Mercury pollution — nothing to worry about if I don’t live in the rural Northeast and don’t eat tons of fish, right?

Guess again, says a new report done by the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy. The report, “Hidden Risk,” details the wide spread and deep impacts of mercury pollution in terrestrial nature — particularly on animals such as songbirds and bats. Researchers are discovering how mercury is causing big declines in reproductive success among these species as well as physiological oddities — like developmental asymmetries and an inability of some birds to hit high notes.

And the same rain that brings mercury pollution down from the sky falls on us, too. So are these species a kind of canary in the coal mine for mercury’s effects on other vertebrates, including people? And will strict new federal standards limiting U.S. power plant pollution be enough in a world where mercury pollution is on the rise from China and other nations? I talked with two co-authors of “Hidden Risk” — BRI’s executive director, Dave Evers, and Tim Tear, the Conservancy’s director of science for New York — to find out more. (Download the report here.)

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Q: Some are going to be surprised that mercury pollution is still a problem — didn’t various agencies and industries take steps to reduce mercury emissions over the last decade in the United States? So why are high levels of mercury still a problem in many wildlife species?

DAVE EVERS:  Yes, a lot of mercury has been taken out of air pollution over the past few decades — but our understanding is growing of how just a little mercury can adversely affect wildlife and how many species have been affected. More species are being impacted than we had thought, and the toxicity of methylmercury to those species is at lower threshold levels than we ever realized.

TIM TEAR: Many of these species and many of the places affected are in people’s backyards. People used to think that mercury pollution was a problem isolated to remote areas of the Northeast. No more.

Q: So, would someone see a bird or a bat acting strangely because of mercury pollution? Or is this something that data is telling you?

EVERS: The effects are difficult to see in the field for the average observer. Mercury doesn’t create physical mutations, and an individual animal with mercury will probably die from predation first. But mercury is a neurotoxin that does impact wildlife behavior, and that behavior impacts their survival and reproduction. We focus on data to really quantify the impacts of mercury on the reproductive success of species.

For example, we quantified mercury impacts on the common loon. Common loons need to spend about 98 percent of their time on a nest incubating their eggs to have those eggs successfully hatch. We’ve quantified with over 5,000 hours of observation that loons with high mercury levels spend only 85 percent of their time incubating those eggs. So they spend less time in an incubation posture, and because of that, eggs do not hatch, and because of that, the species reproductive success goes down.

Q: Where is the mercury pollution still coming from? And what U.S. regions are of most concern? 

TEAR: Most of the research has really focused on the Northeast United States — an area that’s been really hard hit by acid rain, which makes mercury a bigger problem. But mercury pollution is happening all over the world. It comes globally from Asia as well as nationally from power plants in the Midwest to locally from waste incinerators. We’re going to need to address all sources of mercury to be successful in stopping these impacts.

Q: And in different habitats, right? Most people in the United States who know about mercury in nature know about it through warnings about the fish they eat.

EVERS:  Yes, there’s been a paradigm shift in new findings. In the past, most of the scientists assessing risk from mercury in an ecosystem would be looking at fish-eating birds and fish-eating mammals — because we knew methylmercury (the organic form of mercury) moved through the food web in aquatic organisms. But there’s been a missing link in looking at mercury in terrestrial ecosystem food webs and looking at how species that eat insects and spiders — what we call “invertivores” — can be affected.

In the invertivore food web, the key pieces are no longer fish, but spiders. A bird that eats a spider that ate a spider that ate a fly — that’s four different changes in the trophic food web. We’ve established that a little songbird like a northern waterthrush or a sparrow that eats spiders can actually be higher up in the food web than a bald eagle, which eats fish — and so that songbird has more mercury in its body than does the eagle.

TEAR: We’ve also discovered that mercury is in many more food webs than we realized.  It is not just in lakes and ponds. It’s in our forests, our estuaries; it’s in the lowlands and on the mountaintops. It’s in the spiders in the Adirondacks, and it’s in backyard birds in New York City.

Q:  You mentioned effects on reproductive success. What are some of the other impacts of mercury on terrestrial wildlife?

EVERS:  For example, bird song is affected. Two recent studies show that birds with high mercury can’t hit the high notes, and their songs are simplified. I also worry about long-distance migration, because high mercury has been shown to affect the symmetry of development. If a bird’s left wing is 5 percent different in shape than its right wing, that bird is going to fly in a crooked way to compensate for it, which requires more energy to make a flight of thousands of miles to its wintering area. Ultimately, that’s going to affect its survival.

