Mauka to Makai
A science blog for the massesArchive for February, 2009
Eeep!
What if Pikachu were real? They are—kind of. The real things are called pikas. They’re brown (not yellow), say “eeep” instead of “pikachu” and don’t have lightening bolt tails. But they’re still pretty darn cute.
American pikas are found in the mountains of California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. These adorable rabbit-relatives usually live in boulder fields (called ‘talus’) above the treeline. Here, they hop, eeep and eat—and eat and eat, filling their stomachs nine times per day.
When pikas aren’t eating, they’re gathering food for the winter. (They don’t hibernate like bears do.) During the summer, they make as many as 13 foraging trips per hour. The little guys weigh only 1/3 of a pound, but they need to collect at least 60 pounds of grass, flowers and other plants for their winter stashes, called “haypiles,” that serve double-duty as warm bedding and munchies to help the pikas make it through the winter.
Winter presents two problems for most animals—lack of food and cold—but pikas have this whole winter thing figured out. To make sure their haypiles are still edible in late winter, pikas collect toxic plants. The plant’s toxicity serves as a preservative, but the toxicity decreases with time so that it’s actually edible and fresh at the end of winter. To stay warm, pikas take advantage of the insulating properties of the snowpack and snuggle into their 60-pound haypiles. Plus, these guys are built for cold with their thick coat and ability to roll up in a ball like a popple. (A popple, for those who missed it, was an ‘80s icon.)
Being able to withstand the cold seems like a pretty good adaptation for a critter that lives in a cold environment. And it is—unless that environment gets warmer…which would be a totally preposterous idea if it weren’t for something called global climate change.
Scientists expect summer temperatures in the western U.S. to increase by more than 10.3°F in the next century with more frequent and longer heat waves. Plus, they say, high elevations may get even warmer. For pikas, this could be problematic.
In the summer, pikas are out and about during the day, but when temperatures top 80°F, they hide in the cool shade of the talus. Why so wimpy? The uber insulating fur that keeps pikas warm in winter does not keep them cool in summer. In fact, a pika will overheat if its body temperature increases by just 5.4°F. A pika’s average body temperature is 104.2°F, but a body temperature of 109.6°F is lethal. (For reference, normal body temperature for humans is 98.6°F, but a temperature above 107.6°F can cause brain damage.)
While death by overheating is pretty scary, it’s not the only problem pikas will face in a warmer environment. Pikas tend to avoid foraging in hot weather (because it will likely kill them) so scientists fear that consistent high temperatures will prevent pikas from foraging. If they don’t forage, they won’t get the nutrients they need to survive and the food they need to sustain them through the winter. Of course, warmer weather may also change the composition of the plants that grow in the alpine meadows surrounding pika habitat. These plants may not provide the nutrients pikas need—or they might be yucky.
Then there’s winter. Normally, pikas’ habitats are marked by permafrost and snow. The permafrost maintains the talus habitat and the snowpack provides an insulating layer to keep the pika warm. Without talus, pikas wouldn’t have a place to stay warm in winter, cool in summer or safe from predators. And without the snowpack, pikas might die of hypothermia. (Ironic, eh?)
Some pika populations in the Great Basin have already disappeared. Other pikas have moved an average of 900 feet upslope. Still others are trapped on isolated mountaintops—to get to another mountaintop would require going through a hot (and therefore deadly) valley.
The bottom line: Eeep! In other words, pikas are screwed. And that’s why the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering them for protection under the Endangered Species Act. If the American pika is listed, it will be the second animal to be listed because of climate change. (Polar bears were listed as threatened last spring.)
Blame Canada!
Canada’s got a problem—the kind of problem that prompted a Catholic bishop to write a scathing pastoral letter and an environmental group to place a desperate personal ad. Canada’s got oil. That’s not the problem, though. The problem is that getting to the oil (which is actually bitumen), collecting it and making it useable is one humungous environmental clusterf**k.
Bitumen (which sounds like “bitchy men” if you say it quickly) is a solid glob of petroleum that can be refined into regular old oil. In the Florida-sized section of Alberta’s boreal forest known as the Alberta oil sands, bitumen accounts for 10 percent of the soil. The rest is sand, clay, silt and water.
Hold the phone! A Florida-sized chunk of land? An area the Alberta government claims is twice the size of New Brunswick, four and a half times the size of Vancouver Island and 26 times bigger than Price Edward Island? Yup. Experts say there are 1.75 trillion barrels of bitumen in the oil sands, but only 173 billion barrels are actually recoverable using current technology and current prices. Still, that’s a lot of oil. Some see it as the key to weaning us off our addiction to Mid-East oil. Others see it as a forest-wrecking, water-wasting, energy-intensive, toxic clusterf**k.
