
By Jane Braxton Little
Linda J. Cayot's scientific focus for the day was a male giant tortoise, part of her dissertation research on the ecology of these iconic Galápagos reptiles. When her study animal lumbered into a swirling torrent of muddy El Niño waters, the intrepid scientist jumped in, too. Together they banged against rocks, his carapace and her daypack catching on tree branches as they thumped in tandem down the river to the lowlands of Santa Cruz Island.
Cayot's epic 1983 journey launched a 40-year career devoted to conserving the Galápagos Islands. She supervised giant tortoise and land iguana breeding programs; organized campaigns to eradicate invasive species; and coordinated repatriation of tortoises to their native islands. When she began working in the Galápagos, the islands' giant tortoise populations were down to less than 10% of their historic abundance. They've grown since then, bolstered by programs she helped put in place.
Cayot studied Galápagos giant tortoises on many islands during her 40-year career. This 1982 photo is from Pinzon Island. (© Theresa Kineke Brooks, used with permission)
The goal remains to restore tortoise populations to their historic numbers and distribution. At the current rate, that might be achieved within two centuries.
For Cayot, who thinks of conservation in terms of deep time, it's the trajectory that's critical.
She retired early this year and has just completed co-writing and editing Galápagos Giant Tortoises, a synthesis of knowledge of these island endemics, including the 60-year history of their conservation. Cayot was honored in October with the Prichard Turtle Conservation Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Cayot is a visionary with a practical, one-step-at-a-time approach. If she hadn't fallen in love with Galápagos, she says, she would have been conserving species somewhere else.
When I asked her about the lessons she's learned from a lifetime of conservation, it came as no surprise that her succinct responses made little mention of tortoises or the Galápagos. Instead she focused on universal elements that speak to the human element of conservation.
Respectful Relationships: Value Everyone’s Input
"You accomplish much more conservation by having good relationships with everyone," says Linda Cayot.
As a scientist Cayot worked with Galápagos National Park Directorate rangers who were fresh out of high school, as well as some of the world's leading herpetologists and geneticists. She sought out people with the tools and ability to solve problems, regardless of their credentials.
Wacho Tapia is among of them. When he was a 17-year-old Galapagoan volunteer Cayot recognized his passion for giant tortoises and determination to save them. Now director of Galápagos Conservancy's Giant Tortoise Restoration Initiative, Tapia's years of working with Cayot ensure continuity in the tortoise restoration projects she initiated.
The respect Cayot demonstrated throughout her career is reflected in a small incident on Pinta Island. She asked Joe Flanagan, an American collaborator and chief veterinarian at the Houston Zoo, to document the repatriation of tortoises by photographing the park rangers carrying them to their release sites. One after another refused to be photographed. But when he said the photos were for Cayot, each ranger agreed. Some even primped.
"Linda recognizes that most conservation problems are caused by people, but she strongly believes that people are also the solution," Flanagan says.
Long-term Vision: Conservation Happens Slowly
"Projects can take 50 years," says Cayot. "That's a hell of a long time! But those are the projects that push conservation forward."
Cayot has always maintained a long-term vision. But working in the Galápagos honed it from years to decades and centuries.
The successful projects she worked on included repatriating tortoises to Española, the southernmost island. In the 1960s park rangers found just 14 tortoises there.
They took them to the Santa Cruz breeding center, added a male from the San Diego Zoo, and launched a breeding program Cayot later supervised. When young tortoises born at the center were old enough to survive out of captivity, they were released on the island of their ancestors.
In June Galápagos Park marked the successful conclusion of the project by returning the original tortoises to Española — 55 years after removing them — to join their progeny and the offspring they in turn had produced.
Cayot also had a central role in eradicating invasive species from the islands. When she first arrived in Galápagos, the southern rim of Alcedo Volcano was covered with Zanthoxylum trees. By the early 1990s, invasive goats were destroying the forest, a critical area for giant tortoises. Cayot coordinated Project Isabela, the largest invasive species eradication ever attempted anywhere.
It took nearly a decade. Today the vegetation is slowly regenerating. Full restoration will take decades more, but that's not a problem in her mind: Cayot views Galápagos conservation in 100-year increments.
"I worked on the everyday details of Project Isabela, but I was thinking ahead to a century and beyond," she says.
Serendipity: Learn From Surprises
"Don't worry if it takes a long time," says Cayot. "Emerging knowledge may result in significant changes and greater success in the end."
In 1972 Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, was taken to a Santa Cruz Island pen for his protection. Scientists later decided to return tortoises to Pinta, where the habitat was declining without them. Although they would not be the endemic Pinta species, they would still disperse native plant seeds and modify habitat to help other animals and plants thrive, scientists reasoned.
