This species of Little Brown Bat was once common in the Northeast, but has been devastated by white-nose syndrome.
If you’ve ever tried to evict an unwelcome bat from your home, you know it can be tricky. If you haven’t, imagine trying to coax an agile mouse into a laundry basket. Now imagine that mouse has wings. Now imagine it has wings and sonar.
Chris Corben, a bat expert, doesn’t like the “mice with wings” analogy. He says bats are more like elephants (they have very low birth rates, he explains). But he agrees that they are difficult to catch, and it’s because of that “sonar.”
“You can’t just put a trap up in a field and expect to get anything,” says Corben. “Because of the bats’ echolocation system, they’re remarkably good at avoiding the traps.”
That “echolocation” is the way bats get around. They’re active mostly at night, when they can’t rely on their eyesight. So they send out a little “chirp.” Then they wait for that sound to bounce back at them. It tells them what’s nearby, or where they might find a tasty bug to eat. Continue Reading →
Wind turbines in West Texas help produce record amounts of electricity for the state.
Another record was set for wind power generation this week, according to the group that manages much of the state’s power. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) says Wednesday evening, wind power generation on the grid reached10,296 megawatts (MW), or enough to power 5 million Texas homes during times of regular demand. That beat the previous record of actual generation by 600 megawatts, roughly the equivalent of a medium-sized fossil fuel power plant.
A few hours later, early Thursday morning, almost a third of the power on the grid also came from wind power, primarily from turbines in the Panhandle and along the Gulf Coast. It’s the third time this month that wind generation broke previous records.
ERCOT credits both a breezy week and the recent addition of a transmission line project known as the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) that was designed to bring wind power from West Texas and the Panhandle to consumers in Central and North Texas. Continue Reading →
Photo by Al Hicks, NY Dept of Environ. Conservation.
A little brown bat found in a New York cave exhibits fungal growth on its muzzle, ears and wings.
Before Winifred Frick enters a bat cave in Wisconsin, she and her colleagues strip to their underwear and wipe themselves down with Lysol. When they leave, they bag everything up and wash it with Lysol as well.
“Spores can definitely get on peoples’ boots or pants or whatever, so it’s been really important that cavers, as well as researchers, do decontamination,” Frick, a bat researcher and adjunct professor at UC Santa Cruz, says.
She’s talking about the spores of a fungus that’s responsible for the deaths of millions of bats. It’s the cause of “white-nose syndrome,” so-called because of the white growth that appears on the noses of infected hibernating bats.
Researchers are still unclear about how the fungus kills bats, but it appears to wake them from hibernation, leaving them malnourished. Continue Reading →
Near oil spill off Galveston Island, crew prepares to deploy rapid response tracking buoy built by Texas A&M
There are over 500 clean-up crew members working in boats and on beaches near where the oil spilled near Texas City on Galveston Bay.
But determining where some of the oil might still go is being done by experts who aren’t nearby. They’re over 2,000 miles away.
Doug Helton is in Seattle, Washington.
He’s in the war room the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses to help coordinate oil spill responses nationwide.
 “The basic question is where’s the oil going to go, how’s it going to behave and what is it going to look like when it gets there, “ Helton told StateImpact Texas.
Landowner Julia Trigg Crawford on her family farm in Northeast Texas along the Oklahoma border.
A challenge to state law that allows private companies to take land for pipelines will not be heard by the Supreme Court of Texas. Julia Trigg Crawford, a Northeast Texas landowner has been fighting the controversial Keystone XL pipeline for several years. Crawford has lost several rounds and appeals in her case that argues her land had been illegally condemned through eminent domain by the pipeline company TransCanada.
As the case has made its way through the courts, TransCanada legally went ahead with construction and began operation of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline through Crawford’s land earlier this year.
“There is apparently a last ask we can make, to ask if the Supreme Court would reconsider their denial,” Crawford says. “But after that, there’s no other step in Texas court.”
Crews of workers line the Galveston coast in an attempt to contain the 168,000 gallon oil spill from Saturday.
Many fear that because the recent oil spill occurred in open water, the incident will have a greater impact than the 2010 BP spill.
A worker places oil absorbent snares on the beach on the east end of Galveston Island
Oil-coated trash litters the disaster-stricken coast. The highly pollutant oil — bunker fuel — poses severe risks for coastal wildlife.
As of Tuesday morning, TPWD reports that eight birds have been captured for treatment and 10 birds have been found dead.
Organizations such as the Houston Audubon Society search for and treat birds affected by the spill.
Responders load hundreds of feet of boom onto vessels.
An oil-soaked containment boom lies on the beach. More than 35,000 feet of boom has been deployed in response to the spill.
