A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
August 7, 2007
3. Watersheds -
Judge bans Navy from using sonar off Southern California
Federal jurist backs activists, saying use during training exercises off
Los Angeles
Exploring an amphibian epidemic UC team believes deadly fungus may be killing frogs, toads, salamanders in Sierra -
San Francisco Chronicle
Dramatic tree death increase since 1983 linked to warming -
San Francisco Chronicle
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Judge bans Navy from using sonar off Southern California
Federal jurist backs activists, saying use during training exercises off
A federal judge in
U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper issued the preliminary injunction after rejecting the Navy's request to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The lawsuit, along with a similar one filed by the California Coastal Commission, argues for broader safeguards to protect marine mammals from powerful blasts of mid-frequency active sonar that have been linked elsewhere to panicked behavior and mass die-offs of whales.
The Navy, which plans to appeal the decision, said even a temporary ban would disrupt crucial training of sailors before they are sent overseas. The Navy uses the sonar to detect potentially hostile vessels, including quiet diesel submarines, which one captain called "the most lethal enemy known" on the high seas.
"It's akin to sending a hunter into the woods after one of the most lethal preys known, but sending him in partly deaf and blind," said Navy Capt. Neil May, assistant chief of staff for 3rd Fleet training and readiness.
Over the last decade, scientists have linked mid-frequency active sonar to a number of mass strandings or panicked behavior of whales after naval exercises in the waters off
In a well-documented case near the
The dead whales washed ashore after the Spanish navy led international military exercises involving warships from the
Navy lawyers argued in court that mid-frequency active sonar is crucial to national security and to keeping sailors safe from attacks by enemy submarines. Unlike passive listening devices that rely on detecting sounds, mid-frequency active sonar emits bursts of sound waves that can reveal even quiet submarines.
"Today, dozens of countries — including North Korea and Iran — have extremely quiet diesel-electric submarines, and more than 180 of them operate in the Pacific," said Vice Adm. Samuel Locklear, commander of the U.S. 3rd Fleet. "Active sonar is the best system we have to detect and track them."
To remove the temporary ban, the Navy will have to take the case to the
Cooper said it was never easy to balance the interests of wildlife with those of national security. But in this case, she said, environmental lawyers have made a persuasive case that the potential harm to whales and other marine life outweighs any harm to the Navy while the court case proceeds.
The lawsuit, according to environmental lawyers, could be settled quickly if the Navy would agree to more sweeping precautions, such as shutting off or reducing the intensity of the sonar when visibility is too low for spotters stationed on deck to see whales that venture into harm's way.
Joel Reynolds, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the judge's ruling in no way restricts the Navy's ability to use sonar against real threats or in battle. Instead, he said, the court decision zeroes in on training exercises planned long in advance in waters rich with endangered blue whales, various kinds of dolphins and migrating gray whales.
"Just as the Army has a responsibility not to train soldiers to shoot in the middle of a crowded city street, the Navy has a duty, when it's learning how to hunt with sonar, not to choose a practice range next to a marine sanctuary."
Cooper also ruled against the Navy last year in an earlier case, temporarily blocking the use of active sonar in multinational war games near
Ultimately, her decision forced the Navy to negotiate with environmentalists and establish a buffer zone and other precautionary measures before conducting its monthlong Rim of the Pacific exercises involving 40 surface ships and six submarines from the
Other federal judges have also shut down or forced the Navy and various marine researchers to negotiate for stronger safeguards. The U.S. Navy has already conducted three of 14 planned training missions scheduled over the next two years in
Naval attorneys said in court Monday that there was no evidence of strandings, injuries or even behavioral disturbances in marine mammals during those exercises. But the Navy's own environmental assessment, Cooper noted, predicted that the exercises using powerful sonar will harass or disrupt the behavior of marine mammals 170,000 times and will cause hundreds of cases of permanent injury to deep-diving whales.
"The predicted permanent injury of 436 Cuvier's beaked whales is especially significant in light of" federal scientists' "estimate that there are as few as 1,211 such whales remaining off the entire U.S. West Coast," Cooper wrote in a detailed, 19-page tentative ruling.
The judge also took issue with an array of measures to protect whales that the Navy has already put in place, including rules that prohibit using the sonar within 1,000 yards of marine mammals. Sound waves may not dissipate to sublethal levels for more than 5,000 yards, she noted.
Environmental lawyers have argued for a larger safety zone, as well as for a 12-mile buffer along the coastline. They want training missions to remain a respectful distance from the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, and they want the Navy to use acoustic monitoring as well as spotters in aircraft to watch for whales.
The California Coastal Commission, which filed a similar lawsuit, has also been negotiating with the Navy for extensive safeguards. Its hand was significantly strengthened Monday when Cooper ruled that the Navy had failed to comply with the federal Coastal Zone Management Act.
