Bill Minkel: The Amazonian pink river dolphin
[ Bill had great photos of these dolphins; you might want to do some surfing on Google Images to see what they look like! ]
The Amazonian pink river dolphin (henceforth referred to as a "boto," the local native name; it has many other names) is quite unlike more familiar dolphin species. It has a very wide range, extending into Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, and is found in both the Orinoco and Amazon basins. It is found only in rivers; it does not go into salt waters. There are three subspecies which derived from a common ancestor perhaps 8-12 million years ago (longer ago than when salt water dolphins evolved, interestingly); one subspecies is found in the Orinoco, one in the Amazon basin, and one in a tributary of the Amazon above a 500 meter high waterfall barrier that has acted as a cause of allopatric speciation. There are various similar dolphin species around the world that may be distantly related.
The boto has a very flexible body and neck due to unfused vertebrae, unlike mostly marine dolphins. The boto also has very wide pectoral flipper and flukes, and has a very long humerus in its pectoral fin that allows its fin to describe figure eights that allow extremely precise motion. Their dorsal fin is less tall than in marine dolphins, perhaps advantageous for maneuvering in complex river environments. Their rostrum (their "nose") is quite elongate compared to marine dolphins, and vibrissal hairs on their rostra may be used as vibrational sensory structures, or may be vestigial. They have a large, highly flexible melon on their forehead used to focus sounds for echolocation; their echolocation abilities are quite impressive. Their eyes are very small but their vision is good. Their dentition is heterodont (different teeth are different shapes), unlike most marine dolphins, to cope with a wide variety of food; they eat many kinds of fish, some freshwater crustaceans, and even river turtles (whose shells they break with their posterior teeth).
Boto behavior can be playful or aggressive; particularly in mating season, males get aggressive, and they often bear rake scars from the teeth of other males. They porpoise ("dive" upwards into the air) less often than marine dolphins typically do, and are rather less friendly than other dolphins. Their mating pattern is similar to lions: many times in a short period of time (perhaps every four minutes for an hour or so). Boto nurse for about a year and stay with their mother for about two and a half years. Pairs seen together are almost always a mother and calf, but they will occasionally group together for feeding.
Boto live roughly twenty years in the wild (up to 28 or so), but only a few years in captivity. The males grow to about eight feet and 700-800 lbs.; females are 6-6.5 feet long and therefore less massive. Their color varies considerably, but seems to generally change from gray when they are young to pink when they are older. The pink color is often patterned, not uniform, and can be used to identify individuals.
The boto characteristics are probably less derived than those of marine dolphins; they appear to represent an earlier branch in odontocete evolution. The odontocetes are thought to have evolved due to geologic and oceanic changes (particularly sea level changes) since the middle Miocene (~15 mya). At that time, ocean levels were much higher (perhaps 150 meters higher!) than today, and much of the Amazon was open water. At that time, the drainage from the continent seems to have been northward, out of the Orinoco; the northern Andes that now cut the Amazon basin off from the Orinoco had not yet uplifted significantly. The common ancestor of the boto subspecies presumably lived in that area, and as uplift and sea level lowering occurred, populations were isolated and diverged. About 10 mya the Amazon started to drain chiefly to the east, and the areas occupied by the subspecies were probably completely separated.
In native Brazilian folklore, the boto is an incantado, an enchanted being. They inhabit the enchanted world below the surface of the water, but they can transform into humans, especially at night, as botos incantados to walk among people. Male incantados are often described as handsome young men dressed all in white, good dancers and drinkers, on the lookout for young women. Female incantados seduce men to come and live with them in the enchanted world under the surface where life is beautiful and easy. Botos incantados are often used as scapegoats for human activity that is uncomfortable, embarrassing, or inexplicable.
Today botos are doing reasonably well. They are listed as threatened, but their current distribution does not appear to differ significantly from its estimated past distribution. Some loss due to net entanglement has been observed, and they are sometimes used as fish bait; they are also threatened by planned hydroelectric dam development. But today, at least, the current status of boto populations is good.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Talk: Ben Haller
Ben Haller: Global Climate and the Amazon
This talk has accompanying images. Surf to http://tinyurl.com/4yv4bh and you will be redirected to my Mac.com home page. Double-click on the "amazon" folder and you will see seven JPEG files. Download them using the downward-pointing arrows on the right. They will be explained below. This talk is longer since it's my talk, so there. :->
Major regions such as the Amazon Basin have a large impact upon global climate, and they are greatly affected by global climate patterns; the interaction is bidirectional. These interactions have become of particular importance with the advent of global warming; understanding how climate change will affect the Amazon, and vice versa, is essential to minimizing the impact of global warming and planning for the future. Global warming is an enormous threat to the planet and to human civilization; for more on that, I refer you to Al Gore's recent movie, and to NewScientist's excellent coverage of the issue. In this talk, I will discuss the mechanisms by which global warming occurs, its projected effects upon the Amazon basin, and the Amazon's effects on global climate change.
The way that global warming works is discussed at great length on many websites; no doubt Wikipedia has thorough coverage of it. So I'll just touch on the basics here. Most of the energy from the sun is in the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths of light; other wavelengths are relatively minor contributors. A good deal of ultraviolet gets absorbed by ozone high in Earth's atmosphere; most of the rest of the light makes it to the lower atmosphere and to the surface of the earth, since air is very nearly transparent to visible light. Some (30% is the figure I recall from memory) is reflected directly back into space by clouds, by reflection off the oceans, and by the reflectivity (or "albedo") of land masses. The remainder is absorbed, acting to heat up the oceans and the land. Warm objects emit light, too, however, as blackbody radiation; at the temperature of the Earth, the emitted light is in the infrared. Air is not transparent to infrared radiation; in particular, the greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and various others absorb infrared light and re-emit it in a random direction. This means that very little of that infrared light makes it back out into space; it is effectively trapped. The more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped.
That's the simple picture. There are a few wrinkles. Water vapor is actually the most important greenhouse gas, but it is rarely discussed because it is not under direct human control; if there's too much water vapor, it rains, if there's too little, it water evaporates from the oceans, so the atmospheric water vapor content is governed by those sorts of factors (which is an oversimplification, like everything in this talk, but there it is). So carbon dioxide, mathane, and various oxides of sulphur and nitrogen -- the "anthropogenic," or human-generated, gases -- are the ones generally focused upon. Another wrinkle is that soot has recently been found to be a major contributor to global warming, contrary to previous thinking; a short piece by Service in Science (2008) discusses this. Aerosols are also quite important, but their effect is poorly understood at present.
The effects of global warming are similarly unclear. The big picture is easy: melting ice, rising sea levels, more extreme weather, water supply problems, and higher average temperatures over the globe. But the small picture, the effects of global warming on local microclimates, is still hard to predict. Most of the results discussed in this talk came out in only the last year or three, and they are preliminary and tentative. In general, however, it can be said that global warming will cause changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation that will drive many local changes in climate (meaning rainfall, temperature, and seasonality).
What will the effects be on the Amazon specifically? Baettig et al. (2006) looked at the local effects of climate change worldwide, and the three images online from their paper show those effects. The first image essentially shows that everywhere will get hotter; if one takes the hottest year in a baseline period from the 1950s to the 1970s (if I recall correctly), pretty much the whole planet will experience 14-19 out of 20 years as being hotter than that baseline hottest year. What used to be an unusual, once in twenty years event will become the norm. The second image shows shifts in precipitation, and you can see from this that the Amazon will become much drier; many years in any 20-year period will be drier than the driest year in the baseline period. This is an extremely large shift in the climate of the Amazon. (Unfortunately, the same image shows that North America will largely be spared from major effects, so our politicians will be able to continue to ignore the issue.) The third image combines various factors into an overall "climate change index," which reveals that the Amazon will be affected by changing climate more than almost any other area except perhaps the Arctic and southern Africa.
