary for hygiene between 1.2 and 0.3 MYA, and it’s not possible to “groom” naked skin, it seems that Dunbar’s thesis is untenable. No, language started, if not with hunting per se, then with the general need to communicate about the exigencies of life among our ape ancestors who cooperated and coordinated their activities.

References
Ambrose, S. 2001. Paleolithic technology and human evolution. Science 291:1748.
Dunbar, R. 1996. Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusets.
Kappelman, J. 1996. The evolution of body mass and relative brain size in fossil hominids. Journal of Human Evolution 30:243-276.
Pilbeam, D., and S. J. Gould. 1974. Size and scaling in human evolution. Science 186:892-901.
Rantala, M. J. 2007. Evolution of nakedness in Homo sapiens. Journal of Zoology 273:1-7.
Rogers, A. R., D. Iltis, and S. Wooding. 2004. Genetic variation at the MC1R locus and the time since loss of human body hair. Current Anthropology 45:106-108.

Agribusiness not a Panacea for Africa

Many people involved in aid and development programs for Africa think that science and agribusiness can reduce hunger and poverty. Governments, including Canada, promote this. They are wrong. Well, maybe in some hypothetical situation they can, but not in the real world. An example is Margaret Wente’s column about a year ago in The Globe and mail (Enviro-romanticism is hurting Africa, July 18, 2009). She said that in Africa, poverty and malnutrition are rising “largely because of primitive farming practices.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Poverty and malnutrition are rising because, among other factors, bad governance is ruining farmland, bad governments are leasing and selling farmland to foreign firms and governments, and bad international trade is preventing small farmers’ access to markets.

She said, “We could increase the global food supply by 80 per cent just by bringing the rest of the world up to the standards of modern agriculture.” This is pure nonsense. Many analyses of the global food situation, such as that of Lester Brown, “Plan B 3.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization” (Earth Policy Institute, 2008), make it abundantly clear that global food production is on the decline. The improvements and innovations that gave rise to the “Green Revolution” during 1950–1990—mainly in large-scale irrigation, mass-production and distribution of fertilizers combined with plant breeding—have already been made and no amount of technological development can forestall the decline. Desertification (exacerbated by climate change), salinization of soils because of irrigation, and urban encroachment have reduced the global supply of farmland and rangeland. Water scarcity because of over-pumping of aquifers, over-use and degradation of surface water, and logging and other causes of more rapid runoff and erosion in watersheds are further reducing the amount and productivity of arable land. The world’s ocean catch of wild fish peaked at about 96 million tons in 2000. Aquaculture has allowed continued, modest increases in total fish production, but only at the expense of destruction of destruction of coastal ecosystems, especially mangroves, that support local shore-based fisheries and coastal farming.

Meanwhile, the increasing human population has meant that global per-person food supplies have declined. The wild seafood supply per person peaked at 17 kg in 1988 and now stands at 14 kg. The amount of grainland per person in 1950 was 0.23 ha, but in 2007 was 0.10 ha.

The global food crisis of 2007–2008 that saw food riots in several African countries, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Haiti because of dramatically increasing grain prices portends worsening food security. Today, in September 2010, people are rioting in Mozambique for the same reason.

Driving across Saskatchewan or Kansas, one sees Wente’s “modern agriculture”: vast distances of highly productive monoculture farmland with hardly any people. In our recent drive through four sub-Saharan African countries (Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Swaziland), we saw a land densely dotted with small villages and single-family huts where people guarded their small herds and flocks, hoed their meagre maize and vegetable plots, and trudged by with heavy loads of firewood and water. Agribusiness may fit into the overall economic mix and productivity of these countries, but will not help the 60% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa who, as Wente notes, are “smallholder farmers, mostly women, who typically earn a dollar a day or less.”

Agribusiness is making their plight worse day by day. The report, “Land grab or development opportunity? Agricultural investments and international land deals in Africa” by the United Nations and the International Institute for Environment and Development, shows that big businesses in rich countries have been buying and leasing farmland in Africa at an alarming rate. Since 2004, governments of five African countries of re-allocated (sold outright or leased in long-term contracts) 2,492,684 ha of land (excluding allocations below 1000 ha) away from smallholders to big business, many of them foreign. They include governments or businessed in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar, India, Britain, South Korea, and China. The rate of farmland reallocation to foreigners has increased dramatically after the 2007–2008 food crisis as countries seek to increase their own food security. In May, the government of Madagascar fell because of a popular uprising against the government’s 99 year leases of almost 1.8 million ha of farmland to South Korean and Indian companies.

The biotechnology that Wendt and many others advocate as a panacea for African hunger is not bad by itself and may be an important part of the mix, but will not help the smallholders and often hurts them. What they need is for rich countries like Canada to tie its international trade and aid in poor countries to only those business deals and programs that help poor families.

Grizzly and Polar Bears Interbreeding is another threat to Polar Bears

It was one of the most awe-inspiring experiences of my wildlife career: in the autumn of 1975 a colleague and I watched a polar bear swim up an inlet toward us on Bathurst Island, then Northwest Territories (now Nunavut). We were near the head of an inlet on a high promontory, and were excited to watch the white bear swim for a mile or so until it reached the shore just below us. There it walked on the the shore and sniffed in the mud where we had walked moments before. We could see him sniffing in our individual footprints. He looked up and around, nose high, testing the wind. Then started following our tracks towards us.

My colleague ran, but since there was nowhere to hide and nothing to climb on the featureless tundra, I stayed put. In a few moments, the bear abandoned our scent trail and went on up the draw, passing out of sight among the rocks.

