Plants and Animals

Hi Jennifer,

Temperatures in 2006 in the midst of the Daintree rainforest were uncharacteristically moderate.

It was, however, exceptionally wet with a total of 6242.5 mm over 237 rainy days; 14 of which exceeded 100 mm.

Last year was the first year Cooper Creek Wilderness had broadband satellite and rainfall, despite its quantity, never once interfered with the network.

On New Year’s day a two-week old cassowary chick was savaged to death by marauding pig-dogs.

On the same day I captured this photograph of fawn-footed melomies:

All the best for 2007.

Neil Hewett

Hi Russell,

Going back to your points about sentient beings and our perception of other life forms. As you say, there is debate about how intelligent certain species are, how to measure that intelligence, whether they can feel emotions, what this all means. Being human, although we may try to be objective in assessing the cognitive abilities of other species, we are still limited by our own perceptions and interpretations.

I guess you would have come across certain situations with all manner of different species that have amazed you and made you re-evaluate your idea of how these organisms perceive their world. Most people who have pets, domestic animals or who have worked with wild animals can tell you interestng stories of certain encounters, but of course interpreting this into something that will not be labelled anthropomorphising is very hard. Often I think that our shame of anthropomorphising animals means we miss a lot of interesting details.

With regards to whales, I am sure that George, Ann and Peter can related stories that would suggest cetaceans are sentient beings and can feel fear as well as other emotions, and there is literature out there on studies into cetacean ‘intelligence’ and perception. For myself, I have had a few encounters that suggest to me that cetaceans are most definately sentient beings . One was with a southern right whale female I was cautiously observing in the water. I was careful to maintain my distance from her, but she kept positioning herself right next to me. If I would swim away she would follow. When I got tired and was treading water at one stage, she came up underneath me so that I was supported on her back. When I returned to the small boat and placed my hand in the water to say ‘goodbye’, she apporached the boat and lifted it up so that she could touch my hand with her back. Another encounter was observing a mother and calf humpback The mother was snoozing on the reef, but all of a sudden the calf looked up at me, left her side, swam straight up and put me on his belly, before casually rolling over and returning back to mum.

Why did these two animals choose to interact with me the way they did? Was I just a weird looking cetacean, or was I something quite different but that could obviously provide some tactile stimuli as well as perhaps ‘entertainment’? As I said, people who are close to pets and so on would have countless stories of special interactions with them.

Our preception of other species is also as you mentioned dependent upon cultural and religious beliefs. Whether we see ourselves as the pinnacle of all life and thus the ones to control it and dominant it depends often on these factors.

For me, I believe that as animals that can feel empathy, and have an awareness of themselves and others, we have a responsibility to ensure that our actions are not unnecessarily harming those others. Our relationships with animals should be humane and with careful thought for the past, present and future. Humans nowadays divorce themseves from the natural world, but in the end we are animals and part of that natural world, and could do well to remember that.

Cheers Libby.

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This note was originally posted as a comment here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/001806.html .

Hi Jennifer,

Any Australians looking for an example of an endangered or vulnerable freshwater species to focus a campaign on might look no further than the Burnett River tortoise.

This species is under threat due to changes in flow regimes on the Burnett, as it lives primarily in riffle habitats and these are disappearing as a consequence of damming the river.

The species was the subject of some controversy during the Paradise Dam proposal and construction. The dam proponents escaped the endangered species label for this tortoise by pointing out it also occurs in the Fitzroy and the Mary and so how could it be endangered if the Dam was built on the Burnett? Of course there was little discussion of the impact of existing and proposed modifications of habitat for this species on those two other river systems. But as one of the leading engineers for the consulting company that prepared the Enironmental Impact Assessment (and the director of their environmental group) said to me at the time:

…what is the fate of a tortoise, compared to the need to provide table grapes to Brisbane?

What indeed, I had to ask myself? After all, it is nothing more than a rather ugly looking reptile.

What possible moral or ethical dilemma could there be in making a decision not to proceed with a development simply because it might extinguish a species that had moved itself foolishly up an adaptive peak?

Clearly those who eventually made the decision to proceed were motivated by a much loftier sense of duty; the need to provide grapes to Brisbane.

I might also point out they were so motivated by that lofty moral position they had no qualms about changing what I had written in the Environmental Impact Assessment to tone down the quite legitimate concerns about the future of that species.

My point in raising this example, is that some here seem to imply that the fate of the Baiji might have been different if it had been Australians that were making the local decisions.

My personal experience suggests there would be no difference.

Russell.

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This is a slightly edited version of a comment first posted by Russell at the very long thread that began with a blog post entitled ‘The Loss of the Baiji’.

It seems the most endangered mammal on earth, a species of freshwater dolphin from the Yangtze River in China, is now extinct. That’s the conclusion from a group of specialists who recently spent six weeks searching for the dolphin, also known as the baiji, along the Yangtze.

The extinction of the baiji has taken place at a time of unprecedented interest and concern for their large relative, the minke whale. We have know for some time that there are probably over a million minke whales, but perhaps no more than a dozen baiji. Yet so much money has been spent campaigning to “save the minke whale”. Where are our priorities when it comes to conservation? I wrote on this issue in the last IPA Review in a piece entitled, “The Loss of the Baiji’.

This picture is from www.baiji.org.

Click here and you can listen to a recording of the baiji’s whistle.

So beautiful.