Q: That’s sad. But ultimately, why should humans care?

TEAR: First, if you care about the environment and you care about birds and bats and bugs, then you should care that many of these animals are being heavily impacted.

But the second answer is that the neurotoxic rain that contains mercury falls on humans as well as wildlife. We already know that mercury can be a big problem in human health. This research establishes that the effects of mercury are happening all over the planet, all over many habitat types, to vertebrate species other than ourselves. So people should be concerned about these effects, because there’s a link between human health and ecosystem health.

Q:  Back to the science of this. How the heck do you measure mercury in a bird population, anyway?

EVERS:  It’s actually very simple and straightforward.  There are nice and easy ways to capture and/or take samples from an individual bird that are quick and are non-harmful to the bird and do very little disruption to its routine, other than just having it in a net or hand for a half hour or so. We take a blood sample — just a drop does the trick. We also can take a feather sample, which gives us more of a long-term picture of how much mercury has come into that individual over time.

Q: But how do you disentangle the effects of mercury on birds and bats from other factors? How do you know that it’s mercury that is causing the decline of the wood thrush or the little brown bat?

EVERS: It’s a question we’re still studying. There are multiple stressors at play for many species and habitats, and as conservation biologists, we are trying to understand those. We want to provide scientific information to landscape managers and policymakers, so we will have these birds around for a few more hundred years at least.

Take the olive-sided flycatcher. In the last 4 years, it’s declined by 80 percent, so 80 percent of this population is gone in comparison to 4 years ago. It’s a bird that lives in bogs.  Bogs are known to have high methylation rates of mercury, but they are not well studied as a habitat whatsoever. Neither is the olive-sided flycatcher. So here you have a species in a habitat that I think is at great risk to mercury as a potential driver and a primary stressor for why this decline is happening.  Mercury is an omnipresent stressor, but the question is always: Where is it a primary stressor?

TEAR:  I’d also add that, in some places where birds are declining, there has been no obvious habitat change, and many people think of the challenges as being primarily habitat loss, but we certainly know that, for example, some species like the wood thrush within the Adirondack Park, there are fewer wood thrush today than there were 20 years ago. They’re still there, but there aren’t as many.  The question is why, and this is part of the disentangling of those different stressors that Dave is referring to.

Q:  Is there any relationship between mercury emissions and greenhouse gas emissions? Is there a climate change connection?

TEAR: Well, many of the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxides and other air pollutants — such as nitrogen and sulfur, which cause acid rain, and mercury, which brings us this neurotoxic rain — come from power plants, and all of these air pollutants have negative impacts on our environment. Our research shows that we should be factoring in these ecological impacts when we consider the cost and benefits of regulatory programs such as the recent Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Rule. But so far, estimating the ecological impact of these air pollutants that are coming from similar sources as CO₂ has not been done.

EVERS:  Climate change might also be causing great mercury methylation rates into ecosystems or even remobilizing mercury that was stored in the system. For instance, forest fires have become more predominant because of climate change in some parts of the country — and those forests hold a lot of legacy mercury in their systems, which can be released quite rapidly with a fire. Greater storm intensity and frequency could be increasing deposition of mercury from the global atmospheric pool to landscapes below. Increased wetting and drying cycles could be another factor in greater mercury methylation.

Q: It sounds dire. So what can anyone do?

TEAR:  First, while we need more research on this, there are definitely landscape and wildlife management actions that might help reduce the amount of mercury embedded in the environment.

Dave mentioned that hotter forest fires that occur for whatever reason can release a great deal more mercury than cooler burns — so using fire management in our forest systems could have a significant impact on the amount of mercury that’s released. How we manage artificial reservoirs is extremely important — if we manage those in a way to make the wetting and drying cycles greater, we might also be increasing the amount of mercury methylation.

EVERS: Another example: It makes a lot of sense not to log in a riparian area anyway—and it also makes sense from a mercury standpoint. There is a lot of legacy mercury and even new mercury coming into these forest ecosystems, and the less we disturb that mercury the better. There are studies right now quantifying the mercury effects of logging practices in Oregon.

Q: What else?

