My husband returns to the same reefs every year in the Bahamas, where he has been teaching a coral reef ecology class for the last 14 years. On his 2008 trip, he noticed that the reef fish were missing. The culprits were quickly identified — and during his 2009 course, he and his students were eating them.

Lionfish.

Lionfish do not belong in the Caribbean. They are native to the South Pacific and Indian Ocean and made their way into the Caribbean through the release (the exact event is unknown) of aquarium fish. Some say they were in a tank that was destroyed in Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Others say it was a release of just 3 or 6 specimens. Whatever the case, lionfish are now spotted as far north as Rhode Island, and are popping up all over the Caribbean, from Colombia to the Virgin Islands to the Bahamas.

The Bahamas‘ marine ecosystem has already been hard hit. The people that know these reefs well are witnessing a rapid decline in reef fish thanks to these voracious predators, which have an appetite for juvenile reef fish. Their method of attack is particularly unique. Instead of an ambush attack or high-speed chase, lionfish make their presence known and confuse their prey by displaying their beautiful fins like a peacock, slowly dancing towards their prey and then rapidly sucking the prey into their mouths like a vacuum. This technique is so effective because no other predator in the Caribbean uses it — so prey are not adapted to avoid it.

Lionfish have no natural predators in Caribbean waters and are thriving on the tasty but already dwindling choice of baby reef fish. Some think that native grouper might have preyed on lionfish — but because grouper are overfished in the Caribbean (and in most parts of the world), the options beyond human predators are few.

As the distribution of lionfish in the Caribbean expands and the severity of this invasion is becoming more apparent, managers are trying to figure out what to do before the adult populations of reef fish are seriously affected. In the Bahamas, they have issued a “kill on sight” directive. The Caribbean Fisheries Management Council has even developed a Most Wanted Poster to encourage removal of these fish.

The best way to get rid of them? Put them on the menu! In Asia, lionfish are a popular menu item. That’s not yet the case in the Caribbean, so folks are working to change the culture of fear that surrounds lionfish (they have toxic spines that really hurt when they touch you) into a culture of desire for a delightful bite of this light and tasty fish. There are even websites that are collecting lionfish recipes — everything from sushi to Bahamian style fritters to smoked lionfish dip (yum!).

The hope is that people will be motivated to hunt and remove these fish, taking advantage of the existing tradition of artisanal fishing in the Caribbean and turning fishers toward this undesirable species and perhaps away from dwindling populations of grouper and snapper.

An additional approach to this problem — and one that would benefit the reef in multiple ways as well — would be to beef up protection of large predators such as grouper and sharks so that they can work to keep this ecosystem in balance and potentially keep the lionfish population in check.

My husband’s students decided to do a small research project to examine the gut contents (i.e., what is in the bellies) of lionfish they found on the Bahamian reefs, and discovered that their bellies were quite full of baby reef fish. The reward for their efforts was a yummy dinner of fried lionfish…and my husband assures me that in terms of flavor and texture, they compete with any flakey white fish you can think of or catch in the Caribbean. So…

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me advocating for people to eat fish. If you want to eat fish, I’d usually refer you to Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch — a guide that helps diners make decisions about the most sustainable and healthy options for seafood. However, when it comes to lionfish in the Caribbean, I say chow down to your heart’s content!

A few weeks ago, word got out that a review being published in September’s American Journal of Clinical Nutrition had concluded that organic foods are not healthier or more nutritious than conventional food.

Organic advocates were outraged. Mildly engaged consumers began to wonder if organics were really worth the higher price tag.

Momentarily leaving aside some the review’s conclusions, my first thought was: Is higher nutritional quality really what motivates consumers to buy organic food, anyway? Isn’t it more about what’s not in the food than what is?

Most people I know who make a point of buying organic do so to avoid ingesting antibiotics, pesticides and other toxins. Sure, if my organic tomato had a few more vitamins than a conventionally grown one, that would be a nice bonus, but it’s not the reason I’m buying it.

And according to the Organic Trade Association, there are plenty of other good reasons to buy organic food that don’t have anything to do with what goes in your body. The association provides information on how organic agriculture can improve soil fertility, prevent chemical fertilizers from polluting waterways and accommodate higher species diversity.

The environmental reach of conventionally grown food is longer than most of us can even imagine. I stopped buying non-organic bananas after a short visit to Costa Rica revealed something about the industry I never would have known about: the use of plastic bags.

During my visit, my colleague and I drove past millions of banana trees, but I never saw a single banana. Instead, I saw big, blue plastic bags covering each banana bunch on every single tree.

My colleague explained that these bags were filled with pesticides and placed over the bananas to protect them from insects that might cause brown spots on the fruit, making them aesthetically unappealing to American consumers.

