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Gitmo' in the Mojave: How the Marines are saving endangered desert tortoises

The Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base houses vulnerable young desert tortoises until they're hardy enough to withstand predators and drought. The endangered species' continued existence in the wild may hinge on programs like these.

Reporting from TWENTYNINE PALMS Marine Corps base, Calif. —  The two tiny tortoises emerged from their burrows as soon as they detected Brian Henen’s footsteps, eager for the handfuls of bok choy and snap peas that would soon be tossed their way.It will be a few years before the tortoises, roughly the size of playing cards, have shells tough enough to avoid becoming prey for the ravens soaring above. So for now, they live with roughly 1,000 others of their species in a sheltered habitat ringed by barbed wire and draped in netting.The elaborate setup on the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center is designed to protect the tortoises not only from ravens, coyotes and other predators, but from rumbling tanks, live explosives and anything else that might put them in harm’s way at the 1,189-square-mile Mojave Desert base. The Tortoise Research and Captive Rearing Site raises vulnerable tortoises on the vast Marine Corps base. “The desert tortoise is considered a keystone species, which means that they have a disproportionate effect on the entire ecosystem,” says Henen, a civilian who heads the conservation branch of the base’s Environmental Affairs Division.The tortoises pockmark the desert floor with burrows that other animals use for shelter, and disperse the seeds of native plants in their waste. “They’re influencing what else can exist on the landscape,” Henen said.With its barbed-wire enclosure, some call this place Tortoise Gitmo, after the U.S. Navy’s Guantanamo Bay base and prison camp in Cuba. Others call it the Tortoise Bordello, although the young tortoises are released before they are mature enough to breed.Officially it’s called the Tortoise Research and Captive Rearing Site, and since it was established in 2005 it has helped scientists learn how to protect a species that’s threatened by human encroachment, disease and climate change. In the first iteration of the program, biologists gathered eggs from wild females and raised the hatchlings until they were hardy enough to stand a chance against predators and drought, in a process known as head-starting.The facility got an influx of new tenants in 2017, when the military relocated tortoises to make way for a controversial expansion of the base’s training grounds. Biologists decided to head-start about 550 young tortoises that were taken from expansion areas.Then, starting a couple of years ago, Henen’s team began gathering, incubating and hatching eggs from the relocated adult tortoises to study whether they were breeding with their new neighbors. Rather than release the hatchlings into the wild, where they were unlikely to survive, they decided to head-start them as well. Brian Henen of the base’s Environmental Affairs Division holds a desert tortoise. Some desert conservationists are critical of the efforts, saying the captive rearing program is essentially a smokescreen that distracts from the pressing need to conserve critical habitat.“What I’d like to see is this kind of effort being done on public lands as a tool to repatriate areas as opposed to minimizing the impacts of the Marine Corps expansion,” said Ed LaRue, a board member of the nonprofit Desert Tortoise Council.“Hundreds of square miles of good tortoise habitat is now being used for military maneuvers,” LaRue said, citing base expansions at Twentynine Palms and at Fort Irwin National Training Center near Barstow. “It enables the military to go ahead and degrade the desert and claim it’s successful because the tortoises have been moved out of the way.” Bases should instead stop expanding into tortoise habitat, he said.Henen says the program has enabled biologists to both augment tortoise populations and track the success of those efforts by committing to decades of monitoring. He also points out that the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center has partnered with a coalition of agencies and nongovernmental organizations to conserve land off base. And inside the boundaries of the massive installation, officials have identified the most valuable tortoise habitat and set aside 43,800 acres of restricted areas that protect the species, as well as other natural and cultural resources, he says. Marines at Twentynine Palms receive specialized training on how to handle tortoises. A glimpse of a single reptile interloper will bring a training exercise to a halt. Troops must radio in to range control and request permission to move the animal. If permission is granted but the tortoise urinates, which can cause them to become dangerously dehydrated, the soldiers must call it in again and wait for a base ecologist to respond. Desert tortoises were once so plentiful that people driving through the Mojave would take them home to keep as backyard pets. But in some patches of California desert, their numbers have dropped by up to 96% since the 1970s, according to study plots monitored by Kristin Berry, supervisory research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center.Recognizing the dire straits, the California Fish and Game Commission in April voted to uplist desert tortoises from threatened to endangered.The Marines are hardly the only threat to tortoises. Roads and highways have carved up previously wide-open stretches of desert into parcels that are in some cases too small to allow for the breeding and genetic diversity needed to sustain their population health. A warming climate has dried up the precipitation needed to sustain them in some places.Livestock not native to the desert have grazed and trampled the plants tortoises like to eat, spreading unpalatable nonnative grasses in their wake. Power lines have added miles of resting perches for ravens, allowing them to more easily spot young tortoises.Ravens used to be rare in the desert — they could only subsist for a couple of months in the springtime of good rainfall years, said Ken Nagy, professor emeritus at UCLA, who with Henen founded the program at Twentynine Palms. But now, thanks to everything from leaky faucets at gas stations to the irrigation of alfalfa fields, the birds have year-round sources of drinking water that’s caused their population to explode to 30 to 50 times greater than what it once was, he said.“You can go beneath raven nests on power poles and see piles of dead baby tortoises that were opened, killed, carried to the nests by adults and fed to the babies,” he said. “That is what started this whole thing.” The Tortoise Research and Captive Rearing Site raises vulnerable tortoises on the vast Marine Corps base. In desert tortoise head-starting programs, biologists use radio transmitters to monitor wild females and portable X-ray machines to determine when they’re pregnant. They bring those females inside enclosures to lay their eggs, then release them. The hatchlings are reared in captivity until they reach a certain length — Twentynine Palms uses a threshold of 110 millimeters, or about 4 inches long, which can take between seven and nine years — and then rereleased, typically with radio transmitters to monitor their health and movements.The concept was pioneered in the 1990s at Fort Irwin, followed by a similar program at Edwards Air Force Base near Mojave.The captive rearing site is tucked in an isolated corner of the base, down a sandy road flanked by mesquite dunes and wrinkled mountains; past collections of buildings used for training that resemble crudely built neighborhoods. Fences to keep Marines on the road have spiky pins atop each post to prevent ravens from having yet another place to perch. Brian Henen checks on a desert tortoise at the Tortoise Research and Captive Rearing Site at the Twentynine Palms Marine base. Inside the facility, a clanging noise echoes through the pens. It’s a particularly exuberant tortoise nicknamed Typhoid Mary, who got the nickname because she harbors a contagious bacteria that causes upper respiratory tract disease.She has heard the biologists coming and wants a snack. She bangs her shell against the metal divider to get their attention. Henen hands her some kale, which stains her beak green.Mary is believed to be at least 30 years old. One of the few adults at the facility, she ended up here as a result of the 2017 base expansion during which the military used helicopters to relocate more than 1,000 tortoises to other areas, most of them off base. Scientists are currently monitoring about 125 of those adults and 50 juveniles via radiotelemetry so they can keep tabs on their health and movements.But Mary was placed on the no-fly list after she was found to harbor mycoplasma bacteria. Upper respiratory tract disease has also contributed to tortoise declines, usually in populations that are close to human communities. Scientists believe it may be spread by people releasing sick pet tortoises into the wild, Henen said.Despite the disease, Mary has remained in relatively good health because she’s well-fed and hydrated. Still, she’ll probably be living out her days here to avoid infecting others.The program, and others like it, have won converts over the years. Biologist Tim Shields, who founded a company that develops tortoise conservation technology, was once opposed to head-starting because he thought it was unnatural and the tortoises would be inferior at survival.“But some very intelligent people have spent a lot of time figuring out a formula for essentially mass production of tortoises — and I’m all for it,” he said. “Because the underlying ecosystem is so bunged up that I don’t see an alternative.”

