Craig Bennett and colleagues at UCSB have found something truly extraordinary: a dead fish that can read our minds. Bennett conducted an fMRI on the length of a dead salmon, while showing it pictures of different human emotions. It turns out that there are some very active parts of the dead fish when it sees certain types of emotions. Quite incredible. Here is the poster presenting their work.

• 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.

Here’s a great write-up in Science on the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), a definitely bold and exciting project to create a nation-wide ecological monitoring program. The authors start with Lewis and Clark and end with kids in 2020 creating biodiversity tours of their lcoal area for classes thousands of miles away. Sick.

Lowman, M. et al. “A National Ecological Network for Research and Education.” Science. 323: 1172-1173. (doi: 10.1126/science.1166945)

• Science recently published further evidence of the “broken window” theory, which suggests that people act badly in degraded environments. These studies are about human-dominated environments, but it seems likely that the same is true for more “natural” areas, too.
• Christopher Dunn argues in Nature that cultural diversity ought to be preserved alongside biodiversity. He even suggests that maps of hotspots of the two tend to overlap. Okay, so let’s make a deal: people can stay in and around areas of high biodiversity if they agree to live according to their “traditional” culture — any development or significant growth and you’ve got to move to the city. Fair?
• Yesterday I mentioned some worry about homogenizing landscapes in rural areas. There was a paper published in Conservation Biology by Rahmig et al. recently that suggested exactly that: homogenization of farming practices has led to declines in avian diversity.
• Also in Cons Bio, Ben Collen and colleagues at ZSL take a closer look at the “Living Planet Index,” one of the 22(!) headline indicators established by the Convention on Biological Diversity used to assess trends in biodiversity loss. Their conclusion: it’s good, but we need more data.
• Kindberg et al. have shown that hunter-reported observations of moose in Sweden were (if corrected) a pretty good method of monitoring.

I may have been a bit snarky about the new Red List for mammals earlier in the week, but I have to admit the new paper in Science covering the major findings is rather impressive (maybe it’s just that fresh Science smell that has me convinced, or maybe I should just stop reading press releases). Lots of good stuff here:

Phylogenetic diversity is … is arguably a more relevant currency of diversity and less affected by variations in taxonomic classification than species richness. Species richness and phylogenetic diversity are very closely related for land species (r² = 0.98), but less so in the marine environment (r² = 0.73).

The size of land species’ ranges varies from a few hundred square meters (Bramble Cay Melomys, Melomys rubicola; Australia), to 64.7 million km² (Red Fox, Vulpes vulpes; Eurasia and North America). For marine species, ranges vary from 16,500 km² (Vaquita, Phocoena sinus; Gulf of California), to 350 million km² (Killer Whale, Orcinus orca; all oceans). [Good trivia question, that Red Fox bit! --ed.]

For land species, there is a strong association between landmass width and median range size: The largest ranges tend to be found across the widest part of each continent, particularly in northern Eurasia, whereas islands (e.g., in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean) and narrow continental areas (e.g., southern North and South America) tend to have narrowly distributed species. Superimposed on this general pattern, ranges also tend to be small in topographically complex areas (e.g., the Rockies, Andes, and Himalayas). These results agree with those for birds, which suggest that range sizes are constrained by the availability of land area within the climatic zones to which species are adapted.

Very, very, neat stuff.

Okay, what the hell, I’ll take issue with this:

One hundred and fifty-five species were deleted from the original tree: 138 corresponding to taxa no longer recognized as separate species (lumped to another species already on the tree); four for which no match was found; 12 that are Extinct or Extinct in the Wild; and Homo sapiens.

Really? No humans? Why not? I would love to read the IUCN Red List assessment of Homo sapiens:

The Red Fox Man has the widest geographical range of any member of the order Carnivora Primata, being distributed across the entire northern hemisphere from the Arctic Circle to North Africa, Central America, and the Asiatic steppes, and pretty much anywhere else that’s not underwater… okay, and a couple of places that are. Red Foxes Humans are adaptable and opportunistic omnivores and are capable of successfully occupying urban areas (unless your name is Joe SixPack and you are a True American, in which case you are willing to check out urban areas to see a show and go to the Met, aka the “It’s a nice place to visit, but I would never want to live there” theory of range limitation). In many habitats, foxes humans appear to be closely associated with man, even thriving in intensive agricultural areas. The species currently is — barring a serious turnaround in the polls — not under threat.

