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We've been getting a bit distracted with real life - and we forgot to post about it! Silly, I know.
Guess what? Something is happening! If you're a poet anywhere in the world, just send your nature-themed work to us by Friday and you can get it published. Pretty exciting, we know. If you live in the Penang area, be sure to drop by penangpac for Tapir 2014, where this work will be read for the public.
After last week's heavy topic, I thought I'd just give a shout out to one of the oddest fish in the sea: the sarcastic fringehead. Yes, that's an actual thing.
This image seems to sum up the supposed personality of the fish. Comic from Satisfactory Comics.
One almost feels like the scientist who named this fish was having troubles with a very sarcastic, fringe-headed teenager at home. Even better? These fish protect themselves with their big mouths.
These mouth-wrestling matches look something like this:
For more on the sarcastic fringehead, you can look here, here, and here.
The okapi is one of those enigmatic animals. You just can't quite figure them out. They're quiet and elusive, they live in the remote rain forests of central Africa, and they...have zebra stripes on their butts. Kind of.
An odd creature: the okapi's closest relative is actually the giraffe. Photo courtesy of the Okapi Conservation Project.
I only recently had the chance to read about this story, and what happened is truly horrific. People died for these creatures, and they (the okapis) were killed anyways. It's a real spotlight on the brutality of humanity. It was all done in the name of vengeance.
The Epulu Station, situated deep in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, had received threats from groups due to their work against poaching in the area. Agencies responsible for the conservation center (which housed nine okapis and numerous scientists) ignored the threats, and early one morning of June 2012, the station and the nearby village was pillaged and ransacked.
Two people and all the okapis on-site were murdered.
I just have one blaring question: why did the media never cover this?
This is also a stark reminder of how dangerous it is to be a conservationist these days. When people go out to save the environment, they really are risking their lives. They are everyday heroes: conservation work isn't just for the conservationist because their work benefits all of us.
I personally read this story only a few days after learning of the death of Jairo Mora Sandoval. I got chills.
People don't like vultures. I get it. Even in the Lion King, vultures were portrayed as creepy and cackling.
A contemporary art print with a ring to it. From NathanJoyce.
But vultures, key players in numerous ecosystems, have been hit hard by a number of factors, and numbers everywhere have experienced steep declines. One of Save Our Species vulture conservation projects has listed population drops between 97-99% since 1990 for some species.
Much like owls (who have only seen a popularity revival due to the Harry Potter movies), vultures are seen as evil in many cultures, signs of bad omens. This translates into modern day life, where people everywhere turn their noses up at an animal that has the capacity to kill bacteria like E. coli by eating it.
Vultures are nature's cleaner-uppers. Without them, many infectious diseases would be far more widespread.
In Asia (yes, there are vultures here!), most vultures are killed while doing their jobs. Cattle today are often injected with a substance called Diclofenac, which proves fatal to these majestic birds when they appear to dispense of cattle carrion.
The beautiful bearded vulture, or lammergeier, from the Ethiopian highlands; a personal favorite. Image courtesy Martina Carrete.
International Vulture Awareness Day is now in its second year. If you want to get involved, they even have wikispaces page open to the public, but the main thing is to get the word out there: vultures are awesome!
To celebrate Malaysian pride, I'm going to...keep talking about animals. Yay! Talking about my project to a friend, they brought up a question I had never even considered. Why is it OK to eat some animals and not others? To a die-hard animal lover, this sort of thought never even crosses their minds. It never did for me. I never asked myself why I was dedicated to conservation; I just knew in my heart that I was. Coming from this perspective, I am going to try and answer my friend's question. I'm not trying to create a perfect answer with no loopholes. if this sort of issue was black-and-white, I don't believe I'd even be answering this question. Humans, in previous years, were the top of the food chain. For the most part, we have now (luckily) been removed from that food chain (most of us are not so worried about being eaten by a lion this afternoon). However, we have taken with us a select few species of domestic animals.
Lucky for you, this guy doesn't think you'd make a very good meal. He doesn't seem very impressed at all, really. Photo from Lion's Share Digital.
