April 26, 2011

SHARON OOSTHOEK

Blame it on Augusta and the advent of colour television. Up till then, most golfers were content to play around the odd weed and didn’t get overly upset if skunks dug up turf.

But starting in the late 1960s, colour broadcasts of the Masters Tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia showed the world a meticulously-maintained course shimmering like an ethereal Emerald City. Golfers turned green with envy.

“We call it the Augusta syndrome,” says Rob Witherspoon, director of the University of Guelph’s Turfgrass Institute and Environmental Research Centre. “The expectation of standards used to be lower. Golfers saw that and said ‘Why doesn’t our golf course look like that – blemish-free, no weeds?’”

But such standards come at a cost to the environment. Fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and astounding amounts of water are all necessary ingredients.

(more)

August 6, 2010

SHARON OOSTHOEK

When William Baffin sailed past the entrance to a broad channel north of the island that now bears his name, little did the intrepid English navigator realize that it was the gateway to the very thing he was looking for: the fabled northwest passage to the riches of the Far East.

Four hundred years later, another European ship is headed for Lancaster Sound. It, too, is on a voyage of discovery, one designed to advance not only scientific knowledge but the cause of Canadian sovereignty.

The German research vessel Polarstern (Polar Star) has been enlisted by Natural Resources Canada (NRC) to conduct seismic testing of the Arctic seabed. Over the next two months, it will crisscross 5,500 kilometres, nearly 400 kilometres of it in the sound, collecting data and gaining a better understanding of what lies beneath the ocean floor.

At the same time, hundreds of kilometres to the west, Canadian scientists are working with counterparts from the United States on a similar mapping project. Two coast guard icebreakers, one from each nation, are exploring 21,000 square kilometres of the Beaufort Sea in a bid to settle once and for all where Alaska ends and the Northwest Territories begin.

And last week the flagship of Russia’s polar fleet, the Academician Feodorov, left port in Archangel to spend 100 days conducting geological and seismological studies between Siberia and the North Pole as part of Moscow’s drive to expand its territorial waters.

With just three years before the deadline set out by the United Nations Law of the Sea, the race to claim what lies below the ocean is clearly approaching the finish line.

Long a subject of heated debate, northern sovereignty has been especially touchy since the polar ice began to melt, making the Northwest Passage a potential conduit for international shipping. Which is why it was no laughing matter three years ago when the Academician Feodorov reached the North Pole and sent down a submersible carrying the deputy speaker of Russia’s parliament to plant a flag on the bottom.

Yet the fight for national supremacy isn’t why people who live in the path of the Polarstern went to court this week.

SERENGETI OF THE ARCTIC

Lined with steep ice-covered mountains and deep fjords, Lancaster Sound lies between Baffin Island and Devon Island, covering 40,000 square kilometres, more than twice the area of Lake Ontario.

Seemingly desolate to the untrained eye, it is, in fact, home to an unusual abundance of wildlife. Extensive polynyas – stretches of open water surrounded by sea ice – make the area so creature-friendly that it has come to be known as the Arctic Serengeti, inhabited by most of the world’s narwhals and one-third of North America’s belugas, as well as massive bowhead whales, an array of seals (ringed, bearded and harp), walruses, thick-billed murres (cousins of the long-vanished great auk) and one of the highest densities of polar bears in Canada.

This natural bounty has long sustained the Inuit, who look at the $200 the Northern Store charges for a turkey no bigger than a soccer ball and worry about what impact the testing will have on their traditional source of food.

The Polarstern will drag air guns in its wake and measure what happens to the sound waves they blast out every 60 seconds. Hunters says all this noise is bound to drive off the animals, and this week, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, which represents residents of Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet, Clyde River, Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, petitioned the Nunavut Court of Justice to call the whole thing off.

The move has drawn support from a surprising source – environmentalists, who rarely see eye to eye with hunters, says Chris Debicki, who works in Iqaluit with Oceans North Canada, a branch of the U.S.-based Pew Environment Group. But they also oppose the testing, both in the short run and because of what it could lead to down the road: drilling for underwater petroleum and the prospect of a spill like the one that sent an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

If history is any indication, there is cause for concern. Four decades ago, a crew looking for gas on Melville Island, more than 400 kilometres west of Lancaster Sound, sparked a blowout that lasted 485 days – five times what it took to contain the gulf spill.

A year later, perhaps the largest blowout Canada has seen took place north of Melville on tiny King Christian Island. The gas ignited, fried the drilling rig and created an 85-metre-high column of flame that burned for three months and could be seen from the air hundreds of kilometres away.

Even so, in 1974, a company was given approval in principle to drill in Lancaster Sound, but the final go-ahead was delayed for three years and then the ruling rescinded due to environmental concerns.

NO THREAT AT ALL?

Now, the government insists that fears for the future of the sound are groundless, especially since last December, when Environment Minister Jim Prentice announced a $5-million study to determine whether it should become a national marine conservation area, which would effectively ban resource development.

If that is so, the hunters and environmentalists ask, why look for resources at all?

