Extinctions in Near Time: Biodiversity Loss Since the Pleistocene Liz Hadly

Hi everyone, my name is Isabel Cardenas and I’ll be talking about the market for bear bile and what it means to farmed bears, wild bears, and North American bears.
In parts of Asia, drinking bear bile is a traditional remedy to cure intestinal and heart illnesses1. This has created an enormous market for fresh bear bile. Poachers have decimated the populations of Asiatic black and brown bears to satisfy the demand. As a result, bear farms emerged throughout Asia so that profiteers have a constant source. The market for bile has had extensive consequences for bears in farms, wild Asian bears, and now wild bears in North America. My name is Isabel Cardenas and I would like to tell you about how the demand for bear bile is threatening bears around the world.
Today’s demand for bear bile is large enough to warrant the captivity of twelve thousand bears on farms in China, Vietnam, and Korea5. Typically, Asiatic black bears and brown bears are captive on these farms1. On bear farms, a tube extracts bile from the gallbladder twice a day through an open wound6. This is referred to as “milking” the bear.
In addition to the pain and infection of the wound, these bears suffer from physical and behavioral abnormalities from the stress of being caged. This leads them to shatter their teeth on the cage bars or to try to bite their paws off6. Mother bears have become deranged when listening to the sound of distress of their infants; some have suffocated their young7. Bears are such symbols of power that it’s tragic to see them in such miserable conditions.
Though bear farms were intended to allow wild bear populations to recover, they actually led to poaching5. Not only does the farmed bile stimulate the market but, because wild bile is believed to be most potent and is worth more, wild bears are still poached for their gallbladders1. The wild Asiatic black bears and brown bears are still in danger of being hunted and they are now in danger of extirpation4.
Bear bile contains ursodeoxycholic acid, which reduces cholesterol absorption, dissolves gallstones, regulates heart rhythm, and serves as a remedy for other human illnesses3. However, bear bile isn’t the only bile that has ursodeoxycholic acid. Many mammals have this in their gallbladder and pharmaceutical companies harvest it through slaughterhouses of bovine, such as oxen or cows3. Additionally, there are sixty-five herbal alternatives to bear bile, such as coptis or rhubarb8, 9 There is no need for bear farms to exist, so why do they? Wild bear bile has been used as a traditional cure for a myriad of afflictions for 3000 years and Asia isn’t ready to give it up1.
The market for bear parts is worth two billion dollars4. Bile is sold for as little as $500 per gram but vendors can garner up to fifty-five thousand dollars for a whole gallbladder1. North America has more individual bears than the rest of the world combined. Why is that relevant? The increasing rarity of wild bears in Asia has led to poaching in North America for bear parts. North America is seen as a goldmine for poachers. While a gallbladder can be sold for about thirty thousand dollars in Japan, the maximum fine for poaching in Alaska is only four thousand dollars1. Thus, the market incentive is extraordinarily high for poaching in North America.
I contend that laws in North American and Asia have to be adjusted to protect the existing populations of bears from poaching and farming. Increasing the awareness of the cultural and market pressures around bear bile is a start. Another solution is to support groups, such as Animals Asia, that try to protect, rescue, and rehabilitate bears.
Thanks for listening.
Sources
1. Bears: Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan
2. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/asian-bear-bile-remedies-barbarism-or-medicine/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursodeoxycholic_acid
4. http://www.wspa-international.org/latestnews/2011/bear-b(contin