There are still polar bears throughout the Arctic and some populations are healthy, but some are declining, with low production of cubs and low survival of all age classes. Climate change is the main culprit, but now another threat has appeared.

The confirmation of a grizzly-polar bear hybrid (DNA confirms suspected rare grizzly-polar cross shot in High Arctic, Vancouver Sun, May 1, 2010) at Ulukhaktok, N.W.T, (formerly Holman, on Victoria Island) is part of a trend that began at least 20 years ago.

In the winter of 1951-1952, Frank Banfield, a government wildlife biologist, recorded a grizzly bear taken on Banks Island (Banfield 1974). This was so unusual that he reported it as an “extra-limital record,” that is, outside of the known range.

In the last 19 years, sighting of grizzly bears unusually far north have become common: Melville Sound (1000 km north of mainland) in 1991, Banks and Victoria Islands (160 km north of the mainland), Hudson Bay, and Melville Island in 2003 and again in 2007 (Kaufmann 2007; Struzik 2006). They have become so well established on Victoria Island as to be a significant predator of muskoxen (Gunn and Lee 2000) .
The one shot in May was a second-generation hybrid, the offspring female grizzly-polar hybrid mating with a male grizzly bear. It was the second known grizzly-polar bear hybrid. In April 2006 the first known hybrid polar-grizzly bear in the wild was shot on Banks Island (Roach 2006). DNA tests showed it had a polar bear mother and a grizzly bear father.

After I gave a talk on my grizzly bear research at an international bear conference in 1977, several Norwegian bear researchers rushed up to me. They had read my earlier paper in the Canadian Journal of Zoology on grizzly bear denning on the Arctic coast, in which I mentioned that polar bears also occurred in my study area (Harding 1976). It turned out that this was the first report of grizzly bear and polar bear ranges overlapping, and the Norwegians wanted to know how the two species interacted. Their interest was stimulated because a polar bear and grizzly bear had mated in a zoo and produced fertile offspring (c.f. Stirling 1999), and they wanted to know if this could happen in the wild. I had to disappoint them by explaining that, since polar bears only came ashore in winter when grizzly bears were asleep in their dens, they never had an opportunity to interact, even though they shared the same habitat temporarily.

How times have changed! The recent shrinking of the polar ice cap and withdrawal of seasonal ice from shore has driven many polar bears ashore in the summer, bringing them into contact with coastal grizzly bears. At the same time, more and more grizzly bears are taking up residence on the Arctic Islands. Such hybrids may become more common. Over many generations, this could, hypothetically, destroy the polar bear as a species by genetic contamination. That is, if they aren’t first destroyed by shrinking sea ice seal-hunting habitat.

References

Banfield, A.W.F. 1974. The mammals of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Univ. of Toronto Press, Ottawa.
Gunn, A., and Lee, J. 2000. distribution and abundance of muskoxen on northeast victoria island, n.w.t., august 1990. Government of the Northwest Territories, Department of Rresources, Wildlife and Economic Development Manuscript Report No. 119.
Harding, L.E. 1976. Den site characteristics of Arctic coastal grizzly bears (Ursus arctos L.) on Richards Islands, Northwest Territories, Canada. Canadian Journal of Zoology 54(8): 1357-1363.
Kaufmann, B. 2007. Grizzly sightings on northern Arctic island.
Roach, J. 2006. Grizzly-polar bear hybrid found -- but what does it mean?
Stirling, I. 1999. Polar Bears. University of Michigan Press.
Struzik, E. 2006. Grizzly bears on ice.

Dog Evolution: Camp Scavenger Hypothesis Denied

The photo of a Tundra Wolf first appeard in BC Outdoors, April, 1985. An abbreviated version of this post was published as a Letter to the Editor in the November/December 2010 issue of Archaeology.

In the September/October 2010 issue of Archaeology is an article, "More than Man’s Best Friend,” that summarizes theories about how dogs' domestication began. All dogs descended from wolves, although the exact location and hence subspecies of wolf is in doubt: some evidence points to China and some to the Middle East. One of these ideas is that wolves evolved as scavengers, hanging around human camps. Anyone who has lived in wolf country as I have would find this untenable. Wolves don't scavenge, unless they're starving, or if they opportunistically stumble upon another predator's kill. And human camps don't usually leave enough meaty refuse to attract a wolf, although they often visit camps out of curiosity. A hunting camp is a different matter: a large mammal carcass would attract a wolf; but humans have been using tools to clean meat from bones for more than 2 million years, and by about 15,000 years ago, when the first unequivocal dogs appear in the archaeological record, humans were very efficient at cleaning up the bones and extracting the marrow. The leftovers would not feed even one wolf, let alone a pack. Human settlements leave enough refuse; but these only appear about 10,000, just before agriculture.

Moreover, anyone who thinks the first dogs evolved as camp-periphery scavengers hasn’t spent enough time sleeping on bare ground where large carnivores might eat you. They can’t know the terror one feels upon hearing heavy footsteps in the dark after the campfire has died; nor can they realize how easy it is to obtain wolf pups. I have many times heard such footsteps and wished I had brought my dog, and later found grizzly bear or other predator prints. Once the footsteps stopped only a few meters away, and stayed. I lay petrified until the first light of dawn revealed a mountain lion watching me. In the Canadian Arctic and Boreal Forest, where I have worked as a biologist, hunted, and camped with Dene and Inuit and hunters and families for many years, every hunter finds wolf dens and many bring home the pups for the kids to play with. I’m too large to crawl into the wolf dens I have found, but the more lightly-built Dene hunters often can. It would not take long—about one night—for a family to realize how good a sentry the wolf can be. If it is a bitch that they have tamed, she’ll likely be bred by a wild wolf. It is not a great leap to think that the family will keep the most docile of the brood. From there to dogs is a short chain. In the Middle East, one of the places posited for dogs’ first progenitors, even into the last century there were wolves, lions, leopards, brown bears, striped hyenas, and wild boar, all of which can kill sleeping humans. After dogs were domesticated, sure, some no doubt became camp scavengers, but I feel in my bones, where terror lives, that they began as pets and sentries.

