Speciose Weekly - 1/15/2020
In Brief: Bad News from 2020, Good News for 2021; Dire, but not Wolves; Economy in Tension with Ecology; Explaining Global Insect Declines; and much more…
Welcome to this week’s edition of Speciose Weekly, a newsletter about biodiversity and why it matters, by me, Nick Minor.
For more about the Speciose Weekly newsletter, check the about page and my recent post on the stakes for biodiversity in 2021.
What do you think of when you read the word “Amazon”?
For me, 2020 was the year when a company eclipsed the great rainforest it’s named after. As someone who once worked on Amazonian birds, this transition snuck up on me. It’s not a little bit sad that the company Amazon—and all it represents about our corporate economy, our patterns of consumption, and the hegemony of convenience—probably comes to mind first for millions of others too.
This trading of one “Amazon” meaning for another represents a much broader pattern, which is essential for biodiversity activists to understand: those things that appear in our day-to-day lives, that provide practical benefits, that contribute to our economic stability—these are the things that attract most our attention. Not far off ecosystems, not species you may never encounter, not sights and sounds and smells totally unlike your everyday milieu—even if these seemingly abstract realities are of existential importance to our collective future.
Don’t take me the wrong way: it is certainly justified—and effective for attracting donations—to advocate on behalf of far-away species or ecosystems (polar bears and elephants make for excellent fundraising campaigns). But in focusing too much on the far-away, we can unintentionally manufacture a tension between ecological and economic realities.
The fact is: millions of people don’t have the opportunity to ponder far-away ecosystems or abstract scientific concepts. They lack the privileges of leisure time, access to information, funds to donate, or even physical safety and stability. Expecting everyone to prioritize elephants, for example, is a recipe for pitting conservationists against other well-meaning, hard-working people, just doing their best for themselves and their families.
Ultimately, one way out of this morass is a hyper-local focus on biodiversity. Like with the Amazon rainforest, close-to-home biodiversity, and the ecosystem goods and services it maintains, is seldom thought about either. But unlike the Amazon rainforest, this isn’t because the other species around us are abstract; we witness them every day. We simply don’t know them well enough. We don’t know the species’ names. We don’t know their natural histories. And as a result, we don’t appreciate how much we depend on them and they depend on us.
So, in this still-new year, let’s resolve to mind our non-human neighbors—the plants, the animals, the soil underground filled with microbes and fungi—a little more often. It’s a speciose world out there, both far off in the Amazon and close by in your neighborhood.
With that, let’s get to the latest in biodiversity news.
News
Simple, concrete connections between biodiversity and current events.
1. 2020 Ties 2016 for Hottest Year on Record
It happened against all odds. 2020 was a La Niña year, when we would typically expect cooler, wetter climate trends. This past year, climate warming cancelled it out. U.S. carbon emissions fell 10% during pandemic-related shutdowns, while global emissions fell 7%. Again, this did little to prevent 2020’s warming trend.
While these emissions drops may seem like a good thing, they didn’t happen by design. As Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic’s Weekly Planet newsletter emphasized, “the U.S. would need to double 2020’s cuts in less than a decade if we hope to stay on track for net zero,” and we’d have to do it intentionally. There’s no stumbling into an accomplishment like net zero emissions by 2050.
Meanwhile, with each year heating up this rapidly, more organisms are being pushed outside their thermal tolerances. And even if organism themselves can handle a little more heat, other species they interact with—like predators—may respond to heat in ways that fundamentally restructure ecosystems (see the Science section for more on this).
2. Climate Change—and Associated Ecological Breakdown—Cost the U.S. $95 Billion in 2020
The costs of natural disasters in 2020—a record number of named Atlantic storms, the largest wildfires ever recorded in California, vast wildfires across the rest of the West, windstorms in the Midwest—are actually surprisingly easy to measure, if you only have data of insurance claims.
The many 2020 disasters were egged on by the higher amounts of energy in the atmosphere, and their effects—especially those related to floods—are worse in ecologically degraded landscapes. In the ecosystems they impact, these disasters disturb the pre-existing balance of species, killing off some species and making room for others. As these disturbances increase in frequency and severity, our uncertainty about what ecosystems will look like in 10, 20, 50, or 100 years has only increased.
(New York Times, Scientific American)
3. More than 50 Countries Commit to “30 by 30”—including a $4 Billion Pledge from the U.K.
his past Monday at the One Planet summit hosted by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, countries from across six continents committed to preserving 30% of the planet’s natural environments by 2030. The high profile of this agreement is encouraging, but ultimately, it remains to be seen whether real dollars and cents (or whatever other currency) are invested in ecological preservation. Accordingly, the UK government has promised to invest £3 billion in nature preservation and restoration of the coming five years.
These kinds of commitments—and whether countries actually stick to them—will be a major thread to follow in the coming decade. They may translate to a sort of “Paris Agreement for Nature” at COP15 in Kunming, China later this year. And while protecting undisturbed habitats is crucial to stem the extinction crisis, it must be done without grabbing land from Indigenous communities. Preservation, conservation, finance, and sustainable development must all be part of the final Kunming agreement.