It seems so innocent. Pretty houses with manicured lawns, several little parks with small grassy fields bordered by metal fences, a few house sparrows hopping around the picnic tables. We’d call it a beautiful town. Unfortunately, this perception of beauty is deadly (Rosenzweig).
Hi. My name is Yari and I’m here to provide some urban makeover tips that will help many different plants and animals. Usually when we think about saving wildlife, we think about rain forests and the wilderness, but lets not forget city wildlife. Of course, some animals – like rats, cockroaches, and pigeons – do great living with us (Marzluff). These animals that are thriving in cities are called generalists, meaning they can survive in lots of different situations (Francis). It’s the creatures who need very specific habitats that are struggling, because we’ve replaced their homes with our towns (Rosenzweig). That means that a few generalists like house sparrows (Shoshat) and house mice (Francis) can live all over the place, but the animals that needed those specific habitats die (Rosenzweig). Instead of meadowlarks singing in meadows (State of the Birds), marsh marigolds decorating the marshes (Mabey), and woodland jumping mice jumping in woodlands (Mahan), we’ve got pigeons and rats stealing food in cities all over the place (Francis). With a progressive sense of urban beauty, we can change that.
Urban makeover tip #1: Get rid of your lawn! The short, often-nonnative grass isn’t a very good home for animals. Let native plants grow freely! Then, animals will find the food and shelter they need. Bonus tip: Live in a city without much lawn space? Look up! Roofs are a great place for shallow-growing plants.
Urban makeover tip #2: Instead of lots of little parks, have a few big ones. Some animals need more space. With a bigger park, you’d see new types of animals on play-dates, instead of the same old house sparrows stealing your french fries.
Urban makeover tip #3: instead of fences with metal posts, use wooden posts. Wood gets holes in it, making it a great home for bluebirds and other hole-nesters.
But wait, can’t the generalists, the ones who can live in a bunch of different places, just take over all of our urban makeover work? The trick is to cater to the specific needs of the other animals.
For example, common toads are doing great - they’re generalists, but Natterjack toads were really suffering, because their specific needs were not being met. Turns out, they like burrowing in sand. So, we put in sand dunes. They use them and the common toads don’t need to. So, for urban makeover tip #4: give struggling animals exactly what they need (Rosenzweig).
Now, I know you’re excited to get started on your urban makeover, but if you live in the desert, don’t come up with the same plan as your friend who lives by the forest. That’s my final urban makeover tip: Towns need their own style. Let them take on the character of their natural surroundings (Rosenzweig). And slowly, desert towns will begin to look like deserts, forest towns like forests, prairie towns, like prairies. People creating homes for a variety of native life, right within their own towns - that is beautiful.

References
Francis, Robert and Michael Chadwick. “What makes a Species Synurbic?” Applied Geography. 2011.
Mabey, Richard. Flora Britannica. London: Chatto and Windus, 1997.
Mahan, Carolyn and Timothy O’Connell. “Small Mammal use of suburban and urban parks in Central Pennsylvania.” Humboldt Field Research Institute, 2005.
Marzluff, John. “Island Biogeography for an Urbanizing World: Extinction and Colonization may determine Biological Diversity in Human-Dominated Landscapes.” Urban Ecology.
Springer, 2005.
Rosenzweig, Michael. Win-win Ecology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Shochat, Eyal, et al. “Invasion, Competition, and Biodiversity Loss in Urban Ecosystems.” Biosci

On an island called Isla Juan Fernandez in the Pacific Ocean there lives a hummingbird that I’ll tell you a bit about today called the Juan Fernandez Firecrown. It is a strikingly beautiful little thing, and it lives only on this one island (Hodum). Today it is threatened for a whole host of reasons, all caused in some way by humans, and exacerbated by the remoteness and size of the island on which it lives.

Isla Juan Fernandez is an island 400 miles off the coast of Chile (Terrestrial Eco…). It has been 400 miles away from the mainland and therefore any contact with other ecosystems, for 4 million years (Anderson pp1). In that time, the biota, meaning the total complement of animals and plants, that initially settled the island has evolved on its own, independent from outside interference, and formed a totally endemic, native ecosystem (Anderson pp1).

Later on as humans began to arrive, which didn’t happen until this century, they brought things with them. Things like invasive plant and animal species, things like fires, things like agriculture or a need for building materials. Humans tend to bring these things as unintended baggage wherever they go.

