Yesterday we introduced you to four new species of Anniella, or legless lizards, found here in California.

The creatures, previously thought to be categorized under one species known as Anniella pulchra, were described in yesterday’s publication as separate, new species with their own name, range and type locality. Each species was named after a California naturalist that had some association with UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ), home of co-author Ted Papenfuss; and the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), where co-author James Parham (now at Cal State Fullerton) was a PhD student. The biographies behind these taxonomic namesakes offer a fascinating glimpse into the history and impact of the museums. We thought we’d reveal their stories here today.

Anniella alexanderae is named after Annie Alexander. According to the MVZ website,

She was a naturalist, an intrepid explorer, and an extraordinary patron at a time when women did not have the right to vote and few had any involvement with the world outside their homes.

In 1908, Alexander donated $1 million in an endowment for the creation of the MVZ. The gray-bellied Anniella alexanderae is found in the southwestern San Joaquin Valley, near the town of Taft.

Alexander hired MVZ’s first director, Joseph Grinnell. The recently named purple-bellied species, Anniella grinnelli, is named after him. Even in the 1930s, Grinnell was concerned about conservation. From MVZ’s website:

As a visionary, he could see that the rich and unique vertebrate fauna of California was under siege from increasing impacts of human population growth and unsustainable land use practices.

Anniella grinnelli was discovered in a vacant lot behind the Home Depot in Bakersfield a few years ago. That lot is now developed. In yesterday’s paper, the authors placed the type locality for this species in a reserve that has been set aside to protect the endangered Bakersfield cactus.

Charles Camp was an undergraduate under Joseph Grinnell at the MVZ and later became director of UCMP, which was also created by Annie Alexander. Anniella campi, a yellow-bellied lizard with a double stripe, is named after Camp. In 1915, at the ripe age of 20, the young Camp discovered a new salamander species in California—“a major discovery because its nearest relative was found in Italy!” exclaims Papenfuss.

Anniella campi has the smallest range of all of the new California legless lizard species, occurring in just a few canyons that drain out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and into the Mojave Desert. Papenfuss describes it as a relict: “It dispersed long, long ago when there were moister conditions.”

The yellow-bellied Anniella stebbinsi is named after Robert Stebbins, a herpetologist at MVZ, who was Papenfuss’s advisor. Stebbins, now 98 years old, grew up in the Santa Monica Mountains in southern California. It’s fitting, then, that Anniella stebbinsi’s range is the southern-most of the five California species.

Its type locality is at Los Angeles International Airport—no kidding. “The west side of the main runway at LAX,” Papenfuss confirms. “There are big sand dunes between the runway and the ocean, and the sand dunes are protected due to an endangered butterfly that lives there and nowhere else.” That’s good fortune for Anniella stebbinsi, too. “Everything else around that area is urban sprawl.”

Fascinating reptiles deserve fascinating names and homes!

Anniella grinnelli image: Alex Krohn

“You don’t have to go to remote places to find biodiversity,” says UC Berkeley’s Ted Papenfuss. “California has so much biodiversity we’re not even aware of.”

Papenfuss is talking about several new, colorful species of legless lizards that he and California State Fullerton’s Jim Parham describe in a new paper, out today in Breviora, a Harvard publication.

Legless lizards, or Anniella, are “cuter than snakes,” says Parham and also distinctive from the other, better-known legless reptiles. For example, “Anniella have eyelids—snakes don’t,” Parham explains. “Legless lizards, like other lizards, can also lose their tails to escape other predators,” adds Papenfuss. “Snakes unhinge their lower jaws to eat their food whole. Lizards, including Anniella, have to chew their food.”

Parham and Papenfuss published a paper in 2009 about a known California species, Anniella pulchra. Through genetic testing of new specimens and museum collections, including the Academy’s, they determined that there are likely more than just the one species of legless lizard here in California. Today’s paper describes four new species.

Confirming the previous genetic work, the team identified Anniella alexanderae, Anniella campi, Anniella grinnelli and Anniella stebbinsi, each occupying a distinct geographical range. The previously known species—Anniella pulchra—has a yellow belly, and the new species have yellow, silver, or purple bellies. The new species can be further distinguished visually by their number of scales or vertebrae. But, the main difference is determined by DNA, which shows that these species diverged from each other millions of years ago.

As Papenfuss noted above, biodiversity can hide in the most obvious places (such as California), but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find. The trick with these animals is they live underground. They can often be found under logs or leaf litter where there will be some dampness and insects to eat. But, logs and leaf litter aren’t always present in the sand dunes, deserts and grasslands Anniella prefer.

