Sharks have a serious public relations problem. It's understandable—it's hard for people to feel bad for an animal that ate an adorable surfer girl's arm. But sharks are in serious trouble. To paraphrase Alan Moore, people shouldn't be afraid of sharks. Sharks should be afraid of people.

A new report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), released last week, found that more than 30 percent of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction. An additional 24 percent of species were classified as Near Threatened. These are not sharks that were lining up to eat you—of the 350 shark species, only 10 are considered dangerous to people. (Seriously, people, the most dangerous part of your visit to the beach is the car ride there! Compare 10 shark deaths per year in the entire world to 40,000 auto deaths each year in the U.S. alone.) But the declining species are sharks that are strange and beautiful and important to the ocean's health.

Sharks are slow to grow and reproduce, and their decline is primarily due to rampant and wasteful overfishing. The most well-known practice is shark finning, where the valuable fins are removed and the rest of the animal thrown back to rot. Though shark finning is illegal in many locations, poaching is rampant, particularly in isolated, poor areas such as the Galapagos. The lesser-known cause of sharks' decline is as bycatch in other fisheries. Millions of sharks are unintentionally killed every year in the tuna and swordfish fisheries, alongside turtle and seabirds and other unwanted fish.

People are indoctrinated into fearing sharks in childhood. Even the quasi-friendly-sharks in Finding Nemo aren't nice sharks after all. But like all top predators, sharks are critical to maintaining the stability and health of their ecosystems. Without sharks, Nemo and all his buddies would be homeless, their coral reef demolished through a series of food chain breakdowns. To help sharks, consider buying fish that are caught with minimal bycatch. And never, never let your children see Jaws.

Photograph of a Caribbean reef shark by Tom Brakefield/Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: environment, extinct species, IUCN, ocean, Science, sharks

Last week, the United States Global Research program released a report on the potential impacts of climate change in the United States. Based on a year and a half of work and a consensus from 13 federal agencies, the 198-page report makes the doom, gloom, and destruction that await us available to all. Still, who reads 198-page government reports? Well, I do.

So in an attempt to bring some amusement to a dark situation, I’ve summarized the main points of the climate change report using five different literary (ok, quasi-literary) styles. Each vignette is set in the year 2100 under the “higher emissions scenario,” which is a conservative estimate that presumes some kind of international reduction in emissions.

However, our current climate change trajectory is much, much worse than any of the scenarios considered in the report. We’re emitting so much carbon that we’re exceeding climate scientists’ worst nightmares. But I’ve never been a horror fan, so I’ve stuck with the more optimistic predictions here.

Genre: Noir

Climate change prediction: The U.S. will be seven degrees hotter.

The moment she walked into my office, the temperature got two degrees hotter. She smoked like a coal-fired power plant and had a carbon footprint that went all the way to 850 molecules of CO2 for every million molecules of atmosphere. That was more than double the carbon in the atmosphere now, and more carbon than I really wanted to handle. This dame was hot—and I mean seven degrees of global temperature increase hot. And she wasn’t even the worse-case scenario. Even her smart cousin, who stabilized climate change at a mere four degrees of global temperature rise, looked like she could kill some penguins before breakfast and wash them down with torrential flooding. I poured myself a shot of ice water. I was going to need it.

Genre: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Climate change prediction: Flooding in the northern US, drought in the southern US

It was a dark and stormy night in the Northern U.S., not so dark as it had been from all the fossil-fuel-lit streetlights, but still pretty dark. Rain threw itself violently against the huddled houses—considerably more rain than there had been when Bulwer-Lytton wrote about the very first dark and stormy night, since warm air holds more water and since the air was a lot warmer than it had been 100 years ago. The night in the southern U.S., particularly the Southwest, was still dark, but considerably less stormy due to more droughts and dramatically decreased snow pack.

Genre: Haiku

Climate change prediction: Three to four foot sea level rise

The ocean creeps up
And floods the New York subway.
Three to four foot rise.
South Florida floods!
Don’t retire to West Palm.
You’ll need gills to golf.

