Trump Team, Opening Defense, Accuses Democrats of Plot to Subvert Election
President Trump’s legal defense team mounted an aggressive offense on Saturday as it opened its side in the Senate impeachment trial by attacking his Democratic accusers as partisan w***h-hunters trying to remove him from office because they could not beat him at the ballot box. WASHINGTON — President Trump’s legal defense team mounted an aggressive offense on Saturday as it opened its side in the Senate impeachment trial by attacking his Democratic accusers as partisan w***h-hunters trying to remove him from office because they could not beat him at the ballot box.
© Myriam Wares On a sweltering July day, I follow Annise Dobson down an overgrown path into the heart of Seton Falls Park. It’s a splotch of unruly forest, surrounded by the clamoring streets and cramped rowhouses of the Bronx. Broken glass, food wrappers, and condoms litter the ground. But Dobson, bounding ahead in khaki hiking pants with her blond ponytail swinging, appears unfazed. As I quickly learn, neither trash nor oppressive humidity nor ecological catastrophe can dampen her ample enthusiasm.
At the bottom of the hill, Dobson veers off the trail and stops in a shady clearing. This seems like a promising spot. She kicks away the dead oak leaves and tosses a square frame made of PVC pipe onto the damp earth. Then she unscrews a milk jug. It holds a pale yellow slurry of mustard powder and water that’s completely benign—unless you’re a worm.
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Seconds after Dobson empties the contents inside the frame, the soil wriggles to life.
“Holy smokes!” she says, as a dozen worms come squirming out of the soil—their brown, wet skin burning with irritation. “Disgusting.” I have to agree. There is something unnerving about their slithering, serpentine style; instead of inching along like garden worms, they snap their bodies like angry rattlesnakes. But the problem with these worms isn’t their mode of locomotion. It’s the fact that they’re here at all.
© Getty Earthworms (Dendrobena Veneta) Until about 10,000 years ago, a vast ice sheet covered the northern third of the North American continent. Its belly rose over what is now Hudson Bay, and its toes dangled down into Iowa and Ohio. Scientists think it killed off the earthworms that may have inhabited the area before the last glaciation. And worms—with their limited powers of dispersal—weren’t able to recolonize on their own.
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For someone like me, who grew up in the Midwest seeing earthworms stranded on the sidewalk after every rain, this was a shocking revelation. With the exception of a few native species that live in rotting logs and around wetlands, there are not supposed to be any earthworms east of the Great Plains and north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
But there are, thanks to humans. We’ve been moving worms for centuries, in dirt used for ship ballast, in horticultural plants, in mulch. Worms from South America now tunnel through the global tropics. And European earthworms live on every continent except Antarctica. Dobson, a forest ecologist at Yale University, calls it “global worming.”
But of all the earthworms people have shuttled around the world, the ones Dobson shows me at Seton Falls have scientists most concerned. Originally from Korea and Japan, they are known as jumping worms, snake worms, or crazy worms. And they have the potential to remake the once wormless forests of North America.
Snow and ice weather warning issued for entire country today
Snow and ice weather warning issued for entire country todayThe snowfall was so heavy that flights were brought to a standstill and now a status yellow snow/ice warning is in place for the entire country.
The perils of an earthworm invasion are hard to grasp if you’ve been raised to believe that earthworms are good. “They seem so symbolic of a healthy ecosystem,” Dobson says. For their stellar reputation, they can thank none other than Charles Darwin. In addition to developing the theory of evolution, Darwin studied earthworms for 40 years at his home in England.
© Getty Charles Darwin With characteristic curiosity and rigor, the naturalist conducted all manner of earthworm experiments: He observed their reaction to the sound of the bassoon (none) and to the vibrations of a C note played on the piano (panic). He watched how they pulled leaves into their burrows, and tested their problem-solving skills by offering them small triangles of paper instead (most figured out how to drag them by a corner). Darwin also measured how quickly worms covered up a large paving stone in his garden with their castings. He estimated that they could move at least 10 tons of soil per acre per year.
Dirty, slimy earthworms weren’t especially popular in Victorian England. But in 1881, shortly before his death, Darwin compiled his worm studies into a book called The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits, in which he praised the humble critters. “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures,” he rhapsodized. The book became a best seller, giving worms’ dingy public image a makeover in the process.
Is it safe to travel during the coronavirus outbreak? An infectious disease specialist explains.
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Gardeners now rejoice to find earthworms in their soil, and you can purchase a 1,000-pack of “Nature’s Wonder Workers” on Amazon for $45. There’s even an entire canon of worm-centric children’s literature, including Wiggling Worms at Work and Richard Scarry’s Best Lowly Worm Book Ever! But Peter Groffman, a soil ecologist at the City University of New York, says that while worms may do some good in your compost bin, they don’t deserve all the credit for your bumper crops and lush ornamentals. “The earthworms are in the soil because the soil is healthy,” he says. “They are not necessarily doing anything for it.”
And though they can be helpful for breaking up compacted soils and breaking down organic matter, worms can also cause trouble in agricultural fields. Their burrows create channels that allow nutrients and pesticides to leak from fields into nearby waterways, and carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide to escape into the atmosphere. In fact, a 2013 review of recent research found that worms likely increase greenhouse-gas emissions.
But Darwin wasn’t thinking about these things—and he certainly wasn’t thinking about the consequences of introducing worms into ecosystems that had evolved without them.
The mustard pour, which Dobson had done partly for my benefit and partly just to check in on the worm population, is over a few minutes after it begins. The worms—bothered but otherwise unscathed—have disappeared back into the forest floor. So Dobson and I head back to where we left her assistant, Mark, toiling among a jungle of knee-high poison ivy and Johnny jumpseed.
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Franklin Graham threatens arena with legal action as they cancel yet another stop on his ‘hate speech’ tourThe Trump-supporting preacher, who is known for praising Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws and blaming gay people for a “moral 9/11”, is set to visit the UK at the start of Pride Month in June as part of an eight-day evangelist tour.
He’s searching for the pink flags that Dobson left here last year to mark a few dozen specimens of native plants. Her goal is to track them as they grow and reproduce to see if they show any potential of adapting to jumping worms. Mark, an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut, is doing his best. But it’s his first day on the job, and also, someone has deposited a filthy, yellowing mattress over much of Dobson’s research plot.
“That’s the beauty of working in urban systems,” Dobson jokes.
By now, it’s after 11 a.m. and the heat has grown unbearable, so Dobson suggests we decamp to a nearby McDonald’s. We pile into her silver Subaru Impreza, where the dashboard thermometer reads 38 degrees Celsius—100 degrees Fahrenheit. (Dobson and her car are both Canadian.) There is no gauge for the humidity, but it’s stifling.