So Papenfuss invented his own “litter”—literally, says Parham. “He’s essentially littering, with permission.” Papenfuss admits he “dumpster dives” on the UC Berkeley campus looking for cardboard. He uses the flattened pieces as man-made leaf litter in the places he thinks Anniella like to hide and leaves the litter out for months as at time. However, he learned quickly to cover the cardboard with some tarpaper, because cows were eating the uncovered cardboard.

Despite today’s publication, Papenfuss isn’t finished dumpster diving. “This is only the beginning of the story,” Parham says. “We need to further study each species’ distribution. At this point, each species has quite small ranges and if that’s truly the case, more monitoring of their habitat needs to be done. If we lose those small spaces, we’ll lose those species.”

Citing human development such as urbanization, agriculture, and oil/gas exploration as threats to the species, the team realizes they’ll have to work quickly to determine where these species occur and how to protect them and their habitats.

By the way, do the new species’ names sound familiar? Each is named after a famous California naturalist—tomorrow we’ll look at the namesakes and ranges for each new species.

Image: James Parham

The court’s denial doesn’t mean the injunction will stay out of the courts completely, but it’s a great first step to strengthening the ban that prevents shark fins to be sold and served in restaurants in California.

AB 376 was introduced at the Academy nearly two years ago and passed both houses with support from the Asian-American community, WildAid, Shark Stewards and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Governor Jerry Brown signed it into law in the fall of 2011.

The injunction was filed last summer by Bay Area organizations concerned with discrimination against Chinese-Americans, loss of income, and lack of proof that consuming shark fins actually endangers all species of sharks.

In Judge Hamilton’s decision, she addressed all of their concerns as she denied their claims. From the court order:

Plaintiffs’ own evidence shows that only a small percentage of Chinese-Americans eat shark fin soup regularly, and that approximately half of Chinese-Americans actually support the Shark Fin Law…

As for plaintiffs’ claim that the Law does nothing to protect sharks, the evidence provided by the defendant-intervenors and by amici provides strong support for defendants’ contention that the Law is intended to protect and conserve sharks and the marine ecosystems dependent on them by means of regulating local market conditions, which laws targeting the actual practice of shark finning in domestic waters alone do not address.

The “amici” Judge Hamilton refers to is the amicus curiae, in this case a brief written by McCosker, providing scientific evidence to the importance of all sharks and the harm that comes to them from shark finning. From that document:

Shark populations throughout the world’s oceans have dramatically decreased in recent years. One study estimates a decrease of 90% or more in shark populations, from their historical abundance… The rate of population decline for sharks has become more rapid during the last decade, due to the increasing value of shark fins.

In fact, the Pew Charitable Trust estimates that up to 73 million sharks per year are killed, primarily for their fins.

Beyond losing the sharks, McCosker detailed their importance to the larger ocean ecosystem in the brief:

As apex predators, sharks play an important ecological role. In particular, shark predation keeps populations of prey species in check, maintaining balance in marine ecosystems.

Before the ban was implemented, California was the second largest importer of shark fins, behind China. Banning shark fins worldwide still has a long way to go—last week new images surfaced of thousands of fins drying on Hong Kong rooftops and the Huffington Post ran a passionate argument to ban shark fin products in New York. But as McCosker says, it’s an important step in the right direction.

Image: Steve Corey/Flickr

California’s Channel Islands, a group of eight islands just off the coast of southern California, house one of the richest and most diverse collections of land and marine animals anywhere in the world. But a new discovery into the island’s ancient past reveals a rich history of human settlement as well.

In a new study published last week in the journal Science, a team of archaeologists, led by the University of Oregon and the Smithsonian Institution, has unearthed a massive collection of stone tools that date back to the islands’ earliest American Indian settlers.

Excavations at three sites on Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands yielded scores of projectile points and oddly shaped tools called “crescents.”  In many cases, these tools were so delicate that there’s only one place they could have been used: underwater.

“This is among the earliest evidence of seafaring and maritime adaptations in the Americas,” said Jon Erlandson, executive director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon and one of the paper’s co-authors. “The points we’re finding are extraordinary, the workmanship amazing. It’s a very sophisticated chipped-stone technology.”

These tools date to between 12,200 and 11,400 years ago, several thousand years after the first Americans are believed to have crossed the Bering Strait from Asia in present-day Alaska. When the first people arrived at the Channel Islands, they weren’t islands at all, but one large island surrounded by shallow sea. Sea levels in this region were about 200 feet lower than they are today, and the islands were connected to each other.