Schipper, Jan + over 100 others. The Status of the World’s Land and Marine Mammals: Diversity, Threat, and Knowledge. Science, 322:5899. (doi: 10.1126/science.1165115)

Wow. In this week’s Science, researchers Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky have shown that when humans lack a sense of control, it increases their perception of patterns where none exist. This is great! I mean, really obvious, but really great. Now there’s evidence for why mediocre pitchers might cling to religion and guns toothbrushes and foul lines; or, according to the article, why “first-year MBA students are more susceptible to conspiratorial perceptions than are second-year students” (no mention of second-year conservation grad students…). Or, perhaps most importantly, why some people believe a missile hit the Pentagon. Wait, strike that, most importantly, why some people thought Saddam Hussein had to go. Somebody help me out — in the comments, can you tell me what this has to do with conservation?

Whitson, J. and A. Galinsky. Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception. Science, 322:5898. (doi: 10.1126/science.1159845)

I finally have an excuse to write about those Somali pirates who unwittingly hijacked US$30 Million worth of tanks and other arms (thanks to GW for the tip). According to this NY Times article (in which they interview the pirates by telephone), the pirate industry off the coast of Somalia started 10 to 15 years ago “as a response to illegal fishing.” The article continues:

Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax.

Amazing.

Perhaps now is a good time to point to an article from Science a few weeks back on Catch Shares by Costello et al. The authors found, using global databases of 50 years of fisheries data, that locally-represented catch programs provide “individual incentives for sustainable harvest that is less prone to collapse.” Apparently catch share programs also help to prevent pirates. Win-win.

Costello, C. et al. Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse? Science, 321:5896. (doi: 10.1126/science.1159478)

It’s been said, repeatedly, that the single most important advance in environmental science was the development of a global observation system. Through the combination of satellites and regional and locally-scaled observations, environmental scientists are now able to study the earth as a whole, in real time. Any number of metaphors are available, but the power of having that kind of technology should be obvious. At any given time, we can know how much the ice caps have melted this summer; what the air quality is like in Beijing; how big the next hurricane will be. The Global Earth Observatory System of Systems is, quite simply, awesome.

But with the biodiversity crisis, there is no concomitant global observation system. We can’t say, on any given day, how much habitat has been lost; how many insects have gone extinct; where people are hunting. There’s plenty of data available in individual pieces, at different scales, covering different time periods, but it isn’t collected together in one place in a meaningful way. People are trying to change that, however. This piece in the Policy Forum of Science gives a nice introduction at efforts underway to create the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network  (GEO BON) (no doubt located in the Department of Redundancy Department, yuk yuk.) Bad jokes aside, the GEO BON is “a new global partnership to help collect, manage, analyze, and report data relating to the status of the world’s biodiversity.”

Meanwhile, here’s a more nitty-gritty paper in Conservation Letters that details development of the new IUCN Red List Index measuring extinction risk for taxa through time. The authors address

selecting the taxonomic groups to be included in the index, determining the minimum sample size (number of species) necessary to provide robust trends, determing a sampling strategy to ensure sufficient geographic and taxonomic representation, establishing methods for aggregating data and weighting the index, and estimating confidence intervals.

Such an effort is good and necessary. If what I’ve heard about some IUCN Red List groups is true, developing a robust and transparent strategy for determining extinction risk can only improve current efforts. However, one of the things that really stood out to me from the recent SCB conference is that people’s efforts to identify key indicator taxa has sort of stalled. All the talks I attended that addressed this issue concluded that it wasn’t working. I suspect that results from a simple evolutionary / ecological fact: diversity exists because of empty niches. The hope in identifying an indicator group is that there’s some correlation between that particular taxon, but biodiversity is on a very basic level inherently un-correlated. Now, that’s not to say I think developing these methods is a waste of time, merely that as we move forward we must always be cognizant of the fact that focusing on one area of biodiversity, whether it’s at the genetic, species, ecosystem or landscape level, we will necessarily ignore other parts of the whole. I’d like to refer to this as the Whack-a-Mole dilemma.

Scholes, R. et al. Toward a Global Biodiversity Observing System. Science, 321: 1044-1045. (doi 10.1126/science.1162055)

Baillie, J. et al. Toward monitoring global biodiversity. Conservation Letters, 1:1, 18-26. (doi: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2008.00009.x)