Inside the restaurant, air conditioning and cold beverages revive our spirits. We settle into a booth, and I ask Dobson about North America’s first wave of earthworm invaders. Common species like Lumbricus terrestris, better known as the night crawler, arrived hundreds of years ago with European settlers, and have long been welcomed in gardens and farmland. In the 1980s, however, researchers began to find European worms in the forests of Minnesota and other northern states. One hypothesis is that people spread them when they throw away extra fishing bait next to lakes and streams.
© Getty File photo The discovery alarmed scientists. In the absence of worms, North American hardwood forests develop a thick blanket of duff—a mille-feuille of slowly decomposing leaves deposited over the course of years, if not decades. That layer creates a home for insects, amphibians, birds, and native flowers. But when worms show up, they devour the litter within the space of a few years. All the nutrients that have been stored up over time are released in one giant burst, too quickly for most plants to capture. And without cover, the invertebrate population in the soil collapses.
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Where millipedes and mites once proliferated, now there are only worms. “If you were to think about the soil food web as the African savanna, it’s like taking out all the animals and just putting in elephants—a ton of elephants,” Dobson says.
With their food and shelter gone, salamanders suffer and nesting birds find themselves dangerously exposed. Plants like trillium, lady’s slipper, and Canada mayflower vanish, too. This may be because the worms disrupt the networks of symbiotic fungus that many native plants depend on, or because worms directly consume the plants’ seeds. Or that native species, accustomed to spongy duff, are ill-prepared to root into the hard soil left behind when the worms have finished eating. It could be all of the above.
Perhaps most worryingly, early studies suggest that worms can sometimes halt the regeneration of trees. Josef Görres, a soil scientist at the University of Vermont, says he often struggles to find a single seedling in invaded portions of New England’s famous maple forests. His theory is that the worms take out all the understory plants, leaving nothing for deer to chew on but the young trees. And that could spell trouble for the region’s prized maple syrup industry. “In 100 years’ time, maybe it’s going to be Aunt Jemima,” he says. “That’s a real bad horror story for people in Vermont.”
[Read: How to make a half-gallon of maple syrup in 20 easy steps]
These sweeping powers are why earthworms are often called ecosystem engineers. And Dobson and her colleagues fear that jumping worms pose an even greater threat than their European predecessors. Jumping worms appear to have many of the same effects, except that they grow larger and exist in dense colonies, sometimes numbering more than a hundred individuals per square meter of ground. And while European worms range throughout the upper four to six feet of soil, jumping worms stick to the top six inches or so, churning it relentlessly into a loose sediment that Dobson likens to ground beef. (Others I talked to compared it to coffee grounds.)
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The disturbed soil erodes easily, dries out quickly, and generally makes poor habitat for many plants. At McDonald’s, Mark pipes up to say that he noticed patches of it during his basic training at Fort Knox last year. While there, he cursed the lack of understory in which to take cover during tactical exercises.
Dobson explains that the worms act like a funnel, winnowing away the diversity of the forest. First, they take out the most sensitive native plants, leaving only hardy species like poison ivy and Virginia creeper. Then they prime the ground for invasives. Even more than their European relatives, jumping worms seem to reshape the forest from the ground up.
“Every single thing that they do is transformative,” Dobson says.
Until it moves, a jumping worm looks a lot like any other earthworm: long and thin, with rosy brown skin divided into bellows-like segments. Experts will tell you to look at the clitellum—the band that holds the reproductive organs of worms, which are hermaphrodites. In European worms, the smooth, pink clitellum is found closer to the middle of the body. On jumping worms, it’s milky white and sits near the head.
There are many species of jumping worms. The first arrived in the United States in California in the 1860s. Others have been in the Southeast for more than a century—long enough to earn colloquial names like the Alabama Jumper. (You can buy these online, too, but worm experts advise against spreading them.)
The three species that Dobson and others worry most about are newer arrivals, and likely hitchhiked on imported plants, where they caught the attention of groundskeepers. “The gardeners were out there saying, ‘I know these are earthworms; they are supposed to be good. But I swear, they are killing my plants,’” Dobson says.
An oft-repeated anecdote holds that jumping worms first appeared in Washington, D.C., among the cherry trees in 1912. By the 1940s, they were spotted at the Bronx Zoo, where one species was later raised to feed the resident platypuses. They have been in a few other New York parks for more than 50 years, which is why Dobson chose these forests to study their long-term ecological effects. For some reason, however, jumping worm populations have exploded in the last decade or so. And the worms are spreading even faster than Dobson imagined—including within city limits.
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Related: The best wildlife pictures of last year (Photos)
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Now in its 55th year, the Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year award celebrates the best in nature photography and photojournalism from around the world. Showcasing a broad range of visual styles, subjects and techniques, the annual competition attracts photographic work from both amateurs and professionals, with this year's iteration seeing almost 50,000 entries submitted from photographers working in 100 countries across the globe. Click through to see some of the winning entries.
Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. A selection of this year's winning and commended entries will be exhibited at the Natural History Museum in London, England, from Oct. 18 2019 - May 31 2020. For more information, and how to book tickets, visit their website.
(Pictured) 'The moment' (overall winner)
Photographer: Yongqing Bao (China)
Category: Behaviour (Mammals)
"It was early spring on the alpine meadowland of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, in China’s Qilian Mountains National Nature Reserve, and very cold. The marmot was hungry. It was still in its winter coat and not long out of its six-month, winter hibernation, spent deep underground with the rest of its colony of 30 or so. It had spotted the fox an hour earlier, and sounded the alarm to warn its companions to get back underground. But the fox itself hadn’t reacted, and was still in the same position. So the marmot had ventured out of its burrow again to search for plants to graze on. The fox continued to lie still. Then suddenly she rushed forward. And with lightning reactions, Yongqing seized his shot. His fast exposure froze the attack. The intensity of life and death was written on their faces – the predator mid-move, her long canines revealed, and the terrified prey, forepaw outstretched, with long claws adapted for digging, not fighting. Such predator-prey interaction is part of the natural ecology of the plateau ecosystem, where rodents, in particular the plateau pikas (smaller than marmots), are keystone species. Not only are they the main prey for foxes and nearly all the other predators, they are key to the health of the grassland, digging burrows that also provide homes for many small animals including birds, lizards and insects, and creating micro-habitats that increase the diversity of plant species and therefore the richness of the meadows."
