Conservation | Popular Science

In an era of climate change, Alaska’s predators fall prey to politics

Lois Parshley / Grist — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 17:00:00 +0000

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, a recent cull reduced an area’s bear population by 74 percent, though no baseline studies to determine their numbers were conducted there. Deposit Photos

This article was originally featured on Grist.

As spring arrived in southwestern Alaska, a handful of people from the state Department of Fish and Game rose early and climbed into small airplanes. Pilots flew through alpine valleys, where ribs of electric green growth emerged from a blanket of snow. Their shadows crisscrossed the lowland tundra, where thousands of caribou had gathered to calve. Seen through the windscreen, the vast plains can look endless; Wood-Tikchik State Park’s 1.6 million acres comprise almost a fifth of all state park land in the United States.

As the crew flew, it watched for the humped shape of brown bears lumbering across the hummocks. When someone spotted one, skinny from its hibernation, the crew called in the location to waiting helicopters carrying shooters armed with 12-gauge shotguns.

Over the course of 17 days, the team killed 94 brown bears—including several year-old cubs, who stuck close to their mothers, and 11 newer cubs that were still nursing—five black bears and five wolves. That was nearly four times the number of animals the agency planned to cull. Fish and Game says this reduced the area’s bear population by 74 percent, though no baseline studies to determine their numbers were conducted in the area.

The goal was to help the dwindling number of Mulchatna caribou by reducing the number of predators around their calving grounds. The herd’s population has plummeted, from 200,000 in 1997 to around 12,000 today. But the killings set off a political and scientific storm, with many biologists and advocates saying the operation called into question the core of the agency’s approach to managing wildlife, and may have even violated the state constitution.

The Board of Game, which has regulatory authority over wildlife, insisted that intensive control of predators in Wood-Tikchik was the best way to support the struggling herd. But the caribou, which provide essential food and cultural resources for many Alaska Native communities, are facing multiple threats: A slew of climate-related impacts have hampered their grazing, wildfires have burned the forage they rely on, warmer winters may have increased disease, and thawing permafrost has disrupted their migrations.

With conditions rapidly changing as the planet warms, wildlife managers nationwide are facing similar biodiversity crises. Rather than do the difficult work of mitigating rising temperatures, state agencies across the country are finding it easier to blame these declines on predation.

“We don’t want to talk about how the tundra is changing, because that’s something we can’t fix,” says Christi Heun, a former research biologist at Alaska Fish and Game.

In Wyoming, where a deadly winter decimated pronghorn and mule deer, the state spent a record $4.2 million killing coyotes and other predators and is considering expanding bear and mountain lion hunts. Wildlife officials in Washington are contemplating killing sea lions and seals to save faltering salmon populations from extinction. In Minnesota, hunters are inaccurately blaming wolves for low deer numbers and calling for authorities to reduce their population. Culls like these are appealing because they are tangible actions—even when evidence suggests the true threat is much more complex. “You’re putting a Band-Aid on the wrong elbow,” says Heun, who now works for the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife.

As the climate crisis intensifies, she and others say, wildlife management strategies need to shift too. “All we can do is just kind of cross our fingers and mitigate the best we can,” she adds. For people whose job is to control natural systems, “that’s a hard pill to swallow.”

In January 2022, a flurry of snow fell as the Alaska Board of Game gathered in Wasilla, far from where the Mulchatna caribou pawed through drifts, steam rising from their shaggy backs. Its seven members are appointed by the governor. Though they make important decisions like when hunting seasons open, how long they last, and how many animals hunters can take, they are not required to have a background in biology or natural resources. They also do not have to possess any expertise in the matters they decide. Board members, who did not respond to requests for comment, tend to reflect the politics of the administration in office; currently, under Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy, they are sport hunters, trappers, and guides.

That day, the agenda included a proposal to expand a wolf control program from Wood-Tikchik onto the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge—though that would require federal approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; the government ultimately rejected the proposal.

The conversation began with two Fish and Game biologists summarizing their research for the board on the herd. Nick Demma explained that, like most ungulates, on average half of Mulchatna’s calves survive. In a study he conducted, many died within two weeks of birth; he mentioned as an aside that their primary predators are brown bears. “But I want to stress that this basic cause of death and mortality rate information is of little use,” he quickly added. Predator and prey dynamics are complex: The calves may have died anyway from injury or disease, and their removal may reduce competition for food and resources, improving the herd’s overall health.

When Demma tried to analyze the existing wolf control program, he found he didn’t have the data he needed to see if removing the canines helped calves survive. In fact, from 2010 to 2021, when Fish and Game was actively shooting wolves, fewer caribou survived. So the researchers turned their attention to other challenges the herd might be facing.

His colleague, Renae Sattler, explained that preliminary data from a three-year study suggested there could be a problem with forage quality or quantity, especially in the summer. This could lower pregnancy rates or increase disease and calf mortality. In the 1990s, the herd had swelled as part of a natural boom-and-bust cycle, leading to overgrazing. The slow-growing lichen the animals rely on takes 20 to 50 years to recover. Compounding that, climate change is altering the tundra ecosystem the animals rely upon. She also found that today, 37 percent of the sampled animals had, or were recently exposed to, brucellosis, which can cause abortions, stillbirths, and injuries. Biologists consider such high levels of disease an outbreak and cause for concern.

Sattler also noted that half of the animals that died in the study’s first year were killed by hunters taking them out of season—meaning the predators killing the most adult caribou were people. For all these reasons, the biologists suggested that the Board of Game reconsider the wolf control program.

Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang, who oversees the agency, immediately questioned their conclusions, and their recommendation. Killing predators, he said during the meeting, “seems like one of the only things that’s within our direct control.” In other words, it was better than doing nothing.

Demma seemed taken aback, and chose his words carefully. “I guess what we are kind of trying to present there is just the information,” he told the board. “It’s—you know—wolves aren’t an important factor right now.” The meeting broke for lunch. When it resumed, the board unanimously voted to continue the wolf program through 2028, and, even more surprisingly, to add brown and black bears over a larger area. The public and Fish and Game biologists didn’t have the typical opportunity to comment on this expansion of predator control.

When he heard what happened, “I just was stunned. I was shocked,” says Joel Bennett, a lawyer and a former member of the Board of Game for 13 years. A hunter himself, Bennett served on the board under four governors and recalls his colleagues having a greater diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. Their votes were always split, even on less contentious issues. The unanimous vote “in itself indicates it’s a stacked deck,” he says. That’s a problem, because “the system only works fairly if there is true representation.”

In August, Bennett and the Alaska Wildlife Alliance filed a lawsuit claiming the agency approved the operation without the necessary “reasoned decision-making,” and without regard for the state’s due process requirements. Bennett also was troubled that the state has tried to keep information about the cull private, including where the bears were killed. He suspects that, to have slain so many animals in just 17 days, the flights might have veered beyond the targeted area. He also wonders if any animals were left wounded. “Why are they hiding so many of the details?” he asked. A public records request reveals that although the board expected the removal of fewer than 20 bears, almost five times that many were culled without any additional consideration.

Alaska’s wildlife is officially a public resource. Provisions in the state constitution mandate game managers provide for “sustained yields,” including for big game animals like bears. That sometimes clashes with the Dunleavy administration’s focus on predator control. In 2020, for example, the board authorized a no-limit wolf trapping season on the Alexander Archipelago, a patchwork of remote islands in southeast Alaska. It resulted in the deaths of all but five of the genetically distinct canines. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance sued, a case Bennett is now arguing before the state Supreme Court. “That was a gross violation of ‘sustained yield’ in anyone’s definition,” he says, adding that even today, there is no limit on trapping wolves there.

Once, shooting bison from moving trains and leaving them to rot was widely accepted. Attitudes have evolved, as have understandings about predators’ importance—recent research suggests their stabilizing presence may play a crucial role in mitigating some of the effects of climate change. Other studies show predators may help prey adapt more quickly to shifting conditions. But Bennett worries that, just as Alaska’s wildlife faces new pressures in a warming world, management priorities are reverting to earlier stances on how to treat animals. “I’ve certainly done my time in the so-called ‘wolf wars,’” Bennett says, “but we’re entering a new era here with other predators.”

Even as legal challenges to the board’s decisions move forward, scientific debate over the effectiveness of predator control has flourished. Part of the problem is that game management decisions are rarely studied in the way scientists would design an experiment. “You’ve got a wild system, with free-ranging animals, and weather, and other factors that are constantly changing,” says Tom Paragi, a wildlife biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game. “It’s just not amenable to the classic research design.” Even getting baseline data can take years, and remote areas like Wood-Tikchik, which is accessible only by air or boat, are challenging and expensive places to work.

Paragi has for more than a decade monitored the state’s intensive wildlife management programs and believes predator control can be effective. Looking at data collected since 2003, he notes that when Alaska culled wolves in four areas in a bid to bolster moose, caribou, and deer populations, their numbers increased. They also remained low in those areas where wolves were left alone. (His examination of this data has not yet been published or subject to peer review.) Elsewhere in the state, removing 96 percent of black bears in 2003 and 2004, reducing hunting, and killing wolves boosted the number of moose. Heavy snowfall during the next two winters killed many of the calves, and most of the bears returned within six years, but Paragi still considers the efforts a success. By 2009, the moose population had almost doubled.

He’s also not convinced that Demma and Sattler were right when they told board members that predation doesn’t appear to be the most pressing issue for the Mulchatna caribou. He says record salmon runs have likely brought more bears near the park and the calving grounds, and warmer temperatures have fostered the growth of vegetation that provides places to hide as they stalk caribou. As to the suggestion that the herd is suffering from inadequate food supplies, he notes that their birth rate has been high since 2009. That’s often a strong indicator of good nutrition.

But Sattler says, “It isn’t that cut-and-dried.” A female caribou’s body condition, she explains, exists on a spectrum and affects her survival, the size and strength of any calves, and how long she can nurse or how quickly she gets pregnant again. “The impact of nutrition is wide-reaching and complex, and it isn’t captured in pregnancy rates alone.” Understanding how nutrition, brucellosis, and other factors are impacting the herd is complicated, she says.

There are a lot of interacting factors at play on the tundra—and among those trying to determine how best to help the herd. “Part of the frustration on all sides of this is that people have different value systems related to managing wild systems,” Paragi says. To him, last spring’s bear kill wasn’t truly a question of science. “We can present the data, but what you do with the data is ultimately a political decision,” he says.

Sterling Miller, a retired Fish and Game research biologist and former president of the International Association for Bear Research and Management, acknowledges that crafting regulations is left to the politically appointed Board of Game. But Miller says the agency tends to dismiss criticism of its predator control, when there are valid scientific questions about its effectiveness. In 2022, Miller and his colleagues published an analysis, using Fish and Game harvest data, showing that 40 years of killing predators in an area of south-central Alaska didn’t result in more harvests of moose. “Fish and Game has never pointed out any factual or analytical errors in the analyses that I’ve been involved with,” he says. “Instead, they try to undercut our work by saying it’s based on values.”

Miller also was involved in what remains one of the agency’s best examples of predator relocations. In 1979, he and another biologist moved 47 brown bears out of a region in south-central Alaska, which resulted in a “significant” increase in the survival of moose calves the next fall. But Miller says Fish and Game often misquotes that work. In reality, due to a lack of funding, Miller didn’t study the young animals long enough to see if they actually reached adulthood. Similarly, Fish and Game conducted an aerial survey this fall of the Mulchatna herd, finding more calves survived after the bear cullings. But Miller and other biologists say that’s not the best metric to measure the operation’s success: These calves may still perish during their first winter.

The Alaskan government is the only one in the world whose goal is to reduce the number of brown bears, Miller says, despite the absence of baseline studies on how many bears are in this part of the state. It irks him that the state continues to use his research as justification for allowing predator measures like bear baiting. In most parts of Alaska, Miller says, “the liberalization of bear hunting regulations has just been so extreme.”

While last year’s bear killings were particularly egregious, similar cullings have gone largely unnoticed. State data shows over 1,000 wolves and 3,500 brown and black bears have been killed since 2008 alone. In 2016, for example, the federal government shared radio tag information with the state, which used it to kill wolves when they left the safety of the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve—destroying so many packs that it ended a 20-year study on predator-prey relationships. “There weren’t enough survivors to maintain a self-sustaining population,” recounted an investigation by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The nearby caribou herd still failed to recover.

Multiple employees for Fish and Game, who didn’t want to be named amid fear of repercussions, told Grist that the agency was ignoring basic scientific principles, and that political appointees to the Board were not equipped to judge the effectiveness of these programs.

Even these criticisms of the agency’s science have been subject to politics: This summer, a committee of the American Society of Mammalogists drafted a resolution speaking out about Alaska’s predator control—only for it to be leaked to Fish and Game, which put up enough fuss that it was dropped. Link Olson, the curator of mammals at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, was one of many who supported the group taking a position on the issue. Olson says that even as someone who “actively collect[s] mammal specimens for science,” he is deeply concerned with Alaska’s approach to managing predators.

A month later, 34 retired wildlife managers and biologists wrote an open letter criticizing the bear cull and calling the agency’s management goals for the Mulchatna herd “unrealistic.” Meanwhile, neither Demma nor Sattler, the biologists who cautioned the board, are still studying the herd; Demma now works in a different area of the agency, and Sattler has left the state and taken a new job, for what she says are a variety of reasons.

Every fall, millions of people follow a live-streamed view of the biggest bears in Katmai National Park, which sits southeast of Wood-Tikchik. The animals jockey for fish before their hibernation, in an annual bulking up that the National Park Service has turned into a playful competition, giving the bears nicknames like “Chunk,” and, for a particularly large behemoth, 747.

Though marked on maps, animals like 747 don’t know where the comparative safety of the national park ends and where state management begins. This can mean the difference between life and death, as Alaskan and federal agencies have taken very different approaches to predator control: The National Park Service generally prohibits it. This has sparked a years-long federalism battle. Back in 2015, for example, the Board of Game passed a rule allowing brown bear baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, leading the Fish and Wildlife Service to ban it in 2016. The state sued, and in 2020 the Trump administration proposed forcing national wildlife refuges to adopt Alaska’s hunting regulations. Similarly, the National Park Service challenged whether it had to allow practices like using spotlights to blind and shoot hibernating bears in their dens in national park preserves. In 2022, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal agencies have ultimate authority over state laws in refuges; last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

How these agencies interact with local communities is markedly different, too. Both Alaska Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have regional advisory groups where residents can weigh in on game regulations, but Alissa Nadine Rogers, a resident of the Yukon- Kuskokwim Delta who sits on each, says that, unlike the federal government, it feels like “the state of Alaska does not recognize subsistence users as a priority.” On paper, the state prioritizes subsistence use, but under its constitution, Alaska can’t distinguish between residents, whereas the federal government can put the needs of local and traditional users first. This has frequently led to separate and overlapping state and federal regulations on public lands in Alaska.

Many people in the region rely on wildlife for a substantial part of their diet. Since the area isn’t connected by roads, groceries must be barged or flown in, making them expensive—a gallon of milk can cost almost $20. In addition to being an important food source, caribou are a traditional part of her Yupik culture, Rogers explains, used for tools and regalia. It’s a real burden for local communities to be told they can’t hunt caribou, which has driven poaching. As state and federal regulations have increased restrictions on hunting, she says residents have difficulty obtaining enough protein to sustain themselves through the winter. “If people don’t understand how it is to live out here, what true perspective do they have?” she asks. “Subsistence users are the ones who bear the burden when it comes to management. And a lot of the time, folks aren’t feeling that their voices are being heard or adequately represented.”

Yet Rogers says state and federal systems can provide an important balance to each other, and she approves of Fish and Game’s predator control efforts. As the former director of natural resources for the Orutsararmiut Native Council, she helped the council write a resolution, later passed by the statewide Alaska Federation of Natives, supporting last spring’s bear and wolf cull. She thinks officials should focus more on climate change but believes culling remains a useful tool. “It gives a vital chance for the [caribou] population and immediately supports growth and recovery,” Rogers says. She also asked Fish and Game to institute a five-year moratorium on all hunting of the herd. “If we go any lower, then we’re pretty much gonna be facing extinction.”

Who gets to make choices about the state’s fish and wildlife resources is a point of increasing tension this year, as a lawsuit unfolds between the state and federal government over who should manage salmon fisheries on the Kuskokwim River, to the west of the Togiak refuge. All five of its salmon returns have faltered for over a decade—making game like caribou even more critical for local communities. (In sharp contrast, to the east of the river, Bristol Bay has seen record recent returns, showing how variable climate impacts can be.) The Alaska Native Federation and the federal government say fishing should be limited to subsistence users, while the state has opened fishing to all state residents.

To ensure Alaska Native communities have a voice in such critical decisions, the Federation called for tribally designated seats on the Board of Game this fall. “We need to have a balanced Board of Game that represents all Alaskans,” says former Governor Tony Knowles. He, too, recommends passing a law to designate seats on the board for different types of wildlife stakeholders, including Alaska Native and rural residents, conservationists, biologists, recreational users, and others. Knowles also proposes an inquiry into Fish and Game’s bear killings, including recommendations on how to better involve the public in these decisions. “We deserve to know how this all happened so it won’t happen again.”

It’s clear to many that business as usual isn’t working. “I have no idea how the state comes up with their management strategy,” says Brice Eningowuk, the tribal administrator for the council of the Traditional Village of Togiak, an Alaska Native village on the outskirts of the Togiak refuge. He says Fish and Game didn’t tell his community about the bear cull, and he expressed skepticism that primarily killing bears would work. “Bears will eat caribou, but that’s not their primary food source,” he says.

Part of the solution is setting more realistic wildlife goals, according to Pat Walsh, whose career as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist involved supervising the caribou program in the Togiak refuge. Recently retired, he says the current goal for the Mulchatna herd size was set 15 years ago, when the population was at 30,000, and is no longer realistic. Reducing that goal could allow targeted subsistence use—which might help ease some of the poaching. Though Fish and Game has killed wolves around the Mulchatna herd for 12 years, he points out the caribou population has steadily dropped. “We recommended the board reassess the ecological situation,” he says, and develop goals “based on the current conditions, not something that occurred in the past.”

Today’s landscape already looks quite different. Alaska has warmed twice as quickly as the global average, faster than any other state. When Rogers was in high school, she tested the permafrost near her house as an experiment. As a freshman, she only had to jam the spade in the ground before she hit ice. By the time she was a senior, it thawed to a depth of 23 inches—and in one location, to 4 feet. Summers have been cold and wet, and winters have brought crippling ice storms, rather than snow. Berry seasons have failed, and the normally firm and springy tundra has “disintegrated into mush,” Rogers says.

Feeling the very ground change beneath her feet highlights how little sway she has over these shifts. “How are you gonna yell at the clouds? ‘Hey, quit raining. Hey, you, quit snowing’?” Rogers asked. “There’s no way you can change something that is completely out of your control. We can only adapt.”

Yet despite how quickly these ecosystems are shifting, the Department of Fish and Game has no climate scientists. In the meantime, the agency is authorized to continue killing bears on the Mulchatna calving grounds every year until 2028. (The board plans to hear an annual report on the state’s intensive management later this month.) As Walsh summarizes wryly, “It’s difficult to address habitat problems. It’s difficult to address disease problems. It’s easy to say, ’Well, let’s go shoot.’”

Management decisions can feel stark in the face of nature’s complexity. The tundra is quite literally made from relationships. The lichen the caribou feed on is a symbiotic partnership between two organisms. Fungus provides its intricately branching structure, absorbing water and minerals from the air, while algae produces its energy, bringing together sunlight and soil, inseparable from the habitat they form. These connections sustain the life that blooms and eats and dies under a curving sweep of sky. It’s a system, in the truest and most obvious sense — one that includes the humans deciding what a population can recover from, and what a society can tolerate.

As another season of snow settles in, the caribou cross the landscape in great, meandering lines. There are thousands of years of migrations behind them and an uncertain future ahead. Like so much in nature, it’s hard to draw a clear threshold. “Everything is going to change,” Rogers says.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/science/alaska-predator-control-caribou-wolves-bear-hunt/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

One particularly ingenious image showcases an orca posed as a sickle crossed with a hammer. The cheeky caption reads, “Eat the rich,” a nod to the orcas’ penchant for sinking lavish yachts.

A surfboard-snatching sea otter in Santa Cruz, California has also claimed the media spotlight. Headlines dub her an “adorable outlaw” “at large.”

Memes conjure her in a beret like the one donned by socialist revolutionary Ché Guevara. In one caption, she proclaims, “Accept our existence or expect resistance … an otter world is possible.”

My scholarship centers on animal-human relations through the prism of social justice. As I see it, public glee about wrecked surfboards and yachts hints at a certain flavor of schadenfreude. At a time marked by drastic socioeconomic disparities, white supremacy and environmental degradation, casting these marine mammals as revolutionaries seems like a projection of desires for social justice and habitable ecosystems.

A glimpse into the work of some political scientists, philosophers and animal behavior researchers injects weightiness into this jocular public dialogue. The field of critical animal studies analyzes structures of oppression and power and considers pathways to dismantling them. These scholars’ insights challenge the prevailing view of nonhuman animals as passive victims. They also oppose the widespread assumption that nonhuman animals can’t be political actors.

So while meme lovers project emotions and perspectives onto these particular wild animals, scholars of critical animal studies suggest that nonhuman animals do in fact engage in resistance.

Nonhuman animal protest is everywhere

Are nonhuman animals in a constant state of defiance? I’d answer, undoubtedly, that the answer is yes.

The entire architecture of animal agriculture attests to animals’ unyielding resistance against confinement and death. Cages, corrals, pens and tanks would not exist were it not for animals’ tireless revolt.

Even when hung upside down on conveyor hangars, chickens furiously flap their wings and bite, scratch, peck and defecate on line workers at every stage of the process leading to their deaths.

Until the end, hooked tuna resist, gasping and writhing fiercely on ships’ decks. Hooks, nets and snares would not be necessary if fish allowed themselves to be passively harvested.

If they consented to repeated impregnation, female pigs and cows wouldn’t need to be tethered to “rape racks” to prevent them from struggling to get away.

If they didn’t mind having their infants permanently taken from their sides, dairy cows wouldn’t need to be blinded with hoods so they don’t bite and kick as the calves are removed; they wouldn’t bellow for weeks after each instance. I contend that failure to recognize their bellowing as protest reflects “anthropodenial” – what ethologist Frans de Waal calls the rejection of obvious continuities between human and nonhuman animal behavior, cognition and emotion.

The prevalent view of nonhuman animals remains that of René Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who viewed animals’ actions as purely mechanical, like those of a machine. From this viewpoint, one might dismiss these nonhuman animals’ will to prevail as unintentional or merely instinctual. But political scientist Dinesh Wadiwel argues that “even if their defiance is futile, the will to prefer life over death is a primary act of resistance, perhaps the only act of dissent available to animals who are subject to extreme forms of control.”

Creaturely escape artists

Despite humans’ colossal efforts to repress them, nonhuman animals still manage to escape from slaughterhouses. They also break out of zoos, circuses, aquatic parks, stables and biomedical laboratories. Tilikum, a captive orca at Sea World, famously killed his trainer–an act at least one marine mammal behaviorist characterized as intentional.

Philosopher Fahim Amir suggests that depression among captive animals is likewise a form of emotional rebellion against unbearable conditions, a revolt of the nerves. Dolphins engage in self-harm like thrashing against the tank’s walls or cease to eat and retain their breath until death. Sows whose body-sized cages impede them from turning around to make contact with their piglets repeatedly ram themselves into the metal struts, sometimes succumbing to their injuries.

Critical animal studies scholars contend that all these actions arguably demonstrate nonhuman animals’ yearning for freedom and their aversion to inequity.

As for the marine stars of summer 2023’s memes, fishing gear can entangle and harm orcas. Sea otters were hunted nearly to extinction for their fur. Marine habitats have been degraded by human activities including overfishing, oil spills, plastic, chemical and sonic pollution, and climate change. It’s easy to imagine they might be responding to human actions, including bodily harm and interference with their turf.

What is solidarity with nonhuman animals?

Sharing memes that cheer on wild animals is one thing. But there are more substantive ways to demonstrate solidarity with animals.

Legal scholars support nonhuman animals’ resistance by proposing that their current classification as property should be replaced with that of personhood or beingness.

Nonhuman animals including songbirds, dolphins, elephants, horses, chimpanzees and bears increasingly appear as plaintiffs alleging their subjection to extinction, abuse and other injustices.

Citizenship for nonhuman animals is another pathway to social and political inclusion. It would guarantee the right to appeal arbitrary restrictions of domesticated nonhuman animals’ autonomy. It would also mandate legal duties to protect them from harm.

Everyday deeds can likewise convey solidarity.

Boycotting industries that oppress nonhuman animals by becoming vegan is a powerful action. It is a form of political “counter-conduct,” a term philosopher Michel Foucault uses to describe practices that oppose dominant norms of power and control.

Creating roadside memorials for nonhuman animals killed by motor vehicles encourages people to see them as beings whose lives and deaths matter, rather than mere “roadkill.”

Political scientists recognize that human and nonhuman animals’ struggles against oppression are intertwined. At different moments, the same strategies leveraged against nonhuman animals have cast segments of the human species as “less than human” in order to exploit them.

The category of the human is ever-shifting and ominously exclusive. I argue that no one is safe as long as there is a classification of “animality.” It confers susceptibility to extravagant forms of violence, legally and ethically condoned.

Otter 841 is the wild sea otter off Santa Cruz, California, who some observers suspect has had it with surfers in her turf.

Might an ‘otter world’ be possible?

I believe quips about the marine mammal rebellion reflect awareness that our human interests are entwined with those of nonhuman animals. The desire to achieve sustainable relationships with other species and the natural world feels palpable to me within the memes and media coverage. And it’s happening as human-caused activity makes our shared habitats increasingly unlivable.

Solidarity with nonhuman animals is consistent with democratic principles–for instance, defending the right to well-being and opposing the use of force against innocent subjects. Philosopher Amir recommends extending the idea that there can be no freedom as long as there is still unfreedom beyond the species divide: “While we may not yet fully be able to picture what this may mean, there is no reason we should not begin to imagine it”.

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond is an Associate Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

The post The truth behind animal resistance memes appeared first on Popular Science.

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The heroic effort to save Florida’s coral reef from a historic heatwave

Michael Childress/The Conversation — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 22:00:00 +0000

Elkhorn coral fragments rescued from overheating ocean nurseries sit in cooler water at Keys Marine Laboratory. NOAA

This article is republished from The Conversation.

Armed with scrub brushes, young scuba divers took to the waters of Florida’s Alligator Reef in late July to try to help corals struggling to survive 2023’s extraordinary marine heat wave. They carefully scraped away harmful algae and predators impinging on staghorn fragments, under the supervision and training of interns from Islamorada Conservation and Restoration Education, or I.CARE.

Normally, I.CARE’s volunteer divers would be transplanting corals to waters off the Florida Keys this time of year, as part of a national effort to restore the Florida Reef. But this year, everything is going in reverse.

As water temperatures spiked in the Florida Keys, scientists from universities, coral reef restoration groups and government agencies launched a heroic effort to save the corals. Divers have been in the water every day, collecting thousands of corals from ocean nurseries along the Florida Keys reef tract and moving them to cooler water and into giant tanks on land.

Marine scientist Ken Nedimyer and his team at Reef Renewal USA began moving an entire coral tree nursery from shallow waters off Tavernier to an area 60 feet deep and 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) cooler. Even there, temperatures were running about 85 to 86 F (30 C).

Their efforts are part of an emergency response on a scale never before seen in Florida.

The Florida Reef – a nearly 350-mile arc along the Florida Keys that is crucial to fish habitat, coastal storm protection and the local economy – began experiencing record-hot ocean temperatures in June 2023, weeks earlier than expected. The continuing heat has triggered widespread coral bleaching.

A bleached mound of coral at the Cheeca Rocks monitoring site in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary that had been previously tagged shows the coral skeleton.
NOAA AOML

While corals can recover from mass bleaching events like this, long periods of high heat can leave them weak and vulnerable to disease that can ultimately kill them.