Genre: Romance
Climate change prediction: Increased wildfires and insect infestations, mismatches between animals’ life cycles and their food sources

Flynt McKraken’s powerful arms glistened with sweat as he uncoiled his long, thick fire hose. It was dry and hot, like it always was these days. Warmer winters meant more tree-eating beetles and less rain, so every bit of summer lightening or power line sparking could lead to vast wildfires. But it wasn’t just the fire that made McKraken sweat. Katarina was out there, passionately looking for her precious butterflies. The plants the butterflies ate bloomed too early now, before the butterflies had a chance to emerge from their cocoons, and now they were all but extinct. So raven-haired Katarina had wandered far into the back country, and now she was trapped. At the thought of losing her, not even the intense heat of the wildfire warmed the cold ashes in McKraken’s turgid heart.

Genre: New Yorker short story
Climate change prediction: Increased heat leads to worse air quality in cities from ozone and higher pollen loads, insect-borne diseases increase

They sat at the kitchen table, silent except for the gentle susurrations of her asthma. Now that the number of days hotter than 90 degrees in Chicago had quadrupled, she wheezed all the time. He remembered a day, long in the past, where they had had a picnic without worrying about pollen or West Nile virus. They had sat together on a blanket, eating brie and arugula, laughing at the little dogs in coats. He hated her wheezing. The microwave beeped.

I live in San Diego, so I visit our famous zoo a couple times a year. My favorite part is a lush, leafy canyon lined with tigers and tropical birds and tapirs. It's a little piece of the Asian forests on which it's based, an idyll untouched by the downtown skyline or nearby highway. Sure, the path is lined by earnest plaques about poaching and logging and the dire peril of endangered species, but I'm there for a pleasant afternoon stroll and I've never read them.

That's the fate of most earnest attempts to educate zoo-goers about environmental peril. Nobody (except perhaps attendees of environmental film festivals) wants to pay $50 to be depressed and guilt-ridden. But the Vienna Zoo has a different vision. As covered by the landscape architecture blog Pruned, the Vienna Zoo has inserted the nasty side of the human world right into the animals' enclosures.

Instead of evoking a pure natural habitat, human impacts are clearly visible. Penguins frolic around an oil derrick, fish swarm around barrel of toxic waste, and alligators slither over tractor tires and beat-up metal signs. My favorite is a bit of railroad track bisecting a herd of peacefully grazing bison, which neatly summarizes the much of the unfortunate environmental history of the American West.

The artists who designed the trashing of the Zoo, Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf, say in their artists' statement:

The viewer is forced to reconsider traditional modes of animal presentation and simultaneously to question the authenticity of concepts which are restaging 'natural' environments while they are increasingly endangered.

Their work follows a great deal of academic research on the political motivations behind zoos and parks. To choose a few of my favorite examples, Donna Haraway's work on the the primate dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History examined how colonialism and gender politics was written into taxidermy. Susan G. Davis questioned whether Sea World's corporate entertainment and faux emotion constituted actual environmental activism. And William Cronon argues that even our "pristine" national parks were only made possible by the displacement and slaughter of the Native Americans who had once lived there.

That's why I love Steinbrener and Dempf's exhibit in the Vienna Zoo. It's shocking but humorous, and doesn't require people to read depressing little signs or lengthy essays stuffed with postmodern jargon. With just a few well-placed bits of trash, the Vienna Zoo artists manage to say "Hey guys! The whole idea of natural wilderness is a human construction! Also, stop being polluting meanies." And it bursts the myth, so lovingly propagated by TV nature specials, that there's pristine nature somewhere out there. There isn't, but unpristine nature is still worth having around, oil rigs and railroad tracks and all.

Thanks to AMC for the Pruned link!

Photograph of penguins at the Vienna Zoo by Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images

Tags: animals, art, Nature, Science, zoos

It roams the ocean floor, always ravenous, always ready to kill. When it finds its prey, it pulls it apart with hideous strength and then eats it while the prey is still alive. What is this fearsome beast? Is it a shark? A kraken? The Loch Ness Monster? Nope. It's a starfish. The most common starfish species on both the East and West coasts, beloved by millions of beach-going children, are actually mighty predators.

Starfish aren't actually fish—starfish are invertebrates with no skeleton and no central nervous system. (For that reason many people prefer to call them "sea stars," but I'll just stick with starfish here.) Like sea cucumbers and sea urchins, sea stars are echinoderms, invertebrates with spiny bodies and little suction cups called "tube feet."