According to FleetWatch, these bags are used three times before being recycled, but locals will tell you that these blue bags are everywhere, littering the forest floor and choking rivers and streams.

But back to the review.

The review of 55 studies from 1958 to 2008 found that conventionally produced crops had a higher content of nitrogen, while organically produced crops had higher phosphorous and acidity content. No differences were found between the two classes of crops for the other nutrient categories — including vitamin C, zinc, and calcium — that were analyzed.

The review, funded by the U.K. Food Standards Agency, didn’t look for differences in pesticide residues between organic and conventional growing methods.

Organic advocates had strong objections to the review for a number of reasons.

Michael Hansen, Ph.D., a senior scientist at Consumers Union, cited the use of older studies as a major flaw. He told WebMD that most studies done before 1980 probably had flawed methodologies, and newer studies show clear differences in nutrient content between the two growing methods.

Secondly, the study doesn’t look at differences in polyphenols and certain antioxidants, which chief scientist for The Organic Center Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., says are 25 percent higher in organically grown food.

So, what does this mean for your food purchases?

Benbrook actually has some really sound advice: If you want to maximize the nutrient content of your produce, choose the freshest and most colorful fruits and vegetables. And if you want to minimize pesticide residues and environmental pollution, choose organic.

For now, my habits — choosing organic and local produce when I can — aren’t changing.

(Image: Banana bags in Costa Rica. Credit: Margaret Southern/TNC.)

Forest Carbon Policy Advisor Rane Cortez tells us about getting the world ready to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation through workshops and online trainings, and how these trainings relate to the climate negotiations underway now in Bonn:

Here at the UN climate negotiations in Bonn, there is a lot of talk about “getting ready for REDD.” REDD is shorthand for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

For the past year, I have been living in a world of REDD, providing training around the globe — in Indonesia, Peru, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo — to instill a basic level of knowledge among key stakeholders on the technical, political and implementation aspects of REDD.

In partnership with the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance, Conservation International, GTZ, Rainforest Alliance and WWF, The Nature Conservancy led the development and delivery of this 3-day training course titled An Introduction to Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Over the weekend in Bonn we announced an online version of this training that will be live next week.

In each country’s training, national and government officials, local NGO members and indigenous people participated together to gain a fuller understanding of what REDD is.

It’s been very interesting to see the similar concerns and issues that countries are grappling with as they think about REDD, including:

• technical issues like creating reference levels or baselines for carbon emissions;
• social issues of how to ensure stakeholders are involved and their rights are recognized in the process;
• governance issues that improve the legal, financial and institutional structures for forest management.

One of the most valuable outcomes of the workshops is the strengthening of relationships between these diverse actors. For example, no matter where we are, representatives of indigenous peoples always speak up to the national governments, asking to be more involved. These trainings begin to create relationships and help level the playing field so all stakeholders have a similar understanding of what REDD is.

The training also gives countries some ideas about what they can start on now, even though the international policy on REDD hasn’t been figured out yet. By building networks of people who are working on REDD, we keep everyone from having to reinvent the wheel.

And it’s nice to know that our efforts will help strengthen forest institutions and stakeholder relationship no matter what REDD shapes up to be. (You can read more about the Conservancy’s thoughts on how REDD should work here.)

The Nature Conservancy knows first-hand from our involvement in places like Bolivia with the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project and in the Berau district of Indonesia that significant capacity building is needed to make REDD work. Much work has already begun in many countries, but much more is still needed. We hope that making our training course available online will help fill that need.

Download the Participant Manual and Instructors Manual, as well as corresponding presentations.

The self-guided, interactive online course — free and available to all — is a fun and interesting way for anyone to learn the basics of REDD. It features interactive content with quizzes, assessments, and activities and provides a comprehensive overview of REDD, including topics like: the role of forests in climate change, drivers of deforestation, technical and political elements, social considerations, and project development. Available soon at: www.conservationtraining.org.

(Image: Measuring trees in Bolivia as part of a sustainable forestry project. Source: Ami Vitale.)

1. Ecuador is trying to choose the high road with a carbon-credit plan that allows them to profit from not drilling for oil beneath a national park brimming with diversity. (Hat-tip: Environmental Capital.)
2. The Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future gathered together a group of Silicon Valley businesswomen last week who discussed clean tech and whether women are the “greener gender.” 
3. Numerous media outlets reported on a new Nature Conservancy study that found 85 percent of the world’s oyster reefs have disappeared. Read more at the BBC, New Scientist and Treehugger.
4. In the wake of Obama’s proposed new fuel-efficiency standards, Bright Green Blog asks the question everyone is wondering: Will increasing fuel efficiency make people drive more?
5. There’s a new reserve in the Congo — 1,847 square mile Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, which will help protect forests, bonobos and unusual critters like the Congo peacock and dwarf crocodile.