That’s what scientists and volunteers have been scrambling to avoid.

The heartbeat of the reef

The Florida Reef has struggled for years under the pressure of overfishing, disease, storms and global warming that have decimated its live corals.

A massive coral restoration effort – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mission: Iconic Reef – has been underway since 2019 to restore the reef with transplanted corals, particularly those most resilient to the rising temperatures. But even the hardiest coral transplants are now at risk.

Reef-building corals are the foundation species of shallow tropical waters due to their unique symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae in their tissues.

During the day, these algae photosynthesize, producing both food and oxygen for the coral animal. At night, coral polyps feed on plankton, providing nutrients for their algae. The result of this symbiotic relationship is the coral’s ability to build a calcium carbonate skeleton and reefs that support nearly 25% of all marine life.

Unfortunately, corals are very temperature sensitive, and the extreme ocean heat off South Florida, with some reef areas reaching temperatures in the 90s, has put them under extraordinary stress.

When corals get too hot, they expel their symbiotic algae. The corals appear white – bleached – because their carbonate skeleton shows through their clear tissue that lack any colorful algal cells.

Corals can recover new algal symbionts if water conditions return to normal within a few weeks. However, the increase in global temperatures due to the effects of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities is causing longer and more frequent periods of coral bleaching worldwide, leading to concerns for the future of coral reefs.

A MASH unit for corals

This year, the Florida Keys reached an alert level 2, indicating extreme risk of bleaching, about six weeks earlier than normal.

The early warnings and forecasts from NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch Network gave scientists time to begin preparing labs and equipment, track the locations and intensity of the growing marine heat and, importantly, recruit volunteers.

This year’s maximum sea surface temperature (top chart) and degree heating weeks (lower chart), a measure of accumulated heat stress, are the highest since record-keeping began.
Adapted from NOAA

At the Keys Marine Laboratory, scientists and trained volunteers have dropped off thousands of coral fragments collected from heat-threatened offshore nurseries. Director Cindy Lewis described the lab’s giant tanks as looking like “a MASH unit for corals.”

Volunteers there and at other labs across Florida will hand-feed the tiny creatures to keep them alive until the Florida waters cool again and they can be returned to the ocean and eventually transplanted onto the reef.

Degree heating weeks is a measure of accumulated heat stress over the previous 12 weeks. At 4-degree Celsius-weeks (7.2 Fahrenheit-weeks), corals experience stress that can lead to bleaching. Above 8 C-weeks (14.4 F-weeks), they are likely to experience bleaching.
NOAA Coral Reef Watch

Protecting corals still in the ocean

I.CARE launched another type of emergency response.

I.CARE co-founder Kylie Smith, a coral reef ecologist and a former student of mine in marine sciences, discovered a few years ago that coral transplants with large amounts of fleshy algae around them were more likely to bleach during times of elevated temperature. Removing that algae may give corals a better chance of survival.

Smith’s group typically works with local dive operators to train recreational divers to assist in transplanting and maintaining coral fragments in an effort to restore the reefs of Islamorada. In summer 2023, I.CARE has been training volunteers, like the young divers from Diving with a Purpose, to remove algae and coral predators, such as coral-eating snails and fireworms, to help boost the corals’ chances of survival.

Monitoring for corals at risk

To help spot corals in trouble, volunteer divers are also being trained as reef observers through Mote Marine Lab’s BleachWatch program.

Scuba divers have long been attracted to the reefs of the Florida Keys for their beauty and accessibility. The lab is training them to recognize bleached, diseased and dead corals of different species and then use an online portal to submit bleach reports across the entire Florida Reef.

The more eyes on the reef, the more accurate the maps showing the areas of greatest bleaching concern.

Ian Enochs, a research ecologist and lead of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab Coral Program, found that every coral in the Cheeca Rocks area had bleached by Aug. 1, 2023.
NOAA AOML

Rebuilding the reef

While the marine heat wave in the Keys will inevitably kill some corals, many more will survive.

Through careful analysis of the species, genotypes and reef locations experiencing bleaching, scientists and practitioners are learn valuable information as they work to protect and rebuild a more resilient coral reef for the future.

That is what gives hope to Smith, Lewis, Nedimyer and hundreds of others who believe this coral reef is worth saving. Volunteers are crucial to the effort, whether they’re helping with coral reef maintenance, reporting bleaching or raising the awareness of what is at stake if humanity fails to stop warming the planet.

Michael Childress is an associate professor of biological sciences and environmental conservation at Clemson University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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We need billions more baby trees to regrow US forests

Carla Delgado — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Local tree nurseries lack the seedling availability and diversity needed to meet these lofty environmental goals. National Park Service

On Earth Day last year, President Joe Biden called for the inventory, restoration, and conservation of mature and old-growth forests on federal, state, Tribal, and private lands. Forests are important in enhancing resilience to climate change, but they are also vulnerable to its impacts. The wildfires in 2020 and 2021 alone increased reforestation needs by over 1.5 million acres, highlighting how crucial it is to develop a plan to restore forests on a major scale.

In accordance with Executive Order 14072, agency-specific reforestation targets totaling over 2.3 million acres by 2030 were set on federally managed lands. There is also a goal to plant more than a billion trees over the next decade. However, a significant factor may stand in the way of these ambitious planting and restoration goals—the massive undersupply of seedlings.

Tree nurseries lack seedling availability and diversity

According to a recent study published in Bioscience, local tree nurseries lack the seedling availability and diversity needed to meet these lofty environmental goals. Authors from different institutions, including universities, US Forest Service research stations, and local departments of natural resources, analyzed more than 600 plant nurseries across twenty northern states and found that only 56 of them grow and sell seedlings in the volumes needed for conservation and reforestation.

[Related: What successful forest restoration looks like.]

This scarcity is a product of several factors, like how few forest nurseries exist, says author Peter W. Clark, a postdoctoral associate in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. Many state and federal nurseries have closed due to the inability to cover costs through nursery sales.

“The US Forest Service used to maintain 59 federally funded nurseries, but now there are only six, with only one serving the entire 20-state region we examined,” says Clark. Although private nurseries play a key role in supporting the market, publicly-funded nurseries produce important species for conservation and restoration purposes, he adds.

A 2021 study published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change identified 26 million hectares of natural and agricultural lands with reforestation potential across the contiguous US. The authors reported that reforesting this area by 2040 with 30 billion trees would require a 2.3-fold increase in current nursery production levels of 1.3 billion seedlings per year. In short, the number of tree seedlings produced each year must increase by 1.7 billion.

“Much research has emphasized that the volume of seedlings produced in US nurseries is far too low to meet reforestation targets,” says Clark. “We support these findings but add the finer point in that the types of seedlings are highly homogenous.”

He adds that nurseries operate in a free-market economy and tend to favor species that are more economically viable for sales—think conifer species for commercial timber purposes. It’s risky to maintain a broad inventory of diverse species that might not sell, especially since seedlings take one to five years to grow to be ready for resale. However, this dismisses the vast diversity of tree species needed to meet other ecological targets like carbon mitigation, ecosystem restoration, or assisted migration.

In the aforementioned Bioscience study, the authors found that commercially valuable tree species were commonly available, but the majority of other species were challenging to source and produced in low numbers. For instance, only two out of 56 nurseries sold red spruce, a culturally and ecologically important tree species in need of restoration, says Clark. About 800 seedlings were available for purchase, which can only reforest one to two acres.

Limited seed sources or genetic diversity among the species is also an issue. “Even for northern red oak or eastern white pine, two of the most commonly propagated commercial tree species in the region, we found that seed was collected from less than one third of the available seed collection zones,” says Clark. “In other words, just a few trees were contributing to the genetic diversity of all nursery grown seedlings.”

Federal investment and workforce development can boost public tree nurseries and seed collection efforts

The federal government has invested $35 million to rehabilitate the aging National Forest System nursery and seed infrastructure, putting another $10 million to support state and Tribal nurseries and fund native seed partnerships. However, Clark says more public investment like grants, loans, and cost-share programs will be needed to expand forest nurseries and address the growing reforestation backlog. Funding to support research on producing species and genotypes that are better capable of withstanding the effects of climate change is also needed, he adds.

Seedling inventories often favor commercial species over the production of diverse, climate-adapted inventories because the former involves a lower financial risk, even though the latter has a higher reward in terms of ecological diversity, says Clark. “Although nurseries operate based on market demands, in the context of planting for global change, it may be better to simply invest in nurseries to supply seedlings just for the common good,” he adds.

[Related: Tropical forests rebound on farm land blessedly fast.]

Increasing seed stock diversity is an important goal that requires increased seed storage capacity and a trained workforce of seed collectors, says Joe Fargione, science director at The Nature Conservancy. However, labor shortages and aging demographics among professionals in the field, like foresters, seed collectors, transport crews, and extractory staff, and nursery growers, are among the biggest limitations for scaling forest seed collection, says Clark.

To fill the skilled-labor gap and prevent the loss or degradation of institutional knowledge, recruiting new workers in these fields is necessary. “Funding and job-training programs may be needed to serve as economic drivers for job creation while potentially providing renewed access to nurseries in underserved areas,” he adds. Fargione says workforce development programs can ensure there are no bottlenecks in the supply chain.

Nurseries also need to ensure high-quality records of seed origin are readily obtainable for buyers so they can identify its adaptation potential under rapidly changing climatic conditions, says Clark. Forest trees are adapted to different climatic conditions, and they must be matched to the conditions of their reforestation or restoration sites. Developing a national seed-labeling standard and database with high-resolution records of source collections, such as latitude, longitude, and elevation, would improve seedlot selection, he adds. The Department of Agriculture currently has a Seedlot Selection Tool, but it is limited to the western US, Canada, and Mexico.

“By planting with an eye on diverse ecosystem functions, cultural needs, and climate adaptability,” says Clark, “we can meet multiple objectives that result in more resilient future forests capable of withstanding a greater degree of uncertain future conditions.”

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Dead whales and dinosaur eggs: 7 fascinating images by researchers

PopSci Staff — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Researchers from the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme conduct a necropsy of a stranded humpback whale. Submitted by Professor Paul Thompson, photo captured by James Bunyan from Tracks Ecology

Oh, the wonders scientists see in the field. Documenting the encounters can be an integral part of the discovery process, but it can also pull others into the experience. These seven photos and illustrations are the winners of this year’s BMC Ecology and Evolution image competition, which gets submissions from researchers all around the world each year. It includes four categories: “Research in Action,” “Protecting our planet,” “Plants and Fungi,” and “Paleoecology.”

See the full gallery of winners and their stories on the BMC Ecology and Evolution website. And explore last year’s winners here.

An invasive orange pore fungus poses unknown ecological consequences for Australian ecosystems. Cornelia Sattler

The Chimpanzee Conservation Center in Guinea to protect our planet and empower local communities is a sustainable beekeeping project, launched in the surrounding villages of Faranah, which showcases an inspiring solution to combat deforestation caused by traditional honey harvesting from wild bees. By cultivating their own honey, the locals avoid tree felling and increase production. Roberto García-Roa

A researcher releases a new-born blacktip reef shark in Mo’orea, French Polynesia. Victor Huertas

This digital illustration is based on a pair of hadrosauroid dinosaur eggs and embryos from China’s Upper Cretaceous red beds, dating back approximately 72 to 66 million years ago. It depicts an example of a “primitive” hadrosaur developing within the safety of its small egg. Submitted by Jordan Mallon. Restoration by Wenyu Ren.

While it is not uncommon to encounter insects parasitised by “zombie” fungi in the wild, it is a rarity to witness large spiders succumbing to these fungal conquerors. In the jungle, near a stream, lies the remains of a conquest shaped by thousands of years of evolution. Roberto García-Roa

Researchers from the Hoey Reef Ecology Lab deploy an underwater ROV at Diamond Reef within the Coral Sea Marine Park. Victor Huertas

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Behold a 20-armed, strawberry-shaped Antarctic sea creature

Jocelyn Solis-Moreira — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 22:00:00 +0000

Some of these many limbs would keep a feather star moored to the sea floor, while others help it move. Greg W. Rouse

Marine biologists combing through some of the coldest ocean water on Earth have uncovered a never-before-seen sea creature they call the Antarctic strawberry feather star. But don’t let the cute name fool you. Though its body is shaped like a plump fruit, its other features are pure eldritch horror: 20 protruding arm-like appendages that could be sprouting from an Alien movie monster. Some of the “arms” are up to 8 inches long and studded with bumps or feathery tendrils.

“As we continue to understand how diverse ecosystems like the Antarctic are, or other difficult-to-sample habitats like the deep sea, we should continue to appreciate how precious and important these areas are in sustaining a diverse marine ecosystem,” says Nerida Wilson, an invertebrate marine biologist at the Western Australian Museum. Wilson and her colleagues reported the Antarctic strawberry feather star and three other new feather star species in a study published in July in the journal Invertebrate Systematics.

Those four species were among the creatures caught in a net cast in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean. Researchers used DNA samples from the invertebrates to look for a special genetic marker, named mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit 1. This gene is a popular identifier, because it mutates at a rate that helps distinguish between vertebrate and invertebrates, and also has conserved sequences that allow biologists to identify closely related species.

[Related: Scientists are tracking down deep sea creatures with free-floating DNA]

Some feather stars, even to a trained eye, look remarkably similar. These animals belong to the phylum Echinodermata—other members of this group are starfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. These aquatic animals have five or more flexible arms with a cup-shaped body. Before DNA sequencing became available in 1977, Antarctic feather stars were thought to belong to a single species called Promachocrinus kerguelensis.

This new study adds seven species of these creatures, the DNA sequencing revealed—four were the newly discovered ones, and three were critters that had been originally misclassified as other kinds of animals. “The application of molecular tools to understanding biodiversity is widely applicable and has become a necessary part of understanding all living things,” Wilson says.

The limbs of this feather star can grow to 8 inches long. Greg W. Rouse

“It is fantastic that the authors have done this taxonomic work. It is what ecologists like me depend on to do our work because the first step of understanding species interactions is knowing who’s there in the first place,” says Angela Stevenson, a postdoctoral researcher at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany who was not involved in the study. She adds that these genetic findings are helpful in understanding the diverse ecosystem lurking in deep sea zones, polar regions, and other hard-to-reach places.

Of the eight species, six have 20 arms and two have 10 arms. The most eye-catching of the bunch was the Antarctic strawberry feather star (formally, Promachocrinus fragarius.) On the base of its strawberry-sized body are circular bumps where tentacles with tiny claws anchor this animal to the ocean floor. The arms stretch out to help the creature move.

[Related: What this jellyfish-like sea creature can teach us about underwater vehicles of the future]

The newfound animals have developed unusual colorations. Promachocrinus kerguelensis are a shade of yellow-brown. But the newly discovered Promachocrinus fragarius specimens had unexpected pigmentation, including purplish spots or dark red hues.

“As we continue to understand how diverse ecosystems like the Antarctic are, or other difficult-to-sample habitats like the deep sea, we should continue to appreciate how precious and important these areas are in sustaining a diverse marine ecosystem,” says Wilson. “We need to conserve all habitats, not just the ones we can easily visit.” The strawberry feather star lives as deep as 3,800 feet under the ocean surface, the authors estimate—a fittingly extreme home for a far-out animal.

Correction (August 23, 2023): The article previously stated that feather stars are in the same taxonomic class as starfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. They are in the same phylum (a broader taxonomic group) but not the same class.

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Mission to recreate Darwin’s scientific Beagle voyage sets sail

Laura Baisas — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 17:30:00 +0000

Members of the Dutch Tall Ship Oosterschelde wave goodbye from the quay in Rotterdam on August 4, 2023. The Rotterdam ship departs for a two-year world tour that scientist Charles Darwin made two centuries ago. Jeffrey Groeneweg/AFP via Getty Images

On August 15, a schooner set sail from Plymouth on the southern coast of England to recreate the South America-bound voyage taken by biologist Charles Darwin almost 200 years ago. The Dutch tall ship Oosterschelde began its two year mission as a floating laboratory, where about 200 conservationists and naturalists will gather along the way to take part in a project called Darwin200.

[Related: Let’s talk about Charles Darwin’s sexy theory of selection.]

In 1831, the HMS Beagle set sail from Plymouth with a then 22-year-old Charles Darwin aboard. The five-year journey was primarily intended to explore the coastline of South America and chart its harbors, with Darwin tasked to make scientific observations. He explored Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and the remote areas of the Galápagos Islands. Over the course of the journey that Darwin said was “by far the most important event in my life,” he brought back specimens of more than 1,500 different species and this work influenced his book On the Origin of Species and the theory of evolution.

The Oosterschelde is expected to make the 40,000 nautical mile expedition and hopes to anchor in 32 ports, including all the major ports visited by the Beagle. It expected to make its first landing in the Canary Islands and then cross the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil. It will then follow along South America’s eastern coast, up the west coast, and out to the Galápagos. It will then sail to Australia and New Zealand, before stopping in South Africa, and returning to England.

“I always think it is very much worth reminding ourselves on a daily basis that humans and the rest of the living world share a common origin,” Sarah Darwin, a botanist and the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin told the Associated Press. “Darwin was saying that 160 years ago, that we were related with all other nature. We’re not above it, we are part of nature.”

The Darwin200 project has been in the works for at least a decade and aims to empower a new generation of exceptional environmental leaders through training some of the world’s top young conservationists ranging from 18 to 25 years-old. 200 young people were selected based on their accomplishments aimed at making the world a better place and will join the voyage at different stages.

“This is about hope, it’s about [the] future and it’s about changing the world,” leader Stewart McPherson told the AP.

[Related: Letters From Charles Darwin.]

Today’s naturalists are studying a world a bit different than Darwin. The planet’s birds, reptiles, mammals, fish, and amphibians have already shown population declines of around 68 percent since the 1970s and 10 percent of terrestrial biodiversity is set to decrease by 2050 if new policies are not immediately put in place. In December 2022, 200 countries’ delegates at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) reached the 30 by 30 deal, vowing to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s wild land and oceans by 2030, thus representing the most significant effort ever to protect the world’s dwindling biodiversity. The deal also provides funding in an effort to save and preserve biodiversity in lower-income countries. Currently, only 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of marine areas are protected through legislation.

Still, more work is needed as some scientists believe current estimates of biodiversity loss are even higher than scientists first expected. One of the goals of Darwin200 is to develop projects to save the species it is studying along the way before it’s too late.

“We all know we’re in the midst of the sixth great extinction with a lot of doom and gloom about the problems facing the environment, climate change and loss of biodiversity,” Famed primatologist and Darwin200 supporter Jane Goodall told Reuters. “This voyage will give many people an opportunity to see there is still time to make change.”

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Harrison Ford’s latest namesake is an Andean snake species

Laura Baisas — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 19:00:00 +0000

A new snake species named Tachymenoides harrisonfordi was discovered during an expedition in Peru in May 2022. Edgar Lehr

Of all the animals that could be named after Harrison Ford, known for playing one of the world’s most famous fictional archaeologists, it had to be a snake. A newly discovered species of snake from Peru’s Andes Mountains has been named Tachymenoides harrisonfordi for the actor in honor of his conservation work. This honor would surely make famed ophidiophobiac Indiana Jones smile uncomfortably.

[Related: Snakes can actually hear really well.]

According to Conservation International, T. harrisonfordi is a slender snake of only about 16 inches when fully grown, with copper colored scales and amber eyes. The well-camouflaged predator is harmless to humans, though it does have an appetite for lizards and frogs.

While the reptile is not necessarily a formidable foe to humans, finding it proved to be quite a feat. A team of scientists from Peru and the United States took an expedition into Otishi National Park, which is one Earth’s least explored grasslands and is primarily accessible by helicopters (no word if Jock Lindsey was piloting the chopper), to look for new organisms.

The discovery did not come easy, as the team trekked through a dangerous area watched by drug cartels, crossed alpine swamp, sifted through the tall grass. They eventually found a male snake sunning himself on a mountaintop pass that they named for the iconic actor.

“The snake was a big surprise as we did not expect to find a snake in a high elevational swamp,” expedition leader and Illinois Wesleyan University biologist Edgar Lehr said in a statement. “Every new species is exciting, and it’s important to name it because only the organisms that are known can be protected. We hope that the publication of the new snake species will create awareness of the importance of biodiversity research and the importance of protecting nature.

Lehr added that it is pretty rare for new species of snakes to be discovered, with the closest related snake named in 1896.

Ford is the vice chairman of Conservation International who has been an advocate for all sorts of animals. Ford has other species of animals named after him–an ant (Pheidole harrisonfordi) and a spider (Calponia harrisonfordi). However, the star told Conservation International that found quick kinship with his new slithery namesake.

“The snake’s got eyes you can drown in, and he spends most of the day sunning himself by a pool of dirty water—we probably would’ve been friends in the early ‘60s,” Ford said in a statement.

While it may seem like trivial fun to name a new organism, describing new species like this snake is crucial for scientists to identify which organisms need protection and where. Unfortunately, some species are disappearing from the Earth before they can even be found.

[Related: Stressed rattlesnakes just need a little help from their friends.]

Scientists have described around 1.2 million known species on Earth, which is a fraction of the 8.7 million species that are estimated to exist. At the current rate of extinction, it may be impossible to fully understand and name all of the diverse flora and fauna maintaining Earth’s ecosystems.

“Only organisms that are known can be protected,” Lehr told Conservation International, adding that hopes this discovery will draw more attention to the extinction crisis facing animals all over the world.

It’s also crucial for reptiles like T. harrisonfordi, which can be particularly vulnerable. A 2022 report from Conservation International researchers found that one fifth of all reptiles are currently threatened with extinction.

“In all seriousness, this discovery is humbling. It’s a reminder that there’s still so much to learn about our wild world—and that humans are one small part of an impossibly vast biosphere,” said Ford. “On this planet, all fates are intertwined, and right now, one million species are teetering on the edge of oblivion. We have an existential mandate to mend our broken relationship with nature and protect the places that sustain life.”

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Popular shellfish resist extinction in surprising ways

Laura Baisas — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 15:00:00 +0000

Four bivalve species found along the Maine coast, including the Northern Quahog, Eastern Oyster, a steamer clam, and a blue mussel presented together in a bed of seaweed at low tide. Danielle Hall, Smithsonian

It’s not a bad time to be a bivalve. Oyster reefs are hailed as natural storm barrier protectors, and we’re learning more and more about the genomes of these odd little creatures. A study published August 15 in the journal Nature Communications found that hundreds of shellfish species that humans harvest tend to be more resistant to extinction.

[Related: Wild oysters are tastiest in months that end with ‘R’—here’s why.]

A team of researchers found that humans exploit about 801 species of bivalves, a figure that adds 720 species to the 81 listed in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ Production Database. The team identified the traits like geographic diversity and adaptability that make them prime for aquaculture—humans tend to harvest bivalves that are large-bodied, occur in shallow waters, occupy a wide geographic area, and can survive in a large range of temperatures.

Geography and climate adaptability are what make even the most used bivalve species less susceptible to the extinctions that have wiped out species in the past. Species including the Eastern oyster live in a wide range of climates all over the world that include a wide range of temperatures, and this adaptability promotes resilience against some of the natural drivers of extinction. However, increased demand for these species from hungry humans can put them and their ecosystems in danger.

“We’re fortunate that the species we eat also tend to be more resistant to extinction,” study co-author and Smithsonian Institution research geologist Stewart Edie said in a statement. “But humans can transform the environment in the geologic blink of an eye, and we have to sustainably manage these species so they are available for generations that will come after us.”

Bivalve mollusks have been filtering water and feeding humans for thousands of years. The indigenous Calusa tribe sustainably harvested an estimated 18.6 billion oysters in Estero Bay, Florida and constructed an entire island and 30-foot high mounds out of their shells. However, for every sustainable use of bivalve aquaculture, there are also examples of overexploitation from European colonizers and overfishing. These practices have led to collapses of oyster populations in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco Bay in California, and Botany Bay near Sydney, Australia.

[Related: Oyster architecture could save our coastlines.]

“It is somewhat ironic that some of the traits that make bivalve species less vulnerable to extinction also make them far more attractive as a food source, being larger, and found in shallower waters in a wider geographical area,” study co-author and University of Birmingham macroecologist Shan Huang said in a statement. “The human effect, therefore, can disproportionately remove the strong species. By identifying these species and getting them recognised around the world, responsible fishing can diversify the species that are gathered and avoid making oysters the dodos of the sea.”

The team hopes that this data improves future conservation and management decisions, particularly their list of regions and species that are particularly prone to extinction. They also believe that this new list may help identify species that need further study to fully assess their current risk of extinction.

“We want to use what we learned from this study to identify any bivalves that are being harvested that we don’t already know about,” said Edie. “To manage bivalve populations effectively, we need to have a full picture of what species people are harvesting.”

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Judge sides with youth activists in groundbreaking climate change lawsuit

Laura Baisas — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 13:30:00 +0000

Lead claimant Rikki Held, 22, confers with members of Our Children's Trust legal team before the start of the nation's first youth climate change trial at Montana's First Judicial District Court on June 12, 2023 in Helena, Montana. William Campbell/Getty Images

On August 14, a judge in Montana sided with youth climate activists who argued in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that state agencies permitting fossil fuel development without considering its effect on the climate were violating their constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.” The groundbreaking trial in the United States adds to a small, but growing, number of legal decisions surrounding a duty by the government to protect US citizens from the worst effects of climate change.

[Related: Young climate defenders bring hope in an unprecedented US lawsuit.]

The provision in question is part of the Montana Environmental Policy Act which states that agencies are not permitted to consider the effects of greenhouse gasses on climate change when permitting new fossil fuel projects. In Held v. Montana, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley found that the provision is unconstitutional. While the latest ruling won’t prevent burning fossil fuels or mining in the state, it will reverse this recently passed state law that prohibits state agencies from considering emissions when permitting for fossil fuel projects.

“Montana’s emissions and climate change have been proven to be a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana’s environment and harm and injury” to the youth, Judge Seeley wrote in the ruling.

It is now up to the Montana State Legislature to determine how to bring this policy into compliance. Changes may take some time, as the state has numerous fossil fuel and mining interests and is dominated by Republicans in the statehouse.

Julia Olson, an attorney representing the youth and with Our Children’s Trust celebrated the ruling. “As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos,” Olson said in a statement. “This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy, and for our climate. More rulings like this will certainly come.”

During the two-week long trial in June, the state of Montana did not try to dispute the science of climate change, but they argued the state’s greenhouse gas emissions were small in comparison to global emissions. The Montana attorney general’s office will appeal the ruling to the Montana Supreme Court.

“This ruling is absurd, but not surprising from a judge who let the plaintiffs’ attorneys put on a weeklong taxpayer-funded publicity stunt that was supposed to be a trial,” Emily Flower, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Austin Knudsen, said in a statement according to Associated Press. “Their same legal theory has been thrown out of federal court and courts in more than a dozen states. The State will appeal.”

During the trial, Stockholm Environment Institute expert Peter Erickson testified on behalf of the plaintiffs, saying he found that Montana emits the sixth-highest volume of greenhouse gas emissions per capita among US states and more than more than the total amount from 100 countries. He said that the state also has the potential to extract and burn even more, as it contains the largest recoverable coal deposits in the US and 10 times more oil than the state’s 4,000 oil wells currently draw.

[Related: Some climate activists aren’t suing over the future—they are taking aim at the present.]

The case was brought to court by 16 young Montanans ranging in age from five to 22, and is the nation’s first constitutional and first youth-led climate change lawsuit brought to trial. Some experts believe that this win could still energize the environmental movement and help reshape climate litigation across the United States. Climate cases around the world have more than doubled since 2018, but lawsuits led by youth haven’t fared as well as this caseAccording to a report published in July from the United Nations Environment Program and Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, at least 14 of these cases have been dismissed.

The plaintiffs made claims about injuries they have suffered as a result of climate change, including 22-year-old plaintiff Rikki Held detailing how extreme weather has hurt her family’s ranch.