In starfish, tube feet line their underside, acting like tiny legs that glide the starfish slowly over the ocean floor. The tube feet also act like tongues, licking the bottom to sense where something tasty might be hiding. Since starfish don't move very quickly, they have to eat animals that can't get away. (No need to hide the children—people are way out of a starfishes' league.) Starfish are especially fond of shellfish, though they certainly don't balk at a bit of cannibalism. They aren't fast, but they're very, very strong.

When a starfish finds, say, a nice plump mussel, it crawls on top of it and uses its tube feet to pull the mussel slowly apart. Starfish mouths are located on their underside, in the middle where all the legs join. They don't have jaws, but they do have acidic stomachs. So once the delicious soft bits of the mussel are exposed, the starfish vomits out its stomach, slaps it on the mussel, and digests away while the mussel is still alive. Full digestion takes hours to days. When the starfish is done, it sucks its stomach back in and glides off in search of its next victim.

If you're still not convinced that pretty symmetrical starfish are the Godzillas of the sea, check out this time-lapse video (starfish at 1:30) of desperate brittle stars and clams fleeing from a sunflower star. Or this video of a normally sedate abalone sprinting across the rocks. Though I would never cast aspersions on Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants, I do think that beachside hotel art would be greatly improved by a little ecological correctness. Any volunteers to paint some starfish-induced violence in pastel?

Photograph of a starfish by John Foxx/Stockbyte/Getty Creative Images.

Tags: ocean, predators, Science, starfish

On Sunday, NPR reported that more than 2,000 coyotes were living in Chicago, many inside the city's highly developed downtown Loop. That's not unusual. Since the elimination of wolves and the advent of suburbs teeming with tasty prey, coyotes have made their homes in cities from Los Angeles to Boston. According to the NPR story, urban coyotes are actually faring better than their rural counterparts, free from hunting and able to dine upon a bounty of rats and goose eggs. Though it seems counterintuitive for people with visions of roadrunner-chasing Wile E. Coyote, urban coyotes actually protect city-dwelling birds.

The Coyote of Native American folklore is a raunchy, greedy trickster with a detachable penis, but regular, non-mythical coyotes are a bit more pedestrian. They're a lot smaller than you'd think from their fearsome howling—they weigh about 30 pounds and come up to your knee. They're also not dangerous to people. In recorded North American history, there's only been one coyote fatality.

But coyotes do have a mighty appetite for domestic cats. They've have been observed nibbling their way from feral cat colony to feral cat colony, and are responsible for the fact that any wandering pet cat in my San Diego neighborhood will not be seen again. I dote upon my two kitties, so it seems cruel to rejoice in the killing of other cats. But however adorable, domestic cats wreak ecological havoc. The average pet cat kills over 100 small animals every year, a blow that already-declining bird populations can ill afford.

When cat-munching coyotes appear, wild birds thrive. A 1999 study in suburban San Diego found that unlike other predators, cats were disproportionately preying on rarer native species such as California quail rather than common non-native urban species such as rats. Areas with coyotes had significantly more native bird species than areas without coyotes. The coyotes killed some cats and caused worried pet owners to keep the rest inside, allowing the birds to raise their babies free from decapitation.

Cities and suburbs have a lot of fields and shrubs and little clumps of trees, which ecologists call "edge habitat." Animals that can take advantage of these habitats, such as white-tailed deer and raccoons, live fat and happy right alongside people. But with the rise of that old trickster coyote, a top predator is back in town. Coyotes won't be able to balance urban ecosystems all by themselves, but as in the Native American stories, life is more interesting when they're around.

Tags: birds, coyotes, pets, predation, Science

Scientists are not famed for their looks or fashion sense. Personally, I love this about science. I work that "get out of performing femininity free!" card for all it's worth, slouching about in science-themed t-shirts and ratty sneakers as often as I can. But if I want to get in on this next phase of science marketing, apparently I'm going to have to trade the "Evolution Kills" t-shirt for something more befitting a rock star. There's a movement afoot to sex up science and scientists, and it's got big advertising dollars behind it.

