[PHOTO] Street construction, Dupont and Dovercourt

The construction workers of Canadian summer here work on the northeast corner of Dupont and Dovercourt.

[CAT] "Paper Industry Decimating Indonesia's Tigers"

Indonesia is an emergent global force, a country of significant current heft and greater promise, a country that--as it continues to grow--arguably has at least a good a claim if not greater as Russia to be counted as a member of the BRIC, or BRIC, club of emergent global economic powers. Like other countries which are making this ascent, and which have made the ascent, this comes at a significant cost to its natural environment. Charundi Panagoda notes at Inter Press Service that the growing Indonesian paper industry is threatening the endangered Sumatran tiger.

The survival of Sumatra's tigers, elephants, orangutans, rhinos, as well as indigenous communities, is threatened by the "world's fastest deforestation rate", caused by none other than the pulp and paper industry, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

In a recent report, WWF named the Indonesian-based company Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) as "responsible for more forest destruction in Sumatra than any other single company". APP and competitor Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL) have consumed the majority of the wood harvested from commercial forest clearances and agriculture conversion.

"In central Sumatra, the impact of APP's operations on wildlife has been devastating. The company's forest clearing in Riau Province has been driving Sumatran elephants and tigers toward local extinction," the report said.

The companies have also begun clearing peat swamp forests. According to Indonesian ministry of forestry estimates, deforestation associated with peat decomposition and burning totals 1.2 gigatonnes of carbon emissions per year, making Indonesia the world's third largest greenhouse gas emitter.

[. . .]

What APP calls "degraded land" is what WWF calls "tiger habitat," WWF forest programme manager Linda Kramme told IPS. She believes many of the sustainability statements made by APP and Oasis are misleading. Suggesting APP is only impacting a small amount of Indonesia is like saying the recent Gulf oil spill only impacted a small amount of the U.S., she added.

"(WWF) believes they are mischaracterising their practices happening on the ground. Many U.S. customers and companies don't have the ability to go to Indonesia and see what's happening, so it can be easy for them to read materials that APP and companies that market their products like Oasis say - that they have different certification, that they are doing things with conservation. But our teams for two decades have seen impacts on ground and we see and obligation to raise the questions and to raise the facts," she said.

[. . .]

In 2010, APP was affected by the U.S. Commerce Department imposing anti-dumping duty orders for certain coated paper imported from Indonesia. "Dumping" is a predatory pricing practice in international trade that allows companies to sell their imported products at very low prices, driving out the competition.

"There is an environmental component to the fact that (APP products are) less expensive. One of the reasons they can afford lower costs is because they are getting fibre illegally (by illegal logging, for example). They are not engaging in the kind of business practices which cost a little bit more if you want to do things legally and that result in lower prices," Johnson said.

Still, the U.S. can prosecute companies like APP only if the government of the producer country has criminal penalties for the same activity. Therefore, it's the responsibility of the Indonesian government to effectively implement conservation laws, activists say.

Johnson says a strong case can be made that Indonesia has affectively subsidised the pulp and paper industry by not enforcing its own laws.

[CAT] Did Vladimir Putin kill a Siberian tiger to look good?

One nice thing about Livejournal is that, for people who have or can technologically emulate fluency in Russian, you can learn of all kinds of things bubbling under in the Russosphere. I'd first heard of speculation that, through the desire Vladimir Putin's people for an impressive photo op, they gave a Siberian tiger a dose of anesthetic that eventually killed it, via demographer's post here. Anastasia Kirilenko's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article "Sleeping Tiger, Hidden Agenda?" summarizes the case appeared later.

Serga, the Siberian tigress [. . .] was photographed with Putin after being tranquilized midpounce by the gun-toting, conservation-loving prime minister.

A video on Putin's website recounts the event, which took place when the tiger was caught in a trap set by researchers during a 2008 visit by the prime minister to the Ussuri reserve in Siberia.

"Vladimir Putin decided to walk closer to the trap, and appeared on the trail at the very moment when the tigress leaped out," the news announcer says. "He fired from a special tranquilizer gun, hitting the beast in the right shoulder..."

Putin later tagged the sleeping tiger with a satellite-tracking device. Since then, Serga has occasionally returned to the media spotlight with news of her own, most notably the birth of three cubs in 2009. (The "Vladivostok" newspaper ran the story under a banner headline reading, "After Meeting Vladimir Putin, A Tigress Has Given Birth To Three Cubs.")

But animal activists and the Russian blogosphere now say that Serga, commonly referred to as "Putin's tiger," is in fact a substitute cat -- and that the original tigress was not wild but rather a zoo animal who was borrowed for the stunt and later died as a result of a sedative overdose.

Dmitry Molodtsov, a St. Petersburg-based ecological engineer, is the founder of bigcats.ru, a website devoted to tigers and other wild cats.

He says he has concluded from photographs and Internet articles that the actual tiger in the Putin pictures was not the wild Serga but Aralia, a zoo tiger who was sedated and held in a trap for nearly six hours before her encounter with the prime minister.

"When you look at various pictures of Serga -- the tigress they're now saying is Putin's tigress -- it's easy to see that the pattern on her coat doesn't change over time," Molodtsov says. "Depending on the time of year, a tigress becomes fluffier -- in winter, of course, her markings are more indistinct -- but nothing more than that. And the tigress who was with Putin -- and some witnesses have suggested it was another tigress, Aralia -- had completely different markings."