The state argued that Montana’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is small and that changing the law would not bring on a major impact, also contending that the legislature should weigh in on the law. This was a surprising pivot from the expected climate denial defense.

“People around the world are watching this case,” Michael Gerrard, the founder of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told The Washington Post. “Everyone expected them to put on a more vigorous defense. And they may have concluded that the underlying science of climate change was so strong that they didn’t want to contest it.”

The nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust represented the plaintiffs in this case and has taken legal action on behalf of youths in all 50 states. It currently has cases pending in four other states.

The post Judge sides with youth activists in groundbreaking climate change lawsuit appeared first on Popular Science.

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Don’t lick the toads and other things to avoid at national parks

Laura Baisas — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 12:30:00 +0000

The Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone National Park. Temperatures at Yellowstone’s famous hot springs can reach 198 degrees Fahrenheit. Deposit Photos

While any season is a good time to visit some national parks, tourist visits really peak in the summer. Even as extreme temperatures smashed records in Death Valley National Park in California, visitors still trekked out to one of Earth’s hottest locales. Heat related illnesses in Grand Canyon National Park are also expected to rise due to climate change.

The majestic views and inspiring landscapes of “America’s best idea” can create lifelong memories and allow people to connect with the natural world in ways that they might otherwise not. However, they can also bring out some pretty bad behavior. Here’s how to act cool no matter how sweltering it gets on your next trip to a national park.

[Related: The 10 most underrated national parks in the US.]

All for the ‘gram

While the unofficial motto of the national parks is “take only memories and pictures, and leave only footprints,” that does not mean putting life and limb at risk for a photo. In June, a visitor to Yellowstone National Park seemingly ignored warnings and dipped her hand into one of the park’s famous hot springs. These springs can reach temperatures of up to 198 degrees Fahrenheit (the boiling point of water at Yellowstone’s average altitude) due to the area’s active geothermal activity. Don’t do this if you want to avoid burning your hand and disturbing the hot spring. And, if you don’t heed this warning, you could also end up on TouronsofYellowstone.

Another video taken at Yellowstone earlier this summer shows a tourist getting uncomfortably close to a bison. These animals are the largest land mammals in North America and can weigh up to 1,000 pounds. Park rangers urge all visitors to not disturb the wildlife and stay at least 25 yards away. Further east in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, tourists cornered a black bear with a selfie stick. While rare, the park’s black bears have attacked humans and disturbing them is illegal. So when it comes to America’s beloved fauna, admire from afar.

Leave the spray paint at home

National parks are no stranger to artistic endeavors—restricted caves in Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California house various ancient rock carvings and drawings called petroglyphs, for example. But it’s best to leave these drawings alone, and not contribute anymore. In February, a man from Minnesota who climbed into a 600-year-old restricted cave in Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California was fined $540 and banned from any national park for one year. Joshua Tree, known for spiky trees and dramatic rock formations, is unfortunately no stranger to this type of bad behavior. In 2019, the park battled vandalism during a government shutdown that was so bad that it may take the trees 300 years to fully recover.

[Related: How to avoid dying in national parks.]

The National Park Service is also investigating red graffiti at Maine’s Acadia National Park. This kind of vandalism could be dangerous if the red markings confuses hikers, as it could be mistaken for trail blazers. NPS advised hikers to follow blue trail blazes instead. Spray paint has also been spotted on the rocks along Laurel Falls Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. For safety and preservation purposes, save the nature-inspired art for when you get out of the park.

Keep your hands (and tongue) to yourself

Towards the end of last year, NPS officials had to warn visitors to stop licking the Sonoran desert toad. Also known as the Colorado river toad,this roughly seven inch-long amphibian secretes a potent toxin that can make people sick if it makes contact with the skin or gets in the mouth. Some have discovered that these toxic secretions contain 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful hallucinogenic. The US Drug Enforcement Administration considers it a Schedule 1 drug, which means it is not currently accepted for medical use and has a high potential for abuse. So, if you’re tempted to give this frog prince a kiss for whatever reason, please just don’t.

In May, a man pleaded guilty to one count of feeding, touching, teasing, frightening, or intentionally disturbing wildlife at Yellowstone. Even though his actions weren’t proven to be malicious, the newborn bison calf was unable to find its herd. This left the poor creature to wander the roadways causing hazards, and the calf was eventually euthanized. He was charged a $500 fine, a $500 Community Service payment to Yellowstone Forever Wildlife Protection Fund, a $30 special assessment, and a $10 processing fee.

Again, if you love wildlife, it’s best for you and fellow visitors to keep their hands to themselves. The NPS urges all visitors to be mindful of trails and wildlife, take out any trash brought into the parks and heed park rangers’ warnings.

The post Don’t lick the toads and other things to avoid at national parks appeared first on Popular Science.

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Nearly 1 million acres of land near the Grand Canyon is now a national monument

Laura Baisas — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Maya Tilousi, member of the Hopi Tribe, Havasupai Tribe of Grand Canyon, and the Cheyanne and Arapaho Tribes, shakes hands with President Joe Biden at Red Butte Airfield, 25 miles south of Tusayan, Arizona, on August 8, 2023. Biden announced he is putting the brakes on uranium mining around the Grand Canyon and willl give an area of nearly one million acres national monument status. im Watson/AFP via Getty Images

On August 8, President Joe Biden signed a national monument designation for the greater Grand Canyon, turning a multi-year dream by local Native American tribes and environmentalists into a reality. This is the fifth national monument declaration of his presidency, and it protects the area from potential uranium mining.

[Related: The 10 most underrated national parks in the US.]

The existing grazing leases and permits, hunting and fishing, and mining claims in the roughly 917,000 acres of public land are also protected. The land is just to the north and south of the existing Grand Canyon National Park and has numerous plateaus, canyons, and tributaries that house bison, bighorn sheep, elk, and a rare species of cactus. It will also preserve cultural and religious sites and the water sources that flow into the Colorado River.

Arizona tribes have been advocating for President Biden to use the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create a new national monument called Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni. Baaj Nwaavjo means “where tribes roam,” for the Havasupai people and “I’tah Kukveni” translates to “our footprints,” for the Hopi tribe. The national monument will officially be called Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument.

“Today I’m proud to use my authority under the Antiquities Act to protect almost one million acres of land around Grand Canyon National Park as a new national monument – to help right the wrongs of the past and conserve this land … for all future generations,” Biden said during a speech near the Grand Canyon. “Preserving these lands is good not only for Arizona, but for the planet. It’s good for the economy. It’s good for the soul of the nation. And I believe with my core — in my core it’s the right thing to do.

President Biden also tied the new designation to a larger push to combat climate change by his administration. He noted this summer’s extreme heat, which has been especially punishing in places like Phoenix, about 223 miles away from the Grand Canyon.

“Our extreme heat is America’s number one weather-related killer. Extreme heat kills more people than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined,” said Biden. “And it’s threatening the farms, the forests, and the fisheries [that] many families depend on to make a living. But none of this need be inevitable.”

In 2012, President Barack Obama blocked new mining in federal land nearby, but the protections are due to expire. While this new designation would protect the area in perpetuity, mining industry officials said they will attempt to challenge the new decision. They are particularly interested in uranium mining, which environmental advocates are strongly against. They have long argued that the region only contains about 1.3 percent of the United States’ uranium reserves.

[Related: How tribal co-managing movements are transforming the conservation of public lands.]

“Many of us have worked for decades to safeguard our Grand Canyon homelands from desecration at the hands of extractive, harmful operations like uranium mining, and today, with the designation of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, we see these lands permanently protected at last,” Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition coordinator Carletta Tilousi said in a statement, according to CNN.

A map of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. CREDIT: Bureau of Land Management/Grand Canyon Trust. Map by Stephanie Smith.

Protecting Arizona’s clean water supply is a top priority with about 97 percent of the Western state’s voters, according to a poll by Impact Research. The Grand Canyon Trust says that this new move safeguards precious groundwater resources that are vital to tribal and local communities and the Grand Canyon’s seeps and springs, while honoring the deep connections that Native peoples have to the Grand Canyon region.

The monument was proposed by the Havasupai Tribe, Hopi Tribe, Hualapai Tribe, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Las Vegas Tribe of Paiutes, Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Shivwits Band of Paiutes, Navajo Nation, San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, Yavapai-Apache Nation, Zuni Tribe, and Colorado River Indian Tribes.

Arizona lawmakers, including Representative Raùl Grijalva and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, have also advocated for the lands surrounding the Grand Canyon be protected.

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Up the coast from Pompeii, another city grows on top of an underground volcano

Agostino Petroni/Undark — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 01:00:00 +0000

Tourists visit the Solfatara crater, part of the Phlegraean Fields, an active volcano near Naples, Italy. Salvatore Laporta/Kontrolab/LightRocket via Getty Images

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

A curtain of white vapor blurred the outline of Alessandro Santi as he bent over the edge of a gray bubbling pond in Pozzuoli, a city in southern Italy. In the thick sulfurous cloud, the 30-year-old technician dipped a six-foot pole, the end of which was attached to a plastic cup, into the 180-degree Fahrenheit water and pulled back a sample. He turned around and carefully poured the water into a glass container.

Underneath his feet, one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes lay dormant. While many people have heard of nearby Vesuvius, which wiped out Pompeii in 79 AD, far fewer are familiar with this underground threat.

Santi was doing field research in a large circular depression—or caldera, created when a volcano explodes and collapses—that measures up to 9 miles across. The caldera, known as the Phlegraean Fields, is part of a larger stretch of mostly underground and undersea volcanos that run along the Italian coast.

The last two major Phlegraean (pronounced FLEG-rian) eruptions occurred about 40,000 and 15,000 years ago. They annihilated most life forms in the region and sent ashes all the way to Russia. Scientists today are worried about the consequences of another eruption, now that around half a million people have built their homes, vineyards, schools, and roads just above this unstable terrain.

Over the past 18 years, the ground level in Pozzuoli has risen by about 43 inches, and it’s not uncommon for local residents to wake up to sudden sounds and vibrations from the Earth’s bowels. The frequency of earthquakes has been rising, and in 2012, the Italian Civil Protection Department, which is responsible for preventing and managing emergencies, raised its level of alertness from green to yellow. This signaled a need for greater attention and resources to monitor the caldera. Scientists know that something is happening down below, but they’re not exactly sure what.

“The catch is that we can’t go down directly” to check, said Santi. Instead, local researchers sample and measure what they can access, including water from the pond and gases from fumaroles, or vents. The samples carry traces of carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrochloric acid, among other chemicals, which originate far below the pond’s muddy bottom. Changes in the levels of these substances might signal danger, such as the imminent arrival of magma.

The water sampling is part of a greater routine effort by the Naples Center of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, known as the Vesuvian Observatory, which hosts intricate seismic monitoring systems and works with pioneering technology to monitor the volcano. Through dozens of on-field and underwater monitoring sites, the center is keeping the pulse of the caldera; it’s ready to alert Italy’s Civil Protection Department, which has been planning mass evacuations if things go south.

Scientists today are worried about the consequences of another eruption, now that around half a million people have built their homes, vineyards, schools, and roads just above this unstable terrain.

The effectiveness of such an emergency operation would likely depend upon the willingness of local residents to follow orders. “Collaboration between different stakeholders and residents is crucial,” said Rosella Nave, a researcher at the Vesuvian Observatory, “both in planning and managing a crisis.” According to several studies, many living on top of the caldera don’t perceive it as a salient threat. Instead, older generations remain haunted by past mismanaged evacuations, which brought significant economic losses to the local community. Other residents, meanwhile, are more worried, and do not trust the Civil Protection Department to respond effectively in an emergency. Some residents have responded to minor earthquakes in ways that would prevent the smooth execution of a formal evacuation plan, said longtime Pozzuoli resident Anna Peluso, who runs a Facebook group that discusses the volcano monitoring and evacuation plans.

A massive explosion is unlikely to happen anytime soon, scientists say, but smaller eruptions would not come as a surprise: There have been 23 in the past 5,500 years. And because the bay is now densely populated, even a relatively weak burst could turn into a catastrophe.

The Italian peninsula sits atop the border where the Eurasian and African tectonic plates meet. As the African plate dives under the Eurasian one, it stretches part of the Eurasian plate thin, like a pizza dough. According to Mauro Di Vito, a volcanologist and the director of the Vesuvian Observatory, this complex movement sends fresh magma — molten rock below the Earth’s surface — to Italy’s 12 active volcanoes. (Magma that breaches the Earth’s surface is referred to as “lava.”)

Since Ancient Roman times, the Phlegraean Fields have experienced periods of what’s known as bradyseism: the steady uplift or descent of the Earth’s surface. (The term derives from a combination of the Greek words for “slow” and “movement,” and is pronounced BRADY-size-um.) Yet because the region lacks a mountainous landform—something resembling, say, Mount Saint Helens in Washington State, or Mount Fuji, just outside of Tokyo, Japan—few suspected the presence of an active volcano. This began to change in the 1950s, when a Swiss scientist conducting field work in Italy hypothesized that the Phlegraean Fields were part of a caldera.

Over the next decades, geophysicists began to monitor the area. In 2008, a team of researchers identified a sizeable magmatic reservoir about 5 miles underneath Pozzuoli, and smaller pockets of magma exist a bit higher in the crust, Di Vito said. Heat and gases from the fiery underground reservoir create pressure that cracks the layers of rock above; around 2 miles above those cracks, at the Earth’s surface, people feel the movement as an earthquake.

A satellite image of the Phlegraean Fields and surrounding area, on the coastline of southern Italy. The large caldera is pockmarked with craters from previous eruptions. The town of Pozzuoli sits at the center of the caldera, while the outskirts of Naples spill in to the volcanic region from the east. Visual: NASA

Within the volcanic scientific community, there are varying lines of thought on the future of the Phlegraean Fields. Some say that the current earthquakes and ground uplift stem just from the release of gases from the reservoir and the area’s hydrothermal system. Therefore, it’s possible that the ground will eventually deflate and earthquakes will diminish. Others say that the movement of magma in past decades has weakened the Earth’s crust, making it more likely to rupture than previously thought. In this case, were the magma to reach the surface, things could get nasty: An eruption could potentially destroy the 5 cities plus the part of Naples that all sit on top of the caldera.

The lack of consensus stems from a basic problem in volcanology: Scientists have yet to develop an approach that can precisely predict future eruptions. While the presence of magmatic gases in the caldera’s fumaroles might signal the imminent arrival of an eruption, there’s no good way to predict an eruption a year or months in advance.

In 2017, Christopher Kilburn, a professor of volcanology at University College London, co-published a study with Vesuvian Observatory scientists in Nature Communications that caught the attention of the Italian media. While it had been previously thought that periods of relatively fast ground uplift in the Naples region were followed by relaxation of the Earth’s crust, the paper suggested that the crust is actually accumulating the stress. “With each episode of unrest, uplift, the chances are we’re getting closer to the possibility of breaking the crust,” Kilburn told Undark.

In June, Kilburn and his colleagues published a follow-up study, which found that, around 2020, the pattern of earthquakes caused by the volcano had changed, leading the team to conclude that the Earth’s crust was becoming weaker over time, and more prone to rupturing.

According to Kilburn, signs of an imminent eruption could be very subtle. This is what happened at the Rabaul caldera in Papua New Guinea, he said. There, a couple years of intense seismic activity was followed by a 10-year period of relative stillness, Kilburn said. Then, suddenly, in September 1994, after only 27 hours of unrest, the volcano erupted, devastating the town of Rabaul.

Although there is no way to know that the same thing will happen in the Phlegraean Fields, Kilburn stressed, the findings show how the Earth’s crust could break without much extra pressure, which is something to consider for evacuation plans.

“With each episode of unrest, uplift, the chances are we’re getting closer to the possibility of breaking the crust,” Kilburn told Undark.

Previous disasters have resulted in criminal lawsuits for scientists and government decision makers seeking to keep people safe. After an earthquake in central Italy killed 309 people in 2009, seven Italian experts were convicted of manslaughter for carrying out what was deemed to be a superficial risk analysis and for providing false reassurances to the public.

The defendants were sentenced to six years of jail, though all but one was eventually acquitted.

When asked about this lawsuit, Di Vito said that earthquakes cannot be predicted like eruptions of a well-monitored volcano, and that multiple government decision makers are involved in monitoring and assessing risk at a volcano site. “In the case of the emergency in a volcanic area, the situation is quite different.” But still, he added, the 2009 earthquake was a “lesson for Civil Protection and for scientists.”

In 1970, Eleonora Puntillo, then a Naples-based journalist, noticed something strange happening at the Pozzuoli harbor. When people disembarked from ferries, they had to step up to the pier; in the past, they’d had to step down.

“Either the sea had subsided, or the earth had risen,” the 84-year-old reporter recently told Undark. She started investigating and confirmed with local residents that the ground had indeed risen and damaged several buildings, but surprisingly, scientists were not doing much to monitor the likely cause of this bradyseism: the caldera, part of which sits directly below the harbor.

Puntillo knew that in 1538, the Monte Nuovo volcano had erupted, spitting ash and magma just a few miles from Pozzuoli’s old city center. Back then, the soil had risen, accompanied by a series of scary earthquakes. Puntillo connected the dots and published an article headlined “The Sea Retreats, The Volcano Boils,” reminding the community that a similar phenomenon had occurred in their region half a millennium earlier.

“I wish I had never done that,” Puntillo said, recalling how hordes of journalists had rushed to Pozzuoli and asked her where the next volcano would pop up. They wrote stories with terrifying headlines that made the community panic. A few days later, residents of the Rione Terra neighborhood, which had experienced much of the lift, woke up and discovered hundreds of soldiers had arrived to evacuate thousands of people from the area.

Heartbreaking scenes followed, with forceful evictions, mothers carrying mattresses, and children in tears. Panic spread, and residents outside the Rione Terra neighborhood also fled. According to The New York Times, at least 30,000 people evacuated Pozzuoli. “I still get goosebumps today at the sight of that terrifying escape,” Puntillo said. In her view, there was no need for the government’s use of force.

Ultimately, the dramatic shifting of the earth lasted two more years, but the volcano did not erupt. Residents of Rione Terra were never allowed to return to their homes and were moved permanently to a different neighborhood inside the caldera.

Residents of Pozzuoli now have generational memories of lost homes, businesses, and livelihoods — not due to a volcano throwing rocks into the sky, but due to the Italian state that evicted them. “We have bradyseism in our blood,” said Giuseppe Minieri, the 53-year-old owner of Pozzuoli’s A’ Scalinatella restaurant. “We were born here.”

After months of ground uplift in Pozzuoli, concerns of an earthquake or volcanic eruption spurred at least 30,000 residents to leave the city. The dramatic shifting of the earth lasted two more years, but the volcano did not erupt.
Visual: AP News/YouTube

Antonio Isabettini, a painter who has portrayed the Phlegraean Fields from countless angles, stood on his home’s balcony in the run-down Rione Toiano, which was given to his parents by the state in the 70s after they left Rione Terra, a move they had been planning prior to the evacuation. He pointed his finger toward the ground and said, “I’m standing on this plane, which is actually a volcano. What do I do? Should I leave?” Before moving there, he lived for 15 years in an apartment building bordering the Solfatara, a volcanic crater that constantly emits steam and sulfur fumes.

“We co-live with this; we know this is a dancing land; we know that there is a magmatic chamber down here,” he said. But if the entire caldera were to erupt like it did millennia ago, he added, it would be disastrous.

On the third floor of the Vesuvian Observatory, Mario Castellano stood in front of a dozens of computer screens that display data arriving from more than 60 permanent monitoring stations on the Phlegraean Fields. A 2.8 magnitude earthquake had been recorded the night before.

“If there is a strong earthquake, we notify the Civil Protection,” said Castellano, the technologist director at the control center. Over the past 17 years, Castellano said he has witnessed a steady increase in the number and magnitude of earthquakes.

In addition to using seismometers to record the Earth’s vibrations, the observatory’s scientists use both land and custom-designed marine GPS stations to detect what are known as land deformations, places where the ground has risen or fallen due to pressure from underground gases or magma. Additionally, instruments called tiltmeters measure subtle shifts in ground slope. This constant flow of data is crucial to detecting the upward movement of magma quickly, said Prospero De Martino, the scientist in charge of monitoring land deformations.

De Martino has noticed an increase in ground lifting speed, but scientists aren’t certain what is causing it: Gases? Magma? Either way, such a dramatic change in the Earth’s surface is enough to worry De Martino.

The researchers compile the monitoring data into a bulletin, which is published every Tuesday on the observatory’s website and social media platforms, so the public can stay informed on the state of the volcano. Occasionally, the observatory receives phone calls from concerned residents asking when and where they should evacuate—advice that only the Civil Protection Department can give, not the scientists.

For people living in the caldera, attitudes around the threat the Phlegraean Fields pose have, in certain ways, been changing. In a survey conducted in 2006, most study participants viewed an eruption of Mount Vesuvius as a danger, despite the fact that scientists say an imminent eruption there is highly unlikely. These same individuals didn’t know much about the volcano underneath their feet. Additionally, people reported having little trust in local authorities to manage a volcanic emergency.

These findings prompted the observatory and the area’s municipalities to undertake an educational campaign to create awareness of the caldera. They gave talks in schools, public offices, and city squares. In 2019, Nave and her team conducted a follow-up study to see if volcanic risk perception had changed over time. Although the study has not yet been published, preliminary findings suggest that 37 percent of locals still fear Vesuvius above all (though this has dropped from 70 percent in the 2006 survey), and the level of trust in a governmental response remains minimal. The survey also revealed that that most local residents don’t list the volcano as among the top seven problems in their community.

“We have bradyseism in our blood,” said Giuseppe Minieri. “We were born here.”

However, 60 percent of those surveyed recognized the Phlegraean Fields as the more threatening volcano, and more locals are aware of the emergency plans than they were in 2006. “Residents’ awareness of volcanic hazards is higher now,” Nave wrote in an email to Undark.

Perhaps paradoxically, some residents believe the caldera could explode without any warning signs at all, a scenario that no scientists have hypothesized.

Some researchers aren’t surprised by the reaction. In fact, the perception of panic “is institutionalized by emergency plans,” said Francesco Santoianni, who spent 40 years working at the local Civil Protection Department office. It is “criminal,” he said, that evacuation exercises “are carried out as if the only solution is to escape as far and as quickly as possible.” He recalled one exercise in which volunteers showed citizens how to escape through windows.

Antonio Ricciardi, a geologist monitoring the Phlegraean Fields and other volcanoes from the national headquarters of the Civil Protection Department in Rome, said that Italy’s prime minister, advised by the Major Risks Commission and the head of Civil Protection, will declare what is called a pre-alarm status only if things get really bad: thousands of earthquakes per day; the ground deforming and tilting significantly; an abundance of gases laced with carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide—a sign that magma is about to surface; cracks in the streets and broken pipes. Under these circumstances, the government will empty hospitals and prisons, and cultural assets will be moved or wrapped up to withstand the heat. Some locals will start leaving the area of their own volition, scared by the mayhem. If things worsen, a full emergency status, called the “alarm phase,” will kick in.

It will take 72 hours to evacuate all half-a-million people living in the danger zone, said Antonella Scalzo, a geologist at the Civil Protection Department who is involved with planning and handling a Phlegraean Fields emergency. The evacuation goal, she added, is to make sure that nobody is there if the volcano erupts. Anyone who remains could find themselves in the path of a violent river of gases and volcanic material after an eruption, moving at hundreds of miles per hour with temperatures several hundred to over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

During the emergency phase, people should know which roads to take to evacuate the area. If they do not want to leave independently, public transportation will carry them to safety, said Scalzo.

“We have to do a lot of work to make people accept that, not today, not tomorrow, but maybe one day, they will be asked to vacate their home indefinitely,” Nave said. Otherwise, “if you don’t go, you’ll end up like a Pompeian.”

Not everyone needs to be persuaded. Many people will evacuate on their own at the first signs of an imminent eruption, Anna Peluso, the longtime Pozzuoli resident, wrote to Undark. She also pointed to one 2015 earthquake, when parents rushed to school to retrieve their children instead of waiting for the announcement of an evacuation, as per the government’s plan. The additional cars on the road paralyzed the city’s traffic.

“Something is happening. Something has changed,” said Peluso. As she walked along a pier, she pointed to roughly a dozen boats, which floated well below the dock to which they were secured.

Next, she stopped at the nearby port, which was empty of water and where small fishing boats almost touched the seabed—clear signs that the earth has risen. Heading away from the sea and into the city center, she passed buildings showing signs of cracks and wear. One four-story residence was missing chunks of earthy red paint and plaster, and fissures ran along its façade.

Many of Peluso’s neighbors, she said, have dismissed her as an alarmist for openly talking about the volcano. But she said she doesn’t care. What worries her instead are the unanswered questions: What is the underlying cause of the increased ground uplift? Will the observatory detect dangerous changes in volcanic activity? And if an evacuation occurs—when will authorities let residents return to their homes?

Before going home, Peluso stopped along her walk and noted that a volcanic crater could “open up right here, in the middle of the street.”

Then she turned to look at the sea. The sunset had painted the water with a calming orange tint. A rocky coastline hugged the harbor. “When somebody asks, ‘Why do you live in Pozzuoli?’” she said, “the answer is right there.”

Agostino Petroni is a journalist, author, and a 2021 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow. His work appears in a number of outlets, including National Geographic, BBC, and The Washington Post.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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This waddling robot could guide baby turtles to the sea

Andrew Paul — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 18:00:00 +0000

A tiny robot mimics the gait and movement of baby sea turtles. University of Notre Dame

It’s sad but true: only around one in 1,000 baby sea turtles survive the arduous trek from their beach nests to the open ocean. This journey has only grown more fraught thanks to continued seaside development and all manner of human trash obstacles for the tiny creatures. To both better understand their movements, as well as potentially help them out, a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame recently designed and built their own turtle robot.

Their results? Well, take a look for yourself and try not to say “Awww.”

“The sea turtle’s unique body shape, the morphology of their flippers and their varied gait patterns makes them very adaptable,” explained Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and roboticist at the University of Notre Dame who led the latest biomimicry project.

Along with an electrical engineering doctoral student Nnamdi Chikere and undergraduate John Simon McElroy, Ozkan-Aydin broke down sea turtles’ evolutionary design into a few key parts: an oval-shaped frame, four individually operated remote-controlled flippers, a multisensor device, battery, as well as an onboard control unit. The trio relied on silicone molds to ensure the flippers’ necessary flexibility, and utilized 3D printed rigid polymers for both its frame and flipper connectors.

[Related: Safely share the beach with endangered sea turtles this summer.]

To maximize its overall efficacy, the team’s new turtle-bot isn’t inspired by a single species. Instead, Ozkan-Aydin and her colleagues synthesized the gait patterns, morphology, and flipper anatomy of multiple turtle species to take “the most effective aspects from each,” she said on August 7.

Unlike other animal-inspired robots, however, Ozkan-Aydin’s turtle tech is initially intended solely to help their biological mirrors. “Our hope is to use these baby sea turtle robots to safely guide sea turtle hatchlings to the ocean and minimize the risks they face during this critical period,” she explains.

Judging from recent reports, they could use all the help they can get. According to the Wild Animal Health Fund, 6 out of 7 sea turtle species are currently considered threatened or endangered. The aptly named nonprofit sea turtle organization, See Turtles, lists a number of current threats facing the species, including getting entangled in fishing gear, illegal trade and consumption of eggs and meat, marine pollution, and global warming.

The post This waddling robot could guide baby turtles to the sea appeared first on Popular Science.

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Antarctica is in the climate change crosshairs

Laura Baisas — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 15:00:00 +0000

'Nations must understand that by continuing to explore, extract and burn fossil fuels anywhere in the world, the environment of Antarctica will become ever more affected.'. Professor Anna E. Hogg, University of Leeds

In a summer of smashed temperature records and extreme weather events, it’s natural to wonder if anywhere is safe from the wrath of human-made climate change. The answer is probably not, even in the most remote places. A study published August 8 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science found that extreme events, including ocean heatwaves and ice loss, will be more common and more severe in Antarctica.