In Chile there are 296 species of breeding birds,11 of which, only 11, are endemic to (or found only in) Chile, and 5 of those 11 are restricted to Juan Fernandez Island alone (Terrestrial Eco…). Does that give you a good idea of how impressive and valuable the endemic biodiversity of this one island is? Almost half of the species of breeding birds endemic to Chile, a large country housing every sort of ecosystem within its borders, ranging from snow-capped mountains to expansive deserts to wave-battered coasts and dense rainforests, are from this island.

One of those species is the Juan Fernandez Firecrown, which I mentioned earlier. This hummingbird is critically endangered, and habitat and food limitations are two of the factors implicated in its decline (Hagen pp5). The endemic ecosystem in which it lives has itself been altered. In this specific example of the native hummingbird, a small bee has been recently introduced to the island. It was initially considered to be irrelevant to the ecosystem there because it didn’t seem to pose a competitive danger to the native insects and actually was thought to possibly be beneficial by pollinating the endemic plants (Anderson 10). The issue, then, began to arise when the bees began to do two things that were unanticipated. First, they began to outcompete the hummingbirds, which technically did fit with the scientists’ predictions, as the birds aren’t fellow insects, yet it still hurt the Firecrown’s population significantly. Second, these bees began to frequent the newly introduced invasive plants, instead of the native plant species.

What is so problematic about this is that the system as a whole is so incredibly complex that removing any one element in an attempt to remedy the system is virtually impossible without causing some other element to unravel the system yet further. What I mean by that is that removal, for example, of the bees would cause the hummingbirds’ population to rise again as they would no longer be competing for nectar. So too, however, would the populations of the invasive plants because they would have the new help of more hummingbirds. If you removed just the invasive species of plants, then, the bees would still outcompete the hummingbirds, and though the native plants would return en masse, the Firecrown might very well continue on its path to extinction.

This is why protecting Isla Juan Fernandez is so difficult. The island is home to a breath-taking array of plants and animals and provides a model for what a true, un-tarnished ecosystem would look like yet even this island is slowly, inexorably being corrupted. This island is in and of itself one of the most, if not the most, valuable existing model of an ecosystem comprised of endemic biodiversity on the planet. It is a s(con

