The movie is Avatar. Not surprised?  Like it or dislike it, the movie did succeed in highlighting a number of messages worth thinking more about. It may not have been the most accurate portrayal but the movie provided insight into the beliefs and values of the Na-Vi. These ‘fictitious’ indigenous forest peoples hold a worldview which closely resembles that of many indigenous people around the world today. This is a worldview which embodies a profound love, respect and reverence for nature and the land. It is a worldview which thrives on an intimate relationship or kinship between all living things. In Avatar it is a worldview which compels the Na’vi to believe that spirit force of Eywa acts to keep the ecosystem of their land in perfect equilibrium.

And it is an ‘awakened’ worldview which seems to cast the Na-Vi in a perpetual state of heightened awareness – where every moment is sacred…and has the potential to deliver an important symbolic message.

What sort of symbolic messages? There is a profound moment early in the movie. It comes soon after the Na-Vi heroine Neytiri encounters (eventual ‘hero’) Jake Sully in the forest for the first time. Determined to see Jake punished for his trespassing, she is suddenly stopped in her tracks by the presence of the falling seeds of the sacred Eywa tree.  Falling seeds may not normally warrant attention but not only did these seeds come at a time when Neytiri was deciding upon her actions but they fell toward Jake in a mysterious and patterned manner. This was not something which Neytiri could ignore. Indeed, it was a ‘meaningful coincidence’ – some might call it an omen – which signalled to Neytiri that Jake had received an ‘approval’ from a sacred source. He was a person to be trusted and protected.

Now as much meaningful sense as that might have made to Neytiri at the time, it was going to take more than that to convince the rest of her tribe. And that is how it goes for our own meaningful experiences in our present-day reality. We may experience something in nature which is potentially life-changing and profound to us for whatever reason – it is our reality. But try capturing that feeling in a story retold to mates (probably a far less sympathetic tribe than the Na-Vi!) around a barbeque and chances are that your rendition won’t quite convey the same impact.  But that need not matter. Ultimately, for whatever reason, this was a moment which you were privileged to perceive, to experience…in this life you have the free will to interpret it in whatever way you wish. And to derive meaning in a way which may enrich your life forever…

THE END

(well, if it works for Hollywood…)

http://tvnz.co.nz//national-news/moko-dolphin-laid-rest-3650103?ref=emailfriend

Tributes flow for Moko
Ten pallbearers strained to lift a 3m-long, bright blue casket containing Moko the dolphin, much loved and missed, on to a boat.

Adorned with flowers, a dozen dolphin soft toys and two posters of his smiling face, the dolphin was surrounded by his most devout admirers and taken out to Whakatane’s estuary for one last cruise around his favourite swimming spot.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10659354&ref=emailfriend

It is ready! The eyes4earth survey is now online and awaiting your input.
This survey asks about individual’s highly meaningful experiences in nature. It specifically focuses on your profound encounters and ‘coincidences’ with wildlife (e.g. birds, insects, reptiles, mammals, plants).  Other questions relate to the types of environments where such experiences occur and if environmental change and degradation (e.g. the spread of exotic weeds) may influence one’s ability to have a meaningful encounter with wildlife.

The information from the survey is being used to support research on meaningful nature experiences currently being undertaken in South Africa through Stellenbosch University and the TsamaHUB. The results of the survey aim to inform public awareness initiatives, conservation management and strategies for environmental education. All going well, we would love to even compile a little book (to commemorate this Year of Biodiversity) with a selection of stories.

So please go ahead and take the survey!

Researchers surveying whale numbers from North Stradbroke Island’s Point Lookout say they are witnessing record numbers, and Australia Zoo’s Whale One skipper Shane Matterson said whales off the Sunshine Coast were putting on a brilliant show.

“We’ve seen some spectacular breaches and plenty of fin slapping, which is great to see,” he said.

“We see both males and females breaching for a number of reasons. But, when it comes to mating rituals, breaches can occur to try to impress each other or intimidate competition.”

Mr Matterson said consistent numbers of humpbacks were streaming past the Coast and he expected great pulses of whales in coming weeks.

“We’re so sure that this season is going to be a ripper,” he said.

University of Queensland’s Michael Noad, who heads the East Coast Australian Humpback Whale Population survey, said about 100 whales a day were passing through.

“In the last survey (in 2007) the whale numbers weren’t as big. The biggest day was 130 whales with 70 whales a day the average,” he said.

