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Defenders Magazine
Wild Life: Ancient Tabby?
House cats are so familiar today that it’s hard to imagine humans and felines apart. Yet the relationship was thought to go back only about 4,000 years, when the wild cat was first tamed by Egyptians.
A recent discovery announced in the journal Science, however, appears to push the advent of pet cats back much further than the pharaohs. A French team excavating a Neolithic village in Cyprus found a cat buried next to a human in a grave about 9,500 years old. The grave contained polished stone, jewelry and other items, pointing to “a special burial indicating a strong relationship between cats and human beings,” says French scientist Jean-Denis Vigne. “Possibly tamed cats were devoted to special activities or special human individuals in the village.”
Going Ape over Illegal Logging
What could pool cues and orangutans possibly have in common? Demand for tropical wood to make the former, it turns out, is partly to blame for the rapid disappearance of the shaggy primates.
The rusty-colored orangutans are the only great apes found in Asia, where they live on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. These fruit-eating animals spend most of their lives in the tops of trees in the tropical rain forest, descending only rarely. Fewer than 35,000 orangutans are believed to remain in the wild, and they are listed as endangered under domestic and international laws.
Habitat loss is one of the chief threats to orangutans, experts say, and much of the destruction is being driven by illegal logging for ramin from national parks and preserves. Ramin is a blonde-colored hardwood much sought-after for pool cues, cribs and picture frames in the United States and Europe, where it can fetch as much as $1,000 per cubic meter. Despite a ban on ramin logging in Indonesia, thousands of tons continue to be cut down each year and smuggled into neighboring Malaysia for sale, according to a recent report by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit group.
If this illegal logging and other threats aren’t stemmed, experts say, orangutans could disappear within a decade or two. Defenders and other wildlife groups are asking the Bush administration to impose trade sanctions on Malaysia until it ends ramin trade. “Orangutan strongholds are being logged on a massive scale,” says Carroll Muffett, director of international programs for Defenders. “If the logging isn’t stopped, we will be the last generation to see this remarkable species in the wild.”
Finding Nemo…in the Wrong Place
In the recent film “Finding Nemo,” a computer-generated clownfish escapes from a dentist’s aquarium with the help of his fellow captives. Those of us who rooted for Nemo’s freedom should think twice before aiding such escapes in real life, according to a recent study.
Scientists from the University of Washington found 16 types of fish from the tropical Pacific and Red Sea in the waters off of southeast Florida. The most frequently sighted foreign fish, such as emperor angelfish and yellow tangs, are also favorites in the saltwater aquarium trade, leading the researchers to conclude that the fish were dumped from home aquariums.
Researchers don’t know if any of these foreign fish are breeding, or what impact they are having on local marine wildlife. But they point to previous examples of exotic fish being introduced with devastating results on native wildlife.
“Releasing nonnative reef fish is like playing Russian roulette with tropical marine ecosystems,” says Brice Semmens, a biologist at the University of Washington who led the study. Semmens and his colleagues urge programs for dealers and aquarium owners to teach them about the problems of introduced species and provide ways for them to sell or trade unwanted fish.
“While it is against the law to release nonnative marine fish into coastal waters,” Semmens adds, “it’s a problem that can’t easily be policed.”
