Why ants don't get IRB boards
In contrast to the terrible white buffalo stories, there is a fairly genetically enlightening story about Argentine ants, by Jeanna Bryner.
The problem is that these ants are invasive in California, and succeed so well because -- being descended from a single founder -- their limited genetic variation makes them all behave as if they were in a single colony. All the ants across California acting as a single colony. This is like the real worst-case ant scenario -- much worse than Them, where you can just sort of find the big ants and hit them with artillery. These aren't fire ants, but fire ants also pose a similar problem -- adjacent colonies that would have competed and fought if they were genetically variable, instead just help each other out.
Eventually this situation will degrade, as ants will slowly gain genetic variation. This is a really interesting question about intergroup selection, though -- because an ant colony that expresses a "foreign-looking" pheromone will be set upon by every other colony it ever encounters. It's hard to see that as being advantageous unless population structure reinforces it. For instance, a large and successful colony might hold off repeated attacks from lots of small itinerant colonies around it, and being able to recognize them and attack them helps to police its territory.
But until this gets sorted out, scientists want to do something to help the poor native ants, who are all getting annihilated. They're coming up with pheromone formulas, smearing them on the ants, and seeing if they get attacked:
Getting the chemical treatment was dizzying. First, Tsutsui and his team coated the inside of a vial with the chemical. They plopped an ant into the tube and spun it in a machine for 90 seconds to make the chemical stick.
"After all that shaking it's a little bit wobbly, but usually it's still alive," Sulc said. "Then, we put it back into the Petri dish with 10 of its friends from the same colony and then we observe how aggressive they are toward him."
The other ants immediately attacked, using their large mandibles, or jaws, to bite and tear off its legs, Sulc said.
Nice. Pummel them around the face and jaw, and then send them in for the kill.
Still, it's hard to figure how they are going to get this pheromone onto bajillions of ants in the field. Maybe they can engineer a virus to do it. An ant body odor virus.
Bushmeat GIS mapping
Science has a NetWatch feature that pointed me to the Bushmeat Mapserver from the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force.The server allows you to dynamically overlay extant species ranges with other landscape features such as protected areas, human population density, roads and logging concessions. The database has geographic information for 33 species, including all the African apes and 12 monkeys.
Seems like a great tool for making lecture slides about primate conservation, as well as a way to track the problem.
Great apes and human diseases: how primatologists hurt and help
A new paper in Current Biology documents the mortality suffered by Taï Forest chimpanzees as a result of common human respiratory ailments during the last ten years. Tissue samples of deceased animals provided information about the pathogens that caused the outbreaks:
Necropsy samples were screened for respiratory pathogens by using different PCR methods. As for most human respiratory cases, a mix of bacterial and viral respiratory pathogens was found in the lungs. The most common bacterium was Streptococcus pneumoniae, which was found in all respiratory outbreaks. In addition, Pasteurella multocida played a role in the 2004 outbreak [10]. All available samples tested positive for one of two paramyxoviruses: human respiratory syncytial virus (HRSV) was diagnosed in two individuals that died in the 1999 north group outbreak and in one adult female (east group) and one infant (south group) who died in the 2006 outbreak, which occurred simultaneously in both groups. The second virus identified was human metapneumovirus (HMPV), detected in three animals that died in the 2004 south group outbreak (Table 1).
Humans have suffered from these respiratory ailments for a long time. The number of human respiratory pathogens almost certainly proliferated greatly during the last 10,000 years, after the advent of agriculture and village life brought the potential of "crowd diseases." For example, human respiratory syncytal virus (HRSV) is closely related to the bovine BRSV and pneumonia virus of mice (PVM). It seems plausible that the human pathogen descended from the mouse or cattle (or sheep) virus, but no one has yet demonstrated this -- and it is after all possible that they got it from us. HRSV is an important cause of lower respiratory tract infections in humans worldwide, especially in children. In an ironic twist, HRSV was first identified in captive chimpanzees as the cause of a respiratory infection with runny nose and sneezing (called coryza) (Blount et al. 1956). It was actually the human RSV virus contracted by the chimpanzees that had caused the infections.