[Related: Record-breaking heat is bombarding the North and South poles.]

Drastic action is needed to limit global warming to the target of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit made in the 2015 Paris Agreement, and the team on this study are warning that Antarctica’s recent extreme could only be the beginning.

“Antarctic change has global implications,” study co-author and University of Exeter geoscientist and glaciologist Martin Siegert said in a statement. “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero is our best hope of preserving Antarctica, and this must matter to every country—and individual—on the planet.”

Recently, the ice sheets on Antarctica’s western end and particularly its peninsula have seen dramatic and fast melting that threatens to raise global sea level over the next few centuries. The Thwaites glacier, also called the Doomsday Glacier, on the continent’s western side is melting at an especially rapid pace.

In the study, a team recorded extreme events occurring in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, including weather, ocean temperatures, sea ice, glacier and ice shelf systems, as well as biodiversity on the land and sea. They found that the continent’s fragile environments “may well be subject to considerable stress and damage in future years and decades.” The team calls for urgent policy action to protect it and many countries could be breaching an international treaty by not protecting Antarctica.

“Signatories to the Antarctic Treaty (including the UK, USA, India and China) pledge to preserve the environment of this remote and fragile place,” said Siegert. “Nations must understand that by continuing to explore, extract and burn fossil fuels anywhere in the world, the environment of Antarctica will become ever more affected in ways inconsistent with their pledge.”

The study also considered Antarctica’s vulnerability to a range of extreme events to understand the causes and likely future changes. One of these includes the world’s largest recorded heatwave, which occurred in East Antarctica in 2022. Temperatures were a staggering 70 degrees above average, and winter sea ice formation is currently the lowest on record.

The high temperatures have also been linked to years with lower krill numbers. Species reliant on krill like fur seals have had breeding failures as a result.

[Related: The East Antarctic Ice Sheet could raise sea levels 16 feet by 2500.]

“Our results show that while extreme events are known to impact the globe through heavy rainfall and flooding, heatwaves and wildfires, such as those seen in Europe this summer, they also impact the remote polar regions,” co-autor and University of Leeds professor of Earth observation Anna Hogg said in a statement. “Antarctic glaciers, sea ice and natural ecosystems are all impacted by extreme events. Therefore, it is essential that international treaties and policy are implemented in order to protect these beautiful but delicate regions.”

The study also calls for careful management of the area to protect vulnerable sites, as the retreat of the Antarctic sea ice sheet will make new areas of the region accessible by ships. Using the European Space Agency and European Commission’s Copernicus Sentinel satellites can provide regular monitoring of the entire Antarctic region and Southern Ocean, and can measure the ice.

“Antarctic sea ice has been grabbing headlines in recent weeks, and this paper shows how sea ice records—first record highs but, since 2017, record lows—have been tumbling in Antarctica for several years,” study co-author and British Antarctic Survey sea ice expert Caroline Holmes said in a statement. “On top of that, there are deep interconnections between extreme events in different aspects of the Antarctic physical and biological system, almost all of them vulnerable to human influence in some way.”

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Why your favorite beach might be eroding

Zayna Syed — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 18:00:00 +0000

In 2018, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is moving 50,000 cubic yards of sand around at Ocean Beach as a stopgap measure for the erosion along the south end of the shoreline. Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

While most people think of the beach as a place to relax, it has always served a more purposeful role: a buffer against storms. It’s a role that will become even more important as climate change continues to disrupt nature’s delicate balance, inciting sea level rise and stronger, more frequent storms on the coasts.

But those living right along the shore may soon find themselves without as much of a cushion, as coastal erosion diminishes or displaces major beaches. At least 13 miles of beaches have been lost on the Hawaiian islands of Kauai, Oahu, and Maui, and entire beachfront communities are collapsing on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. States like Texas and Alaska have seen their coastlines “retreat” by an average of five to 10 feet per year since 1900. Two-thirds of California beaches could disappear by 2100 all because of sea level rise.

Some forms of soft and hard engineering, like trapping sand with wooden fences, promise to keep erosion at bay, but scientists warn these shouldn’t be considered a permanent fix.

How does coastal erosion work?

When a beach shrinks or even disappears, it’s because coastal erosion removes sand, mud, pebbles, or other sediment along large bodies of water. This could include the saltmarshes in southern Louisiana, sandy strips in the Bay Area of California, and the Great Lakes.

It’s natural for the beach to be wider in northern summers, when waves are weaker and leave more sediment, and sparser in northern winters, when waves are stronger, according to Jennifer Miselis, who studies the effects of storms and sea level rise on coastal geology for the United States Geological Survey. This is because of many seasonal factors, including increased winds, storms, groundswell, and gravitational pull from the moon in winter.

[Related on PopSci+: Humans and nature will handle rising tides, together]

The problem is when sand is taken from the shoreline and then not replenished, resulting in chronic erosion. In the US, this is usually because the pathways that bring sand from the ocean or river become blocked. For example, an inlet that forms naturally might prevent sediment from flowing alongside the coast. In other countries, especially in the Global South, companies are intentionally eroding beaches through sand mining. Sand, which is a key ingredient in concrete, is the second most used resource in the world after water, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

Climate change could also mean less sand on shorelines. Stronger storms mean that more sand will be swept off beaches and into the water. Rising sea levels will cause more areas of beaches to be covered by water. “It’s what I call the bathtub model,” says Stephen Leatherman, a professor at Florida International University who researches beach erosion and sea level rise. “If you bring the water level up, it submerges things, but you’re not having any erosion. Your bathtub’s not falling apart.” However, when coupled with stronger storms, he explains, sea level rise can cause more of the beach to be washed away.

Where do people factor into all this?

Coastlines have always changed over time, says Mark Kulp, a professor of geology at the University of New Orleans. If you study the geologic record, you would find that sea levels have risen about 400 feet over the past 20,000 years or so. But climate change is causing sea levels to rise faster than before, and coastal infrastructure will make it harder for home and business owners to migrate.

Unlike many millennia ago, humans help drive erosion today. It’s often exacerbated by structures that were built to protect people from flooding, but block off sediment flow from bodies of water as a consequence.

Sandbags are one small measure for fighting coastal erosion on Lanikai Beach on Oahu, Hawaii. Hawaii Sea Grant

Take Galveston, Texas, where a hurricane killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in 1900, making it the deadliest natural disaster in American history. After that, the city built a 10-mile-long seawall along the coast. The seawall has kept residents and property safe for the past century, but it also decimated what was once a wide beach, causing the city to lose 100 yards of sand a year and hurting local ecosystems and the tourism industry. And in southern Louisiana, which has some of the fastest deteriorating coasts in the country, part of the problem is the levees built to protect communities from flooding, which also prevent sediment from flowing through and replenishing the marshes.

While people might think development along the coast is responsible for driving coastal erosion, Leatherman says this isn’t true—the reasons for coastal erosion and solutions vary significantly from place to place. But generally, he thinks jetties, which are rock structures built perpendicular to beaches to provide a safe passage for ships into harbors, and then seawalls cause the most erosion out of manmade structures.

What solutions are there?

Renourishment, which could mean dumping trucked-in sand on a beach, designing ways to trap sediment the tide washes in from flowing back into the ocean, or even dredging up sand from the ocean or lake floor to redistribute it on the beach, has been an increasingly popular method of slowing down the effects of erosion around the world. In the northeastern US in particular, “we’re doing a good job by nourishing beaches and keeping them in place,” Miselis says.

But renourishment, especially when it involves transporting new sand, is costly and only a Band-Aid for the problem. “Everybody wants beach nourishment,” Leatherman says. “But people don’t realize, you only set back the erosion clock. In other words, it’s like you’re treating the symptom, not curing the disease. You’re not stopping the sea level from coming up; you’re not stopping coastal storms from coming in.”

Other fixes might employ “soft engineering” techniques to trap sand on the beach, like fashioning wooden fences to build artificial sand dunes, and then planting native plant species to keep the dunes put. And in some cases, like in Louisiana, the levees that keep out flooding could be altered to allow some sediment to flow back into the Mississippi Delta, Kulp says.

[Related: Pendulums under ocean waves could prevent beach erosion]

But ultimately, people have to accept that some of their favorite beaches will wash away little by little. “If we’re gonna live in coastal environments, we just have to come up with creative and unique solutions to try to limit or reduce some of the erosion,” Kulp says. “But we also need to simultaneously recognize that there may be coastal sections on a global [level] that we can’t necessarily do anything about. We just have to accept that they’re going to disappear and change and that’s part of the process.”

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Trumpetfish use other fish as camouflage

Laura Baisas — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 15:00:00 +0000

Shadowing behavior typically uses a non-threatening fish species as camouflage. Deposit Photos

Coral reefs are a bevy of biodiversity, supporting an estimated 25 percent of all known marine species. These reefs are home to many mutually beneficial relationships, but the animals that live there still have to eat. Scientists are learning more about the hunting tactics of some coral reef fish.

[Related: Coral is reproducing in broad daylight.]

A study published August 7 in the journal Current Biology found the first known experimental evidence that trumpetfish conceal themselves by swimming closely behind another fish when it is hunting. This reduces the likelihood of being detected by its prey.

This shadowing behavior typically uses a non-threatening fish species as camouflage, similar to how duck hunters will hide behind cardboard cut-outs of domesticated animals called “stalking horses” to approach ducks undetected. However, this strategy hasn’t been observed much in non-human animals.

“When a trumpetfish swims closely alongside another species of fish, it’s either hidden from its’ prey entirely, or seen but not recognised as a predator because the shape is different,” study co-author and University of Cambridge behavioral ecologist Sam Matchette said in a statement.

In the study, the team conducted field work in the Caribbean Sea near the coral reefs off the island of Curaçao. The team set up an underwater system to pull 3D-printed models of trumpetfish on nylon lines past colonies of damselfish, which are a common meal for the trumpetfish. They had to spend hours underwater perfectly still to conduct the experiment that they recorded using video cameras.

“Doing manipulative experiments in the wild like this allows us to test the ecological relevance of these behaviors,” study co-author and University of Bristol behavioral biologist Andy Radford said in the statement.

[Related: Google is inviting citizen scientists to its underwater listening room.]

When the pseudo-trumpetfish moved past by itself, the damselfish swam up to inspect it and then rapidly fled back to their shelter in response to this potential threat from a predator. When a model of an herbivorous and non-threatening parrotfish moved past alone, the damselfish inspected it and did not have as big a reaction.

The team then used a trumpetfish model that was attached to the side of a parrotfish model as a way to replicate the shadowing behavior that the real trumpetfish use on the reef. The damselfish did not appear to detect the threat and responded the same way they did to the parrotfish model.

Damselfish inspected the model trumpetfish – and rapidly fled from this predator to avoid being eaten. CREDIT: Sam Matchette.

“I was surprised that the damselfish had such a profoundly different response to the different fish; it was great to watch this happening in real time,” said Matchette.

The long thin trumpetfish uses a bigger, non-threatening species of fish, such as parrotfish, as camouflage to get closer to its dinner without being detected. CREDIT: Sam Matchette

Local divers were interviewed to see if this was happening out in the wild. The divers said they were more likely to observe shadowing behavior on degraded, less structurally complex reefs. Global warming from human-caused climate change, pollution, and overfishing are harming coral reefs around the world. In July, water temperatures off the coast of Florida reached a staggering 100 degrees Fahrenheit, prompting coral bleaching and efforts to preserve coral species in laboratories.

“The shadowing behavior of the trumpetfish appears [to be] a useful strategy to improve its hunting success. We might see this behavior becoming more common in the future as fewer structures on the reef are available for them to hide behind,” co-author and University of Cambridge biologist James Herbert-Read said in a statement.

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In water-strained Utah, can golf courses justify their giant footprint?

Samuel Shaw/High Country News — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 01:00:00 +0000

Sprinklers water a golf course as drought continues to worsen on July 1, 2021 in southwest Utah. David McNew/Getty Images

This article was originally featured on High Country News.

On a sweltering late April day, a flock of middle-aged men strolled in athleisure, practicing their backswings and rifling balls into the azure sky above the Green Springs golf community just outside St. George, a ballooning city of 100,000 in southwestern Utah. Some 2,000 homes, mostly single-family—many with RV garages—orbit the fairway, like rings around Planet Golf, and more are on their way.

As in so many cities in the desert West, golf in St. George is a thirsty business, with a powerful lobby and a relationship with water painted in green on the landscape. Among its peers, however, St. George is in a league of its own. Few cities in the Southwest use more water per person: nearly 300 gallons a day. And a hefty portion of that, over half, goes to keeping ornamental grass, lawns and golf courses lush in an arid region where water supplies are dwindling every day. Within a decade, and without immediate action to conserve, local officials predict that its water shortage will become a water crisis.

Utah is notorious for granting an unusual degree of grace to this sort of profligate water use. That may be changing, however, at least when it comes to the golf industry: In 2022, the city of Ivins, an exurb of St. George, effectively banned the construction of new golf courses, while early this year, state Rep. Douglas Welton, R, introduced House Bill 188, which could require golf courses to be more transparent about how much water they use.

In a city and at a time where something’s gotta give, will golf be the first to fall?

Minutes down the road from the Green Springs community, at the Dixie Red Hills Golf Course, I joined a group of older players staging behind the first tee. Before we settled on the griddle-hot pleather of our golf carts, Jim Peacock, 80, slapped a top-spinning rocket up and over the rough that his friend Craig Felt, two years his senior, couldn’t help but admire. “Jim’s the athlete of the group,” Felt said. Soon, the chatter moved to water. “When I was in Mexico, there was only enough water for three flushes. That could happen to us if we don’t pay attention,” Felt said. While Tom Smith, 75, indicated that he’d rather give up golf than toilet-flushing, it’s not clear that the rest of the community is so inclined. “This is a place where a lot of people do a lot of golfing,” Greg Milne said, gesturing toward the sprawl of St. George.

“That’s how it started. The course was built as a sort of vision for growth in the area.”

This area’s mingling of desert and water has long attracted people. Southern Paiute bands lived near the Virgin River for a millennium or more before Mormon colonists arrived in the late 1850s, intent on making “Utah’s Dixie” bloom with cotton. For the next century, Washington County remained “a sleepy little community off the I-15 that people would pass by on their way to California,” said Colby Cowan, director of golf operations for the city of St. George. Throughout the 1950s, nuclear blasts at Nevada’s Yucca Flats test range blew radioactive dust onto the homes of the city’s 5,000 residents—dust that stubbornly clung to the valley’s reputation.

But in 1965, St. George unveiled the nine-hole Dixie Red Hills course, rebranding the Mormon Downwinder outpost as a putter’s paradise. “That’s how it started. The course was built as a sort of vision for growth in the area,” said Cowan. Since then, golf’s role in the regional recreation economy has burgeoned. The 14 golf courses in Washington County, including four owned by the city of St. George, attract nearly 600,000 visitors a year, generating $130 million dollars annually, according to Cowan. That puts golf on par with mining, quarrying, and oil and gas industries in the area, though still below the half-billion dollars generated annually by Zion National Park.

And, like those other industries, golf has political sway. When golf’s water needs came under fire in Washington County in 2021 and again in the state Legislature this January, the industry flexed its influence. Golf Alliance Utah, the lobbying wing of the Utah Golf Association, pulled strings at the Statehouse in Salt Lake City, killing the bill even after sponsors dropped the annual reporting requirement, arguing that it unfairly targeted the sport.

Generally, the golf industry tries to burnish its image by touting its economic benefits and highlighting its efforts to decrease water use. “We’re doing our due diligence with water conservation,” Devin Dehlin, the executive director at the Utah Section Professional Golf Association, said in a call with High Country News. “What the sport brings economic-wise is the story we want to tell.” In practice, those changes have come down to encouraging course operators to replace some turf with native plants. Other technologies, like soil-moisture monitoring and artificial grass coloring, which gives turf a deep green appearance with minimal watering, are being adopted, though strictly on a voluntary basis. Dehlin said his organization does not track how widespread these changes are.

Of the ten thirstiest golf courses in Utah, seven are in Washington County, according to an investigation by the Salt Lake Tribune. Some privately owned courses, including Coral Canyon Golf Course and SunRiver Golf Club, actually increased their water use between 2018 and 2022. The mercury tops 100 degrees Fahrenheit here more than 50 days each year, so it takes an exorbitant amount of water to keep the fairways lush year-round: about 177 million gallons annually for each course, or roughly eight times the national average. And if the region continues to grow at its current breakneck rate, existing water supplies—from wells, springs and the Virgin River — will be severely strained. That prospect has some local and state officials backing a proposed pipeline that would carry Colorado River water from the ever-shrinking Lake Powell to this corner of the Utah desert. With or without the pipeline, the region is likely to face severe water rationing, with golf and lawns likely seeing the first cuts. Washington County’s forthcoming drought contingency plan could require cities to cut their water use by up to 30 percent in a worst-case scenario. “And if you look about where they would cut their water usage,” said Washington County Water Conservancy District Manager Zach Renstrom, “it really would come to large grassy areas, such as golf.”

In a bid to avoid future mandated cuts, St. George is scrambling to reduce its water use now. Under Renstrom’s guidance, the city passed sweeping conservation ordinances early this year—the toughest in Utah, but still mild compared to those in Las Vegas. Three of the four city-owned golf courses now use treated wastewater for irrigation rather than potable or “culinary” grade water. Las Vegas shifted to reused water for the majority of its courses by 2008. Cowan said the city-owned courses are beginning to remove ornamental grass from non-play areas. So far this year, the county has removed more than 264,000 square feet of grass. While that may sound like a lot, it’s only about six acres across the entire county, or roughly 4 percent of one local golf course. Even with those measures in place, Renstom says the halcyon days for golf in southwestern Utah need to end: “I’ve had a couple of developers come to me recently and want to talk about golf courses, and I flat-out said, ‘I won’t provide the water.’”

For now, though, the county still has some water to spare. St. George has secured $60 million for a wastewater treatment plant, all while stashing almost two years of reserves in a network of reservoirs. “We have a lot of water stored away,” said Ed Andrechak, water program manager for Conserve Southwest Utah, a sustainability advocacy nonprofit. If the county enforced the strict conservation rules that Las Vegas has, he believes it could grow at the blistering pace it’s projected to over the coming years.

But Andrechak worries that, ultimately, a culture of profligacy will be the barrier to conservation, not money or technical know-how: “We just don’t think water rules apply to us here,” he said. Andrechak cataloged a number of examples: a 1,200-foot lazy river under construction at the Black Desert golf resort in Ivins; the Desert Color community, which built around an artificial lake that Andrechak described as a “giant evapo-pond”; another three man-made lakes for the Southern Shores water-skiing-housing complex in Hurricane, and perhaps most bewildering, a Yogi Bear-themed water park east of St. George. The water park will require 5 million gallons or more of culinary-grade drinking water annually for rides like one nicknamed the “Royal Flush,” a toilet bowl-shaped slide. The Sand Hollow golf course next door gulps up 60 times as much water. “We’re 23 years into a mega drought, and yet my struggle here is that we’re not really that concerned about it,” Andrechak said. “That’s the culture.”

“We’re 23 years into a mega drought, and yet my struggle here is that we’re not really that concerned about it.”

This culture is enabled and even nurtured by policy: St. George’s water rates are among the lowest in the West, which results in bigger profits for course operators and more affordable green fees, but also disincentivizes conservation. “The whole idea has been to have low (water) rates to take care of the citizens by making golf affordable,” said Dehlin. “Having affordable water is important for the growth of the game and to keep our facilities in the conditions that we do. And that’s one thing about golf courses in Utah in general: they’re very well-manicured, very well-kept,” Dehlin said. “And yes, well-irrigated.”

Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range. Email him at samuel.shaw@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. Follow Samuel on Instagram @youngandforgettable.

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As oceans become more acidic, creatures could struggle to smell

Ethan Freedman/Hakai Magazine — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 23:00:00 +0000

In an acidified ocean, chemosensory-cue chemicals—and animals’ chemical sensors—may not work how they used to. Photo by Cavan Images/Alamy Stock Photo

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Dungeness crabs hunt by flicking their chemical-detecting antennae to and fro. Sensing the water—the underwater equivalent of sniffing the air—is a well-trod strategy for homing in on potential prey. But that timeless tactic appears to be at risk, as new research shows that climate change–induced ocean acidification seems to cause Dungeness crabs’ antennae to falter.

Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Ontario put Dungeness crabs in water just slightly more acidic than normal—conditions that are already present in some coastal ecosystems and could be widespread by the year 2100 if humans continue to emit a high level of greenhouse gases. They found that the animals need to be exposed to cadaverine, a food signaling chemical, at a concentration 10 times higher than normal before they register its presence.

And it’s not just Dungeness crabs that appear to be in trouble. Acidification threatens to deprive a variety of marine species of crucial chemical cues. Research into this phenomenon is still limited, but as the field develops, the scope of the potential consequences is growing clearer.

“Almost every chemical that’s in the sea could be affected,” says Jorg Hardege, a chemical ecologist at the University of Hull in England.

Just like on land, where animals smell and taste chemicals to glean vital information, many marine creatures use chemical cues to spot food, locate potential mates, or avoid nearby predators. Chemoreception works because each of these cues is a molecule with a distinct chemical structure and physical shape. But because all of these chemicals are floating around in water, they’re susceptible to a range of chemical reactions. More acidic water, says Hardege, has more positively charged hydrogen ions floating around. Those hydrogen ions can bind to the cue chemicals, changing their shape—and how they’re detected. Hydrogen ions can also bind to the animals’ chemoreceptors, changing how they sense those chemical cues, Hardege says.

If you think of these chemical cues as a language, Hardege says, it’s as if words start sounding different while, at the same time, your ears are changing how they hear sound.

Unsurprisingly, disrupting an animal’s ability to detect key chemical cues can alter its behavior. Take the European green crab, for example. One study, coauthored by Hardege, shows that a slight increase in water’s acidity can change the shape of chemicals that tell the crabs to fan their eggs with water to provide fresh oxygen and remove waste. Crabs in experimentally acidified water were less sensitive to these cues—they needed at least 10 times as much of these chemicals added to the water before they started fanning their eggs more frequently.

Some fish have also demonstrated having trouble picking up on chemical cues in more acidic water. In one study, juvenile pink salmon seemed less attuned to chemical cues and less able to avoid predators. Gilthead seabream—a commonly eaten European fish—have shown the same trend.

Many of these experiments tested levels of ocean acidification that could be widespread by the end of the century if the world hits extreme climate change projections. But with coastal upwelling, a process that can bring acidic deep-ocean water to the surface, some coastal environments already see this level of acidification occasionally. And even if future carbon emissions are reigned in, the whole ocean will still grow more acidic than it is now. Individual species will likely have different thresholds at which the increasing acidity suddenly derails their ability to detect certain chemicals, Hardege says, and scientists don’t yet know where those thresholds might be.

Christina Roggatz, a marine chemical ecologist at the University of Bremen in Germany, notes that acidification does not always reduce animals’ sensitivity to chemicals. For example, one study found that in more acidic water, hermit crabs seem to be even more attracted to a particular chemical cue.

But with some cues growing stronger and others growing weaker, widespread acidification could upend the balance of chemical communication in the ocean, Roggatz says.

This is on top of the other, more overtly threatening, consequences of changing marine chemistry. In a particularly frightening case, Roggatz discovered that a combination of increasing acidity and rising temperatures actually increases the toxicities of saxitoxin, a potent neurotoxin from contaminated shellfish, and tetrodotoxin, produced by pufferfish, blue-ringed octopuses, and other animals.

Research into acidification’s potential to disrupt underwater chemical communication and sensory perception is really just getting started. Last year, Hardege, Roggatz, and others wrote a paper urging researchers, from chemists to ecologists, to unravel what these changes could mean.

It is possible, Hardege says, that wildlife could adapt to the changing chemical environment. The signal of nearby food, for instance, isn’t often one chemical, but an array of chemicals. Even if a species can no longer detect one of those chemicals, it might still be able to detect the others. Or, it might turn to its other senses, like vision.

Of course, it’s best if we don’t put that to the test. The best way to protect marine ecosystems from ocean acidification is to limit acidification, says Roggatz.

“If we can buy time by reducing the carbon dioxide amounts we emit substantially,” Roggatz says, “I think that is the solution.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Coral is reproducing in broad daylight

Chloe Glad/Hakai Magazine — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 01:00:00 +0000

Efforts by nonprofit Tama No Te Tairoto (Children of the Lagoon in Tahitian) and a team of more than 100 volunteers have revealed that Porites rus coral spawns with impressive synchrony, even thousands of kilometers apart. Photo courtesy of Tama No Te Tairoto

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Vetea Liao was late. Two or three times a week, the Tahitian-born marine scientist heads out for an early-morning dive. He likes to start just as the first rays of light break the horizon. But that morning, in November 2014, the sun was already warming the lagoon off Moorea, Tahiti’s sister island in French Polynesia, when Liao hit the water. Peering down, Liao spotted the familiar branches of Porites rus, a common coral around the archipelago’s western islands that looks a little like ginger root studded with strawberry seeds. He also saw something else: something he’d never seen before. A delicate fog was rising up from the reef. It looked like the coral was smoking.

Liao sought out his colleagues at Moorea’s French Centre for Island Research and Environmental Observatory (CRIOBE). No one had ever seen anything like it. But one offered a lead: maybe the coral was having sex? It was a bold hypothesis.

Coral reproduction is thought to be largely a nighttime activity. In response to environmental cues—the full moon, temperature fluctuations, even the duration of darkness—corals simultaneously release clouds of tiny eggs and sperm into the water, which are fertilized and then float with the current and eventually settle on a new patch of reef. Scientists had witnessed corals spawning in daylight just a handful of times before 2014, but never in French Polynesia. Could the P. rus Liao had seen really be doing it, too?

A female Porites rus coral releases eggs that will drift with the current to meet sperm released by a male coral. While other well-known species in the Indo-Pacific, such as Acropora corals, reproduce just once or twice each year, Porites corals can spawn several months in a row. Photo courtesy of Tama No Te Tairoto

For years, though he returned to the lagoon many times, Liao didn’t see the coral haze again. Then, in 2018, a friend spotted misty waters from her deck, which overlooks a different lagoon in Tahiti. As with Liao’s initial sighting, it was just a few hours after dawn. With confirmation of when to search, Liao soon got proof that the haze was what his colleague had suspected: the sure sign of coral spawning in daylight. Within the next two years, he and a dozen others recorded daytime spawning events across Tahiti, Moorea, and four other islands in the archipelago. P. rus sex, he eventually found, occurs like clockwork: five days after the full moon, from October to April, about two hours after daybreak—roughly 7:00 a.m. in French Polynesia. On deeper reefs, P. rus does the deed later, around 10:00 a.m.

Liao now has a team of more than 100 locals—families, schoolkids, fishers, and volunteer divers—who have reported 226 daytime spawning events by P. rus, surveying more than 100 reefs on 14 islands, including several remote atolls. “Without citizens, it would have taken ages to know all this,” Liao says.

In 2020, marine biologist Camille Leonard witnessed the precision of daytime spawning at CRIOBE, where she was monitoring P. rus coral growing in tanks at the same time that divers were surveying a nearby reef. “The Porites spawned at the exact same minute [in the two places],” Leonard says. Liao’s timing was spot on. “I thought, Okay, he knows what he’s doing,” says Leonard.

That remarkable synchrony extends far beyond Polynesia. In December 2022, after reading about Liao’s work on Facebook, coral scientist Victor Bonito with Reef Explorer Fiji P. rus recorded coral spawning two hours after sunrise in Fiji, more than 3,000 kilometers away. The same is true near the island of Réunion, 15,000 kilometers away in the Indian Ocean. In general, though, observations of daytime spawning remain staggeringly rare. Liao hasn’t yet published his research, which he conducts through the nonprofit Tama No Te Tairoto (Children of the Lagoon in Tahitian) outside his full-time job developing sustainable pearl farming for French Polynesia’s Department of Marine Resources. Publishing is secondary, he says, to sharing knowledge with the locals who have helped survey the reefs.