TEAR: We need greater investment in this country’s mercury monitoring network. A stronger network would help us gather data systematically and also help us know whether current efforts to reduce mercury pollution — like the EPA’s recent Mercury and Air Toxics Rule standard — are enough to improve these areas already damaged by mercury.

We also need continued research on this issue. We’re just beginning to understand the impacts of mercury on both ecological and human health. And we need to support efforts at all levels to reduce mercury — global, regional and local. Mercury is coming from multiple levels, and no single level will be enough.

EVERS: On the importance of a national network — I’ve been fortunate to work with both U.S. Senate and House representatives to introduce bills that would establish the first national mercury monitoring network, which we need from a federal accountability standpoint. But industry also has been supportive of this idea. Industry likes certainty, and a national monitoring network could really help provide a standard playing field for the industry in terms of installing emission protections on their smokestacks.

And a national monitoring network could also help the United States politically wrangle with other countries where mercury emissions are increasing. About 50 percent of mercury emissions have been taken out of U.S. sources between 1990 and 2005 — but the global pool of mercury continues to increase because countries like China are putting in a new coal-fired power plant once a week. A standardized mercury monitoring program provides us the way to really track our progress both spatially and temporally.

(Image: Wood thrush. Image credit: Dave Whitlock/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Let’s say the rise in sea level that climate change will bring us — from melting ice caps, expanding seas — won’t be “all that bad” by, oh, the year 2080.

Maybe it’ll be…just half a meter (a little under 20 inches). We can deal with half a meter, right?

Well, yeah — if we’re ready to “deal with” almost 50 percent more affected people and 73 percent more property losses from a typical Category 3 hurricane — all because of the higher storm surge that’ll come from that additional 20 inches of sea level. (“Storm surge,” in case you don’t know, describes the ocean water that a storm’s winds bring ashore, in addition to what’s usually there with normal tides.)

Those kinds of losses are the scenario the southern shores of Long Island, New York, are looking at, according to a new peer-reviewed study in the journal Natural Hazards. And it’s a scenario that could apply to lots of other U.S. coastlines, says Christine Shepard, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow with the Conservancy’s Global Marine Team.

Unfortunately, she adds, sea-level rise hasn’t been on the radar of most U.S. coastal planners until recently. So is there any good news? Yes, says Shepard: The study offers a set of approaches and accessible tools with which those coastal planners can start mapping their own communities’ vulnerabilities. (Are you listening, Islip?) I caught up with Shepard to find out more.

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Q: Why did you choose to study sea-level rise and storm surges along the southern shores of Long Island? How typical are these places of other U.S. coastlines?

SHEPARD: First, it’s a very densely populated area, so the modeling gives us a good look at how damaging storm surge can be to such an area. We also have access to some very good elevation data on the area. And there’s also a history of storm surges here — they had an intense Category 3 storm in 1938. All that made it a good area to test the development of our methods.

But while Suffolk County is one of the most populous counties in the United States, the results that we found are comparable to other studies that evaluated the effect of sea-level rise on storm surge in less densely populated areas. So we can definitely extrapolate these results to other U.S. metropolitan areas or coastal cities.

Q: We’re talking about 20 inches of sea-level rise. (The height of an English Springer Spaniel, if that helps anyone visualize it.) Just how damaging could 20 inches be?

SHEPARD:  Just a small amount of sea-level rise increases the damage — especially in areas with intense development and a high concentration of people and properties stretching from the coast inland, like the area of Long Island that we studied. Also, the damage per property increases with the depth of the water. Even just a slightly higher storm surge gives you more damage per property — you can really see these impacts at the town level.

Q: Besides having high concentrations of people and development, what else makes a coastal community especially vulnerable to storm surge? In your study, the town of Islip (which has a population of almost 325,000) already has a lot of risk today, and 0.5 meters of sea level rise is going to accentuate that quite a bit.

SHEPARD:  Two variables: socioeconomic considerations, and critical infrastructure and facilities.

Some of the common socioeconomic characteristics of communities that are more likely to have disproportionate impacts from coastal hazards include having 1) areas with high population density and housing unit density, 2) areas with a lot of poverty, or 3) areas with a lot of households that lack access to vehicles they could use to evacuate with.