Much the same thing has happened to the wild chimpanzees, but with a high death toll. A 1999 outbreak of HRSV, compounded by Streptococcus pneumoniae, killed 6 out of 32 animals in the affected group, including 5 adults. A 2004 outbreak killed 8 out of 44 animals. These two outbreaks each killed nearly a fifth of the chimpanzees in these groups, and demographic records show that several "multiple mortality events" in the last 24 years are not attributable to poaching or other diseases such as ebola or anthrax (each of which had least one outbreak).
Easily spread respiratory ailments are among the main causes of sickness in contemporary hunter-gatherers, partly because they are able to persist and spread effectively in low-density populations, and partly because they are so common in neighboring groups. Today, respiratory diseases are an important cause of death in these groups -- including adults -- although they count for fewer deaths than gastrointestinal pathogens and parasites. Their ability to infect low-density populations suggests that some human respiratory pathogens surely date to much earlier periods of human evolution.
One thing is certain: humans have undergone thousands of years of selection, in which susceptible individuals have disproportionately been killed by human-infecting respiratory viruses and bacterial strains. Many of these pathogens have adapted very well to humans, including a substantial time or fraction of the population in which they may be present without causing noticeable symptoms.
Chimpanzees lack this history. Relatively minor diseases in humans may have major effects on chimpanzees, and diseases like RSV that cause measurable mortality among human infants may have devastating effects on chimpanzee communities. Together, respiratory illnesses, ebola, and anthrax are having a death toll in the studied chimpanzee groups almost as great as smallpox in post-contact American Indians.
The shocking thing is that this enormous death toll seems likely to have been caused by the researchers themselves, along with ecotourists:
It has long been recognized that respiratory disease is the most important cause of morbidity and mortality among wild great apes habituated to human presence for research or tourism [4], [24], [25], [26] and [27]. However, the etiological agents of such disease have not been documented. Possibly as a consequence of respiratory disease, about half of the long-term chimpanzee research populations have shown major declines [4] and [28]. Our results suggest that the close approach of humans to apes, which is central to both research and tourism programs, represents a serious threat to wild apes (Köndgen et al. 2008:262).
The authors temper this conclusion in two ways. First, they show that the presence of the research station and the tourist site both have significantly decreased the incidence of poaching at and around these areas. Both areas have lots of chimpanzees, but little sign of poachers in contrast to the rest of the protected forest, where poacher sign is common. Poaching accounts for nearly as many documented deaths in the study population as respiratory infection, so this protective effect may be very important.
On the other hand, communicable diseases may well spread beyond a single group, so much of the forest may be at high risk from both poaching and human pathogens. And needless to say, poachers may spend less time around the research and tourist areas, but that hasn't stopped them from killing lots of chimpanzees there. So the protective effect may not be much of a shield.
Second, they provide recommendations that may decrease the risk to the chimpanzees while permitting continued human presence:
In order to reduce the negative effects of research and tourism, strict hygiene protocols, including vaccination requirements for tourists, tourism personnel, park staff, and research personnel against all potentially dangerous diseases for which vaccines are available (e.g., measles, mumps, and rubella), should be implemented [5], [6], [29] and [30]. Only nonsymptomatic visitors and staff should have access to habituated apes. Feces, vomit, and other human debris or wastes should be removed from areas where chimpanzees may come in contact with it or buried at a depth where other animals will not uncover it [29]. Because carriers of human respiratory pathogens are often nonsymptomatic, wearing of masks (e.g., N95 masks as recommended for avian flu) [31] should be mandatory. Human populations living around the parks and reserves should be vaccinated, thereby decreasing the chances of human-pathogen introduction into chimpanzee populations. As in the Taï project, demographic, clinical, and diagnostic monitoring systems should be implemented to objectively document the negative effects of research or tourism. Furthermore, we urge an intensification of research on ways to prevent disease transmission, as well as the development of new methods for vaccine and treatment delivery, to wild apes (e.g., oral baiting) (Köndgen et al. 2008:262-263).