The team’s work is impressive. “I have not heard of such an extensive citizen science project for coral spawning before,” says James Guest, a coral researcher at Newcastle University in England who launched the Coral Spawning Database. Liao’s contributions to the database, which gathers and shares data on coral spawning times in the Indo-Pacific, filled scientific gaps about Porites corals. “In the Indo-Pacific particularly,” Guest says, “there’s so much focus on Acropora [corals].”

Equally impressive is that this new discovery is already being put to work for the coral’s benefit. Thanks to Liao’s research, two of the biggest environmental consulting companies in French Polynesia now recommend that developers stop all work in nearby coastal areas during the P. rus spawning period to avoid disturbing reproduction.

As the climate continues to change, says Guest, it’s possible that corals in the Porites genus will begin to dominate reefs in the Indo-Pacific. Porites corals are tough, he says. They can handle conditions that challenge other corals, including heat, ocean acidification, and murky water. They also spawn more frequently. “It’s fair to say they are a bit more resistant,” Guest says. But “if [their reproduction] is disrupted, reef recovery could be slower or nonexistent,” he adds.

What actually triggers the special spawn timing of P. rus, though, is still unknown. It could be a certain amount of solar radiation, a precise rise in temperature, both, or something else. But Liao isn’t done investigating. Using some of Tama No Te Tairoto’s limited funds, he recently installed light meters on reefs to investigate if spawning is related to a specific wavelength of light. “Maybe it will remain a mystery,” he says. Whether or not Liao can pinpoint the triggers, corals around the world continue to do it, right on cue, in the light of day.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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The Cook Islands appear to embrace deep-sea mining—but at what risk?

Rachel Reeves/Hakai Magazine — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 22:00:00 +0000

Rarotonga is the largest of the Cook Islands’ 15 islands. Tourism currently drives the country’s economy, but deep-sea mining is being touted as a way to diversify the economy and provide much-needed services and amenities. Marty Melville/AFP/GettyImages

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

The Cook Islands’ main harbor is a small indentation in the island of Rarotonga, which is the most developed of the nation’s 15 islands, yet still the kind of place where you give directions in mango trees and neighbors, not house numbers and street names. The harbor has a few long-term residents and a lone police boat that monitors an area roughly the size of Mexico for illegal fishing by vessels from Europe, North America, and Asia. There are also vessels that transport building materials and basic food such as flour and rice to outer islands, some of them 1,200 kilometers away, where more than one-quarter of the Cook Islands’ 14,600 residents live, fish, forage, and harvest.

Visitors to the harbor include fuel tankers and a cargo ship that arrives twice a month from New Zealand to deliver almost all of the country’s groceries. These are the largest vessels that enter the harbor; cruise ships that feed the islands’ primary industry—tourism—have to anchor at sea and transfer passengers ashore in tenders. There isn’t room on Rarotonga to permanently accommodate the ships that have come to scope the potential of the deep sea for commercial mining. One came from Galveston, Texas, in February; another is returning this year from a fit-out in Wellington, New Zealand. Both can call into Aitutaki, a nearby island with a population of about 1,800, when Rarotonga’s port is occupied. The Cook Islands government began widening and deepening Aitutaki’s harbor in 2021, several months before awarding three companies licenses to explore the country’s territorial waters for polymetallic nodules. This is the official name for the lumps found on the seabed, between 3.5 and six kilometers deep, that contain multiple minerals, including manganese and cobalt, a component of batteries in cellphones, laptops, electric vehicles, and other technologies considered essential to the energy revolution. Time magazine called the nodules a “climate solution”; to Mark Brown, the prime minister of the Cook Islands, they’re “golden apples” ripe for picking.

The ships are the latest and largest indicators that deep-sea mining companies have arrived in the Cook Islands. They came bearing gifts and promises of prosperity, progress, and knowledge. They arrived to drums, fire, and chanting by a man dressed in tī leaves. Vessels with millions of dollars of equipment on board unloaded their crews into an incongruous landscape: lush jungle, brilliant blue sky, trees full of flowers and fruit. The vessels are authorized to conduct research expeditions for five years. After this, the Cook Islands government will make a decision: reject mining, continue collecting data, or, in the government’s parlance, begin harvesting.

For years, there were signs that deep-sea mining was coming to the Cook Islands: speeches by politicians, public meetings, a government agency called the Seabed Minerals Authority (SBMA) that employed a handful of people. Cook Islanders had been hearing about the nodules since a scientific expedition discovered them in neighboring French Polynesia in the late 1950s, back when New Zealand still ran the country’s government. Research boats came for decades from places like the Soviet Union and Japan to study the deep-sea minerals, but always it remained too expensive to commercially extract anything from kilometers down, where the pressure is intense enough to implode submarines. Research, too, remained cost-prohibitive. After half a century of investigating the deep sea, we know more about the moon.

In 2008, the prices of manganese and cobalt spiked. Corporations courted the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an intergovernmental body in Kingston, Jamaica, created by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to regulate access to the seabed in international waters. Already the ISA had engaged contractors to explore the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area of ocean beyond national jurisdiction between Hawai‘i and Mexico. Mining was finally starting to make more economic sense. Companies also began engaging with the governments of small island states that control large oceans. In 2009, the Cook Islands parliament passed the Seabed Minerals Act.

Across the sea, in other worlds, scientists raised questions. Why stage industrial operations in a place we know almost nothing about? Could waste—the sediment and heavy metals that get vacuumed off the seabed, processed aboard large ships, and returned to the ocean—enter food chains, including those that connect the ocean to the people of the ocean? What happens when we disturb the seafloor, which locks carbon in its sediments?

Still, like the deep sea itself, the industry remained largely out of public focus. In the Cook Islands, only decision-makers and the civically engaged paid attention when the Seabed Minerals Act was replaced in 2019 and then amended in 2020. Among the changes was the delegation of authority that left seabed-related decisions largely in the hands of a single person: the minister of minerals, who is currently the prime minister.

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic stalled the Cook Islands’ economic engine—the tourism industry that contributed 61 percent of the country’s GDP in 2019. Passenger planes and cruise ships stopped coming. Aid floated the cash economy. People returned to communal life: tending plantations on the land islanders inherit by birthright, catching fish, and bartering what they grew and caught. Despite the march of modernity, islanders still have land and sea and a deep, lived connection to both. On most islands, a cargo ship comes a few times a year. “You can’t really starve here unless you’re completely useless,” says Jason Tuara, a 45-year-old father who lives on Rarotonga and feeds his family by fishing tuna and marlin, hunting pigs, trapping chickens, and tending fruits and vegetables.

Sealed borders strengthened an already close-knit community. Elsewhere in the world, people could not gather, but in the COVID-free Cook Islands, there were more parties and sporting events than usual. Expatriates reported feeling newly embraced during that time. Tourists who were in the country when the borders closed became part of the community, too. Two of the people who got happily stuck in the Cook Islands were Greg and Laurie Stemm of Tampa, Florida. Greg had registered deep-sea mining company CIC with the Cook Islands Ministry of Justice the previous year, and in early 2020, the couple was stopping by Rarotonga on the way to a conference in Australia. “I only had a carry-on,” Laurie says, laughing.

Greg is the cofounder and chairman emeritus of Odyssey Marine Exploration, a company whose website announces it found more shipwrecks than any other organization in the world before shifting focus in 2009 to a “multibillion-dollar idea”: deep-sea minerals. Odyssey made headlines in 2019 for suing the Mexican government for US $3.5-billion over the denial of environmental permits for a seabed mining project on the grounds that the decision violated the North American Free Trade Agreement. Stranded in paradise, the Stemms made friends at yoga classes and Māori lessons with people who describe them as “lovely” and “down-to-earth.” Laurie befriended Michael Tavioni, an artist and writer, on a tour of Rarotonga she took with CIC’s in-country manager. She told Tavioni that her grandfather was a carver and she wanted to learn how to carve; he invited her to show up at 9:00 a.m. the next day. “And then I never left,” Laurie says. She registered a company called Cook Islands Traditional Arts Press, through which she helped Tavioni print a book he’d been drafting on his laptop. “It all just flowed,” Laurie recalls.

When I returned to the Cook Islands after spending the pandemic in a place that definitely did not experience a higher-than-usual volume of parties and sporting events, the “coconut wireless”—a gossip channel with a remarkably high penetration rate—was carrying stories of gifts local people had received from seabed mining companies, in particular CIC. There was unsubstantiated talk of new trucks and boats. The substantiated gifts, which appear in CIC’s application for a research license from the SBMA, are more benevolent: medical equipment used to treat COVID-19, funding for arts curricula in schools, support for Tavioni’s work.

Tavioni, 76, has a white ponytail and strong, well-researched opinions. He’s best known for carving traditional canoes. People fly to Rarotonga to learn from him. For decades, he has been writing letters to the editor of the Cook Islands News, asking the government to fund the traditional arts. He is grateful to the Stemms and all the other donors who have helped to bring his dream to life by supporting a gallery and gathering space where people can make traditional art.

Beneath the iron roof of his workshop, Tavioni tells me that for 20 years he has been advocating for the nodules as a pathway to sovereign wealth—not wealth generated by tourism, a trade in which “we dance like monkeys for other people,” nor handouts from the governments of New Zealand, China, or any other country. “We are not beggars,” he says over the tapping of the sawdust-covered student who is carving beside him.

Tavioni sees the nodules as a means of alleviating depopulation—the mass migration to urban centers such as Auckland, New Zealand, and Brisbane, Australia, that leaves homes abandoned, yards overgrown, and positions vacant for workers from Fiji and the Philippines to fill. He thinks environmentalists should pay more attention to existing problems, such as the plastic tourists contribute to Rarotonga’s only dump. Besides, he says, deep-sea mining isn’t really mining; there’s no dynamite. “They dramatize it like mining where they blow up the mountain,” he says. “No such thing. … They’re just picking [the minerals] up.”

In June 2021, the president of the Republic of Nauru, a Pacific Island nation about one-third the size of Rarotonga, sent a letter to the ISA that invoked a clause in the law of the sea requiring the completion of guidelines for mining in international waters within two years. Only countries can be members of the ISA, so companies interested in deep-sea mining have to find a sponsoring state. Nauru is a sponsoring state for Nauru Ocean Resources, a subsidiary of Canadian corporation the Metals Company, whose CEO was involved with another company that “lost a half-billion dollars of investor money, got crosswise with a South Pacific government, destroyed sensitive seabed habitat and ultimately went broke,” as reported in the Wall Street Journal. That “South Pacific government” was Papua New Guinea’s; the country now supports a 10-year moratorium on seabed mining. Since being introduced at a regional meeting in 2019, the proposal for a moratorium has gained the support of such players as Google, Samsung, Volkswagen, Volvo, BMW, New Zealand, Germany, France, Spain, a number of Pacific island nations, including French Polynesia, and more than 760 science and policy experts who warn that the impact of deep-sea mining will be “irreversible on multigenerational timescales.”

In January 2022, after nearly two years of remaining shut, the borders of the Cook Islands reopened. The following month, the government hosted a formal ceremony to celebrate the awarding of exploration licenses to three deep-sea mining companies: CIC; CIICSR, the government’s joint venture with Belgian mining company GSR; and Moana Minerals, an offshoot of Ocean Minerals, a Texas-based corporation founded by an engineer who worked in deep-water oil and gas drilling and run by a diamond miner from South Africa. After receiving their licenses, the three companies hired managers and staff, rented office spaces, and began promoting their activities in the Cook Islands. Advertising in the local paper, Moana Minerals described itself as a company focused on metals “critical to the transition to green energy, responsibly sourced from seafloor nodules.” Greg Stemm tells the camera in a video posted on YouTube: “I think everybody believes we have a climate change emergency. Do we want to wait 10 years or 15 or 20 years [to address it]? Maybe, but how much longer do we want to keep using oil and gas, keep polluting our atmosphere, and continuing to create huge climate change issues?”

At COP 27, the international climate change conference convened in Egypt in November 2022, Prime Minister Brown issued a strong statement to supporters of the proposal for a moratorium on seabed mining. In his speech, Brown took exception to the fact that the countries that had destroyed our planet through “decades of profit-driven development” were now making demands restricting use of the Cook Islands’ territorial waters. “It is patronizing and it implies that we are too dumb or too greedy to know what we are doing in our oceans,” he said. “We know what we are doing to protect ourselves and to protect our ocean.”

Applications for the exploration licenses awarded in February 2022 were reviewed by the SBMA and a licensing panel made up of government officials and foreign consultants. In 2020, the prime minister appointed seven members to the Seabed Minerals Advisory Committee to “provide a voice for the community,” according to a press release. The committee’s chair, Bishop Tutai Pere, said in a speech at the licensing ceremony that it would be a sin to leave the nodules on the seabed. In a Q&A posted on the SBMA website, Pere attributes discussion about the environmental impact of deep-sea mining to “only a fear of the untapped depth of the unknown, surrounded by sacred taboos, superstition, and lack of faith.” One member of the committee, who represents traditional leaders, applied for a job with Moana Minerals; he lit up when he mentioned the NZ $1,000 he received for spending a week at sea with the company’s scientists. (This is not a paltry sum; most workers in the Cook Islands earn less than NZ $20,000 annually.) Another member of the advisory committee isn’t sure whether the companies that are licensed in the Cook Islands have the technological capacity to access the nodules (they do); he also thinks the nodules drift here with the current, like the fish, though scientists say they formed in place, slowly accreting over millions of years.

As is the case when any community grapples with an issue, perspectives on deep-sea mining in the Cook Islands vary. Advocates ask: Why shouldn’t we gain the means to better resource the ministries of health and education so we don’t have to fly to New Zealand for medical attention and send our kids to boarding school? Shouldn’t we pursue industry so we can entice some of our people to return home from the cities? They say it’s possible to mine the seafloor responsibly.

Opponents say the risk is too high, particularly now, as climate change and overfishing alter the ocean for island people. Lawyer and former politician Iaveta Short sees the nodules as yet another opportunity for corruption and financial mismanagement. “To me, we’re heading down the same road as Nauru,” he says, referring to the phosphate mining that made the island of Nauru briefly rich. The government squandered the money on an airline, a musical, and hotels overseas, among other unsuccessful investments. The land is now 80 percent infertile. A 1999 report by the island’s government describes Nauru as “one of the most environmentally degraded areas on Earth.” Short adds: “I think we’re going to be taken to the cleaners, just like everybody else.”

There are also people in the Cook Islands who don’t agree with seabed mining but will only talk to me off the record. A few insist on meeting under cover of night. They saw what happened to Jacqui Evans, a scientist who helped draft the Marae Moana Act, which passed in 2017, creating a legal basis for the world’s largest marine protected area. She won the distinguished Goldman Environmental Prize for this work and was shortly thereafter replaced as the marine park’s director and sole employee because she wrote an internal email in which she expressed support for a moratorium on mining. Many see the risk of questioning their government as too great. The government is a significant employer; in a place where most people are related, everyone is close to someone who works for the public service. Some chiefs—who wield influence, and, on some islands, explicit political power—work for the government, too.

A lot of people just don’t have enough time and interest to study the technical information provided by the government. A leader of a new political party vying for seats in parliament describes all the minerals-related material he’s asked to read as boring. “I look at it as, oh my gosh, who has the time?” he says.

One observer in an art-filled house on a red-dirt road has the time. The man, who requested anonymity, has closely tracked the development of the deep-sea minerals industry in the Cook Islands and recognizes historical patterns reminiscent of the colonial project that occurred in the Pacific and elsewhere.

His theory triggers a range of reactions in people I repeat it to—indignation, defensiveness, anger, fear—but he discusses it unremarkably. “Well, what’s happening?” he asks. “The Seabed Minerals Authority [is] emphasizing that they’re taking a precautionary approach by doing the research, yeah? But in fact, that’s the first stage of colonization. The mining companies are going out there exploring it, and they’re going to map it. And then they’re going to extract from it.”

He sees other colonial echoes, too: “alienating scientific discourse,” the role of religion, the compradores. Comprador, a Portuguese word for “buyer,” denotes a local person who acts as an agent on behalf of a foreign organization.

As the world engages in a debate over deep-sea mining, life proceeds on the islands. Some people dream about golden apples. Others feed pigs and plant taro. Beyond the reef, the 1,347-tonne ship Anuanua Moana, which belongs to Moana Minerals, is mapping the seafloor in the Cook Islands’ territorial waters with sonar and collecting samples of the material that some describe as humanity’s only hope, the minerals needed to free us from the grip of fossil fuels. The other two license holders are working toward completing their own research expeditions, estimated to cost US $100,000 per day.

Anuanua Moana means “rainbow ocean” in Māori. The 12-year-old who won the contest to name the ship got an iPad Pro and a NZ $2,000 check for her school. The girl, who attends Rarotonga’s Seventh-day Adventist school, wrote in her submission that the name signifies God’s promise to never destroy the world again.

This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe, and with reporting by Raf Custers and Greet Brauwers.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Eavesdropping on pink river dolphins could help save them

Laura Baisas — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 15:00:00 +0000

A pink river dolphin, or boto, displaying aerial behavior in the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve. Marina Gaona - IDSM

While the pink river dolphins of the Amazon Basin may look like the latest part of the marketing campaign for the smash-hit summer blockbuster Barbie, they are in fact very real freshwater mammals that live in some of the Amazon’s most inhospitable locales.

[Related: When humans and dolphins fish together, they both win.]

Along with their counterparts the tucuxi dolphins, the rare pink river dolphin is under threat from a number of forces. But listening in on their echolocation might be a key part in conserving the unique species, according to a study published July 27 in the journal Scientific Reports.

“Freshwater dolphins are under threat from climate change and human activities: overfishing, construction of dams, and illegal mining, and very little is known about their distribution and behavior when they enter the forest at the floated season,” study co-author and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona bioacoustician Michel André tells PopSci. “The pink dolphin is the most ancient species of dolphins on Earth and presents unique adaptations to a freshwater habitat and to rainforest.”

During the region’s wet season (April to August) the tucuxi and the pink river dolphin–or boto in Portuguese–move into the floodplain forests called the várzea that border river channels in pursuit of freshwater fish to eat. This floodplain and its dense vegetation make it extremely challenging for scientists like André to survey the dolphins using boats or drones .

In the study, the team used five hydrophones submerged between 9.8 and 16 feet deep to survey 308 square miles of the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in Brazil where the Japurá and Solimõesrivers meet. They took recordings from river channels and confluence bays, floodplain lakes, and flooded forest at various times throughout the wet and dry seasons between June 2019 and September 2020.

Two botos exploring the floodplains in the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve. CREDIT: Wezddy Del Toro – IDSM

After obtaining the recordings, the authors used deep learning algorithms called a convolutional neural network and sound data from boat surveys to automatically classify the detected sounds as either echolocation clicks from dolphins, boat engine noises, or rain. The analysis could detect echolocation with 95 percent accuracy, boat engine noises with 92 percent accuracy, and rainfall with 98 percent accuracy.

The team detected that the presence of dolphins increased from 10 percent of the bay to 70 percent in the bay and river channels when the water levels rose between November and January. They believe that the dolphins could be using these waterways as a way to enter the floodplain. Additionally, the boto adolescents and females with calves tended to spend more time in the floodplains than male dolphins, possibly due to the abundance of fish and other prey or as a shelter against the more aggressive behavior from males.

[Related: This dolphin ancestor looked like a cross between Flipper and Moby Dick.]

The results provide “a confirmation that monitoring dolphin populations in a rainforest habitat is feasible and essential for biodiversity,” says André.

The team hopes to develop low-cost bioacoustic equipment that can be permanently placed in the forest to better understand the relationship between aquatic and land environments. This constant monitoring could provide scientists with a better idea of the dolphins’ habitat preferences and conserve the region’s vital biodiversity.

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Mass coral reef bleaching in Florida as ocean temperatures hit 100 degrees

Laura Baisas — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Dead elkhorn coral at Sombrero Reef in the Florida Keys. The white areas are bleached coral, the brownish orange patches are "tissue slough", coral tissue that has died before it has a chance to bleach. Coral Restoration Foundation

As the western United States continues to battle extreme temperatures, the waters off southern Florida are also heating up. Ocean temperatures reached unprecedented 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, as a mass bleaching event and die off from these scorching ocean temperatures is spreading across the reefs near Miami and the Florida Keys.

[Related: Fish poop might help fight coral reef bleaching.]

Coral reefs are vital ecosystems, housing marine life from smaller fish up to turtles and sharks. They also buffer coastlines from increasingly chaotic storms. Climate change is one of the greatest threats currently facing coral ecosystems, as rising temperatures contribute to the scale and frequency of bleaching events and infectious disease outbreaks. When the water gets too warm, coral can become stressed and express algae living in their tissues, thus turning white. Corals are more likely to experience die-offs during these bleaching events.

Scientists are now on a rescue mission to save the region’s coral species from extinction. Coral experts expect a “complete mortality” of the bleached reefs around the Florida Keys in only a week, and fear that other reefs deeper in the ocean could face this same fate.

“This is akin to all of the trees in the rainforest dying,” Florida Aquarium director and senior scientist Keri O’Neal told CNN. “Where do all of the other animals that rely on the rainforest go to live? This is the underwater version of the trees in the rainforest disappearing. Corals serve that same fundamental role.”

The University of South Florida and Florida Institute of Oceanography’s Keys Marine Laboratory (KML) is currently housing more than 1,500 coral specimens in an effort to save them. The corals were harvested over the past week from offshore nurseries and parent colonies.

“For years we have been developing the infrastructure capacity to support reef restoration efforts that enable KML to temporarily house corals during emergencies such as this,” said KML director Cynthia Lewis said in a statement. “Typically, water temperatures at this time of year are in the mid 80s, but we are already recording temperatures of 90 degrees. It is very alarming.”

This summer’s extreme heat and a lack of rainfall in Florida pushed water temperatures around the Sunshine State to some of the highest levels observed around the world. The National Buoy Center recorded a temperature of 101.1 degrees at a depth of five feet on Monday July 24 in Florida Bay. Other stations hit saw temperatures in the mid to upper-90s. While the most significant concentration of Florida coral isn’t located in Florida Bay, the coral around the Florida Keys still experienced temperatures topping 90 degrees.

[Related: To save coral reefs, color the larvae.]

“Climate change is our present reality,” Coral Restoration Foundation CEO R. Scott Winters, said in a statement. “The impact on our reefs is undeniable. This crisis must serve as a wake-up call, emphasizing the need for globally concerted efforts to combat climate change.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) raised its coral bleaching warning system to their highest level (Alert Level 2) for the Florida Keys. This level means that the average water temperatures have been about 1.8 degrees above normal for at least eight consecutive weeks. The Florida Keys are expected to remain at Alert Level 2 for at least nine to 12 weeks.

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These unusual plants had disappeared—until citizen scientists helped hunt them down

Laura Baisas — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 17:00:00 +0000

A flower of a Nasa humboldtiana subspecies called humboldtiana that was rediscovered by a team of botanists and citizen scientists for the first time in 162 years. X. Cornejo

A Captain Planet-style team up of international botanists and amateur plant enthusiasts have rediscovered lost plants from the tropical Andes Mountains. The findings, published on July 25 in the open-access journal PhytoKeys, describe some plants that have been forgotten about for over a century.

[Related: After 50 years, botanists finally identified this Amazonian plant.]

The plants belong to a genus of plants from the Blazing Star family called Nasa. This genus is known for delicate leaves that can pack a mean sting, which makes them difficult for scientists to collect. Most of these plants are rare, highly endemic, and are only around for a short period of time, which also adds to the difficulty in adding them to a collection of samples preserved for long-term study called a herbarium collection.

Fortunately, global science networking and free data repositories have made it easier for botanists to share information, and they don’t have to rely on herbaria as their only source of material and clues. A citizen science platform called iNaturalist played a significant role in the rediscovery of these Andean plants.

A notable species named Nasa colanii had only been once recorded in 1978, until the team on this study came upon a photograph from 2019. This plant grows in a very inaccessible region in a cloud forest in the buffer zone of Peru’s Cordillera de Colán National Sanctuary, at an elevation of over 8,500 feet.

In 2022, iNaturalist users also confirmed the existence of another Nasa species called Nasa ferox that hadn’t been reported for roughly 130 years and did not get a scientific description until 2000. Only a small population of roughly 10 fertile plants of Nasa ferox has been found and these plants always grow in sheltered areas.

“Given the location of the park close to the [Ecuadorian] city of Cuenca, and the fact that the important road 582 goes through the park makes it particularly surprising that the species has not been reported in such a long time, even more so if we consider the numerous botanical expeditions that have been carried out in the general region,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Additionally, the team rediscovered a typical form of Nasa humboldtiana for the first time in 162 years. It was found in a conserved Andean forest in Chimborazo, Ecuador.

[Related: Two newly discovered Andes Mountain plant species have an appetite for insects.]

They also found species that had also been considered extinct in the wild. Nasa hastata and Nasa solaria, were believed to be extinct and listed as remained unknown or almost so in the wild. Photos of living Nasa hastata were taken by a sister of one of the authors and a few dozen Nasa solaria were also spotted using iNaturalist.

“All these discoveries serve as a reminder that even well-studied regions harbor diversity that can so easily remain overlooked and unexplored, and point to the role of botanists in documenting biodiversity which is an essential prerequisite for any conservation effort,” co-author and Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research botanist Tilo Henning said in a statement.

The team hopes that more of this crowd sourcing will lead to descriptions of more undescribed or “long lost” plants.

The post These unusual plants had disappeared—until citizen scientists helped hunt them down appeared first on Popular Science.

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A flightless parrot is returning to mainland New Zealand after a 40-year absence

Laura Baisas — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 16:00:00 +0000

A kākāpō chick. The birds are are large flightless parrots from New Zealand who are masters of camouflage and known for a booming call. Dianne Mason/Department of Conservation (DOC) New Zealand

For the first time in almost 40 years, New Zealand’s quirky and critically endangered kākāpō will return to the country’s mainland. Kākāpō are large flightless parrots that used to be widespread across New Zealand, before being hunted to near extinction. The birds last lived on mainland New Zealand in the 1980s. The last time they were present on the North Island was in the 1960s when five of the birds were living in captivity, according to New Zealand’s Department of Conservation.

[Related: Researchers release more than 5,000 snails in the Pacific.]

Currently, kākāpō only live on five offshore islands: Pukenui (Anchor Island) and Te Kakahu o Tamatea (Chalky island) in Fiordland, Whenua Hou (Codfish Island) and Pearl Island near Rakiura Stewart Island and Hauturu-o-Toi (Little Barrier Island).

The Department of Conservation in partnership with the South Island’s Ngāi Tahu tribe is moving four male kākāpō from Whenua Hou near Rakiura Stewart Island to Maungatautari (Sanctuary Mountain) in Waikato. The four kākāpō are not intended to breed at Maungatautari. The main focus of the project is learning what types of new habitat, outside of the established offshore islands, that the kākāpō can live in.

This translocation follows decades of conservation work through the Kākāpō Recovery Programme. The effort utilized modern science and Māori matauranga (knowledge) to help bring the iconic species back from extinction. The population doubled to reach a high of 252 birds between 2016 and 2022.

Returning this critically endangered nocturnal ground-dwelling parrot back to the mainland is significant for the whole country and a shared success story for all partners involved, according to the team.

“Kākāpō are one of Aotearoa’s [New Zealand’s] most iconic and rare species, recovering from a population low of 51 birds in 1995,” Department of Conservation Manager for Kākāpō Deidre Vercoe said in a statement. “Until now, kākāpō have been contained to a few predator-free offshore islands, so to have them now returning to the mainland is a major achievement for all involved.”