African Wildlife: The Big 5, Ugly 5 and Little 5

Preface

When Jeff and I were planning our trip to Africa in 2008, we searched hundreds of safari Web sites, and corresponded with perhaps 100 tour operators, some in person here in Vancouver, and began to suspect what I wrote above about tours. All of them advertised the “Big 5”. In Ernest Hemingway's day, when he wrote ”The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, these were the 5 most dangerous game animals to the hunter: lions, cape buffalo, white rhinoceros (black is more dangerous, but were nearly extinct by then), leopard, and elephant.



When non-hunting tourism began to take hold, the tour operators co-opted this phrase, implying that if you saw these 5 wildlife species, you had seen Africa.




Preamble

After some time with our guide, Lucky Garenamotse (www.luckyafricasafaris.com), and cook, Moses, on our private safari (which actually cost less than the all-inclusive tours), we discovered that the guides and other tour staff uniformly deride this “Big 5” notion. Our guide, when he understood that Jeff and I felt likewise, played a game: he began to show us the “Little 5” (one was a mouse) and the “Ugly 5” (for example, the Jaribou Stork).




The Story

After I’d been in Africa about 4 ½ weeks (3 with Hannah) and Jeff 1 ½ weeks, and had seen 24 species just in the family Bovidae (the antelopes and buffalo), 2 species of zebra, 2 of giraffe, 2 of rhinoceros, hundreds of hippopotamus including one that ran through our camp between our tents, plus nearly every other big game animal in southern Africa, not to mention almost all of the medium-sizes and large carnivores (bat-eared fox, 6 species of mongoose, 2 kinds of civets, spotted hyena--had actually looked up from my sleeping bag on the ground into the eyes of a hyena looking down at me--hunting dogs, leopards, and lions), and counted 344 species of bird; and had leapt aside as hyenas actually chased impalas between our tents, we came to the resort down of Kasane on the Zambezi River. This is just above Victoria Falls in Zambia, where tourists fly in on 3- or 5-day tours, see the falls, and then take a day’s detour so they can say they were in Botswana. Jeff and I went into the biggest resort for coffee while Lucky and Moses tinkered with the Land Rover and refilled our fuel and food supplies. On the verandah overlooking the Zambezi River, I put up my ‘scope and found an African Finfoot, a rare grebe-like bird with no relatives on Earth (except for the Asian Finfoot) and that that only occurs in Botswana at this one spot. Jeff and I were thrilled, as we wouldn’t get another chance. As we were turning to re-join Lucky and Moses, we encountered a young woman in safari tour-leader garb, with “Naturalist” on her name patch, who asked us if we had “got lucky” that morning. Not knowing what she meant, Jeff mentioned the Finfoot as being quite a prize. Then it was her turn to look perplexed. She had no idea what a Finfoot was. Finally we understood that she had been enquiring whether we had been lucky enough to see a hippopotamus on the morning’s boat ride!




The Epilogue

For the rest of the trip, when Jeff or I saw a new species, the other would say, “Got lucky there!”

The Sequel

Jeff and I are thinking about a trip to Borneo. Reading the tour operators' and lodge literature, it seems that people only go there to see orang-utans, which Jeff and I have labeled "The Big One." Worth seeing, to be sure, but Jeff and I agreed that we could be happy not seeing captive orang-utans being fed bananahs in rehabilitation centres. We've seen them in zoos, after all. If I (a primatologist, partly) miss them in the wild, but see a reasonable diversity of gibbons, leaf monkeys and perhaps a tarsier or two, and if Jeff adds 200 or 300 birds to his life list, we can live without seeing The Big One.

The Oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Canada's Whooping Cranes

The first good news is that the 247 whooping cranes that wintered at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas Coast—all the wild ones remaining in the world—left for their nesting area in Wood Buffalo National Park before the oil began spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. The bad news is that some of the oil will be there when they come back.



Oil is not just oil. It starts out as a complex mixture off hundreds of compounds, some of which are lighter than others. The lighter fractions are more “volatile”, meaning that they go from a liquid to a gas more easily than the heavier fractions. This is what gives fresh oil its stink. Volatilization is temperature-dependent: the hotter the day, the more it volatizes. Immediately after spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, the lighter fractions began volatizing. From 30% to 50% of the oil spilling into the Gulf will be lost to the air within a few days. Since the Gulf of Mexico oil is relatively light, a higher proportion is being lost than if it were, for example in Alberta.

The second good news is that because the lightest fractions are the most toxic, as oil ages it becomes less toxic.

What is left is heavier. It still floats, but not for long. The rainbow sheens seen from the air are composed of lighter fractions separating from the heavier mass that have not yet volatized. Sheens are only a few molecules thick: thinner than the diameter off a human hair. Every sheen seen means a heavier mass of oil is lurking unseen.

