Toronto Zoo disclosed a cyberattack on Monday, after first detecting it last week and working to mitigate the impact. The zoo reassured the public that the attack did not impact animal wellbeing and support staff, but it was still determining possible consequences for human visitors. 

Canada's largest zoo is investigating the attacker's motives and possible damage to its systems. It's unclear if any guest, member, donor or employee records were impacted. Toronto Zoo did, however, say it does not store any credit card information, so past visitors wouldn't have to worry about that. The zoo remains open for normal operations, and its website is still up and running. 

"Unfortunately, these incidents are becoming more and more common and we are grateful we took steps over the past few years to upgrade our technology infrastructure," Toronto Zoo said in a statement. It contacted the city, local police and third-party experts to help with its investigations.

But questions remain, like why would attackers target a zoo? Money usually motivates hackers, and the zoo does bring in a lot. Besides millions in donations for various projects and government grants, it also generates revenue from its 750,000 visitors each year. 

Zoos have been a target of attacks in the past, too. A cyberattack hit ZooTampa in July 2023 and the Louisville Zoo in 2022, allegedly targeting visitors' personal information. In 2015, two dozen zoos in the United States faced a coordinated attack against a vendor going after visitor credit and debit card information. 

The man made flood that miraculously saved our heroes at the end of O Brother Where Art Thou were an actual occurrence in the 19th and 20th century — and a fairly common one at that — as river valleys across the American West were dammed up and drowned out at the altar of economic progress and electrification. Such was the case with Washington State's Elwha river in the 1910s. Its dam provided the economic impetus to develop the Olympic Peninsula but also blocked off nearly 40 miles of river from the open ocean, preventing native salmon species from making their annual spawning trek. However, after decades of legal wrangling by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the biggest dams on the river today are the kind made by beavers. 

In this week's Hitting the Books selection, Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World, University of Vermont conservation biologist Joe Roman recounts how quickly nature can recover when a 108-foot tall migration barrier is removed from the local ecosystem. This excerpt discusses the naturalists and biologists who strive to understand how nutrients flow through the Pacific Northwest's food web, and the myriad ways it's impacted by migratory salmon. The book as a whole takes a fascinating look at how the most basic of biological functions (yup, poopin!) of even just a few species can potentially impact life in every corner of the planet.   

Hatchette Books

Excerpted from by Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World by Joe Roman. Published by Hachette Book Group. Copyright © 2023 by Joe Roman. All rights reserved.

When construction began in 1910, the Elwha Dam was designed to attract economic development to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, supplying the growing community of Port Angeles with electric power. It was one of the first high-head dams in the region, with water moving more than a hundred yards from the reservoir to the river below. Before the dam was built, the river hosted ten anadromous fish runs. All five species of Pacific salmon — pink, chum, sockeye, Chinook, and coho — were found in the river, along with bull trout and steelhead. In a good year, hundreds of thousands of salmon ascended the Elwha to spawn. But the contractors never finished the promised fish ladders. As a result, the Elwha cut off most of the watershed from the ocean and 90 percent of migratory salmon habitat.

Thousands of dams block the rivers of the world, decimating fish populations and clogging nutrient arteries from sea to mountain spring. Some have fish ladders. Others ship fish across concrete walls. Many act as permanent barriers to migration for thousands of species.

By the 1980s, there was growing concern about the effect of the Elwha on native salmon. Populations had declined by 95 per cent, devastating local wildlife and Indigenous communities. River salmon are essential to the culture and economy of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. In 1986, the tribe filed a motion through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to stop the relicensing of the Elwha Dam and the Glines Canyon Dam, an upstream impoundment that was even taller than the Elwha. By blocking salmon migration, the dams violated the 1855 Treaty of Point No Point, in which the Klallam ceded a vast amount of the Olympic Peninsula on the stipulation that they and all their descendants would have “the right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds.” The tribe partnered with environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Seattle Audubon Society, to pressure local and federal officials to remove the dams. In 1992, Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act, which authorized the dismantling of the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams.