What is driving this warming and drying of the Amazon specifically? I want to mention four factors. One is a shift from pastureland to soybean agriculture (Costa et al., 2007). This is being driven by the U.S. shift towards corn ethanol for biofuel production; land in the U.S. is being converted from soybeans to corn, raising the price of soybeans on the global market and causing Brazilian landowners to shift from cattle grazing to soybean farming. But soybean fields have a greater albedo than pasture; so more incoming sunlight is reflected directly back out into space, which (perhaps unexpectedly) causes less moisture to be retained by the land (I'm not sure how that works, exactly, sorry). This shows how interconnected global forces are, and how policy in the U.S. drives change worldwide in unexpected ways. The second factor is decreasing reflective aerosol production (Cox et al., 2008). For a long time now, dirty industrial activity such as the burning of coal has been emitting a lot of reflective aerosols into the atmosphere. This has had an overall cooling effect worldwide. But unfortunately, as industry cleans up its act and plants and factories become less polluting, the effect of lowered aerosol production will be an accelerated pace of warming. The third factor is deforestation (Malhi et al., 2008). Forest retains moisture; vegetation has a high moisture content, and it recycles precipitation back into the atmosphere. As deforestation progresses, more and more rainfall will go into rivers, and then to the ocean, or will go into underground aquifers; it will no longer be put directly back into the atmosphere by transpiration. The extremely humid environment generated by the trees of Amazonia will be lost. Deforestation along roads in the interior of the Amazon is particularly damaging in this respect, because it fragments the humid zones and drives further deforestation due to insufficient humidity in the interior. The last factor driving warming and drying is a shift in rainfall to a a shift in the position of the Hadley cell circulation in the atmosphere. In essence, incoming sunlight is strongest in the tropics, and this warms the air and causes it to rise. As it rises, it cools, and rain occurs due to the decrease in the amount of water the cooler air can hold. This is why the tropics get so much rain. The cooler, dry air falls back towards the surface at around 30 degrees north and south latitude; this is the reason for the deserts that occur at those latitudes, from the Sahara to the Sonora. But as global warming increases, the northern hemisphere is expected to get warm more quickly than the southern hemisphere, because it has more continental land area; the oceans act to stabilize temperatures and delay temperature changes. This means that global warming will cause the "tropical covergence" where the heavy rainfall occurs to shift northwards. The end result is that the rainfall mostly misses the Amazon; the Amazon will be in the zone that is now the desert zone. The first image from Malhi online shows probabilities of various amounts of rainfall reduction for the Amazon basin at two times of year. In December through February, the dry season in the northern Amazon, the image shows that rainfall is likely to decrease significantly in the northern region, while in June through August, the dry season in the southern Amazon, the image shows that rainfall is likely to decrease in the southern region. In other words, the rainfall will decrease the most during the dry season in each area, when it was needed the most; so the reduction in rainfall will be extremely harmful to the native flora. The second image from Malhi superimposes potential forest loss by 2050 on top of a map of drought probabilities under two different IPCC-defined future climate projections; it shows that heavy deforestation will likely occur in the southeast Amazon, where drought is also most severe. This means that the forest in that area will be hit doubly hard, and will dry out more quickly than the forest in the northwest Amazon.
What will this projected warming and drying of the Amazon do to its flora and fauna? The answer is not good; the expectation is that the forest will disappear, even if humans don't cut it all down, and the area will shift towards a sort of tropical savannah. Thomas et al. (2004) discuss the extinction risk faced by species due to climate change. Worldwide they predict that by 2050 "15-37% of species in [their] sample of regions and taxa will be 'committed to extinction'". The picture for the Amazon is even more dire; of plant taxa in the Amazon, they predict (this time under a maximum climate change scenario, unlike their global extinction prediction, which was based on a midrange scenario) that 69-87% will be committed to extinction by 2050. Their survey of Amazonian extinctions is based on a small number of species and is probably quite imprecise, but it is quite a scary prediction. Williams et al. (2007) compare worldwide climates today to those projected for 2100 and analyze what kinds of changes will occur. If a climate (a particular combination of temperature and rainfall profiles and seasonality) exists somewhere today but will not exist anywhere in 2100, it is called a "disappearing" climate, and species adapted to that climate will go extinct. If a climate will exist somewhere in 2100 but exists nowhere on earth today, it is called a "novel" climate, and will represent an opportunity of sorts for colonization and adaptation (probably by aggressive invasive species). The first image from Williams shows that the Amazonian lowlands will experience a novel climate in 2100: drying and warming will create a new type of savannah-like climate currently unknown in the world. The image also shows that the climate of the highlands near the Andes will disappear: the clouds that define the highland cloud forest will rise in altitude due to global warming until they have lifted right off the tops of the mountains, and the cloud forest will cease to exist, being replaced by a more typical montane climate regime. But this first image fails to capture an important biological aspect: dispersal. If a region changes climate, it doesn't really matter if that climate already exists halfway around the world; the species that are adapted to the new climate probably won't be able to migrate to the area from their refuge thousands of miles away. Species dispersal into new areas is limited by time and distance, and so when talking about novel and disappearing climates, it is really necessary to see whether a climate is novel or disappearing within a localized area in which dispersal of species could realistically occur. This is what the second image from Williams shows, and the picture is quite dire. From the perspective of species trying to migrate, disperse or adapt to climate change, the climate of the Amazon as it is today will disappear almost completely, both in the lowlands and the highlands, and will be replaced by climates that are completely novel for the flora and fauna anywhere nearby. The projection, then is massive extinctions of local flora and fauna, and wholesale conversion of the area to a low-diversity invasive. The local species will simply not be adapted to the climate in which they find themselves.
That, then, is the dismal picture of what the future holds for the Amazon. The other topic I want to briefly discuss is how the Amazon itself affects global climate. As the Amazon changes due to global warming, the changes it undergoes will have further repercussions that it is important to understand.
Malhi et al. (2008) discuss some of these effects; their summary is that the Amazon's "removal by deforestation can itself be a driver of climate change and a positive feedback on externally forced climate change." The rainforest stores a great deal of carbon by capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it into biomass (wood and leaves), a good deal of which ends up semi-permanently stored in the soil. Deforestation both halts the deposition of biomass into the soil layer, and releases all of the carbon that was stored in the trees (assuming the trees are burned, as is typically the case with the slash-and-burn agriculture responsible for much of the Amazonian deforestation). Deforestation will therefore enhance anthropogenic increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Rainforest also extracts soil water and returns it to the atmosphere by transpiration; "large-scale forest loss tends to reduce rainfall" as a result, contributing to regional drying as mentioned earlier. Loss of rainforest, according to Malhi et al., will also reduce cloud cover, increase land surface albedo, increase atmospheric aerosol content, and change wind speeds and patterns. The implications of many of these effects for global climate are hotly debated.
A final consideration is the Amazon's effect on the thermohaline circulation (THC). The THC is a global system of oceanic flow that conveys heat from the tropics into the Arctic and Antarctic regions; the Gulf Stream is the best-known component of the THC for most people in North America, but there are many other similar streams, both on the surface of the ocean and at depth. The water that flows out of the Amazon basin in the Atlantic enters the same stream that becomes the Gulf Stream further north (I have no idea what it's called down here). There has been a great deal of speculation that as the Arctic and Greenland ice melts, that massive input of cold freshwater into the THC system may cause it to halt, because its flow is driven by temperature and salinity differences in different parts of the ocean. The effects of a halt (or even a slowing) of the THC would be quite dire, perhaps including glaciation of a good deal of western Europe, which is warmed by the waters of the Gulf Stream. According to Stouffer et al. (2006), however, the input of freshwater from the Amazon has the same effect, even though the input occurs so much farther south. As the Amazon dries and rainfall in the region decreases drastically, the freshwater input from the Amazon basin will decrease accordingly; this decrease may offset the increase in freshwater input in the Arctic region, and prevent a slowdown or stoppage of the THC. Stouffer et al. don't explicitly point out this relationship; I am conjecturing based upon their data, but it seems to me that this is a (single, solitary) positive consequence of the likely disappearance of the Amazon as we know it. It's as silver of a lining as we're likely to see on this topic, so I'll end on that.
People often speak of a tipping point in global climate, a level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or an amount of temperature increase, below which things will be more or less OK, and above which feedbacks and interactions will cause the Earth's climate to change in profound and irreversible ways. In researching this topic, however, global came to look, to me, more like a series of dominos. The Amazon may be one of the first dominos to fall, since it is being pushed not only by climate change but also by deforestation, and by positive feedbacks inherent to its climate; as the studies I've presented show, there is every reason to believe it will be disappearing fast by 2050 and essentially gone by 2100. The Arctic sea ice is another domino likely to fall soon; some estimates predict that the Arctic may be open ocean i summer as early as 2030, although most predictions fall somewhat later. Both of these dominos will cause further dominos to fall. As Malhi et al. point out, the drying of Amazonia "could greatly expand the area suitable for soy, cattle, and sugarcane, accelerating forest disappearance" and generating more methane, fertilizer runoff, and other drivers of environmental degradation. As the Arctic converts to open ocean, countries are already competing for the rights to drill the vast oil reserves that have long been inaccessible under the Arctic ice, and burning all of that oil will, of course, drive further global warming. In my opinion, then, we should not think in terms of a tipping point, but in terms of dominos, and it is of great importance to try to prevent the first dominos from falling. The Amazon depends upon us for its survival; but conversely, we may also depend upon it for ours.
References cited
Williams, J.W., Jackson, S.T., & Kutzbach, J.E. (2007). Projected distributions of novel and disappearing climates by 2100 AD. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(14), 5738-5742.
Thomas, C.D., Cameron, A., Green, R.E., Bakkenes, M., Beaumont, L.J., Collingham, Y.C., et al. (2004). Extinction risk from climate change. Nature, 427(6970), 145-148.