A “slick” is a layer of oil usually a few millimetres thick. It is more difficult to see from the air and contains a much larger volume of oil per unit of surface area than a sheen. Since it is heavier and has lost much of its lighter fraction, it rides lower in the water. Seawater sloshes over it, making it impossible to see from the air, although infrared sensors can still pick it up.

As it is churned by the choppy seas, water molecules get into the oil, changing its physical appearance and chemical properties. It becomes weathered. It begins to look like chocolate mousse (though far less appetizing), and clean-up specialists call it that. Mousse doesn’t form slicks as readily; it tends to coagulate into “pans”, flat blobs several centimetres thick that ride under the surface of the water, although it still gives off sheens as the lighter fractions continue to volatize. Weathered oil and mousse become progressively harder to contain in booms and to clean up.
Although pans are even heavier than slicks, they still float—at first. The churning of the waves mixes dirt, phytoplankton, and other debris into the mousse until it finally becomes heavier than water. Then it sinks to the bottom.

Clean-up companies often hasten mousse-formation by adding detergent. This is like putting dish detergent into a sink full of greasy dishes. It emulsifies the oil, making it miscible in water, so you can empty it down the sink and have clean dishes. But the oil is still somewhere. After dish-washing, it is in the sewer system. In the Gulf of Mexico, it is on the sea-bottom.

The marine life that doesn’t live suspended in the water lives on the sea bottom. Many sea-bottom organisms, from crabs to corals, have eggs or life stages that live suspended in the water, and these are food for others, including the fish and shrimp that make up the bulk of the huge commercial fisheries of the Gulf of Mexico. Oil sinking to the sea-bottom, through its toxic and physical properties (such as smothering) will continue to kill marine animals and plants and affect productivity of the whole marine ecosystem for years.

Sunken oil is rarely visible to scuba divers or to cameras in remotely-operated vehicles that clean-up crews use to look for it. It gets covered quickly with sand and debris. Eventually it forms a sort of pavement.

When slicks and pans land on a beach, they look like chocolate-brown pancakes. Pans range in size from a loony to the shadow of a Volkswagen bus; a slick can cover many kilometres of shoreline. On a flat, sandy beach, pans are easy to pick them up. Clean-up people can roll them up and put them into a garbage bag…if they get there quickly enough.

Mixed in with the oil on the beaches are the dead and dying birds that have floated in with it. They represent only a fraction of the oiled birds. Depending on circumstances, more may die and sink at sea, and others, less heavily oiled, fly off to die in some coastal thicket. Wildlife management authorities know that, on a percentage basis, it is useless to try to clean oiled birds. So few are found alive in a condition that they can be cleaned, and so few of them survive anyway, that public funds would be ill-spent to clean them. The Canadian Wildlife Service, for example, does not provide staff for oiled-bird cleaning.

Wave action breaks up the slicks and pans on the beach into smaller and smaller blobs and covers them with sand. Within a couple of days, a heavily oiled beach can look clean. In one spill I worked on, a woman on our staff had white rubber boots and we sent her onto the beaches to do a “white boot test”. If she walked across a beach and the boots stayed clean, there was no oil. But if there was invisible oil, it turned her boots black.

In a coastal marsh, which is most of the shoreline of the northern Gulf of Mexico, instead of lying there in flat blobs, the oil coats the vegetation and gets worked into the mud. There is no hope of cleaning up much of the oil in marshes. Clean-up crews can use absorbent material, but not without physically damaging the plants they are trying to protect.

Rocky shorelines are a different matter, but these are few in the Gulf of Mexico.
Like the sunken oil on the sea bottom, the heavy pans and slicks of oil on beaches and marshes eventually become a more or less permanent pavement buried in the mud.
The last good news is that the environment is amazingly resilient. Besides the physical action of waves and grinding with sand, chemical processes including photolysis (from sunlight) and oxidation continue to break down the oil. Within weeks or a few months, the pavement-like layers, although continuing to have a physical effect, will have lost their most toxic components. Plants can put roots through them, worms can tunnel into them, and crabs can walk across them. Certain microbes can consume oil, and oil-eating bacteria populations flourish. They feed other organisms. On a hot day, oil still becomes viscous and can continue to generate sheens and oil birds and other shoreline life for years. These effects diminish gradually. After a few years for a moderate-sized spill, few traces of oil can be seen on wildlife, in beach sands, or on marsh plants. Although the beaches and marshes look clean, plant and animal productivity may be depressed for years and oil in the sediments can still be detected with chemical analysis more or less indefinitely.

With luck, by the time that Whooping Cranes leave Wood Buffalo National Park and arrive back on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico next fall, they will not encounter any oil.

References
I published a series of Environment Canada technical reports and conference presentations on the fate and effects of the Nestucca (name of barge) oil spill that occurred at Grays Harbour, Washington, in late December 1988, drifted north, and oiled about 180 km of beaches on the west coast of Vancouver Island. We (Environment Canada) took the polluter to court and won a a settlement of about $3.5 million for clean-up costs and $6.5 million for environmental damages, which were used primarily to restore seabird population on Langara Island by eliminating the introduced rats that had decimated the nesting birds. Please contact me if you would like references.

Cheetah Conservation in Namibia

Since we visited the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) near Otjiwarongo, Namibia, in 2008, there have been many achievements of conservation interest and two in particular that caught my eye:

1. Cheetahs have been successfully reintroduced to an area of southern Namibia where they had long been absent, and

2. A "Bush Project" is up and running. The Bush Project is described thus on the CCF Web site (http://www.cheetah.org/?nd=ccf_bush_project):

“The purpose of the Bush Project is to create a viable market for biomass products derived in environmentally and socially appropriate means. This will encourage the removal of excess bush from Namibian farmlands. Depending on the results of this pilot project, habitat restoration efforts could be vastly scaled up to restore cheetah habitat on an ecologically appropriate scale.”