A kākāpō booms in his bowl
Image: Don Merton | Department of Conservation (NZ)

Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu Deputy Kaiwhakahaere (manager) Matapura Ellison added that this is a key aspect of the translocation is the iwi to iwi (people to people) transfer of the four birds from Ngāi Tahu to Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Raukawa, Ngāti Hauā, and Waikato.

“This is a milestone translocation, and we are thankful for our iwi partners who will keep our taonga (treasured) kākāpō safe at their new habitat on Maungatautari,” Ellison said in a statement. “The whanaungatanga [forming relationships] between our iwi is strengthened further through the shared kaitiakitanga of these precious manu.”

[Related: This three-foot-tall parrot proves New Zealand is the mecca of giant weird birds.]

This translocation is a new phase in the recovery of this marks a new phase for the recovery of this taonga (treasured) species. Returning them to their natural range on the mainland in unmanaged populations has long been a goal, but they need a habitat that is free of introduced mammalian predators such as rats from escaped ships.

The translocation will be marked with a Maori welcoming ceremony called pōwhiri and celebration at Pōhara Marae followed by the release at Maungatautari. The ceremony is set to acknowledge the many people and groups that played a part in kākāpō conservation and the work to make the mountain a “kākāpō-proof” and predator-free inland sanctuary. It will also mark the transfer of care of these four founding birds between peoples.

Kākāpō are experts at camouflage, and the team believes it is unlikely that visitors to the sanctuary will come across them. Visitors could, however, hear their distinctive ‘booming’ calls for the first time in several years.

“Sanctuary Mountain is a large space, with plenty of good habitat for kākāpō, but it’s still unknown whether they will successfully establish here long-term,” said Vercoe. “The main focus of this translocation is to learn if kākāpō can thrive in a fenced sanctuary, while taking pressure off the islands ahead of future breeding seasons.”

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The key to bringing deep sea samples up to the coast? An underwater freezer.

Annie Roth / Hakai Magazine — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 23:00:00 +0000

Japanese scientists have built a freezer that can freeze specimens in the deep sea. They have yet to test their device on any deep-sea organisms. But they did freeze an orange. Deposit Photos

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

During Japan’s sweltering summers, nothing hits the spot quite like a frozen orange. The popular treat, known as reito mikan, tastes great when made at home. But it tastes even better when made 850 meters below the ocean’s surface. “A bit salty, but super delicious,” says Shinsuke Kawagucci, a deep-sea geochemist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

The frozen fruit was the product of a particularly tasty scientific experiment. In 2020, Kawagucci and his colleagues designed a highly unusual freezer—one built to operate in the intense pressure of the deep sea. The frozen orange, chilled in the depths of Japan’s Sagami Bay, was their proof that such a thing is even possible.

Kawagucci and his colleagues’ prototype deep-sea freezer is essentially a pressure-resistant tube with a thermoelectric cooling device inside. By running an electric current through a pair of semiconductors, the device creates a temperature difference thanks to a phenomenon known as the Peltier effect. The device can chill its contents down to -13 °C—well below the freezing point of seawater. Because it does not require liquid nitrogen or refrigerants to cool its housing, the freezer can be built both compactly and with minimal engineering skill.

With a few adjustments, Kawagucci and his colleagues write in a recent paper, their prototype freezer can be more than a fancy snack machine. By offering a way to freeze samples at depth, such a device could improve scientists’ ability to study deep-sea life.

Bringing animals up from the deep is often a destructive affair that can leave them damaged and disfigured. The best example is the smooth-head blobfish, a sad, misshapen lump of a fish that got its name from the blob-like shape it takes when wrenched from its home more than 1,000 meters below. (In its deep-sea habitat, the fish looks like many other fish and hardly lives up to its name.)

Although scientists have previously designed tools to keep deep-sea specimens cold on their way to the surface, the new prototype freezer is the first device capable of freezing specimens in the deep sea. Similarly, other tools do exist that allow scientists to collect creatures from the deep unharmed, such as pressurized collection chambers. Yet these often don’t work well for small and soft-bodied deep-sea animals that are prone to dying and decomposing when kept in such containers for too long—an oft-unavoidable reality, says Luiz Rocha, the curator of ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. “It can take hours to bring samples up,” Rocha says.

A device that freezes samples first would stave off degradation, enabling better scientific analysis of everything from anatomy to gene expression. While the freezing process will undoubtedly damage the tissues of some of the deep’s more delicate life forms, specimens damaged by freezing tend to be more useful to scientists than specimens damaged by decomposition—at least when it comes to DNA analysis.

The prototype freezer takes over an hour to freeze a sample, which is probably “too slow to be broadly useful,” says Steve Haddock, a marine biologist with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California who studies bioluminescence in jellyfish and ctenophores. Every minute of deep-sea exploration is precious, he says. “We typically spend our time searching for animals, and we bring them to the surface in great shape using insulated chambers.” However, if the freezing time could be improved, Haddock believes such a device could be “empowering” for those who study deep-sea creatures that are extremely sensitive to changes in pressure and temperature, such as microbes living on hydrothermal vents.

Kawagucci says he and his team plan to improve their freezer before testing it out on any living specimens. But he hopes that with such improvements, their tool will give scientists a way to collect even the most delicate deep-sea organisms.

In the meantime, Kawagucci is just happy his device proved that deep-sea freezing by a thermoelectric cooler is possible. “Throughout the Earth’s history, ice has never existed in the deep sea,” he says. “I wanted to be the first person to generate and see the ice in the deep sea with my freezer.” And when he finally sank his teeth into that tangy, salty, sweet reito mikan, “one of my dreams came true.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Why the creators of ‘Jaws’ regretted making sharks the monsters

Laura Baisas — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

American actor Richard Dreyfuss (left) (as marine biologist Hooper) and British author and actor Robert Shaw (as shark fisherman Quint) look off the stern of Quint's fishing boat the 'Orca' at the terrifying approach of the mechanical giant shark dubbed 'Bruce' in a scene from the film 'Jaws' directed by Steven Spielberg, 1975. Universal Pictures courtesy of Getty Images

In the series I Made a Big Mistake, PopSci explores mishaps and misunderstandings, in all their shame and glory.

With those two ominous notes, a 25-foot long mechanical great white shark named Bruce, and the menacing tagline “you’ll never go in the water again,” Jaws practically invented the summer blockbuster. It became the first film to gross over $100 million at the box office and put a young filmmaker named Steven Speilberg on the map. But along with some of the most quotable lines in movie history, it induced a societal fear of sharks as mindless monsters that hunt people with virtually indiscriminate taste and threaten seaside communities. Since then, both the author of the original novel and Spielberg have expressed some remorse over their mega-hit creation.

[Related: Great white shark sightings are up in the US, which is kind of good news.]

Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel of the same name has sold over 20 million copies. It drew from Benchley’s life-long fascination with the sea, that he took into his shark conservation work. His novel and the subsequent film were both loosely inspired by a series of shark encounters along the Jersey Shore in July 1916. The tales of what locals dubbed the Matawan Maneater were products of the early 20th century, when ocean swimming was new and sharks were still misunderstood by the general public and scientists alike. This confusion continued when Benchley first wrote the novel.

“I couldn’t write Jaws today. The extensive new knowledge of sharks would make it impossible for me to create, in good conscience, a villain of the magnitude and malignity of the original.”
Peter Benchley, 1995

In the March 1995 issue of Popular Science magazine Benchley wrote, “My research for the book was thorough and good…for its time. I read papers, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the experts. I realize now, though, that I was very much a prisoner of traditional conceptions. And misconceptions. I couldn’t write Jaws today. The extensive new knowledge of sharks would make it impossible for me to create, in good conscience, a villain of the magnitude and malignity of the original.”

Almost three decades later in a 2022 interview with BBC Radio, Speilberg joined his former collaborator in expressing the regret for the terrible reputation sharks are facing due to the film. The 76 year-old director said he feels responsible for the shark’s troubles in the almost 50 years since the film’s release.

“I still fear… that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sword fishermen that happened after 1975,” said Spielberg. “I really, truly regret that.” The film has been blamed for leading to trophy hunting for sharks through the United States, due to its misrepresentation of great whites.

The destruction has only continued in the nearly two decades since Benchley died in 2006. A 2021 study found that the population of sharks and rays decreased by over 71 percent between 1970 and 2018 worldwide. Even as their numbers drop, an estimated 100 million sharks are killed per year and roughly 37 percent of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction largely from overfishing and shark finning.

“We only conserve what we love.”

The fear certainly presents itself as more fictionalized than reality-based at this point. Despite only killing 11 people worldwide in 2021 in isolated incidents, 96 percent of shark films still play into that fear and portray the fish as imminently threatening mass murderers. To help combat these stark exaggerations, shark researcher Heidy Martinez–who is affiliated with Minorities in Shark Science and is currently surveying a shark pupping nursery in the Gulf of Mexico as part of NOAA’s GULFSPAN project–utilizes her psychology background in her marine biology work. She uses empathy and understanding as starting points to try to change the relationship humans have with sharks.

“A fear of predators is normal and it’s healthy. It allows for respect, but that irrational fear of sharks also created a generation of people with galeophobia,” Martinez tells PopSci. “It’s so hard to correct because it targets emotions. It targets feelings and that is so much harder to change than logic.”

[Related: Great whites don’t hunt humans—they just have blind spots.]

She says acknowledging that fear, particularly the fear that a great white shark is going to repeatedly come after you Jaws-style, can be reframed with the knowledge that there are only three species out of roughly 500 sharks that are known to inflict serious injuries on humans and most sharks are only about three feet long.

“I don’t feel like Jaws is solely responsible for the decimation of the shark population… People did not care to love sharks because of what they saw in the media, so there wasn’t a push for society to step in and help sharks.”
Heidy Martinez

Martinez also cites a 1968 quote attributed to Senegalese forestry engineer Baba Dioum with respect to how shark conservation can historically be viewed. “In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught.”

Heidy Martinez swims in Honda Bay in Palawan, Philippines on October 5, 2022. She is taking a photo ID of a juvenile whale shark to record behavioral data and assess population size. CREDIT: LAMAVE (Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines)

These misconceptions about sharks coincide with devastation of shark habitats and overfishing that are putting their existence in jeopardy. Misunderstanding sharks came at a very inopportune time.

“I don’t feel like Jaws is solely responsible for the decimation of the shark population. I think overfishing was going to happen with or without it,” she says. “I think the role that it did play was that it made people have a misunderstanding of sharks. People did not care to love sharks because of what they saw in the media, so there wasn’t a push for society to step in and help sharks.”

Changing tastes

Martinez and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution fish ecologist Simon Thorrold both point to numbers as examples of why getting attacked and eaten by a shark is so unlikely.

Thorrold uses the recently exploding white shark hotspot around the waters of Cape Cod in Massachusetts as a prime example of how well white sharks get out of the way of humans.

“We might have hundreds of white sharks go by the Cape every year and we’ve got thousands of people in the water, some wearing black wetsuits on surfboards that look very similar to their natural prey. And yet, the odds of any kind of interaction are vanishingly small,” Thorrold tells PopSci.

[Related: Sharks are learning to love coastal cities.]

They do not eat humans like lions can and have also proven to be more discriminate in their tastes and have better eyesight than scientists initially believed. The sharks that share these northern waters with humans also have significantly more to fear from us. People too are slowly rehabilitating the sharks’ image. Cape Cod is potentially home to the largest concentrations of white sharks in the world, yet its ocean-conscious community and its leaders aren’t running out and attacking their aquatic neighbors with harpoons.

“A juvenile white shark basically got stranded on the Cape and a whole bunch of people showed up that were keeping the shark wet. They got it back into the water and it swam off,” he says. “Those are the kinds of interactions that we have come to expect when whales or dolphins strand, but to see it for a white shark sort of made my heart skip a beat. It’s sort of evidence of a much more mature relationship that the public has with our wild ocean fauna.”

Encounters with a full grown white shark, however, aren’t exclusively wholesome. They can be fatal due to the way the sharks ambush their prey using intense speed and the element of surprise. In 2018, Massachusetts had its first fatality since 1936 off the coast of Cape Cod, in a day that “changed Cape Cod forever.” Despite the immense tragedy when it occurs, dying from a shark attack remains exceedingly rare. According to NOAA, people are three times more likely to be struck by lightning than by a shark and data from the Florida Museum shows that dog attack fatalities are five times more common than shark bites.

From monster to making it right

Despite Peter Benchley’s remorse over his fearsome novel and its legacy, he has since worked directly on shifting the perception of the sharks. His conservation and advocacy work shone a spotlight on reality. Along with his wife Wendy Benchley, Peter traveled the world speaking with scientists and conservationists, lending their time, resources, and talents to preserving the animals that helped earn him fame and fortune.

In his 2006 obituary in The New York Times, Wendy recounted that many of the letters that Peter received were from people who read his novel when they were younger who went on to become marine biologists or science teachers, and that the generation after Jaws found it a great adventure story instead of a monster story.

Peter lived long enough to see this pivot in popular opinion, but the mistakes made at the expense of sharks is one that would be wise to remember.

“The mistake we make, then, either in seeking to destroy sharks or in not caring if we even inadvertently destroy them, is one of cosmic stupidity,” he wrote in 1995. “If I have one hope, it is that we will come to appreciate and protect these wonderful animals before we manage, through ignorance, stupidity, and greed, to wipe them out altogether.”

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Greenland’s ice sheets aren’t as old—or as resilient—as scientists expected

Laura Baisas — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Greenland’s continental glacier covers about 80 percent of the 836,3000-square-mile land mass. Deposit Photos

As recently as 400,000 years ago, parts of Greenland were actually quite green. New analysis of some core samples taken from underneath Greenland’s ice sheet reveal that the island was ice-free at a time in Earth’s history when temperatures were similar to what the Earth is approaching now thanks to human-caused climate change. The findings were published July 20 in the journal Science, and may indicate some disastrous implications of future sea level rise.

[Related: Greenland’s polar bears are learning to get around in a less icy world.]

“We’re discovering the ice sheet is much more sensitive to climate change than we previously thought,” study co-author and Utah State University geoscientist Tammy Rittenour said in a statement. “This is a foreboding wake-up call.”

Greenland’s continental glacier covers about 80 percent of the 836,3000-square-mile land mass, and this new analysis overturns some previous assumptions that the majority of the glacier has been frozen for millions of years. A less icy and greener Greenland indicates that the ice sheet is not necessarily as stable as it appears.

“We had always assumed the ice sheet has remained about the same for nearly 2.5 million years,” said Rittenour. “But our investigation indicates it melted enough to allow the growth of moss, shrubs and buzzing insects during an interglacial period called Marine Isotope Stage 11, between 424,000 to 374,000 years ago.”

Rittenour added that the melting caused at least five feet of sea level rise worldwide. Some of the models in the study suggest that sea levels could have been up to 30 feet higher than we see today. The Marine Isotope Stage 11 was an unusually long period of warming with slightly elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, today’s CO₂ levels are 1.5 times higher than they were 400,000 years ago and at least 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels.

These inflated levels of carbon dioxide would remain in place for hundreds, even thousands, of years—even if humans ceased all greenhouse gas emissions, according to Rittenour. Sea levels would rise about 23 feet if Greenland’s entire ice sheet were to melt completely. The measurements also do not take melting in Antarctica into consideration, which is also happening at a rate 20 times faster than scientists previously thought.

“The deglaciation has implications for the entire globe and is especially sobering for our coastal mega-cities, where so much of the world’s population resides,” said Rittenour.

The study used frozen sediment from an ice core that was collected during a Cold War-era military project in 1966 at a US army base in northwestern Greenland.

[Related: Climate change revealed this U.S. military secret.]

“In 1960, the US Army launched a top-secret effort called Project Iceworm in northwestern Greenland to build a network of mobile nuclear launch sites under the ice sheet,” Rittenour said. “As part of that project, they also invited scientists and engineers to conduct experiments in a highly publicized ‘cover’ project, known as Camp Century, to study the feasibility of working and carrying out military missions under ice and in extreme-cold conditions.”

The 12-foot-long rock and soil sample was retrieved after scientists drilled through more than 4,500 feet of ice from beneath the ice sheet. The core sat untouched in a freezer until 2017 since there weren’t techniques to understand the sediment when the core was unearthed almost 60 years ago.

Since the samples had remained frozen and relatively unbothered, the team could use luminescence dating to determine the last time they had been exposed to sunlight.

According to the study, the cores and new analysis add a sobering and “upsetting” warning of what our planet could be heading towards.

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Japan’s plan to release treated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant is actually pretty safe

Andrew Paul — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 20:00:00 +0000

People rally to protest against Japan's planned discharge of radioactive wastewater in Seoul, South Korea, June 12, 2023. Local advocates worry about unforeseen consequences of releasing even highly filtered water into the ocean. Wang Yiliang/Xinhua via Getty Image

It’s been 12 years since Japan’s catastrophic Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster, and the country is running out of space to contain the fallout. Over 1 million metric tons of radioactive water is currently housed in massive on-site metal tanks—enough to fill around 500 Olympic sized swimming pools—but authorities need to make room for the naturally occurring groundwaters and rains that will continue to become contaminated.

According to officials, however, treatment processes will render the stored waters safe to be slowly released into the Pacific Ocean over at least the next three decades. Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is already filtering the water to remove most of its radioactive isotopes. To do this, contaminated water is passed through multiple standalone chambers, each containing various adsorbents to remove specific radioactive isotopes. A hydrogen isotope called tritium, however, cannot be sequestered from water due to a number of factors, including its high boiling temperature. To address this problem, Tepco is diluting the tritium-heavy waters down to levels widely regarded as safe by many governments and international regulatory bodies.

[Related: Fukushima fallout was almost twice as bad as official estimates, new study says.]

The water disbursal plan comes following a 2021 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessment of Tepco’s decontamination strategies, which the regulatory body determined to be “consistent with relevant international safety standards.” As The Washington Post notes, the wastewater in question will be diluted to just 1,500 becquerels of tritium per liter of clean water, which is “far below” global standards. Japan’s legal limit is 60,000 becquerels per liter, for example, while the World Health Organization sets their recommended maximum at 10,000.

Supporters of the plan argue that humans are exposed to low levels of tritium everyday via tap water, air, and rain. Meanwhile, other nuclear plants around the world currently release tritiated water into oceans and rivers at even higher levels than what will come from Fukushima. Critics and protesters, however, have voiced concerns for years about the impending water release plans, arguing that more research is needed to assess potential effects of long-term exposure to low doses of tritium.

Local fisheries are also concerned about potential public blowback and reputational damage that may stem from being associated with the nearby treated water release initiative. Residents in nearby China and South Korea also fear potential unforeseen consequences to the decades’ long remediation procedures. Protestors recently took to the streets of Seoul, South Korea to voice their concerns.

Despite lingering concerns, it is undeniable that the current stores of irradiated water have to go somewhere. While there is no perfect solution, the slow-but-sure filtering processes appear to be the best bet at handling what will be a decades’ long cleanup project.

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Who caught the first bluefin tuna?

Karen Pinchin — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 13:57:47 +0000

Two bluefin tuna fish are extracted with a crane after being fished by divers in a purse seine at the Balfego fishing company's aquaculture facility on the open sea off the coast of L'Atmella de Mar in Spain. Pau Barrena/AFP via Getty Images

Excerpted from Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas by Karen Pinchin with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Karen Pinchin.

More than 30,000 years ago, the Strait of Gibraltar was a broad plain. Lapping several kilometers from the limestone cliffs that now tower above its blue, continent‑splitting waters, sea levels were roughly 120 meters lower than those in modern times, a height difference about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. In spring, as they had for thousands of years before the earliest hominid evolved, bluefin tuna migrated from the cold, deep Atlantic inward toward the Mediterranean, drawn by instinct and ancient memories of spawning in the in‑land ocean’s shallower, warmer currents. At the time, the African and European continents were a mere 10 kilometers apart, separated by two distinct, deep channels that had not yet merged, and wouldn’t for thousands of years.

Throughout the fall and winter, huge schools of millions of bluefin prowled the chilly Atlantic Ocean, feasting on its bounty of fatty mackerel and herring, building fat stores and millions of eggs and spermatozoa that would help them complete their annual cycle. These ancient ancestors navigated using a combination of light, scent, and possibly electromagnetism. Each had a translucent pinhole atop its forehead, called a pineal window, which channeled light down a cartilaginous stalk to the pineal organ. That organ allowed each fish to sense light, possibly even beams from the moon and stars. Just before dawn and just after dusk, the fish plunged away from the ocean’s surface to recalibrate their internal compasses. By sensing light during the day and tracking the sun’s progress around the earth, they followed cosmic patterns that accompanied their ancestors and would guide their children. They oriented themselves in relation to polarized light in the water, and used shifts in temperature, salinity, and the directions of the currents they swam with and against to find their way. Some of their bones contained trace amounts of the iron‑ based mineral magnetite, hardly surprising on a planet beset with electromagnetic waves—waves that could provide clues on where the tuna were and where they were heading.

Heading eastward, the outflowing ocean current was strong, but so were they. In the open ocean they were kings, but in the narrowing bottleneck of the strait they were suddenly transformed into prey themselves, now pursued by pods of canny orca whales. It was a race some of them couldn’t win, their fast, stiff bodies darting and cornered, diving and leaping out of the water. At least they had their speed. That speed was their defense, but could also be their downfall. Blinded by an instinct to escape, some fish rocketed onto the shallow beaches and shoals, where, as they had for countless seasons, small groups of Neanderthals waited, arms outstretched, for a gift from the sea.

Starting in 1989, the Gibraltar Museum supervised excavations of Gorham’s Cave, part of a network of tunnels and chambers unearthed by colonial British engineers between 1782 and 1968, about an hour’s drive from Cádiz, Spain. In 1907, Captain A. Gorham explored the high‑ceilinged cave that would later bear his name. Tucking themselves into the Paleolithic caves, the modern researchers unearthed a trove of evidence of the Neanderthals who once sheltered there, covered by layers of sand gradually blown, grain by grain, into the cave by harsh easterly winds, drawn toward fires vented through the cave’s 80‑meter chimney. “Gorham’s Cave is a time machine,” evolutionary biologist Clive Finlayson told tuna writer and researcher Steven Adolf in his book Tuna Wars.

Throughout the 1990s, while exploring Gorham’s Cave and other neighboring caves within a 28‑hectare complex spanning the main ridge, researchers from around the world found charcoal, bone fragments, charred pine seeds, and what seemed to be blade fragments. They also found what they identified as “macro‑ichthyofauna identifiable by tuna vertebrae of medium and large size”—or, in other words, evidence that both medium and large bluefin had been eaten within the caves. Paired with later‑found evidence of fires and of tuna beachings caused by orca attacks in shallow waters, it signaled that even as the earliest modern humans spread across the globe, at least one hominid species already had figured out how to catch and consume tuna.

One of the researchers working in the field was a young professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid named Arturo Morales‑Muñiz. In the mid‑1990s Morales‑Muñiz was widely referred to by Madrid’s fishmongers as “the bone man.” He visited their central fish market, Mercamadrid, every few weeks searching for the carcasses and bodies of their strangest creatures. Sometimes he’d buy a whole fish or a bagful, paying with coins he pulled from a battered leather change purse. Other times the fish were too large, like tuna or swordfish, so he’d settle for stripped, bloody skeletons. He loaded them into his trunk in leakproof containers scavenged from the market’s garbage piles. His car stank, he knew, but it helped that he was “almost like a whale,” he said, in that he had very little sense of smell.

Courtesy of Dutton

In April 2022, I joined the tall, amiable Morales‑Muñiz on a predawn visit to Mercamadrid, home of the second‑largest fish market in the world after Tokyo’s. Since 1982, cars have flowed past its entrance hours before the sun rises. Within its cavernous fish warehouse, thousands of people working for more than 100 companies operate forklifts, butcher fish, and sort a dazzling array of marine creatures by weight and size, quality, and when they’ll spoil. Its aisles are closely packed with boxes of fish, cooler booths, and walk‑in refrigerators with offices above.

Seven days a week, the market echoes with the shouts of fish‑mongers, some clad in blood‑and-ichor‑stained aprons and ranging on a temperamental scale from furious to jolly. They’re closely flanked and constantly approached by insistent salesmen, competitors gathering intel, and cooks in chefs’ jackets looking for the day’s fish specials. The day I visited, the sellers of fish were only men—men with beards and mustaches, bald men, old men, young men—who used whetstone‑sharpened machetes, cleavers, and fine boning knives to separate bluefin flesh from bone and portion steaks. Their short, blunt fingernails scraped against the shells of shrimp and mussels as they weighed fish, shellfish, and a dizzying array of marine creatures on metal scales by the handful, the bucketful, the crateful.

Back in the early years, as Morales‑Muñiz pursued his mission to gather as many animal skeletons as he could, he often found himself in bizarre and sometimes dangerous situations. What he was doing seemed insane, he knew, scavenging carcasses of “strange beasts” from the side of the road and harassing fishmongers for their strangest, most far‑fetched and ‑flung fish. But it drove him crazy, how his country’s archeologists seemed to worship only the relics and old walls left behind by the Romans and ancient Phoenicians, ignoring any bone that wasn’t human. But if bluefin had indeed been the mortar of conquest and early Mediterranean civilizations, why hadn’t his colleagues yet identified the fish’s huge, arcing bones anywhere in the fossil record? For decades, historians and archeologists had insisted that the fish’s calorie‑rich body had fueled armies and provided early Europe with garum, a fish sauce that was one of its most expensive products. But if that was the case, why wasn’t evidence of the fish being found on dig sites?

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Hungry green sea turtles have eaten in the same seagrass meadows for about 3,000 years

Laura Baisas — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 19:00:00 +0000

Green sea turtles are omnivores when they are younger, before becoming herbivores. Deposit Photos

Green sea turtles could be putting even the pickiest eaters to shame. Generations of them have returned to the same seagrass meadows along the coasts of northern Africa to feast for roughly 3,000 years, according to a study published July 17 in the journal PNAS.

[Related: Endangered green turtles are bouncing back in the Seychelles.]

When baby green sea turtles hatch on the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea, they clumsily make their way into the ocean. Their parents have already left the shallows for a long migration, and baby sea turtles are not able to navigate this long trip, so they float around for a few years. During this awkward stage, they are typically not picky eaters. The youthful turtles are even considered omnivores, eating worms, insects, and crustaceans along with seagrasses. At about five years-old, they trek to the same areas where their parents traveled to eat the more seagrass-exclusive diet of herbivores.

While scientists have known that sea turtles migrate between specific eating and breeding locations, seeing how far back this activity stretches highlights the importance of conserving sea grass locations that are suffering the effects of climate change the same way that nesting habitats are protected.

“We currently spend a lot of effort protecting the babies, but not the place where they spend most of their time: the seagrass meadows,” study co-author and University of Groningen marine evolution and conservation PhD student Willemien de Kock said in a statement.

The study from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands combined archaeological findings with modern data. De Kock used boxes of sea turtle remains from archaeological sites in the Mediterranean Sea. By analyzing the bones, De Kock could distinguish two species within the collection: the green sea turtle and the loggerhead turtle.

From there, De Kock was also able to identify what both species had been eating and found that they relied on bone collagen in the plants. She used a mass spectrometer to inspect the bone collagen in the turtle remains and found what types of plants the sea turtles ate.

“For instance, one plant might contain more of the lighter carbon-12 than another plant, which contains more of the heavier carbon-13. Because carbon does not change when it is digested, we can detect what ratio of carbon is present in the bones and infer the diet from that,” De Kock said.

Satellite tracking data from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom revealed the current traveling routes and destinations of sea turtles. The team from Exeter had also been taking tiny skin samples from the sea turtles, which revealed similar dietary information that was present in the ancient bone samples. De Kock could then draw conclusions by connecting the diets of turtles from thousands of years ago to specific locations. The study found that for about 3,000 years, numerous generations of green sea turtles have been feeding in the same seagrass meadows along the coasts of Egypt and West Libya.

[Related: Tiger sharks helped scientists map a vast underwater meadow in the Bahamas.]

Loggerhead turtles showed a more varied diet than the green sea turtles, so their results were less specific.