Stouffer, R.J., Yin, J., Gregory, J.M., Dixon, K.W., Spelman, M.J., Hurlin, W., et al. (2006). Investigating the causes of the response of the thermohaline circulation to past and future climate changes. Journal of Climate, 19(8), 1365-1387.
Service, R.F. (2008). Study fingers soot as a major player in global warming. Science, 319(5871), 1745.
Malhi, Y., Roberts, J.T., Betts, R.A., Killeen, T.J., Li, W., & Nobre, C.A. (2008). Climate change, deforestation, and the fate of the Amazon. Science, 319(5860), 169-172.
Cox, P.M., Harris, P.P., Huntingford, C., Betts, R.A., Collins, M., Jones, C.D., et al. (2008). Increasing risk of Amazonian drought due to decreasing aerosol pollution. Nature, 453(7192), 212-215.
Costa, M.H., Yanagi, S.N.M., Souza, P.J.O.P., Ribeiro, A., & Rocha, E.J.P. (2007). Climate change in Amazonia caused by soybean cropland expansion, as compared to caused by pastureland expansion. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L07706.
Baettig, M.B., Wild, M., & Imboden, D.M. (2007). A climate change index: Where climate change may be most prominent in the 21st century. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L01705.
This talk has accompanying images. Surf to http://tinyurl.com/4yv4bh and you will be redirected to my Mac.com home page. Double-click on the "amazon" folder and you will see seven JPEG files. Download them using the downward-pointing arrows on the right. They will be explained below. This talk is longer since it's my talk, so there. :->
Major regions such as the Amazon Basin have a large impact upon global climate, and they are greatly affected by global climate patterns; the interaction is bidirectional. These interactions have become of particular importance with the advent of global warming; understanding how climate change will affect the Amazon, and vice versa, is essential to minimizing the impact of global warming and planning for the future. Global warming is an enormous threat to the planet and to human civilization; for more on that, I refer you to Al Gore's recent movie, and to NewScientist's excellent coverage of the issue. In this talk, I will discuss the mechanisms by which global warming occurs, its projected effects upon the Amazon basin, and the Amazon's effects on global climate change.
The way that global warming works is discussed at great length on many websites; no doubt Wikipedia has thorough coverage of it. So I'll just touch on the basics here. Most of the energy from the sun is in the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths of light; other wavelengths are relatively minor contributors. A good deal of ultraviolet gets absorbed by ozone high in Earth's atmosphere; most of the rest of the light makes it to the lower atmosphere and to the surface of the earth, since air is very nearly transparent to visible light. Some (30% is the figure I recall from memory) is reflected directly back into space by clouds, by reflection off the oceans, and by the reflectivity (or "albedo") of land masses. The remainder is absorbed, acting to heat up the oceans and the land. Warm objects emit light, too, however, as blackbody radiation; at the temperature of the Earth, the emitted light is in the infrared. Air is not transparent to infrared radiation; in particular, the greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and various others absorb infrared light and re-emit it in a random direction. This means that very little of that infrared light makes it back out into space; it is effectively trapped. The more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped.
That's the simple picture. There are a few wrinkles. Water vapor is actually the most important greenhouse gas, but it is rarely discussed because it is not under direct human control; if there's too much water vapor, it rains, if there's too little, it water evaporates from the oceans, so the atmospheric water vapor content is governed by those sorts of factors (which is an oversimplification, like everything in this talk, but there it is). So carbon dioxide, mathane, and various oxides of sulphur and nitrogen -- the "anthropogenic," or human-generated, gases -- are the ones generally focused upon. Another wrinkle is that soot has recently been found to be a major contributor to global warming, contrary to previous thinking; a short piece by Service in Science (2008) discusses this. Aerosols are also quite important, but their effect is poorly understood at present.
The effects of global warming are similarly unclear. The big picture is easy: melting ice, rising sea levels, more extreme weather, water supply problems, and higher average temperatures over the globe. But the small picture, the effects of global warming on local microclimates, is still hard to predict. Most of the results discussed in this talk came out in only the last year or three, and they are preliminary and tentative. In general, however, it can be said that global warming will cause changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation that will drive many local changes in climate (meaning rainfall, temperature, and seasonality).
What will the effects be on the Amazon specifically? Baettig et al. (2006) looked at the local effects of climate change worldwide, and the three images online from their paper show those effects. The first image essentially shows that everywhere will get hotter; if one takes the hottest year in a baseline period from the 1950s to the 1970s (if I recall correctly), pretty much the whole planet will experience 14-19 out of 20 years as being hotter than that baseline hottest year. What used to be an unusual, once in twenty years event will become the norm. The second image shows shifts in precipitation, and you can see from this that the Amazon will become much drier; many years in any 20-year period will be drier than the driest year in the baseline period. This is an extremely large shift in the climate of the Amazon. (Unfortunately, the same image shows that North America will largely be spared from major effects, so our politicians will be able to continue to ignore the issue.) The third image combines various factors into an overall "climate change index," which reveals that the Amazon will be affected by changing climate more than almost any other area except perhaps the Arctic and southern Africa.
What is driving this warming and drying of the Amazon specifically? I want to mention four factors. One is a shift from pastureland to soybean agriculture (Costa et al., 2007). This is being driven by the U.S. shift towards corn ethanol for biofuel production; land in the U.S. is being converted from soybeans to corn, raising the price of soybeans on the global market and causing Brazilian landowners to shift from cattle grazing to soybean farming. But soybean fields have a greater albedo than pasture; so more incoming sunlight is reflected directly back out into space, which (perhaps unexpectedly) causes less moisture to be retained by the land (I'm not sure how that works, exactly, sorry). This shows how interconnected global forces are, and how policy in the U.S. drives change worldwide in unexpected ways. The second factor is decreasing reflective aerosol production (Cox et al., 2008). For a long time now, dirty industrial activity such as the burning of coal has been emitting a lot of reflective aerosols into the atmosphere. This has had an overall cooling effect worldwide. But unfortunately, as industry cleans up its act and plants and factories become less polluting, the effect of lowered aerosol production will be an accelerated pace of warming. The third factor is deforestation (Malhi et al., 2008). Forest retains moisture; vegetation has a high moisture content, and it recycles precipitation back into the atmosphere. As deforestation progresses, more and more rainfall will go into rivers, and then to the ocean, or will go into underground aquifers; it will no longer be put directly back into the atmosphere by transpiration. The extremely humid environment generated by the trees of Amazonia will be lost. Deforestation along roads in the interior of the Amazon is particularly damaging in this respect, because it fragments the humid zones and drives further deforestation due to insufficient humidity in the interior. The last factor driving warming and drying is a shift in rainfall to a a shift in the position of the Hadley cell circulation in the atmosphere. In essence, incoming sunlight is strongest in the tropics, and this warms the air and causes it to rise. As it rises, it cools, and rain occurs due to the decrease in the amount of water the cooler air can hold. This is why the tropics get so much rain. The cooler, dry air falls back towards the surface at around 30 degrees north and south latitude; this is the reason for the deserts that occur at those latitudes, from the Sahara to the Sonora. But as global warming increases, the northern hemisphere is expected to get warm more quickly than the southern hemisphere, because it has more continental land area; the oceans act to stabilize temperatures and delay temperature changes. This means that global warming will cause the "tropical covergence" where the heavy rainfall occurs to shift northwards. The end result is that the rainfall mostly misses the Amazon; the Amazon will be in the zone that is now the desert zone. The first image from Malhi online shows probabilities of various amounts of rainfall reduction for the Amazon basin at two times of year. In December through February, the dry season in the northern Amazon, the image shows that rainfall is likely to decrease significantly in the northern region, while in June through August, the dry season in the southern Amazon, the image shows that rainfall is likely to decrease in the southern region. In other words, the rainfall will decrease the most during the dry season in each area, when it was needed the most; so the reduction in rainfall will be extremely harmful to the native flora. The second image from Malhi superimposes potential forest loss by 2050 on top of a map of drought probabilities under two different IPCC-defined future climate projections; it shows that heavy deforestation will likely occur in the southeast Amazon, where drought is also most severe. This means that the forest in that area will be hit doubly hard, and will dry out more quickly than the forest in the northwest Amazon.