Animals
Climate
Conservation

Plans to transform an iconic San Francisco highway into a park ignite recall furor

San Francisco residents voted to permanently close the Upper Great Highway to cars and turn it into a park. That sparked a recall effort against a local lawmaker.

SAN FRANCISCO —  On a recent Sunday on the far edge of the Outer Sunset, a cozy oceanfront neighborhood with rows of pastel bungalows, hundreds of people enjoyed a stretch of the iconic coastal road known as the Great Highway. A dad taught his kid how to ride a bike. A young couple strolled with their baby in a bassinet. Two surfers hauled their boards toward the crashing Pacific waves. A day later, the same swath of asphalt was covered with cars, transformed back into a commuter route for thousands of drivers who use the Great Highway to get to work, the airport, school or other parts of town.This two-mile stretch, known as the Upper Great Highway — which starts at the tip of Golden Gate Park and runs south along Ocean Beach — has become a political traffic jam in recent years, with locals clashing over how best to use the historic avenue as coastal erosion and sea level rise threaten its future. Division over the Upper Great Highway’s fate adds to an ongoing debate between so-called urbanists who want to see the city develop more green space and promote public transportation, and those who rely on their cars and worry about traffic. (Paul Kuroda / For The Times) The dispute reached a new fervor in last month’s election, when the majority of San Francisco voters approved a controversial ballot measure to permanently close the Upper Great Highway to cars and convert it into a full-time park, instead of a weekend-only promenade. The measure, Proposition K, passed with nearly 55% of the vote. The bulk of support came from voters on the city’s east side, in neighborhoods closer to downtown and miles from the beach. Voters in the Sunset and Richmond districts, west side neighborhoods that will be most affected by the closure, overwhelmingly voted against the measure.The stark division added to an ongoing — and very San Francisco — debate between so-called urbanists who want to see the city develop more green space and promote public transportation and those who rely on their cars and worry about traffic. It’s also sparked tension between old-timers clinging to their neighborhood’s middle-class roots and other city residents who embrace the coast as an urban oasis. The fight could cost one local politician his job.Soon after Proposition K passed, opponents organized a recall petition against Supervisor Joel Engardio, a Democrat elected in 2022 to represent the Sunset and other west side areas who helped get Proposition K on the ballot. San Francisco Supervisor Joel Engardio, a Democrat elected in 2022 to represent the Outer Sunset and other west side neighborhoods, is facing a recall against for his support of Proposition K. (Jeff Chiu/Associated Press) Recall organizers say Engardio abandoned the neighborhoods he represents by backing an initiative his constituents clearly didn’t want. “This recall is based on the fact that he just betrayed the district,” said Vin Budhai, an Outer Sunset resident who campaigned against Proposition K and filed the recall petition. Budhai said residents fear that closing the highway will push traffic into the neighborhood, polluting the air and making the sleepy streets unsafe. He worries about workers who either can’t afford to work from home or don’t have the option to bike or take public transit to their jobs. “There’s a conversation going around about how we should utilize our roads, but that conversation doesn’t include the driver,” he said. The recall petitioners are waiting to be cleared to collect signatures to qualify for the ballot in a special election before 2026. If it’s successful, Engardio would become the latest in a string of local politicians who have been removed from office in the last three years. In 2022, San Francisco voters recalled progressive Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin and three school board members over voter frustrations during the pandemic. In November, East Bay voters ousted two other progressives, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County Dist. Atty. Pamela Price. Engardio said that he was “humbled” by the votes in his district against Proposition K and that he was dedicated to working with the opposition to address traffic and road safety concerns before the Upper Great Highway closes to cars, possibly by next spring. But he also sees a unique opportunity to reimagine the historic highway in the face of climate change. Already, a southern extension of the Great Highway near the San Francisco Zoo is slated to close because of erosion and other environmental concerns. City officials estimate closing the Upper Great Highway to cars and rerouting traffic through other eastern roadways would add only three minutes to drive times.