Book: Where the WIld Things Were

Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators, is a new and important contribution to conservation and ecology by William Stolzenburg (Bloomsbury, 2008)
The author looks at cases, both experimental and real-life, where the top predators have been wiped out, and looks at what happens next. It turns out that a lot of things happen, none of them good. One result is an explosion of "mesopredators" (the second-tier carnivores, ranging from coyotes to raccoons to feral domestic cats) which wreak havoc on ecosystems without the larger predators to compete with (and sometimes eat) them. Plants and prey animals have evolved for one type of ecosystem and are often helpless in an altered one. While his examples come from all over the world, it's the North American ones that will cause the most consternation to most readers. Who foresaw that killing the eastern wolves and cougars would result in a gigantic deep population explosion that wrecked the habitats of many smaller creatures? Who knew that bringing in a new apex predator (whalers) wiping out the northern Pacific great whales started a cascade that drove the former apex predator (killer whales) to decimate seal and sea otter populations in many areas, resulting in kelp forests being replaced by barren seafloor overrun with the urchins the otters used to keep down? There are many such examples, some almost despair-inducing. One of Stolzenburg's other important points is that, ecologically, human hunters don't replace the predators: they hunt in specific seasons rather than all year round and pick off the largest animals instead of the weakest.
COMMENT: He doesn't use this example, but there's an obvious application in the case of Alaska's wolves. Alaska governor and Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin (who I personally like overall) is one of the officials who has bought into the argument that killing wolves means more moose for hunters. Well, it does, but it will also have many other repercussions on an ecosystem which relies on the wolves to keep moose numbers reasonable.

Lost cities of the Amazon

OK, we're not talking about the legendary cities of gold that lured explorers like Percy Fawcett to their deaths. But this is an interesting story nonetheless. An area of the Amazon river basin thought of as virgin forest inhabited only by hunter-gatherers of the Kuikuro tribe has yielded the remains of well-organized towns from the 15th century. The Upper Xingu region was host to a network of towns up to 60 hectares in area, each organized around a central plaza and surrounded by earthworks. Inhabitants engaged in agriculture and likely aquaculture (fish farming). The towns may have been decimated by disease or may have been attacked by early Europeans, although no records of contact have been found.

MicrospaceNews: Microspacecraft will test artificial gravity

It's often suggested future manned spacecraft should be rotated to provide some approximation of a gravitational field. The idea is fine in theory, but it's never been tested in space. Now it will be - with a microspacecraft supported by the Mars Society. The concept for the satellite, called TEMPO 3, won the Society's Mars Project Challenge. A development schedule was not announced.

New species of giant clam discovered

Scientists studying giant clams in the Red Sea have found a rare new species hidden among the common type they were studying. Tridacna costata, the first species of giant clam described in some 20 years, can be 60 cm in length. There is evidence these clams were once abundant, and marine ecologist Claudio Richter suspects the species was overhunted by early humans. The population appears to have crashed about 125,000 years ago. Richter calles it "the first example of marine overexploitation."

Two experiments lost on test rocket

ATK recently unveiled a new rocket, a one-time suborbital test vehicle to check out unspecified new proprietary technologies. NASA, always desperate for low-cost rides, put two payloads, the HyBolt Hypersonic Boundary Layer Transition experiment and the SOAREX sub-orbital re-entry experiment, on board. The two-stage solid-fuel bird had to be destroyed, though, only 27 seconds into its flight from Wallops Island. NASA acknowledged it had accepted the risk of flying the payloads on an untested rocket.
COMMENT: In a sadly familiar refrain, NASA also acknowledged there had been no budget to build backups, and the important experiments won't be reflown. ATK wasn't happy, either: any rocket failure reflects badly on its insistence that its technology for the Ares I booster is mature (it's not clear how closely this rocket was related, but some shared technology seems likely.) Finally, it's a sad comment on American journalism that countless stories and headlines referred to the lost payloads as "satellites."

New insect species found - on eBay!