Dr Noad said he expected 13,000 humpbacks in Queensland waters this year, an 11% increase on 2007 figures.

Original Source: Nature News

The United Nations is setting up a body to monitor global ecology modelled on its influential climate panel. Last week, representatives from 85 countries gathered in Busan, South Korea, to approve the formation of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which will operate much like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

According to the document hammered out on 11 June, the IPBES will conduct periodic assessments of Earth’s biodiversity and ‘ecosystem services’ — ecosystems outputs, such as fresh water, fish, game, timber and a stable climate, that benefit humankind. These assessments, based on reviews of the scientific literature, will answer questions about how much biodiversity is declining and what the implications of extinctions and ecosystem change might be for humanity. Assessments will take place from global to sub-regional scales.

The IPBES will help to train environmental scientists in the developing world, both with a budget of its own and by alerting funders to gaps in global expertise. The organization will also identify gaps in research and highlight tools — such as models — for policy-makers looking to apply a scientific approach to decisions on issues such as land management.

Negotiations in Busan stretched late into the night as delegates debated the scope of the IPBES and how it would be funded. A key concern among developed countries was that the body should “not become a huge bureaucracy”, says Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Programme. “Governments wanted to be reassured that it would be lean and mean and streamlined.”
 
Among the governments that assented to the IPBES’s creation were the European Union, the United States and Brazil. This autumn the plan will come before the general assembly of the United Nations for official approval, which those involved say is a virtual certainty.

Anne Larigauderie, executive director of Paris-based Diversitas, a facilitator for biodiversity science, says that the IPBES could turn the “fragmented” field of biodiversity research into a more coordinated “common enterprise” that will lead to better models of future biodiversity changes.

For a longer version of this story, see http://go.nature.com/cyOPX2.

Kate Benson,  16th June 2010

The owners of pampered pets have a lot to answer for. Domestic dogs have become so dependent on humans, they can no longer pass simple intelligence tests or solve problems which their counterparts in the wild find easy.

Homeless dogs seek food from rubbish dumps or garbage bins, rather than hunt for it, they struggle to find food hidden in a maze, and have learnt to look to humans first, rather than making an effort to help themselves, says Bradley Smith, a psychologist.

He studied dingoes living at the Dingo Discovery Centre, in Victoria, and found that even those socialised to be around humans were significantly faster and smarter than dogs.

When the dingoes were made to travel around a transparent barrier to find food, all achieved the task in about 10 seconds, Mr Smith said. Some quickly found trapdoors which made the journey to the food shorter.

But previous studies on dogs carrying out the same task showed that many failed to find a way to the bowl. Some pawed at the fence, dug at it or barked at their owners for help. Many looked confused. Closing trapdoors that had previously been open made the dogs even more puzzled, indicating they were not able to quickly adapt to a change in circumstance, Mr Smith said.

In other tests, dogs and wolves were shown to behave in very different ways when confronted with unsolvable problems. After both had been taught to retrieve food by pulling on a rope or opening a bin, the task was changed so that the rope could not be pulled and the bin could not be opened.

Dogs gazed at their owners standing behind them, while the socialised wolves ignored their owners. During the study, seven of the nine dogs looked back at the human after trying to obtain the food reward for only about one minute, while only two of the seven wolves looked back at all, instead attempting to solve the task on their own.

Source:  Sydney Morning Herald

During the exposition, Lucie will display the colourful drawings made by school children from the Baviaanskloof. These drawings formed part of the responses obtained by her research which focused on the children’s perceptions of – and interactions with – ecosystem services and biodiversity.  The results of Lucie’s thesis research are being used by Living Lands, PRESENCE partners and the eyes4earth initiative to help guide the design of future environmental education programmes as part of a broader strategy to help reconnect youth to nature and further support restoration efforts in the area.

Lucie’s initiative needs to be congratulated as an excellent outreach effort for communicating scientific understanding of ecosystem services into the public domain in a simple and attractive way.

Lucie’s thesis research and internship was supervised through Wageningen University’s Environmental Systems Analysis Group and hosted by the PRESENCE  network and Living Lands in South Africa. Her reserach was co-funded by the Anne van den Ban Fund.

The massive journey is a partnership between the Samoa Voyaging Society, the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Programme (SPREP) and the Coral Reef Initiative for the South Pacific (CRISP).  Seven other Pacific islands groups  from American Samoa, the Cook Islands, Fiji, New Zealand, Tahiti, Tonga and Western Samoa are mounting a joint effort to  both raise awareness about (marine) biodiversity conservation as well as working toward revive their cultural traditions of ocean voyaging by using a double-hulled canoe and the lost art of navigating by the stars.