“Do we keep it as a road with less utility? Or do we turn it into an ocean-side park that could have huge benefit to generations of people and the local economy and be good for the environment?” Engardio said. “This has the potential to be transformational, not just for the Sunset but for all of San Francisco.”Drama over the Upper Great Highway goes back to the pandemic, when city officials closed the road to cars as part of a broader effort to free up outdoor recreation space. In 2021, the city modified those rules to allow traffic during the week while reserving the road for pedestrians during weekends. The highway transitions into a park beginning at noon on Fridays and until 6 am on Mondays. In the November 2022 election, advocates frustrated with the anti-car rules organized a ballot measure to reopen the highway to vehicles full time. Voters rejected the measure, Proposition I, with more than 65% of the vote. As a compromise after that election, the Board of Supervisors approved a three-year pilot program to keep the split use of the road. In June, Engardio and four other supervisors sponsored an ordinance to put Proposition K before voters, rather than having the 11-member board decide the highway’s fate. “I felt that it is better for everyone to have an equal vote and equal say on what to do with their coast, because the coast belongs to everyone,” Engardio said. Engardio said he had confidence that his district wanted a park. Many west side voters rejected the 2022 measure to reopen the road full time to cars, and a coalition of Outer Sunset residents campaigned for the weekend promenade and Proposition K. “This idea came from Sunset residents. And I’m the Sunset supervisor,” he said. City officials recorded more than 420,000 weekend visits to the park in 2023, making it the third-most-visited park in the city, after Golden Gate Park and the Marina. A separate study from the city estimated up to 26,400 weekly visitors for a full-time pedestrian promenade. The San Francisco controller’s office also estimates shutting down the road to cars could save the city up to $700,000 annually in sand removal and other maintenance issues that regularly close down the highway. Supporters of Proposition K celebrated its passage as a unique opportunity to transform the road into a park accessible to all people, with paved portions for the elderly or disabled, and teeming with native plants and restored sand dunes. And they’re adamant that local businesses and restaurants will benefit from the increased foot traffic. “The temperature over the past few months on this issue has really overlooked the incredible positive opportunity that San Franciscans had,” said Lucas Lux, an Outer Sunset resident and “Yes on K” campaign manager. “You’ve opened the coast to be enjoyed by more people as part of daily life in San Francisco.”Lux and other supporters of the new park hope it will eventually become as popular as the JFK promenade in Golden Gate Park. Voters in 2022 approved another measure to close it permanently to cars, and it has since become a favorite recreational road, now decorated with art installations, ping-pong tables, a piano and lawn chairs. But bitterness still simmers through the west side. (Eric Risberg / Associated Press) Matt Boschetto, who ran unsuccessfully for supervisor representing the nearby Inner Sunset neighborhood, said he sees the closure of the Upper Great Highway as San Francisco abandoning working-class people. “I’m not trying to silence urbanist views and people who want to see more open spaces and people who are concerned about the climate and concerned heavily about housing,” he said. “But you also gotta respect the other view of San Francisco as well.” Boschetto ran a campaign committee against Proposition K that raised roughly $239,000, with at least $65,000 from Boschetto’s family members. In comparison, a committee backing Proposition K raised more than $780,000, including $350,000 from Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and chief executive of Yelp. “We did the best we could,” Boschetto said. “I feel like maybe history might not be on our side, but morally I feel like it was a victory in a lot of ways. I think it’s really mobilized the west side.” The California Coastal Commission this month voted to grant San Francisco’s permit to make the road into a park. Opponents were disappointed but said they hope Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie, who takes office in early January and opposed Proposition K, slows implementation of the closure. In a statement, Lurie said that he was “committed to respecting and upholding the will of the voters” and that his administration “will work hand in hand with residents on both sides to ensure that the measure is implemented thoughtfully.”As for Engardio, he said he is also dedicated to spending the next many months working with outraged voters to address road safety and traffic concerns. He said he respects the “democratic right” to organize a recall against him, but hopes that voters consider how he has worked on other issues important to the district during his time in office, including public safety and organizing popular night markets to support local businesses. “At this point, I have to only look forward,” he said. “I can’t undo the past.”

Business
Climate
Nature

Our Big Global Problems Are Connected, so Tackle Them Together, Scientists say

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, researchers and policymakers have proposed solutions like installing renewable energy, replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric ones, and developing technology to suck carbon out of the air. But these policies often address climate […]