4. The Year Energy Storage Technology Boomed
Just at the end of the 2020, a 300 megawatt battery storage system went online in Moss Landing, California—the largest in history. A similarly immense 409 megawatt energy storage system is under construction near Parrish, Florida. These storage systems were made possible by years of innovation in battery technology, which has brought battery storage prices low enough that it can now compete with the U.S.’s pre-existing electric grid.
Already, these technological and economic winds of change have taken a bite out of fossil fuel’s energy dominance, making it possible for our transition to clean energy to take place more rapidly. For species struggling with hotter, drier conditions, or those suffering from the environmental impact of fossil fuel extraction, a rapid shift to clean energy is the only option.
5. Brexit Interferes with Scottish Seafood Business
Much of Scottish seafood industry, which benefits from the rich ocean fauna of the Gulf Stream, depends on buyers in the European mainland. Now, with the passage of a Brexit Deal, administrative problems have left many fishing companies—and thousands of pounds of perishable seafood—in limbo. In some cases, the rich harvest from coastal ecosystems has gone to waste.
It may very well be good for these coastal ecosystems to experience less harvesting. But, like with falling emissions in 2020, such an improvement would be happening for the wrong reasons. Any lasting work to protect biodiversity, slow ecological breakdown, and halt extinctions must protect people in search of economic security, rather than placing them at odds with ecological recovery.
Science
Your finger on the pulse of research from ecology, evolutionary biology, conservation, economics, and other fields where biodiversity counts.
Common European Bird Species Is Smaller in Urban Environments - In urban habitats, Great Tit (Parus major) nestlings appear to be singificantly smaller than their forest counterparts—though notably, they were not less healthy. Adult tits showed smaller sizes as well, with shorter legs, winds, and tails. Males especially had shorter wings. While interesting, these trends are still largely unexplained, but a fascinating possibility is that other urban-adapted bird species will converge on these trends. (Urban Ecosystems)
Island Lizard Faces Enhanced Predation in a Warmer Future - On Japan’s Izu Islands, the hotter a Okada’s five-lined skink (Plestiodon latiscutatus), the better it is at escaping predatory snakes. The skinks are, after all, ecotherms, which means they can only exert the effort require to flee their predators when their bodies are warm. Climate change promises to warm their environments wholesale, but while these temperatures may make for speedier skinks, they may also benefit the predatory Japanese four-lined rat snake (Elaphe quadrivirgata). The outcome of this climate-exacerbated arms race remains to be seen. (Ecology Letters)
Dire Wolves Weren’t Really Wolves - Yet another double-take from genetics here. It turns out that, rather than falling within the wolf phylogenetic tree, Dire Wolves were on a branch of their own, part of the last lineage of Canids to evolve in the Americas. As such, it’s likely that the physical resemblance between gray wolf and dire wolf bones is another fascinating case of convergent evolution. (Nature)
How To Limit Loss of Habitat to Agriculture to Only 1% - If global agricultural development continues as it has, the vast majority of vertebrate species will lose habitat. 1,280 species are likely to lose more than a quarter of all habitat available to them. But if the global human population shifts toward more plant-based diets, food waste is halved, and land use and planning is improved, these losses can be almost entirely prevented. (Nature)
Special Issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Tackles Global Insect Decline - I will certainly be digging into this one more this weekend. For now, my key takeaway is that insect decline, like much of biodiversity loss, is a death by a thousand cuts. Though some stressors on insect populations have a larger impact than others, the sheer number of stressors outweighs the significance of any one on its own. This diagram illustrates many of these stressors. Humans and many other species rely on insects for pollination (a critical ecosystem service). They are a source of energy and nutrition for even more species. To remove this one piece from the Jenga tower of the world’s ecosystems would be to carelessly tempt collapse. (PNAS)
Shout-Outs
How about some good news from across last year, eh? Last week, Emily Atkin in her Heated newsletter reported the remarkable number of climate wins from last year. These include all six major U.S. banks saying no to funding Arctic drilling, multiple universities pledging to divest their billions in endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry, and BlackRock, the world's largest money-management firm, promising to “move away” from fossil fuels. This newsletter is awesome, and I highly recommend it.
Bonkers nature video: watch this snake literally use its body as a lasso to climb up a pole. More about it here.
On a more somber note, The Revelator, publication of the Center for Biological Diversity, compiled a list of the species we know went extinct last year—an important record to have as “extinction denial” is likely to be a roadblock for ecological recovery like “climate denial” was for climate action. On the list are “32 orchid species in Bangladesh”, “65 North American plants”, “22 frog species”, “15% of mite species”, and sadly, much much more.
The New York Times Magazine did a fabulous multimedia interactive about the ICARUS Project, a remote sensing project promising a “new era in animal ecology”.
Nature recently published a career feature for scientists about including Indigenous researchers in science—an essential and long-overdue movement in ecology. The article draws from four, firsthand accounts from Indigenous researchers, and, in my opinion, should be required reading for anyone who cares about enabling everyone to flourish in the academy.
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With much gratitude,
—Nick