Mr. Prentice argues that by providing a better understanding of geology, the testing will “inform the creation” of a conservation area. Meanwhile, Leona Aglukkaq, who represents Nunavut in Parliament and is the federal minister responsible for the north, says that “the mapping of undersea geology is essential to making better decisions on land use and economic development.”

The territory’s chief geologist, Donald James confirms that testing is “part of the process” for a national park. “It’s called a mineral and energy resource assessment. It has to be done in the legislation.”

He says, “people don’t understand the process,” and “should a conservation area be formed, Lancaster Sound will be protected … regardless of the resource potential.”

Many Arctic residents don’t believe this. “When they find something, they will want to do the drilling or mining,” insists Meeka Kiguktak, mayor of Grise Fiord.

This week, although Inuit leaders had asked for a delay while the National Energy Board reviews the safety of offshore drilling, Indian and Northern Affairs auctioned off for $103-million exploration rights to 205,000 deep-water hectares in the Beaufort Sea.

The apparent haste worries people like Ms. Kiguktak: “I can’t imagine our whales and walruses floating on shore, coated with oil. Our elders always say money comes and goes, but if animals and birds go, they’re gone. For Inuit to survive up here, we’ve got to protect our environment.”

Experts in oil recovery say the cold and ice would make a cleanup far more difficult than in the Gulf of Mexico. News reports this week suggest companies facing a spill may need three years to drill a relief well.

And if the spill is significant, “there does not exist today technology that can recover oil from ice,” Ron Bowden of Vancouver-based Aqua-Guard Spill Response Inc. recently told a Senate committee. “You can’t lay boom on ice. You can’t recover oil from the surface because it’s hampered by the ice, or under the ice, so it’s quite a different scenario.”

Okalik Eegeesiak, president of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, says that, given what is at stake, she is “bewildered” that Ottawa stuck with the seismic testing. “We were led to believe they would” cancel it or avoid Lancaster Sound.

So, it’s no surprise residents are joining forces with environmentalists, who she says are “starting to understand where we come from.” The feeling is mutual, adds Ron Elliott, the area’s member of Nunavut’s Legislature. “As someone … commented: ‘I think we’re starting to sound like Greenpeace.’ ”

TO DRILL OR NOT TO DRILL

Although exploration licences have been granted, no offshore drilling is being done in the Canadian Arctic, and Mr. James says no one knows whether there ever will be. The government and the NRC are “not in the oil and gas business,” he says. “But what we can do is say, … ‘Here are great areas that, in the future, we can direct exploration companies to test further.’ ”

In any event, he adds, “decisions are going be made with the very best geoscience tools and research data available. The work we’re doing right now is going to assist that.”

Residents can’t help but wonder how much say they will have. “A lot of times, it feels like David and Goliath here,” Mr. Elliott says. “And it seems Goliath is going to do what Goliath is going to do.”

In the Western Arctic, a verdict is much closer. Last week, Imperial Oil announced that it and its U.S. parent company, Exxon Mobil Corp., will take a 50-per-cent share in a venture to develop deep-water properties in the Beaufort Sea, where the stakes in the border dispute are high. The contested area may hold 1.7 billion cubic metres of gas and a billion cubic metres of oil.

The joint mapping mission should produce an agreement, but drilling is unlikely to begin until the NEB finishes the investigation it launched in the wake of the massive gulf spill – which is especially relevant, considering who has the other half of Imperial Oil’s big project: British Petroleum.

The Globe and Mail,  Saturday March 13, 2010

by Sharon Oosthoek

Like a fickle god, phosphorus gives life and takes it away. If too much leaches into lakes and streams, algal blooms suck oxygen from the water and choke off life.

But if too little exists, we are all in trouble: Phosphorus is a dwindling, and non-renewable, component of agricultural fertilizers, essential to growing food for Earth’s burgeoning population, says the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Winnipeg-based environmental think tank, which recently released a report on phosphorus spills in Manitoba’s waterways.

(The problem in Lake Winnipeg is so severe that the green-blue algae can be seen from space.)

In a race against time – some experts cite 30 years, some 100, until the resource runs out – scientists are scrambling to recapture phosphorus. “So, we convert a problem into a product,” says Fred Koch, a researcher at the University of British Columbia.

Mr. Koch is a research associate of Don Mavinic, a UBC civil engineer who has designed a system that removes phosphorus from liquid sewage at wastewater-treatment plants and turns it into slow-release fertilizer pellets.

Their system capitalizes on the fact that humans expel about three million tonnes of valuable phosphorus a year, which, along with fertilizer runoff, often ends up in local waterways. “We prevent the pollution and we ship fertilizer into a marketplace that will literally be starving for phosphorus,” Mr. Koch says.

“Clean phosphorus reserves are rapidly being depleted and there are no new reserves being found by the mining sector,” Mr. Mavinic says.