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'The equal match'
Photographer: Ingo Arndt (Germany)
Category: Behaviour (Mammals)
"Fur flies as the puma launches her attack on the guanaco. For Ingo, the picture marked the culmination of seven months tracking wild pumas on foot, enduring extreme cold and biting winds in the Torres del Paine region of Patagonia, Chile. The female was Ingo’s main subject and was used to his presence. But to record an attack, he had to be facing both prey and puma. This required spotting a potential target – here a big male guanaco grazing apart from his herd on a small hill – and then positioning himself downwind, facing the likely direction the puma would come from. To monitor her movements when she was out of his sight, he positioned his two trackers so they could keep watch with binoculars and radio Ingo as the female approached her prey. A puma is fast – aided by a long, flexible spine (like that of the closely related cheetah) – but only over short distances. For half an hour, she crept up on the guanaco. The light was perfect, bright enough for a fast exposure but softened by thin cloud, and Ingo was in the right position. When the puma was within about 30 feet (10 metres), she sprinted and jumped. As her claws made contact, the guanaco twisted to the side,his last grassy mouthful flying in the wind. The puma then leapt on his back and tried to deliver a crushing bite to his neck. Running, he couldn’t throw her off, and it was only when he dropped his weight on her, seemingly deliberately, that she let go, just missing a kick that could easily have knocked out her teeth or broken bones. Four out of five puma hunts end like this – unsuccessfully."
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'Frozen moment'
Photographer: Jérémie Villet (France)
Category: Rising Star Portfolio Award
"Pushing against each other, two male Dall’s sheep in full winter-white coats stand immobile at the end of a fierce clash on a windswept snowy slope. For years, Jérémie had dreamed of photographing the pure-white North American mountain sheep against snow. Travelling to the Yukon, he rented a van and spent a month following Dall’s sheep during the rutting season, when mature males compete for mating rights. On a steep ridge, these two rams attempted to duel, but strong winds, a heavy blizzard and extreme cold (-40°) forced them into a truce. Lying in the snow, Jérémie was also battling with the brutal weather – not only were his fingers frozen, but the ferocious wind was making it difficult to hold his lens steady. So determined was he to create the photograph he had in mind that he continued firing off frames, unaware that his feet were succumbing to frostbite, which it would take months to recover from. He had just one sharp image, but that was also the vision of his dreams – the horns and key facial features of the mountain sheep etched into the white canvas, their fur blending into the snowscape. "
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'Snow-plateau nomads'
Photographer: Shangzhen Fan (China)
Category: Animals in Their Environment
"A small herd of male chiru leaves a trail of footprints on a snow-veiled slope in the Kumukuli Desert of China’s Altun Shan National Nature Reserve. These nimble antelopes – the males with long, slender, black horns – are high-altitude specialists, found only on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. To survive at elevations of up to 18,000 feet (5,500 meters), where temperatures fall to -40 ̊F (-40 ̊C), they have unique underfur –shahtoosh (Persian for ‘king of wools’) – very light, very warm and the main reason for the species’ drastic decline. A million chiru once ranged across this vast plateau, but commercial hunting in the 1980s and 1990s left only about 70,000 individuals. Rigorous protection has seen a small increase, but demand – mainly from the West – for shahtoosh shawls still exists. It takes three to five hides to make a single shawl (the wool cannot be collected from wild antelopes, so they have to be killed). In winter, many chiru migrate to the relative warmth of the remote Kumukuli Desert. For years, Shangzhen has made the arduous, high-altitude journey to record them. On this day the air was fresh and clear after heavy snow. Shadows flowed from the undulating slopes around a warm island of sand that the chiru were heading for, leaving braided footprints in their wake. From his vantage point a kilometer away (more than half a mile), Shangzhen drew the contrasting elements together before they vanished into the warmth of sun and sand."
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'Snow exposure'
Photographer: Max Waugh (U.S.)
Category: Black and White
"In a winter whiteout in Yellowstone National Park, a lone American bison stands weathering the silent snow storm. Shooting from his vehicle, Max could only just make out its figure on the hillside. Bison survive in Yellowstone’s harsh winter months by feeding on grasses and sedges beneath the snow. Swinging their huge heads from side to side, using powerful neck muscles – visible as their distinctive humps –they sweep aside the snow to get to the forage below.Slowing his shutter speed to blur the snow and ‘paint a curtain of lines across the bison’s silhouette’, Max created an abstract image that combines the stillness of the animal with the movement of the snowfall. Slightly overexposing it to enhance the whiteout and converting the photograph to black and white accentuated the simplicity of the scene."
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'Land of the eagle'
Photographer: Audun Rikardsen (Norway)
Category: Behaviour (Birds)
"High on a ledge, on the coast near his home in northern Norway, Audun carefully positioned an old tree branch that he hoped would make a perfect golden eagle lookout. To this he bolted a tripod head with a camera, flashes and motion sensor attached, and built himself a hide a short distance away. From time to time, he left road-kill carrion nearby. Very gradually – over the next three years – a golden eagle got used to the camera and started to use the branch regularly to survey the coast below. Golden eagles need large territories, which most often are in open, mountainous areas inland. But in northern Norway, they can be found by the coast, even in the same area as sea eagles. They hunt and scavenge a variety of prey – from fish, amphibians and insects to birds and small and medium-sized mammals such as foxes and fawns. They have also been recorded as killing an adult reindeer.But livestock farmers in Norway have accused them of hunting sheep and reindeer rather than just scavenging carcasses, and there is now pressure to make it easier to kill eagles legally. Scientists, though, maintain that the eagles are a scapegoat for livestock deaths and that killing them will have little effect on farmers’ losses. For their size –the weight of a domestic cat but with wings spanning more than 6 1/2 feet (2 meters) – golden eagles are surprisingly fast and agile, soaring, gliding, diving and performing spectacular, undulating display flights. Audun’s painstaking work captures the eagle’s power as it comes in to land, talons outstretched, poised for a commanding view of its coastal realm."
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'Another barred migrant'
Photographer: Alejandro Prieto (Mexico)
Category: Wildlife Photojournalism (Single Image)
"Under a luminous star-studded Arizona sky, an enormous image of a male jaguar is projected onto a section of the US-Mexico border fence – symbolic, says Alejandro, of ‘the jaguars’ past and future existence in the United States’. Today, the jaguar’s stronghold is in the Amazon, but historically, the range of this large, powerful cat included the southwestern US. Over the past century, human impact – from hunting, which was banned in 1997 when jaguars became a protected species, and habitat destruction – has resulted in the species becoming virtually extinct in the US. Today, two male jaguars are known to inhabit the borderlands of New Mexico and Arizona – probably originating from reserves in northwest Mexico. But with no recent records of a female – a hunter in Arizona shot the last verified female in 1963 – any chance of a breeding population becoming re-established rests on the contentious border between the two countries remaining partially open. A penetrable border is also vitally important for many other species at risk, including Sonoran ocelots and migrants such as Sonoran pronghorns. The photograph that Alejandro projected is of a Mexican jaguar, captured with camera traps he has been setting on both sides of the border and monitoring for more than two years. The shot of the border fence was created to highlight President Trump’s plan to seal off the entire US‑Mexico frontier with an impenetrable wall and the impact it will have on the movement of wildlife, sealing the end of jaguars in the US."