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, researchers and policymakers have proposed solutions like installing renewable energy, replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric ones, and developing technology to suck carbon out of the air. But these policies often address climate change in isolation—without regard for other pressing issues like a decline in biodiversity, the contamination of freshwater sources, and the pollution of agricultural soils.  A new report released Tuesday by the United Nations’ expert panel on biodiversity makes the case for a different approach based on addressing the “nexus” between two or more out of five essential issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, food, human health, and water. Such an approach is not only more likely to help the world meet various UN targets on biodiversity, sustainable development, and climate mitigation; it’s also more cost-effective. “We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos,” said Paula Harrison, a professor of land and water modeling at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a co-chair of the report, in a statement. Other scientific reports have studied the interlinkages between two or three of these issues, but she told reporters on Tuesday that this latest report is the “most ambitious” to date. The new report was the result of three years of work of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, an expert body that’s analogous to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which periodically assesses the state of the science on global warming. The report centers on biodiversity—that’s the IPBES’s remit, after all—describing how the variety of life on Earth is “essential to our very existence.” But it goes out of its way to show how rapidly accelerating biodiversity loss is both contributing to and being exacerbated by other crises. Climate change, for instance, is making some habitats inhospitable to their erstwhile animal populations, while the loss of those populations can have impacts on freshwater availability and carbon storage. The five interlinking issues were selected by representatives of the 147 IPBES’s member countries. Meanwhile, solutions that focus on just one issue may have detrimental effects on other elements. Pete Smith, a professor of soils and global change at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, gave the example of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, a climate solution in which crops are grown to draw CO2 out of the air and then burned to generate energy. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions are captured and stored in rock formations, with the aim of removing them from the carbon cycle permanently. The problem, Smith said, is that to implement this process on a large scale would require vast tracts of land that might otherwise have been used to grow food crops—so BECCS can unintentionally harm food security. Devoting land to single-variety crops can also use up lots of water and jeopardize biodiversity. “When you just focus on climate change,” he told Grist, “you might end up with some solutions that damage other elements of the nexus.” In other scenarios, it’s not the solution itself that’s problematic; it’s the way it’s implemented. Planting trees, for example, can be done in consultation with local communities and taking into account unique ecosystem needs. Or, as Smith described, a big company seeking to generate carbon credits could evict Native peoples from their land and start a plantation of fast-growing, nonnative tree species.  The latter situation might benefit climate change in the narrowest sense, Smith said, but “with a whole bunch of negative impacts on people, on health, on water.” The assessment finds that, between 2001 and 2021, every one of the five issues analyzed has been damaged by factors including urbanization, war, and growing per capita consumption—except for food availability. That could be explained by a kind of decision-making the report describes as “food first,” in which more food is grown to benefit human health at the expense of biodiversity, freshwater availability, and climate change. Decision-making built solely around climate change or conservation could be similarly counterproductive, the report says, based on an analysis of 186 future scenarios crafted from 52 scientific studies. The most promising alternative is a “nature-oriented nexus” focused on all five target areas, emphasizing “strong environmental regulation, sustainable agricultural practices, lower rates of global per capita consumption, and strong development of green technologies.” More than 160 scientists from 57 countries contributed to the report, which was formally adopted this weekend at IPBES’s annual conference in Windhoek, Namibia. During a press conference on Tuesday, the authors said they were ending the year “on a high note for multilateralism,” in contrast to the stalemates that defined other intergovernmental negotiations in 2024, like the global plastics treaty and the climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. In addition to the nexus report, IPBES member states also approved a report on the “transformative change” that is needed to address global crises connected to biodiversity, including climate change. Notably, that report says that “disconnection from and domination over nature and people” is at the root of toxic chemical pollution, deforestation, the burning of fossil fuels, and other causes of climate and environmental degradation. Both reports highlight the need to address the inequitable concentration of wealth and power and the prioritization of short-term material gains in order to “prevent triggering the potentially irreversible decline and projected collapse of key ecosystem functions.”  “Right now, our economic and financial system is not fit for purpose; it does not value nature,” Pamela McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University and a co-chair of the nexus report, told reporters on Tuesday.  The nexus report finds that $7 trillion a year in public subsidies and private financial incentives go toward activities that directly damage the five issue areas. Only $200 billion—less than 3 percent of that total—is spent directly on improving biodiversity. Because the nexus report was requested directly by the governments of IPBES’s 147 member countries—among them, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the United States, and most of Europe—the scientists who contributed to it are hopeful that their recommendations will be adopted by policymakers. In the report, they highlight 71 cross-cutting responses to interlinked global problems, ranging from reducing plastic pollution to conserving wetland ecosystems to providing universal health coverage.  Smith, who is a soil researcher and has also contributed to reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said working on the report has changed his own outlook. “I’ve tried to apply the nexus thinking on a couple of projects on how climate change affects the food system, and people in disadvantaged communities,” he said. “All of these things are leading me to take a broader, less siloed view than I would have done 10 years ago.” Previous IPBES reports have shown how biodiversity is “declining faster than at any time in human history.” At the group’s next conference in 2025, it’s expected to present a new assessment of businesses’ impact and dependence on biodiversity, and IPBES plans to release its second global assessment of the state of biodiversity in 2028. 

Climate
Energy
Technology

What Bird Flu Means for Milk

On Wednesday, California became the first state to issue a declaration of emergency regarding the avian flu (H5N1). That same day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the first severe case of the flu in a human on US soil and outbreaks in cow herds were detected in Southern California. Still, the […]