While there is scientific debate over when we will see a shortage, researchers at the University of Technology in Australia and Linköping University in Sweden say we may have mined all the easily accessible, high-quality phosphate rock in as few as 30 years. By then, the United Nations estimates, there will be two billion more of us, clamouring to be fed. The implications are daunting. While there are alternatives to other finite resources such as oil in the form of renewable energy, there are no current substitutes for phosphorus.

Mr. Koch’s and Mr. Mavinic’s system of two-storey metal cone reactors was designed to deal with struvite, a byproduct of biological wastewater treatment that clogs pipes and valves and must be regularly removed at great cost. Struvite is a concrete-like substance made up of phosphate, magnesium and ammonium.

The invention takes struvite from the wastewater in its soluble state, before it can harden on pipe walls. The soluble struvite is then forced into giant metal cones, where it mixes until it hardens and forms phosphorus-based fertilizer pellets.

Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, the Vancouver-based company created to commercialize the invention, built cone reactors at an Edmonton wastewater-treatment plant in 2007 – the first large-scale demonstration of the technology. Last summer, the first commercial system came online in Portland, Ore.

Oregon farmers are buying the pellets, and say they are happy to find high-quality fertilizer at a time when supplies are becoming uncertain and prices volatile.

Ostara estimates there are 200 plants across North America, and several hundred in Europe and the rest of the world, that are candidates for the technology. Two new struvite reactors are coming online early this year – one in Chesapeake Bay, Va., the other in York, Pa.

While there are a limited number of struvite-recovery operations in other countries – Japan leads the way – most have so far yielded pellets of uneven quality, Mr. Koch says.

Meanwhile, Ostara says its technology has passed performance tests in industrial wastewater-treatments plants, including corn-ethanol production plants. And Mr. Mavinic is now working with colleagues at UBC’s Dairy Education and Research Centre on retrieving phosphorus from cow manure, which is an even richer source of this essential element.

“Globally, we have no choice but to implement phosphorus removal and recovery from wastewater-treatment plants. Otherwise, we cannot grow enough food to feed all those people, or raise cows and hogs,” Mr. Mavinic says.

Condemned to death: What happens when a rescue plan works too well

By Sharon Oosthoek

Thirty years ago, the cormorant was a poster bird for the campaign to clean up DDT, the pesticide killing creatures here and abroad. The Great Lakes, home to 900 nesting pairs in the early 1950s, had a mere 125 by 1973, with scientists unable to find even a single pair on Lake Michigan or Lake Superior.

Photos showing chicks born with crossed beaks and unable to feed led to public outrage and a reduction in use of the chemical, giving the bird a chance to bounce back.

Double-crested cormorant. (Courtesy Parks Canada)

And bounce back it has. Today, the cormorant is more numerous on the Great Lakes than at any time in recorded history. Now the “crow ducks” are so common that some of them have been condemned to death – a bizarre state of affairs for a species so recently in peril.

In fact, says Mark Ridgway, a biologist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, it’s the first time in Canada “we’ve gone from having an organism that’s a rarity to having a management issue. No one’s confronted this before.”

The cormorant has become one of the growing number of cases in which human intervention, however well-meaning, has had unintended consequences.

From elephants in South Africa to alligators in Florida and even the newly reintroduced plains bison in Saskatchewan, wildlife managers accustomed to dealing with endangered species are starting to confront some that have become “hyper-abundant.” Animals once in grave danger have become a threat to others.

So what is a responsible conservationist to do – let nature run its course and hope for the best or, to paraphrase George Orwell, kill the cormorants because some lives are more sacred than others?

‘A DYING ISLAND’

The stench of guano from the 20,000 cormorants on Lake Erie’s tiny Middle Island is overwhelming – and the visual impact is equally dramatic.   More than 40 per cent of the forest canopy is gone, stripped for nests, and the birds’ droppings have altered the chemistry of the soil.

But the real problem, conservationists say, goes beyond aesthetics. The 18.5-hectare island in Point Pelee National Park is part of Canada’s rare Carolinian ecosystem and home to nine species protected by federal legislation, including the eastern fox snake and the red mulberry tree.

So many cormorants in such a small space amounts to a death sentence for these species. “This is a dying island that supports a dying population of plants and animals,” says Marian Stranak, the park superintendent.

Reducing DDT helped, but the cormorant truly took flight when humans unwittingly supplied them with a never-ending banquet in the form of invasive alewife fish in the Great Lakes and farmed catfish in the bird’s U.S. wintering grounds. By 1993, the big greenish-black water birds had increased nearly 300-fold to 38,000 nesting pairs. Now, many fishermen say they are directly to blame for a decline in valuable fish stocks.

A drastic solution is being adopted. Between 2003 and 2006, cormorants were culled at Presqu’ile Provincial Park on Lake Ontario, in a bid to rehabilitate its woodlands for such species as herons, egrets and monarch butterflies.

Now, Parks Canada is following suit on Middle Island. The federal agency is two years into a five-year plan to shoot about 80 per cent of the island’s nesting pairs, hoping that the endangered ecosystem will bounce back.