The demolition of the Elwha Dam was the largest dam-removal project in history; it cost $350 million and took about three years. Beginning in September 2011, coffer dams shunted water to one side as the Elwha Dam was decommissioned and destroyed. The Glines Canyon was more challenging. According to Pess, a “glorified jackhammer on a floating barge” was required to dismantle the two-hundred-foot impoundment. The barge didn’t work when the water got low, so new equipment was helicoptered in. By 2014, most of the dam had come down, but rockfall still blocked fish passage. It took another year of moving rocks and concrete before the fish had full access to the river.

The response of the fish was quick, satisfying, and sometimes surprising. Elwha River bull trout, landlocked for more than a century, started swimming back to the ocean. The Chinook salmon in the watershed increased from an average of about two thousand to four thousand. Many of the Chinook were descendants of hatchery fish, Pess told me over dinner at Nerka. “If ninety percent of your population prior to dam removal is from a hatchery, you can’t just assume that a totally natural population will show up right away.” Steelhead trout, which had been down to a few hundred, now numbered more than two thousand.

Within a few years, a larger mix of wild and local hatchery fish had moved back to the Elwha watershed. And the surrounding wildlife responded too. The American dipper, a river bird, fed on salmon eggs and insects infused with the new marine-derived nutrients. Their survival rates went up, and the females who had access to fish became healthier than those without. They started having multiple broods and didn’t have to travel so far for their food, a return, perhaps, to how life was before the dam. A study in nearby British Columbia showed that songbird abundance and diversity increased with the number of salmon. They weren’t eating the fish — in fact, they weren’t even present during salmon migration. But they were benefiting from the increase in insects and other invertebrates.

Just as exciting, the removal of the dams rekindled migratory patterns that had gone dormant. Pacific lamprey started traveling up the river to breed. Bull trout that had spent generations in the reservoir above the dam began migrating out to sea. Rainbow trout swam up and down the river for the first time in decades. Over the years, the river started to look almost natural as the sediments that had built up behind the dams washed downstream.

The success on the Elwha could be the start of something big, encouraging the removal of other aging dams. There are plans to remove the Enloe Dam, a fifty-four-foot concrete wall in northern Washington, which would open up two hundred miles of river habitat for steelhead and Chinook salmon. Critically endangered killer whales, downstream off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, would benefit from this boost in salmon, and as there are only seventy individuals remaining, they need every fish they can get.

The spring Chinook salmon run on the Klamath River in Northern California is down 98 percent since eight dams were constructed in the twentieth century. Coho salmon have also been in steep decline. In the next few years, four dams are scheduled to come down with the goal of restoring salmon migration. Farther north, the Snake River dams could be breached to save the endangered salmon of Washington State. If that happens, historic numbers of salmon could come back — along with the many species that depended on the energy and nutrients they carry upstream.

Other dams are going up in the West — dams of sticks and stones and mud. Beaver dams help salmon by creating new slow-water habitats, critical for juvenile salmon. In Washington, beaver ponds cool the streams, making them more productive for salmon. In Alaska, the ponds are warmer, and the salmon use them to help metabolize what they eat. Unlike the enormous concrete impoundments, designed for stability, beaver dams are dynamic, heterogeneous landscapes that salmon can easily travel through. Beavers eat, they build dams, they poop, they move on. We humans might want things to be stable, but Earth and its creatures are dynamic.

Whales face numerous threats from humans, not the least of which are ship collisions — the World Sustainability Organization estimates 18,000 to 25,000 animals die each year. There may be a technological way to minimize those deaths, however. Reutersreports Chile's government and the MERI Foundation have deployed the first smart buoy from the Blue Boat Initiative, an effort to both safeguard whales and track undersea ecosystems. The device, floating in the Gulf of Corcovado 684 miles away from Chile, alerts ships to nearby blue, humpback, right and sei whales to help avoid incidents. 

The technology uses oceanographic sensors and AI-powered Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment (LIDO) software to determine a waterborne mammal's type and location. It also checks the ocean's health by monitoring oxygen levels, temperature and other criteria. That extra data could help study climate change and its impact on sea life.

The Blue Boat Initiative currently aims to install six or more buoys to protect whales across the gulf. In the long term, though, project members hope to blanket the whales' complete migratory route between Antarctica and the equator. This could reduce collisions across the creatures' entire habitat, not to mention better inform government decisions about conservation and the environment.