On Wednesday, California became the first state to issue a declaration of emergency regarding the avian flu (H5N1). That same day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the first severe case of the flu in a human on US soil and outbreaks in cow herds were detected in Southern California. Still, the threat to humans is low according to the CDC. The agency has traced most human infections back to those handling livestock, and there’s been no reported transmission between people. “I have dairies that are never coming back from this.” But for cows and the dairy they produce, it’s a different story. This year was the first time the flu was detected in cows in the US, and it has ripped through many Western states’ dairy farms with startling speed. Since March, the virus has been found in cow herds of 16 states. For the last few months, infected herds have largely been concentrated in California—the state that makes up about 20 percent of the nation’s dairy industry. Last week, Texas, another one of the nation’s top dairy producing states, saw the reappearance of bird flu after two months without a detected outbreak. In the industry hit hardest by bird flu, the poultry industry, the virus’ spread has resulted in the culling of entire flocks which has lead to higher egg prices on supermarket shelves. Will milk and butter prices soon go the same route? And how worried should you be about consuming dairy? How exactly does bird flu affect dairy cows? Some farmers are first identifying outbreaks in their herds through the color and density of the milk, in what they are coining “golden mastitis,” according to Milkweed, a dairy news publication. As early studies by University of Copenhagen researchers found, the virus latches onto dairy cows mammary glands, creating complications for the dairy industry beyond just the cow fatalities. The virus is proving deadly to cows. According to Colorado State University Professor Jason Lombard, an infectious disease specialist for cattle, the case fatality rates based on a limited set of herds was zero to 15 percent. But California saw an even higher rate of up to 20 percent during a late summer heatwave in the states Central Valley. It was a warning for how the rising number of heatwaves and temps across the country could result in deadlier herd outbreaks in upcoming summers.  For some of the cows that survived, there was a dip in their dairy production of around 25 percent according to multiple experts I spoke with. As a farmer told Bloomberg News, some of the cows aren’t returning to full production levels, an indication of longer lasting effects of the virus. It’s a finding experts are seeing in other parts of the US, too. According to Lombard, this may be due to the severity of the virus in the cow. According to reporting in Milkweed, there may also be “long-tail” bird flu impacts on a cow’s dairy production, health, and reproduction. Additional research is likely needed to understand the extent of these potential longterm effects of the virus and whether they could spell trouble ahead for recovering farms.   A spokesperson with the California Department of Food and Agriculture told Mother Jones, “it’s too soon to know how production has been impacted.” How is this impacting farms and farm workers? As of today, more than half of the people who’ve contracted H5N1 are dairy farmworkers, according to the CDC. This population is particularly vulnerable because they are often the ones handling milking or milking equipment which can lead to spreading the virus. The CDC is recommending employers take steps to reduce their workers’ exposure to the virus by creating health and safety plans. The CDC is working with organizations like the National Center for Farm Worker Health to expand testing, PPE availability, and training. According to Bethany Alcauter, a director at the organization, ensuring dairy farmworkers have access to testing is a tricky situation. The 100,000-some workforce faces barriers to accessing health care and testing, such as an inability to take paid-time off to get themselves tested if they are sick. And the system depends on the producer to decide to bring in the health department to oversee potential outbreaks within herds and staff, which doesn’t always happen because there’s no government mandate. “It’s all recommendations and kindness—that’s what we’re running on. It’s not regulation and enforcement.” “It’s all recommendations and kindness—that’s what we’re running on,” Alcauter says. “It’s not regulation and enforcement.” She believes the testing infrastructure could be strengthened by “recognizing that farm workers can be public-health first responders if they have the knowledge and the access to the right contacts, in the right system.” Outside of navigating farmworker health, farmers face economic impacts when the virus spreads through their herds. “What you’re losing at the end of the day is revenue for your farm when it rolls through,” says Will Loux, vice president of economic affairs for the National Milk Producers Federation. “Depending on the financial situation of an individual farm it can certainly be devastating.”  There are a handful of variables and factors that shape the financial losses of a dairy hit with an outbreak. Luckily, agriculture economist Charles Nicholson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and some colleagues created a calculator to estimate this financial impact of a bird flu outbreak. Based on Nicholson’s estimates for California, a typical farm of 1500 cattle will lose $120,000 annually. For context, this is about $10,000 more than the median household income of a dairy farmer. Based on those estimates, that would mean California’s farmers have collectively lost about $80 million at most due to avian flu so far. The US Department of Agriculture is providing support for farmers who are impacted by H5N1 outbreaks. In reviewing a few herd datasets in Michigan, Phillip Durst, a dairy and cattle expert, noted that about half a year after an outbreak, herds were producing around 10 percent less than before. Not only do farmers face massive short term losses, they also struggle to return to full capacity again. And, there are high costs associated with putting resources into taking care of sick animals too.  Even strong diaries that had “tip top” biosecurity measures, or comprehensive environmental protection measures in place, are shutting down, according to Anja Raudabaugh, CEO of Western Untied Dairies, a trade organization overseeing farms across California. “I have dairies that are never coming back from this,” Raudabaugh says. “This was just so cataclysmic for them. They’re not going to be able to get over that loss in production hump.” There is some hope around the corner. A vaccine for cows, which the USDA claims is in the works, could help stop the spread and protect remaining uninfected herds. “Until we have a vaccine that we can inoculate them with at an early age, we have no choices except to hope that herd immunity sets in soon,” Raudabaugh says. What’s the effect on milk? In June, the US dropped 1.5 percent in production, around 278 million pounds of milk, compared to 2023. It was one of the early potential indicators of the industry’s vulnerability to this virus. However, since then, the nation’s production rebounded to above 2023 numbers. It’s largely why consumers are not seeing the same impact on the price and availability of dairy products like they are with eggs.  “When one state gets H5N1 there are a lot of other states that tend to pick up the slack. So in general, when you look at the national numbers, you really have to squint to kind of find where H5N1 is in the milk production”,” says Loux. California produces around a fifth of the nation’s dairy, and since August over half of the state’s herds had an outbreak. In October, California saw a near four percent drop in milk production compared to 2023, equating to about 127 million pounds of milk. On Thursday, the USDA released November’s data on milk production showing California with the largest decrease this year of 301 million fewer gallons of milk compared to 2023. That is more than double the decrease of last month. Still, the nation only saw a near 1 percent decrease since 2023. How the next administration handles this virus may spell a different story for the dairy industry and the country. With Trump’s history of downplaying infectious diseases and promoting unfounded cures, and public health cabinet nominations who decry vaccine effectiveness, a human-to-human outbreak could lead to another pandemic. Likely to take over the USDA is Brooke Rollins, who, according to Politico, had less experience in agriculture than others on Trump’s shortlist (though she does have a degree in agriculture development). It’s currently unclear what her plans are for handling this virus and supporting farmers and the industry at large. Rollins did not respond to my request for an interview. Should I be worried about getting sick from drinking milk? Drinking pasteurized milk is safe. For more than 100 years, pasteurization has kept the public safe by killing harmful bacteria and viruses. The CDC is warning against raw milk consumption, on the other hand, due to it potentially having high-levels of bird flu. While there’s yet to be a human case of bird flu traced to raw milk consumption, there is fear that the unpasteurized product could lead to illness. And raw milk loaded with the virus has been linked to deaths in other mammals, like cats. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the likely soon-to-be director of Health and Human Services under Trump, has a history of promoting raw milk. Earlier this month, Kennedy’s favorite raw milk brand was recalled by California after testing positive for bird flu. Kennedy’s rise to public health power comes at time when raw milk is rising in popularity on TikTok. In response to the spread of bird flu in raw milk, the USDA announced a national strategy requiring milk samples nationwide be tested by the agency. Since officially beginning testing on Monday, 16 new bird flu outbreaks in cow herds have been identified in two states. For now, as the nation continues to work on controlling the spread of bird flu, consider tossing your raw milk out before it does more than just spoil.