Part of the point of this study was to create maps that communities can use to develop targeted approaches to hazard mitigation. We created a  social vulnerability index to help map these communities so that hazard mitigation policies or grants could be targeted towards communities that are socially vulnerable, to reduce their risk. And for critical facilities and infrastructure, just to have easily accessible maps of where these are with respect to present and future storm surge risk is very valuable for community planning.

It’s also valuable for conservation. I’ve been working on maps that prioritize marsh restoration projects adjacent to population centers and vulnerable communities. These marshes may help mitigate storm impacts, so that kind of planning could be a win-win for coastal communities and conservation.

Christine Shepard

Q: The 0.5 meters sea-level rise estimate by 2080 you used — that’s a pretty conservative estimate, isn’t it, given some of the modeling that’s now out there?

SHEPARD:  I would say it is pretty conservative, so you could conclude that the results from this paper are conservative. And our estimates of damage are also conservative because our analysis only incorporates losses due to flooding, not wind.

Q: Why haven’t coastal agencies and towns in the United States taken sea-level rise into account when they’ve thought about managing storm surges?

SHEPARD: First, FEMA didn’t really acknowledge sea-level rise and the impacts on storm surge until the last couple of years. There’s been a cultural dichotomy between the people who analyze the impacts of sea-level rise versus those who plan for hurricanes and storm surges.

But most municipalities aren’t currently planning for increases in inland extent of storm surge. Their proposed maps for a variety of strengths of hurricanes assume present conditions and don’t incorporate sea-level rise. The same goes for flood maps.

Q: The study gives communities a methodology for getting prepared. What do they need to do to tap into it?

SHEPARD: It’s never been easier for them to do their own planning for storm surge and sea-level rise. The tools that we incorporate into our approach are readily available, and the organizations or government agencies that provide them provide training for them. And we tried to pull from those processes and tools that someone with an intermediate level of GIS expertise — someone who would be a typical GIS analyst for a county or a city — could use with training offered by some of the agencies that provide the tools such as FEMA and NOAA.

Q: 2080 is an awfully long time off. Is there anything in this report that should set off alarm bells for ordinary people, either for right now or 10 to 20 years down the road? Should they be buying property in places vulnerable to these kinds of storm surges?

SHEPARD: If they’re thinking about purchasing coastal property, they definitely need to consider that current flood zone maps do not reflect any sea-level rise. Those maps may soon be obsolete.

Editor’s note: Christine Shepard is a member of the Conservancy’s Coastal Resilience project, which seeks to support decision-making that reduces risk and vulnerability from coastal natural hazards by incorporating both socioeconomic and ecological considerations. The project was pioneered on the southern shores of Long Island and now encompasses Southern California, Connecticut, the Gulf of Mexico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

(Image: Storm surge crashing ashore in Texas from Hurricane Ike, 2008. Image credit: poepoe374/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

The following is a Q&A with actress Kristen Bell. Kristen recently wrapped filming the true story feature film Big Miracle opposite Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski which comes out in February 2012. Prior to that, Kristen will be seen opposite Don Cheadle in the Showtime series House of Lies premiering in early January 2012. She was recently seen in Burlesque. Bell starred in the highly successful comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Her other film credits include: Couples Retreat, When in Rome, You Again, Pulse, Serious Moonlight and David Mamet’s Spartan. Kristen’s television credits include: Veronica Mars, Deadwood, Heroes and Party Down. Her Broadway credits include: Tom Sawyer and The Crucible opposite Liam Neeson and Laura Linney, and her Off-Broadway credits include: Reefer Madness and A Little Night Music both at The Kennedy Center in New York and Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles.

Kristen is also involved with Invisible Children, The Humane Society, The Art of Elysium, and dedicated her 30th Birthday by raising awareness and funds for Charity: Water. Kristen is a Brand Ambassador for Neutrogena Naturals which has partnered with The Nature Conservancy around domestic water conservation

Q: Why have you taken up the cause of clean water?

KRISTEN BELL: I think it’s often thought of as a problem within the rest of the world that there isn’t clean water, but people don’t realize how close to home it hits until you really investigate our resources and how they are diminishing. I really want to make people aware of that which is why I am thrilled that Neutrogena Naturals has partnered with The Nature Conservancy to bring awareness to domestic water issues in order to educate people on how they can make a difference.

Clean water and water in general is not an endless resource and I want future generations to not suffer from these developments – which is why I think that raising the awareness about how we can help conserve for future generations has become so important to me.