That's the law that gives the California Coastal Commission power to influence federal activities in waters off the state.#
Exploring an amphibian epidemic UC team believes deadly fungus may be killing frogs, toads, salamanders in Sierra
San Francisco Chronicle – 8/7/07
By David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
For decades, the mass disappearance of frogs and other amphibians from the High Sierra has puzzled biologists, fishermen, hikers and even motorists from the city who pause by roadside streams and lakeshores in vain attempts to glimpse whatever's there.
The creatures are vanishing all over the world, too - a major environmental disaster, as a UC science team calls it - and now it appears that sexual reproduction in a single fungus species that produces hardy, long-lived spores may be primarily to blame.
Dead bodies of countless species of frogs, toads and salamanders have been found on every continent except Antarctica (where amphibians don't exist), and the California scientists have zeroed in on a remote group of lakes and streams on the eastern side of the Sierra where they have watched as red-legged and yellow-legged frogs and Yosemite toads became extinct throughout the study area.
Voracious hatchery trout introduced into the mountain lakes have been blamed in the past for eating the tadpoles of the vanishing frogs; so have pollutants like pesticides and toxic dust clouding up over the Sierra from the
But a new report published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focuses on the population genetics of the widely known frog-killing chytrid fungus with the forbidding name of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and the manner in which it reproduces and infects the amphibians.
Tough, long-lasting disease-causing spores created as the fungi reproduce may well be a major cause of the widespread amphibian die-offs, says the report.
The gene study at UC Berkeley was led by Jess Morgan, a postdoctoral researcher who worked in the microbial biology lab of Professor John Taylor before she returned to her native
Among the major Sierra study's other scientists are biologists Vance Vredenburg of UC Berkeley and Roland Knapp of UC Santa Barbara's Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory in Mammoth Lakes - both of whom have spent years studying the fish and amphibians in nearly 10,000 of the High Sierra's most remote lakes and streams.
"We haven't found the spores yet,"
Most fungi, he said, produce spores by the millions and even by the billions, and the frog-killing fungi may well be no exception.
Knapp, in a phone call from his lab at
In an e-mail from her lab in
In another message to UC Berkeley she added: "If, in fact, this fungus produced resistant spores, people could be unwittingly transferring this pathogen around the world from dirt on our shoes or car tires, but spores could also hitchhike on the feathers of birds for quick transport across mountain ranges."
Global control of the killer is badly needed. Only a year ago, 50 of the world's leading experts on amphibians, including David and Marvalee Wake of UC Berkeley, warned that nearly a third of the 5,743 known amphibian species around the world are now threatened, with perhaps 122 of them already extinct since 1980.
The scientists blamed the deadly infectious disease caused by the same fungus that Morgan, Taylor and their team are studying, as well as land-use changes in many nations, commercial over-exploitation and global climate change that may encourage the spread of the fungus.
Also last year, another international team of amphibian experts headed by A. Alan Pounds at the
"If it's global warming that's involved in the fungus spread," said
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/07/MNV5RCGO21.DTL
Dramatic tree death increase since 1983 linked to warming
San Francisco Chronicle – 8/7/07
By Jane Kay, staff writer
Federal scientists have found that tree deaths in the
If temperatures continue to rise, temperate forests that receive little rain and snowfall are poised for die-backs, according to findings released Monday by the U.S. Geological Survey's
Over the past several decades, trees have grown faster in some other states' water-rich forests because of higher temperatures and other factors such as greater precipitation, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and a rise in the number of cloudless days.
But arid forests such as
Researchers Phillip J. van Mantgem and Nathan L. Stephenson, based at the Sequoia and Kings Canyon field station, studied more than 21,000 ponderosa pine, white fir, red fir, Jeffrey pine and other conifers in a network of old-growth plots in Yosemite and Sequoia national parks between 1983 and 2004.
They mapped tree deaths every year, and correlated short-term changes in tree deaths with parallel changes in climate and other potential factors. The stands chosen have never been logged and hadn't burned since the late 1800s. Over the study period, the temperature increased by about 1 degree Celsius.
The average mortality rate increased at 3 percent per year, meaning that the rate of tree deaths nearly doubled over the study period.
The scientists found no evidence that new trees sprouted more or less frequently during the study period.
Tree deaths caused by insects and disease - which is linked to warmer weather and drought - were much higher than deaths caused by factors like breaking or uprooting.
In other studies being presented at meetings of the Ecological Society of America in
Climate change models predict substantial shifts in weather patterns over coming decades in many regions, including higher temperatures and increases in duration and severity of extreme drought events, scientists say. #
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/07/BA2KRDSFL1.DTL
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