What will this projected warming and drying of the Amazon do to its flora and fauna? The answer is not good; the expectation is that the forest will disappear, even if humans don't cut it all down, and the area will shift towards a sort of tropical savannah. Thomas et al. (2004) discuss the extinction risk faced by species due to climate change. Worldwide they predict that by 2050 "15-37% of species in [their] sample of regions and taxa will be 'committed to extinction'". The picture for the Amazon is even more dire; of plant taxa in the Amazon, they predict (this time under a maximum climate change scenario, unlike their global extinction prediction, which was based on a midrange scenario) that 69-87% will be committed to extinction by 2050. Their survey of Amazonian extinctions is based on a small number of species and is probably quite imprecise, but it is quite a scary prediction. Williams et al. (2007) compare worldwide climates today to those projected for 2100 and analyze what kinds of changes will occur. If a climate (a particular combination of temperature and rainfall profiles and seasonality) exists somewhere today but will not exist anywhere in 2100, it is called a "disappearing" climate, and species adapted to that climate will go extinct. If a climate will exist somewhere in 2100 but exists nowhere on earth today, it is called a "novel" climate, and will represent an opportunity of sorts for colonization and adaptation (probably by aggressive invasive species). The first image from Williams shows that the Amazonian lowlands will experience a novel climate in 2100: drying and warming will create a new type of savannah-like climate currently unknown in the world. The image also shows that the climate of the highlands near the Andes will disappear: the clouds that define the highland cloud forest will rise in altitude due to global warming until they have lifted right off the tops of the mountains, and the cloud forest will cease to exist, being replaced by a more typical montane climate regime. But this first image fails to capture an important biological aspect: dispersal. If a region changes climate, it doesn't really matter if that climate already exists halfway around the world; the species that are adapted to the new climate probably won't be able to migrate to the area from their refuge thousands of miles away. Species dispersal into new areas is limited by time and distance, and so when talking about novel and disappearing climates, it is really necessary to see whether a climate is novel or disappearing within a localized area in which dispersal of species could realistically occur. This is what the second image from Williams shows, and the picture is quite dire. From the perspective of species trying to migrate, disperse or adapt to climate change, the climate of the Amazon as it is today will disappear almost completely, both in the lowlands and the highlands, and will be replaced by climates that are completely novel for the flora and fauna anywhere nearby. The projection, then is massive extinctions of local flora and fauna, and wholesale conversion of the area to a low-diversity invasive. The local species will simply not be adapted to the climate in which they find themselves.
That, then, is the dismal picture of what the future holds for the Amazon. The other topic I want to briefly discuss is how the Amazon itself affects global climate. As the Amazon changes due to global warming, the changes it undergoes will have further repercussions that it is important to understand.
Malhi et al. (2008) discuss some of these effects; their summary is that the Amazon's "removal by deforestation can itself be a driver of climate change and a positive feedback on externally forced climate change." The rainforest stores a great deal of carbon by capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it into biomass (wood and leaves), a good deal of which ends up semi-permanently stored in the soil. Deforestation both halts the deposition of biomass into the soil layer, and releases all of the carbon that was stored in the trees (assuming the trees are burned, as is typically the case with the slash-and-burn agriculture responsible for much of the Amazonian deforestation). Deforestation will therefore enhance anthropogenic increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Rainforest also extracts soil water and returns it to the atmosphere by transpiration; "large-scale forest loss tends to reduce rainfall" as a result, contributing to regional drying as mentioned earlier. Loss of rainforest, according to Malhi et al., will also reduce cloud cover, increase land surface albedo, increase atmospheric aerosol content, and change wind speeds and patterns. The implications of many of these effects for global climate are hotly debated.
A final consideration is the Amazon's effect on the thermohaline circulation (THC). The THC is a global system of oceanic flow that conveys heat from the tropics into the Arctic and Antarctic regions; the Gulf Stream is the best-known component of the THC for most people in North America, but there are many other similar streams, both on the surface of the ocean and at depth. The water that flows out of the Amazon basin in the Atlantic enters the same stream that becomes the Gulf Stream further north (I have no idea what it's called down here). There has been a great deal of speculation that as the Arctic and Greenland ice melts, that massive input of cold freshwater into the THC system may cause it to halt, because its flow is driven by temperature and salinity differences in different parts of the ocean. The effects of a halt (or even a slowing) of the THC would be quite dire, perhaps including glaciation of a good deal of western Europe, which is warmed by the waters of the Gulf Stream. According to Stouffer et al. (2006), however, the input of freshwater from the Amazon has the same effect, even though the input occurs so much farther south. As the Amazon dries and rainfall in the region decreases drastically, the freshwater input from the Amazon basin will decrease accordingly; this decrease may offset the increase in freshwater input in the Arctic region, and prevent a slowdown or stoppage of the THC. Stouffer et al. don't explicitly point out this relationship; I am conjecturing based upon their data, but it seems to me that this is a (single, solitary) positive consequence of the likely disappearance of the Amazon as we know it. It's as silver of a lining as we're likely to see on this topic, so I'll end on that.
People often speak of a tipping point in global climate, a level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or an amount of temperature increase, below which things will be more or less OK, and above which feedbacks and interactions will cause the Earth's climate to change in profound and irreversible ways. In researching this topic, however, global came to look, to me, more like a series of dominos. The Amazon may be one of the first dominos to fall, since it is being pushed not only by climate change but also by deforestation, and by positive feedbacks inherent to its climate; as the studies I've presented show, there is every reason to believe it will be disappearing fast by 2050 and essentially gone by 2100. The Arctic sea ice is another domino likely to fall soon; some estimates predict that the Arctic may be open ocean i summer as early as 2030, although most predictions fall somewhat later. Both of these dominos will cause further dominos to fall. As Malhi et al. point out, the drying of Amazonia "could greatly expand the area suitable for soy, cattle, and sugarcane, accelerating forest disappearance" and generating more methane, fertilizer runoff, and other drivers of environmental degradation. As the Arctic converts to open ocean, countries are already competing for the rights to drill the vast oil reserves that have long been inaccessible under the Arctic ice, and burning all of that oil will, of course, drive further global warming. In my opinion, then, we should not think in terms of a tipping point, but in terms of dominos, and it is of great importance to try to prevent the first dominos from falling. The Amazon depends upon us for its survival; but conversely, we may also depend upon it for ours.
References cited
Williams, J.W., Jackson, S.T., & Kutzbach, J.E. (2007). Projected distributions of novel and disappearing climates by 2100 AD. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(14), 5738-5742.
Thomas, C.D., Cameron, A., Green, R.E., Bakkenes, M., Beaumont, L.J., Collingham, Y.C., et al. (2004). Extinction risk from climate change. Nature, 427(6970), 145-148.
Stouffer, R.J., Yin, J., Gregory, J.M., Dixon, K.W., Spelman, M.J., Hurlin, W., et al. (2006). Investigating the causes of the response of the thermohaline circulation to past and future climate changes. Journal of Climate, 19(8), 1365-1387.
Service, R.F. (2008). Study fingers soot as a major player in global warming. Science, 319(5871), 1745.
Malhi, Y., Roberts, J.T., Betts, R.A., Killeen, T.J., Li, W., & Nobre, C.A. (2008). Climate change, deforestation, and the fate of the Amazon. Science, 319(5860), 169-172.
Cox, P.M., Harris, P.P., Huntingford, C., Betts, R.A., Collins, M., Jones, C.D., et al. (2008). Increasing risk of Amazonian drought due to decreasing aerosol pollution. Nature, 453(7192), 212-215.
Costa, M.H., Yanagi, S.N.M., Souza, P.J.O.P., Ribeiro, A., & Rocha, E.J.P. (2007). Climate change in Amazonia caused by soybean cropland expansion, as compared to caused by pastureland expansion. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L07706.
Baettig, M.B., Wild, M., & Imboden, D.M. (2007). A climate change index: Where climate change may be most prominent in the 21st century. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L01705.
Talk: Victoria Johnson
Victoria Johnson: Rubber
The Para rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, is a tree in the family Euphorbiaceae. It grows to about 30 meters, and is endemic to the Amazon rainforest. It has had a huge economic impact as the source of natural rubber. Latex, the source of natural rubber, is also found in other plants (tens of thousands of species), and may be a defense against insect herbivory. Latex is produced by secretory cells called lactifers, located in the inner bark of the tree. Latex vessels spiral up the tree in a layer outside the cambium. Latex can be extracted by cutting with machetes or more sophisticated rubber tapping techniques. Unlike many latex-producing plants, the more damage that is done the more latex flows, making the rubber tree much easier to harvest latex from than other species; the rubber tree is responsible for 98% of the world's natural rubber harvest. The latex is then collected, preserved and stabilized. The wood of the tree, called parawood or rubberwood, is an ecologically sustainable tropical hardwood used for furniture. Cultivation of rubber trees is made more difficult by South American leaf blight, a fungal disease caused by the native ascomycete Microcyclus ulei; this fungus has prevented commercial-scale plantations in South and Central America, but is still absent from Asia.
The Para rubber tree was not domesticated in Brazil, but the Amazonian natives harvested the wild plants. Amazonian Indians leached poison from Para rubber tree seeds and ate them; the cooked seeds are edible. Some Amazonian Indians dipped their feet into latex and dried them over a fire to create perfectly sized sneakers. The waterproofing qualities of rubber were discovered by Europeans on a French expedition to the New World; de la Condamine documented rubber being used for torches, bottles and shoes by natives in Ecuador. Rubber was exported from tropical zones to Mesoamerica. In the Mesoamerican ball game, the ball was solid rubber, weighed up to five pounds, and was about six inches in diameter. Europeans initially believed the bouncing balls were bewitched or inhabited by spirits. The Olmecs (the "rubber people") were the first to cultivate the rubber tree, and are often given credit for having invented the ball game. Rubber balls were symbolic of fertility, and the Aztecs and the Maya equated latex with blood and semen.