The clusterf**king starts in the forest. Workers cut down trees and yank up the topsoil and peat. With the pesky trees, animals and soil out of the way, they extract the bitumen using one of two methods: strip mining (like mountaintop removal mining) or “in situ thermal,” which blasts steam underground to pump out the melted bitumen. Then the bitumen is processed. The mixture of sand, clay and bitumen is combined with hot water and caustic soda. When the mixture is shaken (not stirred), the sand settles to the bottom, the oil floats to the top and a whole bunch of crap called the “middlings” ends up somewhere in the middle. Workers skim the oil from the surface—it still needs further refining before it’s market-ready—and send the middlings to the tailing ponds.
Now, how much does it cost? Financially-speaking, producing one barrel of oil from the oil sands costs 10 times more than producing one barrel of oil using the conventional “drill, baby, drill” method. Environmentally-speaking, the cost meets and exceeds clusterf**k standards.
Producing a single barrel of oil from the oil sands requires four tons of sand, three barrels of fresh water and a whole lotta natural gas. The oil sands operations produce 1 million barrels of oil each day. That means that they use 4 million tons of sand, 3 million barrels of fresh water and enough natural gas to heat 4 million American homes in a single 24-hour period.
Not surprisingly, the carbon footprint of the oil sands is gargantuan. Producing one barrel of oil sands oil produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than the process of producing one barrel of conventional oil. Current estimates put the industry’s annual emissions at 40 million tons. (According to Environmental Defence Canada, if the oil sands was a country, it would be the 63rd highest greenhouse gas emitter, right between New Zealand and Denmark.) And it’s getting worse. Experts predict that the oil sands will produce 80 million tons of carbon dioxide by 2011, accounting for at least 15% of Canada’s total carbon footprint.
The industry produces an impressively disturbing amount of toxic waste as well. Making one barrel of oil produces two barrels of toxic waste. One company, Syncrude, produces 250,000 tons of toxic waste each day. The waste is dumped into the massive tailing ponds—they cover an area of 50 square kilometers (more than 19 square miles) and can be seen from space—where it will stay until someone figures out a way to detoxify it. Until then, the companies are supposed to keep ducks out of the ponds. Sounds simple, eh? Not so much. In April 2008, 500 ducks died after landing in Syncrude’s ponds.
So Canada’s got a problem or a clusterf**k or a SNAFU (although it was never really “normal”), whatever you want to call it. Frankly, we think Al Gore summed it up best in a 2006 Rolling Stone interview: “It is truly nuts. But you know, junkies find veins in their toes.”
Cool Critter: Coconut Crab
The coconut crab—a.k.a. the giant robber crab—is the world’s largest terrestrial arthropod (animal with jointed limbs, a segmented body and an exoskeleton). Granted, other terrestrial arthropods include spiders and centipedes so the competition isn’t especially fierce…
Nevertheless, the coconut crab is one big-ass crab!
Even ‘big-ass’ is an understatement. These crabs are freakishly huge. They can weigh up to nine pounds with a body length of 16 inches—that’s about the size of a Shih Tzu. And, if an adult coconut crab were to lay flat with its legs fully extended (which would be unlikely for a living crab), it would have a leg span of more than three feet. (Baseball bats max out around 34 inches, FYI.)
Alas, big ass-ness will only get a critter so far in this world. To truly succeed an animal needs to have a talent of some sort. For instance, manakins are known for their dancing skills and cuttlefish can create body doubles. Coconut crabs, well, they’re just really strong mo’ fo’s. They can use their front claws, called “chelae,” to easily cut through a broom handle. These same claws can lift objects weighing up to 64 pounds—that’s about the average weight of an 8-year old child, according to the CDC.
Fortunately, there haven’t been any reports of coconut crabs actually lifting small children with their claws.
In fact, coconut crabs are rather shy. They hide alone in underground burrows during the day and emerge at night to find food. Coconut crabs can and will eat anything, but they really like fruit. They eat guava and figs and nutmeg, but they looove coconuts (hence the name “coconut crab”). Locals believe that the crabs climb palm trees, cut the coconuts down and then scamper down the tree to de-husk and open the ripe coconut. Scientists disagree. Numerous experiments have shown that coconut crabs can only open coconuts that are already damaged.
When they’re not eating fruit, coconut crabs munch on dead fish and rats and even attack land-crabs. When the comparatively wimpy land-crab sticks out its large front claw to defend itself, the coconut crab grabs it and holds on. Eventually the land-crab casts off its front claw so it can escape and the coconut crab is left with a fresh claw to eat at its leisure.
Ahhh, life is pretty good for the big-ass/bad-ass coconut crab. But this big, bad mo’ fo’ can’t swim. In fact, an adult coconut crab will drown almost immediately if it ends up in the ocean. (Yeah, we know you’re thinking, “What kind of crab can’t swim?” And we know that query may have led you to think of another kind of “crab,” but please, this is not that kind of blog!)