Agriculture
Animals
Food

To Improve Your Gut Microbiome, Spend More Time in Nature

Microbes found in green spaces can transfer into your body, increasing bacterial diversity and potentially boosting the strength of the immune system.

Microbes in our gut can have a profound impact on our health, but research is showing that those surrounding us in our environment—what’s known as the natural environmental microbiome—can have a big impact too. This suggests that we should all spend a lot more time interacting with nature, both outdoors and indoors.I was first introduced to this emerging area of science by Professor Gretchen Daily from Stanford University. She mentioned a Finnish research project that showed how letting kindergarten-aged children play in a yard that contained “dirt” from the forest floor resulted in a significant positive impact on their gut microbiome. Seventy-nine young children took part, all living in urban environments and spending the majority of their days at different daycare centers around Finland. The only difference between them was that these daycare centers had three different types of outdoor spaces.The first type was a fairly standard outdoor play area, comprised of concrete, gravel, and some plastic matting. The second was the type typically found in daycare environments that are already nature-orientated, with grass, soil, and planted areas for the children to play in. These two acted as a control against which to compare the third experimental space, where the concrete and gravel were covered with segments of forest floor and soil from the local coniferous forest.The children were encouraged to play in only one of the three types of yard each day over the 28 days of the experiment (note that some kindergartens have multiple play areas). Before and after periods of play, the children’s skin and gut microbiota were measured using genetic sequencing of bacteria taken from skin swabs and stool samples, along with changes to T cells and cytokines in their blood. These cells and proteins play a critical role in preventing autoimmunity and autoimmune diseases; their levels are often used as an indication of how well the immune system is functioning.Science NewsletterYour weekly roundup of the best stories on health care, the climate crisis, new scientific discoveries, and more. Delivered on Wednesdays.Remarkable results emerged. The children who played in the experimental yard showed a large increase in the diversity of microbiota on their skin and in their gut in comparison to the children playing in the urban and nature-orientated areas. Importantly, these were the “good” types of microbiota—those associated with health benefits. There was also a significant increase in the children’s immunity markers, indicative of them having gained enhanced immunoregulatory pathways—which is indicative of a reduced risk of immune-mediated diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis.The importance of this study cannot be overstated. It implies that even short-term exposure to nature’s microbial diversity has the potential to radically alter the diversity of microbiota on our skin and in our gut. In addition, it suggests that the altered gut microbiota can modulate the function of our immune system.A Healthy Microbiome Is Made, Not BornEveryone has a distinctive community of microbes in their gut—a person’s ethnicity, the food they consume, antibiotic use, body size, and the amount they exercise all leave a clear signature on their gut microbial diversity. The role of these microbiota communities is significant. Our organs can only synthesize 11 of the 20 essential amino acids that we need, so the rest, along with 13 essential vitamins, are retrieved and synthesized by our gut microbes.And these microbial communities don’t just help our gut extract nutrients from food. Microbes also produce some of the most important compounds for our health, including immuno-suppressants, anti-cancer, and anti-inflammatory compounds. They appear to be associated with the functioning of our immune system, central nervous system, and associated health outcomes, so much so that clear correlations have been found between particular gut microbiota—so called “sick” microbiomes—and certain illnesses. Those with a distinctive gut microbial signature include irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, and colorectal cancer as well as nonintestinal disorders such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Nature
Climate
Food

Canyon De Chelly in Arizona Will Become Latest National Park Unit to Ban Commercial Air Tours

Commercial air tours will soon be prohibited over Canyon de Chelly National Monument in northeastern Arizona under a plan approved this week by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Park Service

CANYON DE CHELLY NATIONAL MONUMENT, Ariz. (AP) — Commercial air tours will soon be prohibited over Canyon de Chelly National Monument in northeastern Arizona under a plan approved this week by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Park Service.The park service said in a statement that the plan was was signed Thursday and will take effect in 180 days, barring any legal challenges. It will ban the tours over the park and within a half mile (800 meters) outside its boundary.“Prohibiting commercial air tours protects these lands’ cultural and spiritual significance to the Navajo Nation,” said park Superintendent Lyn Carranza. “Canyon de Chelly National Monument’s Air Tour Management Plan honors the unique nation-to-nation relationship regarding decisions affecting the park and helps to preserve one of the most important archeological landscapes in the southwest.” What is Canyon de Chelly National Monument? The park lies within the Four Corners region inside the Navajo Nation and is among the most visited national monuments in the United States. It's known for its soaring sandstone cliffs and 800-foot (244-meter) high Spider Rock spire. Prehistoric rock art is found throughout the area, which has been home to Native Americans for millennia. What's the history of air tours at U.S. national parks and monuments? The sightseeing flights reportedly date back to the 1930s, when crews building the Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada border asked helicopter pilots working on the project to give flyovers to their families.The tours offering a unique overhead view of spectacular landscapes have long been popular at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Some of the nation’s busiest spots for tour operators have included Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, which is home to one of the world’s most active volcanoes, and Haleakala National Park. What are some objections to to the tours? Supporters of the tours say they offer an exciting experience to tourists and allow older people and those with disabilities to see and enjoy the parks. Critics say the flights are an unnecessarily dangerous way to view some of the most stunning public lands in the United States. Rules designating routes and minimum altitudes were set in 1986 after two tour aircraft collided over the Grand Canyon, killing 25 people. Still, there are currently numerous options for helicopter tours to the Grand Canyon, departing from places including Las Vegas and Sedona, Arizona. Critics also complain that the buzz of helicopters drowns out the sounds of nature, disrupting the experiences of visitors on the ground and tribal members who call the land around the parks home. What regulations exist to manage the tours? The park service works with the FAA to implement the National Park Air Tour Management Act of 2000, which requires tour operators who want to conduct such commercial air tours to get FAA approval. The law also requires the FAA, in conjunction with the park service, to establish management plans for air tours for those parks and nearby tribal lands where applications are made. What other parks have air tour regulations? Canyon de Chelly is the last of roughly two dozen national park units where the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility had fought for flyover restrictions. Other national parks where such commercial flyovers essentially are or will be banned in coming years include Badlands National Park and Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, Glacier National Park in Montana, and Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. Only two air tours per year are allowed at Death Valley National Park along the California-Nevada border.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Nature