Columbus saw rubber in the West Indies, and saw games with bouncing rubber balls in Hispaniola, between 1492 and 1496. Rubber was introduced to Britain in 1730, but it took a long time to catch on, partly because of the chemical instability of natural rubber. In 1827 Brazil exported 31 tons of natural rubber; in 1830 Brazil exported 156 tons. In 1834-1839 vulcanization was developed by Charles Goodyear, making the rubber more stable (and harder), and rubber took off. In 1840 Brazil exported 388 tons, in 1850, 1467 tons, in 1860, 2673 tons, in 1870, 6591 tons. Manaus was at the center of this trade; the rubber export from Brazil went through Manaus, and it caused a huge economic boom. The British were quite unhappy about the Portuguese monopoly on rubber, and Sir Henry Wickham managed to cultivate rubber trees from seeds (smuggled? stolen?) from Brazil. The British began growing rubber trees in tropical spots in the British empire, such as Sri Lanka and Singapore. In Brazil, meanwhile, 8680 tons were exported in 1880, 19000 tons in 1890.
The years of 1890-1920 was the "rubber boom," the Golden Age of Manaus. 120,000 native slaves were used to collect latex, and the rich rubber barons built huge colonial mansions, paved the streets, ran streetcars, introduced electricity, and so forth. The opera house in downtown Manaus dates to this period. The effect on the native people of Brazil was quite negative; brutal labor practices, debt and introduced alcohol were used to control them, and the rubber trade fragmented their society. The population of native peoples dropped precipitously.
But in 1898 the British established a successful rubber tree plantation in Malaysia (after much struggling). The British had an advantage because of the lack of the South American leaf blight in Asia, and rubber prices began to drop. In 1902 rubber plantations were established in India. The maximum output of rubber from Manaus was in 1906-07, when 30,000 tons were exported; things went downhill from there.
From 1920-1945 Henry Ford established Fordlandia, a large rubber tree plantation in Brazil, in an attempt to obtain his own rubber for car tires. It failed, as did all later attempts at large-scale rubber cultivation in Brazil. Ford was oblivious to Brazilian culture; he forced his workers to wear ID badges, eat hamburgers, work 9 to 5 days, and did not allow drinking or smoking. A worker rebellion in 1930 had to be subdued by the Brazilian army. Ford lost $20 million on Fordlandia before giving up.
During World War II the Japanese had control over most areas suitable for growing rubber trees, and the other powers struggled to find alternatives; the Germans experimented with harvesting latex from dandelions! From 1941 to 1953 Richard Evans Schultes, the "Father of Ethnobotany," was sent to South America to find a reliable source of rubber for the U.S. war effort. He remained to discover and catalog 25,000 new botanical species. In 1945 synthetic rubber was developed, made from gas or oil.
In the 1960s world natural rubber prices collapsed,and many landowners in Brazil sold to ranchers. In the 1970s Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and unionist, united the rubber tappers and opposed the loss of rainforest to cattle ranches. By 1988 Mendes has reached such prominence and importance that he was assassinated by the cattle ranchers; but the seringeuiros, the rubber tappers of Brazil, became heroes in popular culture.
Today, worldwide rubber production is 9.7 million tons. Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia are the prime rubber producers in the world, followed by Sri Lanka, India, Liberia, and Nigeria. 90% of world rubber production comes from Asia, because of the South American leaf blight. In 2007, Brazil produced about 1% of the world's natural rubber, which is less than Brazil itself consumes.
Rubber today is used in tires, toy balloons, water bottles, condoms, carpet underlay, belts, wire cables, hoses, rubber bands, erasers, rubber stamps, footballs, golf balls, tennis balls, gloves, Wellington boots, Mackintoshes, waterproof fabrics, rubber bullets, rubber duckies... About 40% of the world's rubber is natural rubber, while the other 60% is synthetic; natural rubber has some properties that synthetic rubber does not, so it is still needed for some uses. 75% of all rubber is used in tire manufacturing.
The Para rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, is a tree in the family Euphorbiaceae. It grows to about 30 meters, and is endemic to the Amazon rainforest. It has had a huge economic impact as the source of natural rubber. Latex, the source of natural rubber, is also found in other plants (tens of thousands of species), and may be a defense against insect herbivory. Latex is produced by secretory cells called lactifers, located in the inner bark of the tree. Latex vessels spiral up the tree in a layer outside the cambium. Latex can be extracted by cutting with machetes or more sophisticated rubber tapping techniques. Unlike many latex-producing plants, the more damage that is done the more latex flows, making the rubber tree much easier to harvest latex from than other species; the rubber tree is responsible for 98% of the world's natural rubber harvest. The latex is then collected, preserved and stabilized. The wood of the tree, called parawood or rubberwood, is an ecologically sustainable tropical hardwood used for furniture. Cultivation of rubber trees is made more difficult by South American leaf blight, a fungal disease caused by the native ascomycete Microcyclus ulei; this fungus has prevented commercial-scale plantations in South and Central America, but is still absent from Asia.
The Para rubber tree was not domesticated in Brazil, but the Amazonian natives harvested the wild plants. Amazonian Indians leached poison from Para rubber tree seeds and ate them; the cooked seeds are edible. Some Amazonian Indians dipped their feet into latex and dried them over a fire to create perfectly sized sneakers. The waterproofing qualities of rubber were discovered by Europeans on a French expedition to the New World; de la Condamine documented rubber being used for torches, bottles and shoes by natives in Ecuador. Rubber was exported from tropical zones to Mesoamerica. In the Mesoamerican ball game, the ball was solid rubber, weighed up to five pounds, and was about six inches in diameter. Europeans initially believed the bouncing balls were bewitched or inhabited by spirits. The Olmecs (the "rubber people") were the first to cultivate the rubber tree, and are often given credit for having invented the ball game. Rubber balls were symbolic of fertility, and the Aztecs and the Maya equated latex with blood and semen.
Columbus saw rubber in the West Indies, and saw games with bouncing rubber balls in Hispaniola, between 1492 and 1496. Rubber was introduced to Britain in 1730, but it took a long time to catch on, partly because of the chemical instability of natural rubber. In 1827 Brazil exported 31 tons of natural rubber; in 1830 Brazil exported 156 tons. In 1834-1839 vulcanization was developed by Charles Goodyear, making the rubber more stable (and harder), and rubber took off. In 1840 Brazil exported 388 tons, in 1850, 1467 tons, in 1860, 2673 tons, in 1870, 6591 tons. Manaus was at the center of this trade; the rubber export from Brazil went through Manaus, and it caused a huge economic boom. The British were quite unhappy about the Portuguese monopoly on rubber, and Sir Henry Wickham managed to cultivate rubber trees from seeds (smuggled? stolen?) from Brazil. The British began growing rubber trees in tropical spots in the British empire, such as Sri Lanka and Singapore. In Brazil, meanwhile, 8680 tons were exported in 1880, 19000 tons in 1890.
The years of 1890-1920 was the "rubber boom," the Golden Age of Manaus. 120,000 native slaves were used to collect latex, and the rich rubber barons built huge colonial mansions, paved the streets, ran streetcars, introduced electricity, and so forth. The opera house in downtown Manaus dates to this period. The effect on the native people of Brazil was quite negative; brutal labor practices, debt and introduced alcohol were used to control them, and the rubber trade fragmented their society. The population of native peoples dropped precipitously.
But in 1898 the British established a successful rubber tree plantation in Malaysia (after much struggling). The British had an advantage because of the lack of the South American leaf blight in Asia, and rubber prices began to drop. In 1902 rubber plantations were established in India. The maximum output of rubber from Manaus was in 1906-07, when 30,000 tons were exported; things went downhill from there.
From 1920-1945 Henry Ford established Fordlandia, a large rubber tree plantation in Brazil, in an attempt to obtain his own rubber for car tires. It failed, as did all later attempts at large-scale rubber cultivation in Brazil. Ford was oblivious to Brazilian culture; he forced his workers to wear ID badges, eat hamburgers, work 9 to 5 days, and did not allow drinking or smoking. A worker rebellion in 1930 had to be subdued by the Brazilian army. Ford lost $20 million on Fordlandia before giving up.
During World War II the Japanese had control over most areas suitable for growing rubber trees, and the other powers struggled to find alternatives; the Germans experimented with harvesting latex from dandelions! From 1941 to 1953 Richard Evans Schultes, the "Father of Ethnobotany," was sent to South America to find a reliable source of rubber for the U.S. war effort. He remained to discover and catalog 25,000 new botanical species. In 1945 synthetic rubber was developed, made from gas or oil.