Parks Canada’s chief ecosystem scientist, Stephen Woodley, insists that anything less than a cull would be irresponsible. “If we’re going to protect ecological value, we have to intervene in nature far more frequently than we ever thought we would have to.”

It’s because humans have dramatically changed the ecosystem, he and others argue, that many systems must be managed, perhaps in perpetuity. “Nobody likes to kill animals,” Mr. Woodley says, “but I think there is a pretty good understanding now that in certain cases we do have to cull animals for the greater good of ecosystem health.”

That’s the conclusion South Africa came to last year when deciding to cull the elephant, an animal endangered in much of the rest of the continent. After a 14-year moratorium on hunting, the elephant population of Kruger National Park roughly doubled to 14,000, park spokesman William Mabasa says.

African elephant

Transporting elephants elsewhere on the continent is prohibitively expensive, and South Africa has little suitable habitat left.

The cull has yet to begin, but retired Kruger elephant specialist Ian Whyte says it’s for the best.

“Elephants have big appetites,” he told a local newspaper. “You can utilize an area to maintain biodiversity, or else you have a purely elephant sanctuary. You can’t have both.”

HUNTS HUMANS

Florida faced a different dilemma. In the late 1960s, the alligator was in deep trouble but then anti-hunting laws were enacted and some wetlands rehabilitated. By the late 1980s, the reptile had recovered, and now is a danger to humans – with 12 fatal attacks  in the past decade.

American alligator in Florida.

Letting nature take its course is simply not an option. “Humans take precedence over alligators,” says Allan Wood-
ward, a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

As for the plains bison, it was recently reintroduced to Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan after an absence of 120 years, but Parks Canada already has a plan to keep their numbers at a sustainable 300.

“The area can only support so many animals,” Mr. Woodley says. “If there are more, they start to wreck the range and you start to eliminate species from the ecosystem. They will graze the grass down to dirt and there is actually nothing growing.”

The 130 bison in Grasslands are expected to reach 300 within a few years. While the preference is to move them, Mr. Woodley says, with so little suitable habitat left, a lethal cull is entirely possible.

But back at Middle Island, the cormorant’s fate has already been decided. Gunshots will ring out every spring until 2012, when wildlife managers hope that the lives of the island’s other inhabitants no longer hang in the balance.

Sharon Oosthoek is a Toronto-based writer who specializes in science and the environment.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

by Sharon Oosthoek

Twenty-eight years ago, a Wyoming rancher’s dog carried a strange-looking dead animal home to its master.

The cream-coloured creature was about the size of a house cat, with a slim body and black feet, face and tail tip. Puzzled, the rancher took it to wildlife biologists, who were stunned to discover an animal thought extinct: a black-footed ferret.

Black-footed ferrets, born at the Toronto Zoo, peek out from their wooden burrow. (Courtesy, The Toronto Zoo)

Further examination revealed that the rancher’s property was home to a small, stable population of these ferrets. But six years later, disease cut their numbers to just 18 and panicked biologists raced to round up the remaining animals, rightly suspecting that they would never find others.

Now, the process is being reversed: This fall, the black-footed ferret will return to Saskatchewan, where it hasn’t been seen since the 1930s, when settlers converted prairie to farms, decimating the ferret’s prairie dog prey.

While the ferrets have already been reintroduced to Wyoming and other places in the United States and Mexico, this will mark a first in Canada. Most of the 40 animals to be released in Grasslands National Park will come from the Toronto Zoo, which runs one of six captive breeding programs set up across North America two decades ago.

But before being given their freedom, the animals must receive something crucial to their success in the wild: survival training.

The black-footed ferrets have to go to boot camp.

“It’s pretty essential for pre-conditioning,” says Maria Franke, the Toronto Zoo’s curator of mammals.

The problem of how to “re-wild” animals bred in captivity is cause for much hand-wringing these days as habitat destruction forces more creatures onto endangered-species lists. Animals raised with regular meals and nary a predator in sight simply can’t be let loose to fend for themselves. They need to learn how to hunt for their own food and find shelter. The hardest part for most is recognizing and escaping those animals that want to make a meal out of them.

The Toronto Zoo’s young ferrets will be flown next month to the U.S. Geological Survey’s facility in Fort Collins, Colo., where they will live with their mothers for six to eight weeks in large, closed outdoor pens.

Boot camp is crucial, as biologists learned after their first disastrous attempt at reintroduction in Wyoming in 1991. The black-footed ferret was taken straight from captivity into the wild and nearly every ferret died in the first year, mostly in the jaws of coyotes and badgers.

But a series of trial-and-error experiments led by wildlife biologist Dean Biggins of the U.S. Geological Survey has since produced today’s regimen for toughening up the creatures. Unwilling to risk the few remaining ferrets, Mr. Biggins brought Siberian polecats from China – the ferrets’ closest living relatives – to act as stand-ins for testing boot-camp techniques.

He raised the polecats in the same one-by-1.2-metre cages in which the ferrets were first reared, testing their reactions to mock predators, including the rather disappointing robo-badger.