• Headline of the Month: Jaguar Swims Panama Canal, Then Takes Own Picture. (Hat tip: EcoWorldly.)

• The dream of a hydrogen-powered car? Forget about it, says EcoGeek’s Hank Green — especially after the Obama administration just slashed research money for hydrogen fuel cells. He argues that the dream was really a foolish fantasy that wasted billions of dollars.

• China is now “the world’s leading builder of more efficient, less polluting coal power plants,” reports The New York Times — beating the United States to the “clean coal” punch.

• How do you get rid of e-waste (geek speak for old electronic gadgets)? Treehugger runs down the ways.

• The chemicals in just one cigarette butt can make a liter of water fatal for fish, says a new study from San Diego State University. (Hat tip to Blogfish, which adds that cigarette butts are the number one litter item found on beaches by the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup.)

I recently returned from participating in the 5th International Bird Watching “Encounter” in Antigua, Guatemala.  The encounters have been developed by the Guatemalan National Bird Watching Roundtable (Mesa Nacional de Aviturismo) with the assistance of INGUAT, the Guatemalan Tourism Institute.

Based on this visit, I am convinced that Guatemala is ready to go as a major destination for birding/avitourism/ecotourism (however you want to describe it). The country has everything you might want in a destination: well over 700 species of birds (more on this below), great infrastructure for tourism, knowledgeable guides, a rich and very much living culture, and a past without parallel. How can you not go there?

For birders, Guatemala offers a delectable mix of resident and migrant birds (the latter only if you go in the “winter” months). Many of the resident birds are spectacular, rare and eagerly sought after by birders — birds such as the Resplendant Quetzal, Horned Guan, and Pink-headed Warbler.

Even the migrants, though most North Americans are likely to have seen them before, occur in different mixes and habitats. For example, where else are you going to see flocks of Townsend’s and Tennessee Warblers hanging out with Crescent-chested Warblers? Even the songs seem to be a bit more magical there — for example, that of the Brown-backed Solitaire.

Guatemala’s archaeological sites are world-famous, and justly so. For example, Tikal National Park is without peer in many ways. However, if you are like me, when you go to places like this, it is hard to decide whether to look at the spectacular ruins or the wildlife — both catch your eyes, although in different ways.

Tikal is part of the larger Maya Forest region, where The Nature Conservancy has worked for many years, both in Guatemala and in adjacent Belize and Mexico. This area has much to offer the ecotourist, whether birder or archaeologist. Check it out!

(Image: Logo of the 5th International Birdwatching Encounter, courtesy http://www.birds-guatemala.org/en/.)

Time was when the U.S. economy sneezed, Latin American economies keeled over from pneumonia or worse, but no longer.

While not exactly immune from the economic turmoil in the United States, economies like Brazil and Mexico will suffer less and recover earlier. There is more than a little schadenfreude south of the border at seeing Uncle Sam with custard pie all over his face after all those stern lectures about economic rectitude and belt-tightening our governments have been subjected to over the years. But, custard pie on the face or no, everyone knows how important Uncle Sam continues to be for the hemisphere, and  everyone is watching the United States intently for evidence of how you guys and gals plan to get out of this mess.

In that regard something very interesting happened two weeks ago — a new presidential budget from Obama that breaks historical patterns in a lot of ways, not least by proposing to set up a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions in the United States. So far, so European…but American cultural norms kick in with the idea of what to do with the revenues — tax cuts.

It’s interesting to run a compare-and-contrast with what the Europeans have done with their cap-and-trade revenues. The Germans,  for example, use some of them to finance an International Climate Protection Initiative that in 2008 financed 74.8 million euros — around $100 million — of worthy projects around the world. I spent much of the last month working on a proposal to help create new protected areas in the Andes with this funding, and I hope it will be the first of many such.

Which set me to thinking. The United States has a proud tradition of defending free trade, and has set up a number of free trade agreements in recent years in Latin America — in the last couple of years accords have been signed with Peru and Central America, with Colombia waiting in line.

North of the border, there are thousands of companies positioning themselves for the cap-and-trade system they know is coming. South of the border, there are millions of hectares of threatened grasslands and tropical forests, and millions of people — farmers, indigenous peoples, communities of every kind — living in and around degraded ecosystems they’d love to be restoring. It shouldn’t be beyond the bounds of human ingenuity to put this particular two-and-two together and bolt a hemispheric dimension onto a U.S. cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions.