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'Pondworld'
Photographer: Manuel Plaickner (Italy)
Category: Behaviour (Amphibians and Reptiles)
"Every spring, for more than a decade, Manuel had followed the mass migration of common frogs in South Tyrol, Italy. Rising spring temperatures stir the frogs to emerge from the sheltered spots where they spent the winter (often under rocks or wood or even buried at the bottom of ponds). They need to breed and head straight for water, usually to where they themselves were spawned. Mating involves a male grasping his partner, piggyback, until she lays eggs – up to 2,000, each in a clear jelly capsule – which he then fertilizes. Manuel needed to find the perfect pond in the right light at just the right time. Though common frogs are widespread across Europe, numbers are thought to be declining and local populations threatened, mainly by habitat degradation (from pollution and drainage) and disease, and in some countries, from hunting. In South Tyrol there are relatively few ponds where massive numbers of frogs still congregate for spawning, and activity peaks after just a few days. Manuel immersed himself in one of the larger ponds,at the edge of woodland, where several hundred frogs had gathered in clear water. He watched the spawn build up until the moment arrived for the picture he had in mind – soft natural light, lingering frogs, harmonious colors and dreamy reflections. Within a few days the frogs had gone, and the maturing eggs had risen to the surface."
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'The huddle'
Photographer: Stefan Christmann (Germany)
Category: Wildlife Photographer of the Year Portfolio Award
"More than 5,000 male emperor penguins huddle against the wind and late winter cold on the sea ice of Antarctica’s Atka Bay, in front of the Ekström Ice Shelf. It was a calm day, but when Stefan took off his glove to delicately focus the tilt-shift lens, the cold ‘felt like needles in my fingertips’. Each paired male bears a precious cargo on his feet – a single egg – tucked under a fold of skin (the brood pouch) as he faces the harshest winter on Earth, with temperatures that fall below -40 ̊F (-40 ̊C), severe wind chill and intense blizzards. The females entrust their eggs to their mates to incubate and then head for the sea, where they feed for up to three months. Physical adaptations – including body fat and several layers of scale-like feathers, ruffled only in the strongest of winds – help the males endure the cold, but survival depends on cooperation. The birds snuggle together, backs to the wind and heads down, sharing their body heat. Those on the windward edge peel off and shuffle down the flanks of the huddle to reach the more sheltered side, creating a constant procession through the warm center, with the whole huddle gradually shifting downwind. The center can become so cozy that the huddle temporarily breaks up to cool off, releasing clouds of steam. From mid‑May until mid-July, the sun does not rise above the horizon, but at the end of winter, when this picture was taken, there are a few hours of twilight. That light combined with modern camera technology and a longish exposure enabled Stefan to create such a bright picture."
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'Humming surprise'
Photographer: Thomas Easterbrook (U.K.)
Category: 10 years and under
"On holiday with his family in France, Thomas was eating supper in the garden on a warm summer’s evening when he heard the humming. The sound was coming from the fast-beating wings of a hummingbird hawk moth, hovering in front of an autumn sage, siphoning up nectar with its long proboscis.Its wings are reputed to beat faster than the hummingbirds that pollinate the plant in its native home of Mexico and Texas. With the moth moving quickly from flower to flower it was a challenge to frame a picture. But Thomas managed it, while capturing the stillness of the moth’s head against the blur of its wings."
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'Show time'
Photographer: Jasper Doest (Netherlands)
Category: Wildlife Photojournalist Story Award
"For the past 17 years Riku, a Japanese macaque legally captured from the wild, has performed comedy skits three times a day in front of large audiences at the Nikkō Saru Gundan theater north of Tokyo. These highly popular shows, which attract both locals and tourists, derive from Sarumawashi (translated as ‘monkey dancing’) – a traditional Japanese performance art that has been around for more than 1,000 years. The appeal of these contemporary performances lies in the anthropomorphic appearance of the trained macaques –invariably dressed in costumes – that move around the stage on two legs performing tricks and engaging in ridiculous role-plays with their human trainers. Photography is banned at shows, and so it took a long time for Jasper to gain permission to take pictures. Recording Riku’s performance on stage – here with one of the trainers dressed in a Scottish kilt – he was appalled that such intelligent animals, once considered sacred, are now exploited for laughs. Riku was finally retired in 2018."
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'The architectural army'
Photographer: Daniel Kronauer (U.S.)
Category: Behaviour (Invertebrates)
"At dusk, Daniel tracked the colony of nomadic army ants as it moved, travelling up to a quarter of a mile (400 meters) through the rainforest near La Selva Biological Station, northeastern Costa Rica. While it was still dark, the ants would use their bodies to build a new daytime nest (bivouac) to house the queen and larvae. They would form a scaffold of vertical chains (see top right) by interlocking claws on their feet and then create a network of chambers and tunnels into which the larvae and queen would be moved from the last bivouac. At dawn, the colony would send out raiding parties to gather food, mostly other ant species. After 17 days on the move, the colony would then find shelter – a hollow tree trunk,for example – and stay put while the queen laid more eggs, resuming wandering after three weeks. The shape of their temporary bivouacs would depend on the surroundings – most were cone- or curtain-shaped and partly occluded by vegetation. But one night, the colony assembled in the open, against a fallen branch and two large leaves that were evenly spaced and of similar height,prompting a structure spanning 20 inches (50 centimeters) and resembling ‘a living cathedral with three naves.' Daniel very gently positioned his camera on the forest floor within centimeters of the nest, using a wide angle to take in its environment, but wary of upsetting a few hundred thousand army ants. ‘You mustn’t breathe in their direction or touch anything connected to the bivouac,’ he says. The result was a perfect illustration of the concept of an insect society as a superorganism."
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'Creation'
Photographer: Luis Vilariño (Spain)
Category: Earth’s Environments
"Red-hot lava tongues flow into the Pacific Ocean, producing huge plumes of noxious laze – a mix of acid steam and fine glass particles – as they meet the crashing waves. This was the front line of the biggest eruption for 200 years of one of the world’s most active volcanos – Kîlauea, on Hawaii’s Big Island. Kîlauea started spewing out lava through 24 fissures on its lower East Rift at the start of May 2018. In a matter of days, travelling at speed, the lava had reached the Pacific on the island’s southeast coast and begun the creation of a huge delta of new land. It would continue flowing for three months. By the time Luis could hire a helicopter with permission to fly over the area, the new land extended more than a mile (1.6 kilometer) from shore. Luis had limited time to work, with the helicopter forbidden to descend more than 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) and with the noxious clouds of acid vapor filling the sky. He had chosen to fly in late afternoon, so the side light would reveal the relief and cloud texture. Thick clouds of haze covered the coast, but as dusk fell, there was a sudden change in wind direction and the acidic clouds moved aside to reveal a glimpse of the lava lagoons and rivers. Framing his shot through the helicopter’s open door, Luis captured the collision boundary between molten rock and water and the emergence of new land."