These are necessary precautions, but they are unlikely to be enough. There is no effective or widely available for RSV, or HMPV. S. pneumoniae normally exists in the respiratory tract of 10 percent of healthy adults. There is no way that chimpanzees can hold off these diseases if they are in recurrent contact with people.
References:
Blount RE Jr, Morris JA, Savage RE. 1956. Recovery of cytopathogenic agent from chimpanzees with coryza. Proc Soc Exp Biol Med 92:544-549.
Köndgen S and 17 others. 2008. Pandemic human viruses cause decline of endangered great apes. Curr Biol 18:260-264. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.01.012
Will climate change leave threatened species behind?
A Cornelia Dean article explores a theme that concerns many primatologists, indeed anyone who studies threatened animals: When you confine a small set of animals to a tiny patch of forest, they can't move when their patch starts to degrade. Climate change will certainly pose such a threat over the long term -- today's climate being vastly different from the Pleistocene -- and many are worried that local climate changes may significantly impact habitat patches within the next 100 years.
This kind of uncertainty is widespread. For example, Dr. Hamilton said that on the Northern California coast, fog has an influence on natural systems. But "none of our climate models can tell us what is going to happen with fog," she said. "So we are facing profound uncertainties about how our coastal ecosystems are going to look."
"It's a real dilemma," said David S. Wilcove, a conservation biologist at Princeton. "What you are trying to do is balance the urgent needs of the present -- the ongoing destruction of habitats that species need now -- with the urgent needs of the future -- places where they may end up if they are able to move in response to changing climate."
Clearly, even though governments and others have been setting aside patches of habitat for 100 years, that is nothing compared to the geological time over which species originated. A true conservation plan will require contingencies for climate change, in some cases extending to relocation plans. But as the article points out, much of the activity of conservationists is mere triage -- trying to stabilize threatened populations. It doesn't help that the natural world can be as unstable as the human world. Species have adapted to natural instability, but being penned in by humans is entirely new.
New bonobo reserve set aside in Congo
Congo has announced the establishment of a rain-forest preserve intended to shield the bonobo, one of human beings' two closest ape relations, from wildlife poachers and deforestation.
The Sankuru Nature Reserve -- at 11,803 square miles, it is larger than the state of Massachusetts -- is being created through a partnership involving American and Congolese conservation groups and government agencies.
Death to the bottle-fed polar bear?
This is just a fascinating story from the international Der Spiegel:
Knut Should Be Killed, Say Some Animal Activists
Berlin's polar bear cub Knut is more famous than ever. Even star photographer Annie Leibovitz has been to take his picture. But not everyone loves the little bear. Animal rights activists want him put to sleep because he has been raised on a bottle.
It is such a contrast -- the photography is toward the aim of making the polar bear a symbol against climate change; the "animal rights activists" decry the fact that the cub is being raised by people.
Berlin Zoo is allowing Knut to be raised in such a way that the bear will have a behavioral disorder for the rest of his life, Albrecht believes. "In actual fact, the zoo needs to kill the bear cub," he adds.
He's not alone. Wolfram Graf-Rudolf, director of the Aachen Zoo, told the newspaper, "I don't consider it appropriate for the species that the little polar bear is being raised on a bottle." The animal will be fixated on his keeper and not be a "real" polar bear, he says. However he feels it is now too late to put Knut out of his supposed misery. "The mistake has been made. One should have had the courage to put him to sleep much earlier."
Of course, some "animal rights activists" are simply anti-zoo, and this case seems like quite the publicity-driver. The really surprising part of this to me is that it has happened before:
The idea isn't as outlandish as it may at first seem. Although giving Knut a death sentence would likely bring his many fans out on to the streets, baby zoo animals have been killed for the same reason in the past. Two-day-old baby sloth Hugo was put down by lethal injection in Leipzig Zoo at the end of last year, sparking emotional protests.
