Waterfall on the Carbon River, Washington State, USA.

Hey, EPA! You really do have a responsibility for the environment. All of it, even the parts this administration would rather ignore.

People like to fish, and some of the animals people like to fish for are sharks of all types. Sharks have a reputation as large, ferocious predators, and I’m sure it’s a thrill to land one.

Unfortunately, as with many types of ocean fishes, so many sharks have been killed that their numbers, in some places, are being depleted. In today’s Science magazine, two scientists report that over-fishing of sharks has led to a surprising outcome — depletion of scallop beds along some east coast fisheries.

The connection they found was a surprise because sharks and scallops don’t really interact. So how did shark fishing affect the scallop harvest? One of the scientists had been studying sharks and the other studying scallops. The connection they found lies in the intermediate step in the food chain, cownose rays. Sharks like to eat the rays, and since there are fewer sharks, populations of rays have increased dramatically. And the rays like to eat scallops, which live in shallow water and are relatively undefended and easy prey. So fewer sharks, more rays, and scallops get eaten in larger quantities.

From the Washington Post’s story on this:

Peterson, who works at the university center in Morehead City, N.C., said scallops used to be so abundant there that people were allowed to collect a bushel a day. “The kids were able to see that food doesn’t just come from a market,” he said.

Now, scallops are very reduced, he said. “The rays, as they come through, eat all that are in any dense patch and have eaten so many there does not appear to be enough to create spawning stock.”

The rays also like to dig in seagrass for clams, and can destroy vital habitat for shrimp and crabs.

Not all scientists are convinced that this research has proven the connection, and further research will no doubt be necessary. But similar ecosystem linkages have long been shown in terrestrial food webs, and this is the first glimpse into similar systemic links among ocean wildlife.

Robert E. Hueter, director of shark research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., said scientists have warned about the effects of shark depletion for years but there have been few studies to back them up.

This report, he said, “demonstrates plausible links between the decline of sharks, the subsequent rise of their prey, and the resulting decline of those prey species’ prey. You don’t have to be a marine biologist to grasp this connection.”…

Hueter, who was not part of the research team, said the “overall message is important and true: If we take out whole segments of ecosystems, especially top predators like sharks, the balance among species is toppled, and the effects cascade throughout the system. And some of those effects — such as a negative impact on other important fisheries, as in the Myers study — can be long-term and deleterious to human society.”

Pictured is a black ray, relative of the cownose ray.

Although I don’t have the same religious impulses that Andrew Sullivan does, much of my conservation activism springs from similar feelings of reverence for our natural world. At least, much of what he describes in this blog post on Green Faith is familiar to me.

Like many of us this week, he’s been watching Planet Earth, and is astonished and moved by the vision it gives us of this place we call home.

At its root, this is a conservative impulse. In America, in particular, love of the land has long been a part of patriotism. And where religious faith appears, it isn’t necessarily a paean to Gaia. “America, The Beautiful” is an environmentalist hymn. America’s greatest poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, are intoxicated with the natural beauty of this continent. Part of their intoxication is their sense of the divine saturating the natural. Read Thoreau or Emerson and the same American interaction with nature is palpable. Americans, after all, forged a relationship with wilderness more recently than any Europeans. And there is, therefore, a deeply patriotic form of green thought in America that has been overly neglected by environmentalists and that can and should be reclaimed by political leaders, especially on the right.

I agree with his statement there, even though it is a vision of Gaia that moves me. And it is odd but somehow heartening that where he has found confirmation of his deep faith by watching this series, I have found confirmation of my own.

Watching the first episode, Pole to Pole, I was struck by the way they framed their presentation in the movements of the sun. Sun worship, marking the year’s journey around the sun via solstices and equinoxes, is the most basic of pagan rituals and still frames most pagan worship to this day. There is an impulse the pagan that is atavistic, sensual, and no doubt grounded in some genetic past where the return of the sun in springtime literally meant life would continue after a time — winter — where the ability to stay alive was severely tested.

I would argue that Christian beliefs are an overlay on the old pagan traditions. But I certainly don’t think the two need to be at odds, when it comes to appreciation of the planet we share.

Don’t forget to catch Planet Earth, playing now on the Discovery Channel.

Ring-billed gulls take flight.

Climate change is disrupting the life cycles of wildlife in Britain

Young animals are dying due to inconsistent weather and lack of their usual food sources.

The Independent writes:

The visible impact on Britain’s wildlife has manifested itself in the form of earlier than normal breeding, egg-laying, nesting and flowering of plants and trees, observed in British wildlife for more than 15 years and now linked to global warming in a whole series of scientific studies. They have sparked huge new interest in the discipline of phenology — ­ the timing of natural events.

Administration officials attempt to control discussion of climate change

The New York Times writes:

Internal memorandums circulated in the Alaskan division of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service appear to require government biologists or other employees traveling in countries around the Arctic not to discuss climate change, polar bears or sea ice if they are not designated to do so.

Discussions of polar bears and sea ice are especially sensitive at the moment, since many are pushing for the bears to be designated as threatened due to changes in Arctic habitats as the globe warms up.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more.

Don’t miss the Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth

Filmed by crews from the BBC, using technology never before available, this HDTV series shows the Earth and its creatures in ways you’ve never seen before. The 11-part mini-series starts March 25th, at 8 pm Eastern.

Wired Magazine explains how it’s done:

Brace yourself: Every hunt you’ve ever seen on a nature show has been a scam….

Until now.

…Jaded couch potatoes may think they’ve seen everything HD has to offer, but Planet Earth will show its full potential. HD cams capture footage of creatures from thousands of feet away, without subjecting them to intrusive floodlights and loud vehicles. For situations too dark, too slow, or too fast for HD, the BBC crew turned to gadgets that reveal what the naked eye can’t see. For instance, they used a high-speed cam typically found in automotive crash-test labs to film a split-second shark attack and an infrared security cam favored by banks to track desert animals in the black of night.

Learn more at the Wired link.