Photo of the Day: Close Strolling

We are about to announce our own photo contest winners and I wanted to show this terrific photo from Plymouth State University's Museum of the White Mountains. On their webpage it's called "close strolling".

What a great title! Forget backbacks and water bottles and fancy hiking boots. Let's just go for a stroll together among the tall, tall pines.

From their body language you can almost sense their amiable conversation.

But can you imagine the Whites without their spectacular forest cover? One hundred years ago, deforestation was a huge problem and it was largely thanks to the efforts of one person, Philip Ayres, who went on the lecture circuit with his own lantern slides , that a national forest reserve was ultimately created.

If you go to the above exhibit, you see that the efficiency with which Ayres describes the logging companies' decimation of the forests is reminiscent of the efficiency with which we are overfishing the oceans. Still, full credit -- and profound thanks -- to Ayres for giving us all such an incredible legacy. Perhaps one of us will fill his shoes for the beleaguered fish and other endangered species.

In the meantime, I suggest taking advantage of whatever weather you've got and going for some close strolling...

Guide to North American Mammals

I have a confession to make.

No, I'm not going to confess that I'm not as green as I'm letting on (I switched to 100% renewable electricity last month). Nor am I going to confess that I'm a proud shareholder of BP (I'm not -- btw, happy oil spill anniversary!)

No, I'm going to confess something much more mundane.

I confess that I love the Internet.

It's true. I love it that people from around the world are tuning in to what we're saying here. We're getting hits from India (Namaste), Qatar (Marhaba), Russia (Dobro požalovat'), Azerbaijan (Xoş gəlmişsiniz!), Australia (Welcome mates), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Dobrodošli), Canada (Howdy),
Germany (Willkomen), Fiji (Bula) and other great places. Thanks for reading. It's nice to know you're interested in a greener, more sustainable planet whereever you are.

I also love the Internet because of cool sites like the Smithsonian's North American Mammals.
Before we start, how many mammal species would you guess exist in North America? 100? 200? 500? 800? 1000?

Fire up the site in another window, go to Enhanced Map Search (Beta) and we'll look at some cool things together. The first thing you'll notice, if you're on the default "mammal" view, is that there are 426 mammal species spread among just ten orders (remember Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species). Personally, I would have guessed there are 100-200 mammals in North America, so I would have been short by more than a factor of 2!

Here are the ten orders of mammals in North America: 1. even-toed ungulates; 2. carnivores; 3. whales, dolphins, porpoises; 4. bats; 5. opossums; 6. shrews, moles, hedgehogs; 7. rabbits, hares, pikas; 8. rodents; 9. manatees, dugongs; 10. armadillos, sloths, anteaters.

Really, if we were serious, we could memorize a short list of ten items like that.

Click on any order and you'll see how its species are distributed. For example, when you click on the box for Manatees and dugongs, you see that they are found only around the coast of Florida. Similarly, you can click on the arrow next to Bats and then see all the bat families. Click on any family and check off a species to find its geographical distribution. For example, the Family "Vesper Bats" seem to be quite widely distributed. When you check off the Pallid bat, you find it is concentrated in the western US, but the big brown bat has colonized the entire continental US, Mexico and southern Canada. You can amuse yourself with all ten different orders of North American mammals and get to know them better.

Another thing to try is to switch from the "Mammals" view to the "Ecoregions" view. Now you'll see the map transform into a colorful collage that indicates different ecological regions like grasslands, steppes, forests and so on. I live in Boston and suppose I want to go to Cape Code for the weekend -- what mammals might I see down there? Well, when I click on the Cape on the map, a box pops up that tells me it's the "Atlantic coastal pine barrens" ecoregion and I've got a chance to see 37 different mammals in the area including white-tailed deer, skunk, voles and much more. Click on "Explore" to see the geographical range for each.

Click on your favorite area and see what you can find.

Maybe you want to sink your teeth in a little deeper and find out which mammals are in trouble? Go back to the main page and click on Conservation status. You should list of categories on the right with "Extinct", "Extinct in the wild", "Critically endangered" and so on.

Here's where we can create our own field guide.

Suppose we want to find out more about the "Critically endangered" mammals". When I click on that menu item I get "13 records returned". Scroll down to the bottom of the page and "Select all" and then click on "Create field guide".

Voila! The site has generated a nice 13-page pdf file of all the critically endangered mammals in North America, including a color picture, a note about its conservation status, a paragraph about its habits, a map of where its found (some of my maps didn't reproduce very well) and space for me to make my own notes.

Go ahead, make your own field guide. This is a tool to use again and again. And there's much more to explore at this great site.

Yes, it's true, I love the Internet!

Making time for endangered species

Education is the first step... then, if we don't take more action soon, we're going to have many more passenger pigeons for the 21st century...

10 Weird Endangered Species

Here’s another video from the Mother Nature Channel highlighting 10 weird endangered species. Once you get past the annoying computer-generated voice, the video is full of fascinating facts about the aye aye, dugong, platypus and the ugly, ugly, ugly purple frog, who lives mostly thirteen feet below ground, the tiny bumblebee bat, and the olm, a blind amphibian who “skeeves out the locals with its strange, human like skin”, among others.