Adult coconut crabs can’t swim because they can’t breathe underwater—they breathe through a lung-like organ that absorbs oxygen from the air rather than water, the way gills do. Coconut crab larvae, however spend their first few months in the ocean. The mama coconut crab releases hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of eggs into the ocean at a time. The eggs hatch immediately and the larvae spend about a month floating near the surface. Then, they drop down to the ocean floor and search for an empty snail shell. (That’s right, coconut crabs are a type of hermit crab.) They hang out on the bottom for another month or so, switching shells as they grow, and then they haul themselves (and their shell du jour) out of the water.
Juvenile coconut crabs live as hermit crabs in the intertidal zone for a few more months, until they can no longer find a shell that fits them. Then, they dig themselves a burrow and start molting (shedding their outer layer and developing a bigger, better exoskeleton). They molt and molt and molt until they become full grown, which probably takes about 40 years.
After 40 years, they’re big and strong and pretty much dominate their environment (which includes most of the islands of the Indian and Central Pacific Oceans). But “pretty much” is not the same as totally. Juvenile coconut crabs can fall victim to large mammals or, on Christmas Island, yellow crazy ants, but the big ‘uns have only one predictable predator: humans. It turns out that coconut crabs are rather tasty—so tasty, in fact, that the species is threatened on some islands.
To see what a coconut crab looks like, click here. Check out our facebook page for more photos of this cool critter.
Bunnies on the Brink
In 1960, New England cottontails hopped through the forests of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, eastern New York, southern Vermont and southern Maine as happily as Little Bunny Foo Foo (without bopping any field mice on the head). Today, the bunnies occupy only 24% of their historic range. Scientists estimate that only 100 New England cottontails—NECs for short—live in New Hampshire and only 300 live in Maine. No one’s seen an NEC in Vermont since 1971.
What happened? Did the good fairy turn them all into goons?
No. If you were paying attention, you’d recall that the ‘60s-era NECs refrained from bopping field mice on the head. Therefore, the good fairy had no reason to turn them into goons.
Like magic, the bunnies just disappeared (Poof!), except that it wasn’t magical at all. NECs are very particular about their habitat, and when they can’t find a place to live, well, they don’t end up living for long. NECs like early successional forests—what we often call scrub or thickets—where lots of scrawny trees grow side-by-side. These forests provide plenty of hiding spots—and food—for the rabbits. Biologists have found that NECs are happiest (and more likely to survive) when they have 12 or more acres of brambly forest in which to roam, but that’s rare these days. The young forests of twenty years ago have grown into bunny-unfriendly mature forests with open areas and thick trees. What scant scrub forest remains exists only in fragments separated by roads and buildings, which aren’t particularly rabbit friendly either.
It’s tough to survive without a decent place to live, but when home and food are one and the same, homelessness takes on a whole new level of screwage. Since most of the food NECs like to eat—bark and twigs in winter and grasses and plant leaves during the rest of the year—are found in or near their preferred (now nearly non-existent) habitat, the rabbits are probably pretty hungry. Plus, white-tailed deer, a rather abundant species in the Northeast, munch on many of the same plants the bunnies like. And, many of the plants NECs used to eat have been replaced with invasive exotic plants like multiflora rose, honeysuckle bush and autumn olive, which may not be as yummy as the native species they displaced.
No food + no shelter = no bunnies? It’s not quite so simple. There’s a bit of Darwinism in the equation too. Scientists have found that hungry NECs in a food-less, but otherwise decent habitat will choose to stay put and starve rather than abandon the shelter to seek food. Eastern cottontails—another species of cottontail found in the northeast—will choose food over shelter.
That’s because eastern cottontails are better bunnies. Eastern cottontails aren’t only smarter than NECs. They’re also more flexible in their habitat needs—they’re perfectly happy chomping on dandelions in suburban lawns, something a skittish NEC would never do—and they’re much better at spotting predators than NECs. (That’s right; NECs aren’t very good at seeing predators, which may be why they prefer to hide in brambles.) But these better bunnies—the smarter, keener eyed, almost identical* rabbits—aren’t supposed to be here. Eastern cottontails are native to areas west of the Hudson River, but hunting clubs brought thousands of them to New England in the 1920s.
Alas, New England cottontails are on the brink of extinction. They’re already listed as endangered in New Hampshire and Maine and they’re up for federal endangered species status. But, c’mon, they’re rabbits. Everyone knows what rabbits do. NECs do it too—producing litters of 3-8 kits** three times a year—but to DO it, they need the right location …and that brings us back to the homelessness issue.
*The only way scientists can tell eastern cottontails and New England cottontails apart is by testing the DNA in their poop.
**If you get nothing else out of this fascinating post, at least you’ll know that a baby bunny is called a kit.