This is the place where Hannah and I took a large box of derelict but good cameras and other optics and electronics as a donation from members of the Association of Professional Biologists of British Columbia. CCF uses the cameras as camera traps for cheetah research.

The whole country around Otjiwarongo and much of northern Namibia is covered with thorn-scrub brush, apparently not a natural situation that resulted from farmers putting out fires over many decades. CCF developed technology to cut up the brush and compact it into firewood. Since the brush is always growing, it is a never-ending supply. Local people can operate it and it gives them a business. It improves the land for wildlife (we saw 7 species of antelopes there!), and for livestock. More antelopes means more cheetahs. Also, since cheetahs hunt by pursuit on flat grassland, it is not just the forage for antelopes (hence, prey for cheetahs), but the cleared land itself that helps cheetahs hunt. So it is win-win-win-win situation.

Namibia is the only country in the world with a healthy, wild, and expanding cheetah population outside of nature reserves, and that is mainly due to the work of Dr. Laurie Marker and her Cheetah Conservation Fund. Her groups works with ranchers and farmers to make their properties “cheetah friendly,” mainly with respect to design and location of fences, but also in not poisoning or otherwise killing cheetahs. When farmers, game wardens or others capture cheetahs alive, they bring them into CCF for rehabilitation and eventual release. Also, a lot of ranches are also game farms (but they call them wildlife reserves) that offer guided hunts. So Namibia is also one of the few countries that allows hunting of cheetahs, because it has a healthy population and the ranchers are involved in their conservation. That makes it a win-win-win-win-win situation.

Plus, the CCF is temporary home to a revolving-door of wildlife researchers who are investigating ecology of not just cheetahs, but also brown hyenas and many other species. So it is a win-win-win-win-win-win situaiton.

Conservationists Need Bear Hunters

With the spring bear hunt come articles in the newspapers and radio talk shows on the probity of killing bears. Environmentalists don’t like it. Hunters like it and they are supported by guides, outfitters, the Guide Outfitters Association, and the provincial government. What the hunters know and the conservationists don’t is that they are on the same side of a losing battle over conservation of wild lands and wildlife.

Meanwhile, as Larry Pynn (The Vancouver Sun, April 3) pointed out, the government raised the overnight fee for a camp site up to $30 per night. Add on reservation fees and buy a bundle of firewood and you are looking at $120 for three nights of camping. Does anyone not see how these are related?

Pynn quotes Environment Minister Barry Penner conceding that just 2.48 million people used BC Parks campgrounds in 2009, compared with 2.89 million in 1998, a 14% decline for the decade. Most people visiting our parks don’t even stay the night: overnight use has declined to about one-tenth of day use.

Not just here, but in the United States, Europe, and Japan, per capita visits to national parks, number of fishing and game hunting licenses, and time spent hiking or backpacking have all declined since about 1987. This worries resources management agencies because outdoor recreationists are their political constituency. Without public demand for wild land, natural scenery, wildlife viewing opportunities, and, yes, hunting and fishing opportunities, there will be no political will to protect them.

The trend is the same in Alberta. For example, although absolute numbers of visitors to Banff National Park tripled to four million (not counting those who simply drove through to other destinations) between 1970 and 2004, the number of people using the backcountry declined from a peak of 20,300 user nights annually in 1975 to 18,000 annually by 2004. Jasper National Park shows a similar trend.

A 2006 survey showed that, relative to the average Canadian pleasure traveller, visitors to British Columbia are especially likely to participate in nature-oriented activities (e.g., camping, canoeing and kayaking, horseback riding) but less likely to go fishing or hunting; and 53% of Canadian travellers to British Columbia stayed in a public campground. Tourists may stop at a casino while they are in British Columbia, but that is not what they come for. They come for nature, in all of its forms and products.

Through their license fees, hunters and sports fishers pay far more for habitat conservation than do most environmentalists as individuals. Their other expenditures are important to the economy, but are unevenly distributed throughout the province. In 2001, 18% (395 businesses) of all nature-based businesses in British Columbia operated in Northern BC (encompassing Prince George and Prince Rupert to the Yukon, Alaska and Alberta borders), but 47% (111) of guide-outfitters operated in this region. Guide-outfitters in the region generated $136.5 million in revenues in 2001.
The number of resident hunting licences in British Columbia peaked at 174,000 in 1981 and has declined ever since. The decline is not only in the number of hunters, but in the numbers of game that they take. Thus, the large-game harvest fell 27% after 1981, though most of the downturn occurred in the 1990s. Between 1992 and 2002, the resident harvest of big game species fell by 40%. The harvest of deer and moose fell sharply after 1992, by 47% and 13% respectively. The bighorn sheep and mountain goat harvest fell by 34%. Because of lower hunting pressure and healthy game populations, hunters have been expending fewer hunter-days per kill for deer, elk, moose, and caribou. These statistics haven’t escaped the notice of non-resident hunters, whose take has increased by more than 20% since 1992.The grizzly hunt, subject to ever-tighter wildlife management restrictions, fell 41% in the same period. However, since 1976, non-resident hunters have taken an increasing proportion of the total grizzly bears killed by hunters.

