Challenge of the week: Take an unheated shower!

Taking an unheated shower can reduce your use of fuel, thus reduce your carbon footprint. Unheated showers also tend to be shorter showers, reducing water transport!

Some tips:

- Keep it short

- Dance around like a maniac

- Wear a sweater afterwards

Taking cold showers is fun and energizing. You won't believe how awake you feel after you've taken it!

Let's reduce our carbon footprint—keep our ice caps! 

The Joy of Victory: Lion Lights!

An Chinese guardian lion.

Lions are one of the most feared and revered animals in the world: from the beginning of recorded history, people have loved, and hated, lions for their skill in hunting.

A lion on a decorative panel from
the Persian Empire, 500 - 330 BC.

World lion populations have been going down at an alarming rate; an estimated 30 - 50% in the last two decades! Leading causes to this drastic decline are habitat destruction, and humans retaliating with firearms for lost cattle.

On the edge of Nairobi National Park in Kenya, thirteen-year-old Richard Turere tends to his family's cattle. He has been caring for the cattle since he was just nine years old; a huge responsibility as the cattle are one of the most precious possessions the family owns. "I'd take them out in the morning and bring them back in the evening. We put them in a small cow shed at night." This is when the lions would attack the cattle—leaving Richard to count the losses in the morning.

Richard Turere, age thirteen, in Kenya.

Richard knew there had to be something the lions were afraid of, other than a gun. Then the solution came to him when one night when he was walking about with a flashlight. He noticed that the lions were afraid of the moving light he held—and after tinkering for three weeks, an invention was born of broken flashlights and an indicator box from a motor cycle: Lion Lights!

Richard rigged these light around the cow shed, and at night, they flash on and off as if a human were walking around. The contraption was so successful at keeping the lions away, his neighbors asked him to install Lion Lights on their own properties. Since then, the invention has spread all throughout Kenya, and made its way into Zambia and Tanzania, too. A person from India is even trying them out for tigers.

A Lion Light.

By coming up with a simple, affordable, and working solution to the issue of lions eating livestock, Richard has earned himself a scholarship in Kenya's best school—go Richard! 

Let's put all our minds together to come up with more ingenious yet simple ideas to save our amazing world!

Basking in the victory of Richard's invention, this lion can live without fear of being hurt by the humans.

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Check out this great video about Richard and the Lion Lights!

Biosphere Wonders: Seahorses!

Seahorses are very interesting animals, not to mention being very pretty and cute!

Seahorses live all over the world, mostly in tropical and temperate zones. They enjoy shallow, sheltered places, like seagrass beds, coral reefs, mangroves estuaries ( the place where rivers meet the sea).

Sea horses come in many different shapes and sizes. Since they can't swim very fast, many rely on camouflage to protect them from predators. Try to spot the pygmy seahorse in the pink coral!

Sea horses have interesting reproductive habits. The female first lays her eggs, then the male puts them in a pouch on his stomach. To keep them safe, he carries them around for nine to forty-five days. During this time, the female gestates another litter of seahorse pups. The baby seahorses hatch from the male's pouch, and leave to fend for themselves. Within hours or days, the female gives the male another batch of eggs while she yet again begins to gestate another batch of pups. This reproductive method allows the pair of seahorses to produce twice as many offspring than if the female carried around the eggs!

Seahorses are certainly an amazing group of animals! Some types are threatened by habitat loss, pollution, or human collec-tion, while others are thriving. Some day let's hope that no seahorse has to worry about humans collecting them for decorations!

Influential Issues: Coffee

Coffee: the miracle bean that gives a morning buzz! Roughly one hundred million Americans are daily coffee drinkers—even more world-wide! Upwards of one billion pounds of coffee beans are consumed yearly by just America. So, where do all these beans come from? How are they grown?

The answer lies in the cloud forests of tropical countries such as Brazil and Kenya. A cloud forest is a jungle at high altitudes. Instead of getting rain, it is watered by clouds that float through it.

Cloud forests are threat-ened by a variety of things. Many people poach animals for medicine, or animal pelts. Deforestation is a major threat, with estimates of 11/2 acres of rainforest being cut down, per second! 

This Read Howler Monkey
lives in the cloud forests
of the Americas.

Even this nearly 400-pound silverback
gorilla needs your help!

