A 3-month-old killer whale at SeaWorld has died after suffering from an infection over the weekend, the marine park announced.
She was the last whale to be born since SeaWorld discontinued its breeding program.
Kyara, who was born in April, died at San Antonio’s SeaWorld park on Monday after showing signs of pneumonia, SeaWorld said in a statement.
“Despite (the staff’s) best efforts, her health continued to decline and she passed away earlier today,”the statement read.
“The veterinary team will conduct a full post mortem examination to determine the cause of death.
It may take several weeks before results are finalized.” The park said that pneumonia is one of the most common causes of morbidity or illness in whales and dolphins, “both in the wild and in aquariums.” Over the last 30 years, nearly 150 sea lions, beluga whales, orcas and other dolphins have died from infections at SeaWorld’s three parks in Orlando, San Antonio and San Diego, San Antonio’s Express-News reported.
Back in 2015, three killer whales died from infections at the San Antonio park.
The decision followed public backlash after the 2013 release of “Blackfish.” SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby, in announcing the program’s end, said the park wanted to appease those who are more “conservation-minded.” Kyara’s mother, a 25-year-old orca named Takara, was already pregnant at the time of that announcement.
After that, its whales were either purchased from other parks or were bred through artificial insemination.
Reactions on Twitter, in contrast, included criticism and anger against the park, as well as talk of boycotts and protests.
Conservation & Sustainability
Utility companies knew about climate change for decades, too.. A report out today from the Energy and Policy Institute, a clean energy advocacy organization, provides evidence that scientists warned utility companies about the potential dangers of climate change as early as 1968.
That’s about two decades before global warming generally broke into the public consciousness.
Researchers at the institute have unearthed speeches from scientists to utility companies and industry groups, as well as government reports that those groups contributed to, both of which predicted that fossil fuels could spur climate change — although the scientific consensus then wasn’t as solid as it is now.
The Electric Research Council, a research group with input from utility companies like Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison, set aside $1.5 million to study the long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants in 1971, the documents show.
Knowledge, or at least suspicion, of the impending crisis from utilities adds to the list of fossil fuel industry leaders who were aware of the risks of global warming well before they emerged on the world stage.
Activists say that by keeping mum on the topic, those leaders “robbed humanity of a generation’s worth of time to reverse climate change.”
Trump’s EPA promised to prioritize communities like East Chicago.
How’s that working out?.
In short, not so well.
When EPA administrator Scott Pruitt took office, he pledged that the agency would redouble its efforts on guaranteeing clean air and clean water in its so-called “back to basics” environmental agenda.
In April, he visited East Chicago, a community of color in Indiana where residents have coped with lead and arsenic contamination for decades, to highlight that agenda.
Nobody is willing to pull the trigger to enforce the law,” the former head of the U.S. EPA’s Office of Regulatory told the Chicago Tribune.
More than 100,000 people live within the five miles surrounding the East Chicago facility.
The company that owns the facility told the Tribune that it’s “exploring a number of projects” to deal with the continued pollution.
With proposed budget cuts of 31 percent at the EPA, it may be up to companies to monitor pollution and clean up after themselves.
That’ll work.
Yolanda and Alan Young never intended to make Ivanhoe their home.
They purchased a two-story, shirtwaist-style house in the Kansas City, Missouri, neighborhood at public auction in 1986, planning to renovate and rent or resell it.
Vacant homes dominated the neighborhood, alongside illegal dumps, drug houses, and gun violence.
Alan Young recalls once having to clean up a haul of 10,000 old tires.
“We said, we need you to help us help ourselves,” Alan recalls.
That same year, the Youngs helped restart the local community group, the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council, with Alan as president and Yolanda as secretary.
Since their first purchase, they’ve also acquired a few other properties in the northwestern part of Ivanhoe and begun an urban farm.
After all, Alan Young notes, it allows residents to get anywhere in Kansas City within 15 minutes.
Ivanhoe has come a long way since the Youngs bought their house in 1986.
Watley, who is in her 60s, has performed this daily ritual for nearly 15 years, and she tells me some people call her, affectionately, “the bag lady.” They stop her as she’s on her walk, to thank her or give her a thumbs up — gestures, Watley says, that make her feel like she’s doing her part.
Ships head for the melting Arctic.
But there’s no plan if things go wrong..
Climate change is rapidly altering the region, and less sea ice means more ships are lining up to traverse its remote waters.
“It’s what keeps us up at night,” Amy Merten, a NOAA employee, told the New York Times.
“There’s just no infrastructure for response.” Cargo ships and cruise liners are already setting sail, and the Trump administration is clearing the way for oil rigs to join them.
Canada, the U.S., and Russia have an agreement to help each other during emergencies, but the U.S. only has two functional heavy icebreaker ships, and rescue efforts would likely have to rely on other commercial ships being nearby.
To top it all off, the head of the Coast Guard, Paul Zukunft, says the U.S. is unprepared to deal with an Arctic oil spill.
Zukunft pointed out the difficulty in cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon spill, which had much more favorable conditions.
“In the Arctic, it’s almost like trying to get it to the moon in some cases, especially if it’s in a season where it’s inaccessible; that really doubles, triples the difficulty of responding,” the head of the Navy’s climate change task force told Scientific American.
Editor’s note: This week, the Society for Conservation Biology — the pre-eminent professional society for conservation science — is hosting its biennial International Congress for Conservation Biology in Cartagena, Colombia.
