This amazing shot by Flickr user “Soggydan” Dan Bennett of a leaping coho salmon in Issaquah Creek, Washington state was taken with a 60mm lens — which basically means the photographer could have reached out and touched this fish. Like we said — amazing! Thanks for sharing it through The Nature Conservancy’s Flickr Group, Soggydan!

Check out all The Nature Conservancy’s featured daily nature images, submitted to the Conservancy’s Flickr group by people like you — at my.nature.org. And why not give the gift of clean water this holiday season to keep salmon spawning?

1. Call it Tom Friedman’s Worst Nightmare: Asia’s already outpacing the United States in clean technology investment by hundreds of billions of dollars — which will mean the U.S. will be importing trillions of dollars in green tech down the road, says a new report. (Hat tip: CleanTechnica.)
2. Call it a Whale’s Worst Nightmare: Japan’s whaling fleet is off to the Southern Ocean for its annual hunt. Dot Earth quotes ocean explorer Sylvia Earle on why eating whale isn’t at all like eating a farm-raised cow, which is what Japanese whaling interests claim.
3. Call it Todd Stern’s Worst Nightmare: Pledges by individual countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions are multiplying like tribbles, reports The New York Times — and UN climate czar Yvo deBoer is now putting pressure on the Obama administration to release its own proposal.
4. Call it a Gearhead’s Worst Nightmare: Star driver Jeff Gordon has joined with the EPA to warn the public that auto painting causes air pollution and degrades human health, reports Ecopolitology.
5. Call it Ungreen Companies’ Worst Nightmare: GoodGuide releases an iPhone app that scans product barcodes and gives you ratings on the product’s healthy, environmental, and social impacts. (62,000 products in the database so far, says CNET’s Health Tech.)

Good news about cow poop. Good news (?) about Copenhagen. Good news for those of you who’ve always dreamed of a dress made of LED lights. Happiness is the smell of a new Cool Green Morning, to paraphrase Don Draper…

1. The rehabilitation of poop continues: The Netherlands has opened its second cow-dung power plant, reports CleanTechnica — to make biogas that will heat more than 1,000 homes.
2. In case you missed it yesterday, President Obama has endorsed a plan to push an ultimate climate change agreement sometime beyond December’s UN meeting in Copenhagen, reports The New York Times. Grist’s Dave Roberts says that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
3. Charlie the Tuna muzzled? Dot Earth says last week’s meeting among fishing countries to reach an agreement on restoring depleted numbers of tuna, shark, turtles and other marine life was missing one thing — a basis in science.
4. Count on Inhabitat to render us speechless — with a dress made of 24,000 LED lights (plus “4,000 hand-applied Swarovski crystals and 40-layers of pleated silk organza crinoline.” When’s it going to hit the shelves at Target?!)
5. Always like to end on good news — this time from the Brazilian Amazon, where deforestation dropped nearly 46 percent from August 2008 to July 2009, says AP. But the “why” is a chicken and egg problem — is it because of the Brazilian government’s promotion of sustainable livelihoods in the region (coupled with enforcement of laws against deforestation), or just a drop in ag commodity prices worldwide?

1. Are hybrids more likely to hit pedestrians and bicyclists than other car types, as a new study reports? Treehugger analyzes the data.
2. Andrew Revkin at DotEarth takes a look at the topic of how journalists and scientists can effectively communicate about environmental topics like marine pollution.
3. Did an albatross die so you could eat a tuna sandwich for lunch today? Probably, says Scientific American. A new report says tuna fishing kills an albatross every five minutes.
4. Sure, scientist Stephen Schneider made a mistake back in 1971 when he predicted that aerosol pollution would cause a global cooling effect, but today he’s considered a leading climatologist. Check out this Q&A with him from The New Republic.
5. Thinking about taking a vacation this winter? A new study finds that nature tourism doesn’t necessarily bring more money to the pockets of local people – although the longer the stay, the more benefits for the local economy. 