“He was a road-kill badger mounted on a toy truck chassis and we’d chase them around with it. But robo-badger was slow and although he looked like a badger, he just didn’t behave like one,” Mr. Biggins admits.

So a more convincing stuffed owl was rigged to swoop down when the polecats passed through an infrared trip line.

The first generation fled to their boxes, where they cowered for hours. But each successive generation became less wary and by the fourth generation very little spooked them.

While the results were no surprise, Mr. Biggins hoped that his next experiment would show that the unwary behaviour was reversible and not genetically hardwired. He wanted his next experiment to show that by taking that fourth generation and raising them in large pens that simulated their natural environment, their offspring would eventually relearn how to be wary and avoid predators.

He created as normal a habitat as possible while still offering protection from predators so that the animals could live long enough to unlearn bad habits. To his relief, each successive generation became increasingly wary, until their reactions were close to normal.

“Why that happened, we don’t know,” Mr. Biggins says. “Was it simply lack of human attention? Or being in burrows where mom can transmit escape behaviour? Or are they more physically fit?”

While he is painfully aware that not every animal is ready for release, Mr. Biggins says it’s too expensive to assess each individual. The black-footed ferrets are simply given the best possible preconditioning, and the rest is up to them.

Still, animals released today have survival rates 10 times better than those raised in cages and there are now about 800 black-footed ferrets living in the wilds of the U.S. and Mexico.

Biologists have had less success with the masked bobwhite, a plump short-tailed quail native to Mexico and Arizona. After cattle-grazing decimated their grassland habitat, they were believed extinct until pockets of them were discovered about 40 years ago.

While the birds bred well in captivity, they had no survival skills. At Arizona’s Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, sterilized Texas bobwhites males were brought in to act as foster parents, teaching the chicks how to be wild.

The system worked until the males were released along with their foster chicks, says veterinarian Glenn Olsen of the U.S. Geological Survey.

“Texas bobwhites are bigger, stronger birds and they tried to mate with the female masked bobwhites – they out-competed the male masked bobwhites,” he says.

The females laid infertile eggs and the population stagnated.

So while the masked bobwhites succeeded in boot camp, the populations of masked bobwhites did not increase, which was the point of reintroduction. For the past two years, researchers have put the program on hold while they go back to the drawing board, Dr. Olsen says.

The opposite seemed to occur in Rio de Janeiro, where conservationists worked to reintroduce the golden lion tamarin, only to encounter another unexpected obstacle.

Originally victims of the fragmentation of coastal forests, these small red and orange primates later became victims of captive-rearing techniques.

“They were like human beings thrown into the forest and told to get on with it,” recalls primatologist Anthony Rylands, deputy chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s species survival commission.

The golden lion tamarins had trouble swinging on branches because fixed poles used in captivity don’t bob about the way real branches do. Regularly replenished food bowls meant that they had no idea how to forage. And they had never dodged a hungry forest cat.

So branches were made more realistic and their food was hidden, encouraging them to at least get up and look for it. Biologists even captured wild golden lion tamarins and put them in with the captives, hoping that they would learn a thing or two.

But the captives were so unfit that all the boot-camp training didn’t help: They just couldn’t keep up with their wild cousins.

“The captive animals remain pretty damned useless [in the wild],” Mr. Rylands says.

So much for boot camp. But in the case of golden lion tamarins, the reintroduction turned out to be somewhat successful anyway.

“What is important is they breed and the little babies get going,” he says.

Offspring, growing up with real tree branches and limited provisioned food, break off into peer groups at about 13 months and teach each other the ways of the wild.

Of the 1,000 wild golden lion tamarins in Brazil today, roughly one-third are estimated to be descendants of captive-bred animals.

The problem now is there is nowhere for these endangered animals to go.

“Every bit of forest has now got golden lion tamarins in it,” Mr. Rylands says. “A lot of the battle now is to connect fragmented habitat together.”

The International Union for Conservation of Nature warns that extreme fragmentation of the habitat of golden lion tamarins means that they are not likely to reach even 2,000 individuals, the minimum estimate for a self-sustaining population.

Which means that despite all the work, golden lion tamarins may never come off the endangered-species list.

Sharon Oosthoek is a Toronto-based writer who specializes in science and the environment.

Saturday, December 8, 2007

A ‘dating service’ for lonely elms

by Sharon Oosthoek

GUELPH, ONT. Come winter, tree huggers wax poetic about towering pines or stands of silvery birch. But Alan Watson is awed at the sight of a small patch of saplings. He hopes they will grow into an umbrella-shaped canopy – and revive a stately species that has nearly been wiped out.
The trees are elms, once found across the continent but devastated by a fungus that has killed millions of trees in Canada and the United States. Dutch elm disease, like some arboreal version of AIDS, may have been North American’s greatest forest scourge until the recent attack of the mountain pine beetle.

But about nine years ago, some researchers at Guelph University’s arboretum noticed a smattering of mature elm trees across the province.
These elms (called white or American elms) somehow resisted the fungus and survived – in some cases living for hundreds of years.

