by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 20, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
By Daniel Cusick / Scientific American
If moose disappear from the boreal forest of northern Minnesota, as some biologists predict, they will not exit with a thunderous crash. Climate extinctions come quietly, even when they involve 1,000-pound herbivores.
Experts who have studied the Northwestern moose — Alces alces andersoni — believe they are witnessing one of the most precipitous nonhunting declines of a major species in the modern era, yet few outside Minnesota fully appreciate the loss.
The moose is an iconic species whose existence is woven into the social, economic and cultural fabric of this region. Its elongated head and wide antlers are emblazoned on everything from T-shirts to tire flaps. The 1960s cartoon character Bullwinkle J. Moose and his flying squirrel friend Rocky were residents of the fictionalized town of Frostbite Falls, Minn.
But the animals that inspired Bullwinkle are not what they were. Here, even healthy bulls — whose size, strength and rutting prowess make them the undisputed kings of the North Woods — are dying from what appear to be a combination of exhaustion, exposure, wasting disease triggered by parasites and other maladies.
The biologists are baffled and also helpless.
Mark Lenarz, who retired in March from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR), where he led moose research efforts, said it’s not like the TV show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”
“Unlike ‘CSI,’ it’s very hard to identify in the field exactly what an animal is dying from,” he said. “We know something about the symptoms” of distressed moose, he added, “but we don’t necessarily know the exact causes of mortality.”
What Lenarz and other experts do know is that a variety of climate stressors — including higher average annual temperatures, a long string of very mild winters, and increasingly favorable conditions for ticks, parasites and other invasive species — are conspiring to make northern Minnesota a moose graveyard.
Since 2002, Minnesota DNR specialists have put radio collars on 150 healthy adult moose; 119 subsequently died, most of them from unknown causes, according to wildlife officials. Car and train collisions accounted for 12 mortalities, while wolves were culpable in just 11 deaths.
Sudden collapse of herds
Meanwhile, annual surveys taken from helicopter overflights show that the state’s primary moose population, in the state’s northeastern Arrowhead region, has been halved in just six years, dropping from 8,840 animals in 2006 to just 4,230 this year. The decline mirrors a similar collapse a decade ago in the state’s northwest corner, where moose plummeted from an estimated 4,000 animals in the mid-1980s to less than 100 by the mid-2000s.
While some monitoring of moose had occurred in the 1990s, most of the animals were gone before scientists could examine cause-and-effect relationships. In the Arrowhead, however, experts are watching mass mortality, discovering multiple moose carcasses in the same area, including animals that appeared relatively healthy only a few years before.
It’s not just the occasional sickly moose succumbing to common causes of mortality, said Lenarz. “We’re out in the
field collecting dead radio-collared moose, and we were finding other moose that had died along with them.”
Similar mysterious deaths of one or more moose have been documented in Voyageurs National Park, where the National Park Service had launched its own radio-collar study of the animals, and in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, where moose sightings used to be routine for visitors but are increasingly rare.
Read more from Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rapid-climate-changes-turn-north-woods-into-moose-graveyard
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 4, 2012 | Agriculture, Toxification
By Pesticide Action Network
Results released today from water sampling across four Midwestern states – Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota – indicate that the endocrine disrupting pesticide atrazine is still being found in drinking water at levels linked to birth defects and low birth weight. Syngenta, one of the world’s largest pesticide corporations, has continued to promote the use of the chemical, despite growing concerns from independent scientists. The US Environmental Protection Agency will weigh these findings as it continues its re-evaluation of the chemical in the coming months.
“These water monitoring results should raise concerns for policymakers, they confirm that atrazine continues to contaminate Midwest drinking water at meaningful levels,” said Emily Marquez, PhD, endocrinologist and staff scientist for Pesticide Action Network. “Endocrine disrupting chemicals like atrazine are hormonally active at vanishingly small amounts. That is why scientists are looking again at atrazine, and that is why the EU set water contamination tolerance levels at 0.1 ppb. EPA’s current legal limit of 3 ppb is 30 times that and much too permissive. The best way to ensure rural communities and farmers are protected is to keep atrazine out of their water entirely.”
In the results released today, atrazine was found in a majority of water samples from Midwestern homes and farms. Atrazine is found more often than any other pesticide in groundwater – 94% of drinking water tested by USDA contains the chemical. The weed killer is the second most widely used pesticides in the U.S., with more than 76 million pounds used last year, mostly on Midwestern corn fields. Atrazine is applied most heavily in Illinois, where applications exceed 85 pounds per square mile.
The results, on average, demonstrate that levels frequently found in drinking water are five times the former legal limit in Europe, and five times the levels associated with adverse health effects, including low birth-weight in babies. Europe’s legal limit was 0.1 ppb before the chemical was banned in 2003. One Illinois sample is above the EPA limit for atrazine in drinking water, and is well above the level associated with significantly increased risk of birth defects.
“Syngenta’s atrazine is linked to irreversible harms like cancer and birth defects. Rural families are on the frontlines of pesticide exposure and we risk contaminating the water of millions of people with the chemical’s continued use,” said Julia Govis, a mother, author of Who’s Poisoning Our Children, and Statewide Program Coordinator of Illinois Farm to School.
As EPA continues its reevaluation of the chemical and plans to release additional findings on atrazine in June, new studies highlight the link between low-level exposure atrazine and adverse human health effects, including cancer and altered development. At the same time, the chemical’s manufacturer, Syngenta, continues to influence scientific analysis of the chemical, downplaying evidence showing that atrazine is harmful.
Last summer, EPA’s independent scientific advisory panel concluded an 18-month review of atrazine’s health and environmental effects. They pointed to “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential” for ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, hairy-cell leukemia, and thyroid cancer.
Unfortunately, EPA has been misled or ignored key findings. Dr. Jason Rohr, a scientist from University of South Florida, took a look at industry-funded reviews of the effects of atrazine on fish and frogs, indicators of impacts on human health, and he found: “The industry-funded review misrepresented more than 50 studies and included 122 inaccurate and 22 misleading statements. Of these inaccurate and misleading statements, 96.5% seem to benefit the makers of atrazine in that they support the safety of the chemical.”
Despite pressure from pesticide maker Syngenta, farmers across the Midwest are demonstrating ways of producing corn and growing food without relying on Syngenta’s atrazine.
“Levels of atrazine in our water raise concerns about the health impacts on farmers and communities like mine. The results underscore the challenges facing many farmers; they are caught in a pesticide trap, and it’s no surprise that they are forced to use more and more pesticides. These results should spur state and federal officials to take action and support farmers as they transition away from Syngenta’s atrazine, towards safe and healthy farming,” said Anita Poeppel, owner of Broad Branch Farm in Central Illinois.
From Pesticide Action Network: http://www.panna.org/press-release/atrazine-found-water-dozens-midwest-communities