Hi I’m Lauren and your listening to “Where did the Dingo Go?”
We often think of Australia as a land hopping with kangaroos, wallabies, bilbies and other fuzzy critters. What most people don’t realize is that, despite this apparent diversity, in the last 2 centuries Australia has seen 19 of its unique mammal species become extinct (Johnson 2006) –that’s about half of all mammal extinctions worldwide in that period (Johnson et al. 2007). And Australia's mammals are still in great danger because of the slow demise of the wily dingo.
About 4000 years ago man brought the dingo to Australia. Since then, the dingo has gone from ancient companion to top predator(Ritchie & Johnson 2009).While you might think the Dingo is a pesky carnivore that eats livestock, gobbles up native animals and is generally the equivalent of the big bad wolf, the truth is that the dusty colored dingo is anything but bad. Since becoming top dog, dingoes have lived in relative harmony with the many small, rare Australian marsupials-you know, those cute mammals with pouches. This is mainly because dingoes are sparsely distributed and, because of a large body size, are specialized to hunt larger prey (Ritchie & Johnson 2009). To a dingo, a wallaby just doesn’t have enough meat on it to be as appetizing as a kangaroo. The same, however, cannot be said for the invasive red fox.
When Europeans introduced the red fox in 1855 for some recreational sporting (Dprt. of the Enviro. and Heritage (Australia) 2004) they could not have suspected that foxes would soon become the plague of Australia’s small mammals. In fact, foxes have been blamed for the extinction of many of Australia’s species. (Short 1998) (Johnson & VanDerWal 2009) (Johnson 2006)(Glen & Dickman 2005). The fox is a prey generalist, meaning he is not picky about what he eat. Rabbits, wallabies, birds—it all goes down the hatch. Foxes, because of their smaller size have more babies than dingos, more often (Dprt. of the Enviro. and Heritage (Australia) 2004) (Corbett 2004) and don’t need as much space per individual, so they can exist at high densities. Combine these three things—an undiscriminating appetite, lots of babies and the ability to pack many individuals into a small area-- and you can see how the fox is having a terribly negative effect on vulnerable ground dwelling marsupials (Ritchie & Johnson 2009).
Interestingly however, where dingoes exist, threatened marsupials are able to survive predation by foxes (Johnson et al. 2007) (Johnson & VanDerWal 2009). In fact, knowing where dingoes exist can be one of the best predictors of how well vulnerable species are doing (Wallach et al 2009) (Johnson et al. 2007). Turns out that the dingo is nowhere near the bad guy in this story. If anything he is the opposite, the good guy—protector of marsupials.
Why? Well, it turns out that dingoes play a very important role in culling fox populations. Dingoes actively attack foxes and, as a result of this persecution, foxes make a great efforts to avoid dingoes and dingo territory (Ritchie and Johnson 2009) Thus dingoes create a safety zone for the local small animal population(Ritchie & Johnson 2009) (Johnson and VanDerWal 2009).
Food webs are complicated and its important for us to understand that a top predator doesn’t effect only its prey but also impacts other predators and smaller animals that the apex carnivore doesn’t even directly associate with. In Australia, it is truly a dog-eat dog world—or in this case a dog-eat-fox.
Besides preserving Australia’s biodiversity, controlling the fox population also has significant economic impacts. The sheep industry in Australia produced 1/5 of the world’s wool in 2010. Yet, in some areas, foxes may kill up to 1/3 of lambs (Saunders 1995). And of course there is also the loss in ecotourism as more and more unique Australian species end up in the stomachs of foxes( Saunders 1995).
The dingo is as iconic to Australia as the wallaby

Why has the Pacific Island of Guam gone from sounding…like this...to a little more like this...

Hello again everyone!
My name is Joseph, and today I’m reporting to you all from the always beautiful Stanford University.
Before we dive in, first a little about me. You see, I was born on the island of Guam 18 years ago. The silence you got a brief glimpse of is extremely concerning for me. Many species of animals on Guam have disappeared forever- that’s the silence. For my generation of Guamanians, this pestilent silence has nowadays become common place. Sixty years ago my grandfather would have heard all of those beautiful birds. Where.have.they.gone?
Why has the island of Guam become a quieter place?!

Ope!
And it looks like we have caller! You're live caller #1, what do you have to say on the subject?
YARRRRRRR
Oh goodness me, not again. Make it quick captain yosef.
I have the answer to your question!!! NOW...
Come with me across the Pacific to peer at the answer in the form of an evolutionarily gifted predator.
It looks *pause* like this: It has…large unblinking eyes… elliptical pupils. It is the perfect hunter who, lacking appendages, will strike, and constrict its prey with its body. Then it will chew…and chew with its venomous rear fangs… until the helpless victim is poisoned, and ready for consumption.

OOOOOK, that's enough from you.
He's spot on though
What is this tank of nature? It’s the Brown Tree Snake.

The Brown Tree Snake’s home is Papua New Guinea and Northern and Eastern Coastal Australia. However, it has found new home. Research estimates that around the late 1940s, the Brown Tree snake was inadvertently transported in a cargo ship to the Island of Guam where it quickly found an abun dance of defenseless prey. The Brown Tree Snake targeted nearly every animal on Guam, including Guam’s 13 native forest birds. Of those 13 bird species, only 3 species of birds have survived. The lone bird you hear now is the Mariana crow. The last female crow on Guam died earlier this year, and there are only two male crows left.

We can’t let this silence spread across the Pacific to other islands. We, the public, must express our concerns about our beloved islands across the Pacific to let Governments know that we strongly support policies that control Brown Tree Snake populations, and prevent the Brown Tree Snake from being inadvertently transported once again.

