losing it

Here's a teaser for you:
What do these animals have in common?  And which is the odd one out?

In this post, I'd like to share a collection of articles that have caught my eye recently.

The first, which hit particularly close to home ('cause it's about puddycats, see) informs us that the Scottish Wildcat seems likely to become a proverbial dodo before the year is out.  Joining the likes of the Japanese River Otter, last spotted in the year of my birth (striking another chord), and seven other life forms declared extinct by the Japanese government alone this summer. A sad, sad state of affairs.

It's largely in consequence of degradation and depletion of natural habitats by humans the world over, of course, which has been happening for many, many decades now. One of the most emotive and well-known examples of this is the rate of deforestation in the Amazon, but there are plenty of others.  I'm sure there are fewer trees, fewer strips of wild common land, fewer spaces to breathe than there ever used to be, just in your very own immediate environs. Try to beat the destruction trend - get (non-invasive) things growing wherever you can!

It seems harder for us to feel we can have any control over the oceans, perhaps. But something surely needs doing.  You'll have heard in recent years about our seas' starkly declining fish populations.  It astounds me to think how much cod still gets consumed (especially in Portugal, as it happens) (and yes, by a hypocritical me), and how cheaply it and other species in similar straits are available, especially in light of this visual from one of the coursera video lectures by Professor Jonathan Tomkin (see earlier post).

How can we continue this way? And yet, it's the content of this article that was real news to me - quite shocking news if you read about the future implications of these hugely decreased plankton stocks.  Exactly why we have 40% less oxygen-producing phytoplankton than we did in 1950 hasn't been established, but add sewage dumping, nuclear weapons testing and vast areas of plastic soup (to name but a few obvious issues) to the overfishing debate and it's clear as day that we need to establish a much less abusive relationship with our precious, far-off, waters.

It's not all absolute doom and gloom, though. Because we can act to improve the situation.  Because we can face it rather than ignore it.  Because there is still a lot of beauty and specialness contained within our world.  Because we can make choices.  Because we have the means to inform those choices much more accurately and easily than any generation before us could ever have dreamed. There is hope.

The Lesula, is our odd one out.  He's also hit the news, but for his existence, not his disappearance.  This quiet, shy, newly-discovered species of monkey lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the scientific world didn't know a thing about him until this year.  His fate (along with that of bees, rhinos, tigers, etc. etc. etc... etc. ad infinitum!) doesn't look too promising, either.  But we'll work on it, right?

There's something mesmerising about his face, don't you think?.
Quirky little chap.


It takes all sorts to make a world.