They, too, have been removed from the food chain. We are responsible for them. We now farm things that we eat - chickens, cows, pigs, goats. (I will not address the issue of factory farming here.) So we've effectively taken them with us. They are no longer subject to being eating by roving lions either. When we eat them, we have control over their population and their lifestyle. However, with wild animals, we have not removed them from the food chain. They are still subject to the forces of nature - different species working in a sort of "checks and balances" system where controlling one effectively controls all. In a simple example, if we have too many top predators, too many middle-range herbivores will be eaten, leading to seeds that won't get spread and grass that won't get eaten. This in turn will lead to numerous ecological balancing catastrophes.
Notice that humans often do not feature in these sorts of pyramids - we are no longer native to these ecosystems. Illustration from Tutor Vista.
When we step in here and try to artificially manage a population, we have an issue. We are no longer part of the system - we don't really know what we're doing. When we eat from this environment, we destroy the balance. This is just a sort, simple way to think about it. I won't go into issues of morality here - there is too much gray area to make a proper assessment. Hopefully this helps clear the air in terms of "WHY?" for a little bit. P.S. A bonus reason is that wild animals are pretty and don't need to be eaten because they look better running majestically through the 2000 sq ft of habitat they have left. ;)
Majestic zebras run in their 2000 sq ft. Image via Wallpaper Wide.
Perhaps I should have included more Malaysian wildlife... oh well.
For someone who doesn't know any better, this video is downright adorable.
And that's the problem. People don't know any better - that needs to change.
According to work done by the likes of Professor Anna Nekaris (basically the slow loris lady out there), videos like these are boosting demand for any species of slow loris.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how this is possible. When I first saw this video, I thought it was completely harmless. Not long after, I started to learn the truth.
A loris in the wild, where it should be. Image from Arup Shah via BBC Wildlife.
Basic Loris Myths Debunked
"They come from captivity." Experts have found it near impossible to breed lorises in captivity - they often don't survive long enough.
"This loris is happy." Raising arms, like the loris in this video is doing, is often a sign of distress in lorises. Lorises are also very sensitive to light, being a primarily nocturnal species, and you can see the wide eyes of the one in the video.
"They are easy to look after." Lorises have a very specific diet that humans cannot replicate in captivity. They are not meant to survive off of bananas and rice balls, and will not last long on such a diet.
"They can just go back to the wild later." Most lorises, after being removed from the wild, have their teeth violently removed with pliers. They never eat properly again.
In a disturbing turn of events, YouTube refuses to remove this video and others like it, claiming it not to be animal abuse. In the comments, if you talk about the wildlife trade and discuss ramifications of the video, chances are you will be voted down so much YouTube will remove your comment!
The first step to curbing demand for the loris is recognizing that is it not a cut pet but a wild animal. Also, take a minute to sign this petition asking YouTube to remove videos of captive lorises.
For more on slow loris conservation, visit Nekaris' Little Fireface Project and learn about her work in the region.
Several weeks ago, an Italian member of parliament was called an orangutan by her colleagues. Although this was a racially-charged, insensitive and derogatory remark, I must say: I've met more than my fair share of cheeky, incredibly intelligent and totally adorable orangutans. I would take it as more of a compliment.
Dozens of adorable babies like this one are orphaned every year and must then be rehabilitated in purpose-built centers like Sepilok, in Sabah, Borneo. Picture thanks to Orangutan Foundation International.
All this to say that two days from now we will be celebrating the inaugural World Orangutan Day!
Orangutans are one of the most iconic symbols of Southeast Asia. The "man of the forest" has been facing extinction for years, but recently, wild populations have plummeted despite repeated efforts from NGOs and government bodies alike.
This paragraph from the front of WOD's website gives startling statistics:
"From 1992-2000, the population of the Sumatran orangutan declined by more than 50% and only an estimated 7,000 animals are left in the wild. The Bornean orangutan population fell nearly 43 % in the past decade and estimates place their population at about 45,000 animals."
This lucky individual was found and sedated for transport and re-release into the wild, into a more viable habitat. Many orangs lose their lives in situations like this because plantations do not yet have adequate organization to deal with it. Image via EVOHE.
As the Huffington Post outlines in this short editorial, however, orangutans are not safe yet. Bornean populations may sound promising, but they are not stable. Considering a constant influx of deforestation, less and less space is there for the orangutan. Pushed to the edge, many plantations have not yet learnt how to deal with the wild creatures wandering onto their land.
