- Author: Anne Lombardo
There is a new predator in the forest these days. It has arisen quietly over the years. Any wildlife feeling hungry when they come upon it in the Sierra is vulnerable. This predator is amazingly small for the scope of its damage; it can’t run fast or climb high.
This new predator is rodenticide in pellet form, used in violation of all safe-use regulations in our national forests by large-scale marijuana growers. Rodenticides are being used to protect young and tasty marijuana seedlings from wildlife roaming through the forest looking for a meal. Chemicals never meant to be used more than 50 feet from homes are now scattered across forest hillsides. Piles of poisons are left around hundreds of plants even though only a few...
- Author: Iqbal Pittalwala
Ants can be a huge nuisance in and outside our homes, particularly if you have food lying around. But now, it turns out, they’re unwelcome, too, on citrus trees.
A year ago, UC Riverside entomologists released Tamarixia, a parasitoid wasp and natural enemy of the Asian citrus psyllid (ACP) imported from Pakistan, into a biocontrol grove in Riverside, Calif. Tamarixia can serve as an excellent biocontrol agent against ACP, a citrus pest first detected in 2008 in Southern...
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
The rotten-egg stink that invaded Southern California in September was blamed by scientists on an unfortunate combination of a large fish die-off in the Salton Sea, a storm churning the fetid lower levels of the sea and unusual gusts from the southeast blowing the odors toward Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Times.
That was just latest episode in a series of environmental woes for the lake that formed 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles in 1905 when the Colorado River flooded the Sonoran Desert. Now the Salton Sea is mainly fed by fresh water drainage from nearby farms and waste water...
- Author: Aubrey White
Approximately every ten years, the research team at the Russell Ranch Sustainable Agriculture Facility at UC Davis gets the chance to dig deep into their research material to help answer questions about the long-term sustainability of agricultural systems.
With a steel probe attached to the back of a tractor, the team digs three meters deep to take soil samples at 432 different points around the 72-acre field. The initiative takes the team nearly a month to complete, and the information in each soil core can answer major research questions...
- Author: Katherine E. Kerlin
Decades of extreme weather crippled, and ultimately decimated, first the political culture and later the human population of the ancient Maya, according to a study by an interdisciplinary team of researchers that includes two University of California, Davis, scientists.
Now, for the first time, researchers have combined a precise climatic record of the Maya environment with a precise record of Maya political history to provide a better understanding of the role weather had in the civilization’s downfall.
Their findings are published in the Nov. 9, 2012, issue of the...