What these hardy elms can’t do, however, isolated as they are from other survivors, is pass on their genes. That’s why this year Prof.
Watson, director of Guelph University’s arboretum, mounted an intensive public campaign he calls his elm “dating service.” His goal was to locate mature elms in Ontario and help the best candidates mingle and mate.

So far Prof. Watson has received 1,800 reports. Now, he and Guelph horticulturalist Sean Fox are taking cuttings from the most eligible
singles and creating disease-resistant clones.The clones will be bred from trees that endured a fungus that chokes vascular tissues and shuts down circulation of water and nutrients.

First identified in Belgium in 1918 by a Dutch pathologist, Dutch elm disease reached North America in logs imported from Eastern Europe and was spread by elm beetles – first in the Ohio valley, and then in Canada. By the 1960s, the disease had cut a swath through both forests and urban landscapes, where elms were often planted in tight rows because they could tolerate harsh street conditions.

The exceptions were trees that were able to seal off infected branches. According to Prof. Watson, an environmental biologist, these trees
appear to have just the right mix of genes to fight off the fungus, so he and his colleagues have been taking hundreds of cuttings from them
and are grafting them onto root stock (twigs with two to three buds) to create clones.

The clones are then incubated for about three years – at which point they are turned over to University of Toronto forestry scientist Martin
Hubbes. He repeatedly injects them with more Dutch elm disease to make sure they’re resistant.

“They’re really getting their butts kicked,” says Fox. “They recover and then we give them another strong dose. It’s like giving them SARS after
getting over the flu.”

While he and Prof. Watson have lost some of the clones to such injections, most have survived and roughly 30 are now planted in Guelph
University’s seed orchard. Other recently acquired clones, in some cases created from 250-year-old “super elms” nearing the end of their life span, are also expected to join them after a round of inoculation.

Once all these clones are old enough to produce flowers – in about 10 years – they will be cross-bred to create seedlings and immunized one
more time. The goal is to make truly resistant seeds and seedlings available to the public within 20 years.

“Seeing the way things are developing here, it’s more than a glimmer of hope,” says Prof. Watson. “It think this project has a good chance”

Still, some researchers are taking a different approach. The Elm Research Institute in New Hampshire, for example, has produced six
resistant clones called Liberty elms – each cultivar genetically pure instead of cross-bred for diversity. So far, they have sent out
250,000 trees to individuals and groups across North America.

But critics say such clones may not have the genetic depth to resist new scourges. And indeed Dutch elm disease has been reported in some Liberty
elms. “We’re trying to follow nature’s rules,” says Fox. “And nature’s rule is biodiversity. We’re getting a lot of good genes together.”

Dale Simpson also prefers the Guelph method. He believes new combinations of genes may create a generation of elms more resistant to
illness “than either parent” and is overseeing a small experimental orchard of such clones just outside Fredericton for the Canadian Forest
Service.

Joanna Freeland, a molecular ecologist at Trent University, adds that the Guelph system may provide greater insurance against the effects of
climate change as well. “If you’ve got lots of genetic diversity, there’s a greater likelihood one or more individuals will have the right
combination of genes to adapt.”

Of course, even if Guelph’s dating and mating project succeeds it will be decades before its orchard produces the impressive elms of yesteryear. But neither of the scientists behind the project seem fazed that they may not live to see the fruits of their labour. Prof. Fox
quotes an ancient Greek proverb: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Published

Globe and Mail, Saturday, December 8, 2007

Saturday, December 1, 2007

The trouble with hybrids.

Because of environmental change, a growing number of endangered animals are mating with genetic cousins. Which leaves conservationists with a dilemma: Should they prevent wildlife from crossing the species divide – or protect offspring such as grizzlars and bob-o-lynx? Sharon Oosthoek reports

On a trip to the Northwest Territories last year, Jim Martell spent more than $45,000 for the right to shoot a polar bear. But the animal he killed turned out to have puzzling characteristics – long claws, a humped back and brown patches in its white fur. Had he shot a grizzly by mistake? If so, the American tourist faced up to a year in jail for hunting without a proper licence.

DNA tests showed that the animal in question was not, in fact, a grizzly. But neither was it a polar bear. It was the only confirmed case of a hybrid – born of a polar bear mother and grizzly father – in the wild. This let Mr. Martell off the hook. He even got to take the “grizzlar” home. As he told one newspaper, “It will be quite a trophy.”

For conservationists, however, the animal has become more of a booby prize – a symbol of the troubling questions posed by cross-breeding between at-risk species. For example, should the offspring of “animals of special concern” such as grizzlies and polar bears be protected from hunters? Or even encouraged to breed? Or could hybrids actually weaken genetically pure populations of disappearing wildlife?

In Alberta, for instance, hybridization has contributed to the 80-per-cent decline in threatened cutthroat trout. Cross-breeding has similarly affected populations of golden-winged warblers in Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. And in British Columbia, mating with other species is an insidious threat to the province’s tiny population of spotted owls. Such hybridization could also have an impact on other animals and plants in these ecosystems.