The SPREP reports that “over the next few months, seven of the Samoan “Va’a Gaualofa” crew will sail to French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, Samoa and Tokelau as part of the Pacific voyaging expedition. During the Pacific voyage the Va’a Gaualofa crew will act as observers by documenting all rubbish, oil spills or any forms of marine life that they sight upon a geographical information system. They will take images of their sightings and mark their findings on a map to explain and show their results while the va’a is docked in the different harbours throughout the region.”

These voyage sightings as well as results to their visual survey of “What did nature do for you today?”  will be made into short awareness films which will be on show during an interactive learning exhibition at each stop that the Va’a Gaualofa crew makes.

The Va’a Gaualofa crew departed on the 18th April and as of 3rd May (Day 13) found themselves soaking wet as they continue to battle mountainous seas. They are having to bail out 3 – 8 buckets of water a day from their canoe in what has become a high pressure situation only made easier my plenty of jokes amongst the crew to keep spirits up. In their own words they reflect that they have been “pretty much been battered, beaten up and smashed by mother nature for the past week. We’ve been through her washing machine, and so far we haven’t seen much of a gentle cycle…”

These intense and life challenging and changing experiences certainly put a different but yet equally important spin on “What did nature do for you today?”

Click here to follow the Pacific Voyage blog of the Samoan Voyaging Society

Click here to see the article in the Solomon Times about the voyage and asking of “The Question”

Click here to follow the Pacific Voyage blog of the Fijian Voyaging. The Fijian’s have just arrived to a wonderful warm welcome in Raivavae. Click here for news and photos.

Credit: Images sourced from fijivoyaging.com

Blue whale songs are mysteriously changing frequencies. In a puzzling development, blue whales around the world are singing in deeper tones. This finding came as researchers analyzed historical recordings of seven types of blue whale songs taken in the Pacific, Atlantic, Southern, and Indian Oceans. The most-extensively monitored type of song, recorded in the eastern North Pacific, dropped in tonal frequency by 31 percent between 1963 and 2008. The other six song types also have steadily moved to lower frequencies, the researchers found.

Why such a widespread shift? Changes in ocean temperature and acidity, which might modify sound propagation through the water, are too slight to explain the trend, the authors say. The team also considered the possibility that blue whales are responding to an increase in human-generated noise in the ocean. But if whales wanted to overcome the noise by singing more loudly, they would be more likely to shift their frequency up rather than down, says coauthor Mark McDonald of WhaleAcoustics.

Another potential explanation is the recovery of whale populations, prompted by the decline of commercial whaling. If whale numbers are rising, the team speculates, males might face more competition for mates. Since females may favor deeper tones, males could be lowering the frequency of their songs to improve their chances of success. McDonald also notes that louder sounds are easier to produce at higher frequencies. In denser populations, males may not need to sing so loudly to reach their listeners—and thus can sing more deeply.

—Roberta Kwok
McDonald, M., J. Hildebrand, and S. Mesnick. 2009. Worldwide decline in tonal frequencies of blue whale songs. Endangered Species Research 9:13-21.

View Original Article

COMMENT?

Why do you think whales are changing the frequency of their songs? Is it in response to one of the possibilities outlined in the article above or is it in response to some other global change?

Conservation Magazine, October-December 2009 (Vol. 10, No. 4)

On a dark night last fall, 11-year-old Joe Hess was playing a backyard game of hide-and-seek with his younger brother and two friends near Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington. Lying face-down in the grass, Joe thought he saw Magellan—a huge housecat that lived next door—out of the corner of his eye. When the cat pounced on the boy’s head, Joe leaped to his feet and yelled, “No!” But it wasn’t Magellan—Joe was staring at a cougar that looked a little bigger than a German shepherd.

Joe slowly backed away from the animal, then turned and ran inside the house. He had a few shallow scratches but was otherwise unharmed. The wildlife agents who responded to the scene told Joe’s parents that the cougar was probably a young animal, about a year old, that had recently left home to begin life on its own. Joe’s lack of serious injuries might have meant the cat was just playing with him. Or maybe it was simply an inexperienced predator, unsure of whether a boy belonged on the menu.

Cougar encounters like this one are becoming increasingly common in the United States…

Read more