NPR Episode 433: Holding A Rainforest Hostage? NPR Ecuador's Yasuni National Park, a pristine corner of the Amazon rainforest, is home to jaguars, giant otters, and the golden-mantled tamarin.
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RAINFOREST EXPLORER
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New and noteworthy updates from the Amazon Rainforest & the Morpho Institute
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The Morpho Institute
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Many Awá are still uncontacted, and they are running for their lives. http://www.survivalinternational.org/awa "One man has the power to stop the loggers: Br...
The Morpho Institute's insight:
So easy to trivialize the plight of indigenous tribes who are making a choice to remain "unconctacted." How would you feel if you and your community wanted to make this same choice? 
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Authorities perplexed as more than 100 members of clan that has almost no contact with outsiders threaten to cross river
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The Morpho Institute's insight:
Can orchid bees tell us how or why we form social groups?
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Ecuador halts pioneering plan to conserve rainforest
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AFP Ecuador Sparks Outcry Over Plan to Drill in Rainforest Wall Street Journal QUITO, Ecuador—Environmental groups here and indigenous lawmakers threatened over the weekend to take Ecuador's government to international court over a plan to drill...
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A Cambridge University academic came across the red and yellow budded plant more than 30 years ago when living with a secretive Peruvian tribe. Using extracts from the plant, the researchers have developed a gel which blocks the pain receptors found in nerve endings – and could be on the market in only two years’ time. In early trials, it helped relieve pain during removal of teeth that were impacted, or stuck below the gum line. Via Sepp Hasslberger
The Morpho Institute's insight:
The rainforest just keeps on giving. We need to start giving back!
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The Amazon Rainforest, also known as Amazonia or the Amazon Jungle, is a moist broadleaf forest that covers most of the Amazon Basin of South America. Via Jerónimo M.M.
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A group of students and professors from Yale University have found a fungi in the Amazon rainforest that can degrade and utilize the common plastic polyurethane (PUR). As part of the university’s Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory educational program, designed to engage undergraduate students in discovery-based research, the group searched for plants and cultured the micro-organisms within their tissue. Several active organisms were identified, including two distinct isolates of Pestalotiopsis microspora with the ability to efficiently degrade and utilize PUR as the sole carbon source when grown anaerobically, a unique observation among reported PUR biodegradation activities. Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
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High above the Amazon rainforest in Peru, a team of scientists and technicians is conducting an ambitious experiment: a biological survey of a never-before-explored tract of remote and inaccessible cloud forest. Via Henrik Safegaard - Cloneartist
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Some 500 years after Columbus first encountered cocoa beans, scientists are discovering new, wild cacao flavors in the Amazon rainforest. Turns out, we've barely begun to sample the many flavors nature has to offer. Via No Such Thing As The News
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Conserving tropical rainforests is the single greatest thing we can do to reduce carbon emissions.
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Mishquipanga (Renealmina alpina) is the first in a series of videos produced by the Center for Amazon Community Ecology about dye plants of the Peruvian Amaz...
The Morpho Institute's insight:
In the Amazon, dyes for coloring clothes and fibers don't come out of a box from the store! They come directly from plants and the colors can be amazing.
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As the world’s population increases and agricultural frontiers expand into native tropical habitats, researchers are working furiously to understand the impacts on tropical forests and global biodiversity.
The Morpho Institute's insight:
Tropical forests regions like the Amazon not only have more species to be lost in absolute terms, but also contain relatively more sensitive, vulnerable and endemic species that are likely threatened by both pesticide use and agricultural land expansion.
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HuffPost Live is a live-streaming network that attempts to create the most social video experience possible. Viewers are invited to join discussions live as on-air guests. Topics range from politics to pop culture.
The Morpho Institute's insight:
Great debate on Ecuador's recent reversal of its ban on oil exploraton in the Amazon
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Peru: oil spill threatens rainforest reserve World War 4 Report Peru's Vice-Ministry of Inter-Culturality (VMI) has reportedly thrown its support behind proposals to establish five new reserves for indigenous peoples living in "voluntary isolation"...
