Discovery
‘Nearly 3K apes stolen’: Almost 3,000 great apes are killed or captured in the wild each year because of rampant illegal trade, according to a new UN report released Monday in Bangkok, that voiced fears for their survival.
More than 22,000 great apes are estimated to have been lost to the illicit trade between 2005 and 2011, according to the study by the UN Environment Programme, which oversees the Great Apes Survival Partnership (Grasp).
“This trade is thriving and extremely dangerous to the long term survival of great apes,” said Grasp coordinator Doug Cress, describing the illegal trade as “sophisticated, ingenious, well financed, well armed”.
“At this rate, apes will disappear very quickly,” he said.
Capturing a single chimpanzee alive can require killing 10 others, said Cress.
“You cannot walk into a forest and just take one. You have to fight for it. You have to kill the other chimpanzees in the group,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a major conference on endangered species in Bangkok.
The fate of captured gorillas was even more bleak as they die quickly from stress, he added.
International trade in chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas — the three African species of great apes — as well as orangutans, the only Asian species, is banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) whose member countries are gathering in the Thai capital this week.
But in reality great apes are sold as exotic pets for wealthy individuals who see them as status symbols, bought by “disreputable zoos” and exploited by the entertainment and tourist industries, the report said. (AFP) World agriculture suffers: Falling numbers of wild bees and other pollinating insects are hurting global agriculture, a study has found.
Managed populations of pollinators are less effective at fertilizing plants than wild ones, the researchers said, so the dearth of pollinating insects cannot be solved by simply introducing others.
“Adding more honey bees often does not fix this problem, but... increased service by wild insects would help,” said Lawrence Harder, a scientist with the University of Calgary in Canada, which led the study.
Pollinating insects usually live in natural or semi-natural habitats, such as the edges of forests, hedgerows or grasslands.
These habitats are gradually being lost as the land is cultivated for agriculture, but, as a result, the abundance and diversity of wild pollinators crucial for the crops’ success is declining. The researchers analyzed 41 crop systems around the world, including fruits, seeds, nuts, and coffee to examine the impact of wild pollinators on crop pollination.
“Paradoxically, most common approaches to increase agricultural efficiency, such as cultivation of all available land and the use of pesticides, reduce the abundance and variety of wild insects that could increase production of these crops,” says Harder. (AFP)
Junk transforms into blankets:
Some 40 people stand ankle-deep in used plastic bottles in the yard of a recycling station in Taipei, stamping them flat in the first step of a process that will transform the junk into usable goods.
At the station operated by Taiwan’s largest charity group Tzu Chi Foundation, hundreds of volunteers help sort and recycle plastic waste along with used glass bottles and electronic appliances.
“Plastic bottles won’t be decomposed even if they are buried for 1,000 years so we started to recycle and re-use them to reduce garbage and pollution,” said Chien Tungyuan, a spokesman for the foundation.
“The used bottles are being treated and processed in a 13-step procedure to be made into textiles such as blankets and clothes and even dolls.”
Tzu Chi runs 5,400 recycling stations across Taiwan under its president Ma Ying
jeou with the help of more than 76,000 volunteers and has distributed more than 460,000 blankets made from plastic bottles since 2007 for relief use at home and abroad.
For the volunteers in charge of crushing the plastic bottles, who are from two nearby nursing homes for the mentally ill, the recycling work has also become part of their therapy, Chien said. (AFP)
To save rhinos, sell their horns:
In order to save the perilously endangered rhinoceros, sales of its horns should be legalized, four leading environmental scientists has said in the influential journal “Science.”
“As committed environmentalists we don’t like the idea of a legal trade any more than does the average member of the concerned public,” wrote lead author Duan Biggs of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) and University of Queensland.
“But we can see that we need to do something radically different to conserve Africa’s rhino,” he said.
Although there is a global ban on killing rhinoceroses and selling their horns, there is a fierce demand, mainly attributed to Asian consumers who use the ground up horn for traditional Chinese medicines.
Attempts to discourage the use of rhino horn have failed, the scientists said, and, without a legal avenue to obtain the ingredient, the black market has stepped in.
“Rhino horn is now worth more than gold,” the scientists noted, saying that a kilogram that cost $4,700 in 1993 would fetch around $65,000 in 2012. (AFP) Shiseido ditches animal testing: Japan’s Shiseido on Friday said it was mostly dropping animal-tested cosmetics, as the European Union gets set to finalise a sweeping ban on the sale of such products later this month. But the company said exceptions to the policy meant it would still allow animal testing when that was the only way of proving the safety of products already being sold in the market, and in some countries where animal testing is legally required.
The policy, which starts from April, applies to all of the Tokyo-based cosmetic giant’s production sites, including those run by suppliers, it said. “Our business partners that supply material to us will not rely on animal testing, while we will no longer outsource such testing to outside labs,” a Shiseido spokesman said. (AFP)