Trayvon Martin Essays

Trayvon Martin Essays Trayvon Martin Essay Trayvon Martin Essay Essay Topic: Turtle Island On Friday, March 11, Japan was rocked by an earthquake. People were displaced, a nuclear reactor was in trouble, and the world watched as a tsunami flooded Japan, threatened the islands of the Pacific, and ultimately hit the western coasts of North and South America. Very little of the devastation resulting from this earthquake was from the initial shaking. But mainly because any damage from the seismic waves that was dwarfed by the impact of the 10 metre tsunami that hit the Japanese coast less than an hour later. Most of the reporting (both good and bad) that has been done on the earthquake, the tsunami, and the resulting fallout from both has focused on their effects on humans. But humans are just one species affected by these sorts of disasters. Slowly, a bit of information about various scaley, furry, or feathered critters has begun to trickle out of the affected areas. Kazutoshi Takami, a veterinarian at the Osaka Municipal Tennoji Zoological Gardens, reported last week that several zoos and aquariums were suffering shortages of gas, heater fuel, and food and drinkable water for humans as well as for animals.Also, according to Takami, the Fukushima Aquarium made plans to move their sea mammals and birds to Kamogawa Sea World. On Saturday, March 12, Pete Leary, a wildlife biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service who is stationed at Midway, blogged extensively on the tsunami and subsequent animal rescue operations: We had all 67 island employees/visitors up here watching the news on BBC and watching our tide gauge data over the internet. We saw that we had about a 5 foot rise in the tide gauge level, but were glad that we couldn’t see any water when we looked out the windows.After looking at a bit of the washover on Sand Island, and setting a crew to work on digging albatross chicks and petrels out of the debris, Greg and I took the boat over to Eastern Island. On the way, we passed thousands of albatross adults and petrels that had been washed into the water and lost their ability to stay dry. Their feathers weelfuelte re messed up by being tumbled over the island and through the vegetation. We pulled some into the boat, but needed to get to Eastern Island, so we had to hope that most of them would paddle to shore. Eastern Island was mostly washed over, so 10? s of thousands of chicks were washed away.I’ll have to look at our count numbers from Dec. to figure out how many chicks were in the affected areas. There were dead fish by the hundreds up in t he middle of the island. The short-tailed albatross chick must really be wondering what kind of place it lives in because it was washed away from the nest for the second time this year already. This time, it was about 40 yards away from the original nest. It was easy to spot because all the other chicks were washed away in a previous storm. I didn’t want to pick the chick up, because it was already stressed and upset, but the parents may not have found it that far from the nest.I put out a sheet of plastic and when it stepped onto it, I gave it a sled ride the 40 yards back to its nest. I hope that’s all the excitement that it has for the rest of the season. There were a lot of chicks and adults buried in debris (mostly dead vegetation). Greg and I were digging out stuck birds all day. We took our volunteers and some people from the visitors group over yesterday and dug out another hundred or so birds. We also found 2 turtles that were washed quite a way up onto the is land, which were then carried back to the beach and seemed glad to get back in the water.At least we didn’t find any injured Hawaiian monk seals or Laysan ducks. The seals were back resting on the beaches on Friday. What Can We Expect? While some of the reports are heartening, and many are devasting, more in-depth research into the short- and long-term effects of the tsunami on marine and coastal ecosystems will take much longer. But the 2004 magnitude 9. 15 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, and the resulting tsunami that rippled across the Indian Ocean have been extensively studied, and allow us to speculate regarding possible outcomes of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.The Wildlife Trust of India, along with the International Fund for Animal Welfare initiated several investigations[-gt;0] following the earthquake and tsunami to assess their impact on wildlife. Overall, they found that damage to wildlife populations was generally limited on the mainland, and slightly worse on the islands. Particularly hard-hit, however, were coral reef systems. Several beaches were washed away, and freshwater habitats were inundated with saltwater. While most of these ecosystems were eventually able to rebound, problems did occur.For example, one mainland wildlife sanctuary became flooded with saltwater and covered with sand, making is impossible for the various plant-eating ungulates (hoofed animals) to graze. Even worse, with seawater comes toxic pollution. According to the Wildlife Trust report: Other grave problems stem from the onslaught of seawater laden with sediments and toxins. Aquifers, the primary source of drinking water, have been contaminated by saltwater, raw sewage, oil, and other pollutants. On the coasts of Indonesia and Sri Lanka, paddies and farm fields are smothered under a crust of salt and silt.Some areas may never recover, for others irrigation and one or more rainy seasons may be enough to flush out the soil. For now farmers are being en couraged to plant salt-tolerant crops, like pumpkins and kale. In other areas, rather than covering plants with saltwater, the tsunami simply washed all plants away, making it possible for invasive species to take root, quite literally. The change in plant life wasn’t problematic for some species, such as the fan-throated lizard (Sitana ponticeriana), which were able to survive in the new ecosystem.Other species, surely, were not so lucky, but little information is available. And there were probably other invaders, as well. Furry ones. Large dead trees from distant islands were found washed up on mainland beaches. While there was no danger to beach ecosystems from the trees themselves, since they were dead, they may have carried some critters with them that would eventually colonize mainland coasts. It is well-known that rodents, reptiles, and insects are quite capable of setting up camp in new environments after rafting across the sea. [-gt;0] wildlifetrustofindia. org/pub lications/reports. htm