Ecolympics, Week 1

Check out this graph from the first week of Ecolympics challenge events.
As of Friday afternoon, we were at about 163 participants (with some Friday afternoon registrants still to be entered). According to the numbers, our three most popular events are Recycle! (128 participants), Stair Climb (101 participants) and, unlabeled on the far, far right, beyond Veggie-Mania, Water Break (107 participants) -- let's keep those water bottles out of landfills by not buying them in the first place.

If you have batteries, printer cartridges or old cell phones, you can bring them to our office in CAS 119 to help you Recycle!

At the other end, I want to shout out to those who agreed to defrost their freezer in De-freeze (15 people Ecolympians) -- as we say in our event page, doing this with a friend makes it much easier!

And we've got a more than a dozen dedicated people who are trying to keep an eye out for endangered species via Endangered Species Watch, or who are getting to know their environment via Species ID. We're looking forward to seeing your news on our Facebook page. In fact, we'd love to get more action on our Facebook page so if you have any event news, please share!

Good luck with your events in week 2 -- you can sign up for more if you're up for the challenge -- and thanks for Competing for Team Earth!

Things to to, things to do, things to do

From convenient to challenging, have we got a list for you! Check out these fine lists for some eco-ideas and step up your involvement in preserving a sustainable environment. If you read a few of the lists, you'll see that one item is common: educate yourself.

Let's start with ten ways you can eat local from the (recently defunct) Boston Localvores.

Or how about ten sustainable actions (many of which are Ecolympics events) from Sustainability@BU?

If you just want to take simple steps to live green, check out the list from Conservation International.

If you're tuning into the biodiversity crisis, here are ten easy things you can do at home to protect endangered species, from the Endangered Species Coalition.

Strapped for cash? Here are ten things you can do for endangered species that don’t require money, from Squidoo.com.

Want to combine wildlife conservation and climate change activism? Here are ten things you can do to help imperiled wildlife survive climate change, from It’s Getting Hot Out There.

Or how about ten things you can do to save the ocean, from National Geographic.

Don't forget about the coral reefs. Here’s 25 things you can do to save them, from the NOAA.

Not enough for ya? Here are 100 ways to make a difference, from Marinebio.

Okay, you've had enough and you're ready to take action? Here are some action items from the World Wildlife Fund, the current action campaigns from the Center for Biological Diversity and the present advocacy campaigns from the Audubon Action Center .

What's inspiring you?

Guess the Endangered Species

How well do you know your species, endangered or otherwise? Let's find out.

The pictured species is found in the rainforests of Mexico and Central and South America. It’s the only cat that can climb down a tree head first like a squirrel. They are also known to hang from a branch with only one hind foot. Its diet consists of rodents, monkeys, lizards, birds, tree frogs and fruit and the majority of its prey is caught leaping through the trees. The main threats to the species are hunting for its fur and the pet trade and habitat loss due to deforestation.

This species is:


Answer coming soon!

Most Threatened Species in 2010

I stumbled on a powerpoint presentation online that gives a nice summary of endangered species (well, I didn't exactly stumble since my search terms were "endangered species powerpoint"). The problem with writing about endangered species is that it's very much doom and gloom, after all, extinction is forever. The message in this presentation, which was directed at kids, was "Endangered means there's still time." Nice.

Then I found this nice infographic that summarizes the ten most threatened species in 2010. I suspect most of them will make the "10 most threatened" lists for the next several years, but the image presents information about the reasons that these species are so threatened. The present high rates of species loss are due to five human-caused factors: habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, overexploitation and global warming and you can see each of these factors rearing its head for these threatened species.

It should be noted that these are the most threatened high profile species. It's easy to find many more less famous species whose numbers are much more desperate, in the hundreds or only dozens. The Iberian lynx, for example, is thought to have less than 100 members.You can find lists of critically endangered species on Wikipedia and elsewhere. If "endangered"
means there's still time, then critically endangered means time is critical.

Introducing the Arkive

We're going to have some posts about what we're doing and you're doing for the Ecolympics soon, but I wanted to let you know about the Arkive, which is mentioned in the Resources for our Tell-A-Friend event. You should just go to the Arkive and explore or you can view the terrific promo featuring David Attenborough. It aims to be an image and video database of all the world's endangered species.

At left is the Fony Baobab, found only in Madagascar, where it is suffering from habitat loss. It was an IUCN Species of the Day earlier this month. Go to the Arkive and click on the image and you can see a nice slideshow of this exotic tree.

This little critter is called Burrowe's Giant Glass Frog, which doesn't look so giant to me. The Arkive doesn't have conservation status for it, so presumably they are waiting for an expert to fill in the details.







Another recent IUCN Species of the Day was the Humphead Wrasse, one of the largest reef fishes in the world. The Arkive has a nice collection of images and videos of this beauty, which is suffering from exploitation in the live reef-fish trade.
As you can see, the Arkive contains some top nature photography and as a website and archive, it has some other cool features like slideshows and creating your own scrapbook. All for free. Worth checking out!