An aerial view of cleanup operations in the Houston Channel.
Responders are scrambling to contain the slimy mess left by an oil spill in Galveston Bay.
After a barge carrying tar-like heavy fuel collided with a vessel in the Houston Ship Channel on Saturday, cargo exports and imports have been put on hold. That’s raised concerns about the impact on Texas’ oil-dependent economy. The Coast Guard says parts of the channel have been re-opened to limited traffic, but the spill is also expected to have an environmental toll.
Mexican Free Tail bats leave the Ann Richards Bridge on their nightly hunt.
The Ann Richards Bridge in downtown Austin is home to the largest urban bat colony in North America. But it’s just one of many Texas bat colonies. In other parts of the country, bats have been decimated by a disease called “White Nose Syndrome.”
The bats in Texas appear untouched by the disease so far, but it is heading in this direction. Now, researchers think they have a powerful tool to track the spread of the disease. It all has to do with that little chirping you hear when you you see a bat in the air. Take a listen to the story:
Michael Fossum of the Austin Heritage Tree Foundation stands in front of the heritage Live Oak known as the "Taco Bell Tree." Fossum and his group fought to save the tree from being cut down for a traffic project. Now it's going to be moved across the street.
Back in the 1970s and ’80s, it probably looked like something out of Dazed and Confused. Teenagers pulling up in T-Birds, wind in their hair, to hang out in the parking lot of a Taco Bell. The sun would set in the Hill Country to the west, sending a glow through the branches of an old Live Oak tree. Today the Taco Bell and the teenagers are long gone, but the tree remains, affectionately known as the “Taco Bell Tree.”
It’s also now at an intersection best known for being a traffic nightmare – the Y at Oak Hill – where two highways intersect and a third road feeds into the jumble. In order to improve that intersection, the state embarked on a temporary plan to expand it that would help for the next five years, while something longer term is put into place. The plan included cutting down the Taco Bell Tree, which has been here long before drive-thrus (or even combustion engines). All right, all right, all right.
Texas trees have to be hardy. There are Live Oaks along the Gulf Coast that survived Hurricane Katrina while buildings around them toppled; those trees probably survived other storms long before that. But as the Lone Star State grows, it needs more roads. More homes. More developments. The big trees are now coming into conflict with a state that can’t help keep getting bigger. And the trees can either be cut down, built around, or, as in the case of the Taco Bell Tree, they can be moved. At a hefty price. Continue Reading →
Responders load hundreds of feet of boom onto vessels at the Texas City Dike in this U.S. Coast Guard photo taken March 23, 2014.
Two dozen boats and over 500 people are now involved in the response to an oil spill from Saturday that closed the Houston Ship Channel.
What spilled was a heavy fuel oil, called bunker fuel, which was carried in a barge that collided with a ship. Up to 168,000 gallons were dumped into the channel.
“Last ten years, I haven’t seen a spill like this,” says Larry McKinney, the head of a Gulf research institute at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. “Before that, we’d see them, seems like, every other year.”
McKinney knows a thing or two about the devastation of oil spills, having headed up natural resource protection for the State of Texas and working on spill prevention and response for decades.
“These spills here in Galveston are becoming less frequent. That’s the good thing,” he says.
A barge loaded with marine fuel oil sits partially submerged in the Houston Ship Channel in this U.S. Coast Guard picture taken March 22, 2014. The barge leaked oil into the Houston Ship Channel after colliding with another ship near Texas City on Saturday and emergency responders laid down floating barriers to contain the spill, U.S. Coast Guard officials said.
With no end in sight to containing a spill that may have dumped 150,000 gallons of fuel oil into Galveston Bay on Saturday, the hit to Texas’ economy and environment is already huge — and sure to grow.
The 50-mile Houston Ship Channel, one of the world’s biggest waterways for the transport of petroleum products, chemicals and other materials, remains shut down. Cruise ships can’t depart from key ports. Galveston Bay’s multibillion-dollar recreational and commercial fishing industry is off limits during a peak tourist season. And the scores of vulnerable species in Galveston Bay, most notably birds that are soon to begin their northward migration along the upper Texas coast, are at grave risk.
The type of oil that spilled — a marine fuel oil known as RMG 380 — is black, sticky and particularly heavy. That means that instead of evaporating from the surface of the water like gasoline would, much of it will sink, persisting in the environment for months or even years. While this heavier oil is not acutely toxic, it can smother wildlife, to devastating effect.
“Fuel oil is not easy to clean off anything,” said Jim Suydam, a spokesman for the General Land Office, the state agency that is leading the response and cleanup efforts in conjunction with the U.S. Coast Guard. “It sticks to things.” Continue Reading →
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