Ladies & Gentlemen, The Sixth Extinction! Starring Elephants, Giraffes, Coral Reefs, Bees . . .

[hatrack]

Ingrid recounts the story of an elephant orphaned in the Kruger culls, called Shireni. Shireni's handler taught her a trick: to remove her handler's hat with her trunk and to put it on her own head and then to put it back on her handler's. Ingrid observed as the elephant learned the behavior.

Nearly a decade later, Ingrid went back and saw Shireni. "She remembered me with that simple gesture. She took the hat off my head and put it on hers. She then put it back. She made the link to that time in our lives," says Ingrid. "Shireni hadn't done that in all the interim years. I was amazed, and truth be told, flattered."

Anybody who has studied or worked with elephants has their own stories about how sharp elephant memories are. Experts like Dame Daphne Sheldrick, who has rescued hundreds of orphaned calves, talks about elephants remembering people years later, and the things that happened to them -- good and bad.
Sheldrick speaks of elephants reintroduced to the wild who have returned years, sometimes decades, later for help with an injury or just to say "hello."

EDIT

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/11/world/vanishing-mckenzie-botswana-elephants/index.html

Its construction-crane neck, toothpick legs, knocked knees and two-story stature make it an awkwardly lovable favorite of children's book authors and cartoonists. This animal brings an odd sort of wonder to the savannahs of Africa.

But perhaps it's best for us to start imagining a world without the humble giraffe. The International Union for Conservation of Nature on Thursday up-listed this goofy creature -- known for its craning neck, which helps it reach tree-top leaves its competitors can't -- to its "vulnerable" status, meaning the animal is at high risk for extinction.It moves up from the category called "least concern."

The reason: a sharp 36% to 40% decline in giraffe populations in recent decades. In 1985, the group said, there were as many as 163,452 giraffes. Now the estimate is 97,562.

This puts the giraffe in good company. The elephant, the orangutan, certain bees, coral -- so many of the Earth's mind-blowingly cool creatures face extinction risk these days. If poaching rates continue, some fear African elephants will be extinct in 20 years. Scientists worry coral reefs will mostly vanish by 2050 because humans continue pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere, warming up the oceans and making them more acidic, and making life hard for coral.

I've spent much of 2016 reporting on the mass extinction event that's brewing all around the world for a CNN series called "Vanishing." That reporting will debut on CNN International on Friday and on this website Monday morning.

EDIT

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/08/world/sutter-giraffe-extinction/index.html

I struggle with whether or how to engage Hary and Lydia in a conversation about climate change and the white coral -- this foreign curse that understandably makes little sense out here.

How do you tell someone that factories and cars and deforestation on the other side of the world are slowly heating up the entire planet, warming the ocean, making it more acidic, and messing up reefs worldwide? It's a tricky concept even for those of us who are climate culprits, who live in polluted cities and burn coal to pump electricity and air conditioning into our homes.

Out here, there are no factories, no air pollution, no cars or roads. Lydia says she's only been in a car once in her life, and it was to take her son to another family member's funeral. Her son cried, she says, because he didn't understand what was happening. Only one or two cell phones (solar powered) exist on the island, and there's a single dusty television set. Its owner uses it mostly to play Kung Fu movies from a USB stick for the island's kids.

Yet, this is an existential crisis. To be Vezo, according to some, you have to work on the water. This place -- and its culture -- could vanish with the reef.
I ask James Paul, a diver who surveys reefs in this area for Blue Ventures, and is Vezo himself, how he handles local conversations about climate change.
It's difficult, he says. "I tell them just be careful, it's sick. Don't touch it. If you touch it, it's dead quick."

EDIT

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/11/world/vanishing-sutter-coral-madagascar/index.html

Bees help pollinate 35% of the world's food, and bumblebees, of which Franklin's bumblebee is (or was) one, pollinate everything from tomatoes to cranberries and blueberries and melons. Yet they live in underground colonies, caring for a queen. And they don't make honey, so you don't hear as much about them from journalists.

Sarina Jepsen, deputy chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's bumblebee specialist group, and a director at the Xerces Society, an environmental nonprofit, told me about 25% of bumblebees in North America are at risk for extinction. "If you think about it, that's a really strikingly high percentage of a fauna to be declining -- and in some cases really crashing," said Leif Richardson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics.

And much of the vanishing is undocumented. "It's abysmal what we know right now," Droege, from USGS, told me. "There are just too few people on the ground looking."

EDIT

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/11/us/vanishing-sutter-franklins-bumblebee/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/specials/world/vanishing-earths-mass-extinction

[liberal N proud]

1. Humans will not be far behind