One area that bucks (no pun intended!) the downward trend is in the hunter kill of cougar and wolves. These predators specialize on deer, elk, and moose. With prey populations expanding, both in response to habitat changes (logging, fires, and land-clearing for agriculture) and to the lowered hunting pressure, the wolves and cougar have plenty to eat. In 1986, wolves re-colonized Banff National Park after a 30-year absence. About the same time, after a quarter century of never hearing their howls or seeing their tracks around my cabin in the Kootenays, I heard a wolf howl. My son, living there now, has heard them howl, and soon my grandchildren will. It is my fervent hope that wolves, grizzly bears, and cougars will always remain a feature of these forests.

Personally, I loathe the idea of killing large predators. I killed a bear once and swore I never would again. As a biologist who has radio-tagged grizzly bears and tracked them to and from their den sites, frankly, I came to love bears. .. black, white, or brown. There is no biological justification for hunting bears. But neither is there any biological reason to disallow hunting, as long as the hunter take is in line with the annual production (this is an open question, but one for another time). Neither is it a moral issue—or, if it is, it is one where we city-dwellers need to consider the rights and values of country-dwellers here and guests from abroad. We live in British Columbia, which has as fair a chunk of mountain wilderness, unrivalled for scenic beauty and large mammal diversity, as almost anywhere else on Earth. Although some 2.3 million of us live in the Greater Vancouver area, the other 1.6 million live in towns, villages and a handful of small cities scattered across the province. Many are First Nations trappers, ranchers and others who hunt for meat under aboriginal entitlements and, yes, who guide hunters for extra income in the fall. Many are business people who own outfits (a Crown land tenure for commercial hunting), sporting goods stores, cafes or motels that cater to resident and non-resident hunters. With nature-based recreation decreasing, and with the government discouraging the public from camping by setting exorbitant fees, we conservationists need all the friends we can get. Hunters are among them.

Archaeological sites in northern Chile

Archaeology in northern Chile has revealed the Chinchorro Tradition (7500–2500 B.P.), and the Altiplano or Andean Tradition (3000–0 B.P.) (see Rivera 1991 for a synthesis). Later, there was a prehispanic expansion of the Aymara culture in the souther Altiplano and San Pedro de Atacama area. While birdwatching there, I found two archaeology sites:

One was just a scattering of seemingly hand-worked flint or obsidian chips.









Another was a rock wall made in the crevace of a steep cliff. looking exactly like the Puebloan rock works I'm familiar with in Arizona. Here is site:













And here is the constructed rock wall, taken with a telephoto lens of the same site:



I would tell someone about these sites, if I knew whom to tell.

Primate Friendships, human mating systems and Bipedalism

There are “pleasure” chemicals in the brains of old human couples (e.g., oxytocin) that are released when they are interacting and feeling happy together that are not the chemicals associated with sex. Our endocrine system wasn’t built overnight.

Literature on primate behaviour in general and human evolution in particular has got me thinking about this male infanticide issue had how it has distorted our view of human evolution. It seems that virtually all the papers for the last 30 years on how and why humans became bipedal and upright assume that males are brutish thugs who only want sex from the females and whose closed relationship is to exchange food for it, and to combat other males over it.

When I began researching a leaf monkey, Trachypithecus cristatus, I read in a secondary reference book that, when a male from outside the troop deposes the troop's alpha male, "He immediately kills all the infants" to make sure that the progeny of the troop are all his, and to bring the lactating females into estrus so he can mate with them. Yet when I dug deeper into the literature, I found that male infanticide has never been observed in this species. It was based on a single 1979 study in which male infanticide had been inferred because all of the infants had disappeared when checked three months later. It was inferred because of a theory, then sweeping the wildlife behaviour literature, that males kill infants not their own to increase the likelihood of their own progeny being born and surviving: the "male infanticide" hypothesis.

I've just now got a stack of 20- and 30-year old primate books from the library, and in one of the chapters about a Trachypithecus species, the two males in a troop (as well as the females) run to grab up the infants for safety when danger threatens. In my own species (the subject of three papers, one published, one in press and one in prep.) male infanticide has almost never been observed and where it occurs is infrequent--perhaps once every several years, in a well-studied group of Trachypithecus leucocephalus, as reported to me by the author of a detailed study. This is contrary to the male infanticide paradigm.

On the contrary, in my own studies on T. cristatus and other studies on at least two other species of this genus, males care for infants and the most aggressive they get is to bark or swat at a juvenile who is pestering them.

In fact, recent reviews of the issue have cast doubt on the extent (number of species) to which male infanticide applies, and the evolutionary significance when it does.

The over-emphasis of male infanticide hypothesis, and the flip side, the females' "infanticide avoidance hypothesis", has worked its way into ideas about homonid evolution. I just can't reconcile seeing Homo sapiens males love and care for their own and other juveniles (how many dads coach their kids' hockey or basketball teams, or take their daughters to ballet? Almost every one I know), and have deep relationships with their wives that go far beyond sex, with this brutish Home erectus / early Homo sapiens paradigm of "food for sex" and "kill all the infants who are not mine" paradigm. I think we’ve been too influenced by baboons, and not enough by gibbons. Somehow we got to be upright, monogamous in complex social systems, and large-brained. I think the archaeologists agree now that upright/bipedal came first and the large-brain/complex social systems came later. But my feeling –nascent though it is—is that we really have to overthrow this male infanticide/food for sex paradigm before we can begin to explore how human relationships developed, and even to understand what they are.

While searching literature on this yesterday, I came across a paper (Niemitz, C. 2010. The evolution of the upright posture and gait—a review and a new synthesis. Naturwissenschaften 97(3): 241-263) that synthesized all the theories about how hominids began walking upright. The author had discounted the hypothesis that the need to carry infants was involved in hominids first walking upright.