1. Seems fishy, but overall U.S. water consumption has declined in the past 25 years — despite a growing population and increasing water use. Huh? Tina Casey at CleanTechnica says it’s because of more efficient ag irrigation systems and better cooling schemes for power plants (which still amount to 50% of U.S. water use).
2. Barcelona climate talks update: Jeff Tollefson at Climate Feedback says the E.U. might accept a political agreement on climate at Copenhagen rather than a binding legal treaty. (Trust me: You need to know what that means.) Grist reports that European climate negotiators say success at Copenhagen is up to President Obama.
3. In case you missed it, a U.S. Senate committee passed a climate bill yesterday, with all Republican committee members boycotting the vote.  The Vine yawns, saying the real action on the bill will be separate negotiations between Senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham.
4. Where could coastal wetlands go when sea level rises? Um…nowhere, says a new report in Environmental Research Letters — more than 50% of the land along the U.S. Atlantic coast that could have been used for inland wetlands migration is developed or soon will be. (Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)
5. Speaking of on the move, half of 36 Atlantic Ocean fish stocks have moved north as ocean temps have warmed, says a new study by NOAA researchers. Some species have left U.S. waters altogether! Just wait until Glenn Beck gets wind of these treasonous climate-change dodgers!! (Hat tip: Yale Environment 360.)

1. How are things in Barcelona (aside from the shocking underperformance of its namesake soccer team this year)? For the climate talks now underway there, Climate Feedback’s Jeff Tollefson reports there’s some optimism that the world can reach political agreement on a climate deal in Copenhagen, with a binding legal agreement following in 2010.
2. We’re #1! (in funding for geothermal R&D, that is!) EcoGeek says the United States government has announced $300 million in such spending — putting it ahead of every other country and Google.org (which is its own planet, isn’t it?)
3. Another, not so nice kind of #1 — the  2009 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is out, and Ecoworldy says Ecuador tops the list of countries with the most such imperiled fauna (2,211).
4. Great white sharks aren’t such sociopathic loners, after all — the Washington Post says they like to hook up in a spot halfway between Hawaii and California that researchers are calling “the cafe.”
5. Noah’s Ark Deux? A team of scientists is proposing an effort to sequence the genomes of 10,000 vertebrate species in an effort to aid their conservation, says a report in the Journal of Heredity. (No talk of cloning…yet. Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)

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!

Phew, that was a furious Blog Action Day ‘09 yesterday — with more than 13,000 blogs posting 27,000 blog posts in 24 hours on climate change in 155 countries to almost 18 million readers. (The Nature Conservancy and Cool Green Science were thrilled to be partners in the effort.) But the sun has risen again — and this day brings new word of disappointment for extremely rare turtles, a decrease in American driving, and bad news for freshwater species. Consume it all below:

1. It’s back to the, er, drawing board for the last female Yangtze giant soft-shelled turtle in the world (see video) — she (known by the nickname “China Doll”) laid 188 eggs this year, but none of them hatched, reports EcoWorldly.
2. Why is Senator Lindsay Graham now supporting a climate change bill? The Vine says the South Carolina Republican has  been swayed by the climate-change-is-a-national-security argument and by South Carolina hunters who are seeing the effects of climate change on the landscape. Kate Galbraith at Green Inc. says his constituents are giving him heat for his new stance.
3. More ice, please! Bright Green Blog reports that the Arctic ice cap is melting so fast, it will be gone during summers in a generation, says a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge.
4. Has driving jumped the shark? Fifty percent of American drivers are driving less than usual, says a new Harris poll reported in Environmental Leader, with 18 percent walking to places more than they did six months ago. (Self-powered scooters don’t show up as an option in the poll, even though they’re seemingly everywhere these days.)
5. Finally, some cheery news for the weekend: Freshwater species are the most threatened on Earth, reports Mongabay, with their extinction rates four to six times that for terrestrial and marine species. Even worse, say scientists, the problem is being completely ignored at the policy level.

1. New data suggest that wetlands could store six times more carbon per acre than forests, leading some scientists and companies to consider wetlands restoration as the next shining hope for carbon offsets.
2. How much does it cost to save an endangered species? A lot. A new report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the United States spent $1.5 billion on efforts to protect endangered species in 2007. The most expensive species that year? Chinook salmon.
3. Marijuana growers in California get blamed for a lot of nefarious activities, and a new one has just been added to the list: worsening the state’s drought. Officials in Mendocino County say illicit pot growers have a huge impact on water resources.
4. Do you ever use your phonebook? Has the thought crossed your mind that phonebooks are a colossal waste of paper? A new campaign is trying to put a stop to the waste by making phone books optional.
5. Using an infrared camera, Terry Gosney spots gas leaks that can’t be seen with the naked eye – thereby helping companies save energy and money and reduce climate change impacts.

Boys fishing the Zambezi River behind a crocodile barrier

How do you convince people that a river they’ve known their whole lives is not the river it once was…or could be?

That turned out to be my challenge last week, when I traveled to Zambia in support of The Nature Conservancy’s new project to restore the Zambezi River.  After several days of meetings with our partners — including WWF and universities and government agencies from Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique — I finally got to spend some time on the river itself, in Lower Zambezi National Park.