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'Face of deception'
Photographer: Ripan Biswas (India)
Category: Animal Portraits
"It may look like an ant, but then count its legs – and note those palps either side of the folded fangs. Ripan was photographing a red weaver ant colony in the subtropical forest of India’s Buxa Tiger Reserve, in West Bengal, when he spotted the odd-looking ant. On a close look, he realized it was a tiny ant-mimicking crab spider, just 5 millimeters (1/5 inch) long. Many spider species imitate ants in appearance and behavior – even smell. Infiltrating an ant colony can help a spider wanting to eat ants or to avoid being eaten by them or by predators that dislike ants. This particular spider seemed to be hunting. By reverse-mounting his lens, Ripan converted it to a macro, capable of taking extreme close-ups. But with the electrical connection lost between the lens and camera,settings had to be adjusted manually, and focusing was tricky, as the viewfinder became dark while he narrowed the aperture to maximize the depth of field. Here, the lens was so close that the diminutive arachnid seems to have been able to see its reflection and is raising its legs as a warning."
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'Tapestry of life'
Photographer: Zorica Kovacevic (Serbia/USA)
Category: Plants and Fungi
"Festooned with bulging orange velvet, trimmed with grey lace, the arms of a Monterey cypress tree weave an otherworldly canopy over Pinnacle Point, in Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, California, U.S. This tiny, protected coastal zone is the only place in the world where natural conditions combine to conjure this magical scene. Though the Monterey cypress is widely planted (valued for its resistance to wind, salt, drought and pests), it is native only on the Californian coast in just two groves. Its spongy orange cladding is in fact a mass of green algae spectacularly colored by carotenoid pigments, which depend on the tree for physical support but photosynthesize their own food. The algal species occurs widely, but it is found on Monterey cypress trees only at Point Lobos, which has the conditions it needs – clean air and moisture, delivered by sea breezes and fog. The vibrant orange is set off by the tangles of grey lace lichen (a combination of alga and fungus), also harmless to the trees. After several days experimenting, Zorica decided on a close-up abstract of one particular tree. With reserve visitors to this popular spot confined to marked trails, she was lucky to get overcast weather (avoiding harsh light) at a quiet moment. She had just enough time to focus-stack 22 images (merging the sharp parts of all the photos) to reveal the colorful maze in depth."
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While in New York, I meet with Clara Pregitzer, a forester at the nonprofit Natural Areas Conservancy, who takes me on a tour of Forest Park in Queens. When I find her next to the statue of a somber soldier at the Richmond Hill War Memorial, she’s wearing tortoiseshell glasses, a loose white blouse, and dirty jeans cuffed above leather boots. We stroll up the tree-lined avenue, then turn off onto a shady path. “This is one of my favorite parks for showing off high-quality forest,” Pregitzer says.
Indeed, it’s a beautiful spot. Hundred-year-old oaks stretch their boughs across the wide trails and the understory is neither bare nor overgrown. (Pregitzer says the park has good “sight lines.”) The gently undulating landscape is a textbook example of the “knob and kettle” terrain left behind by retreating glaciers.
Earlier, over email, Pregitzer had warned that we might not find any jumping worms here. In 2013 and 2014, she led a survey of New York’s green spaces, tallying up the trees and understory plants and noting the distribution of jumping worms. She found heavy infestations in 12 percent of the plots she studied, though they may have been present in close to a third. Less than 5 percent of the plots at Forest Park showed signs of jumping worm activity.
But within ten minutes of walking, I spot the coffee-ground soil on the edge of the trail. Pregitzer decides to do her own version of the mustard pour: a dilute solution of dish soap. Within a few minutes, a parade of jumping worms emerges from the ground.“Oh, nasty,” says Pregitzer, scrunching up her nose.
We follow the worm soil away from the trail, 10 feet, 15 feet, 50 feet, into a shallow depression. There, we don’t need the dish soap. Brushing away the leaf litter reveals a dozen worms in an area the size of a dinner plate. Pregitzer picks up a six-inch-long monster with a stick. “Nasty,” she says again.
She is visibly unsettled by the discovery. “This is one of the best parks, and now that we are digging in a little bit and really looking for them, they’re everywhere,” she says, gazing around. “There have got to be, like, millions.” We keep walking for another hour or so, and, much to her dismay, find only one worm-free site—on a steep hill where the topsoil has washed away.
That’s a big change from a few years ago, and when I report the news to Annise Dobson, who is using Pregitzer’s survey data in her own work, she immediately decides to revisit the original study sites. A week after I get home, Dobson emails me to say that she’s finding worms everywhere. “I'm floored and honestly reeling from the extent of it,” she says. They are now in 64 percent of the plots across the city.
© Provided by The Atlantic Myriam Wares It’s not entirely clear how the jumping worms have spread. Conventional knowledge holds that they can’t cover much ground on their own—perhaps 30-odd feet in a year, although one researcher I talk to swears he’s seen a single worm move that far in an afternoon. Their cocoons, which are about the size of peppercorns, can be carried much farther in water, and scientists have noticed that invasions often march down hillsides and along waterways.
But experts suspect that the blame lies primarily with humans. It’s all too easy to unwittingly transport worms and cocoons in plants, mulch, and soil, in the treads of shoes and tires, or caked onto landscaping equipment.
[Read: Is the insect apocalypse really upon us?]
Perhaps we’ve been moving more earth in recent years, and carrying worms with it. A few major nurseries could be spreading them by accident. Or the worms may be benefiting from favorable conditions or some clever adaptation to their new environment. Whatever the reason, jumping worms have fanned out across the northern United States over the past few decades and continue to expand their territory. They were first identified in Rhode Island in 2015 and in Oregon in 2016, though they may have arrived earlier in both places.
As of late 2017, there had only been one sighting of jumping worms in Canada, but the country’s vast tracts of carbon-rich, worm-free boreal forest are already under siege by their European cousins. And scientists there know it’s only a matter of time before the jumping worms follow.
Bernie Williams remembers when she discovered jumping worms in Wisconsin. October 3, 2013, was “the day that ruined many of our lives,” says Williams, a worm expert at the state Department of Natural Resources.
She was leading a group of researchers and managers on a tour of the University of Wisconsin arboretum. Scientists already knew European worms had taken up residence there, and Williams led the visitors to a heavily invaded spot. But as soon as she saw the soil, she knew something was wrong. “These worms were everywhere,” she says.
Over the next three years, the jumping worms stormed across 25 acres of forest in the arboretum, effectively eradicating their European rivals. They have now been reported in 52 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, Williams tells me, disproving predictions that the harsh winters would keep them at bay.