The technology may be as important for humans as for the whales. On top of their roles in delicately balanced ecosystems, whales both help capture CO2 and redistribute heat through ocean currents. The more these animals are allowed to flourish, the better the ocean is at limiting global warming and its harmful effects.

As the boundaries between developed spaces and wildlands continue to blur, the frequency and intensity of human-animal interactions will surely increase. But it won’t just be adorably viral trash pandas and pizza rats whistling on your veranda — it’ll be 30-50 feral hogs in your garbage and birds of prey predating upon your precious pekinese. Next thing you know your daughter’s knocked up and the fine china’s missing! But it wasn’t always like this, Peter Alagona explains in his new book, The Accidental Ecosystem. He explores how and why America’s cities — once largely barren of natural features — have exploded with wildlife over the past 150 years, even as populations have declined in their traditional habitats.

In the excerpt below, Alagona examines our long and complicated relationships with the coyote, one that has lasted for millennia and ranged from reverence to revulsion, a narrative now influenced by the social media hivemind.

UC Press

Excerpted from The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities by Peter S Alagona, published by the University of California Press. © 2022 by Peter S Alagona.

Urban adapters and exploiters may be prepared for life among people, but are people prepared for life among them? In the 1970s and 1980s, when coyotes started showing up more often in dozens of American cities, residents and officials were unprepared, and many were unwilling to accommodate animals they saw as dangerous interlopers. As one teenager who lost her toy poodle to a coyote told the Los Angeles Times in 1980, “Coyotes make me mad. They take care of our rats, which are really disgusting. But I hate coyotes.” The same year, the Yale social ecology professor Stephen Kellert found that, among US survey respondents, coyotes ranked twelfth from the bottom on a list of “most liked” animals, above cockroaches, wasps, rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes but below turtles, butterflies, swans, and horses. The most-liked animal was the dog, which is so closely related to the coyote that the two can mate in the wild and produce fertile offspring.

In his 2010 book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight about Animals, the anthropologist Hal Herzog wrote that “the way we think about other species often defies logic.” This is not to say that our ideas about animals are arbitrary, but rather that the ways we think about them are shaped as much by history, culture, and psychology as by physics, chemistry, or biology. In the absence of this social context, people’s ideas about and actions toward other animals can seem nonsensical, hypocritical, or downright weird.

Animals are often presumed innocent or guilty — and thus treated with respect or contempt — based on the baggage our culture, through art or literature or tradition, has forced them to carry. An animal’s inherent or perceived qualities also matter. We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to creatures that are big, that we think are cute, pretty, majestic, or humanlike, that seem to embody admirable qualities such as grit, entrepreneurship, or good parenting, or that at the very least leave us alone. Yet such perceptions rarely reflect a species's real behavior or ecology. Many people see rats as disgusting or dangerous, even though most rats pose little threat to most people most of the time. Cats, meanwhile, seem friendly and cuddly despite being ferocious predators and disease-ridden ecological wrecking balls.

Mass and social media play especially important roles in shaping perceptions. When large and charismatic wildlife species started showing up in many American cities more frequently in the 1970s and 1980s, around the time of Kelly Keen’s death, newspapers and TV shows often adopted one of two tones: irony or sensationalism. Ironic images and stories emphasized how surprising it was to see wild animals showing up in supposedly civilized areas. Sensationalistic stories emphasized conflicts between people and wildlife. They often used military metaphors about wars and battles or echoed the paranoid, racist, and xenophobic tropes of the day, comparing wildlife to undocumented immigrants, gang members, criminals, terrorists, and “super predators.”

These images were circulating in the media during an era when the proportion of Americans with firsthand experiences of wild places was flattening or even declining. During the 1970s and 1980s, \consumer products and better infrastructure fueled the growth of outdoor sports, including non hunting wildlife activities like bird watching and photography. Yet technology, which enabled so many people to enjoy the outdoors, also began inserting itself into these same people’s encounters with nature, first mediating and then replacing them. Video screens allowed Americans to spend more time watching virtual creatures and less time interacting with actual animals. Animal-themed visual media exploded in popularity, while zoos and museums struggled to attract patrons. Between 1995 and 2014, even the National Park system saw its annual per capita visitation slide by 4 percent.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the people who encountered wildlife in cities often reacted by treating these animals like the caricatures they read about in the news or saw on TV. For many, creatures like coyotes looked like either cuddly pets or bloodthirsty killers. Neither image was accurate, of course, but both had real world consequences.