[. . .]

Natalya Remennikova, the coordinator of the Siberian tiger-conservation project that Putin so famously participated in, says no substitute tigers were used in Putin's brush with big cats, and that Serga herself is alive and thriving.

"Serga was definitely the one who was tagged in 2008 with the help of the prime minister. This tigress is alive, and she's doing well," Remennikova says. "She's living on the territory of the Ussuri reserve. People who don't have reliable information -- especially people who don't know much about science -- try to make everything political."

demographer's post is available in English translation via this link. The crux of the argument, that Siberian tigers have identifiable and unchanging markings and that these markings either prove or disprove the hypothesis that Serga met an unfortunate end, is beyond my ability to judge.

People?

[LINK] "Birds of a feather talk together"

James Nicoll linked the other day to the news, reported by Australian Geographic's Hannah Price, that in Australia, human communications systems are influencing the native parrot species.

(Cross-species cultural diffusion is such a cool idea.)

The Australian Museum's Search and Discover desk, which offers a free service to identify species, has received numerous reports of encounters with talkative birds in the wild from mystified citizens who thought they were hearing voices.

Martyn Robinson, a naturalist who works at the desk, explains that occasionally a pet cockatoo escapes or is let loose, and "if it manages to survive long enough to join a wild flock, [other birds] will learn from it."

As well as learning from humans directly, "the birds will mimic each other," says Jaynia Sladek, from the Museum's ornithology department. "There's no reason why, if one comes into the flock with words, [then] another member of the flock wouldn't pick it up as well."

'Hello cockie' is the most common phrase, though there have been a few cases of foul-mouthed feathered friends using expletives which we can't repeat here.

The evolution of language could well be passed on through the generations, says Martyn. "If the parents are talkers and they produce chicks, their chicks are likely to pick up some of that," he says. This phenomenon is not unique; some lyrebirds in southern Australia still reproduce the sounds of axes and old shutter-box cameras their ancestors once learnt.

In rural areas talking parrots will probably begin to lose their language abilities, says Martyn, with some words "likely to just disintegrate a bit and become part of that particular flock's repertoire."

However, in Australia's big cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, cockatoos will probably maintain and improve their vocabulary due to regular contact with humans. "That's certainly the case in the Botanic Gardens [in Sydney]," says Martyn. "If you say 'hello' or 'hello cockie' to the cockatoos, and if they're interested in you and not just picking around for food, you may well trigger a response."

[LINK] "Will we ever… talk to dolphins?"

Over at the Discover-hosted blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong posts about the efforts of Denise Herzing, a Florida-based dolphin researcher who has been studying dolphins in the wild, to come up with new protocols for enabling two-way communications between dolphins and human beings.

Wild dolphin communication is hard to study. They are fast-moving and hard to follow. They travel in groups, making it hard to assign any call to a specific individual. And they communicate at frequencies beyond what humans can hear. Despite these challenges, there is some evidence that dolphins use sounds to represent concepts. Each individual has its own “signature whistle” which might act like a name. Developed in the first year of life, dolphins use these whistles as badges of identity, and may modulate them to reflect motivation and mood. This year, a study showed that when wild dolphins meet, one member of each group exchanges signature whistles.

[. . . Herzing] notes that captive animals, which often lack stimulation, will respond to systems like the underwater keyboards. She thinks that these experiments disappointed because they were cumbersome. “The dolphins swim very fast and went to where they were requested, but humans are very slow in the water. There wasn’t enough real-time interaction.”

Herzing is trying to solve that problem with Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) – a lighter, portable version of the underwater keyboards. It consists of a small phone-sized computer, strapped to a diver’s chest and connected to two underwater recorders, or hydrophones. The computer will detect and differentiate dolphin sounds, including the ultrasonic ones we cannot hear, and use flashing lights to tell the diver which animal made the call.

The CHAT device can also play artificial calls, allowing Herzing to coin dolphin-esque “words” for things that are relevant to them, like “seaweed” or “wave-surfing”. She hopes the dolphins will mimic the artificial whistles, and use them voluntarily. By working with wild animals, and focusing on objects in their natural environment, rather than balls or hoops, Herzing hopes to pique their interest.

Herzing emphasises that her device is not a translator. It will not act as a dolphin-human Rosetta stone. Instead, she wants both species create a joint form of communication that they are both invested in. She hopes that CHAT will tap into the “natural propensity” that dolphins have “for creating common information when they have to interact”. For example, in Costa Rica, distantly related bottlenose and Guyana dolphins will adopt a shared collection of sounds when they come together, using sounds that they don’t use when apart.

As with past projects, all of this depends on whether the dolphins play along. Kuczaj says, “It’s a remarkable challenge because she is working with wild dolphins so they’ve got the option to participate or not.” Here, Herzing has an edge, since the animals know her, and vice versa. “We’ve been observing them underwater every summer since 1985,” she says. “I know the individuals personally – their personalities and relationships. We’ve got a pretty good handle on what they’d be interested in.” Perhaps this combination of cutting-edge technology and old-school fieldwork will finally produce the conversations that have eluded scientists for so long.