In the 1960s world natural rubber prices collapsed,and many landowners in Brazil sold to ranchers. In the 1970s Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and unionist, united the rubber tappers and opposed the loss of rainforest to cattle ranches. By 1988 Mendes has reached such prominence and importance that he was assassinated by the cattle ranchers; but the seringeuiros, the rubber tappers of Brazil, became heroes in popular culture.
Today, worldwide rubber production is 9.7 million tons. Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia are the prime rubber producers in the world, followed by Sri Lanka, India, Liberia, and Nigeria. 90% of world rubber production comes from Asia, because of the South American leaf blight. In 2007, Brazil produced about 1% of the world's natural rubber, which is less than Brazil itself consumes.
Rubber today is used in tires, toy balloons, water bottles, condoms, carpet underlay, belts, wire cables, hoses, rubber bands, erasers, rubber stamps, footballs, golf balls, tennis balls, gloves, Wellington boots, Mackintoshes, waterproof fabrics, rubber bullets, rubber duckies... About 40% of the world's rubber is natural rubber, while the other 60% is synthetic; natural rubber has some properties that synthetic rubber does not, so it is still needed for some uses. 75% of all rubber is used in tire manufacturing.
FUCAPI
Today we're visiting FUCAPI, the Fundacao Centro de Analise, Pesquisa e Inovacao Tecnologica (The Foundation Center for Analysis, Research and Technological Innovation). I'm in a small auditorium right now with a screen in front, and they are starting a video about FUCAPI that I will try to summarize here.
The Amazon is the planet's largest freshwater reserve, with vast quantities of wood and minerals. Manaus is an economic powerhouse, the eighth largest city in Brazil and the center for 60% of northern Brazil's economic activity, with a total revenue of about $28 billion per year. FUCAPI places itself at the center of all this. They are involved in many areas, from cell phone technology to electronic voting machines to sewage treatment bioreactors to processing of guarana berries. In all cases the overall goal is to help the development of the Amazonas region in ways that are compatible with the rainforest.
Now
we're getting a little PowerPoint presentation from a fellow who works here. FUCAPI is now 26 years old. It is a nonprofit private foundation. Its initial focus in 1982 was industrial production analysis, but in 1986 they changed their scope to larger issues. FUCAPI's primary vision is the sustainable development of the Amazonas region through technology and education. Their goal is to become "a benchmark as an educational and technological institute to society, based upon the expertises of its professionals". They have partnerships with many international companies (Oracle, Diebold), government agencies, and small local institutions. They employ about 1500 people now. You can see more about them at http://www.fucapi.br.
A question was asked about their source of funding; it is from organizations (corporations, government agencies) that essentially hire them for their expertise. They receive no bulk funding from the government to support them in general, although individual government agencies do pay them for specific projects.
A question was asked about their involvement in carbon dioxide reductions. Their answer was very long, and made clear that they take the problem seriously and are attacking it on many fronts, from promoting a carbon credit scheme to promoting biodiesel to many other things. They promote reforestation in the south of Brazil, and fight deforestation in the Amazon, and work closely with local people to try to promote sustainable ways of life with a low carbon footprint. They are, however, opposed to the view of the Amazon as a sanctuary; 23 million people live in it and depend upon it for their livelihood, and that is a fact that should not change.
A question was asked about water purification and distribution systems that FUCAPI had been mentioned as producing and promoting; the questioner had visited several small river communities in the past week and had not seen any evidence of such systems in use. The seasonal rise and fall of the Amazon is about 29 meters, and the width of the river can vary by a factor of twenty. People living on the margins of the rivers cannot have normal systems for water or waste, because of these variations; so FUCAPI has been developing water treatment systems to address the needs of these communities. It purifies water from wastewater on-site, can be submerged without any problems, and works using aerobic and anaerobic bacteria and ultraviolet light. The reactors are made from recycled PET plastic from plastic water bottles; about 1500 water bottles are used to make one reactor. The reactors use no electricity. The resulting water is very nearly pure. These systems have been installed in companies, hotels, hospitals, universities, small floating river restaurants, and floating hotels; they have models for small houses as well, at a cost of about $4000 for a five-house treatment unit. The use of these reactors will soon be required by law, if I understood correctly. Right now only a small percentage of the wastewater from Manaus is treated; most is released into the rivers, and in some areas the pollution is extreme. A shift to these bioreactors provides a huge opportunity; the hope is that in five years the rivers will be clean again. Applications for this technology may reach far beyond Brazil in the future.
A question was asked about FUCAPI's involvement in hydroelectric power (which provides most of the electrical power in the Amazonas region), and what measures are taken to minimize the ecological impact of hydroelectric generation. Because the Amazonas region is so flat, the area flooded by dams is much larger than it would be in other regions. Problems with hydroelectric power involve submerging of forest, disruption of indigenous communities, and effects upon river fish. Projects at FUCAPI include increasing efficiency of hydroelectric generation, finding ways to decrease the flooded area, new fish ladder technologies, and turbine innovations to allow generation from a lesser height differential. The impact upon indigenous people is addressed chiefly by not siting dams in their areas; no planned hydroelectric plants will impact indigenous people. By 2025 Brazil will be the world's fifth largest economy, so Brazil will need a huge amount of energy. They are focusing on hydroelectric energy and renewable energies, particularly biodiesel from ethanol; they don't want to use nuclear power. Brazil also has large oil reserves, but they are trying to focus on biofuels, not fossil fuels.
A question was asked about FUCAPI's involvement in education. They are involved from high school to postgraduate and MBA work. They help about 4000 students currently, and offer classes in many different areas, with a focus on technology. Night classes are offered for those who work during the day. FUCAPI partners with international and American universities, including San Jose State University. One current goal is to bring 18 US students to Brazil and 18 Brazilian students to the US in the next four years, on an exchange program. The exchange program currently centers on students in management and technology.
Next
we wandered over to a building at FUCAPI called the Tropical Design Center. They design furniture and other items out of tropical woods, and then promulgate those designs to people (indigenous and otherwise) in rural areas of Brazil for manufacture. The goal is to use fallen trees, wood scrap, and other sustainable materials to produce high-quality (and high-priced!) items for export. They had some stuff on display, and it was really quite beautiful. Their website is http://www.nativeoriginal.com.br/, although it seems to only be in Portuguese, to offer other products not made by FUCAPI, and not to have prices (in any currency) on the site. Possibly if my Portuguese were better I could find that information somewhere.
Now
we're in a highly air-conditioned computer classroom at FUCAPI where we're all busily checking email and surfing. I'm going to give my presentation in a couple of minutes, and then two others will present as well; so I'll end this blog entry here, and put up separate entries for the presentations.
The Amazon is the planet's largest freshwater reserve, with vast quantities of wood and minerals. Manaus is an economic powerhouse, the eighth largest city in Brazil and the center for 60% of northern Brazil's economic activity, with a total revenue of about $28 billion per year. FUCAPI places itself at the center of all this. They are involved in many areas, from cell phone technology to electronic voting machines to sewage treatment bioreactors to processing of guarana berries. In all cases the overall goal is to help the development of the Amazonas region in ways that are compatible with the rainforest.
Now
we're getting a little PowerPoint presentation from a fellow who works here. FUCAPI is now 26 years old. It is a nonprofit private foundation. Its initial focus in 1982 was industrial production analysis, but in 1986 they changed their scope to larger issues. FUCAPI's primary vision is the sustainable development of the Amazonas region through technology and education. Their goal is to become "a benchmark as an educational and technological institute to society, based upon the expertises of its professionals". They have partnerships with many international companies (Oracle, Diebold), government agencies, and small local institutions. They employ about 1500 people now. You can see more about them at http://www.fucapi.br.A question was asked about their source of funding; it is from organizations (corporations, government agencies) that essentially hire them for their expertise. They receive no bulk funding from the government to support them in general, although individual government agencies do pay them for specific projects.
A question was asked about their involvement in carbon dioxide reductions. Their answer was very long, and made clear that they take the problem seriously and are attacking it on many fronts, from promoting a carbon credit scheme to promoting biodiesel to many other things. They promote reforestation in the south of Brazil, and fight deforestation in the Amazon, and work closely with local people to try to promote sustainable ways of life with a low carbon footprint. They are, however, opposed to the view of the Amazon as a sanctuary; 23 million people live in it and depend upon it for their livelihood, and that is a fact that should not change.
A question was asked about water purification and distribution systems that FUCAPI had been mentioned as producing and promoting; the questioner had visited several small river communities in the past week and had not seen any evidence of such systems in use. The seasonal rise and fall of the Amazon is about 29 meters, and the width of the river can vary by a factor of twenty. People living on the margins of the rivers cannot have normal systems for water or waste, because of these variations; so FUCAPI has been developing water treatment systems to address the needs of these communities. It purifies water from wastewater on-site, can be submerged without any problems, and works using aerobic and anaerobic bacteria and ultraviolet light. The reactors are made from recycled PET plastic from plastic water bottles; about 1500 water bottles are used to make one reactor. The reactors use no electricity. The resulting water is very nearly pure. These systems have been installed in companies, hotels, hospitals, universities, small floating river restaurants, and floating hotels; they have models for small houses as well, at a cost of about $4000 for a five-house treatment unit. The use of these reactors will soon be required by law, if I understood correctly. Right now only a small percentage of the wastewater from Manaus is treated; most is released into the rivers, and in some areas the pollution is extreme. A shift to these bioreactors provides a huge opportunity; the hope is that in five years the rivers will be clean again. Applications for this technology may reach far beyond Brazil in the future.