When people who viewed coyotes with suspicion saw them in urban areas, often the first thing they did was call the police. Involving the police tended to turn a non problem into a problem or make a bad problem worse. Yet moving away from a law-enforcement-based approach has been difficult.

As late as 2015, New York City, which saw its first coyote twenty years earlier, was still often approaching these creatures as outlaws. That April, the New York Police Department, responding to an early-morning 911 call reporting a coyote in Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, deployed tranquilizer guns, patrol cars, and helicopters. The ensuing three-hour chase ended when officers failed to corner the fugitive canine. When questioned about the costly and time-consuming incident, the NYPD contradicted a statement previously issued by the Department of Parks and Recreation saying that the city would no longer pursue coyotes that did not appear to pose a threat. It turned out that the two departments did not have a written agreement spelling out this policy. NYPD officers were not trained on how to deal with coyotes, but it was up to them to decide how to respond. The result was predictable: the same excessive force that has plagued modern policing in general was mobilized to combat a wild animal that presented little if any risk.

Over time, some cities and their residents adjusted to their new reality of living with coyotes. Jurisdictions with ample budgets, supportive residents, and helpful institutions like zoos and museums developed research, education, conservation, and citizen science programs. Some parks and police departments started working together to develop new policies and practices, limiting the use of force and trying, with some difficulty, to respond only to genuine emergencies. One of the key messages wildlife officials stressed was that the decision to launch a response should depend on an animal’s behavior — whether it appeared injured or sick or was acting aggressively — and not its mere presence.

As such messages have percolated, attitudes have evolved. In New York, as people have become more accustomed to living with coyotes, fear has given way to tolerance and even a tenuous kind of acceptance. In some neighborhoods, individual coyotes have become mascots with names, backstories, and social media accounts. Few people actually trust coyotes, and most people don’t want them prowling around their backyards, schools, or playgrounds, but many communities have shown a growing willingness to embrace their furry neighbors.

As early as 2008, studies from suburban New York showed that most residents appreciated coyotes, enjoyed having them around, and even “found the likelihood of injury from a coyote acceptable.” But people’s willingness to live alongside coyotes in their communities dropped quickly when incidents occurred, suggesting that tolerance for them remained fragile. Overall, however, the longer most people lived with urban wildlife like coyotes, the more they viewed these creatures not as threats but as natural and beneficial members of multispecies urban communities.

While we humans can't agree where we stand on tracking devices, one group of birds assertively came out against the technology. In The Conversation, Dominique Potvin, an Animal Ecology professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, said he and his team recently witnessed a mischief of magpies display a rare cooperative “rescue” behavior when they attempted to track the birds.

As part of their study, Potvin’s team developed a seemingly ingenious way of collecting data on a group of five magpies. They developed a lightweight but tough harness the birds could wear like backpacks and carry a small tracker with them as they went about their daily lives. They also created a feeding station that would wirelessly charge and download data from the trackers. It even had a magnet for freeing the birds of the harness. “We were excited by the design, as it opened up many possibilities for efficiency and enabled a lot of data to be collected,” Potvin said.

Unfortunately, the study fell apart in mere days. Within 10 minutes of Potvin’s team fitting the final tracker, they saw a female magpie use her bill to remove a harness off of one of the younger birds. Hours later, most of the other test subjects had been freed of their trackers too. By day three, even the most dominant male in the group had allowed one of his flock to assist him.

“We don’t know if it was the same individual helping each other or if they shared duties, but we had never read about any other bird cooperating in this way to remove tracking devices,” Potvin said. “The birds needed to problem solve, possibly testing at pulling and snipping at different sections of the harness with their bill. They also needed to willingly help other individuals, and accept help.”

According to Potvin, the only other example they could find of that kind of behavior among birds involved Seychelles warblers who helped their flockmates escape from sticky Pisonia seed clusters. Visit The Conversation to read the full story.