I think it is wrong to reject infant carrying as a force in bipedalism, which always assumes that women were doing the carrying and they did it with the infant on their hips or in their arms. But consider:

1. Humans are the only primates who carry infants on our shoulders. The infant grabs the head. Human neonates’ hands are far too weak to securely grasp hair or any other part of the body, but they automatically and effectively grasp the head of the carrying adult.

2. Go to any park and you’ll see families with the dad carrying a toddler on his shoulders, perhaps leading a second by the hand, while the mom cradles an infant on her hip or in a snuggly, perhaps leading a second.

3. Humans vertebral columns can carry a heavy load for an extraordinary distance (many km) and we like doing it so much that, even when not forced to, we do it for fun-go to any national park with wilderness and you’ll see backpackers hiking long distances. Why did we need such strong backs if we carry infants, weapons, food etc. in our hands and arms?

4. ...but we can’t carry even small loads with a slight stoop. Lumbar pain would have been a powerful motivation to stand straighter when carrying.

5. Home erectus could not have walked all the way to China without a way to transport juveniles too large (or too many) for the mom to carry and/or lead, but too small to keep up. Don’t forget that neoteny was progressing: the kids were getting heavier just when our predecessors were roaming farther.

The above has obvious implications for grouping behaviour and mating systems, which in turn are integral to brain size. it’s a package. It is time to reconsider the evolution of bipedalism in the light of research that shows primate males to be more caring and less homicidal of infants. Maybe they got more from their mates than sex; maybe they gave more than food. It is time to conder this along with development of monogamy, societal grouping and dispersal.

Key papers consulted in this essay:

Hrdy, S.B. 1974. Male-male competition and infanticide among the langurs (Presbytis entellus) of Abu, Rajasthan. Folia Primatologica 22: 19-58.

Brotoisworo, E. 1979. The Lutung (Presbytis [Trachypithecus] cristata) in Pangandaran Nature Reserve: social. adaptation to space. Kyoto University, Kyoto.

Van Schaik, C.P., and Kappeler, P. 1997. Infanticide risk and the evolution of male-female association in primates. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 264(1388): 1687.

Borries, C., Launhard, K., Epplen, C., Epplen, J.T., and Winkler, a.P. 1999. DNA analyses support the hypothesis that infanticide is adaptive in langur monkeys. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 266: 901-904.

Palombit, R.A., Cheney, D.L., Fischer, J., Johnson, S., Rendall, D., Seyfarth, R.M., and Silk, J.B. 2000. Chapter 6 Male infanticide and defense of infants in chacma baboons. In Infanticide by males and its implications. Edited by Carel van Schaik, and Charles Helmar Janson. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. pp. 123–152.

Zhao, Q., and Pan, W. 2006. Male-immature interactions seem to depend on group composition in white-headed langur (Trachypithecus leucocephalus). Acta Ethol 9: 91-94

Zhao, Q., Tan, C.L., and Pan, W. 2008. Weaning age, infant care, and behavioral development in Trachypithecus leucocephalus International Journal of Primatology 29(3): 583-591.

The Second Amendment in the American Bill of Rights

A survey making the email listserv rounds, apparently sponsored by USA Today, asks: "Does the Second Amendment give individuals the right to bear arms?"

The 2nd amendment in the American Bill of Rights reads, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

It does not explicitly give individuals the right to arms. “The People” have this right. (Capitalization of “People” was not in the original draft, but was added to the version distributed to the states.) At best, this is ambiguous, since “people” can be taken to mean individuals, or a government “of the people, by the people and for the people”. The introductory phrase “...well regulated Militia...” seems to lean the whole amendment towards the latter interpretation but, of course, this has been debated ever since it was passed. "well regulated " could also imply restrictions on citizens' right to bear arms, i.e., gun control. In 1791, there was no national army; America won independence with an aggregation of state militias, the raising of which would have been nearly impossible had not a great majority of individuals already had their own weapons. Therefore, for all practical purposes, it can be argued (and has been!) that the amendment implies the right of individuals to bear arms. Unfortunately, it doesn’t say it. Since it is ambiguous, and since the USA Today question asks about rights of individuals, which are not mentioned in the Amendment, I think a strictly literal answer would have to be no. I noticed, however, that 97% of respondents disagreed with me.

From Wikipedia: " One aspect of the gun control debate is the conflict between gun control laws and the alleged right to rebel against unjust governments. Some believe that the framers of the Bill of Rights sought to balance not just political power, but also military power, between the people, the states and the nation,[44] as Alexander Hamilton explained in 1788:

“[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude[,] that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens.[44][45]
“Some scholars have said that it is wrong to read a right of armed insurrection in the Second Amendment because clearly the founding fathers sought to place trust in the power of the ordered liberty of democratic government versus the anarchy of insurrectionists.[46][47] Other scholars, such as Glenn Reynolds, contend that the framers did believe in an individual right to armed insurrection. The latter scholars cite examples, such as the Declaration of Independence (describing in 1776 “the Right of the People to … institute new Government”) and the New Hampshire Constitution (stating in 1784 that “nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind”)."

Anyway, I’m about to pass my (registered) .444 Marlin lever-action with the gold-plated trigger to my son, since he finally got around to getting a federal license to own one. Not owning it yet didn’t preventing him from using it to kill a bear that had eaten 4 of his goats and was threatening my wife and granddaughter two years ago. And had he not, I had it in the sights of my (also registered) .308 at that moment anyway.