Understanding more about how a species eats over past generations can help counteract shifting baseline syndrome. This is when slow changes to a larger system, like animal populations, are unnoticed since each new generation of researchers may redefine what the natural state was based on how the environment was at the start of their careers.

“Even long-term data goes back only about 100 years. But tracing back further in time using archaeological data allows us to better see human-induced effects on the environment. And it allows us to predict, a bit,” De Kock said.

Recent models have forecasted a high risk of widespread seagrass loss right where green sea turtles have been migrating for generations. Losing these food resources could be detrimental to the green sea turtle, and future conservation efforts can include supporting seagrass planting efforts, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and building better signs and markers so that boats do not weigh anchor in seagrass meadows.

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How climate change is pushing oxygen out of the world’s oceans

Carla Delgado — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Loss of oxygen content also has significant impacts on marine microbes and animals. Deposit Photos

Since the 1960s, the oxygen level in the world’s oceans has dropped by about 2 percent. While that may not sound like a lot, the continuous decline in oxygen content of oceanic and coastal waters, called deoxygenation, can alter marine ecosystems and biodiversity. This is largely happening due to global warming and nutrient runoff.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from anthropogenic activities like deforestation and fossil fuel use trap the sun’s heat, warming the planet and heating up the ocean. Oxygen becomes less soluble at higher temperatures, which means warm water holds less oxygen than cold water. Eutrophication due to excess inputs of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture or wastewater also stimulates algal blooms, resulting in oxygen depletion when they decompose.

[Related: Scientists say the ocean is changing color—and it’s probably our fault.]

Deoxygenation affects living resources and disrupts natural biogeochemical processes, says Nancy Rabalais, professor and chair in oceanography and wetland studies at Louisiana State University who researches coastal eutrophication and hypoxic environments. Oxygen concentrations play a role in the rates of breakdown of organic matter and the cycling of different elements in the environment. For instance, deoxygenation may enhance phosphorus recycling, reduce nitrogen losses, and initially enhance the availability of iron, all of which can alter the productivity of coastal and ocean ecosystems.

Loss of oxygen content also has significant impacts on marine microbes and animals. Deoxygenation can alter their abundance and diversity, reduce the quality and quantity of suitable habitats for them, and interfere with reproduction. The oxygen decline doesn’t have to be major to potentially cause ecosystem-wide changes. In oxygen minimum zones that may already be close to physiological thresholds, even small oxygen declines can have drastic impacts.

When oceans lose oxygen, marine organisms become stressed and need to adapt—if they can—to survive. Species that are especially sensitive to oxygenation changes, like tuna and sharks, are being driven to shallower habitats as oxygen-deficient zones expand, says Anya Hess, PhD candidate at Rutgers University who studies ocean oxygenation. Deoxygenation also threatens the ocean’s food provisioning ecosystem services for humans, potentially leading to reduced catches for fisheries and the collapse of regional stocks.

Although new research suggests deoxygenation may eventually reverse, it might not happen until the far future. In a recent study published in Nature, Hess and her co-authors looked to the Miocene warm period about 16 to 14 million years ago when temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were higher than today to study a “possible example of how oceans behave during sustained warm periods,” she says.

Their results show that the eastern tropical Pacific—a major oxygen-deficient or “dead” zone that has been losing oxygen as the climate warms—was well oxygenated at that time, which suggests that deoxygenation could reverse on long timeframes as the climate continues to warm.

[Related: A deep sea mining zone in the remote Pacific is also a goldmine of unique species.]

Climate models from a 2018 study published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles predict oxygen concentration may start increasing and oxygen-starved regions in the ocean can begin shrinking by 2150 through 2300 due to decreasing tropical export production—the nutrient supply from the ocean interior—combined with increased ocean ventilation or the transport of surface waters into the interior. But marine ecosystems are already facing various impacts today—and rebounding is hard because deoxygenation can reconfigure food webs and organisms that can’t avoid low oxygen levels can become lethargic or die.

“I don’t think we should wait around to see whether deoxygenation will reverse as the climate continues to warm,” says Hess. “We know that rising temperatures are causing ocean deoxygenation, so if we want to stop it we know what we need to do—reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Policymakers can also establish long-term monitoring programs around the world to study oxygen measurements, which will help identify patterns and predict biological responses. All in all, deoxygenation trends may eventually reverse in the future, but taking the steps to mitigate climate change and control nutrient runoff will benefit humans and marine ecosystems today.

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Beer’s pungent scent could help salmon find their way home

Ben Goldfarb/Hakai Magazine — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 01:00:00 +0000

The Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) is the largest species in the Pacific salmon genus Oncorhynchus. The common name refers to the Chinookan peoples. Other vernacular names for the species include king salmon, Quinnat salmon, spring salmon, and Tyee salmon. Danita Delimont/Getty

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Of all the traits that make salmon extraordinary migrants—their leaping prowess, their tolerance of both fresh and salt water, their attunement to the Earth’s magnetic fields—the most impressive might be their sense of smell. Guided by the odors they imprint on in their youth, most adult salmon famously return to spawn in the stream where they were born. No one knows precisely what scents young salmon memorize, but it’s probably some combination of mineral and biological signals, such as distinctive metals and the smell of their own kin.

Several years from now, however, if scientists at the Oregon Hatchery Research Center have their way, some chinook salmon will be chasing a very different scent: the rich, beery bouquet of brewer’s yeast. The alluring aroma of ale is a bid to solve a sticky conservation conundrum: how do you get hatchery-reared salmon to come home?

Though the vast majority of salmon return to their birthplace to spawn, they sometimes slip up. A small portion naturally stray into other streams. “From an evolutionary standpoint,” says Andy Dittman, a Seattle, Washington–based biologist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “it’s an important alternative strategy” that helps populations survive disaster and expand their range.

After Washington’s Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, for example, steelhead trout, a close salmon relative, ditched the ash-choked Toutle River and bred in nearby watersheds. And as climate change shrinks Alaska glaciers, salmon have begun to trickle into newly exposed streams and lakes.

But hatchery-raised salmon take straying to an extreme. Many hatchery fish are released in unfamiliar streams or turned loose during developmental stages when they don’t readily imprint. As adults, these fish often cruise past their home hatcheries and mate with wild-born fish, distorting wild gene pools that have been finely tuned by thousands of years of natural selection. On the Elk River, this problem was historically acute. Some years, recalls Dittman, more than half of breeding fish were hatchery-born salmon that wandered into wild spawning grounds.

In 2016, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife tasked the state’s hatchery research center with solving the problem. Could scientists get juvenile hatchery-reared fish to imprint on a scent of their own choosing, one that would lure them home years later?

Finding the perfect scent fell largely to researcher Maryam Kamran. Much as Pavlov trained his dog to slobber at a sound, Kamran dropped various smelly compounds into tanks full of pinkie-length salmon fry, then added food pellets to get the fish to associate the odors with their meals. If she could then add only the odor to the water and watch the fish still dart with excitement, she knew they could cue into that scent.

Kamran tested a vast—and occasionally weird—array of aromas, among them extract of shrimp, tincture of watercress, skin of steelhead, and bile of minnow. She mixed and matched various proteins and hormones and pheromones. You’re trying things that will give the fish information, Kamran says. “Is there a predator? Is there a mate? Is there food? What is the quality of habitat?”

In his Seattle laboratory, Dittman supplemented Kamran’s efforts. He placed electrodes on the salmon’s smell receptors, then spritzed them with Kamran’s chosen scents to see how their neurons responded. “Whatever odors we picked,” Kamran says, “we had to see if the salmon noses could actually detect it.”

After several years, a leading candidate emerged: a cocktail of amino acids purchased from a commercial laboratory. In 2021, managers at the Elk River Hatchery released the first chinook salmon fry imprinted on those acids into the wild, along with others reared on minnow bile and other compounds. Yet the amino acid mixture, for all its promise, proved prohibitively expensive to deploy in large quantities. So the quest for a cheap odor continued—which, this spring, led the scientists to beer.

The idea came from Seth White, director of the Oregon Hatchery Research Center. White, an amateur beer maker, knew that brewer’s yeast contains glutamate, an amino acid on which salmon are capable of imprinting. And he knew exactly where to find it in bulk.

One day this March, White visited Newport, Oregon, where the brewmaster of Rogue Ales turned a lever on two vats of beer and poured out pitchers of trub—the yellowish sediment of malt particles, coagulated proteins, and settled yeast that’s left behind by the brewing process. White packed plastic bags of trub in a cooler and drove the hour to the hatchery research center. “I felt like Ulysses on a quest,” White says.

His journey wasn’t in vain, as Dittman quickly found young salmon are highly sensitive to the trub. “It seems to be a good candidate,” White says. “It’s working out really well so far.”

Of course, it’s one thing to get juvenile fish to imprint on an odor, and quite another to get adult salmon to chase it back to their natal hatchery. This past winter, the first males imprinted upon the amino acid cocktail began to trickle back into the Elk River, although scientists haven’t yet analyzed the data. As for the beer, White says the Oregon Hatchery Research Center still has experiments to conduct before hatchery managers consider exposing their fish to trub. If it someday succeeds, though, he already has a name picked out for the brew: Olfaction Pale Ale.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Scientists say the ocean is changing color—and it’s probably our fault

Laura Baisas — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 15:00:00 +0000

An image of the northern Gulf of Mexico created from remote-sensing reflectance and chlorophyll measurements taken from newly reprocessed VIIRS data. NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

Climate change is already baking the Earth with record breaking heat, intensifying rain storms, and pushing the planet past eight major indicators of stability. The latest impact of increased greenhouse gas emissions could be changing the color of the world’s oceans.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to the ‘hydrogen rainbow.’]

In a study published July 12 in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists found that the changes and blue-green fluctuations to the ocean’s hue over the last 20 years cannot be explained by the natural year-to-year variability alone. These changes are present in more than 56 percent of the planet’s oceans. The study also found that tropical oceans near the Earth’s equator have become steadily greener overtime.

A shift in ocean color is an indication that ecosystems within the surface may also be changing. While the team can’t point to exactly how marine ecosystems are changing to reflect the shift, they are quite sure that human-induced climate change is likely behind it.

“I’ve been running simulations that have been telling me for years that these changes in ocean color are going to happen,” study co-author and MIT senior research scientist Stephanie Dutkiewicz said in a statement. “To actually see it happening for real is not surprising, but frightening. And these changes are consistent with man-induced changes to our climate.”

The ocean gets its signature colors from what is living in its upper layers. Waters that are a deep blue typically reflect little life, while greener water indicates the presence of ecosystems. Greener water also generally means there is plenty of phytoplankton, the microscopic plant-like microbes that call the upper ocean home and are full of a pigment called chlorophyll.

Phytoplankton are the backbone of the marine food web, and these tiny organisms support everything from tiny krill and fish up to marine mammals and seabirds. They also help the ocean capture and store carbon dioxide. Scientists monitor phytoplankton levels across the ocean’s surface as an indicator of how these essential ocean communities are responding to changes in climate. To keep an eye on it, scientists track changes in chlorophyll that are based on the ratio of how much green versus blue light is reflected from the ocean’s surface. These changes are monitored from space.

A 2010 paper by one of this new study’s co-authors, Stephanie Henson of the National Oceanography Center, found that if scientists were only tracking chlorophyll, it would take at least 30 years of continuous monitoring to detect a trend that was specially being driven by climate change. They argued that this was because large natural variations in chlorophyll that occur year to year would overtake any human-made influence on chlorophyll concentrations.

[Related: Jackrabbit’s color-changing fur may prepare them for climate change.]

A follow-up model in 2019 by Dutkiewicz confirmed that signals that climate change might be driving changes in hue should be easier to detect over the smaller and more normal variation in color and should be apparent within 20 years.

“So I thought, doesn’t it make sense to look for a trend in all these other colors, rather than in chlorophyll alone?” study co-author and bio geoscientist at the National Oceanography Center in the United Kingdom B. B. Cael said in a statement.“It’s worth looking at the whole spectrum, rather than just trying to estimate one number from bits of the spectrum.”

In this new study, the team analyzed measurements of ocean color taken by an instrument aboard the Aqua satellite called the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). True to its name, the Aqua satellite has been monitoring ocean color for 21 years and MODIS takes measurements in seven visible wavelengths, including the two colors that researchers generally use to estimate chlorophyll levels.

Using measurements taken from 2002 to 2022, Cael carried out a statistical analysis using all seven ocean colors. First, he looked at how much these colors changed between regions in a given year, to get a sense of their natural variations. Next, he looked at the bigger picture to see how annual variations in the ocean’s color changed over two decades. The analysis showed a clear trend of above the normal year-to-year variability in color.

To determine if this trend is related to climate change, he looked at the model that Dutkiewicz determined in 2019. This model simulated the Earth’s oceans with the addition of greenhouse gasses and also without it. The model matched up almost exactly with the real-world satellite data–with greenhouse gasses, a change in ocean color will show up within 20 years and occur in about 50 percent of the world’s surface oceans.

The team believes that this new study demonstrates that monitoring the oceans colors beyond green chlorophyll can give a faster and clearer way to detect changes to marine ecosystems.

“The color of the oceans has changed. And we can’t say how. But we can say that changes in color reflect changes in plankton communities that will impact everything that feeds on plankton,” said Dutkiewicz. “It will also change how much the ocean will take up carbon, because different types of plankton have different abilities to do that. So, we hope people take this seriously. It’s not only models that are predicting these changes will happen. We can now see it happening, and the ocean is changing.”

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Some sea snakes may not be colorblind after all

Laura Baisas — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 13:00:00 +0000

A banded sea snake swimming freely. Some species of venomous sea snakes lost their ability to see in color when the moved from the land to the ocean about 110 million years ago. Deposit Photos

For annulated sea snakes, seeing the wonderful world of color wasn’t always possible. These venomous sea snakes that roam Australia and Asia’s oceans once lost their color vision, but a new study into their genomes reveals that they have potentially regained their ability to see a wider palette of colors over the last 100 million years. The findings were published July 12 in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press.

[Related: A guide to all the places with no snakes.]

For animals, normal color vision is mostly determined by genes called visual opsins. Multiple losses of opsin genes have occurred as tetrapods—a group including amphibians, reptiles, and mammals—have evolved. The emergence of new opsin genes is significantly more rare than losing them. A 2020 study found that some semi-aquatic snake species in the genus Helicops found in South America are the only known snakes to regain these opsin genes.

“The ancestral snake, which is the original snake species, lost the capacity for advanced color vision ~110 million years ago. This was because they likely dwelt in dim-light environments where visual perception would be limited,” study co-author and University of Adelaide PhD student and marine biologist Isaac Rosetteo tells PopSci.

This ancestral snake species lived on the land and would later evolve into all snake species, including sea snakes. When their genes for color vision were gone, they could only perceive a very limited range of colors. However, that likely started to change as some elapid descendants began to change. Within the last 25 million years, two elapid lineages have moved from terrestrial to marine environments.

With the fully sequenced genome of the annulated snake in hand, the team in this new study from the University of Adelaide in Australia, The University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom and The Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology looked at visual opsin genes in five ecologically distinct species of elapid snakes. Elapids are the family of about 300 venomous snakes that include mambas, cobras, and the annulated sea snake. Looking at this family more broadly offered an opportunity to investigate the molecular evolution of vision genes.

The team found that the annulated sea snake now has four intact copies of the opsin gene SWS1. Two of these genes are sensitive to ultraviolet light that has shorter wavelengths, while the other two genes have evolved a new sensitivity to the longer wavelengths of light that dominate ocean habitats.

“Only one [of these genes] was expected. To our knowledge, every other ~4000 snake species in the world (except a couple of Helicops species) have just one of these genes. The most interesting part is that two of these genes allow for perception of UV light, while the other two allow for the perception of blue light. This is expected to dramatically increase their sensitivity to colors which could be very useful in bright-light marine environments,” says Rosetto.

The authors believe that this sensitivity means that the snakes could have color discrimination that allows them to distinguish predators from prey, as well as potential snake mates against the more colorful background in the ocean.

[Related: How cats and dogs see the world.]

This significantly differs from the evolution of opsins in mammals like bats, dolphins, and whales during their own ecological transitions. These mammals saw more opsin losses as they adapted to dim-light and aquatic environments.

“Our own primate ancestors developed the advanced color vision we enjoy via a similar mechanism. Their long-wavelength-sensitive opsin was duplicated, and one copy changed to allow for perception of a different wavelength of light than the original,” says Rosetto. “These snakes have done the exact same thing, just with a different visual opsin and there are now four copies instead of just two. Without these duplications, our (and their) capacity for color vision would be heavily reduced.”

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The fossil record holds clues about modern-day marine ecology

Laura Baisas — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Organisms with hard, durable parts, like shells, are more likely to be preserved as fossils than organisms composed entirely of soft tissue. Carrie Tyler

As we plunge into Earth’s sixth stage of mass extinction (that we are aware of), biologists looking to conserve and restore ecosystems that have been stripped of plant and animal life can face a pretty daunting task. However, help is on the way in the form of some of the ocean’s worms, mollusks, and crabs. A study published July 11 in the journal PeerJ, finds that fossils from these groups are actually preserved in the fossil record in proportion to their diversity, making for a solid source of information about past ecosystems.

[Related: Fossil trove in Wales is a 462-million-year-old world of wee sea creatures.]

Reliable evidence of what they looked like before humans arrived can be tough to come by, especially in coastal ecosystems. These spots were ravaged by overharvesting and pollution centuries before humans began to monitor their health. This is where the lowly mollusk can help.

“This has been a topic in paleontology for decades. People have looked at modern ecosystems in a variety of habitats to see how well the fossil record reflects what’s living there,” study co-author and chair of invertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History Michal Kowalewski said in a statement. “But most previous studies looked at how species are recorded within a specific group. We wanted to know how groups are recorded within the entire system.”

Ancient organisms that were primarily made of soft tissues are less likely to be in the fossil record than those with harder body parts like bones and shells. These tougher parts also come in varying degrees of thickness and strength, primarily depending on what organism they belonged to and what stage of development they were in.

Researchers have looked to mollusks as a proxy for the overall health of ecosystems since they are common in the fossil record and can represent the health of an ecosystem. Their sturdy shells litter the seafloor and show patterns of species diversity and distribution that can provide a window into the past states of the ocean before humans entered the picture.

According to the team, mollusks past and present can be used to broadly infer the health of an ecosystem, in part due to their status as the backbone of an aquatic ecosystem, the way that vital signs are used to signal a patient’s health. Scientists can then perform a more robust check-up and find patterns of population declines, shifting habitat ranges, and if invasive species were introduced when comparing the remains of long dead species with living ones.

In 2021, scientists in Europe demonstrated that the native molluscan biodiversity of the eastern Mediterranean Sea has almost entirely collapsed due to global warming, which suggests that other organisms may be struggling too.

“Most of what we know, in terms of biases in the fossil record, is based on mollusks,” co-author and University of Nevada, Las Vegas marine conservation paleobiologist Carrie Tyler said in a statement. “We designed our study to determine whether those biases are consistent when you include many types of organisms, not just mollusks. What happens when you have worms and sea urchins and all other groups in a marine ecosystem?”

[Related from PopSci+: The ghosts of the dinosaurs we may never discover.]

In this study, the team’s first step was to find a suitable marine ecosystem to compare living and fossil organisms to examine the discrepancies between past and present communities. They used a relatively unchanged environment off the coast of North Carolina that had the skeletal remains of dead animals and living animals. While there, the team collected samples from 52 locations that include a wide spectrum of onshore and offshore habitats that support specialized communities of organisms.

Over the course of two years, the team counted over 60,000 living and dead specimens representing hundreds of different marine invertebrates. The thick shells of mollusks were overly represented in the fossil record, compared with other softer groups. However, the fragments of dead sand dollars, corals, tube-forming worms, and other non-mollusks were more broadly represented at the same level of both abundance and diversity as their living counterparts.

Brachiopods and sea stars that had less current-day diversity in the region were not seen in fossil record, partially due to their low numbers. Past and present habitats were also dominated by different species. For example, a type of hermit crab that is common today didn’t appear in the fossil record, but the overall number of species in different groups remained consistent.

According to the team, most marine ecosystems do not have a complete inventory of the species that live there, and the existing count is shrinking as some species decline and others go extinct. If these other marine environments are archived like the one in North Carolina in this study, researchers will have a baseline to evaluate the long term viability in those communities.

“We can use the whole fossil assemblage as a picture into the past for a particular place despite differences in preservation among animals,” Tyler said. “By comparing it to the living community, we can see how much an ecosystem has changed and decide on the best conservation strategies based on those changes.”

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Are ‘mother trees’ real?

Zayna Syed — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

A couple tries to wrap their arms around a massive 800-year-old Douglas fir in British Columbia, Canada. Matthew Bailey/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In the forests of British Columbia, where recent wildfires have sent smoke across borders and dimmed blue summer skies, a series of studies from the past 30 years contends that large, old trees send resources and messages to the seedlings around them. The “mothering” could, hypothetically, help burned landscapes recover faster, boost the amount of carbon dioxide stores in soil, and improve the resiliency of natural systems overall.

The idea seems to borrow from bedtime tales about ancient trees and the enchanted forests they foster; to validate beliefs about all types of creatures nourish their young; to vouch for the inherent goodness of nature, where collaboration triumphs over competition.

[Related: Behold the world’s tallest trees]

But two papers have recently called into question the evidence supporting the “mother tree” explanation. Do these veterans of the forest act as guardians for newer generations, protecting them from drought, disease, and deforestation? Or is their relationship much more complicated?

What is a ‘mother tree’?

The term “mother tree” was coined in the 2000s by a Canadian scientist named Suzanne Simard, who grew up in a family of loggers in the Monashee Mountains in British Columbia. The old-growth forests on the range sustained a booming timber industry for more than a century.

In her book Finding the Mother Tree, Simard describes a childhood spent wandering through the forest, gaining keen insight on the intimate connections between long-lived trees like Douglas firs and ponderosa pines and the ecosystems they inhabit. Later, she studied forestry, became a research scientist for the Canadian Ministry of Forests and now teaches and leads a lab at the University of British Columbia.

Her childhood experiences and decades of scientific research led her to draw a connection that was somewhat revolutionary in forestry management and the conventional biological thinking that species must compete to survive. Simard proposed that large trees that are hundreds or even thousands of years old can send carbon, nutrients, water, hormones, and even alarm signals to young plants via a network of underground fungi known as mycorrhiza. She describes these trees as “mothers” in her writing and interviews, and argues that they are essential in making forests around the planet better suited to survive climate change.

“We need to save the legacies, the mother trees and networks, and the wood, the genes, so they can pass their wisdom onto the next generation of trees so they can withstand the future stresses coming down the road,” Simard said in her Ted Talk from 2016. “We need to be conservationists.”

What’s the scientific evidence?

Some forestry researchers warn that the mother tree viewpoint is ahead of the science. A paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution in February reviewed 26 studies that look at the ability of underground fungal networks to transfer resources and if mother trees send resources to young plants.

The studies spanned continents, experimental design, and forest and soil type. The authors found that in about 80 percent of the studies, access to mycorrhizal networks associated with nearby trees had no benefit to the seedlings planted around them. In 18 percent of the studies the seedlings did benefit. And in a much smaller subset, those trees and their mycorrhizal networks actually harmed the others

“There are lots of important ecological roles for big trees in the forest,” says Justine Karst, the lead author of the paper and a professor at the University of Alberta. “But this sort of popularized idea of their role and how they work with these fungi as these passive conduits in the soil doing things under the direction of trees, there’s just not really evidence for that.”

Part of the problem is that there’s so much variability within the 26 studies, making it difficult to draw conclusions about mother trees—or large, old trees, as Karst prefers to call them—as a whole.

“It differs in which forest the experiment was conducted in: how far the seedlings were growing from the mature tree, the type of seeds or the type of soils, if there’s overstory mortality,” Karst explains. “There’s so many of these background features that there’s just no way to generalize. This is something that we would suggest moving forward is that we need to understand, what is the cause of this variability?

Another issue is that most of the research that supports the mother tree theory comes from studies in labs, Meghan Midgley, a soil ecologist at Morton Arboretum who was not an author on the recent review, explains. “We haven’t been able to observe it in the forest, which is where we’d really want to see this sort of relationship happening.”

The idea might even be so appealing, scientists have let it bias them. “There are alternative explanations that have not been acknowledged in studies,” Karst says. For example, one common experimental design using mesh bag encourages different types of fungal growth, potentially biasing the results.

PopSci reached out to Simard and The Mother Tree Project about these scientific uncertainties, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

What role do fungi play?

One facet of the mother tree debate experts agree on is that fungi have a unique relationship with trees. Midgley studies this symbiotic subset of organisms, which grow on the tree’s root system and allow it to gain access to water and nutrients deep in the soil. In return, the guests get carbon, which the fungi can’t can’t produce itself. “From the tropics to boreal forests, trees are associating with fungi,” Midgley says. “This is a relationship that has been established for much of evolutionary time.

These collaborative fungi also have an overall beneficial effect on plants. “There are many hundreds of studies showing that when there’s no fungi, plants don’t grow as well as when there are fungi,” Midgeley adds. “There’s also some evidence that they can help protect plants from below-ground pathogens or from being eaten by below-ground invertebrates, so they can play a variety of roles for a plant.”

[Related: Inside the lab that’s growing mushroom computers]

Knowing this, forest manager might take fungi, as well as large, old trees, into account when restoring an ecosystem after a wildfire. However, there’s not enough evidence right now to support specific strategies, like introducing fungi into a forest that’s been harmed by wildfire, Midgley says.

She and Karst both suggest further research that would help scientists better understand the variability between mature trees and their relationships with fungi and the rest of the forest. “Why do seedlings sometimes show no response, a positive response, or a negative response [to older trees]?” Karst says. “We don’t know those answers, but I think that they’ll be important to find out.”

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Why preserving museum specimens is so vital for science

Darren Incorvaia/Undark — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 01:00:00 +0000

Maintaining such a vast collection isn’t easy, particularly when it comes to specimens preserved in alcohol. Stone via Getty Images

This article was originally published on Undark.

In a dusty room in central Florida, countless millipedes, centipedes, and other creepy-crawlies sit in specimen jars, rotting. The invertebrates are part of the Florida State Collection of Arthropods in Gainesville, which totals more than 12 million insects and other arthropod specimens, and are used by expert curators to identify pest species that threaten Florida’s native and agricultural plants.

However, not all specimens at the facility are treated equally, according to two people who have seen the collection firsthand. They say non-insect samples, like shrimp and millipedes, that are stored in ethanol have been neglected to the point of being irreversibly damaged or lost completely.

When it comes to how the FSCA stacks up with other collections she’s worked in, Ann Dunn, a former curatorial assistant, is blunt: “This is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

Experts say the loss of such specimens—even uncharismatic ones such as centipedes—is a setback for science. Particularly invaluable are holotypes, which are the example specimens that determine the description for an entire species. In fact, the variety of holotypes a collection has is often more important than its size, since those specimens are actively used for research, said Ainsley Seago, an associate curator of invertebrate zoology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

A paper published in March 2023 highlighted the importance of museum specimens more generally, for addressing urgent issues like climate change and wildlife conservation, with 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums estimating their total collections to exceed 1.1 billion specimens. “This global collection,” the authors write, “is the physical basis for our understanding of the natural world and our place in it.”

Through Aaron Keller, the communications director of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services—which oversees the FSCA—the museum declined to speak with Undark for this story. In response to a complaint that Dunn filed with the FDACS Office of Inspector General, the director of the museum’s parent agency Trevor Smith wrote: “scientific specimens do not need to be pristine or perfect specimens” and “museum staff strive to maintain materials in the best condition possible because they cannot be replaced.”

Dunn started working at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods in April 2022 as an assistant to curator Felipe Soto-Adames. She was initially hired, she told Undark in a recent interview, in part to help maintain part of the FSCA’s collection—some of the so-called wet specimens, or invertebrates stored in vials and jars filled with alcohol. But she said she was shocked when she saw the condition of many of the specimens that were supposed to be under her care. (The FSCA did not respond to a request for comment on Dunn’s hiring or specifics about her role, nor did the museum respond to multiple requests for an interview with Soto-Adames.)