“It’s godawfully complicated,” says Marco Festa-Bianchet, a biologist with Université de Sherbrooke. This week, he led a meeting of wildlife experts in Ottawa for the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. The group is drafting recommendations on how to deal with hybridization to be released next year.

“People may say, ‘So what if we have no more cutthroat trout and instead we have a swarm of hybrids?’ Well, cutthroat trout were selected for a certain ecosystem. We don’t know what impact the hybrid will have on the ecosystem,” Prof. Festa-Bianchet says. “Hybrids occur in nature, but we’re facing a situation worsened by the actions of man.”

BREEDING HYBRIDS
Before the 1800s, hybrids were rare. But European arrivals began removing barriers that separated related species.

Take the eastern wolf in Ontario. As settlers cut down trees to create farmland, the animals’ forest habitat disappeared and put them in close quarters with gun-toting humans trying to protect livestock. Wolf populations plummeted.

At the same time, coyotes living in the prairies moved east into newly cleared land. According to Brad White, a geneticist at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., the two species started mating in the early 20th century. And by 1995, DNA tests of eastern wolves in Algonquin Park showed that they all carried some proportion of coyote genes.

“Western coyotes and eastern wolves had reached an equilibrium and along we came and broke everything down,” Prof. White says.

Habitat destruction could also be pushing cross-breeding among spotted owls. Extensive logging cut down 80 per cent of the old-growth forest they live in and allowed for the invasion of barred owls. This has resulted in cases of hybridization between the two species – and today the David Suzuki Foundation calls the spotted owl the most endangered bird in Canada.

Climate change is another factor in the rise of interspecies mating. Because of changing temperatures, the blue-winged warbler has been moving north – both competing and mating with its closely related golden-winged cousins.

This also could explain the “grizzlar.” Wildlife geneticist David Paetkau, whose company tested the hybrid’s DNA, thinks that warming temperatures may have caused the grizzly father to spend less time hibernating, giving him more time to wander farther afield. And once he found himself so far out of his usual range, he may have chosen to mate with a polar bear because he could find no females of his own kind.

In fact, grizzlies and polar bears separated into two distinct species less than one million years ago. In evolutionary terms, this is a blink of an eye, and the bears’ genes are so similar that Mr. Paetkau suspects that the offspring, like other hybrid species, was probably fertile.

PREVENTION OR PROTECTION
Yet none of this answers the question of what – now that humans have altered their habitats – should be done about hybrids. Should they be allowed to proliferate, further changing fragile ecosystems? Or should conservationists put a stop to cross-breeding?

In New Brunswick, officials have decided to protect the hybrid offspring of bobcats and lynx – dubbed bob-o-lynx – from hunters. “We treat the animal as its most restricted parent,” says Cade Libby, a wildlife biologist with the Department of Natural Resources.

In contrast, a government project in the southern United States stresses the importance of genetic uniqueness. To keep coyotes from over-hybridizing with at-risk eastern wolves (also called red wolves), officials have captured purebreds and put them into a special breeding program.

But others say hybrids need not be controlled at all. They see them as a part of evolution – nature’s answer to habitat destruction and climate change.

“What matters is the ecosystem, not the individual populations within it,” Mr. Paetkau says. “You can spend an incredible amount of energy preserving animals on a landscape when that landscape is changing underneath them because of deforestation and climate change. The issue is how to preserve a functioning ecosystem that can evolve in the face of change.”

Trent’s Prof. White agrees. “The most important thing in biology is to facilitate the evolutionary process and not be a preservationist,” he says. “You can’t turn the clock back to before the Pilgrim fathers landed. All individuals will be dead relatively soon. The only thing that will go on is genetic information and it’s that information that will allow animals to adapt to change. So we celebrate genetic diversity.”

Still, Prof. Festa-Bianchet is concerned about the implications of such celebrations. “I worry it could be used as an excuse not to act at the local habitat level,” he says. “It could be used as an excuse for doing nothing.”

As for hunters such as Jim Martell? As long as he buys the right licence, he is free to shoot whatever species he sets his sight on. Since snagging his “grizzlar,” he reportedly has returned to Yellowknife to kill a grizzly.

Published in The Globe and Mail

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Saturday, December 9, 2006

Genetically engineered spruce and poplars could save Canada’s forests from over-harvesting and vicious pests such as the pine beetle. So why aren’t environmentalists hugging these trees?

by Sharon Oosthoek
QUEBEC CITY — When Christmas snows thaw this spring, Armand Seguin will cut down a stand of about 300 trees outside Quebec City. Although he spent years growing these spruce and poplars, he will take care to completely burn their trunks, branches, leaves and roots. And environmental groups such as Greenpeace can hardly wait for the chainsaws to rev up.

That’s because these are Canada’s first and only genetically modified trees to be grown outdoors. While some scientists believe that they represent the future of our forests — and a forest-product industry that accounted for nearly 60 per cent of our $55.1-billion trade balance in 2005 — others fear the fallout from experimenting with “frankenpines.”