I couldn't find any other story confirming "emotional protests" after the death of a sloth named Hugo, so I have my doubts. But this certainly seems a different context than discussions about American zoo animals.
Like pandas. Those little guys can't feed themselves!
(via Volokh Conspiracy)
The gorilla Ebola toll
The title of the one-page paper by Magdalena Bermejo and colleagues tells most of the story: "Ebola oubreak killed 5000 gorillas."
Over the past decade, the Zaire strain of Ebola virus (ZEBOV) has emerged repeatedly in Gabon and Congo. During each human outbreak, carcasses of western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have been found in neighboring forests (1). Opinions have differed as to the conservation implications. Were these isolated mortality events of limited impact (2)? Was ZEBOV even the cause (3)? Or, were they part of a massive die-off that threatens the very survival of these species (4)? Here, we report observations made at the Lossi Sanctuary in northwest Republic of Congo, where ZEBOV was the confirmed cause of ape die-offs in 2002 and 2003 (5). Our results strongly support the massive die-off scenario, with gorilla mortality rates of 90 to 95% indicated both by observations on 238 gorillas in known social groups and by nest surveys covering almost 5000 km2. ZEBOV killed about 5000 gorillas in our study area alone.
Gorillas aren't alone; the authors estimate that ca. 85 percent of chimpanzees also died, but don't have detailed observations on their initial numbers, so they can't give a census number.
The paper doesn't answer an important question -- how do these apes get Ebola? There is a Timesarticle that tries to address this:
Precisely how gorillas contract the disease is a mystery. Scientists assume they must catch it somehow from another animal that acts as a natural reservoir host and carries the virus without being harmed by it. Fruit-eating bats are suspected, but none has been confirmed as the reservoir, Dr. Nichol said.
Whatever the host, it could infect western gorillas by defecating on their food, which is mostly fruit. The gorillas could then infect one another, both inside their own social groups and between groups. The virus is spread by bodily fluids and by touching sick or dead animals. Dr. Walsh said that gorillas commonly eat one another's dung, which could also transmit the virus.
Scientists have debated about whether gorillas' infecting each other plays much of a role in spreading the disease, or whether the reservoir host is really the main culprit. The new report says the gorillas themselves do play an important part: it shows that the spread of the disease and the timing of outbreaks match the pattern that would occur if the animals were infecting one another, both within and between groups.
It's hard for me to imagine it isn't spreading directly from individual to individual. Still, it seems to be jumping between groups very quickly -- certainly faster than individuals transfer between social groups. Which suggests it may spread more easily between these apes than between humans. Which is scary, since it suggests it might evolve to spread more readily between people than it does now.
Yikes.
References:
Bermajo M, Rodríguez-Teijeiro JD, Illera G, Barroso A, Vilà C, Walsh PD. 2006. Ebola oubreak killed 5000 gorillas. Science 314:1564. DOI link
Fertility drug really delivers for gorilla
Here's a happy AP article:
BRISTOL, England - A western lowland gorilla has given birth at a zoo in southwest England after being given a fertility drug that is normally used on humans, zoo officials said Friday.
She's been trying for 20 years, after having a first baby young.
After consulting gynecologist David Hill, a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol, zoo veterinarians gave Salome a fertility drug called clomifene to stimulate ovulation, Carroll said.
Salome became pregnant three months after first receiving the treatments, he said.
We're running completely irony- and snark-free here on Christmas. Nothing more than a touching story of gorilla motherhood.
"Female gorillas, like their human counterparts, find conceiving more difficult as they get older, so zoos may now be able to give some of their important breeders a helping hand," Caroll said. "Being able to treat female gorillas with human fertility drugs is potentially a very important breakthrough."
Carroll said the treatment was likely to be replicated worldwide.
OK, I guess that was a little bit too Handmaid's Tale-like...
Lion attacks
This Reuters article is just brutal:
Lions in the area [southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique] have developed a taste for human flesh because people have been sleeping outdoors to protect their crops from raiding bush pigs, which the cats follow onto croplands, a leading expert said.