Dunn told Undark that she found mushy specimens sitting in brown ethanol, some with stoppers so eroded that they were dripping a waxy substance onto the contents of the vial. Most of the damage is in the collection of non-insect arthropods, like sun spiders, millipedes, and shrimp. She estimates that half of the FSCA’s ethanol collection, which included 200,000 vials and approximately 1.1 million individual arthropods as of 2022, is damaged or rotten. Another person who is familiar with the FSCA collections agreed with Dunn’s assessment. (They asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retaliation.)

The FSCA was founded in 1915 to house the collection of the Florida State Plant Board (now the Division of Plant Industry), and merged with other state collections in the 1960s after the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services formally took it over. Today, the FSCA seeks “to build the best possible worldwide collection of terrestrial and aquatic arthropods in support of research, education and the functions of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services,” according to its website.

The state of the collection, Dunn said, prevented her from fulfilling the FSCA’s mission of identifying pest species. When people asked the museum for help identifying lawn shrimp—terrestrial crustaceans that are invasive in Florida—Dunn had to rely on Google Images. “I knew from experience that the collection would not help me at all,” she said, due to a lack of organization and degradation of specimens.

Maintaining such a vast collection isn’t easy, particularly when it comes to specimens preserved in alcohol. While a few institutions have well-managed alcohol collections, many others do not, said Seago of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. (Seago is also president of the Entomological Collections Network, a nonprofit that provides best practices for insect and other arthropod collections.) She demonstrated one such challenge in a Zoom interview, holding up jars of crabs that were bone dry—all the alcohol within had evaporated over time. While hard-bodied crabs can remain intact when desiccated, soft-bodied invertebrates fare worse. And evaporating alcohol can also degrade the stopper used to seal the specimen’s container, especially if it’s made of cork or rubber.

At the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, there are approximately 76,000 containers of ethanol specimens, mostly stored in a World War-II-era Quonset hut, which is made from corrugated steel and is uninsulated. According to Seago, replenishing the required ethanol of each sample takes a lot of work. Even if interns or volunteers are available to go through them all, supervisors have to oversee the process to ensure they’re using the correct alcohol concentration and understand how the specimens should be properly organized.

“Just keeping an alcohol collection at baseline ‘okay’ is a monumental amount of effort,” Seago said.

According to Dunn, her work at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods came to a halt when her one-year contract was not renewed in April, just days after she posted negative comments about the workplace behavior of head curator Paul Skelley on her personal, anonymous Twitter account. Dunn had submitted a formal complaint against Skelley and the state of the ethanol collections to the FDACS Office of Inspector General on April 17. The inspector general’s office determined that Dunn’s complaint did not warrant an investigation, and in a written evaluation, they noted that Dunn was let go for “conduct unbecoming a public employee and insubordination associated with derogatory comments posted on social media.”

Following her firing, Dunn tweeted photographs of damaged specimens from the FSCA’s collection. Jackson Means, a millipede taxonomist at the Virginia Museum of Natural History, told Undark he had only seen similar conditions in an alcohol collection that had been left unattended in a warehouse for 22 years. “These images are definitely long-term neglect,” he said.

Some of the neglected specimens included holotypes, Dunn told Undark. The loss of holotypes can cause uproar among the scientific community, but they can be replaced—if someone goes through the effort of formally describing a neotype (a new holotype meant to replace one that has been lost or damaged). But designating a neotype “usually relies on other people being able to determine whether or not you can find a specimen of the same species from the same locality” as the holotype, said Seago. For many species, there aren’t enough experts to do that work, she said, “and the fewer taxonomists you have for that group, the less likely that is.”

Seago is currently applying for a grant to help locate, consolidate, and digitize holotype specimens at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. And Means said the Virginia Museum of Natural History is working to catalogue its holotypes too. Dunn had been working on a similar organizational endeavor at the FSCA before her firing.

Many collectors, from scientists to hobbyists, donate their personal collections to museums. This was the case for Nell Causey, who had her millipede collection given to the FSCA after her death in 1979. Causey earned a Ph.D. from Duke University in 1940, and was “the predominant myriapodologist of her time,” said Means. “She was a really good collector, and she described a lot of species.”

During Dunn’s efforts to help catalogue the FSCA’s holotypes, she says she found eight of Causey’s millipedes sitting mislabeled on a shelf in the wrong building gathering dust. The samples had been described in 2010 by William Shear, a professor emeritus at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had borrowed the specimens several years prior for a research project. Neither Dunn nor her coworker on the project knew they existed before Shear reached out to check on them. (Shear told Undark that this snafu was caused by a lack of communication from the previous curator, and he has since borrowed and deposited specimens at the FSCA with no problems.)

Dunn is worried that the life’s work of Causey and other passionate collectors, like arachnid specialist Martin Muma, who died in 1989, is at risk of degradation at the FSCA, especially without dedicated taxonomists to care for them. It is a shame, Means told Undark, to lose parts of a prominent collector’s work. “Maybe art historians will be mad at me, but it’s a lot like the degradation of a painting,” he said. “You are losing a piece of history.”

Many museum curators have a preference or bias for the specific group they work on, said Seago, and will prioritize care for that group—especially if they’re in a collection where “the people in charge don’t care at all about those groups.” Meanwhile, taxonomists can be hard to come by, and she said this is even truer for small, obscure, and uncharismatic groups of organisms. Dunn said this taxonomic bias was strong at FSCA, which especially favors beetles. The person familiar with the museum’s collections who did not wish to be named agreed with Dunn that there is a persistent attitude of favoritism toward charismatic insects at FSCA.

Museum donors also usually have preferences for certain groups—Seago said she could easily raise funds for a new butterfly cabinet—but natural history museums need more money if they’re going to adequately care for their entire collections. That hasn’t always been the case even for more popular creatures. “Funding has been dropping across the board,” said Means. “And because of that, staffing is down.”

Dunn accepts the commonality of neglect in ethanol collections, but said “that doesn’t make it acceptable.” And when it comes to holotypes, she said, there’s no excuse. “Holotypes should never go without care.”

Means and Seago agreed. “The whole point of a museum,” said Means, is to take care of type specimens “in perpetuity.”

Darren Incorvaia is a journalist who writes about animals and the natural world. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, and Science News, among other publications. He holds a Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior from Michigan State University.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Human noises make animals in the woods nervous

Christine Peterson/High Country News — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 01:00:00 +0000

Human sound affects animal behavior. Deposit Photos

This article was originally featured on High Country News.

The first grainy film clip shows a black bear exploding out of the trail camera’s frame. In another, a mule deer stops munching wildflowers, backs away and takes off in the opposite direction. In a third, a moose doesn’t move at all but stands there, vigilant.

All three animals were reacting to sound bites from boomboxes in the woods, part of a study measuring the effect of outdoor recreationists’ noise on wildlife. The sounds included people chatting, mountain bikers spinning down trails—even just quiet footfalls. Each clip lasted less than 90 seconds.

The new study, currently underway in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, adds to mounting evidence that the mere presence of human sound, no matter how loud or quiet, fast or slow, changes how animals behave.

Don’t start feeling guilty about going for a hike just yet, though. Researchers are also trying to understand the significance of those reactions. For some species, hikers and bikers may be little more than a sideshow in a forest full of natural disturbances. For others, recreationists could have an impact similar to that of terrifying predators, invading habitat where food can be found, resulting in lower birthrates and even increasing deaths.

“The whole point of the study isn’t to vilify recreationists,” said Mark Ditmer, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station and one of the study’s co-leaders. “It’s to understand where and when we cause the most disturbance.”

The idea that we must know and love the outdoors in order to protect it has held sway for over a century. Recreation built a constituency that helped protect wild places. But even decades ago, there was evidence that using wilderness—whether formally designated or otherwise—as a human playground caused its fair share of collateral damage. Trails crisscrossed woods without rhyme or reason; used toilet paper clung to bushes in the backcountry. Groups like Leave No Trace began reminding people to pack their garbage out with them, leave wildlife alone and poop responsibly.

Still, “non-consumptive recreation,” the wonky term for enjoying oneself outdoors without hunting or fishing, has generally been considered a net good. At best, outdoor recreation connects people to the land and sometimes inspires them to protect it—to write lawmakers, attend land-use meetings, support advocacy groups, perhaps remind others to stay on trails. At worst, it seems harmless.

“The whole point of the study isn’t to vilify recreationists.”

But recent studies show otherwise. There’s one out of Vail, Colorado, showing that increased trail use by hikers and mountain bikers disturbed elk so much the cows birthed fewer calves. Another out of Grand Teton National Park showed that backcountry skiers scared bighorn sheep during winter when food was scarce, with potentially lethal consequences. A 2016 review of 274 articles on how outdoor recreation affects wildlife revealed that 59% of the interactions were negative.

But most of the research looked the impacts of random encounters with hikers, backcountry skiers and others. Few questioned what exactly it is about humans that bothers wildlife so much, whether it’s the way we look, how we smell, or the sounds we make.

“Wildlife, more often than not, probably hear us before they see us, and so we can rarely observe if it is a negative response,” said Kathy Zeller, a co-leader on the new study and a research biologist with the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute and Rocky Mountain Research Station.

Ditmer and Zeller decided to record people biking and hiking in the woods. Last summer, they carted boomboxes of those recordings into the forest and set them up on game trails away from heavily traveled areas.

On and off for about four months, whenever a motion-sensitive camera at one end of the trail detected an animal, a boombox about 20 yards away played human sound bites—nothing like a ’90s dance party, just recordings of two hikers chatting or walking quietly, or of large and small groups of mountain bikers. Two more cameras near the boomboxes and one at the other end of the trail recorded wildlife reactions. They also played forest sounds and even blank tracks to be sure the animal wasn’t simply reacting to sudden noises or the almost imperceptible sound of a speaker turning on and off.

“Wildlife, more often than not, probably hear us before they see us, and so we can rarely observe if it is a negative response.”

Judging by an initial analysis of last summer’s data, large groups of mountain bikers were the most likely to cause animals like mule deer and elk to flee. Smaller groups of mountain bikers and hikers talking also triggered a response. The animals paused and listened to people walking, but didn’t flee as often.

Researchers are still figuring out how harmful those reactions are. Joe Holbrook, a University of Wyoming professor who was not involved in the study, suspects that it depends on the species and the time of year. He and his team have spent years studying wolverines’ reactions to backcountry skiers and snowmobilers. His most recent work shows that female wolverines don’t linger to feed on carcasses if backcountry recreationists are nearby. That suggests they’re losing access to good habitat, but he still doesn’t know if that means they’re also having fewer babies or dying more often.

And some wildlife gets accustomed to the presence of humans: the herds of elk that wander the streets of Mammoth, Montana, the mule deer that munch roses in towns across the West, the pronghorn that wander onto golf courses and through subdivisions. Ditmer and Zeller found that in areas with more recreation, some species became less likely to flee.

Not all wild animals adapt to humans, though, and Ditmer said that planning for trails and other projects should take into account the impacts we have on them—whether we can see them or not.

Christine Peterson lives in Laramie, Wyoming, and has covered science, the environment and outdoor recreation in Wyoming for more than a decade. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Outdoor Life and the Casper Star-Tribune, among others. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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New species of inkless octopus may have been found in Costa Rica’s deep seas

Laura Baisas — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 17:00:00 +0000

The 19-day Octopus Odyssey expedition located a site of low temperature (7oC) hydrothermal venting with brooding octopus on an unnamed outcrop that was explored for the very first time on this trip. Schmidt Ocean Institute

Forget Baby Shark—this summer’s marine darling is the baby octopus. Scientists working off the coast of Costa Rica say they’ve confirmed the location of the world’s third known octopus nursery and possibly a new species of the eight legged cephalopod. If confirmed, the new species would belong to Muusoctopus, a genus of small to medium sized octopus that do not not have ink sacs.

[Related: Female octopuses will chuck seashells at males who irk them.]

This deep-sea octopus nursery is located in a low-temperature hydrothermal vent in the Dorado Outcrop offshore of Costa Rica. The nursery was initially discovered in 2013 and was the first observation of a female octopus gathering together to brood or incubate their eggs. When the scientists didn’t see any developing embryos when the site was first explored, scientists believed that the Dorado Outcrop may not support octopus growth.

According to the Schmidt Ocean Institute, the team watched the Muusoctopus species hatch during their work, disproving the idea that this area of the deep sea is inhospitable for developing octopus young. The Schmidt Ocean Institute is a nonprofit research organization that was founded in 2009 by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy.

The team of 18 scientists from all over the world also explored five never-before-seen seamounts in the northwestern corner of Costa Rica’s waters. These undersea giants are teeming with thriving biodiversity—some of which are suspected to be new species.

Scientists exploring the octopus nursery in the Dorado Outcrop. CREDIT: Schmidt Ocean Institute.

These seamounts are currently not protected from human activities like fishing, and many local scientists are working to determine if this area should become a designated marine protected area.

“This expedition to the Pacific deep waters of Costa Rica has been a superb opportunity for us to get to know our own country,” University of Costa Rica marine biologist Jorge Cortes said in a statement. “The expedition had a significant number of local scientists and students which will accelerate our capacity to study deep regions. The information, samples, and images are important to Costa Rica to show its richness and will be used for scientific studies, and outreach to raise awareness of what we have and why we should protect it.”

The team used an underwater robot called a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to observe the vents and new octopuses. These kinds of submersibles are valuable for conducting deep-sea expeditions like the ones that discovered the wreckage of the RMS Titanic in 1985.

[Related: Scientists Freak Out Over Newly Discovered Hydrothermal Vents.]

“The discovery of a new active octopus nursery over 2,800 meters [9186 feet] beneath the sea surface in Costa Rican waters proves there is still so much to learn about our Ocean,” Schmidt Ocean Institute Executive Director Jyotika Virmani said in a statement. “The deep-sea off Costa Rica rides the edge of human imagination, with spectacular footage collected by ROV SuBastian of tripod fish, octopus hatchlings, and coral gardens. We look forward to continuing to help the world witness and study the wonders of our incredible Ocean.”

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Humans are dangerous predators because we love collecting weird animals

Emily Harwitz / Hakai Magazine — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 19:00:00 +0000

Humans hunt, kill, or capture a massive number of species. Surprisingly, most of this is for non-food reasons. Deposit Photos

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Some people may be picky eaters, but as a species we are not. Birds, bugs, whales, snails, we’ll eat them all. Yet our reliance on wild animals goes far beyond just feeding ourselves. From agricultural feed to medicine to the pet trade, modern society exploits wild animals in a way that surpasses even the most voracious, unfussy wild predator. Now, for the first time, researchers have attempted to capture the full picture of how we use wild vertebrates, including how many, and for what purposes. The research showcases just how broad our collective influence on wild animals is.

Previously, scientists have tallied how much more biomass humans take out of the wild than other predators. But biomass is only a sliver of the total picture, and researchers wanted a fuller understanding of how human predatory behavior affects biodiversity. Analyzing data compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, researchers have now found that humans kill, collect, or otherwise use about 15,000 vertebrate species. That’s about one-third of all vertebrate species on Earth, and it’s a breadth that’s up to 300 times more than the next top predator in any ecosystem.

The predators that give us the biggest run for our money, says Rob Cooke, an ecological modeler at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a coauthor of the study, are owls, which hunt a notably diverse array of prey. The Eurasian eagle owl, for instance, is one of the largest and most widely distributed owls in the world. Not a picky eater, this owl will hunt up to 379 different species. According to the researchers’ calculations, humans take 469 species across an equivalent geographical range.

Yet according to Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a coauthor of the study, the biggest shock isn’t how many species we affect but why we take them. The “ta-da result,” he says, “is that we remove, or essentially prey on, more species of animals for non-food reasons than for food reasons.” And the biggest non-food use, the scientists found, is as pets and pet food. “That’s where things have gone off the rails,” he says.

There is some nuance to this broad trend. When it comes to marine and freshwater species, our main take is for human consumption. For terrestrial animals, however, it depends on what kind of animal is being targeted. Mammals are mostly taken to become people food, while birds, reptiles, and amphibians are mainly trapped to live in captivity as pets. In all, almost 75 percent of the land species humans take enter the pet trade, which is almost double the number of species we take to eat.

The problem is especially acute for tropical birds, and the loss of these species can have rippling ecological consequences. The helmeted hornbill, a bird native to Southeast Asia, for example, is captured mainly for the pet trade or for its beak to be used as medicine or to be carved like ivory. With their massive bills, these birds are one of the few species that can crack open some of the largest, hardest nuts in the forests where they live. Their disappearance limits seed dispersal and the spread of trees around the forest.

Another big difference between humans’ influence on wild animals and that of other predators is that we tend to favor rare and exotic species in a way other animals do not. Most predators target common species since they are easier to find and catch. Humans, however, tend to covet the novel. “The more rare it is,” says Cooke, “the more that drives up the price, and therefore it can spiral and go into this extinction vortex.”

That humans target the largest and flashiest animals, Cooke says, threatens not only their unique biological diversity and beauty, but also the roles they play in their ecosystems. Of the species humans prey on, almost 40 percent are threatened. The researchers suggest industrialized societies can look to Indigenous stewardship models for ways to more sustainably manage and live with wildlife.

Andrea Reid, a citizen of the Nisg̱a’a Nation and an Indigenous fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, notes that people have been fishing for millennia. “But the choices that shape industrial fishing,” she says, like how people consume fish that were caught far away from their own homes, “are what contribute to these observed high levels of impact on fish species.”

If we want wild species—fish and beyond—to survive, Reid says, we need to reframe our relationship with them, perhaps from predator to steward.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Drones are following dolphins to spy on their complex social lives

Laura Baisas — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 13:30:00 +0000

Common bottlenose dolphins swimming in Coffee Bay in South Africa. Andre Seale/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Seeing a majestic superpod or “stampede” of hundreds of free-ranging dolphins swimming and surfacing in the ocean is not only a spectacle for the eye, but can help scientists better monitor populations of the marine mammal. A study published in June in the journal Ecology and Evolution found that using unoccupied aerial systems, or drones, to photograph bottlenose dolphins can inform their conservation efforts.

[Related: How echolocation lets bats, dolphins, and even people navigate by sound.]

When a dolphin swims up to the surface to breathe, their blowhole and dorsal fin are visible. Measuring the distance between these two body parts can help researchers estimate their total length—and therefore the dolphin’s age. The team on the study developed a technique of inferring age based on length for each dolphin measured in a group. The spots that appear with age on some cetaceans like Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins can also reveal the animals’ age to scientists.

“This method can help us quantify the age-structure of free-ranging populations,” co-author and PhD candidate at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Fabien Vivier said in a statement. “Healthy dolphin populations usually contain a certain proportion of newborn, immature, and mature animals, while deviances from this distribution may be interpreted as a population growth or decline.”

Earlier studies on using drone photos to measure the body condition and sizes of large whales showed encouraging results, but this is the first to show how this aerial approach can be used to study smaller mammals like bottlenose dolphins.

“Because it is difficult working with free-ranging animals, we could not be sure if it would work out as planned,” said Vivier.

In the study, the team collaborated with a swim with the dolphins program called Dolphin Quest O‘ahu to test out this measuring method on that population of bottlenose dolphins. They then took what they learned with those dolphins and applied it to free-ranging dolphins by collaborating with the world’s longest running dolphin research project, Sarasota Dolphin Research Program in Florida.

The research program provided the team with the total body length, distance between the blowhole and dorsal fin, and age for many of the individuals within their study community. They used this data to test the accuracy of this measurement method and age estimates on the free-range dolphins.

[Related: Male dolphins form alliances to help each other pick up mates.]

“Our hope in developing and using this method is that we can quickly monitor the health of free-ranging dolphin populations,” said Vivier. “This may facilitate the detection of early signs of population changes, for example, a decrease in the number of calves, and provide important insights for timely management decisions.”

This method was initially developed for bottlenose dolphins that are found in temperate and tropical waters around the world. This species, known for their intelligence and echolocation, are well studied due to their proximity to humans, but can also run a high risk of injury due to their closeness to people.

Currently, the team is applying it to the spinner dolphins, which have a longer snout and smaller stature than bottlenose dolphins, in the main Hawaiian Islands. These mammals are known in the Pacific Ocean for their habit of leaping from the water and spinning in the air before plunging back into the water.

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Coastal flooding predictions triple

J. Besl/Hakai Magazine — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 23:00:00 +0000

Preparing for the effects of sea level rise depends on having good data. As measurements of coastal elevation improve, those projections are getting more refined, which may require decision-makers to update their plans. Deposit Photos

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Around the world, communities are bracing for sea level rise: the Netherlands is stabilizing its dikes, Senegal is relocating neighborhoods, Indonesia is moving its entire capital city. These projects are hefty, expensive, and slow.

But they may need to pick up the pace. As new research shows, in many places, sea level rise will cause coastal flooding and other disruptions much sooner than anyone realized. It’s not that the water is rising faster; it’s that the land was lower to begin with.

Calculating when a rising sea will flood any one place involves a lot of math: you need to know the height of the water, the range of the tide, the elevation and slope of the land, the pace of sea level rise, and how much the land itself is rising or falling, among myriad other factors. As with all of science, the accuracy of these predictions is only as good as the data flowing into them.

The problem, according to the new study by Ronald Vernimmen and Aljosja Hooijer, two data analysts working on flood risk in Southeast Asia, is that time after time, the measurements of coastal elevation that scientists feed into their models have been wildly inaccurate. In tropical forests, says Vernimmen, these misinterpretations can be off by 20 meters or more. “Obviously, you can’t use that,” he says.

The problem stems from limitations in the technology typically used to measure elevation: radar. Radar blankets an area in radio waves, then measures how long it takes the waves to bounce back. But radar isn’t precise enough to separate treetops from terra firma, and a patch of pines or cluster of condos can easily exaggerate the elevation. Many studies of sea level rise still use radar elevation data collected by the space shuttle in 2000.

Lidar is a lot like radar, but it uses lasers instead of radio waves. A lidar detector like the one on the ICESat-2 satellite, which NASA launched in 2018, can send up to one million pulses each second, firing lasers that can pinpoint the gaps between buildings and trees to more accurately gauge the elevation of the land underneath. Analysts still need algorithms to filter that barrage of information into a functional map, but the results are far more precise.

Vernimmen and Hooijer spent the past few years filtering the new satellite data for Earth’s immense coastline, comparing elevation estimates gathered from radar with the newer lidar-based measurements. It wasn’t pretty.

The scientists’ big finding is that forests and buildings along the coast have skewed radar maps, presenting planners with inaccurate elevation data. Lidar showed coastlines often lower than first realized. This has two important implications: the same amount of sea level rise will be able to reach much farther inland, and it’s going to happen a lot sooner than expected.

The scientists’ new lidar-based estimate predicts that roughly 482,000 square kilometers of land will be submerged with one meter of sea level rise, nearly triple the 123,000 square kilometers predicted by radar-based projections. That’s an extra Cameroon-sized chunk of Earth, currently home to roughly 132 million people, that will be underwater by 2100 under a high-emissions scenario.

The risk is greatest for river deltas in tropical regions where the land is flat, the population is often high, and the data tends to be old. With two meters of sea level rise, by around the year 2150 under a high-emission scenario, the Niger Delta in West Africa and Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta will have five times more land underwater than the older radar-based estimates suggested. The same is true for the Chao Phraya delta, which spans metropolitan Bangkok, Thailand’s capital of 11 million.

To Vernimmen, the recalculation means society needs to rethink some things. “There are huge construction projects underway in areas that really should not be built on,” he says.

The researchers made their elevation data set publicly available in hopes that governments take note of the new timeline, adds Hooijer.

Mir Matin, a remote sensing expert at United Nations University in Ontario who was not involved in the study, says these estimates could be made even more accurate by using airborne lidar—the type attached to drones or airplanes—rather than passive satellite-based readings. Though more accurate, airborne lidar is also more expensive, requiring pilots, planes, and planning. Some rich countries and large cities have shelled out for airborne lidar surveys, but Matin says developing countries would benefit as well. Rich countries—responsible for the bulk of global warming—could cover the cost, he says. “At the end, climate change is a global phenomenon,” Matin adds.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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OceanGate confirms missing Titan submersible passengers ‘have sadly been lost’

Andrew Paul — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 19:30:00 +0000

Titan's depth capabilities make it much more difficult to locate. OceanGate

OceanGate announced on Thursday afternoon it believes a “debris field” discovered near the Titanic indicates all five passengers aboard OceanGate’s Titan submersible “have sadly been lost.” The experimental, uncertified vessel disappeared on Sunday during its 2.5 mile descent to briefly visit the historic ship’s remains. The Titan’s $250,000-per-seat inhabitants included a billionaire British explorer Hamish Harding, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, Sulemanthe father-and-son scions of a Pakistani fertilizer company, French maritime expert Paul Henry Nargeolet, and OceanGate’s own CEO Stockton Rush.

“The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said in a news conference on Thursday.

[Related: Why finding the missing Titanic-bound tourist submersible is so challenging.]

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” reads a portion of OceanGate’s statement, as reported via CNN. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”

The news arrives after more than four days of frantic international search efforts that spanned over 10,000 square surface miles, as well as North Atlantic ocean floor. On Monday, experts estimated Titan possessed roughly 96 hours of oxygen reserves—according to US Coast Guard officials’ calculations, the Titan’s oxygen likely would have run out around 7:10am EST on Thursday morning. But even with some leeway given to that estimation, recovery teams reportedly still needed as long as 8 hours to return an intact submersible to the ocean’s surface.

On Thursday afternoon, however, US Coast Guard officials confirmed a newly located debris field clearly originating from the missing vessel. The discovery came via video evidence collected by a remote operating vehicle (ROV) deployed by the Canadian vessel, Horizon Arctic. Among the international, state-of-the-art fleet also searching for Titan were at least nine other ships, including US and Canadian Coast Guard vessels, deep sea pipeline construction ships, and multiple other ROVs including the French vessel L’Atalante’s Victor 6000. On Tuesday evening, Canadian aircraft also reportedly detected “underwater noises” of potential human origin within the search area. Subsequently redirected resources failed to determine or locate the sounds’ sources.

[Related: Staggering 3D scan of the Titanic shows the wreck down to the millimeter.]

Mike Reiss, a tourist aboard four previous Titan trips including one to the Titanic, described signing waivers that “mentioned death three times on the first page.” On each voyage, Reiss alleged the submersible briefly lost communications with OceanGate’s surface crew. During his trip to the Titanic, Reiss also recalled the vessel being briefly carried off course by ocean currents as the compass appeared to malfunction, and spending three hours attempting to locate the wreckage despite being only 500 yards from the site.

In the years since its initial debut, submersible experts warned of “catastrophic” issues within Titan’s design, and voiced concerns regarding OceanGate disregarding standard certification processes. In a March 2018 open letter to OceanGate obtained by The New York Times, over three dozen industry leaders, oceanographers, and explorers “expressed unanimous concern” about the Titan’s “experimental” approach that they believed “could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

[Related: Watch never-before-seen footage of the Titanic shipwreck from the 1980s.]

“Your marketing material advertises that the Titan design will meet or exceed the DNV-GL safety standards, yet it does not appear that OceanGate has the intention of following DNV-GL class rules,” the letter reads, referring to the internationally recognized maritime industry regulatory organization. “Your representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold.”

In a blog post published by OceanGate the following year entitled “Why Isn’t Titan Classed?,” unnamed authors argued, “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”

“The entire OceanGate family is deeply grateful for the countless men and women from multiple organizations of the international community who expedited wide-ranging resources and have worked so very hard on this mission,” the company wrote in its statement Thursday. “We appreciate their commitment to finding these five explorers, and their days and nights of tireless work in support of our crew and their families.”

The post OceanGate confirms missing Titan submersible passengers ‘have sadly been lost’ appeared first on Popular Science.

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