This month's GQ has a four-page spread on the "Rock Stars of Science." Sponsored by the philanthropic arm of clothing company Geoffrey Beene, the promotion advocates for increased biomedical research funding by showing famous-in-scienceland scientists rocking out with slightly has-been rock stars. A rather aged Joe Perry gets down with sunglasses-clad geneticist Francis Collins. Josh Groban is in a "genius sandwich" between Alzheimer researchers Jeffrey Cummings and Dale Schenk. Though anyone who has been to a scientific meeting knows that the middle-aged white guys in ties can dominate the dance floor (especially after happy hour), will this campaign make people think that biomedical research is glamourous? The GQ spread did feature some of the nation's most renowned scientists, but I think the science-is-sexy quotient would have been increased if they had included a few younger, female, and/or non-white scientists. Particularly since (as Chris Mooney points out in his Science Progess column), so many of us have fabulous science-themed tattoos.

Another advertisement featuring scientists ups the glamor quotient in the service of high-end retail. Discover Magazine's Science Not Fiction blog found astronausts Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin, and Jim Lovell in a Louis Vuitton handbag ad. The "Icare" handbag is presumably meant to invoke Icarus, which is unfortunate both because it sounds like an Apple accessory and because Icarus plummeted precipitously from the heavens. Nonetheless, it's amazing that Louis Vuitton thinks that grey-haired astronauts are glamorous enough to sell a $1500 handbag, and I'm all for these genuine national heroes getting in on a little celebrity-sponsorship money.

But scientists don't need big companies to look good. In popular science competititon all over the world, regular non-glammed-up scientists are bringing red-hot science to the masses. Europeans have FameLab, an American Idol-style show in which scientists compete to see who can give the best popular talk. International FameLab concluded this week, with Serbian molecular biologist Mirko Djordjevic triumphing by explaining sexual selection with the Bloodhound Gang song "The Bad Touch." Though I cry a thousand tears for lack of a FameLab competition in the United States, American scientists can achieve minor fame (and zero fortune) through the traveling science talk/rock show combo Nerd Nite and the American Association for Advancement of Science's Science Dance Contest.

It's great to see scientists as being a bit glamorous, but I would hate for science communication to revolve too much around whether one can fit into a size 2 lab coat. Trading content for sexiness can be a slippery slope - just ask some TV new anchors. But since most people still see scientists as white guys with test tubes, I think scientists can do a lot more rocking out before worrying that we're too sexy for our labs.

Tags: advertising, communication, glamour, Science, sex

Last month, Pat Robertson fretted that hate-crime legislation would lead to the protection of people who "like to have sex with ducks." His remark resulted in a delightful Robertson-mocking pro-duck-sex song released last week by musical group Garfunkel and Oates. Robertson doesn't have to worry too much about human-on-duck sex - it's clearly illegal since quacking doesn't qualify as consent. But ducks are no innocent victims. Rather, their giant members and coercive sexual practices make them the perfect posterbird for heterosexual sex gone awry.

Most birds forgo genitalia for a single all-purpose opening called the cloaca. Waterfowl are the well-endowed exception. The Argentinian lake duck is the most impressive—one individual had a phallus as long as its entire body— but most ducks, geese, and swans have some kind of phallus. Female ducks have equally elaborate reproductive tracts, called oviducts, with spirals and twists and dead ends. (Incidentally, while male duck phalluses have been studied for years, no one noticed the ladies' oviducts until 2007, when researcher Dr. Patricia Brennan figured "Obviously you can’t have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car.”)

Ducks with teeny weenies do live the nuclear family dream (at least for a season), with a daddy duck, a mommy duck, and some adorable little ducklings. But amongst the webfooted Ron Jeremys, phallus and oviduct size is related to sexual violence. Female ducks in large-phallused species choose a mate for the season, but other males will still try to forcibly copulate with her. Since several males can assault a single female, duck sex can be an alarming sight.

Though a duck female may not be able to avoid her attackers, researchers suggest that complicated internal anatomy prevents unwanted fertilization. In other words, if the female duck isn't into it, the bends and twists in her oviduct make it hard for the male to get his phallus position. Considering only 2 percent to 5 percent of ducklings are conceived during forced matings, most of that sperm probably ends up in one of the oviduct's dead ends.

If larger phalluses mean greater fertilization, male and female ducks could be locked into a competition, with males evolving larger and larger phalluses as females evolve twistier and turnier oviducts. Between the giant phalluses and the violence, anyone who wants to have sex with ducks is going to have to really commit to that lifestyle. Somehow, I don't think Pat Robertson has too much to worry about.