Many Madison residents know and loathe the worms, which can decimate flowers and vegetables. At a community garden near campus, I meet a man sifting compost through a screen as a precaution. “That usually catches ’em,” he says.
Sometimes, under the right conditions, the worms can reach “infestation” levels, and come pouring out of a house’s foundations “like Medusa’s head,” Williams says. “If you like invertebrates, you squeal with delight.” Homeowners, however, tend to be less thrilled, and in bad years, Williams spends her days fielding calls from disgruntled residents.
Dobson hears similar frustrations in heavily impacted parts of the East Coast. People are seeing changes in their gardens, in their local woods, even on their kids’ soccer fields (the worms can damage the roots of turf grasses). She’s watched people break down in tears and pick fights with their neighbors over who’s to blame for introducing the worms. “A lot of my time is taken up trying to comfort very upset people,” Dobson says.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much anyone can do once invasive earthworms get established. This becomes clear one day as I watch Brad Herrick and Marie Johnston crawl around for hours in Wisconsin’s mosquito-infested woods, plucking jumping worms from inside a series of two-foot-wide metal enclosures. Herrick and Johnston, both researchers at the UW arboretum, want to test one of the few promising weapons against jumping worms: a low-nitrogen fertilizer called Early Bird, commonly used on golf courses. To assess its effectiveness, they’ve been manually removing all the worms from each of 24 high-walled rings before adding back a known number of victims. (When I ask Herrick what they do with the evicted worms, he says, “We gently chuck them.”)
The problem is that the cocoons act like a seed bank. Mature worms lay them in the fall before they die, and the cocoons hatch throughout the spring and summer, providing a seemingly endless source of young worms. “It’s like a two-headed monster,” Herrick says.
Herrick and Johnston each claim an enclosure and start sweeping through the leaf litter. In his first, Herrick finds 37 jumping worms; Johnston counts 52 in hers. Then they move on to the next. This is their sixth removal attempt, and Herrick is baffled by the high number of holdouts. “Maybe they are climbing in,” Johnston muses, only to look over and see a worm crawling up the outside of a nearby enclosure. “C**p!”
Even if Early Bird is effective, Herrick says, it will only be useful for small infestations in gardens or urban landscapes. Scientists are wary of applying it to forests. Prescribed burning shows some promise, but everyone agrees that by far the best solution to the worm problem is to stop spreading them in the first place.
Related: Close to extinction - critically endangered animals (Photos)
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Many animals are on the brink of extinction due to habitat loss, poaching or changing environments. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains the IUCN Red List that tracks critically endangered species and those that are already extinct in the wild. Take a look at some of the world's most threatened species.
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Spix's Macaw
Made famous by the 2011 animated musical-comedy “Rio,” the Spix’s macaw has teetered on the edge of extinction for over two decades; it has been listed as “Critically Endangered” by the IUCN since 1994. Hunted for the illegal live bird trade, this macaw has also been hit by loss of its woodland habitat and the introduction of aggressive African bees in what remains of its range. The species has been declared possibly extinct in the wild. According to IUCN, there are less than 50 individuals alive in captivity.
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Chinese giant salamander
Native to China, the giant salamander can grow to nearly six feet (two meters) in length and is regarded as the world’s largest amphibian. Current population trends indicate decreasing numbers for a species that was quite common even as recent as 30 years ago. The major threats facing the species are commercial exploitation for human consumption and habitat destruction due to mining.
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Northern white rhinoceros
Also called the Northern square-lipped rhino, they used to be found in several east and central African countries before going extinct in the wild. The world's last three, a male called Sudan (pictured), his daughter Najin and his granddaughter Fatu, were kept at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. On March 19, 2018, 45-year-old Sudan died from multiple age-related issues, leaving only two females to save the species.
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Western lowland gorilla
The most common gorilla subspecies in the Congo Basin, their population has decreased rapidly due to poaching and disease, and according to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), currently about 100,000 of them remain.
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Javan rhinoceros
These rhinos are dusky gray in color and have a single horn of up to about 10 inches (25.4 centimeters). Their skin has a number of loose folds, giving the appearance of armor plating. Habitat loss and poaching over the years have drastically reduced their numbers. The estimated population size is 46-66, found at the Ujung Kulon National Park in Java, Indonesia.
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Amur leopard
Found in the Russian Far East, Amur leopards are solitary hunters. Nimble-footed and strong, they carry and hide unfinished kills so as to not attract other predators. Loss of habitat due to rampant human activities is threatening their existence. As per WWF, only 20-25 remain in Russia and nearly another dozen in China.
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Black rhinoceros
One of the oldest mammals on Earth, black rhinos were once found extensively along the eastern coast of the African continent. Rampant hunting and poaching have led to a sharp decline in their numbers over the last few decades. Data from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) indicates there are approximately 5,000 individuals left today.
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Sumatran elephant
Feeding on a variety of plants and depositing seeds, Sumatran elephants contribute to a healthy forest ecosystem. Civil conflicts, hunting and poaching for tusks have reduced their population enough for them to be marked critically endangered by IUCN.
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Sumatran tiger
With a dangerously dwindling population, Sumatran tigers are on the watch list of animals that need protection. Found in patches of forest on the Sumatra island, these tigers are threatened due to rampant deforestation and poaching.
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Saola
Saola was discovered in Vietnam in 1992, after the recovery of a skull with unusually long horns, at a hunter's home. It was one of the most spectacular zoological discoveries of the 20th century and is one of the world's rarest large animals. Hunting, poaching, habitat fragmentation and snares threaten their existence, and their population is estimated to be less than 750, according to IUCN data.
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Hawksbill sea turtle
Found throughout the world’s tropical oceans, hawksbill turtles have inhabited the planet for over 100 million years. A vital link in marine ecosystem, they help maintain the health of coral reefs and seagrass beds. They are extensively poached for their colored and patterned shells, which are sold in the market at high prices as "tortoiseshells." According to WWF, their population has declined by over 80 percent in the last century.
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South China tiger
These tigers were hunted in thousands before a ban was imposed by the Chinese government in 1979. According to WWF, about 30-80 tigers were estimated to be existing in 1996, but no sighting in the wild has prompted scientists to consider them as "functionally extinct."
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Cross river gorilla
Very similar in appearance to the western lowland gorilla, these gorillas live in the Congo Basin and face poaching and habitat loss due to human encroachment. WWF data suggest that not more than 200 to 300 of this species exist in the wild.
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Malayan pangolin
Also called Sunda or Javan pangolin, they are found widely in Southeast Asia, from southern China to Borneo, and are known for their protective, scaly body armor. They are killed increasingly for their flesh and scales.