So far, trapping snakes has been the most successful way to protect what birds remain. Proposed ideas like introducing predators to eat the Brown Tree Snakes hold little value since there are no other predators on Guam to eat those predators in turn. For example, if a predator like the mongoose were brought to Guam to eat the snakes, then Guam would just have a mongoose problem in place of its snake problem.

With that in mind, the greatest thing that Guam and other pacific islands can do (and have done) is invest in Brown Tree Snake prevention. Prevention measures are easy to enact--- Simple measures that include inspecting ship cargo, and any kind of shipment in and out of Pacific islands.

Everything aside though, we need to step back and realize that we can’t see the Brown Tree Snake as an evil animal. It is our fault, not the fault of the Brown Tree Snake, that Guam’s birds have become extinct. The animals of Guam, and the Brown Tree Snake played according to the rules--- they have all been living to the best of their abilities in their environments. And just because the Brown Tree Snake can do its job incredibly well, we can’t fault this skilled hunter for success.

You are the future, and now that you know how our simple, human mistakes impact the natural world, I invite you to remain conscious of human interaction with living and non-living environments. Collectively, it is an educated and conscious human population that will tend towards harmony with nature. Thank you for listening.

References
Stophlet, John J.(continued)

Hello again. Like I said before, I’m Mark Valentine and I’m going to be talking about Megafaunal Extinction and how it affects present and future biodiversity. Before I begin, you probably are going to want to know what exactly Megafauna are. Megafauna are HUGE animals. This would certainly include animals like elephants and giraffes, but also lions, tigers and bears. All these animals, however, are relatively well known and still exist in the world today. What many people don’t know is that there were many incredible Megafauna that existed a few thousand years ago that are now extinct. Around 50,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, Megafauna worldwide underwent massive and widespread extinctions . Before then, there were all kinds of amazing and enormous animals worldwide: In Eurasia, there were wooly mammoths and saber tooth cats, which you’ve probably heard of, but in North America there were beavers the size of small cars and 9 foot tall Bison with horns that spanned over 6 feet , in South America there were 5 foot tall armadillos and Giant Ground Sloths the size of elephants , and in Australia there were wombats the size of Hippopotamuses . All these animals have two things in common: One, that they are absolutely massive, and two, that they have all contributed to the historical phenomenon that Megafauna are more likely to go extinct than smaller animals . So what caused these extinctions? There are two causes. We know that human hunting lead to the extinction of many Megafaunal species, like Steller’s Sea Cow, which was basically a 30 feet long , 20,000 pound manatee . Another major cause of these extinctions was climate change. A recent study showed that climate change had significant effect on many species, and actually may have been the cause of extinction for wooly rhinos, giant bison, and other Megafauna . So what does this mean for present and future biodiversity? It’s not good. The same two factors—humans and climate—are again playing a role in Megafaunal extinctions. As humans increase in population and expand outwards, more and more animals are being threatened, and since Megafauna need more living space than other animals they are more affected. Animals including pandas and tigers are already endangered because of this. We’re also experiencing global climate shifts due to global warming, which is already causing a decline in Megafauna like the polar bear . The continued global trend of a loss of large animals is clearly leading towards one result: a world overrun with the smallest kinds of animals which can live alongside humans, or in other words, a world overrun with rodents . But this does not have to happen. If we as humans can dramatically change the way we live to reduce climate change and preserve wildlife, we can maintain biodiversity, especially among Megafauna, for much longer. The only question is, can we change? ```
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Kurtén, B. and E. Anderson (1980). Pleistocene Mammals of North America. Columbia University Press. pp. 236–237. ISBN 0231037333.
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Turvey S. T., Fritz S. A. 2011 The ghosts of mammals past: biological and geographical patterns of global mammalian extinction across the Holocene. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 366, 2564