South Texas coal-fired power plant to switch to clean energy after receiving more than $1 billion in federal money

San Miguel Electric Cooperative's plan to turn into a solar and battery plant will leave only 14 coal-fired power plants in the state.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. A South Texas coal-fired power plant will receive more than $1 billion in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to convert into a solar and battery facility, according to the agency. The switch by San Miguel Electric Cooperative, located in Christine in Atascosa County, to a solar and battery plant will be funded by more than $1.4 billion of a $4.37 billion federal grant to support clean energy while maintaining rural jobs. With the co-op’s transition to a renewable energy plant, only 14 coal-fired power plants will be left in the state. In September, the CEO of San Miguel Electric Cooperative, Craig Courter, told a local newspaper that with federal funding, the co-op can “virtually eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions while continuing to provide affordable and reliable power to rural Texans.” “We take pride in our attention to detail in safety, environmental compliance, community service and mined land reclamation,” Courter told the Pleasanton Express. According to the USDA’s Thursday announcement, the transformation will reduce climate pollution by more than 1.8 million tons yearly and support as many as 600 jobs. In 2019, a Texas Tribune investigation showed that state agencies allowed San Miguel Cooperative to contaminate acres with toxic chemicals. These chemicals can leach into groundwater and soil and endanger people’s health. According to 2023 EPA data, the plant is the fourth-largest mercury polluter of all power plants in the state. “For years, folks in my county have been worried about water contamination from San Miguel’s lignite mine, so with this announcement, we are hopeful that McMullen County’s water will be clean long into the future,” McMullen County Judge James Teal told the Sierra Club, a grassroots environmental group. Teal said that county government officials are looking forward to a benefits plan that will “implement a quality remediation process for the existing plant and mine and provide us with peace of mind that the mess has been cleaned up.” The most important Texas news,sent weekday mornings. San Miguel will still need to establish a timeline for shutting down the coal plant. Still, it’s a “historic victory” for South Texas, said James Perkins, a Sierra Club Texas campaign organizer. Other co-ops in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, and Nebraska received similar federal funding. “Texans want healthy air and water and affordable, reliable energy — and we’re ready to come together to get it done,” said Perkins.

Energy
Agriculture
Climate

Work In Progress

Aren’t we all? This article is scheduled to go live soon. Please check back shortly! The post Work In Progress appeared first on Bay Nature.

Aren’t we all? This article is scheduled to go live soon. Please check back shortly! About the Author Tanvi Dutta Gupta is a 2024-2025 editorial fellow at Bay Nature focusing on Wild Billions, Bay Nature's project tracking federal money for nature. She graduated in June 2024 from Stanford with an assortment of degrees including earth systems, ecology, and science communication. Before reaching California, she grew up across Singapore, London, Hong Kong, and India. She enjoys unraveling the intersections of people, nature, and politics; cool animal facts; long runs; and new scone flavors. Every story from Bay Nature magazine is the product of a team dedicated to connecting our readers to the world around them and increasing environmental literacy. Please help us keep this unique regional magazine thriving, and support the ecosystem we’ve built around it, by subscribing today—you’ll get Bay Nature four times a year in your mailbox! Read This Next December 18, 2024 Baynature.org November 27, 2024 Baynature.org November 19, 2024 Baynature.org November 19, 2024 Magazine

Nature
Animals
Science

Ecologists find computer vision models’ blind spots in retrieving wildlife images

Biodiversity researchers tested vision systems on how well they could retrieve relevant nature images. More advanced models performed well on simple queries but struggled with more research-specific prompts.