A question was asked about FUCAPI's involvement in hydroelectric power (which provides most of the electrical power in the Amazonas region), and what measures are taken to minimize the ecological impact of hydroelectric generation. Because the Amazonas region is so flat, the area flooded by dams is much larger than it would be in other regions. Problems with hydroelectric power involve submerging of forest, disruption of indigenous communities, and effects upon river fish. Projects at FUCAPI include increasing efficiency of hydroelectric generation, finding ways to decrease the flooded area, new fish ladder technologies, and turbine innovations to allow generation from a lesser height differential. The impact upon indigenous people is addressed chiefly by not siting dams in their areas; no planned hydroelectric plants will impact indigenous people. By 2025 Brazil will be the world's fifth largest economy, so Brazil will need a huge amount of energy. They are focusing on hydroelectric energy and renewable energies, particularly biodiesel from ethanol; they don't want to use nuclear power. Brazil also has large oil reserves, but they are trying to focus on biofuels, not fossil fuels.
A question was asked about FUCAPI's involvement in education. They are involved from high school to postgraduate and MBA work. They help about 4000 students currently, and offer classes in many different areas, with a focus on technology. Night classes are offered for those who work during the day. FUCAPI partners with international and American universities, including San Jose State University. One current goal is to bring 18 US students to Brazil and 18 Brazilian students to the US in the next four years, on an exchange program. The exchange program currently centers on students in management and technology.
Next
we wandered over to a building at FUCAPI called the Tropical Design Center. They design furniture and other items out of tropical woods, and then promulgate those designs to people (indigenous and otherwise) in rural areas of Brazil for manufacture. The goal is to use fallen trees, wood scrap, and other sustainable materials to produce high-quality (and high-priced!) items for export. They had some stuff on display, and it was really quite beautiful. Their website is http://www.nativeoriginal.com.br/, although it seems to only be in Portuguese, to offer other products not made by FUCAPI, and not to have prices (in any currency) on the site. Possibly if my Portuguese were better I could find that information somewhere.Now
we're in a highly air-conditioned computer classroom at FUCAPI where we're all busily checking email and surfing. I'm going to give my presentation in a couple of minutes, and then two others will present as well; so I'll end this blog entry here, and put up separate entries for the presentations.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Another INPA visit
Well, I'm almost caught up with my blogging -- whew! Today I returned to INPA, the center for scientific research in the Amazon, with a few others. We took things at a slower pace today, which was nice since it meant I could find a lot more insects; they're small and camouflaged, so you have to go slowly if you're going to see them. Rather than giving you a blow-by-blow description of things, I think I'll just post a bunch of photos I took today, and let you all figure out what they are!
Well, I´m all caught up with my posting! Whew. Tomorrow is supposed to be rainy, so three people will supposedly give presentations, including myself. Brace yourselves. As compensation in advance, I will leave you with a picture of four kinds of local beer:
Well, I´m all caught up with my posting! Whew. Tomorrow is supposed to be rainy, so three people will supposedly give presentations, including myself. Brace yourselves. As compensation in advance, I will leave you with a picture of four kinds of local beer:
Bacchanalia
I've been blogging like mad, but haven't had a chance to get to the internet cafe, so the last several days will get posted in one big wave. Sorry about that!
This entry is about what we all did last night: we went to a big festival called Bar do Boi, or Bibim Bap, or something like that. Well, not quite; the full-on festival is a little ways away. What we went to was a rehearsal, really. The festival involves two teams whose mascots are bulls, so you have the red bull and the blue bull teams. Each team has musicians, singers, dancers, and presumably set and costume designers, choreographers, and who knows what else. The teams perform on alternate weekends, and get judged by the people who attend their concerts. In the end, as Dr. Ouverney put it, one of the two teams wins, and whichever one it is, that's cause for another several weeks of celebration.
So we went to a place called the Sambodroma (the "place where samba is," perhaps similar to the English words hippodrome and aerodrome and so forth). It was essentially a large dance hall, with the musicians in the front, platforms for the team dancers next, and then a big area for people to dance. We got there soon after 10 PM, when the ball was just beginning to roll, and the place was pretty empty; but after an hour or so the pace picked up, the music got more interesting, and the performance got more complex. 
Costumed dancers with various props came out and danced around the arena, and the bull (not a real bull, but a person in a large bull costume) was driven out on a float. Fireworks started being set off, and the arena filled with smoke, and people were screaming and dancing wildly; it had quite a Bacchanalian mood!
Eventually the costumed dancers and the bull went up onto the stage in front, and the band launched into some very bouncy, catchy music. The music had a specific dance that one was supposed to do to it, which I gather had been choreographed by the blue team ahead of time; the team dancers in the front would do that dance, and the Brazilians in the front rows were watching carefully and learning the moves so they would be ready when the real festival arrived. I, not being Brazilian, did not attempt to learn the moves, but I did wiggle my butt a little from time to time.
Some of the costumes were quite interesting; the lead dancer was a woman in a sort of frilly blue mock-colonial dress with a very wide-brimmed hat, and there were two very young girls (I would guess perhaps eight years old) who danced right up in front in brilliantly colored costumes, one an orange-feathered indigenous tribal sort of get-up, the other a green dress with appliqued flowers. 
Many of the other people in the blue team were dressed in sailor outfits, for no clear reason.
It was unspeakably loud; Brazilians are a remarkably noisy people. I put earplugs in early on, and even then my ears were ringing for more than an hour after we left at about 12:30 AM. The music was great, but there were long interludes of advertising for Coca-Cola, who apparently put up a lot of money for the blue team, and since I'd gotten up around 6:30 that morning, I eventually ran out of gas. Others in our expedition stayed on for another hour or so; the Brazilians, being Brazilian, apparently kept going until dawn!
This entry is about what we all did last night: we went to a big festival called Bar do Boi, or Bibim Bap, or something like that. Well, not quite; the full-on festival is a little ways away. What we went to was a rehearsal, really. The festival involves two teams whose mascots are bulls, so you have the red bull and the blue bull teams. Each team has musicians, singers, dancers, and presumably set and costume designers, choreographers, and who knows what else. The teams perform on alternate weekends, and get judged by the people who attend their concerts. In the end, as Dr. Ouverney put it, one of the two teams wins, and whichever one it is, that's cause for another several weeks of celebration.
So we went to a place called the Sambodroma (the "place where samba is," perhaps similar to the English words hippodrome and aerodrome and so forth). It was essentially a large dance hall, with the musicians in the front, platforms for the team dancers next, and then a big area for people to dance. We got there soon after 10 PM, when the ball was just beginning to roll, and the place was pretty empty; but after an hour or so the pace picked up, the music got more interesting, and the performance got more complex. 
Costumed dancers with various props came out and danced around the arena, and the bull (not a real bull, but a person in a large bull costume) was driven out on a float. Fireworks started being set off, and the arena filled with smoke, and people were screaming and dancing wildly; it had quite a Bacchanalian mood!Eventually the costumed dancers and the bull went up onto the stage in front, and the band launched into some very bouncy, catchy music. The music had a specific dance that one was supposed to do to it, which I gather had been choreographed by the blue team ahead of time; the team dancers in the front would do that dance, and the Brazilians in the front rows were watching carefully and learning the moves so they would be ready when the real festival arrived. I, not being Brazilian, did not attempt to learn the moves, but I did wiggle my butt a little from time to time.
Some of the costumes were quite interesting; the lead dancer was a woman in a sort of frilly blue mock-colonial dress with a very wide-brimmed hat, and there were two very young girls (I would guess perhaps eight years old) who danced right up in front in brilliantly colored costumes, one an orange-feathered indigenous tribal sort of get-up, the other a green dress with appliqued flowers. 
Many of the other people in the blue team were dressed in sailor outfits, for no clear reason.It was unspeakably loud; Brazilians are a remarkably noisy people. I put earplugs in early on, and even then my ears were ringing for more than an hour after we left at about 12:30 AM. The music was great, but there were long interludes of advertising for Coca-Cola, who apparently put up a lot of money for the blue team, and since I'd gotten up around 6:30 that morning, I eventually ran out of gas. Others in our expedition stayed on for another hour or so; the Brazilians, being Brazilian, apparently kept going until dawn!