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Scientists believe that we are at a tipping point of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest, the largest contiguous tropical forest in the world. If we lose much more, the damage may be irreversible. The Amazon is a vast storehouse of biodiversity and plays a critical role in regulating global climate. Today, nearly one fifth of the Amazon has been cleared. This video describes some of the extraordinary efforts being undertaken by social entrepreneurs and stewards of the rainforest that have made a considerable difference to reducing deforestation. Over the last 5 years, Brazil has managed to reduce the rate of deforestation by 80%. However, new regulations threaten to reverse this trend.... http://www.karmatube.org/?op=nletter&id=3239 Via pdjmoo
Justin C.'s curator insight,
December 8, 2014 10:02 AM
Video: C- December 8, 2014 R- This video talks about the effect of the rainforest on humans and the effect of humans on the rainforest A- This video is by KarmaTube, which makes people aware of the problems and importance of the rainforest A- KarmaTube is an official organization of professionals, who know what they are talking about P- Talks about impact on humans and limitations
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Paul Evans investigates the Amazon, the biggest area of rainforest left on Earth.
Via Herbaceous , Whats New In The WORLD
The Morpho Institute's insight:
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Roberto Alencar Zuazo is a native Aymara Elder, storyteller, artisan, activist, author and educator, from a tiny village in the Amazon Rainforest. He grew up in the traditional way with his family. His Grandfather was an Amauta, a Spiritual Healer, and his Father is a Native historian, Amazonian wisdom keeper, and River Pilot, expert in traditional environmental knowledge and the Amazon ecosystem. Roberto, at the age of eighteen, became a jungle guide and cultural interpreter for European scientific expeditions into the Amazon. As a result, he now speaks eight European languages and several Indigenous tongues. He has also taught Environmental knowledge, Amazonian lore, healing medicine and the use of herbs. Along with his sister Auxiliadora, a well-known activist and artist, he co-founded the first “Amazon Arts School” to revive aboriginal art and provide ongoing income for native artists. They taught traditional arts, woodcarving, pottery and mask making. Roberto has organized ethnographic exhibitions of Amazon traditional arts and workshops on Amazonian Spiritual Healing. Nearly two decades ago he came to Canada and was later granted Canadian citizenship. Presently, he is beginning the process of publishing seventeen traditional stories and accounts of his experiences growing up in a remote Amazon Jungle village. Via Jerónimo M.M.
Jerónimo M.M.'s curator insight,
March 15, 2013 4:34 PM
Roberto, from a tiny village in the Amazon Rainforest, is beginning the process of publishing seventeen traditional stories and accounts of his experiences growing up in a remote Amazon Jungle village
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This image is of a Yanomami indigenous person from the tropical rainforest of the Amazon. Researchers conducting a study in the Rupununi region of Guyana recruited and trained local native people like these to help gather data. They found that the native people were just as capable of systematically recording accurate data as trained researchers, dispelling a theory that some scientists have that the cultural and educational differences between the two are too great for data collected by the former to be reliable. Via Sakis Koukouvis
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The Amazon rainforest, a well-known epicenter of biodiversity, has offered up another trove of riches. The treasure takes the form of 15 newly described bird species. Some are tiny. One has a long, curved bill. Another is super fluffy. All live in the southern Amazon, most of them in an area known as the “arc of deforestation.”
The Arapaçu-de-bico-torto, which loosely translates to crooked-beaked woodcreeper. This bird most closely resembles a Curve-Billed Scythebill (Campylorhamphus procurvoides), said Tom Schulenberg, an expert in neotropical birds and Peruvian species, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
It’s been 140 years since as many new Brazilian bird species were described at one time. In 1871, 40 new species were described by Austrian August von Pelzeln in Zur Ornithologie Brasiliens.
Discovered mostly within the last five years, in southern swaths of forest, many of the birds live near rivers. Eleven can only be found in Brazil; four of the species have also been seen in Peru and Bolivia. Most are Passeriformes, belonging to an order that includes ravens, sparrows, and finches.
They were spotted on various expeditions that included ornithologist Luis Silveira, of the University of São Paulo, and his students, as well as collaborators from three additional institutions. Together, they noticed that these strange new birds didn’t quite fit in.
“Describing new species is not a trivial task,” Silveira said. Many sang different songs, or had different genetic sequences than previously known birds. “We considered a bird as a new species when at least two of the three criteria — plumage, voice, and genetics — were consistently different from some previously known and closely related, already described species.”
Silveira and his colleagues will describe the species in a special volume of the Handbook of Birds of the World, which will be published in early summer. Here, we have photos of seven new species; others have only been illustrated.
Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
Vloasis's curator insight,
June 6, 2013 8:32 AM
What sheds a pall over these discoveries (the largest group in 140 years), is the fact that deforestation helped reveal them. |
