Five in danger

YOU'VE got to feel sorry for the poor old hare. First it lost out in the speed stakes to a tortoise. Now it's been beaten hands down in popularity terms by, of all things, a ragworm.

Ragworms may well be, as York University's Prof Dave Raffaelli was trying to persuade us, vital to the planet's health - but they are hardly cute and cuddly. They are, in fact, slimy, off-white, segmented creatures with loads of legs which live deep in the mud of the sea-floor. Which surely makes them less appetising than even the most self-obsessed of jungle celebrities.

It is easy to learn too much about ragworms, too. Such as, for example, the fact that they are a potential source of food for hungry people. Prof Rafaelli knows this because he has eaten one.

"All you have to do is bite the head off and suck out the insides," he said, drawing a collective groan of disgust from his mainly youthful audience.

The ragworm and the hare were two of the species competing for the popular vote at a 'balloon' debate held yesterday at York University.

A 'balloon' debate is one of those formats popular with schoolteachers and the organisers of a certain type of school activity. You have to imagine you have a hot air balloon which is running out of hot air and so crashing towards earth. There are five people on board and you have to decide who to chuck over the side to save the rest. You do this repeatedly until you have a winner.

It's a popularity contest, in other words - not so much an I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here as an I'm A Celebrity Keep Me In Here.

National conservation charity Earthwatch holds such a debate every year, in which an audience of mainly schoolchildren and young people has to decide which of five endangered species is most worth saving.

Usually the debate is staged in London's Natural History Museum. Yesterday, in a break with tradition that may become an annual event, the charity, at the invitation of York University's environment department, staged an extra debate - the first it has held in the north.

The five 'celebrities' competing for the vote of schoolchildren and students were: the brown hare, the juniper tree, the nightjar, the ragworm and the sturgeon. They are all species which are either endangered or declining (except the ragworm, but more of that later).

Each had their 'champion' - a high-powered academic or naturalist whose job it was to persuade a fickle audience that their celebrity was the one most worth saving.

Looking at the cast list, you would have thought the brown hare had it sewn up. Few creatures are more cute and cuddly.

Dr Piran White, a senior lecturer in the environment department at York, clearly thought so. "Why should we save the brown hare?" he asked. "Look at this picture. Do we even need to ask the question?"

The audience was not going to be satisfied with such a blatant appeal to sentimentality. If Dr White wanted their vote, he was going to have work for it.

He did his best. The brown hare, he said, was not a native of Britain at all but had been introduced by the Romans 2,000 years ago, probably for sport, and had flourished, until the past half a century, when the growth of intensive agriculture had seen a drastic decline in numbers.

The key importance of the hare was that their presence indicated a diverse, environmentally-managed farmland, Dr White said. If they were allowed to die out, it would represent the triumph of intensive farming over the more traditional field and hedge farming that has for so many centuries been typical of our countryside.

A nice try. Sadly, Andy Byfield, landscape conservation manager with wild plant conservation charity Plantlife International, trumped it easily.

The juniper tree, which is also in decline, was every bit as much an indicator of a healthy, diverse and varied landscape as the brown hare, he told the audience. But it has an advantage the poor hare can't match - it's a vital ingredient in gin.

Andy plonked a large bottle down on the lectern in front of him. "I was going to start by offering to open a bottle," he said, to appreciative cheers. "But I tried that once before at a conference, and after you've had a couple of glasses..."

So the bottle remained unopened. Andy continued to shamelessly play the gin (and Martini) card, however, describing in loving detail his favourite recipe for the perfect gin cocktail. He even scored a below-the-belt point by claiming that for hare to be edible, it had to be flavoured with juniper berries.

What about the ecological and social importance of the juniper? It was a mini-habitat in itself, Andy said, being home to more than 40 species of insects. It was found in some of Britain's most ecologically valuable and endangered habitats - chalklands, coastal cliffs - and had been valued for centuries for its medicinal properties (the ancient Egyptians used it, apparently, to produce essential oils).

Then he played one final card - going for the sentimental vote. The juniper was like human beings, he said. It had roughly the same lifespan: and, like human beings, its sexual fertility declined sharply with age.

This is bad news for the juniper, because most of the trees in Britain are now getting on a bit. We have a population of juniper geriatrics and if something wasn't done soon, by 2065 when the last of them died off, the tree could have virtually disappeared.

Not so the nightjar. As the Evening Press reported earlier this year, it is making an astonishing comeback on the North York Moors.

But it is still on the decline elsewhere, insisted Barry Bishop of the York RSPB, threatened mainly by habitat loss (it prefers scrubby, open land - much of which was being lost until recently to conifer plantations, which it doesn't like.)

You can't eat nightjars, Barry agreed, and you can't make gin from them. But, apart from being a sign that we care about our environment, there are two other reasons for saving them.

The soft, churring call of the nightjar always used to be the classic sound of romantic summer evenings, Barry said. Nightjars were as English as Thomas Hardy - and it would be a sad day if they were ever to die out.

They are also important for another reason, Barry said - as a role model for today's generation of spoiled, self-centred young men.

Typically, nightjars raised two broods a year. The male would be left looking after the first brood while a newly pregnant female went off to establish a new nest for the second brood. Talk about being left holding the baby. But the males never seemed to complain, Barry said. "It's real teamwork!"

The ragworm is great at teamwork, too. It's not endangered, because there are literally billions of them seething in the mud on sea floors all over the world. But it is hugely important to the well-being of the planet.

The microscopic plankton (tiny creatures visible only through a microscope) that live in the waters of the world's oceans are responsible for regulating the climate of the planet, and with it the air we breathe, Prof Raffaelli, head of York's environment department, told the audience. They depend for their survival on nutrients in the sea.

It is the ragworms living in the mud of the seabed which, by their constant burrowing, stir up those nutrients so that they float in the water and can be consumed by the plankton.

No ragworms, no life on earth, in other words - at least, not as we know it. Wow. Top that.

Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at York University, promptly did. No sturgeon, he pointed out, no caviar (caviar is sturgeon's eggs). "Imagine a world where you can read about but never taste caviar," he said.

That didn't much impress his young audience - but his next tack did. Sturgeon, with their huge, armour-plated bodies (some weigh as much as rhinos) are the world's biggest freshwater fish. They look ancient, Prof Roberts said - and that's because they are. They're "living fossils" that have been around for 250 million years. "They swam in the same rivers and streams that dinosaurs paddled in," he said.

They are, however, under threat - especially the "caviar" sturgeon living in the Caspian Sea. Russian poachers catch them illegally to harvest their expensive caviar. Soon, if that trade isn't stopped, some species could die out altogether, said Prof Roberts.

"It would be appalling for us to lose them in our generation. It would be gross negligence on our part."

That was telling his audience. In York's balloon debate, substance won out over show. It was the unfancied ragworm and sturgeon which ran neck and neck at the front of the field for most of the debate. At the final count, the living fossil won out over the seabed-stirring worm.

And that's not something you often see on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.

Updated: 09:29 Wednesday, July 20, 2005