"In Tanzania in the early 1990s there were about 40 recorded lion attacks a year. In the past couple of years they have risen to over 100 and about 70 percent are fatal," said Craig Packer, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota.
Even at this high level lion attacks are about on par with bear attacks in Alaska and BC (with fewer people). But there are two main differences -- lion attacks are much more likely fatal, and, well read for yourself:
People in the region and in neighboring Malawi also frequently fall victim to crocodile attacks. But Packer said while crocodiles lay in wait in rivers, the lions actively stalked people even in their homes -- a more chilling scenario.
In short, both are man-eaters but the lions are actually man-hunters.
It is always really challenging to work for conservation of any predator. But this has to be one of the hardest cases -- a real reason for fear in the countryside.
What's ailing hybrid lions?
I ran across this story about unusual disease affecting hybrids of Asiatic and African lions in Indian zoos:
NEW DELHI - Nearly two dozen crossbred lions are slowly dying in northern India from a mysterious disease afflicting the hybrid offspring of Asiatic and African cats paired in a discontinued experimental program.
Zookeepers are mournfully watching the results of the program, which began in the late 1980s at the Chhatbir Zoo and was ended in 2002 after many of the nearly 80 crossbred lions were struck by a mysterious disease linked to inbreeding and a weakened gene pool, said Kuldip Kumar, Punjab state's conservator of forests and wildlife.
This is very curious. I did a little search to see if anything more detailed had been written. The best I could find was an article from 1990 that mentioned possible problems related to inbreeding Asiatic lions in American zoos, which turned out to be genetic hybrids:
Meanwhile, Paul Joslin was not quite sure whether the "Asiatic lions" in US zoos were really Asiatic lions. Joslin, then assistant director of Chicago's Brookfield Zoo and now an independent zoo consultant, had noticed that many of the lion males lacked a telltale belly fold, a flap of loose skin on their undersides that distinguishes Asiatic from African lions. He was also worried that increased infant mortality among "Asiatic lions" in US zoos signaled inbreeding problems.
...
O'Brien and Martenson eventually found that almost all Asiatic lions in US zoos and some in Asian ones as well were hybrids. As a result, US zoos agreed to suspend mating Asiatic lions and allow the hybrid animals to die off naturally (Cohn 1990:168).
So I wonder if this is some infectious disease that has been affecting their chronic health, or if -- as the reports seem to suggest -- there is some postzygotic incompatibility between the lion subspecies.
References:
Cohn JP. 1990. Genetics for wildlife conservation. BioScience 40:167-171.
Pandas cost too much
The NY Times has an article about the licensing fees that zoos pay to China to keep giant pandas in the country.
But the real sticker shock comes from the annual fees that Zoo Atlanta and three other American zoos must pay the Chinese government, $2 million a year, essentially to rent a pair of pandas.
The financial headache caused by the costly loan obligations has driven Dennis W. Kelly, chief executive of Zoo Atlanta, to join with the directors of the three other United States zoos -- in Washington, San Diego and Memphis -- that exhibit pandas to negotiate some budgetary breathing room. If no agreement with China can be made, Mr. Kelly said, the zoos may have to return their star attractions.
"If we can't renegotiate, they absolutely will go back," Mr. Kelly said. "Unless there are significant renegotiations, you'll see far fewer pandas in the United States at the end of this current agreement."
YESSSS! At last there is hope! I am so tired of having to hear about it every time a panda ovulates in this country!
Count me out of this number:
[V]isitors flock to see them, and when they cannot make it through the gates, self-described pandaholics blog with doe-eyed ardor about the bears.
Give me a break! "Doe-eyed ardor" for pandas? Personally, I find red pandas much more interesting than giants, and there are a lot of species I would rather see.
Now, I don't have any ill will toward the pandas -- protecting their habitat is really vital, and they are good mascots for conservation. But this panda madness is insane.
First of all, they're just not that smart -- other kinds of bears are much more entertaining.
Second, they don't respond well to captivity. If it didn't screw up their behavior so much, they wouldn't have so much trouble breeding. I say, leave the poor animals in the wild, and give them some more room to live.