A British entomologist, Dr. Richard Harrington, spotted an interesting-looking insect fossil offered by a Lithuanian man on eBay. He paid 20 pounds for it. When he could not identify the amber-encased insect after viewing it directly, he sent it to a Danish aphid expert who told him it was a new species: Mindarus harringtoni. Harrington said, "It's not uncommon to find insects in amber... but I'm not sure that one has turned up on eBay that has been undiscovered before."

MicrospaceNews: Dnepr going up with five satellites

Britain's Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. will soon launch five small imaging satellites in one throw on a Russian Dnepr rocket, scheduled to go up August 29. Germany's RapidEye AG will operate the medium resolution constellation, built in cooperation with Surrey and with Canada's MacDonald Dettwiler, to enhance imaging services available around the globe. Mean orbital altitude is 620km, and the constellation's planned lifespan is seven years.
COMMENT: There will be many fingers crossed, since the Dnepr does not have a perfect record as of late. Nonetheless, I'm always partial to converted Soviet ballistic missiles in general (the Dnepr is modified from the medium-range SS-20), since in my Air Force days of commanding a Titan II ICBM site, I was one of their prime targets. It's a weird sort of connection.

A very big new fish species

The goliath grouper, Epinephelus itajara, was always considered a species with a very large range, as it occurred in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. A genetic examination, though, has shown there are two species of this fish, which still look very similar but have been reproductively isolated for about 3.5 million years. Researchers led by Dr. Matthew Craig of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology have named the new Pacific species Epinephelus quinquefasciatus. Both species can be 1.8m long and weigh some 450 kg. Both are critically endangered.

Elephants can do math

Elephants are not going to do calculus anytime soon, but they can count small numbers and discern the difference between quantities in tests requiring basic addition. This report comes from experiments with an Asian elephant by Naoko Irie of the University of Tokyo. Ecologist Mya Thompson of Cornell commented that this finding leads to a new mystery: "It really is tough to figure out why [elephants] would need to count."

New Species: a robin from Africa

The bird world has a newcomer - Stiphrornis pyrrholaemus, the olive-backed forest thrush. The colorful little bird has (as one would assume) an olive back, a white underbelly, a yellow breast, and an orange throat. It was discovered in southeastern Gabon. Brian Schmidt, the species' discoverer, noted that the bird "is definitely a reminder that the world still holds surprises for us."

Has Iran launched a satellite?

The answer appears to be "no," but that wasn't clear from the official press dispatches (some of which contradicted others). It now looks like Iran launched a three-stage orbit-capable booster with a dummy satellite, but the U.S. reports it did not orbit a payload despite some Iranian claims to the contrary.

COMMENT: It does appear Iran is quite close to being able to orbit a small satellite, which matters for a couple of reasons. One is that any small satellite launcher is technically the close cousin of an IRBM (America's first launcher, the Jupiter-C, was a modified Redstone ballistic missile, and the Iranian launcher is a similar concept: an existing missile with upper stages). The other is that technology has advanced to the point where microspacecraft, either bought whole or constructed from commercially available components, can do economically and militarily important work in communications, Earth observation, and electronic intelligence, among other fields.

MicrospaceNews: Important new technology

One of the problems in very small spacecraft is controlling internal temperature, since there's no room for the active cooling systems used on larger craft. At a meeting of the American Chemical Society, researchers led by Dr. Prasanna Chandrasekhar, announced a solution - a thin film which changes color when triggered by an electrical signal. The film could wrap around a microspacecraft and change its visual and infrared absorption/reflectance as needed to maintain temperatures. Ground tests indicate the film could withstand the space environment, and the researchers are working with NASA to get the film, which is 1/100 of an inch thick, tested in space.

COMMENT: This is potentially a lot more interesting than it may sound. Being able to control the temperature inside a microspacecraft greatly expands the types of equipment. instrumentation, and experiments that can be carried.

Why sasquatch matters

Eoin O'Carroll, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, offers a cogent analysis of why sasquatch, real or not, matters in a world fearful of environmental degradation and the loss of connection to nature. I can't resist quoting his last paragraph:'

"Perhaps our desire to find the Bigfoots of the world represents an ancient longing for the wild twin who helped bring us into the world, whom we then abandoned along the way to creating a civilization. As for me, I’m now firmly in the skeptics’ camp. But I hope that others will keep up the hunt. After all, there aren’t too many wild places left, and it would be a shame if the poor beast – on the off chance that he exists – were to become extinct before we could thank him."