These environmentalists say trees with novel traits could spell the end of tree biodiversity and threaten the larger ecosystem. They point to scientific studies suggesting that animals developed abnormalities after being fed crops genetically engineered by biotech giant Monsanto. In short, they cannot fathom Mr. Seguin’s argument that GM trees could be good for the environment.

Mr. Seguin works for the Canadian Forest Service, a federal government agency, and is one of the country’s foremost experts in tree biotechnology.
In 1997, he planted poplars engineered to contain a gene from an E. coli bacterium. These acted as a marker to show whether the trees could be successfully genetically altered. He then followed that experiment in 2000 by planting spruce trees that were genetically engineered to contain DNA from the insecticide Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), a bacterium used to control plant pests.

Mr. Seguin needed to know that when these genes were introduced, they would persist long enough to have the desired effect. But, now that he can confirm that genes were expressed throughout these trees’ lives, they must be destroyed.

Still, Mr. Seguin has high hopes for his work going forward. One day, he sees plantations of trees with designer genes yielding more usable wood than they do now, removing incentive for logging old-growth forests. “I don’t think we can continue to harvest the natural forest much longer,” he says.
(In Mr. Seguin’s home province of Quebec, the government’s Coulombe Forest Commission made headlines two years ago when it denounced flawed calculations that led to over-harvesting. It recommended reducing the allowable cut by 20 per cent.)

But over-harvesting is not the only thing on Mr. Seguin’s mind. He also hopes that by engineering trees that produce toxins against bugs, he can one day eliminate the need for pesticides.

“I like genetic engineering more than chemically sprayed trees,” he says. “Those chemicals get in the water and stay around . . . my genetically engineered spruce Bt gene will degrade.”

A robust but safe pesticide-generating tree certainly has implications for British Columbia, where the mountain pine beetle infected 8.7 million hectares of pine forest last year and continues to be one of the largest causes of economic loss in the province.

Says Mr. Seguin, a slim, energetic man who rides his bike to work: “These technologies have great potential for the environment. I understand there were some mistakes made in agriculture. But if we can start from zero again, I think we can present a positive aspect of GMOs [genetically modified organisms].”

Panos Grames, a forest researcher at the Vancouver-based David Suzuki Foundation, remains skeptical. He doubts that it will ever be possible to engineer a pesticide-producing tree that could prove harmless to either other trees or to the larger ecosystems they inhabit.

“The science is very experimental,” he says. “With fewer insects, there are fewer birds. And insects break down organic matter for the ecosystem.”

Even if the toxin a tree produces were targeted to just one insect, Mr. Grames adds, nature abhors a vacuum and another bug will inevitably come along to fill the void. “There may be a short-term gain, but there are long-term consequences every time you try to improve on Mother Nature,” he says.

Speaking on the phone from his Montreal office, Greenpeace Canada’s Eric Darier has concerns about Mr. Seguin’s strategy as well. He argues that we know so little about how genetically modified organisms behave — including GM trees grown in controlled test plots — that we can’t predict their impact should they find their way into natural forests.

“It’s one thing to know what one gene can do. What we really don’t know is the interaction between all these genes,” he warns. Tree pollen can travel long distances and there are limited options for locating plantations. “Where are they going to plant these trees? On the Prairies? I don’t think so. It’s going to be in old clear-cut areas, next to old-growth forest.”

Mr. Seguin freely admits that it will never be possible to guarantee that GM trees won’t cross-pollinate. Instead, he advocates creating genes that will not harm natural forests.

University of Toronto’s Malcolm Campbell says the work Mr. Seguin and others are doing is crucial, that the cost of dismissing genetic engineering is too high. Climate change means trees are fighting off threats for which they have few defences — pests and diseases more typical of warmer regions, drought, floods and extreme temperatures.

“We simply cannot afford to be throwing options out,” says the molecular geneticist, part of an international team of scientists who announced in September that they had decoded the genome of the black cottonwood poplar — a first for a forest tree.

“We have to decide what level of risk is acceptable [in genetic engineering]. For most environmentalists, no risk is acceptable. I can’t accept that. It’s the kind of thinking that would outlaw the use of the wheel.”

China seems to agree. In 2002, the government there approved commercial plantations of poplars genetically engineered with the Bt bacterium. About 1.5 million trees have already been planted.

Meanwhile, big forestry companies in Canada see genetically engineered trees as a tool whose time has not yet come. Seth Kursman, the spokesman for Abitibi-Consolidated, says his company’s emphasis is on natural generation. And scientists predict commercial planting in this country is still decades away.

As for environmentalists such as Mr. Darier? They recommend that Canada manage supply rather than try to keep up with demand for wood products.
“We’re being greedy in the short term and not thinking about the medium and long term,” he says. “A shortage of a commodity is a good thing. It can encourage conservation. I think we’re tackling the issue the wrong way.”

Published in the Globe and Mail

Saturday, December 9, 2006