Try taking a picture of each of North America's roughly 11,000 tree species, and you’ll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots — ranging from butterflies to humpback whales — are a great research tool for ecologists because they provide evidence of organisms’ unique behaviors, rare conditions, migration patterns, and responses to pollution and other forms of climate change.While comprehensive, nature image datasets aren’t yet as useful as they could be. It’s time-consuming to search these databases and retrieve the images most relevant to your hypothesis. You’d be better off with an automated research assistant — or perhaps artificial intelligence systems called multimodal vision language models (VLMs). They’re trained on both text and images, making it easier for them to pinpoint finer details, like the specific trees in the background of a photo.But just how well can VLMs assist nature researchers with image retrieval? A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), University College London, iNaturalist, and elsewhere designed a performance test to find out. Each VLM’s task: locate and reorganize the most relevant results within the team’s “INQUIRE” dataset, composed of 5 million wildlife pictures and 250 search prompts from ecologists and other biodiversity experts. Looking for that special frogIn these evaluations, the researchers found that larger, more advanced VLMs, which are trained on far more data, can sometimes get researchers the results they want to see. The models performed reasonably well on straightforward queries about visual content, like identifying debris on a reef, but struggled significantly with queries requiring expert knowledge, like identifying specific biological conditions or behaviors. For example, VLMs somewhat easily uncovered examples of jellyfish on the beach, but struggled with more technical prompts like “axanthism in a green frog,” a condition that limits their ability to make their skin yellow.Their findings indicate that the models need much more domain-specific training data to process difficult queries. MIT PhD student Edward Vendrow, a CSAIL affiliate who co-led work on the dataset in a new paper, believes that by familiarizing with more informative data, the VLMs could one day be great research assistants. “We want to build retrieval systems that find the exact results scientists seek when monitoring biodiversity and analyzing climate change,” says Vendrow. “Multimodal models don’t quite understand more complex scientific language yet, but we believe that INQUIRE will be an important benchmark for tracking how they improve in comprehending scientific terminology and ultimately helping researchers automatically find the exact images they need.”The team’s experiments illustrated that larger models tended to be more effective for both simpler and more intricate searches due to their expansive training data. They first used the INQUIRE dataset to test if VLMs could narrow a pool of 5 million images to the top 100 most-relevant results (also known as “ranking”). For straightforward search queries like “a reef with manmade structures and debris,” relatively large models like “SigLIP” found matching images, while smaller-sized CLIP models struggled. According to Vendrow, larger VLMs are “only starting to be useful” at ranking tougher queries.Vendrow and his colleagues also evaluated how well multimodal models could re-rank those 100 results, reorganizing which images were most pertinent to a search. In these tests, even huge LLMs trained on more curated data, like GPT-4o, struggled: Its precision score was only 59.6 percent, the highest score achieved by any model.The researchers presented these results at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) earlier this month.Inquiring for INQUIREThe INQUIRE dataset includes search queries based on discussions with ecologists, biologists, oceanographers, and other experts about the types of images they’d look for, including animals’ unique physical conditions and behaviors. A team of annotators then spent 180 hours searching the iNaturalist dataset with these prompts, carefully combing through roughly 200,000 results to label 33,000 matches that fit the prompts.For instance, the annotators used queries like “a hermit crab using plastic waste as its shell” and “a California condor tagged with a green ‘26’” to identify the subsets of the larger image dataset that depict these specific, rare events.Then, the researchers used the same search queries to see how well VLMs could retrieve iNaturalist images. The annotators’ labels revealed when the models struggled to understand scientists’ keywords, as their results included images previously tagged as irrelevant to the search. For example, VLMs’ results for “redwood trees with fire scars” sometimes included images of trees without any markings.“This is careful curation of data, with a focus on capturing real examples of scientific inquiries across research areas in ecology and environmental science,” says Sara Beery, the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT, CSAIL principal investigator, and co-senior author of the work. “It’s proved vital to expanding our understanding of the current capabilities of VLMs in these potentially impactful scientific settings. It has also outlined gaps in current research that we can now work to address, particularly for complex compositional queries, technical terminology, and the fine-grained, subtle differences that delineate categories of interest for our collaborators.”“Our findings imply that some vision models are already precise enough to aid wildlife scientists with retrieving some images, but many tasks are still too difficult for even the largest, best-performing models,” says Vendrow. “Although INQUIRE is focused on ecology and biodiversity monitoring, the wide variety of its queries means that VLMs that perform well on INQUIRE are likely to excel at analyzing large image collections in other observation-intensive fields.”Inquiring minds want to seeTaking their project further, the researchers are working with iNaturalist to develop a query system to better help scientists and other curious minds find the images they actually want to see. Their working demo allows users to filter searches by species, enabling quicker discovery of relevant results like, say, the diverse eye colors of cats. Vendrow and co-lead author Omiros Pantazis, who recently received his PhD from University College London, also aim to improve the re-ranking system by augmenting current models to provide better results.University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor Justin Kitzes highlights INQUIRE’s ability to uncover secondary data. “Biodiversity datasets are rapidly becoming too large for any individual scientist to review,” says Kitzes, who wasn’t involved in the research. “This paper draws attention to a difficult and unsolved problem, which is how to effectively search through such data with questions that go beyond simply ‘who is here’ to ask instead about individual characteristics, behavior, and species interactions. Being able to efficiently and accurately uncover these more complex phenomena in biodiversity image data will be critical to fundamental science and real-world impacts in ecology and conservation.”Vendrow, Pantazis, and Beery wrote the paper with iNaturalist software engineer Alexander Shepard, University College London professors Gabriel Brostow and Kate Jones, University of Edinburgh associate professor and co-senior author Oisin Mac Aodha, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst Assistant Professor Grant Van Horn, who served as co-senior author. Their work was supported, in part, by the Generative AI Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, the U.S. National Science Foundation/Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change, a Royal Society Research Grant, and the Biome Health Project funded by the World Wildlife Fund United Kingdom.

Nature
Animals
Conservation

Cold weather-related deaths rising in US: Study

Deaths in the United States from cold weather-related causes have been rising, according to a new study published in a medical journal on Thursday.  The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that the number of Americans who died from cold weather-related factors more than doubled from 1999 to 2022,...

Deaths in the United States from cold weather-related causes have been rising, according to a new study published in a medical journal on Thursday.  The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that the number of Americans who died from cold weather-related factors more than doubled from 1999 to 2022, with the highest rate being detected in the Midwest.  Over 40,000 people died between 1999 and 2022 in situations in which cold was found to be the underlying or a contributing factor, according to the study.  The death rate from cold weather-related causes was the highest among adults aged 75 and over. As people age, the body’s ability to regulate temperature worsens, therefore being more prone to body temperature declines.  People between the ages of 45 and 74 had the highest year-to-year increase in cold-related deaths. Black, American-Indian and Alaska Native people had the highest cold-relate death rates, according to the study. The highest annual mortality rate spike from cold weather-related factors was among white and Hispanic people.  “Even though we are in this warming world, cold-related deaths are still a public health issue in the U.S.,” Michael Liu, the study’s lead author, told The New York Times.  The study’s authors wrote that “although mean temperatures are increasing in the U.S., studies have found that climate change has been linked with more frequent episodes of severe winter weather in the U.S. over the past few decades, which may in turn be associated with increased cold-related mortality.”  Deaths during winter months in recent years have been 8 to 12 percent higher than those in non-winter months, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Climate
Health

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