As the newly elected president of the society and the first social scientist to lead the network in its 32-year history, Mike Mascia of Conservation International (CI) represents an evolution for a discipline that has long focused on the natural sciences.
In this Q&A, Mascia — senior director for social science at CI — talks to Human Nature about why conservation science still matters and what role scientists can play in a time of political upheaval.
Q: How has your research informed conservation actions?
For example, the government assumed that people living on remote islands were primarily fishermen, but our data showed they were farmers first and fishers second.
We now see social science as a fundamental, integral component of conservation science, and we now think differently about protected areas and about the social consequences of conservation.
Thus, conservation is an inherently social process with social implications.
Accordingly, social science — the study of people and their interactions with the environment — is critical.
A: Since its origins, the society has recognized the insights that diverse disciplines can provide to advance its mission, which is to advance the science and practice of conserving Earth’s biological diversity.
My job is to help the society mobilize those insights and shape the future of our planet for the better — in any way that I can.
Warren Buffett is driving truckloads of money into electric companies.. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway recently announced that it plans to buy Oncor, one of the country’s largest electricity-transmission companies, for $9 billion.
And Berkshire was already making 10 percent of its earnings from energy investments.
It looks like the Oracle of Omaha is betting that there are big improvements for utilities to make.
“There are tremendous efficiencies to be squeezed out of the system,” Jon Wellinghoff told the Los Angeles Times.
Wellinghoff is the former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and chief executive of consulting firm Policy DE.
To wring these efficiencies (read “profits”) out of the system, Berkshire is pushing for a more interconnected electrical system across the American West.
It’s involved in a project to build 1,000 miles of transmission lines across Idaho and Wyoming.
That would allow distribution of cheap renewable energy — which is sometimes wasted in places where too much is produced at once — to more places that need electricity.
Of course, it might also allow coal power plants to stay profitable longer.
Buffett apparently doesn’t think utilities are entering a death spiral at all.
Composting leftovers may seem like a hobby reserved for only the most dedicated environmentalists, but it’s a lot more accessible than you may think.
The social media star and sustainability guru recently teamed up with celebrities including actress Rosario Dawson, singer Jason Mraz and actor Adrian Grenier in a campaign to get more people to compost their leftover produce at home.
In the video above, she shows how easy it is to start your own compost bin at home, from start to finish.
To get started, all you’ll need is some dirt, strips of newspaper, live red wiggler composting worms (which you can easily buy online) and a container with a lid.
Add leftover vegetable scraps, leftovers or compostable trash, then let the worms and their nutrient-rich poop do their magic.
You can use the composted soil for your home gardens or house plants.
Just remember, as Teal recommends in the video, avoid adding any meat, dairy or foods cooked with oil.
Food waste is the single largest component that takes up space in landfills across the country, which causes landfills to release toxic amounts of methane gas, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
Composting is an easy way to put your food waste to good use and do your part to help the planet.
Your house plants, and Jason Mraz, will thank you for it.
Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani said the company had approved its “final investment decision” regarding the controversial project in central Queensland.
The 100-square-mile Carmichael mine would produce millions of tons of the fossil fuel each year.
“We have been challenged by activists in the courts, in inner city streets, and even outside banks that have not even been approached to finance the project,” said Adani, who founded the energy company, at a press conference.
But we are committed to this project.” In recent months, Australian officials have cleared regulatory hurdles for the project and the federal government announced it had conditionally approved a $750 million loan to help build a rail line to transport coal from the Carmichael mine to a proposed shipping terminal on the coast.
Australia is still party to the landmark Paris climate accord and has pledged to reduce emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2030.
“You can’t be the world’s biggest coal exporter and at the same time be taking action on climate change,”said Nikola Casule, a climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Australia.
“It’s completely incompatible.” The Morning Email Wake up to the day’s most important news.
“We know Australians don’t want billions of dollars of money going to the Carmichael coal mine,” Casule said.
Is it funding a billionaire’s coal mine or is it for things Australians actually care about.” Tuesday’s announcement comes as scientists continue to warn about the future of the Great Barrier Reef.
Government officials have said the mine wouldn’t impact the Great Barrier Reef.
Waxworms, which grow into the Galleria mellonella moth, have been found capable of ingesting polyethylene plastic, suggesting a new way to break down the trillion plastic bags the world uses every year, according to a report published Monday in the journal Current Biology.
University of Cambridge Bertocchini, of the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, removed the destructive, wax-eating worms from her hives and placed them in a plastic shopping bag.
“Wax is a polymer, a sort of ‘natural plastic,’ and has a chemical structure not dissimilar to polyethylene,” Bertocchini said in a release.
Adding to environmental concerns, around 80 million tons of this material is produced each year, with the average person using 230 plastic bags annually, according to the Spanish National Research Council.
savagespider via Getty Images To test the worms’ capabilities, researchers gave approximately 100 of them plastic bags.
Within 40 minutes, the worms had chewed sizable holes.
After 12 hours, they reduced a single bag by 92 mg, the researchers said, about one-sixth the weight of a typical shopping bag.
“The caterpillar produces something that breaks the chemical bond, perhaps in its salivary glands or a symbiotic bacteria in its gut,” Bertocchini said.
“The next steps for us will be to try and identify the molecular processes in this reaction and see if we can isolate the enzyme responsible.” rootstocks via Getty Images The Morning Email Wake up to the day’s most important news.
Could this be the solution to the world’s woes with plastic waste?