Coffee plantations are a considerable part in this. Many coffee farmers strip a mountainside of its cloud forest in order to plant their coffee trees. Wild coffee trees naturally grow in the shade. When they are planted in the sun, they grow super fast and strip the land of its nutrients! A few years after the coffee trees are planted, the farmer is forced to move to a new lot of cleared cloud forest, because the sun-grown coffee trees suck out all the nutrients from the soil of the first lot.

A tree like this would take a few hundred years to grow back.

The cloud forest can't regrow on an abandoned coffee planation because the coffee trees have stripped the land of its nutrients. It takes a long while before bacteria and fungi have recycled the coffee trees and returned their nutrients to the soil, and even longer for the colossal jungle trees to regrow to their former majesty.

What can you do to help? There is an easy solution to the coffee issue: simply drink shade-grown coffee! Shade-grown coffee is grown in a cloud forest, rather then instead of a cloud forest. This not only allows the animals of the cloud forest to be more-or-less undisturbed, but the more-natural shade-grown coffee tree doesn't suck all the nutrients from the ground. Shade-growing also makes slower growing, which creates a denser, harder bean. Coffee roasters and coffee experts prefer a bean like this, as it makes for even more delicious coffee.

Most coffee shops offer shade-grown coffee. When you're drinking it, be sure to congratulate yourself on the eco-friendly, tastier way of life!

Influential Issues: Overfishing

Covering over 70% of our Earth, the oceans' waters hold amazing, beautiful, bountiful and just plain strange animals, and many other life forms besides!

...But what happens when the ocean begins to become... not bountiful? What happens when humans begin to realize that the fishes are getting scarce? 

Without these herring, it would be
very difficult for this whale and
many other animals to find food!

This goby is keeping watch for predators, 

while the shrimp next to it digs a hole.

When a predator comes, the shrimp gets the 

warning from the goby and both rush

into the hole!

Overfishing is the practice of taking too many fishes out of the ocean at once. When too many fishes are taken, not only does their overall number fall, but their ability to find appropri- ate mates in order to reproduce! This sets a chain reaction, because if one species of fish becomes endangered, then an entire line of marine animals could soon follow due to that one endangered fish not fulfilling its role in the ecosystem. 

Right now, the ocean's fishes are disappearing at an alarming rate. It is estimated that the large 'factory vessels' are fishing out what could be sustainably managed on two to three Earths! These factory boats are the size of football fields, staying out at sea for up to six months, and using advanced electronic equipment to track fish schools. They store thousands of tons of fishes in colossal freezer compartments on board. Also, cruel methods are used to catch the fish that often involve struggling for long periods of time and eventually bleeding to death.

Many factory vessels use huge nets—sometimes a mile wide!—to catch their target fish. However, as one can imagine, many other unintended marine animals are caught as well! The shrimp trawls, which are weighted nets that drag along the bottom of the ocean to scrape shrimp away, bring to the surface only ten percent shrimps! The other ninety percent of the haul is by-catch, which is thrown back into the water dead or soon to be.

Imagine swallowing that,
and how it would catch
your throat with its barb!

A sea turtle caught in a net.

What can you do to help? Certain species of fishes are sustainable to catch in large numbers! While we still need to monitor the numbers of these fishes and the by-catch, they are much better to eat than some others. The list below shows these sustainable species. The list has been kindly provided by the New England Aquarium conservation experts.

A Manta Ray has gotten
itself tangled.

A dolphin has gotten its head stuck.

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Wild caught: 

Pacific cod (longline, US)

Alaska Pollock

Alaska Salmon

Mahimahi (US) 

Pacific Halibut

Pacific Sardine

Sablefish (US)

Wahoo

Or farm-raised:

Arctic Char (Iceland, Norway, Canada, US)

Tilapia (US, South and Central America)

Hybrid Striped Bass

Rainbow Trout (US)

Sturgeon (US)

Catfish (US)

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Many humans have realized the issues with massive-scale fishing and worked to better it. One great new invention is the 'Turtle lights' which can decrease turtle catch by 60 percent! Yet another great invention was the 'Yamazaki Double-weight Branchline', which was invented by a Japanese tuna boat captain. This, paired with other devices, can reduce sea bird by-catch by almost 90 percent! Great job, captain!

Let's put in some effort to keep our fishy friends around.