Image of male Argentine Lake Duck by K. McCracken/Nature.

Tags: ducks, forced copulation, hate crime legislation, Science, sex

[Spoilers for Up ahead.]

Seeking scientific accuracy in Hollywood is a fool's game. I've frothed at the terrible biology of Bee Movie and gnashed at the poor oceanography of Transformers and muttered at the unfortunate physics of Star Wars. So I wasn't expecting much from Pixar's latest offering, Up, what with the house floating along on helium balloons. But I was pleasantly surprised. The biology of Up is reasonably accurate—though Kevin the bird might harbor a dark secret.

In Up, our heroes float to Paradise Falls, in South America. This spectacular landscape of flat mesas and giant falls is based off Venezuela's Canaima National Park, home to Angel Falls, the world's tallest waterfall. The mesas, called tepui, are ancient rocks inhabited by unique plant communities found nowhere else. Since a barren tepui is a hard place to make a living, many of the plants have turned to meat—they capture insects with sticky bulbs or with water traps. According to Bay Area Science, these excellent plants do get little cameos throughout the movie, but the other inhabitants of Pixar's Paradise Falls are glimpsed only as skeletons on display.

But what about Kevin? Kevin is a large, colorful ostrich-like bird pursued by the bad guy because she's a living fossil that will prove that Paradise Falls is indeed a "Lost World." While there are flightless birds in South America today, they aren't colorful and they don't live on the tepui. The most Kevin-like is probably the rhea, a gentle ostrich-like herbivore that grows up to six feet tall and 70 pounds. Rhea roam the low-lying plains of Brazil and Argentina, but are kept as livestock and pets all over the world. Anything that wanders around a Scottish suburb is probably not exotic enough to drive the plot of an entire feature film. That's why I think Kevin may have been something far more mysterious and dangerous—an ancient terror bird.

The terror birds (also known as phorusrhacids) were carnivorous flightless birds that ate their way through South America until their extinction 2.5 million years ago. The largest terror bird stood 10 feet tall, weighed 1,000 pounds, and used its giant razor-sharp claws to feed its babies meat, not chocolate. A self-respecting terror bird would have had no fear of talking dogs—it could have could have swallowed them whole and kung-fu-chopped their bones for the marrow. Discovering a living terror bird, though likely fatal, would certainly propel the discoverer to fame and fortune.

If Kevin was a terror bird, why would she spare the lives of Up's heroes? Perhaps her species evolved to vegetarianism over the last 2.5 million years, turning to a life of pacificism and quiet contemplation. Maybe she was saving them in order to eat them later. Or maybe she was entirely satisfied with being fed chocolate. Nonetheless, if I were a Pixar character, I wouldn't turn my back on Kevin. They don't award the "fleeing from extinct mega-predator" Wilderness Scout badge posthumously.

Tags: Angel Falls, extinct species, Pixar, predation, Science, Up, Venezuela

Poor women. While normal intelligence can co-exist with ovaries, our delicate lady-brains can't contain genius-level intelligence. Men and women might have the same average intelligence, but men have more variation, and thus more idiots AND genuises. At least that's what former Harvard President and current Obama advisor Larry Summers implied in 2005 when he said that biological differences might explain the lack of female mathematics professors.

If Summers was right and biological differences are to blame, there should be fewer math-genius girls the whole world over. However, a new study that looked at worldwide data found that countries with greater gender equity had just as many girls as boys in the top 1 percent of mathematics. An article in NewsDaily presents the take of the researchers, Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz:

"Analysis of data from 15-year-old students participating in the 2003 Program for International Student Assessment likewise indicated that as many, if not more girls than boys scored above the 99th percentile in Iceland, Thailand, and the United Kingdom," Mertz and Hyde [the study's authors] wrote.

Several different international tests show the same pattern, including the International Math Olympics, Mertz said.

So why is there a gender gap in the United States? It just might have something to do with the discouraging message that a person in possession of breasts is biologically incapable of doing that ever-so-manly math. As Mertz said,

"If girls don't have equal educational opportunities or if they know if they learn the material there won't be jobs available to them, why bother, they seek something else."

Tags: gender issues, Larry Summers, math, Science, sexism