Q: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned (or encountered) since getting involved with clean water issues?

KRISTEN BELL: Last year for my 30th birthday, instead of receiving gifts I encouraged donations be made to an organization called Charity: Water, which resulted in being able to raise a lot of money to build wells in Ethiopia. I had visited Ethiopia and seen the water crisis there first hand, and it really inspired me to take a look at where my own water came from. Clean water is so much bigger of an issue domestically than anyone realizes. America is amazing and wonderful but everything is celebrated in such excess that people don’t often realize that conservation actually benefits all, not just in the immediate but ongoing.

This is an empowering issue as, unlike a lot of problems in the world that are truly daunting and don’t seem to have a solution, this particular issue is solvable and easily overcome with the right steps. Making changes to your lifestyle to achieve a greater goal of conservation doesn’t have to be a huge sacrifice. There are teeny tiny things in your daily life that you can alter in order to make a huge impact.

Q: Is there a place in nature that’s special to you?

KRISTEN BELL: My film Big Miracle is set in the Arctic Circle so we spent a lot of time in Alaska filming where I experienced some of the most beautiful scenery I had ever seen in my life. I realized when we were up there how much good can come out of taking pause. Los Angeles is such a fast pace lifestyle and I run at such a speed, but I think that when I was up there, on the top of the Chugach Mountains and Mount Alyeska, I quickly realized that there is such a good balance that comes from taking a moment to be one with nature.

That experience of taking a step back for reflection made me want to preserve those environments and moments so that other generations can be given the opportunity to find the same value in our parks and open spaces. All of the beauty that those moments provide on both a personal and community level in order to cherish and find value in the simple things around us. These types of experiences have really opened my eyes and have driven me to get involved.

Q: What would you encourage people to do about this issue?

KRISTEN BELL: It’s actually really simple as there are solutions around every corner. The tiny choices we make on a daily basis really do add up! You can save so many gallons just by taking one to five minutes off of your shower or by shutting the faucet off while you are shaving or while brushing your teeth. This has a huge impact on a yearly basis when you consider thousands of households doing the same thing when it comes to basic every day activities. All we have as human beings is our collective intelligence so once you are aware, you can capitalize on the power of banding together to make a difference, and begin to see a big dynamic shift.

This week, the Conservancy’s lead scientist M. Sanjayan is speaking at the Aspen Environment Forum in partnership with National Geographic. The focus: the global population is at 7 billion—how do we reconcile Earth’s finite resources with its ability to sustain our expanding human needs?

Before the conference, Sanjayan sat down with Chris Johns, editor-in-chief at National Geographic Magazine, to discuss some exciting initiatives the Conservancy is working on.

Listen in on their conversation.

Jeff DeQuattro is coastal projects manager for The Nature Conservancy in Alabama.

1. It’s been a year since the Gulf oil spill. How are you feeling about the health of the Gulf’s ecology?

JEFF DeQUATTRO: Bob, I can’t come up with an answer for this one because I’m frustrated with the politics of the “health of the gulf’s ecology” that we are facing here. There is too much noise in those politics for me to know the health of the Gulf. There is disagreement among so many different groups of people about how to fix the problems that ail us. It’s really tough for me to talk about it without cringing at the thought. Some scientists say one thing, some say another. Most can’t say anything until the BP lawsuit. But The Nature Conservancy is moving ahead with our own restoration work in the Gulf, and we have the science and experience to back up that work.

2. When will science have a good handle on how damaging the spill was (or wasn’t) to the Gulf?

JEFF DeQUATTRO: That’s just the thing. It will be years before we have a stronger handle on what’s happening. But our estuaries and coastal areas along the Gulf have been degrading for many decades even before 200+ million gallons were released into our systems. That is why we are starting the restoration of our natural heritage on a pace that can give the rate of loss a run for its money.

3. You were helping clean up some of of Alabama’s coast after the spill. What’s the weirdest thing you saw washed up?

In Alabama, I saw mostly oil in the form of numerous tar balls — some that were the size of a BB, and some that were quarter-sized. It was mostly evident on the first 10 meters of land, and then in the wrack line (the line of seaweed and debris that’s deposited at high tide). Besides various sizes and shapes of plastic bottles splattered with oil and pieces of Styrofoam boom floats, I did find a 55-gallon drum that was covered in oil. The label indicated it belonged to a BP crew boat. I’ve seen these barrels before and it was empty because it was probably going to be used for recovered oil or oil-contaminated absorbents. Mind you, tar balls are still washing up on Alabama beaches to this very day.

