• Nice and morbid article on the work of a fellow Berkeleyan Steve Bellan on anthrax in Etosha NP, with pictures.
• The Carteret Islands are being inundated by rising sea levels, forcing migration of about 800 of the 1,300 inhabitants. This spring, Dan Box traveled to the islands to report on the evacuation.
• Carol Kaesuk Yoon on “Naming Nature.”
• National Red Lists is a new website spearheaded by ZSL to consolidate national-level information on species declines.
• An interview with Erik Patel on the ecological ramifications of the political unrest in Madagascar, though take with a grain of salt because his solution to the poverty/conservation problem is birth control and tourism…
• It’s been a slightly environmental few days for the Obama administration, with Tom Vilsack (Sec of Ag) releasing a new vision for the Forest Service (Defenders of Wildlife seems to like it), and the Obama family taking a trip to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.

Cicadas, prime numbers, David Attenborough.

• Himalayas proving to be a hotspot for describing new species.
• A roundup of the recent SCB conference in China, from CI.
• The amazing impact of a city abandoned 900 years ago on crops grown in drought conditions, today. So, the next time somebody tells you there’s no such thing as wilderness, that human’s impact on the land lasts longer than you could imagine, BELIEVE IT.It’s true in America, too, where old American Indian middens still have higher levels of non-native plants.
• Extinctions can be correlated with genetic history. Not surprising, but interesting.

Trying something new here… keep track of the global biodiversity count on Twitter (@speciescount). Tips welcome.

SHARK WEEK

Hey, it’s been a year since this blog got up and running. Thanks to Bill Bean (my dad!) for pushing me into it. Here’s how the e-mails went:

Me: Dad, do you have any recommendations for web hosting? I’m thinking of starting a blog.

Dad: Check your e-mail. You should have an admin account for a new blog on my server.

Me (to myself): … guess I gotta do this.

And, of course, thanks to everybody who demanded insightful, important videos every Friday. Thoughts, comments, suggestions, volunteer bloggers always welcome.

• Sumatra may get additional forest lands conserved through a pretty large ($30million over 8 years) debt-for-nature swap, negotiated by CI.
• First bald-faced songbird in Asia described by WCS scientists in Laos.
• Oysters are returning to Chesapeake Bay. Or, we’re bringing ‘em back. Successfully!
• In the same issue of Science that reported the oyster comeback, there’s optimistic news on the world’s fisheries. As pointed out in that article, this study was a follow-up to an earlier report that was much more pessimistic. This time, though, the original author teamed up with one of his fiercest critics, which is pretty sweet and sort of hard to imagine.
• Here’s an interesting, short note on the Mountain Gorillas in Bwindi: now that elephants have left the forest, and conservation has prohibited logging, vegetation preferred by gorillas can’t grow any more, so they’re moving out into farms and raiding crops. +1 trophic cascades.

Sciencewatch.com is a neat service that tracks current trends in publications (at least in the Thomson-Reuters universe), including tracking “hot papers,” “rising stars,” &c. It seems kind of superficial, but also pretty interesting.