Canada searches for the Franklin expedition

Canada is launching an expedition to solve one of polar exploration's great myteries - the fate of the Franklin expedition. Sir John Franklin's two-ship expedition to find the Northwest Passage vanished sometime after 1845. Three bodies have turned up since then, but no signs of the ships. Inuit whose ancestral tales relate contact with the explorers are assisting on the expedition.

What next for military space?

The top-level Allard Commission has come out for a thorough restructuring of American military space efforts. They argue there is currently no central authority or responsibility and a dismal acquisition system, among other problems. They propose a radical restructuring including abolishing the National Reconnaissance Office.

COMMENT: There's not much to disagree with here. "Black world" and "white world" space were properly given separate agencies over 45 years ago, but the separation makes little sense today. Here's hoping this report gets written into policy... though the record of intelligent recommendations being adopted is not very good, either.

And yet another headache - Russian transportation

With a five-year gap between the Shuttle and the CEV, NASA was planning to rely on Russian transportation to the ISS. Russia's invasion of Georgia has added a new obstacle to that.

Like NASA needed another headache ... USA v ATK

United Space Alliance (USA), NASA's prime Space Shuttle contractor, has sued Alliant Techsystems and ATK Launch Systems, Inc., seeking damages for fraud and breach of contract, and seeking an injunction against further piracy of USA employees with skills needed to flying out the Space Shuttle manifest. USA says:

"The lawsuit is in response to ATK's failure to negotiate a long-term contract in good faith during the past two years. More importantly, ATK concurrently undertook an aggressive campaign to hire critically skilled USA employees, who have been performing specialized work in support of both the Ares and Space Shuttle programs in order to solely perform work on Ares."

COMMENT: Wow

Press conference: no sasquatch and no point

Tom Biscardi, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer today held the most pointless press conference in history. They had promised evidence of sasquatch, a specimen of which which they claimed to have stuffed in a freezer. They provided... nothing.
DNA they had submitted to a biologist for testing came back as (really a mixture of human and opossum segments. Biscardi said scientists would soon be allowed to examine the body, which prompted skeptics to make the obvious point that you should have the examination and then the press conference. And there is no excuse for providing poor images that look remarkably like a commercially available sasquatch costume if you do, in fact, have a sasquatch handy and can take the time to photograph it thoroughly.

So far, this looks like one of the boldest and dumbest in a long series of sasquatch hoaxes. If the animal is really out there, I hope he has the intellect to tune in and understand what's going on. He may kill himself laughing and leave a real corpse to discover.

NASA News conference: News is not good

In 2005, NASA announced the goal of having the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) flying in 2011. Three years into the Constellation program, that goal has now officially slipped four years. It sounds like one of Zeno's paradoxes: for every year of the program, you slip 1.33 years, so you never fly.

COMMENT: OK, some of the problem is budget (with blame to share among the President and Congress), and some is the nature of all large high-tech programs to develop unforeseen difficulties and require changes as the managers and engineers accumulate data. But you can't absolve NASA management on this. They knew roughly what was going to happen with the budget, and it was obvious some time ago that premature commitment to a launch vehicle solution was not the best path they could have chosen. Development of the Orion seems to be going pretty well in most areas (with the exception of the crater made by the with the Parachute Test Vehicle) , but integrating it with a launch vehicle that seems frighteningly marginal is not. The Ares-1 looks more and more like Vanguard every day: a vehicle which was sold as a simple upgrade of existing stages when the engineers suspected (and soon knew for sure) it was going to be a completely new rocket, with chronic technical problems and budget overruns. They eventually made Vanguard work, but there's a lot more riding on the Ares - literally.

I need hardly mention, but will anyway, that, as with all my posts, the comments in this one are strictly my personal opinions.

What's up at NASA? Not Constellation

I can't resist linking to this arch Klyde Morris cartoon strip summarizing NASA's current management dilemma.