4. You work a lot on oyster reef restoration — which sounds like a dirty job. What’s the worst part of it?

JEFF DeQUATTRO: There is nothing about what I do that I don’t enjoy. I could totally do without the yellow flies though. No big deal. Seriously though, I’ve seen some challenges in my line of work, but they have only made us better at what we do.

5. Oysters — how do you like ‘em served?

JEFF DeQUATTRO: Raw, grilled, fried, stuffed, fresh, sustainable, and from the Gulf of Mexico.

(Image: Jeff DeQuattro at an Alabama oyster reef restoration project. Image credit: Beth Maynor Young.)

1. Wildlife crossings have come a long way from the narrow tunnel under the highway…check out these design finalists. (Treehugger)
2. Is Jonathan Franzen’s new book Freedom, which features a fictional Nature Conservancy employee, the Silent Spring of today? (Grist)
3. China beats the United States in these 7 green technologies. (Green Biz)
4. Alaskan wildlfires are burning more intensely due to climate change, says a new study. (Green)
5. Better check your cupboards for ‘undiscovered’ species of flowering plants…scientists think there could be as many as 35,000 out there. (BBC)

1. A fanged frog? How about a frog with an inflatable nose? See this cool slideshow of 10 strange new frog species. (Treehugger)
2. This week in Congress: will the EPA be thwarted in its bid to regulate greenhouse gas emissions? (The Vine)
3. A Climate Corps comes up with $350 million in energy efficiency savings. (Green Biz)
4. Have Gulf habitats escaped worst-case scenario predictions from the spill? (The New York Times)
5. Get the skinny on the World Bank’s first clean-energy czar. (Green)

1. Watch our lead scientist Sanjayan talk about northern white rhinos on this morning’s The Today Show.  (MSNBC.com)
2. Major League Baseball kicks off a major conservation and greenhouse-gas reduction program.  (CleanTechnica)
3. What happens if California’s climate law gets put on hold?  (Grist)
4. The GOP might be interested in getting on board with energy reform.  That would be nice.  (Treehugger)
5. A new movement encourages pharmaceutical companies to make drugs that are just as safe for the environment as they are for people.  (YaleE360)

1. The site of a former brothel in Nevada could become a free-roaming river and sanctuary for wildlife, with restoration help from The Nature Conservancy (NYTimes).
2. Besides the big climate summit, Copenhagen is a city known for its biking culture. So it makes perfect sense that the city is lighting its Christmas tree with pedal power (Environmental Capital). 
3. Treehugger talks to Nature Conservancy scientist Lindsay Chadderton, who discovered that the Asian carp has spread beyond an electric barrier meant to keep it from invading the Great Lakes (Treehugger).
4. Looking for some eco-friendly ways to decorate your Christmas tree? See a slideshow of glorious green ideas (The Daily Green).
5. Californians are riled up about smart utility meters, saying the new meters are logging more kilowatt hours than customers actually use (NYTimes).

We take the morning’s green news by the horns here at Cool Green Science — including a great story about Central Asia’s saiga antelope (above), being brought back from the brink of extinction by good old-fashioned conservation:

1. European leaders are openly questioning whether the United States has the political will to address climate change, reports The New York Times. Todd Stern, the U.S. chief negotiator on climate, says the Euros just don’t understand our system.
2. Climate change a bigger business than military spending? So says a new report from the investment bank HSBC — which also says climate might be a great way to boost job growth…or just be terribly inefficient, says Environmental Capital. (Hat tip: Yale Environment 360.)
3. Maya Lin (who of course designed the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, DC) has a new memorial called “What is Missing?” honoring lost species…and those at risk of extinction. (Hat tip: Triple Pundit.)
4. Will increasing U.S. biofuel production mean a bigger “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico? Yes, says a new study in Environmental Science and Technology. (Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)
5. Finally, a success story! The Saiga antelope of the Central Asia steppes has recovered from the brink of extinction with a concerted conservation effort. Read Mongabay for an interview with the founder of the Saiga Conservation Alliance.

(Image: Saiga antelope. Credit: jamasca66/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)