What makes these archaeological finds so exciting to researchers is not only their abundance and preservation, but their style. The delicate stemmed and crescent tools are entirely unlike the more well known Clovis point technology found throughout much of North America. The Channel Islands’ discovery lends credence to an increasingly popular idea: the makers of the maritime tools took a more coastal path from Alaska than their Clovis-making counterparts.

Several years ago, Erlandson proposed the idea of a “kelp highway,” from Japan to California, rich in marine life such as seals, seabirds, and fish. Could the Channel Islands settlers be the descendants of these early travelers?

While many questions remain, this and previous discoveries on the Channel Islands have given archaeologists a considerably better understanding about the earliest settlers of coastal California. “[This discovery] shows that very early on, New World coastal peoples were hunting such animals and birds with sophisticated technologies that appear to have been refined for life in coastal and aquatic habitats,” said Torben C. Rick, curator of North American Archaeology at the Smithsonian and one of the paper’s co-authors.

But uncovering how and when these settlers arrived will require more digging. Erlandson and Rick hope to head back to the island in search of earlier sites, retracing these coastal peoples’ steps up the coast of California.

Anne Holden, a docent at the California Academy of Sciences, is a PhD trained genetic anthropologist and science writer living in San Francisco.

Image courtesy of Jon Erlandson

But what about the opposite? The US Geological Survey had a conference and issued a press release this month about preparing for severe flooding in our state. Flooding that could cause more damage and be even deadlier than a large earthquake.

What the what? How is this possible?

Atmospheric rivers, my friend, atmospheric rivers.

According to NOAA:

Atmospheric Rivers are narrow corridors of concentrated moisture in the atmosphere and are a key process linking weather and climate. When atmospheric rivers strike land, they produce flooding rains that can disrupt travel, induce mud slides, and cause catastrophic damage to life and property.

The USGS goes on to say that atmospheric rivers are:

a hurricane-like phenomenon that occurs on the west coast.

And the Sacramento Bee defines the phenomenon this way:

a focusing of high-powered winds that drag a fire hose of tropical moisture across the Pacific Ocean, pointed directly at California for days on end.

The big, wet storms we had in northern and southern California in December were due to a series of atmospheric rivers, but apparently only a tame series.

It can get much worse, says USGS,

Beginning on Christmas Eve, 1861, and continuing into early 1862, an extreme series of storms lasting 45 days struck California. The storms caused severe flooding, turning the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea. A storm comparable to that of 1861-1862 could occur again.

“We think this event happens once every 100 or 200 years or so, which puts it in the same category as our big San Andreas earthquakes,” stated Lucy Jones, chief scientist of the USGS Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project, in the recent press release.

To prepare for a storm of this magnitude and greater, USGS has created a model scenario called ARkStorm. The scenario estimates that California’s flood protection system would be overwhelmed and more than $300 billion in damage would result. That could be worse than a large earthquake.

Being prepared is the key.

“The time to begin taking action is now, before a devastating natural hazard event occurs,” said USGS Director, Marcia McNutt. “This scenario demonstrates firsthand how science can be the foundation to help build safer communities. The ARkStorm scenario is a scientifically vetted tool that emergency responders, elected officials and the general public can use to plan for a major catastrophic event to help prevent a hazard from becoming a disaster.”

Image of Sacramento in early 1862 courtesy of the Center for Sacramento History

And, if some people have their way, it will become your new national park.

As the Sacramento Bee wrote last week, this is an ambitious, “purely academic plan” right now, developed by John Bass, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. He has set up a website to start speculation and conversation about the possibilities.

The plan offers several innovations on the typical national park model. Levee ownership would change, but other land ownership would not. There would be your typical national park lodge, but during part of the year, it would house migrant workers.

Sarah Lewis, a graduate student at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, is writing her dissertation on land-use in the Delta, past, present and future. When we asked her about the concept of the Delta National Park, it was the first she’d heard of it. “The approach is entirely novel. It would be great for the ecosystem and just what the species need,” she said. “But it wouldn’t be a national park like Yosemite. There would still be privately owned land and water could still flow freely. How would it really change things? Would there be any pesticide restrictions? My main question would be, by making it a national park, what would be different? “

With all of the political wrangling around the Delta, a national park designation seems all but impossible.

Yet, the state is planning to apply to Congress to make the Delta the state’s first National Heritage Area, with the National Park Service in a purely advisory role. A regional trail system is also in the works.

Perhaps these are both first steps in the direction of a new national park? Maybe it’s not so impossible after all.

Working with locals, he’s organizing conservation efforts up and down the Pacific coast of Mexico. His work is amazing and inspiring.