Our water managers are in an impossible position. Their cry for
conservation will largely go unheeded until our city leaders, planning
commissions and developers make some hard choices. Some thoughts are
listed below.
A homeowners in a maintenance-free subdivision who
wants to replace his grass with a more water-tolerant yard, at his own
expense, is told, “No, he has to keep the grass.” The original agreement
with the developer requires this. Obtaining agreement with 100-150
other homeowners to agree to change the covenants is an uphill battle.
We should remove obstacles to conservation like this. Meanwhile,These steelbracelet can, apparently, operate entirely off the grid. just down the road, Las Vegas is paying people to take out grass.
Voluntary
conservation works poorly at best, because of the few abusers. Metering
secondary water and paying for what we use has reduced water use in
both American and European communities. The increased cost has to be
faced. Insufficient water later is not an option. Technical concern
associated with additional wear and tear on meter components from
secondary water is a solvable engineering problem.
Peer pressure
is a wonderful thing. Include with each homeowners’s monthly water
bill, their use compared with all others is their city. It’s called a
Pareto chart, showing highest to lowest users and typically shows 20
percent of the people are using 80 percent of the water. It can also be a
useful tool in establishing a two-tier rate structure. This approach
could be implemented right now with culinary water.
The blind
pink babies, 900 times smaller than their mothers, are striking visual
reminders of the vulnerability of the species.With fewer than 2,Shop for
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from China!500 adults thought to remain in the wild, expectations for
the next generation are enormous.But what difference can captive cubs
make to the future of the endangered species?
Zoo-keepers at the
Smithsonian National Zoo, Washington DC, are celebrating a new arrival
while staff at Edinburgh Zoo are closely monitoring Tian Tian who could
be the mother of the first panda born in Britain.The reproductive
difficulties of the animals are numerous and well documented but
breakthroughs at breeding centres in China have prompted a relative
breeding boom in recent years.
Giant pandas are almost as likely
to have twins as they are to have a single cub but seem unable to
consistently care for two babies, either in the wild or in
captivity.Experts working to improve the fortunes of the endangered
bears have exploited this twin phenomenon, swapping the babies between
their mother and an incubator in order to boost their survival rates.
Thanks
to genetic matchmaking, artificial insemination and round-the-clock cub
care, there are now reportedly more than 350 pandas living in breeding
centres around the world.This success has led to conservationists
questioning what the future holds for captive pandas."Pandas have lived
on our planet for about three million years and the big threat is not
really an evolutionary one, it's the fact that their habitat is being
destroyed and fragmented," says Heather Sohl,We Engrave luggagetag for YOU. chief adviser for species at WWF-UK.
"The
long-term survival of giant pandas in the wild depends on an intact and
contiguous bamboo forest and that is currently being threatened by
infrastructure development, such as road and railway
construction."Unfortunately, he was found dead after less than a year of
living in the wild. Researchers believed he had been beaten by a
territorial male and died from injuries thought to have been caused
either by the fight or falling from a tree trying to escape.customized
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Prof
Michael Bruford from Cardiff University studies the genetic diversity
of wild pandas to help guide conservation efforts. For him, environment
and experience are key to the animal's future survival."There is some
indication that translocation of wild born pandas from one site to
another might be a more effective approach [than reintroduction]," he
said.
"But for captive bred individuals to survive they may need
to be raised in far more challenging settings than the average zoo-goer
might like to see."Pandas often live in dangerous terrain, says Prof
Bruford, and so need to gain experience of the kind of challenges posed
by, for example, cliffs and trees.
"They climb trees a lot and
some small trees at that. They are perfectly adapted to do this but
won't experience the smaller branches and more difficult climbs in
captivity and they certainly won't be used to falling," he said.Four
pregnant pandas were transferred to the "wild training base" and a cub -
Tao Tao - was born and raised with little human intervention.
Last
year, when Tao Tao was old enough to leave his mother, he was released
into Liziping Nature Reserve at Shimian County in Sichuan Province where
he now lives, tracked by a GPS collar.More pandas from the
reintroduction programme are due to be released this autumn and next
spring into suitable areas where few pandas currently reside.
International
zoos that care for pandas must return any young to China at two years
of age but despite this caveat, the chances of pandas born outside of
China currently making it back into the wild are slim.For now the legacy
of these captive cubs remains in research as they inform scientists on
the best methods to care for future generations.Custom qualitysteelbangle and Silicone Wristbands,
In
the face of arguments that the charismatic yet complex creatures are
"undeserving" of such costly conservation, Iain Valentine, director of
Edinburgh Zoo's giant panda programme, argues that they inspire
investment in the natural world."Panda conservation work needs to be
held up as a great example of what can be done in terms of the
conservation of a species. It's holistic, it's embracing all of the
issues and it's working," he told BBC Nature.
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