Lonesome George in 2008. Photo: Arturo de Frias Marques (CC BY-SA 3.0)
But the herpetologists working on Galápagos tortoise conservation disagreed, and breeding tortoises were never moved to Pinta.
It ended up being a fortuitous delay. Soon expeditions to Wolf Volcano, a remote island where a variety of tortoise species roamed, discovered living tortoises with mixed ancestry, including the Pinta tortoise. That sparked hope that scientists might eventually find others more closely related to Lonesome George — a better option for release on Pinta.
For now, though, this northernmost island remains without the tortoises that evolved there. And that may be for the best.
"We don't know everything," says Cayot. "The more knowledge we get the more carefully we can find the right tortoises for that island."
Collaboration: One Solution From Many Agendas
"You can see the excitement growing when you come up with solutions no one had thought of before," says Cayot.
When Cayot began coordinating Project Isabela, she knew it would only succeed if Galápagos Park Directorate and Charles Darwin Research Station worked together.
Because they'd never officially co-run a project, Cayot spent an evening sewing. She took a park hat and a station hat — each of which bore an image of a tortoise — cut them both in half and stitched them back together, making the bisected embroidered tortoise whole again. Cayot wore that hat when she gave talks, pulling it on if discussions became contentious.
Linda Cayot made this hat out of a Galápagos Park cap and a Charles Darwin Research Station cap to symbolize and promote the cooperation required for the projects they shared. (© Jane Braxton Little, used with permission)
The grand plan to restore giant tortoises to their historic numbers and distribution included an international workshop in 2012 that she facilitated. Scientists and rangers were beginning to design expeditions to Wolf Volcano. The geneticists focused on finding animals with genetic material from two extinct species and breeding them, a process that would involve multiple generations and take at least 100 years. Conservationists also wanted to find the highest genetic matches possible, but their priority was getting tortoises onto the islands, where they're key to habitat restoration; they couldn't wait a century.
These differences challenged geneticists and conservationists alike to be creative. The solution they adopted is the basis for an ambitious plan to revive extinct species and restore island ecosystems. They're using the knowledge of the geneticists to select the best animals to breed in captivity. Those with lesser genetic material will be released to the islands of their ancestors, satisfying the conservationists' goal.
"With everyone willing to think outside the box, we ended up with novel solutions, ones that we all liked better than our own individual plans," Cayot says. "That can only happen when everyone values each other's input and respects each other's knowledge."
Jane Braxton Little is an award-winning independent journalist who writes about science and the environment for publications that include The Atlantic, Audubon, Bay Nature, Discover, and Scientific American. Little is based in rural Plumas County, where she arrived years ago fresh out of Harvard graduate school for a summer that has yet to end.
http://twitter.com/JBraxtonLittle
https://www.janebraxtonlittle.com/
Reposted with permission from The Revelator.
A federal court on Tuesday struck down the Trump administration's rollback of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
- Pruitt Guts the Clean Power Plan: How Weak Will the New EPA ... ›
- It's Official: Trump Administration to Repeal Clean Power Plan ... ›
- 'Deadly' Clean Power Plan Replacement ›
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
By Jonathan Runstadler and Kaitlin Sawatzki
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have found coronavirus infections in pet cats and dogs and in multiple zoo animals, including big cats and gorillas. These infections have even happened when staff were using personal protective equipment.
Gorillas have been affected by human viruses in the past and are susceptible to the coronavirus. Thomas Fuhrmann via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
- Gorillas in San Diego Test Positive for Coronavirus - EcoWatch ›
- Wildlife Rehabilitators Are Overwhelmed During the Pandemic. In ... ›
- Coronavirus Pandemic Linked to Destruction of Wildlife and World's ... ›
- Utah Mink Becomes First Wild Animal to Test Positive for Coronavirus ›
Trending
By Peter Giger
The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
The period of the 45th presidency will go down as dark days for the United States — not just for the violent insurgency and impeachment that capped off Donald Trump's four years in office, but for every regressive action that came before.
- Biden Announces $2 Trillion Climate and Green Recovery Plan ... ›
- How Biden and Kerry Can Rebuild America's Climate Leadership ... ›
- Biden's EPA Pick Michael Regan Urged to Address Environmental ... ›
- How Joe Biden's Climate Plan Compares to the Green New Deal ... ›
Washington state residents are taking climate matters into their own hands. Beginning this month, 90 members of the public join the country's first climate assembly to develop pollution solutions, Crosscut reported.