Amid a supremely chaotic news environment—dominated by Trump’s deportations, Trump’s funding cuts and layoffs, Trump’s tariffs and, of course, the tumultuous stock market the tariffs produced—one carefully calibrated science story managed to break through the noise and make global headlines this week: A biotechnology company called Colossal Biosciences claims to have resurrected the dire wolf, a species that went extinct over 10,000 years ago.
Republished by Mother Jones here.
I was prepared to loathe the new nature docuseries from PBS, “Evolution Earth.”
The press release crowed that the series “reveal[s] animals keeping pace with a planet changing at superspeed” and “tells a tale of resilience that redefines our understanding of evolution and hints at how nature can show a path towards a sustainable future for Planet Earth.”
This copy flew in the face of at least one article that recently passed through my inbox, which reported that even African wild dogs, a species adapted to the warm tropics, were suffering from hotter temperatures. Researchers found fewer pups were surviving to adulthood; the time between litters was getting longer; and adult survival was lower after bouts of hot weather. And that’s just one example of a species struggling to adapt to a changing climate. Certainly, the promotional materials made no mention of the ongoing extinction crisis, in which more than one million species are teetering on the brink of nonexistence.
The last thing society needed, I thought, was a feel-good series about how the animals will prevail during the climate and biodiversity crisis, while masking, circumventing, or denying the full extent of the damage humans have wrought on the Earth and its ecosystems.
But “Evolution Earth” walks a precarious tightrope, acknowledging irreversible losses in the same breath as it celebrates the unexpected and, yes, even hopeful adaptations of a few select species around the globe.
Artist Sarah Conti situates life-size versions of the shorebirds in a disappearing habitat.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and republished by Mother Jones as part of the Climate Desk collaboration
Comau Fjord is a sliver of sea framed by thickly forested mountain slopes. Melting glaciers peek between the crags. Waterfalls tumble down mountainsides, faint lines across vast expanses of gray rock. It is quintessential Chilean Patagonia, but in the austral summer of 2021, the narrow fjord filled with the smell of putrefying fish.
The salmon farms that populate the remote glacial fjord were in crisis. A massive algal bloom was suffocating salmon in their pens.
Boris Hernandez, a third-generation resident who lives in a house at the edge of the fjord, went out on the water for a closer look. He saw a boat sucking dead fish from one of the salmon farms and spewing pink liquid—a mix of seawater, liquified salmon remains, and algae—out the boat’s other side.
Hernandez contacted Thomas Montt, who had recently visited Comau Fjord and expressed concern about the proliferation of salmon farming operations in the area. A few days later, Montt came by boat with a photographer to document masses of dead salmon rotting in nets on the water.
“It was the biggest organic spill I had ever seen,” Montt recalled. “It’s something you can’t imagine. It’s hard to visualize the amount of organic garbage that was floating on the water and everywhere. It would go into the bathroom of the boat, it would go in the cooling system, it would go on your hands. Everything was oily, fishy, messy.”
That was early 2021. By April of that year, just one salmon company, Camanchaca, had lost 1.3 million fish—approximately 2,500 tons. By the end of the month, total losses in the fjord had reached 6,000 tons.
As bad as that sounds, it pales in comparison to 2016, when a red tide of algae killed approximately 27 million salmon in Chile, a staggering loss of more than 110,000 tons of fish. More salmon died in two weeks than would be expected to die in two years of normal production. Jose Miguel Burgos, the then-head of Sernapesca, the governmental office that oversees fishing and aquaculture, said the dead salmon could easily fill 14 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Lesser celandine, with its a small, pale yellow blossoms, looks like an innocuous plant. But the sprawling weed crowds out native species when it blooms in spring and then goes dormant, leaving ground brown and bare through summer and fall. Normally at this time of year, volunteers with the New York New Jersey Trail Conference’s Invasives Strike Force would be pulling up the species and other invasive plants during weekend meet-ups. This year, however, is anything but normal—the group suspended work on March 23.
Across the country this spring as the COVID-19 pandemic has taken hold, conservation organizations and government agencies have postponed or canceled projects that require groups to meet and work together. Although public health is everyone’s firm priority, gaps in invasive species removal, controlled burns, and habitat restoration can create short- and long-term setbacks to time-sensitive projects
Jessica S. McKenzie