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Yangtze finless porpoise
Found in the Yangtze River and known for their mischievous smile and an intelligence level comparable to that of gorillas, this aquatic creature is threatened by human activities and pollution. According to IUCN, only 500-1,800 of these dolphins survive today.
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Sumatran orangutan
These orangutans are fruit eaters and play a vital role in the dispersal of seeds over a huge area. Once found across the Sumatran island, they have now been reduced to pockets of the island's northern part due to poaching and illegal pet trade. According to WWF, their population is a little over 14,600.
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Sumatran rhinoceros
In the last 15 years, only two captive female Sumatran rhinos have given birth. There are three known subspecies: while two of them are found on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, the third is believed to be extinct. Poaching poses the greatest threat to these animals. IUCN reports show their estimated population to be less than 275.
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Guam rail
These flightless birds once inhabited Guam in large numbers before the island was invaded by brown tree snakes, which led to their predation and plummeting in number. Today, they are confined to a captive-breeding facility in Guam and across a few zoos in the U.S. In the last couple of decades, efforts have been made to release small batches of rails in a controlled environment to help promote their breeding. According to IUCN, they are extinct in the wild.
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Mountain pygmy possum
These mammals, found in alpine and subalpine boulder fields and rocky scree in south-eastern Australia, were believed to be extinct until 1896. However, the rediscovery of a single living specimen in a ski club lodge on Mount Hotham, Victoria, in 1966 revived hope for their survival. Destruction of their habitat is the major reason for their dwindling numbers.
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Northern hairy-nosed wombat
Indigenous to Australia, these shy animals had completely disappeared in the early 20th century after the loss of their only two known habitats in southern Queensland and New South Wales. In the 1930s, a small population was spotted in Epping Forest National Park in Queensland. According to IUCN, nearly 80 mature individuals exist now.
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Pygmy three-toed sloth
They are known to be one of the slowest animals in the world – so slow that algae grow on their back, giving them a natural cover from predators. Found only in Isla Escudo de Veraguas, an isolated Panamanian island in the Caribbean, their population has suffered due to destruction of habitat.
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Addax
Also known as white antelope or screwhorn antelope, these animals thrived in the extreme climate of the Sahara Desert for thousands of years. However, destruction of habitat and frenzied hunting have forced them to the verge of extinction. As per IUCN, there are less than 90 of them left in the Termit Massif Reserve in Niger.
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Philippine crocodile
This freshwater species is on the verge of extinction due to habitat destruction, hunting and dynamite fishing. As per IUCN, less than 140 adults survive, and aggressive conservation efforts are on to protect them from going extinct.
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Hula painted frog
In 2011, a park ranger in Israel found one specimen of the Hula painted frog, considered extinct since the 1950s due to the draining of the 15,000-acre Lake Hula — their natural habitat. The discovery of a second specimen a few days later revived the hopes of their survival.
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Lord Howe Island stick insect
Commonly referred to as "land lobster," these nocturnal insects were primarily found in Lord Howe Island in the Tasman Sea. However, in 1918, the introduction of black rats by a ship that had run aground near the island led to their massive predation. They were believed to be extinct until they were rediscovered on a nearby island in 2001. According to IUCN, nearly 35 individuals exist today.
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Common skate
The common skate has become uncommon across northwestern Europe and the Mediterranean and Black Seas. They are often caught accidentally in fishing nets, and their re-population is difficult because they are long-lived and slow to mature.
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Alagoas curassow
Locally called mitu mitu, the Alagoas curassow was found in the forests of northeastern Brazil. Last seen in its natural habitat in the late 1980s, there are only 130 of them in two aviaries. According to IUCN, they are extinct in the wild. They were lost due to deforestation and hunting.
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European eel
Since the early 1980s, an almost 90 percent decrease in the population of the European eel has prompted a ban on their export throughout the European Union. Water pollution, changes in climate, dams, overfishing and parasites are probable causes of its decline.
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Hawaiian crow
Found only in Hawaii, U.S., the last-known crow disappeared from the wild in 2002 – making them getting classified as "extinct in the wild" by IUCN. There are a few in captivity, since they are especially susceptible to environmental fluctuations and avian malaria.
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Scimitar-horned oryx
Once commonly found across North Africa, scimitar oryx have been extinct in the wild since 2000 and only a few hundred survive in captivity. They are kept in protected areas because they are prized by game hunters for their horns and the local population used their flesh and hide.
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Malayan tiger
Found only in the southern tip of Thailand and the Malay peninsula, only about 80-120 of these tigers still survive, as per IUCN. Illegal hunting for parts used in folk medicine and loss of forests have caused their population to decline by more than 25 percent in the last generation.
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Wyoming toad
There are no self-sustaining Wyoming toads in the wild and they are only found in the Mortenson Lake National Wildlife Refuge in the U.S. According to IUCN data, they are classified as "extinct in the wild," with their number slowly declining due to diseases and droughts in parts of the Laramie River basin.
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Socorro dove
These birds were last sighted in their natural habitat, Socorro Island, Mexico, in 1972, making them extinct in the wild. There are around 150 of them in captivity, as per 2016 IUCN data.
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Bornean orangutan
Destruction of forests in the island nation and hunting have led to a decrease of 50 percent in their population over the last 60 years, making them critically endangered. According to IUCN, about 104,700 of them remain.
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Russian sturgeon
Overfishing for caviar and loss of spawning sites due to construction of dams have led to a 90 percent decline in their population. These fish are found in the Black Sea basin and the Caspian Sea but are estimated to go extinct soon due to illegal fishing.
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Staghorn coral
A branching, stony coral, it is found throughout the warmer Atlantic waters, the Great Barrier Reef, the western coast of South America and Southeast Asia. Over the last 30 years, 80 percent of their population has been lost due to climate change and diseases.
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Totoaba
These fish were initially found in America's Colorado River delta and in the Gulf of California around Mexico, but river degradation has left them endemic to Mexican waters. They have been extensively fished since the 1940s, as their swim bladder is a delicacy, further reducing their number. Commercial fishing of the species was banned in 1975 and the Mexican government has started a program to rescue and conserve them.
MSN UK are Empowering Happiness for mental health awareness month. Find out more about our campaign and the charities working to stop people falling into crisis here.
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Johnston and Herrick recently published a study showing that heating compost and soil to 104 degrees Fahrenheit effectively kills both worms and cocoons. That’s something that mulch and compost companies could do. The bigger challenge is educating the public, which Herrick has made a personal mission.
The day I visit, he and Johnston give a talk to a few dozen teachers who are visiting the arboretum for a training workshop. That same night, he drives three hours across the Illinois border to speak with a group of master gardeners. He tells them to buy only mulch and compost that have been treated to kill stowaways, and to avoid city compost made of leaves collected from sites all over town. He urges them to inspect potted plants for jumping worms and to buy bare-root varieties whenever possible. Some scientists go even further, advising local garden clubs not to hold plant swaps at all.