Third, they are sucking the oxygen out of conserving every other kind of animal. The article gives the total value of the contracts to the Chinese government as $80 million. Think about the protection that might provide to other species.
It seems to me that each of these zoos should devote its attentions to a different charismatic species, and drive an education and public interest effort around that. I mean, most of the publicity around these pandas is zoo-driven -- why else do they issue a press release after every failed breeding attempt?
And they're intrinsically expensive:
A curator, three full-time keepers and one backup keeper care for Lun Lun and Yang Yang at Zoo Atlanta. A six-person crew travels around the state six days a week, harvesting bamboo from 400 volunteers who grow it in their backyards. (Zoo Atlanta tried growing its own on a farm, as the Memphis Zoo does, but Lun Lun and Yang Yang turned up their noses.)
"It's crazy," Mr. Kelly says. "These bears, year-round, are some of the most pampered animals on the planet. We measure everything that goes in. We measure everything that goes out."
It's like a pyramid scheme, where if they don't have cubs, you take a financial bath.
Sooty mangabey trouble
There's a nice long AP article about the possible trade-off between conservation and experimentation on sooty mangabeys. The problem is that Yerkes National Primate Research Center
Scientists at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta have nurtured a group of these primates for decades. But after Yerkes started the colony, federal officials listed sooties as endangered.
The result: Yerkes has the world's largest collection of captive sooties, but with little hope of scientific benefit.
"We don't need them around just to look at them. We're not a zoo," said Thomas Gordon, Yerkes' associate director for scientific programs.
Recently, Yerkes researchers proposed a novel solution: The primate center will help conserve sooties in the wild in exchange for permission to do AIDS-related research on them here.
It seems like a terrible situation to be in -- you have these primates, they are doing well in your facility, but it's just not your purpose to keep primates without researching on them. How much better it would be to involve them in something useful. Otherwise, you'll ultimately have to get rid of them, and how does that help anything?
And yet, these individuals represent an endangered species.
The white buffalo
OK, this was local news here, and now it's national news:
MILWAUKEE - A farm in Wisconsin is quickly becoming hallowed ground again for American Indians with the birth of its third white buffalo, an animal considered sacred by many tribes for its potential to bring good fortune and peace.
This is much, much better than panda news. No question.
Still, I have to think they are missing an opportunity here to make this a bit, well, educational:
Dave Heider said he was inspecting damage on his farm after a late August storm when he saw the newly born buffalo, a male. His last white buffalo, a female named Miracle, died in 2004 at the age of 10. Thousands of people came to see the animal, whose coat became darker as it aged.
...
[The new calf] is no relation to Miracle, he said.
"We never even thought about having another white one until we got this one," he said. "There's got to be a reason that we're getting these white calves."
Yes. The reason is called inbreeding. Remember that a hundred years ago, there were only around 500 bison in North America? Considering that the "white" pelage here is not really pigmentless -- and becomes darker through ontogeny -- this may well not be a simple Mendelian trait. But even if it were, very nearly all the bison in this herd must be close relatives!
And there's another reason for white coloration --- the majority of today's bison have cattle genes introduced during the last century. Some of these genes influence coat color. Hence, color variation in today's bison includes a range that historical bison never would have had, because of genetic introgression from cattle.
No, the story doesn't go into this sort of thing. It does quote an expert, though:
Odds of having a white buffalo are at least 1 in the millions, said Jim Matheson, assistant director of the National Bison Association. For years buffalo in general were rare but their numbers are increasing, with some 250,000 now in the U.S., he said.
OK, first of all, the entire population of bison in North America is now on the order of 500,000. Considering there have been three white bison at this one farm we know that the odds are not "1 in the millions"!
In fact, white bison are bred at one ranch in Arizona, and a record of at least a dozen of them exist from there and other places. Now, I know that the AP can't be bothered to consult Wikipedia for this sort of thing, but this seems like an especially good chance to dispel some myths about genetics -- and this one connects very clearly to the problems of endangered species in small populations!