This was my first experience in an African wilderness, and I was awestruck by the sheer abundance of hippos and crocs and the throngs of elephants, buffalo, antelope and baboons brought to the river’s edge by the blazing heat and parched hills that marked the end of Zambia’s long dry season (see below for a slideshow of the river, dam and wildlife).

While the wildlife had left me with a childlike sense of wonder, it was our dinner companion that night that brought home for me the importance and challenge of this project.

We sat down to dinner amidst a throbbing insect soundtrack, a slow-burning fire glowing in the foreground with the Zambezi a sinuous darker void in the darkness beyond. Joining us was Kevin, a Zambian who manages the lodge where we were staying.  Conversation turned to the health of the river and he told us the majority of his guests were anglers lured by the aptly named tiger fish, a fearsome predator with teeth right off the costume rack of a B-horror movie.

Kevin mentioned that fish numbers were down and had been going down for a while. This seemed a natural opening to talk about one of the specific objectives of our Zambezi project: working with dam managers to improve how they release water from the massive upstream Kariba Dam (called “environmental flow releases”), in part to promote the productivity of fish in this part of the river.

My Conservancy colleague suggested this: “You know,” he said, “some people think the fish decline is because the river no longer has high water during the rainy season because how the dam is operated.”

Kevin, nothing if not blunt, shook his head and said: “Nah, that’s crap. The real reason is that people in the villages take too many fish — they use nets with a small mesh that catch everything in the river, even the smallest fish. That’s why the fish numbers are going down.  But what can you do? You can’t simply tell people not to fish, they have nothing else. What will they do then, come and rob you at night?” He went on to relate his skepticism that the operation of Kariba Dam should, or even could, be altered; it just seemed risky to him.

In this one riposte, Kevin succinctly framed both the need and challenges for the Zambezi project.

First, although the river appears healthy — its water is clean and its banks are wild and rich in wildlife — appearances can be deceiving.  The river is not healthy, or at least not the same healthy it once was. Kariba Dam — big enough to store every drop of water flowing in the river for two years — has tamed it, made it a different river. Before the dam, the river ran high during the rainy season and very low in the dry. Today, the big reservoir behind Kariba captures the floods and evens out the flows throughout the year

Though we don’t have fisheries data from before Kariba, if the Zambezi is like most other big rivers, much of its fish abundance would have been produced in the floodplain grasslands and wetlands when they were inundated by high flows. Now the Zambezi mostly stays in its banks.

Second, the challenges for conservation and of people are intertwined. Overfishing is hurting the Zambezi and, ultimately, the people that depend upon it. The people who live here need some combination of better fisheries management, alternative sources of income and protein, and more fish in the river (one of the goals of the environmental-flows project). These livelihood challenges are inextricably linked with nature conservation and restoration.

Finally, even potential beneficiaries of changes can be skeptical of deviations from the status quo, because the risk of disruption looms larger than the as-yet-unproven possibility of benefits. Thus, the benefits must be clearly analyzed, demonstrated, and communicated.

Kevin’s conviction that overfishing, not flow regime, is the cause of fish decline is partly right — it is a problem for the river as it is today, this river. But this river is different from the river it once was. It’s not surprising that Kevin doesn’t suspect the flow regime; the current river is the only river he’s ever known.  Kariba was built in 1955, and so the only people who can really remember how the river previously worked — let’s say those at least 12 years old then — are nearly 70 years old today.  For everyone else, this river is the river.  And this Zambezi is being overfished.  But perhaps some aspects of the old Zambezi can be restored.

It’s clear we need good communications tools.  If Kevin — who has much to gain from a new flow regime — was skeptical of changes to the river’s management, what would other people say?

Fortunately, we got some practice at that communication later in the conversation. Kevin mentioned that the anglers know they need to fish near the river’s edges, where it flows next to or through downed logs, grasses and other vegetation. “Not out in the middle of the river,” he said. “The water’s too fast and the fish don’t like it. The fish are along the edges.”

I explained that what we talked about before — environmental flows to restore the connection between river and floodplain — was really the same thing as creating lots and lots of such “edge” habitat. Rather than just being restricted to the sides of the river, the shallow, calm, and vegetated “edge” habitat would cover an extensive plain — the difference between grazing cows in a strip of grass along a highway versus a vast meadow.

Kevin nodded his head thoughtfully.  I don’t know if he was convinced, but we’d found some common understanding and vocabulary of how the river worked.  We have much work ahead of us.

(Photo credit: Jeff Opperman/TNC.)