Biogeography of Gibbons

I've been struggling on taxonomy of langurs and gibbons lately: langurs because I have an accepted paper "in press" that needs a little tweaking and the tweaks go back to early in the 19th Century; and because the gibbon monograph that I'm starting has taxonomic problems pre-dating Linnaeus 1771.

But the good news is that so many ancient manuscripts are finding their way on to the Internet that I can actually sit here in Coquitlam and read books from that era. And that they're often in French, Dutch, German or Latin doesn't matter so much, because the names of the authors and the journals are all the same, and the Latin names of the critters is still Latin. Takes time, though.

Last night I had an epiphany: I noticed that the 3 Indochinese species of gibbons are separated by big rivers: crested gibbons (Nomascus spp.) east of the Mekong, Lar-type gibbons (Hylobates spp.) between the Mekong and the Salween system, and Hoolock gibbons (Hoolock hoolock) west of there, between the Salween River and the Irrawaddy River. It's because gibbons can't swim, and these big rivers have been stable for long enough for these genera to evolve--that's back to the Pliocene, between 2 and 5 million years.

I'm not the first to notice that large rivers separate gibbon species, nor the first to notice that the biggest rivers separate the genera. But it was fun to figure it out for myself.

The Duality of Racism and Diversity

We have a problem with race in this country. The previous sentence is deliberately ambiguous. Some readers will assume that I think there are too many; that I’m racist. Of those who interpret it thus, most, thankfully, will think I’m despicable. Some few, regrettably, may applaud the sentiment. Others, reading the first line, may think, approvingly, that I’m appalled at people who recognize race at all, whether as an issue or a reality. “We are all one,” they say, implying that our prose should ignore ethnic distinctions.

We happily go to the fall Diwali festival of South Asian culture, or the Chinese New Year parade, but few of us like being forced to reveal our ethnic origins in job applications. So “multiculturalism” is fine, politically speaking, but racial distinctions are not. I don’t mind this duality; it’s how it is. We should celebrate diversity when we can, but keep it out of places where it could subvert equality.

As a scientist, however, I think that it is time to make our discussion of ethnic and cultural diversity more accurate. Wednesday’s reports on the Statistics Canada projections of ethnic diversity uses terminology that is woefully obsolete. I’m not talking about the fact that so many of us are mixtures, but about how we define our ethic origins. The graphs on page A3 encapsulate the conundrum. We think we know what is meant by “Black,” for example, but most of us are wrong, to which I will return in a moment.

We see the “Arab” category and, having just read Douglas Todd’s column on religion, might assume that it equates to “Muslims” since most Arabs are, in fact, Muslim. But my Persian barber, although she would like to have a mosque nearby, speaks Farsi and has little in common, culturally, with Arabs. Most Pakistanis are Muslim, too. Are they in the “Arab” category or “West Asian” (a new one for me)? If we recall the latest atrocities in Darfur, we may think that the camel-mounted raiders from the north of Sudan were Arab because the reporters invariably say so, but they are not. They only speak Arabic—mainly as a second language—because of the Muslim conquests around 1200 years ago. People of Chad, northern Sudan and Ethiopia speak endemic languages such as Nubian, in the Nilo-Saharan language group; Beja, in the Cushitic language groups; and Kordofanian languages. Nilo-Saharan languages predominate in the south. To the west, in Niger, Mali and southern Algeria, the nomad peoples, such as the Tuareg, speak Berber languages. To lump these people in with “Arabs” as is so often seen in newspaper articles, distorts our perspective.

Similarly, “Filipino” is listed on page A3, separately from their relatives elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Here is the problem with this terminology: The Philippines is a country with many languages and cultures, but its genetic and ethnic affiliations are much broader.

Recent genetic, linguistic, and archaeological discoveries have led to a new appreciation of how we came to be whom we are. Fundamentally, we are all Africans. All humans can trace their genetic heritage to eastern or southern Africa about 150,000 years ago. Our forebears spread throughout the southern and western parts of the continent. But then, about 90,000 years ago, climate change and consequent forest expansion isolated groups to the north and south. Over time, the northern group evolved new genetic types and cultures and spread throughout the continent, but they didn’t replace the original humans, who also evolved and diversified without mixing with the northerners. The southern groups maintained their isolation by adapting to extreme desert or deep jungle. We know their descendants today as the Bushmen, or Khoisan, and Pygmies. They have lighter skin and straighter hair than the northerners, among other differences. Later, one of the northern groups migrated out of Africa; these migrated and diversified further, eventually peopling the whole world.

Recently, on a photo safari in Botswana, as we talked about human diversity, our guide—a Motswana man who spoke Setswana in the Niger-Congo language group, which also includes the Bantu languages—seemed a little surprised and even sceptical when I mentioned that, genetically, he and I were more closely related to each other than either of us are to his wife, a Khoisan. That is what the recent genetic results mean: at the highest level of genetic diversity, there are two kinds of people in the world: the Khoisan/Pygmy group, and everyone else. At the highest level of unity, there is one kind: modern humans. In between is a multitude of genetic, cultural, and ethnic diversity at different degrees of separation. So what are we to make of designations like “Black” and “visible minority”? Visible to whom?
Fortunately, all is not lost. Language evolves along with genetic heritage, and culture tracks language, so it is actually possible to modify our terminology to celebrate both our diversity and our unity. We can start by eliminating confusing terms related to appearance, by reserving country designations for political discussions, and by using genetically and linguistically accurate terms for ethnic groups.

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.