Biodiversity and the Future

So just about every year now my family has a big family reunion on Cape Cod in July. I remember when I was 10 or 12 I went to a beach to walk the tide pools. There were shells everywhere. There were great stretches of seaweed, and huge spider crabs walking through all the seaweed. We visit the same tide pool beach every year now, and I'm finding it quite depressing. There is no more algae. There are no more spider crabs. It used to be there were so many hermit crabs you had to watch where you were stepping. plenty of basic rock type crabs too. Now you're lucky if you see 2 dozen hermits on your walk to the ocean. The most common site is strings of discarded beheaded striped bass still tied together and left to rot on the beach. There are almost no shells left. I brought back dozens of perfect scallop shells, big clam shells, and slipper shells when I was younger. Now there is nothing. I just keep thinking my 10 yr old cousin is visiting this beach, and he thinks this is what it's supposed to look. No critters, some dead fish and stretches of barren sand. No shells. No spider crabs. No algae. No wonder the next generation isn't screaming about all the animals that are dying. They never got to see them in the first place. Enjoy nature while it lasts.

Predators and how they balance the landscape

I just finished a book on the ecology of predators as controls keeping the herbivores in check. It had many good points, and while somewhat depressing, wasn't any worse than some of my other recent reads. Book was Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators by William Stolzenburg. It started with the basics of ecology and food webs and how everything is connected to something else. The author went on to discuss what happens when you remove the apex predator and the middle opportunists begin proliferating. Likely we can blame raccoons and the like for the decline of the Eastern US songbirds, as them not being in check keeps egg thieves more abundant than they once were. It covered the reintroduction of the Wolves to Yellowstone nicely, though not as detailed as Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone by Douglas W. Smith & Gary Ferguson, which I read a few months ago. Both books detailed how the return of the wolf has positively affected the landscape of Yellowstone. Plants that were being grazed to the ground every year by deer and elk are now recovering, and beavers have returned to Yellowstone. Pronghorn antelope have been making a comeback due to Wolves not putting up with coyotes, who had devised ways to kill the much faster pronghorn. Anyway, both books were a good if slightly depressing read.