Talk: Vida Kenk
Vida Kenk: Fauna of epiphytic bromeliads
An epiphyte is a plant that grows on another plant for support (i.e. not in a parasitic sense). Big trees often collect a good deal of dirt, leaf litter, water, and other good stuff in the crotches between branches, and even in depressions along the tops of branches. These spots provide everything a plant needs to grow, and are even, by virtue of being up in the canopy, better illuminated than spots on the forest floor. So there are plants, epiphytes, that take advantage of this opportunity.
Bromeliads are a type of flowering plants, members of the pineapple family. There are more than 2600 species of bromeliad in 56 genera; they diverged from a common ancestor about 20 million years ago (mya). They seem to have met with a great deal of success due to their use of CAM photosynthesis (a special, efficient type of photosynthesis) and their evolution of the ability to live as epiphytes. They are nearly exclusively neotropical (i.e. New World tropical); there is one species in West Africa that may have rafted over on a floating mat of vegetation. Bromeliads now occur in many habitats: granitic outcrops, coastal dune fields, high altitude cloud forests, and rain forests. 26 of the 56 genera of bromeliads include epiphytes as over half of their species, so it is a very common habit among the bromeliads.
Bromeliads grow with a ring or "whorl" of leaves that enclose a central "tank" where water is stored (think of a pineapple's leaves). Water and organic debris from above accumulate in the tank, creating a microhabitat suitable for all sorts of life. Bromeliads dominate the epiphytic vascular flora of the neotropics; their biomass exceeds that of all the other angiosperm families combined (such as orchids). In a Colombian cloud forest, over 175,000 mature bromeliads may occur in a single hectare, resulting in the storage of perhaps 50,000 liters of water per hectare in bromeliad tanks (the largest bromeliads can hold 45 liters each, although most are much smaller). This means that bromeliads create an ephemeral island-like freshwater habitat for other species. It also means that countless millions of semi-isolated habitats exist simultaneously; this may have caused rapid evolutionary radiation among species that use bromeliad tanks, since each tank is a sort of independent experiment.
Bromeliads possess these tanks for a reason: they are "animal-assisted saprophytes". As organic debris such as leaf litter falls into the tank, it is decomposed by microorganisms, and the various decomposition products are eventually absorbed by the bromeliad through specialized trichomes. Due to this evolution towards absorption of nutrients from decomposition products in their tanks, it is thought that the bromeliads are currently evolving towards carnivory, along a path similar to that taken by the pitcher plants one often sees in bogs.
More than 500 animal species have been described within bromeliad tanks, about 470 of which are insects. Protozoa, bacteria and fungi are also commonly seen. A wide variety of species are found in bromeliad tanks; they include a great many ants, somewhat less beetle larvae and fly larvae, and occasional observations of taxa as diverse as amphibians, annelids, all sorts of arachnids (more pseudoscorpions than spiders, interestingly), isopod crustaceans, butterflies, molluscs, nematodes, and even one onychophoran worm. Some of these organisms use bromeliad tanks facultatively, meaning that the tanks are not essential to their life cycle: mosquito larvae can breed in bromeliad tanks, for example, but there are many other places with stagnant pools of water where they can also breed. Other species appear to be obligate users of bromeliad tanks, meaning that they rely exclusively upon them in some way, and cannot survive or reproduce without them: three clades of diving beetles have been found, for example, that appear to have evolved in close association with the original evolutionary radiation of the bromeliads 20 mya, and now live exclusively in the tanks. Some species spend only part of their life cycle in bromeliad tanks, usually in a larval phase; the family of tree frogs that includes the poison dart frogs, Hylidae, sometimes lays its eggs in tanks, or transports its eggs to tanks after laying them elsewhere, and then feeds their tadpoles with additional eggs (fertilized or unfertilized) as they grow in the tanks.
An interesting question that remains largely unanswered is how these species (particularly those living in bromeliads obligately) disperse to new sites. Bromeliads die, like any plant, and their tank then disappears; so all of the organisms that use or rely upon them must have a means of finding and dispersing to new bromeliad tanks. Some organisms, such as most insects, are motile: the adults can simply explore and find new tanks in which to lay eggs, for example. The non-motile, obligately aquatic animals, from ostracods to annelids, may be carried on the skin of motile animals such as frogs, or may be carried by being eaten and emerging unharmed in fecal material. Other organisms may disperse by being windblown as cysts.
Bromeliad tanks are related to human health, interestingly, because they provide a breeding ground for mosquitoes that act as vectors for important diseases such as dengue and yellow fever. Even when extensive urban control measures are taken, the bromeliads in nearby forest can act as a reservoir for mosquito breeding populations.
An epiphyte is a plant that grows on another plant for support (i.e. not in a parasitic sense). Big trees often collect a good deal of dirt, leaf litter, water, and other good stuff in the crotches between branches, and even in depressions along the tops of branches. These spots provide everything a plant needs to grow, and are even, by virtue of being up in the canopy, better illuminated than spots on the forest floor. So there are plants, epiphytes, that take advantage of this opportunity.
Bromeliads are a type of flowering plants, members of the pineapple family. There are more than 2600 species of bromeliad in 56 genera; they diverged from a common ancestor about 20 million years ago (mya). They seem to have met with a great deal of success due to their use of CAM photosynthesis (a special, efficient type of photosynthesis) and their evolution of the ability to live as epiphytes. They are nearly exclusively neotropical (i.e. New World tropical); there is one species in West Africa that may have rafted over on a floating mat of vegetation. Bromeliads now occur in many habitats: granitic outcrops, coastal dune fields, high altitude cloud forests, and rain forests. 26 of the 56 genera of bromeliads include epiphytes as over half of their species, so it is a very common habit among the bromeliads.
Bromeliads grow with a ring or "whorl" of leaves that enclose a central "tank" where water is stored (think of a pineapple's leaves). Water and organic debris from above accumulate in the tank, creating a microhabitat suitable for all sorts of life. Bromeliads dominate the epiphytic vascular flora of the neotropics; their biomass exceeds that of all the other angiosperm families combined (such as orchids). In a Colombian cloud forest, over 175,000 mature bromeliads may occur in a single hectare, resulting in the storage of perhaps 50,000 liters of water per hectare in bromeliad tanks (the largest bromeliads can hold 45 liters each, although most are much smaller). This means that bromeliads create an ephemeral island-like freshwater habitat for other species. It also means that countless millions of semi-isolated habitats exist simultaneously; this may have caused rapid evolutionary radiation among species that use bromeliad tanks, since each tank is a sort of independent experiment.
Bromeliads possess these tanks for a reason: they are "animal-assisted saprophytes". As organic debris such as leaf litter falls into the tank, it is decomposed by microorganisms, and the various decomposition products are eventually absorbed by the bromeliad through specialized trichomes. Due to this evolution towards absorption of nutrients from decomposition products in their tanks, it is thought that the bromeliads are currently evolving towards carnivory, along a path similar to that taken by the pitcher plants one often sees in bogs.
More than 500 animal species have been described within bromeliad tanks, about 470 of which are insects. Protozoa, bacteria and fungi are also commonly seen. A wide variety of species are found in bromeliad tanks; they include a great many ants, somewhat less beetle larvae and fly larvae, and occasional observations of taxa as diverse as amphibians, annelids, all sorts of arachnids (more pseudoscorpions than spiders, interestingly), isopod crustaceans, butterflies, molluscs, nematodes, and even one onychophoran worm. Some of these organisms use bromeliad tanks facultatively, meaning that the tanks are not essential to their life cycle: mosquito larvae can breed in bromeliad tanks, for example, but there are many other places with stagnant pools of water where they can also breed. Other species appear to be obligate users of bromeliad tanks, meaning that they rely exclusively upon them in some way, and cannot survive or reproduce without them: three clades of diving beetles have been found, for example, that appear to have evolved in close association with the original evolutionary radiation of the bromeliads 20 mya, and now live exclusively in the tanks. Some species spend only part of their life cycle in bromeliad tanks, usually in a larval phase; the family of tree frogs that includes the poison dart frogs, Hylidae, sometimes lays its eggs in tanks, or transports its eggs to tanks after laying them elsewhere, and then feeds their tadpoles with additional eggs (fertilized or unfertilized) as they grow in the tanks.
An interesting question that remains largely unanswered is how these species (particularly those living in bromeliads obligately) disperse to new sites. Bromeliads die, like any plant, and their tank then disappears; so all of the organisms that use or rely upon them must have a means of finding and dispersing to new bromeliad tanks. Some organisms, such as most insects, are motile: the adults can simply explore and find new tanks in which to lay eggs, for example. The non-motile, obligately aquatic animals, from ostracods to annelids, may be carried on the skin of motile animals such as frogs, or may be carried by being eaten and emerging unharmed in fecal material. Other organisms may disperse by being windblown as cysts.
Bromeliad tanks are related to human health, interestingly, because they provide a breeding ground for mosquitoes that act as vectors for important diseases such as dengue and yellow fever. Even when extensive urban control measures are taken, the bromeliads in nearby forest can act as a reservoir for mosquito breeding populations.
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