[Read: When conservationists kill lots (and lots) of animals]
Under its invasive-species rules, Wisconsin has officially banned the transportation and sale of jumping worms, as has New York. But Williams says the state focuses more on helping limit worm movement than on punishing people who spread them, since it’s usually unintentional.
The day after our meeting, she heads up north to talk to a group of loggers about the risks of invasive worms and what they can do to stop them. She recommends using a broom to knock soil off trucks and tires. She’s under no illusion that this will solve the problem, but “you’ll slow them down,” she says.
In general, it’s hard to change people’s opinions about earthworms. “We have this Eurocentric mind-set that whatever is good in Europe has got to be good here,” Dobson says. “People don’t take it really seriously unless they’re actually seeing the impacts on the ground.”
In a perverse way, the jumping worm has been something of a blessing: Unlike European worms, they elicit an intense feeling of repulsion in most people. “They only get more gross over time,” Dobson says.
“They are the stuff of nightmares,” says Justin Richardson, a soil biogeochemist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who studies heavy-metal accumulation in worms. Remembering his first encounter with them, he says, “It was like Night of the Living Dead.”
Bernie Williams is the only person I talk to who has anything nice to say about jumping worms. “They’re much faster. They’re aerodynamic, almost. They’re smooth. They’re handsome,” she says. “I really think they are an amazing animal.”
Williams’s enthusiasm for worms knows few bounds. She tells me that the annelid phylum, to which earthworms belong, has been around for at least 500 million years. It contains more than 7,000 species of worms, which come in all different shapes and sizes, including one native to eastern Washington State that reportedly grows up to three feet long. And, as if that weren’t enough, earthworms have five hearts—or the worm equivalent. (However, it’s a myth that cutting a worm in half makes two; it usually just makes one dead worm.)
Williams understands the concerns about invasive worms’ effects on forests, and she spends a lot of her time teaching people how to prevent their spread. But she also takes a more pragmatic view. “We are going to have to live with them,” she says.
It’s a sad truth about most biological invasions. If humans catch the problem early on, or if the intruders are confined to an island, we can sometimes eradicate an unwanted visitor. But more often than not, the offending organism infiltrates the landscape long before we fully grasp the threat. Think of chestnut blight, which toppled 4 billion trees in the early 20th century, or the Burmese python, now a top predator in Florida’s Everglades.
Given that earthworms won’t likely fell giant trees or swallow your cat, I wonder if they will fit into the category of lesser-known offenders, like house sparrows and starlings. Both were introduced in the late 1800s from Europe to New York. The sparrow was brought over for pest control and old-world nostalgia, the starling by a group of Shakespeare enthusiasts intent on importing every species mentioned in his writings.
The birds outcompete native songbirds for nest sites and hurt agricultural yields by eating seeds, pooping on grains stored in silos, and transmitting diseases. By one estimate, starlings cause $800 million in damage every year. But the birds have not set off alarms in most ordinary citizens. They are just part of American life.
[Read: Eat an invasive species for dinner]
Will worms be the same? There is no question that forests are changing in fundamental ways as a result of the invasion. “Do they store less carbon? Probably. Are they more susceptible to drought? Probably,” Peter Groffman says. “Are they supporting a different suite of biodiversity? Yeah, they are.” But the impacts are invisible to most of us, and represent metamorphosis as much as destruction.
Perhaps it’s not a matter of whether worms are good or bad. Maybe such projections of human values—from the Victorians to Darwin to today—are what got us into this mess in the first place, Dobson says. “What I’ve come to realize is that that’s not the right way to think about anything in an ecosystem.”
On my last day in New York, Dobson picks me up and we battle our way along the Gowanus Expressway toward Staten Island and more city parks. With brick warehouses and shiny skyscrapers rising around us like mutant trees, it’s tempting to dismiss New York’s parks as urban anomalies with little bearing on the fate of the rest of the continent’s forests. But Dobson pushes back against that idea.
For one thing, she says, the ecosystems aren’t that different; native hardwoods dominate the overstories of both, and the understories of New York’s parks often hold surprising troves of rare plants like true Solomon’s seal. More importantly, the stresses urban forests experience—including biological invasions, pollution, and human disturbance—presage those that other North American forests will encounter in the future. “What happens here is going to predict potentially what happens beyond,” Dobson says.
Eventually, the traffic thins and we cross the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, passing from a world of glass and concrete into one overrun by lush vegetation. We head south and soon arrive at a quiet sweep of forest called Wolfe’s Pond.
Dobson parks on an empty street and we take a few minutes to ready ourselves. I follow her lead, tucking my pants into my socks to protect against ticks, as she prepares three jugs of mustard slurry. Then we set off into the woods, using the GPS on her phone to locate one of Pregitzer’s plots.
We find the site next to a muddy wash, surrounded by dented beer cans and faded plastic debris. The ground is solid poison ivy and Virginia creeper, both mowed down to ankle height by deer. The soil looks like the dregs in a French press. “Wow, this is so wormy,” Dobson says. She throws down the PVC frame and pours out half of the mustard mixture. Then she sets a 10-minute timer and starts counting. Within five minutes, she’s at 24. She dumps out the rest of the bottle, and another wave appears. “Oh, there’s 30,” she says. “31.”
Dobson suspects that this is a relatively new invasion, like the one I saw at Forest Park. Worm infestations tend to peak and then decline. Their numbers climb quickly when resources are abundant. Then, after the worms eat themselves out of house and home, the population density drops. “This is the top of the parabola,” Dobson guesses.
Next, we head to another plot, across the road. Upon setting foot in the woods, we can tell it’s different. We retreat to the sidewalk and clean the treads of our shoes with sticks to avoid transporting cocoons into what appears to be a worm-free forest.
Dobson points out dainty Canada mayflower growing along the trail. She pulls out a handful of duff and lights up when she sees the thin white tendrils of hyphae—symbiotic fungi—weaving through the humus. “There are so many beautiful things here!” she says.
We continue a few hundred yards up the trail to another of Pregitzer’s plots. Dobson lays down the frame, carefully fitting it over a few fragile plants. Then she pours. We hold our breath, waiting to see if anything moves. After a minute, a jumping worm emerges, then another. She counts four in all. For the first time, Dobson appears crestfallen. This forest seems so healthy. She looks over her shoulder, back toward the worm-infested spot across the road.
“This might very well look like that in a few years,” she says. While it may not be good or bad, it will certainly be different.
Philippines Reports First Death Outside China as Toll Passes 300 .
A man from Wuhan has died in the Philippines. A 44-year-old man in the Philippines has died of the coronavirus, health officials said on Sunday, making him the first known death outside China. The man, a resident of Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the virus, died on Saturday after developing what officials called “severe pneumonia.