Why not include a provision in the U.S. carbon trading system that allows U.S. companies to gain carbon credit for offsets in Latin America? After all, if the Amazon goes, the climate shifts will hit the United States almost as hard as Brazil, Peru and the other Amazonian countries. Things that drive climate — like atmospheric convection and surface temperatures — don’t exactly respect political frontiers.

But frontiers do create political realities, and most U.S. cap-and-trade revenues will have to be channeled to U.S. taxpayers. That’s as it should be. Yet the Germans have shown that a small proportion of cap-and-trade revenues channeled abroad can make a difference. (Rather a big difference, actually, to those Andean ecosystems, if we can get that proposal funded; and protecting those carbon-rich Andean montane forests will benefit the United States by buffering climate change just a little bit.) But it is precisely the accumulation of those little bits that will eventually make an impact on climate change, and now’s certainly the time to get going on it.

Environments — like economies — are interconnected. The whole history of free trade in the Americas is built on the idea that the free flow of goods and services is in everyone’s interest. It would be nice to see that assumption of interconnectedness reflected more in U.S. environmental policy, and the coming U.S. cap-and-trade system would be a great place to start. A Free Carbon Trading Area for the Americas, anyone?

(Image: Man cutting tree and clearing forest in Acre, Brazil. Credit: Haroldo Palo, Jr.)

The rarest cat in America — the ocelot — lives in the southmost corner of Texas, near Brownsville. It’s a spotted cat, marigold yellow and black, about the size of a small border collie — and a few weeks ago I was asked to go help catch one.

Jody Mays works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in Texas. It’s her job to keep tabs on the small, remnant population of ocelots in the United States. No one knows their true numbers in this country: Fewer than 100 — maybe fewer  than 50. They live in the impenetrable, tick infested, thorn and brush country of South Texas, right near the Rio Grande, just across from Mexico. (Their habitat includes the Conservancy’s Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve.)

Though widespread in South and Central America, this prettiest of cats is now on the brink of extinction in the United States due to clearing of its habitat, which is seen by locals as pretty nasty. Ironically, as the cats get scarcer, their name and fame spreads and adorns developments, roads and golf courses. Every other subdivision, it seems, is called “Ocelot something-or-another.”

The Nature Conservancy is working with others to protect as much ocelot habitat as possible through conservation easements, linking up the small known breeding populations of the cat. But this work is expensive business — and was recently made a little harder by the U.S. government’s plans to build a border fence, which would permanently isolate the U.S. ocelot population from the source population in Central America.

At Laguna Atascosa, some 45,000 acres are occupied by perhaps just two dozen cats. Secretive, nocturnal and rare, they don’t make Jody’s job any easier. Our traps, baited with chicken, quail or pigeons (the bait is kept in a separate cage and thus unharmed) caught us everything from armadillos to bobcats to coyotes. But on the mornings I visited, the ocelots were staying away.

I left a camera with Jody, in the hopes that she might film what is no doubt rare footage of an American ocelot. And sure enough, a few days later, she calls with news of a young male ocelot being trapped. (See him above.)

With a radio collar on, he was subsequently released, and in the days and months to come, he will help us understand the needs and desires of the ocelot. But in some ways we already know what they need most. More land. More habitat.

In a state where private property is king, and where roads and agriculture bisects the slivers of remaining habitat, finding that additional habitat may be far harder than finding the rarest cat in America.

(Image: Ocelot at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, Texas. Used courtesy of USFWS.)

Photo: Hendrik De Bruyne

POZNAN, POLAND — Over the weekend here at the COP-14, Duncan Marsh, director of international climate policy for the Conservancy, led a panel on why reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) is a critical part of the climate change solution.

Among the speakers were Ambassador Hans Brattskar of Norway, Benjamin Karmorh from Liberia’s Environmental Protection Agency, Nur Masriputin of Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry and Natalia Calderon of Fundacion Amigos de la  Naturaleza (FAN), the Conservancy’s partner in the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project in Bolivia — the world’s first forest carbon project to have its carbon emission reductions verified by a third party.

All the speakers talked about how deforestation and degradation — which produces about 20 percent of the world’s annual carbon emissions — must be stopped if we are to win the battle against climate change.

But perhaps the most moving member of the panel was Gilberto Arias of the Kuna Yaba indigenous community of Panama.

Arias — who had a translator with him as he spoke in his indigenous language — described the need to protect the world’s “tree spirit,” not just to stop climate change, but also to ensure the forest resources local communities rely upon for survival remain healthy and productive for future generations.

It’s only been a few hours since I arrived in Poznan, but I’ve already been overwhelmed by the passion demonstrated by people from all walks of life and from all over the world to come together in search of a common solution to climate change. I can’t wait to see what happens next week!