What to do with the Laetoli footprints?
Rex Dalton reports on Charles Musiba's efforts to preserve the Laetoli footprints with a new museum:
[The weathering to the trackways] prompted Tanzanian anthropologist, Charles Musiba, now at the University of Colorado in Denver, to call for the creation of a new museum to reveal and display the historic prints. But other anthropologists question this idea -- as they did when the tracks were covered -- because Laetoli is several hours' drive into Ngorongoro National Park, making guarding and maintaining any facility extremely difficult. Musiba presented his proposal for the museum last month at the International Symposium on the Conservation and Application of Hominid Footprints, in South Korea. He says that Tanzania now has the scientific capacity and the funds to construct and monitor a museum.
Dalton quotes Tim White and Terry Harrison as skeptics, citing them as
among a group that favours cutting the entire track out of the hillside, then installing it in a museum in a Tanzanian city
The article weighs pros and cons. Dalton also gives a good description of the problems that arose with previous attempts to preserve the trackways. Initially covered with dirt, the trackways were endangered when acacia trees sprouted and started breaking up the ash layer. The current setup, constructed in 1995, involves a mat overlain by fill, but this is eroding out.
I tend to think they should be managed in a way that maximizes their benefit to local people. It's hard for me to believe that chunking the whole thing out and moving it in trucks halfway across Tanzania would be better than whatever might happen in a poorly-guarded museum. But clearly there are no perfect choices. It is a real challenge to start and build continuing interest in a museum like this without very strong support -- but I would like to see it succeed.
References:
Dalton R. 2008. Fears for oldest human footprints. Nature doi:10.1038/451118a
Lascaux struggling with fungal invasion
Julien Riel-Salvatore has been following the fungus problems at Lascaux. His earlier post discusses a December NY Times article on the problem. That article is a really good one, it explains why this fungus problem is different from the white fusarium fungus that preservationists battled in the cave in 2001.
Whatever the reason for the problems at Lascaux, the white mold outbreak in 2001 led the government to close it to all nonessential visitors.
It was so serious that, to stop the invasion, the floor was covered with quicklime and scientists began treating the problem chemically, said Marc Gauthier, president of the International Scientific Committee for Lascaux, which was created as a result of the crisis.
The new problem at Lascaux, however, does not appear to be linked to the fusarium fungus. Described by experts as black stains, the blemishes are in fact both gray and black. "They vary from a few millimeters to 4 centimeters," said Mr. Geneste, noting that most are found in the passages where the rocks are most porous and paintings had faded the most long before modern man entered. While only a few stains have affected the paintings, they have now been found in some 70 different spots.
Now, Julien links to a more recent story from the CBC, which describes the political pettifog between the International Scientific Committee and the French government:
[The team of specialists] put pressure on the French government by alerting UNESCO, which classifies the caverns as a World Heritage Site, about the conditions.
Laurence Leaute-Beasley, president of the International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux, called for the management of the caves to be taken out of the hands of the French government, saying someone who understands the science involved should take over.
The French government, not wanting such an an important site to be seen as neglected, has decided to accept the committee's advice and act now against the fungus.
So they were threatening to bring the UN into France to fight an invasive subterranean fungus. Don't tell the "black helicopter" believers!
The experts disagreed on the cause of the problem. Some say global warming is to blame, others that human activity in the caves is exacerbating the problems.
Global warming is not to blame. It's not a totally silly idea -- the Times article discusses an increase in the average soil temperature around several caves, and Lascaux is a relatively shallow one that might be influenced by increasing soil temperatures. But the climate around these caves has fluctuated a whole lot more during the last 20,000 years than in the last 20. The important recent changes have been caused by people -- walking into the cave, lighting the cave, ventilating the cave.
But now that the changes have been initiated, they can't be solved by people just leaving the cave alone. It seems like such a curious contrast -- archaeologists know they must destroy the sites to learn from them; art historians must preserve their objects to learn from them. Lascaux is both site and object, and has faced both pressures.
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks