Cold weather is prime time for humans to stay inside and snuggle up with loved ones. For our primate cousins, cuddling may even keep them healthy, as frosty temps and social bonds seem to go together like hot chocolate and marshmallows. Chilly temperature behavior, as it turns out, may also alter the course of evolution.

A study published June 1 in the journal Science found that a species’ long-term adaptation to life in extremely cold climates led to the evolution of successful social behaviors. Asian colobines living in colder regions saw genetic changes and adaptations to their social behaviors including extended care by mothers, which increased infant survival and the primates’ ability to live in the large complex multilevel societies we see today.

[Related: These primate ancestors were totally chill with a colder climate.]

An international team of researchers from the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and Australia studied how langurs and odd-nosed monkeys adapted over time. These members of the colobine family are leaf-eating monkeys that have been on Earth for about 10 million years. Their ancient ancestors dispersed across the planet’s continents and learned to live in tropical, temperate, and colder climates. 

“Virtually all primates are social and live in social groups,” study co-author and  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign anthropologist Paul A. Garber said in a statement. “But the groups differ in size and cohesiveness. There are those that live in units of two or three individuals and others living in communities of up to 1,000 individuals.”

According to Garber, genomic studies suggest that the harem unit of organization—one male with two or more females and their offspring—was the ancestral norm for Asian colobines. Males are intolerant of other rival males and will fight to protect their turf. In some species, the females will stay with their natal group, while in others, both sexes leave to join or form new harems.

More complex societies formed over time. Some odd-nosed monkeys still form harems, but aren’t territorial. “This means their group territories can overlap and there are times they may come together to forage, rest and travel,” said Garber. 

Snub-nosed monkeys form a multilevel or modular society where multiple harems remain together throughout the year and create a large, cohesive breeding band. The team on this study recorded a society of about 400 individuals and breeding between individuals from different harems was common in golden snub-nosed monkeys. This inter-harem breeding happened roughly 50 percent of the time.

The study used ecological, geological, fossil, behavioral, and genomic analyses, and found that the colobine primates that lived in colder places tended to live in larger and more complex social groups. The glacial periods over the past six million years likely promoted the selection of genes that are involved in cold-related energy metabolism and hormonal regulation in the nervous system.

[Related: Baboons can recover from childhood trauma with a little help from their friends.]

Black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys in some parts of China live in low-oxygen elevations up to about 13,500 feet where night time temperatures can drop below zero on the coldest evenings. The Odd-nosed monkeys living in extremely cold locations developed more efficient pathways for dopamine and oxytocin. Oxytocin particularly is an important neurohormone for social bonding and this hormonal efficiency may lengthen the time a mother monkey takes care of her baby. This led to longer periods of breast-feeding and increase in infant survival.  

These adaptive changes appear to have further strengthened the relationships between individual monkeys, increased tolerance between males, and encouraged the evolution of more complex and larger multi level societies that go a long way. Strong social bonds can even help gut bacteria health in some monkeys.

In future studies, the team is interested in studying how changes in mating and social behavior may be the result of genetic changes from past environments and other social factors from the past. 

“With climate change becoming an hugely important environmental pressure on animals, it is hoped that this study will raise awareness for the need to investigate what course social evolution will take as the prevailing climate changes,” study co-author and University fo Western Australia biological anthropologist Cyril Grueter said in a statement. “Our finding that complex multilevel societies have roots stretching back to climatic events in the distant evolutionary past also has implications for a reconstruction of the human social system which is decidedly multilevel.”

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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.

Out in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 100 kilometers off the northwest coast of Africa, lies an archipelago known as the Canary Islands, created millions of years ago by intense volcanic activity. The biggest and most populated island, Tenerife, rises from the deep-ocean floor to a series of peaks, one of which is the third-largest volcano in the world. Tenerife’s interior highlands are a moonscape, while its coastline of lava rock and sheer cliffs is pounded by surf. In contrast to most of the island’s stark geology, north of the island’s capital, Santa Cruz, is a long crescent-shaped beach of soft yellow sand, with groves of palm trees and a calm bay created by a long breakwater. This is Playa de las Teresitas, a magnet for northern European tourists craving winter sun.

But most of the people sunbathing on Teresitas are likely unaware of what lurks in the shallow waters lapping the shoreline. The bay—engineered and less than 10 kilometers from the Canaries’ second-largest city—is a surprising haven for pups of one of the world’s most critically endangered fish: the angelshark.

When the Spanish took control of the Canaries in the 1400s, they began cultivating cash crops: cochineal and sugar cane in the beginning, and later adding bananas, tomatoes, and other valuable commodities. For centuries, the islands’ economy thrived, but it was a fragile wealth. Over the years, livelihoods were threatened by cycles of crop disease, competition from cheaper markets, and lava flows that wiped out harvests and turned good agricultural land into barren terrain. In the 1950s, the boom in package tourism showed promise as a new cash crop. But while the islands had the sunshine, warm climate, and ease of access from Europe needed for this new industry, they were missing a vital element: picture-postcard sandy beaches.

Cue planners on Tenerife, who concocted an audacious plan to make over one of the island’s exposed lava-rock beaches. They chose a stretch of coastline close to Santa Cruz and expropriated the avocado farms and other smallholdings. Earthmovers leveled the foreshore and intertidal zone, and they constructed a breakwater over a kilometer long. And then, from the Western Sahara on Africa’s northwest coast, they shipped in the pièce de résistance: 240,000 tonnes of sand.

By 1973, this gargantuan project, environmentally questionable from today’s viewpoint, was complete. As anticipated, tourists arrived. Unanticipated was what their presence gave to one of the world’s most endangered fish species—visibility. Maybe angelsharks always gathered here, but until recently, no one really knew.

Along Playa de las Teresitas, rows and rows of tourists lounge on beach chairs under umbrellas or pad across soft sand to cool down in the water. The breeze creates tiny sapphire-tipped waves on the water’s surface, a magical cover for what lies beneath—an angelshark nursery.

Female angelsharks regularly migrate to these ideally sheltered waters to give birth to anywhere between eight and 25 live pups, who remain in the shallows for about a year. Feeding on cuttlefish and other small prey, they grow to around 50 centimeters, about the same length as a newborn baby. Then they disappear for years until they are mature. Where they go is a mystery.For centuries, angelsharks had been common along the Atlantic coast of North Africa and Europe, as well as the Mediterranean. The ancient Greeks fished them; Pliny the Elder described the use of their skin to polish wood and ivory. On the British Isles, they were called monkfish for their resemblance to a monk’s hooded robes. With the advent of industrial bottom trawling in the late 1800s, they were easily caught and became a common food fish. By the 1960s, aggressive fishing of angelsharks, coupled with their extremely low reproductive rate, led to a dramatic decline in their populations. Targeting them eventually became commercially unviable and the name monkfish was relegated to another species, the anglerfish.

But angelsharks were still by-catch in other fisheries, and by the early 1970s, as developers barged Saharan sand to Tenerife, the fish were pushed close to extinction in most parts of the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

In the European Union and the United Kingdom, it has become illegal to fish or retain angelsharks. If one is accidentally caught, fishers must return it alive to the sea. But the main threat to angelsharks remains the powerful bottom-trawling industry, which accounts for over 30 percent of fish landed in the European Union.

The story in the Canary Islands is slightly different. Michael Sealey, a marine biologist with the Angel Shark Project (ASP) in Tenerife, says that bottom trawling has never been as viable in the Canaries as in most of Europe and the Mediterranean. The seabed is mostly too deep, he explains, the underwater topography laced with jagged seamounts and reefs where fishing gear can get hung up. On top of that, the European Commission has halted all trawling in the Canaries since 2005.

But biologists only became aware about a decade ago that the Canaries host an angelshark population. Subsequently, in 2014, the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Museum Koenig Bonn, and Zoological Society of London collaborated to establish ASP. The project’s goal: to gather data on critical habitats, movement patterns, and reproductive biology of angelsharks, and work with local communities and officials to protect the fish. Life history information is crucial for developing effective conservation strategies and protecting valuable, if improbable, habitat—like Playa de las Teresitas.

But angelsharks are not the easiest of research subjects. They are masters of disguise, so spotting them is a challenge. They have a peculiar flattened shape and spend most of their time lying on the ocean bottom partially covered by sand. Their coloring—reddish- or greenish-brown scattered with small white spots—helps them blend into the seabed.

Gathering data on such elusive animals, with low population densities spread over a huge area, is labor intensive. Help has come in the form of citizen science: everywhere in the Canary Islands, recreational divers and fishers are invited to make online reports of any sightings or accidental catches of angelsharks. Through an ASP initiative, dive operators conduct friendly competitions to see which company can record the most sightings, thereby increasing data collection, particularly from citizen scientists.

Rubén Martinez, a dive instructor in Lanzarote, the easternmost island of the Canaries, is a keen advocate of angelsharks and regularly volunteers for ASP surveys. He helps with procedures such as tagging the fish with either spaghetti tags—an easily attached plastic loop—or acoustic tags. Both are done on the spot without having to catch the fish or lift it out of the water. “We work in a team and practice beforehand,” Martinez says. After an angelshark has been spotted in the sand, the team places a mesh attached to a sturdy frame over the animal. They take a small sample of fin for DNA analysis and attach a tag to the base of the dorsal fin. The whole procedure, when done properly, takes less than a minute.

Surveys have shown that other beaches in the Canary Islands are also potential nursery sites. Interestingly, most of them have been altered, like Teresitas, to make them more attractive to people. On Lanzarote, Playa Chica boasts another long sweep of imported sand. It’s a magnet for divers—as well as a spectacular and easily accessible site—so the number of sightings of mature angelsharks off this shoreline is one of highest in the whole archipelago. How do the sharks react to these shoals of wetsuited humans? Alba Esteban Pacheco, a biologist and former dive instructor with Euro Divers Lanzarote, admits that while there have been instances of divers getting too close to the sharks, most dive companies are sensitive in this regard and brief their clients well. They have little choice: in 2019, Spain introduced legislation in the Canaries that made disturbing the sharks or harming their habitat and breeding grounds a criminal act subject to large fines.

Pacheco is very clear that she keeps her dive clients at least the recommended one meter distance from any angelsharks they find hiding in the sand. “Also,” she says, “these days, with everyone videoing everything and posting it on social media, it’s hard for divers to step out of line.”

But is this enough? Eva Meyers, a cofounder of ASP, acknowledges that the diving community plays a crucial role in conservation of the species. But she adds that much more needs to be done to ensure the long-term survival of angelsharks in areas like Playa Chica.

A recovery plan ASP developed with local authorities is in the final stages. It will include measures such as signage along sensitive coastlines and establishing a code of conduct for divers throughout the Canaries.

Among international dive communities, the word is out about the chance to see mature angelsharks in the Canaries, and this is a growing part of the tourism sector. Indeed, shark diving all over the world is a boon to economies. It generates over US $24-million yearly in the Canaries. Globally, shark-diving tourism generates over $300-million yearly, and local communities benefit much more from shark diving than from shark fishing. In some cases, this has led to the creation of marine reserves, such as in Fiji, which help other marine species as well.

Many divers may now be cognizant of the fragility of the angelshark population, but what about all those people splashing about and swimming in the all-important nursery areas just off the beaches? Sealey thinks that human activity in the shallow nursery areas influences angelshark behavior. On busy beaches like Teresitas, juveniles normally retreat to deeper water during the day when lots of people are around. During the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions kept people off the beach. After almost two years of peace, angelsharks seemed unprepared for the people wading back into the water, as swimmers reported an unusual number of bites soon after restrictions lifted. The fish rely on their camouflage for protection, but when stepped on, they might lunge up from their hiding place and bite, though they usually swim away. Known locally as “gummings,” the bites are not serious and rarely draw blood. But the increase in gummings was an indication that the juveniles had adapted to remaining hidden in the shallows 24/7 to conserve energy. Post-pandemic, angelsharks have adapted again, by heading into deeper water earlier in the day and avoiding interactions with humans, as do many other urban wildlife species.

Back in the 1970s, did angelsharks also adapt to the Canaries’ headlong efforts to redesign itself for tourists? It’s intriguing to think that the massive, environmentally disruptive projects to remake beaches could have accidentally enhanced the habitat for one of the world’s rare fish species. But what’s clear is that after the breakwater was built and the sand arrived, people followed, and in the calm, shallow waters they began to see baby angelsharks. And unlike how many an association between humans and wildlife ends—in conflict and dead animals—this time it led to conservation.

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

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But if you’re an animal lover determined to feed your local park’s residents, there are several healthy alternatives. Before you go stock up on snacks, though, always make sure you’re allowed to feed the critters in question—some areas’ rules are more lenient than others.

What to feed ducks (and other waterfowl)

The best advice we can give about feeding ducks (or other types of park fowl like swans and geese) is to imitate the types of food they naturally eat in the ponds and fields they call home. This means vegetables and nutritious grains work well, while processed “human” foods do not. Even though bread is typically made from grains, the breadmaking process renders it very filling with a relatively low amount of nutrients, two factors that can lead to malnourished ducks. Instead, try to stick with snacks that haven’t been highly processed.

For vegetables, the most important consideration is making sure that the bits and pieces you offer are small enough for waterfowl to handle. Ducks and their relatives aren’t great at chewing—while their bills help break down food, they don’t have teeth, at least in the traditional sense. Cut salad greens, vegetable peels, nuts, grapes, and other produce into small pieces before you toss them to these birds.

[Related: Why do ducks have orange feet?]

A bag of frozen mixed peas, corn niblets, and carrot pieces is one of the best options for waterfowl: these veggies are nutritious, affordable, and small enough for ducks to eat whole. Grains like oats, rice, and seeds make good waterfowl chow for the same reason. Even better, many of these little morsels will float on your local pond, keeping them easily accessible to ducks. Big chunks of food that sink to the bottom aren’t as useful.

If you’re looking to get fancy, you can also drop a couple more dollars on a bag of specially formulated waterfowl food. These pellets, available online or at your local pet store, are typically fed to pet birds and farm animals. These bite-size bits may not float on water, though, so test a few handfuls near the water’s edge before you start a feeding frenzy. This designer food may be best served up on the banks.

Other tips for feeding ducks

No matter how eager they are for a human-provided snack, your local park’s resident fowl are almost certainly not going to go hungry without you. Most ducks are perfectly capable of foraging for insects, plant life, and other nutrition sources on their own. That means you don’t need to feel bad if some of them miss out on the feast. In fact, overfeeding waterfowl can cause a host of problems, from teaching them to rely on human handouts to throwing off their natural nutritional balance. When in doubt, it’s better to stop feeding the birds sooner than you’d like than it is to feed them too much.

If you suspect a particular duck, goose, or swan may be unable to feed itself after you leave, it’s time to call in professional help. Waterfowl that live in parks are susceptible to a host of dangers from the human world, ranging from vehicle strikes to lead poisoning. Feeding them may be a temporary kindness, but it’s not a sustainable solution. If you see a bird having difficulty moving around or visibly in distress, contact your local wildlife specialists right away.

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This article was originally published on Undark.

George Washington’s palm tree. Thomas Jefferson’s sloth. Edward Harris’s hawk. Quite a few species come with a person’s name attached to them. Sometimes these names — formally known as eponyms — memorialize the original collector. Sometimes it’s a scientist’s family member, a benefactor or government leader, a colleague, or even a celebrity. According to one official estimate, eponyms make up around 20 percent of all animal names in use.

Many species got their eponyms during the early days of scientific collecting, which was partially fueled by the broader colonization programs of European powers throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Over the past few years, however, that history has come under increased scrutiny. In 2020, for instance, amid the protests over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the push to remove Confederate monuments, some ornithologists began questioning whether birds named for Confederates and slaveholders should be retitled.

Now, an international group of researchers argues that it’s time to move away from eponyms entirely. “In short, we believe that naming species in honour of real people is unnecessary and objectively difficult to justify,” the authors wrote in a recent paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. “The Earth’s biodiversity is part of a global heritage that should not be trivialized by association with any single human individual, whatever their perceived worth.”

The authors of the paper are wading into an ongoing and contentious debate — and the scientific institutions responsible for approving new species names aren’t budging.

The goal of naming species — or nomenclature — is to make sure scientific names are uniform across different fields and research labs, said Luis Ceríaco, a commissioner with the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, which controls the naming of animal species. “It’s a space to promote stability and promote universality on the use of names,” Ceríaco added. “What we want is to have a set of rules that allow people to really know what they are talking about when referring to species.”

For this reason, the ICZN and its partner organization, The International Association of Plant Taxonomy, follow established codes that prioritize older names, and only alter them for reasons of science and stability.

Proposals to rename species due to social or political concerns have attracted both criticism and support. In February 2023, a group of ICZN commissioners — including Ceríaco — put out a paper against renaming species on ethical grounds. Deciding which eponyms should be replaced due to “perceived offensiveness” isn’t in the code’s remit, they wrote. “Owing to the inherently subjective nature of making such assessments, it would be inappropriate for the Commission to assert judgments on such matters of morality, because there are no specific parameters to determine thresholds for offensiveness of a scientific name to a given community or individual, either in the present day or in the future.”

Other scientists, however, have been happy to step into the gap.

The push to reassess problematic species names isn’t new. Consider the case of Anophthalmus hitleri, a cave beetle named after Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, the eponym of which — in addition to honoring a historical genocidaire — has made the insect a target for some collectors. Yet despite calls to drop the eponym, the species has not been renamed by the ICZN. “The logic to date in preserving ‘hitleri’ is that the name per se is not offensive,” entomologist May Berenbaum noted in a 2010 issue of American Entomologist. “Frankly, though, a scientific name that sentences a species to extinction at the hands of fanatical Fascist memorabilia collectors causes considerable offense, at least to me.”

More recently, in 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement — a reference to Cecil Rhodes, the former prime minister of British colonial South Africa — launched discussions in the botanical sciences about replacing “culturally offensive and inappropriate names,” which grew alongside similar debates in ornithology around the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

For some people, the stakes of such decisions can feel high. “Naming and language have power. The way that you use language tells people whether they belong or not,” Earyn McGee, a conservation biologist and organizer of Black Birders Week, told Undark in 2020. The refusal to change species names, she said, “tells Black people and other people of color that they don’t matter, that they’re not important.”

Such movements have, in turn, led some taxonomists to argue that renaming species injects political considerations into taxonomy, opening up thorny questions. After all, where should scientists draw lines between good actors and bad ones? (Should species named after Queen Victoria be replaced? What about plant names commemorating American slaveholders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?)

“We have a code of ethics,” Ceríaco said, “and the ethics part says that no one should erect a new name knowingly that’s going to cause offense.” However, he added, the ICZN emphasizes the freedom of authors to name species as they see fit, so they also don’t revise names that break their ethics code. “It’s always on the responsibility of the author. We strongly suggest for people to be sure that what they’re going to erect is not going to cause offense to anyone.”

The alternative, Ceríaco said, would be for the ICZN to have to adjudicate which names are acceptable, opening “a pandora’s box.” Allowing such revisions at all would affect the work of global researchers, conservationists, and others who depend on a stable taxonomic framework. “We’re not being dismissive toward the arguments that the names are offensive,” he said. But, he added, the consequences of changing the names would be trickier than keeping them.

Not all researchers were convinced by the ICZN’s argument. Some of them, like Patrícia Guedes — a biologist with the CIBIO Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources — banded together to in March 2023, pointing out that eponyms were effectively more trouble than they were worth. Part of the issue with eponyms, they noted, was that the practice is inextricably bound up with science’s colonial history: Many past researchers came from colonizing European nations, and as a result many species ended up named after White, male, upper-class Europeans. In Africa alone, the researchers found, 1,565 species of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals — a quarter of the continent’s native vertebrates — are eponyms, the majority of which honored “colonizers or people of colonial descent.”

“A name that is considered innocuous by some may be perceived as offensive by others, and names that were once considered inoffensive are not necessarily viewed in the same way in a post-colonial world,” the authors wrote. Overturning all prior eponyms would be ethically sound but practically unfeasible, they conceded. Still, the authors argued that the ICZN could put taxonomists of the species’ native region in charge of renaming proposals.

Guedes told Undark that it would be neater — and easier — to tighten the ICZN code’s rules to restrict eponyms going forward. As long as organisms are named after people, she said, such arguments about which names are appropriate will continue: “I’m sure there are other ways of honoring people who’ve contributed to science that’s not attaching their name to another living being.”

Guedes and her colleagues face an uphill battle: Many taxonomists like eponyms. “I think it’s positive in many, many cases,” Ceríaco said. He himself has described around 40 species, some of them eponyms, including a species of viper named after James Hetfield from Metallica. (This is a bit of tradition in taxonomy: Consider Taylor Swift’s millipede, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s snake.) Such names are a chance to get communities that generally don’t pay attention to such discoveries involved, he said. Eponyms also give researchers the chance to name species after scientists from the countries in which they were found, he added, such as an Angolan gecko that honors local scientist Francisco M. P. Gonçalves.

“There are certainly unfortunate eponyms out there,” Stephen Heard, an ecologist and author of “Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider,” a book about eponyms, wrote to Undark in a Twitter message. “There are also wonderful ones that bring attention to underrecognized figures in science, including Indigenous people, women, and more.”

It’s an honor for a researcher to have a species named after them, said Brian Sidlauskas, an ichthyologist at Oregon State University. (He would know: There’s an Amazonian fish with his name on it.) But while he’s not interested in barring their use, he does think the ICZN could create a process for ditching problematic names — perhaps through a panel of experts tasked with weighing in on proposed name changes. “There really are some names in history that genuinely are really offensive, so having some mechanism for changing those is a good idea,” he said — a position other researchers have staked out as well.

In addition, the ICZN’s stance against making changes for ethical reasons is a “classic slippery slope argument,” Sidlauskas said. “It’s clear that they don’t want to the responsibility for doing so. But if not them, then who has the responsibility and ability?”

Others argue that naming practices should change on a community level, regardless of what the ICZN does. “Going forward I think that White Europeans should not be naming species from countries that are not their own after other White Europeans,” said Laura Jennings, a botanist at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. While she doesn’t feel it’s for her to tell colleagues how to name species in their own country, she’d decline her own eponym. “My preference is to name species after a characteristic of the plant, a place name, or a name in a local language,” she added. “Something that links the plant to its native habitat.”

The broader community discussion isn’t going anywhere. The ICZN is currently working on the 5th edition of its formal code, Ceríaco said, which will be delivered for comment and debate by the community before it’s ratified in the next year or two. That’s part of the reason he and his colleagues made their position clear earlier this year, he said — to foster debate.

It’s a goal that Guedes’ team shares. “I don’t think the real change is going to happen anytime soon. But what we wanted to do was create a space for discussion,” she said.

“And I think we’re achieving that,” she added.

Asher Elbein is a writer based in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in The Oxford American, the Texas Observer, and The Bitter Southerner.

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

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On May 27, an Australian man snorkeling off of the coast of North Queensland survived an attack from a saltwater crocodile—by prying the reptile’s jaws off of its head. Australia’s reptilian saltwater giants have the highest bite force of any animal on Earth at 3,700 pounds.

McGowan was snorkeling with his wife and some friends near the Charles Hardy Islands, about 25 miles off the coast of Cape York on the day of the attack.

[Related: Saltwater crocodiles are eating a lot of feral hogs in Australia.]

“I was attacked from behind by a saltwater crocodile which got its jaws around my head. I thought it was a shark but when I reached up I realized it was a crocodile. I was able to lever its jaws open just far enough to get my head out,” McGowan said in a statement released by the Queensland Government’s hospital service.

According to McGowan, the crocodile attempted to attack a second time, but he managed to push it away with his right hand that had already been bitten by the reptile. McGowan was transported to Haggerstone Island about 45 minutes away, before going to Cairns Hospital. He suffered cuts and puncture wounds to his head and hands and is currently recovering from his injuries.

The area surrounding Haggerstone Island is known as “croc country,” according to the Queensland’s Department of Environment and Science. The department urges visitors to practice “crocwise behavior,” such as staying away from the water’s edge, properly disposing food, and keeping pets on a leash. The department warned that crocodiles could be in all of the waterways in the region and that people  in smaller vessels like kayaks, standing close to the water’s edge, or  wading while fishing are at a greater risk of a croc attack. Queensland’s science department is investigating this most recent incident, stressing the importance of reporting crocodile sightings and incidents in a timely manner.

There have been at least 44 occasions of crocodile attacks on humans in the area since 1985. In February, a non-fatal attack occurred off the Cape York Peninsula, where another man was able to free himself from the jaws of a crocodile. 

[Related: This small crocodile’s giant ancestors likely preyed on early humans.]

Billy Collett, the operations manager at Australia Reptile Park told The Guardian that those who escape crocodile attacks usually frighten the reptiles away. “Crocodiles are the hardest-biting animal on the planet. But when people do fight back, they seem to let go,” he said. “[McGowan] probably scared the croc which realized it grabbed something too big to handle.”

According to the Australia Zoo, the home of famed crocodile advocate Steve Irwin, saltwater crocodiles can grow up to 19 feet long and weigh up to 2,000 pounds. They can swim up over 500 miles per day, which can make them difficult to track. Locals affectionately call the reptiles “salties” and they are more commonly found in Australia’s warmer northern regions. Australia’s federal government estimates that there are about 100,000 saltwater crocodiles in the northern parts of the country.

“I live on the Gold Coast and am a keen surfer and diver, and understand that when you enter the marine environment, you are entering territory that belongs to potentially dangerous animals, such as sharks and crocodiles,” McGowan said in his statement.“I was simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” 

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As they creep through tropical environments appearing not to have a care in the world, sloths give off some of the chillest vibes in the animal kingdom. This relaxed and elusive nature does make studying sloths a bit difficult, but a study published May 29 in the journal PeerJ Life & Environment is shedding some new light on activity patterns and behaviors adaptations of two sloth species.

[Related: Sloths aren’t the picky eaters we thought they were.]

The team looked at Bradypus variegatus and Choloepus hoffmanni, two sloth species that live in the lowland rainforests of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Costa Rica is home to six species of sloths, who have the slowest digestive system of any animal on Earth. It can take the mammals two weeks to digest an entire meal, and they sleep about 20 hours a day to conserve energy. 

Using micro data loggers, the team continuously monitored the behavior of both three-toed sloths (Bradypus) and two-toed sloths (Choloepus) for periods ranging from days to weeks. These recordings enabled the team to explore how fluctuating environmental influences sloth activity and how that correlates with their uniquely chill and low-energy lifestyle. 

Choloepus sloths are cathemeral, meaning that they have irregular variable periods of activity throughout a 24-hour cycle. Cathemeral behavior allows them to take advantage of better environmental conditions while minimizing the risk of predation. 

The study also observed a large amount of variability in activity levels between the animals and also within individual sloths. This flexibility suggests that the animals have developed diverse strategies to adapt to their surroundings, which enhances their chances of survival when the environment fluctuates. 

The team initially expected that daily temperatures, which can hit the mid-90s, would influence sloth activity, but their observations did not support that initial hypothesis. However, Bradypus sloths did increase their night time activity on colder nights and the nights that followed colder days. The authors believe that this indicates a potential correlation between sloth behavior and temperature variations.

[Related: Our bravest ancestors may have hunted giant sloths.]

While this study adds more understanding to sloth ecology, it also highlights the importance of preserving and protecting tropical rainforests and their unique inhabitants. According to Global Forest Watch, Costa Rica lost about 2.4 percent of its forest cover between 2000 and 2020, but the country has gained international recognition for its efforts to mitigate climate change and promote animal welfare.

“Understanding the drivers of sloth activity and their ability to withstand environmental fluctuations is of growing importance for the development of effective conservation measures, particularly when we consider the vulnerability of tropical ecosystems to climate change and the escalating impacts of anthropogenic activities in South and Central America,” the team wrote in the paper.

As these tropical ecosystems become more vulnerable due to human-made climate change, understanding wildlife patterns are crucial for conservation methods. While long-term observational research is a challenge, this study could pave the way for more studies on this cryptic and elusive species. 

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When it comes to the critical process of pollination, butterflies and especially bees are typically the most lauded participants. These pollinators fly from flower to flower to feed and fertilize plants by spreading pollen around. But, these fluttery creatures are far from the only species that help flowers reproduce and bloom. It turns out that some of nature’s most unsung and diverse pollinators are a type of long-snouted beetles called weevils.

[Related: Build a garden that’ll have pollinators buzzin’.]

A study published May 25 in the journal Peer Community in Ecology wiggles into the world of weevils, including some who spend their entire lifecycle in tandem with a specific plant they help pollinate. 

“Even people who work on pollination don’t usually consider weevils as one of the main pollinators, and people who work on weevils don’t usually consider pollination as something relevant to the group,” study co-author and assistant curator of insects at the Field Museum in Chicago said in a statement. “There are lots of important things that people are missing because of preconceptions.”

The quarter-of-an-inch long  weevils can be considered pests, especially when found munching on pasta and flour in pantries. Weevils used to find their way into the biscuits on Nineteenth Century ships that even highly ranked officers ate, as depicted in the 2003 seafaring film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. They can be so destructive that from 1829 to 1920, boll weevils completely disrupted the cotton economy in the South as they fed on cotton buds. 

Despite this less than stellar reputation, the insects are still beneficial to many of the world’s plant species. 

Scientists have identified roughly 400,000 species of beetles, making them one of the largest groups of animals in the world. Among this already big bunch of bugs, weevils are the largest group. “There are 60,000 species of weevils that we know about, which is about the same as the number of all vertebrate animals put together,” said de Medeiros.

The authors looked at 600 species of weevil, reviewing hundreds of previously published data on how weevils and plants interact to get a better sense of their role as prime pollinators. It focused on brood-site pollinators—insects that use the same plants that they pollinate as the breeding sites for their larvae. It is similar to the relationship between Monarch butterflies and milkweed, which is the only plant that Monarch caterpillars can eat. 

“It is a special kind of pollination interaction because it is usually associated with high specialization: because the insects spend their whole life cycle in the plant, they often only pollinate that plant,” said de Medeiros.  And because the plants have very reliable pollinators, they mostly use those pollinators.” 

[Related: This lawn-mowing robot can save part of your yard for pollinators.]

Unlike Monarchs, brood-site pollinators take the relationship with the plant a step further. They rely on only one plant partner as a source for both food and egg laying, unlike adult Monarchs who will eat the nectar of many different types of flowers. 

“This kind of pollination interaction is generally thought to be rare or unusual,” said de Medeiros. “In this study, we show that there are hundreds of weevil species and plants for which this has been documented already, and many, many more yet to be discovered.”

The relationship like the one between weevils and their plants means that they both need each other to flourish. Some industries, like palm oil,  have already hurt forests, therefore disturbing the animal species that rely on them. 

“Oil palm, which is used to make peanut butter and Nutella, was not a viable industry until someone figured out that the weevils found with them were their pollinators. And because people had an incorrect preconception that weevils were not pollinators, it took much, much longer than it could have taken,” said de Medeiros.

Misconceptions about weevils were one of this team’s motivations for the study. The team hopes that by summarizing what is known about the pollinators, more scientists and the general public appreciate the role of weevils as pollinators, particularly in the tropics. 

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Industrial mining of the deep ends of the ocean for valuable minerals is becoming more of a possibility as companies search for new sources of needed minerals, such as cobalt and lithium. The devastating impacts that this noisy and extractive process could have on the ocean’s numerous species is front of mind for scientists around the world, particularly in the mineral-rich Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Pacific Ocean. Now, experts are attaching some numbers to the concerns.

[Related: Deep-sea mining has murky aftereffects.]

A study published May 25 in the journal Current Biology found 5,578 different species in the CCZ, and roughly 88 to 92 percent of these species are entirely new to science. The authors compiled a CCZ checklist of all the species and records to better understand what may be at risk when mining begins. 

“We share this planet with all this amazing biodiversity, and we have a responsibility to understand it and protect it,” co-author and Natural History Museum London deep-sea ecologist Muriel Rabone said in a statement. 

Spanning six million square kilometers from Hawaii to Mexico, the CCZ is one of the most pristine wilderness regions in the world. According to NOAA, it is also home to polymetallic nodules that are a potential source of copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, manganese, and rare earth elements. These materials are becoming increasingly important for modern life, since they are used in making a range of electronics. Polymetallic nodules are also found in deeper regions of the Indian Ocean.

To study the CCZ, researchers travel throughout the Pacific Ocean using techniques such as using remote-controlled vehicles to travel the ocean. They also use simple box core sampling, where a study box is placed on the bottom of the ocean floor to collect samples.  

“It’s a big boat, but it feels tiny in the middle of the ocean. You could see storms rolling in; it’s very dramatic,” said Rabone. “And it was amazing—in every single box core sample, we would see new species.”

In the study, the team sifted through over 100,000 records of the creatures found in the CCZ taken during these expeditions. They found that only six of the new species found in the CCZ—including a carnivorous sponge, a nematode, and a sea cucumber—have been seen in other regions of the world. The most common type of animals in the CCZ are arthropods, worms, sponges, and echinoderms like sea urchins.

[Related: Even mining in shallow waters is bad news for the environment.]

“There’s some just remarkable species down there. Some of the sponges look like classic bath sponges, and some look like vases. They’re just beautiful,” said Rabone. “One of my favorites is the glass sponges. They have these little spines, and under the microscope, they look like tiny chandeliers or little sculptures.”

In the future, the team emphasizes the importance of increasing research efforts in the CCZ that are collaborative, cohesive, and multidisciplinary so that scientists and business alike can gain a deeper grasp of the region’s vast biodiversity. They also stress the importance of learning more about these new species, how they are connected to the greater environment around them, and the biogeography of the area to understand why some species cluster in specific regions more than others.   

“There are so many wonderful species in the CCZ,” said Rabone, “and with the possibility of mining looming, it’s doubly important that we know more about these really understudied habitats.”

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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.

In 2020, on a rocky hillside overlooking the vast swell of the Pacific Ocean near the Chilean port city of Antofagasta, a local man out walking his dog stumbled upon the sun-bleached skull of a small mammal. Curious, he pocketed it and brought it to the attention of researchers Alejandro Peñaloza and Jaime Jiménez. The scientists were shocked. The skull belonged to a long-tailed chinchilla, a species typically found deep within the Chilean Andes Mountains. As far as scientists knew, chinchillas had never inhabited the coast.

“I couldn’t believe it at first,” says Jiménez, a researcher at the University of North Texas who has studied chinchilla ecology for over 30 years. “There were no past records of chinchillas in the area, and never on the coast, so it just didn’t make any sense.”

The excited researchers dug into the mystery. They quickly discovered a plethora of pint-sized paw prints in the sand and rodent scat strewn among the boulders, but what they really wanted was photographic evidence. The researchers baited camera traps with apple slices and, to their delight, captured dozens of images of the rodents. It was only when the scientists checked the cameras that they realized just how close they’d come to seeing the chinchillas—one image was snapped just 11 minutes after they’d left.

The footage shows that the coastal chinchillas are strikingly different from their Andean counterparts. As the scientists detail in a recent report, while the mountain chinchillas are larger with thick fur and rounded ears, the coastal chinchillas have smaller bodies, sleeker fur, and unusually elongated rabbit-like ears. Aside from their peculiar looks, the coastal chinchillas were also captured moving about in the daytime—a behavior never before seen in wild chinchillas.

“These animals are usually completely nocturnal, so it may be a sign of fewer predators or an adaptation to their environment,” says Jiménez.

The revelation that long-tailed chinchillas are inhabiting the coast is challenging scientists’ long-held assumptions about how these animals live. For one thing, says Fabian Jaksik, a member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences who was not directly involved in the research, the find “is significant because it’s the northernmost record of the long-tailed chinchilla in Chile ever, even historically speaking.”

The environment where the coastal chinchillas reside is also a world apart from the harsh and frigid deserts of the Andes. Sandwiched between the Atacama Desert and the Pacific Ocean, life flourishes along the coastal margin thanks to the proximity of the sea and its moderating effect on daily temperatures. A thick fog known as the camanchaca frequently rolls in on morning easterly winds and nourishes the region’s plants.

For researchers striving to learn more about these novel animals, however, even their palate is puzzling.

While the Andean chinchillas mainly eat grass, scientists aren’t quite sure what the coastal chinchillas eat. The hillsides they inhabit are absent of grasses but rich in flora that is either highly toxic or studded with spines and thorns. “It could be that they are eating something completely new or nibbling on a bit of everything and somehow digesting and surviving the toxins,” says Jiménez. “But this is just a hypothesis.”

With so many differences in appearance, behavior, and ecology, scientists aren’t quite sure what to make of these chinchillas. “The coastal chinchillas might be a subspecies or maybe even a new species,” says Jiménez. “We’ll only be able to answer these questions after we’ve understood these animals and their lives better.”

Beyond their enigmatic ecology, the coastal chinchillas are raising wider questions about the species’ future.

While Andean long-tailed chinchillas are still recovering from centuries of overhunting and face ongoing threats from habitat destruction for mining, the coastal chinchillas seem to be thriving. If they are the same species, the new population suggests long-tailed chinchillas are more abundant than previously thought, offering hope for their survival in the wild.

“This is probably a population that escaped overhunting due to its isolation,” says Peñaloza. “So there may be lots more out there waiting to be found.”

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The armadillo is beloved for its ability to scrunch itself up in a ball with their protective flexible shells. They’ve long been considered the only living mammals with these reptilian and fish-like suits of bony or scaly armor instead of hairy mammalian skin. However, a study published May 24 in the journal iScience, shows that African spiny mice actually produce the same spiny structures beneath the skin of their tails, which has gone largely undetected by scientists.

[Related: How science came to rely on the humble lab rat.]

African spiny mice are small to medium sized rodents with spiny hairs on their upper body, large eyes and ears, and scaly tails. Some species are found in Egypt, other parts of eastern Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan and while others are native to South Africa.  

A team of scientists made this spiny discovery while conducting routine CT scanning of museum specimens for the openVertebrate program. 

“I was scanning a mouse specimen from the Yale Peabody Museum, and the tails looked abnormally dark,” co-author and director of Florida Museum of Natural History’s digital imaging laboratory Edward Stanley said in a statement. 

Stanley initially assumed the discoloration was caused by an imperfection that was introduced when the specimen was preserved, but analysis of the X-Rays revealed an unmistakable feature that he was intimately familiar with.

“My entire PhD was focused on osteoderm development in lizards,” he said. “Once the specimen scans had been processed, the tail was very clearly covered in osteoderms.”

Osteoderms are the bony deposits that form scales or plates on the skin. They are also distinct from the scales of pangolins or the quills of hedgehogs and porcupines. These parts are composed of keratin, the same tissue that makes up hair, skin, and nails.

Osteoderms on spiny mice have been observed since the mid-1970s. A 2012 study demonstrated spiny mice can regenerate injured tissue without scarring. This ability is very common among reptiles and invertebrates, but was previously unknown in mammals. While mammalian skin is particularly fragile, spiny mice can heal twice as fast as their rodent relatives.

Spiny mice belong to four genera in the subfamily Deomyinae, but other than similarities in their DNA and possibly the shape of their teeth, scientists have been unable to find a single shared feature among the species of this group that distinguishes them from other rodents.

[Related: This newly discovered gecko can literally squirm right out of its skin.]

The team scanned additional museum specimens from all four genera and found that the spiny mice tails were covered in the same sheather of bone. Gerbils are the closest relatives of Deomyinae and they do not have osteoderms, which means that this trait likely evolved only once in the ancestor of spiny mice. 

“Spiny mice can regenerate skin, muscle, nerves, spinal cord and perhaps even cardiac tissue, so we maintain a colony of these rare creatures for research,” co-author and University of Florida biologist Malcolm Maden said in a statement. 

Maden and his team are mapping the genetic pathways that give spiny mice these healing powers to hopefully find a model for human tissue regeneration. The team further analyzed the development of spiny mice osteoderms and confirmed that they were similar to those of armadillos, but likely evolved independently. 

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This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Dressed head-to-toe in protective gear, Peggy Eby crawled on her hands and knees under a fig tree, searching for bat droppings and fruit with telltale fang marks.

Another horse in Australia had died from the dreaded Hendra virus that winter in 2011. For years, the brain-inflaming infectious disease had bedeviled the country, leaping from bats to horses and sometimes from horses to humans. Hendra was as fatal as it was mysterious, striking in a seemingly random fashion. Experts fear that if the virus mutates, it could jump from person to person and wreak havoc.

So while government veterinarians screened other horses, Eby, a wildlife ecologist with a Ph.D., got to work, grubbing around the scene like a detective. Nobody knew flying foxes, the bats that spread Hendra, better. For nearly a quarter century, she’d studied the furry, fox-faced mammals with wingspans up to 3 feet. Eby deduced that the horse paddock wasn’t where the bats had transmitted Hendra. But the horse’s owners had picked mandarin oranges off the trees across the street. The peels ended up in the compost bin, where their horse liked to rummage. “Bingo,” Eby thought. Flying foxes liked mandarins. The bats’ saliva must have contaminated the peels, turning them into a deadly snack.

Eby, however, longed to unlock a bigger mystery: Could she, with the help of fellow scientists, predict when the conditions were prime for Hendra to spill over from bats, before it took any more lives? What if they could warn the public to be on guard — maybe even prevent the virus from making the leap? It would be painstaking work, but it wasn’t a pipe dream; Eby was already spotting patterns as she crawled around infection sites.

But when she pitched her research to a government funder the following year, she got a flat no. She proposed starting small, gathering basic data on flying foxes that could be used to figure out when and why they spread the virus. Her work, she was told, wasn’t considered a “sufficiently important contribution.”

Global health organizations and governments have long focused on responding to outbreaks rather than predicting and preventing them. Billions of dollars pour into developing treatments and vaccines for infectious diseases, but only a small fraction goes to understanding why contagions spread from animals to humans in the first place. Some experts reject even that, viewing spillover as too random, mysterious and rare to be observed and studied.

The work Eby does is the opposite of the major research projects on deadly diseases that typically get scientific grants. Government and nonprofit funders are often drawn to studies involving cutting-edge technology like artificial intelligence, and they want results in a few years’ time. Eby had spent decades trekking into the Australian bush, often on her own dime, observing flying foxes for hours on end with only a notebook and a pair of binoculars. To support her research, she took on consulting jobs, such as advising towns whose residents viewed bats as pests. She knew, though, that side hustles would never be enough to support the multidisciplinary team of scientists needed to crack the Hendra virus.

In the years that followed, Eby found like-minded scientists, and the team, led by women, persisted. They cobbled together grant after grant, battled burnout and kept impatient funders at bay. A decade after Eby’s government grant proposal was shot down, they published a groundbreaking paper in the journal Nature that demonstrated it was not only possible to predict Hendra virus spillover, but it might be preventable. Only then did it become obvious just how important Eby’s quiet fieldwork truly was.

Dr. Neil Vora, a tuberculosis physician and former officer at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he was thrilled when he saw the paper. “It gave clear evidence that we can take actions to prevent spillovers of viruses,” said Vora, who now works for environmental nonprofit Conservation International. “I hope it helps to convince funders and policymakers that spillover prevention merits implementation now.”

In a world still scarred by the COVID-19 pandemic, Eby’s dogged success exposes a global scientific blind spot. It’s not that trendy science involving the latest AI wonders isn’t worthy of research dollars. It’s that it should not be funded at the expense of the sort of long-term, shoe-leather work that allowed Eby and her colleagues to solve the mystery of a deadly contagion, Vora and other public health experts say. “All of these actions are important if we want to save as many lives as possible from infectious diseases,” Vora added.

Novel infectious diseases will keep coming at us, Eby warns. Investing in scientific work like hers “seems like a poor approach now,” she said, “but 20 years from now, we’ll look back and wonder why we didn’t do it.”

Fresh out of college in the 1970s, Eby explored the wilds of Australia on a research fellowship, following the path a German naturalist had chronicled before he disappeared in 1848. Some parts were so remote that she had to hitch a ride on the tiny plane that delivered mail to park rangers. Eby, who grew up in Kansas, was awed by the diversity of the landscape and charmed by the openness of the people. When her fellowship ended, she decided Australia was home.

Eby was in her 30s when she came to love flying foxes. Her boss at the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service asked her to figure out how bats spread fruit seeds in rainforests. She followed signals transmitted by radio collars on flying foxes and knocked on landowners’ doors to ask if she might, please, observe the bats feeding in their trees and collect droppings. She even tracked them from a single-engine Cessna, battling nausea as she discovered that the bats could migrate hundreds of miles, a fact that nobody knew at the time.

When she watches flying foxes hanging in repose, Eby’s breathing slows. It feels like meditation. “It changes my perspective so I feel less significant,” she explained. “I think that’s important for all of us to feel less significant in the world.”

She was working on her dissertation about the bats in 1994 when a novel virus struck a Brisbane suburb called Hendra. The trouble started when a pregnant racehorse named Drama Series became congested and feverish. A veterinarian gave her painkillers and antibiotics, but she died the next day. As horse after horse got sick, some thrashed in their stalls, unable to breathe. “It’s a horrible thing to see when they’re mutilating themselves,” the veterinarian, Dr. Peter Reid, recalled.

Then the horses’ trainer died. The outbreak had spread to humans.

For more than a decade, Hendra popped up sporadically. It killed another horse trainer and two veterinarians. A veterinary nurse became so ill that she had to learn to walk and talk again and never regained some of her hearing.

Scientists figured out that Hendra came from flying foxes, and it had to pass through horses before it could infect humans. Eby was aware of those discoveries but didn’t get pulled in until an unprecedented number of horses died in 2011. Nobody knew why so many were getting sick when Hendra had been rare in the past. Media helicopters rumbled over sites where horses died, and people who lived and worked near them panicked. A group of ecologists lobbied the government to add a bat expert to the team deployed to infection sites, a practice that wasn’t common then and still isn’t. The ecologists picked Eby.

Shortly after her 60th birthday, Eby began suiting up in PPE and heading to the scene every time a horse tested positive for Hendra. She soon noticed the bat roosts near these sites were new and small. Something strange was going on.

Around the same time, Dr. Raina Plowright, a professor of disease ecology at Cornell University, proposed working together. Plowright was an Australian who had emigrated in the opposite direction of Eby but had never lost interest in her homeland’s infectious diseases.

They agreed to tackle the mystery together. They applied for multiple grants and were shot down because their ambitions didn’t match the funding silos: Agencies that support human health don’t typically care about animal health, and those that back studies on the environment often aren’t interested in how it affects public health. In saying “no,” one animal foundation explained that its mandate didn’t extend to diseases that leaped to humans.

In 2012, Plowright received a small grant from the Australian government, but that was only for mathematical modeling and didn’t support fieldwork like Eby’s. By 2017, a National Science Foundation grant came through, but it wasn’t enough to cover all of the costs of catching and testing bats. The team spread itself thin. “It was headed to a burnout situation,” Plowright recalled.

Eby, meanwhile, tapped unusual sources to get data. She befriended beekeepers, who could tell her when and where key species of trees were flowering. This helped them track shortages of the bats’ favorite food: nectar from eucalyptus blossoms. She also asked workers at wildlife rehabilitation centers to keep logs about sick and injured bats that they cared for.

The team studied weather patterns and how the forest cover had changed. Eby contributed field records on the location, number and health of bat roosts. Altogether, their data spanned 25 years.

The team’s resourcefulness paid off. By 2017, the researchers figured out how and why Hendra was spilling over from bats:

In early 2017, the researchers determined that conditions were ripe for Hendra to leap from bats to horses and potentially to people. A drought, followed by too much rain, had led to a dire shortage of eucalyptus blossoms, and malnourished bats were turning up at wildlife rescue organizations. By then, there was a Hendra vaccine for horses, but few owners had opted for it. It was only a matter of time before a horse nibbled something tainted with the bats’ saliva or droppings.

Eby pushed past the fear that their prediction might be wrong. She and her colleagues published a bulletin that winter, warning veterinarians of an impending Hendra outbreak and their need to wear full protective gear near horses.

The team was right. Four horses on separate properties caught Hendra that season.

No humans got sick.

When the same pattern of weather and food shortages repeated in 2020, Eby and her colleagues were confident that it’d be a calamitous year. They sounded another warning that May, at the start of the Australian winter season: “Conditions predict heightened Hendra virus spillover risk in horses this winter: actions now can change outcomes.”

Later that month, one horse was infected and euthanized. The team braced itself for a wave of horse deaths. But then — nothing. No other Hendra cases were identified, and the outbreak that was supposed to happen just didn’t.

Somehow, they had gotten it wrong.

“We still felt confident in our understanding,” Eby recalled, “but we didn’t have the full story yet.” She ran through everything she knew about bats and Hendra, scouring for what they might have missed. There had, indeed, been a food shortage. So where were all the bats?

Eby was in COVID-19 lockdown in mid-July that year when she got stunning news. Gympie, a former gold-mining town near the east coast, had been less affected by the severe weather than expected, and a few patches of a type of eucalyptus known as the forest red gum were flowering en masse. Their slender branches teemed with fluffy white blooms. Eucalyptus trees don’t flower every winter; their blooms appear erratically. Some 240,000 flying foxes had flown in for the rare feast.

“I immediately knew,” Eby said. “This is what was different.”

Her collaborators, a field team from Griffith University, rushed to check roosts in areas where Hendra cases had previously struck. Many roosts were empty, the bats drawn away by the Gympie banquet.

Eby and Plowright had worked on this for a decade now, patching together four or five grants at a time to continue their research. Funders wanted results.

But they needed more data. They had to understand how this unexpected winter flowering in Gympie was affecting bats across eastern Australia. With the lockdown preventing Eby from examining the roost herself, she began to compile information on historic mass winter flowerings like this one.

One reason why it wasn’t initially obvious that the Gympie congregation was important was that the bats that had flocked to town were grey-headed flying foxes, not the black flying foxes that spread Hendra. Eby came to believe that a hierarchy of bat species governs which can claim the best food, and the behavior of one affects the other.

The greys get dibs on the best food. When eucalyptus nectar is scarce, the greys eat what’s available, pushing the black flying foxes to scavenge for fruits in horse paddocks, their equivalent of junk food. But when the nectar is abundant, like it was in Gympie, the greys will depart for that fine dining opportunity, allowing the blacks to ditch the horse paddocks for better food that the greys leave behind. This draws the bats that carry Hendra away from horses and people.

In the end, what she concluded was astonishing: There had never been a spillover at the same time as a rich winter flowering.

“We said, this can’t be real, it’s too good,” Plowright said. “Those remnant patches of flowering were protecting the whole landscape.”

Patches of eucalyptus around a single town could protect all of eastern Australia. Imagine a few clusters of trees in New Jersey protecting the entire Eastern Seaboard.

The researchers could see how, between 1994 and 2006, consistent winter flowering was still taking place around the country. But as people cut down more and more trees, reducing the available habitat, winter flowering became unreliable and occasional, leading bats to search in horse paddocks for other sources of food.

Habitat destruction and deforestation has been linked to outbreaks of many notorious viruses, including Ebola, monkey malaria and the brain-invading Nipah virus. The discoveries of Eby and her colleagues show that we can learn all of the elements that lead to spillover — environmental, animal and human — in enough detail to design ways to predict and prevent the next outbreak.

Their discovery comes as the threat of Hendra increases. Deforestation has decimated the bats’ winter foraging habitats and shows no signs of stopping. Climate change likely will cause more extreme weather conditions, which will further disrupt the winter budding of eucalyptus, making food shortages more common.

Eby and her colleagues see a new way forward: If the remaining patches of winter-flowering trees were preserved and more were planted, they could once again reliably draw the bats away from people and protect the entire country from Hendra virus for years to come.

Yet few government agencies and global health authorities are ready to invest in action that comes out of this hard-won discovery.

The Hendra team, in 2018, had managed to score a grant from a program under the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that was unique in its scope and vision. Called Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT, it sought to understand the mechanisms of spillover with the goal of developing technologies to protect U.S. military forces deployed to disease-prone locations. But the program was a one-off and is ending after five years. DARPA says it is not its role to fund the solution Eby and her colleagues discovered.

“We are ready for the next hard problem,” said Kristen Jordan, the deputy director for the DARPA Biological Technologies Office. “There are many we need to address.”

Department of Defense officials asked Plowright whether the model that predicted Hendra could also predict the next coronavirus spillover in Southeast Asia.

Plowright recalls responding: “Well, you need data. And we have no data.” It’d be impossible to calculate that risk without replicating the years of wildlife tracking, environmental data gathering and number-crunching that the Hendra team conducted. “People just don’t get that.”

On a crisp afternoon last September in the city of Tamworth in New South Wales, Eby pulled into the parking lot of a Hungry Jack’s burger restaurant. She had heard reports of an enormous roost of flying foxes in town and hurried to get there. Eby couldn’t see any bats from where she had parked, but she didn’t need to. Her clear blue eyes lit up and she beamed. “Can you smell them?”

Alongside the aroma of cooking grease was a musky, sweet scent that announced the presence of bats. As Eby walked to the river, she could also hear their shrill chattering. Then, there they were, hanging upside down from every branch on every tree that lined the river, grooming themselves and resting before the evening’s forage. With their wings folded around them, the bats looked like tear-drop-shaped fruit. A week earlier, another researcher had flown a heat-seeking drone over the roost and estimated that the river in Tamworth was hosting about 300,000 bats — more than half of the grey-headed flying fox population in all of Australia.

Eby moved slowly so as not to startle the roosting animals. She raised her binoculars, tallying males and females, noting any that were pregnant and scanning for babies born out of season. The roost looked healthy. She was elated. The Tamworth bats confirmed that a single unusually abundant flowering of eucalyptus could provide a protective effect for the whole system. And sure enough, there were no Hendra virus cases in the winter of 2022.

A few years ago, Eby had thought it might be time to retire. She was nearing 70 and ready to take a break from the physical grind of fieldwork. But then came an unconventional funding opportunity she couldn’t pass up.

After thousands of bushfires burned an estimated 59 million acres in a single season that came to be known as the Black Summer, money poured in to help restore habitat for Australia’s iconic koala. Eby instantly recognized the chance to explore how planting eucalyptus affects flying foxes, which conveniently feed on nectar from many of the same trees preferred by koalas. “The bats are hanging onto the coattails of the koalas,” she said with a wry grin.

There wasn’t a universal data set tracking reforestation projects, so she set out to create one. Today, supported by money from various koala-focused projects, she drives across eastern Australia training koala conservationists to upload records of their tree-planting projects into a common database. She hopes that reforestation efforts will make winter flowering commonplace again and prove the case for preventing spillovers with habitat restoration.

Eby says that she believes preventing outbreaks is possible, and that the methods she and her colleagues have developed can be applied to other disease systems. “There was nothing remarkable about my work. It can be done again in other circumstances, it just takes the will,” she said. “It also takes an understanding that this is a long term quest.”

Even while she embarks on her new mission to prove the power of reforestation, she pauses to cheer the remnant patches of forest when they bloom.

As the sun set over Tamworth, she stood above the riverbank, her hair glowing silver under the light of a streetlamp. She watched as the bats set out into the darkening sky, their long wings beating the air as they soared from the trees and headed out to feed. Eby couldn’t see where they were headed but knew that nearby, eucalyptus trees were blooming, producing sweet nectar that would keep the country safe from a Hendra virus spillover. Smiling to herself, she murmured, “Isn’t it wonderful?”

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On May 9, a baby California condor hatched at Liberty Wildlife, a wildlife rehabilitation, education, and conservation organization in Phoenix, Arizona. The hatching is a ray of hope and welcome good news for the struggling species that was only recently brought back from the brink of extinction. 

Only 22 condors were believed to be alive during the 1980s after a maelstrom of habitat loss, poaching, lead poisoning accidents with power lines, and the insecticide DDT. Currently, about 275 wild birds are cruising the skies about California, Utah, Arizona, and Baja California, Mexico, more than 160 are in captivity, and more than 400 live worldwide. 

[Related: Inside the Yurok Tribe’s mission to make critically endangered condors thrive.]

The largest bird species in North America and a crucial part of the ecosystem, California condors are considered sacred to many indigenous peoples. The Yurok Tribe of the Pacific Northwest call California condors “prey-go-neesh,” and say the birds have been tied to the Yurok Hlkelonah, or the cultural and ecological landscape, since the beginning of time. The tribe has officially been a driving force on condor reintroduction since 2008. 

Now, these sacred and important birds face a grave threat in the form of a tiny pathogen. Highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1), also called bird flu, is threatening condors at an alarming rate. It was first detected in the California condor in late March, and more than 20 are known to have died since. 

“It is scary particularly for endangered species like the California condors. It has the ability to wipe out an entire species,” Liberty Wildlife’s Animal Care Coordinator Jan Miller tells PopSci. 

One of the birds that succumbed to the disease was the new hatchling’s mother, part of a breeding pair of wild California condors. The mother was found acting suspicious in a cave near the Grand Canyon and was brought to Liberty Wildlife due to suspected bird flu. She died eight days later.  

“Using telemetry, it was assumed that she had laid an egg, probably between March 13 and March 17, and it was predicted to hatch between May 9 and May 17,” Liberty Wildlife’s Executive Director Megan Mosby tells PopSci. “The limited movement of the male led to the assumption that he was trying to incubate an egg.  The biologists at the Arizona Vermilion Cliff site decided that it wasn’t safe for the male, a known breeder, to attempt to raise a chick solo and feed himself, especially in a dank, cool cave … a perfect place for flu contamination.”

[Related: Spy tech and rigged eggs help scientists study the secret lives of animals.]

Biologists brought the egg back to Liberty Wildlife, where it was monitored in a structure called a brooder.  When the egg began to “pip,” the Los Angeles Zoo’s propagation team advised Liberty Wildlife on best practices for monitoring the hatchling’s progress. The team noticed that the chick was in the wrong position in the egg due to where it had pipped, or poked through its membrane, and that it would need assistance in order for the hatch to be successful. 

“Veterinarian Dr. Stephanie Lamb assisted in the freeing of the baby from the egg and the operation was successful.  After a health check, a swab to test for Avian Flu was obtained, and the chick was placed in an incubator with a surrogate (stuffed animal) ‘mother’ condor,” Miller says. 

The hatchling was negative for bird flu and continued to eat solid food and bond with her surrogate plush parent. According to Mosby, the team was excited to find out she was female because 11 of the 21 condors that have died due to bird flu were breeding age females.

On May 17, she was flown to The Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho. There she will be raised by foster parents so that she can one day be released back into Arizona’s skies.  

“At this age it is very easy for the chick to imprint on humans so getting her with her own species is critical to her releasability,” says Miller. “The Peregrine Fund has a very advanced propagation department with proven foster parents to help raise chicks for release into the wild. It is a very large operation with proven results.”

According to the team, vultures like the California condor are not only intelligent, but are incredibly necessary to help clean up the environment since they handle dead and decaying animals that can spread disease. 

“Vultures are part of the natural cleanup crew in nature. They deserve every fair chance they can get to continue to survive and be a part of this world,” says Miller. 

In addition to this welcome hatchling’s continued success this week, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service approved the emergency use of bird flu vaccine on May 16. The Yurok Tribe called this move, “a huge step in the effort to combat this virulent threat, but still a long road ahead.”

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If Spiderman and Antman took their DNA and mixed it together in a petri dish, the result might be something like the spider species Siler collingwoodi (S. collingwoodi). This tiny, colorful, jumping spider found in China and Japan uses a combination of camouflage and some award-worthy mimicry to deter some hungry predators. In a stressful scenario, these spiders will imitate the way an ant walks to avoid being eaten.

[Related: Black widows battle their even deadlier cousins in a brutal spider war.]

A study published May 17 in the journal iScience found that the combo of camouflage and ant mimicry works to evade spiders that eat other spiders, but not hungry praying mantises. It’s advantageous to mimic an ant because they are typically not very tasty, and can have spiny defenses, chemical repellents, or venom. Not to mention, species of “exploding” ants like Colobopsis saundersi that are not afraid to fight and bite back. While scientists already knew that S. collingwoodi walked like an ant, the team on this study were curious how accurate the mimicry is, whether it imitates multiple species of ants, and how effective it is at discouraging predators. 

“Unlike typical ant-mimicking spiders that mimic the brown or black body color of ants, S. collingwoodi has brilliant body coloration,” co-author and Peking University in China ecologist Hua Zeng said in a statement. “From a human’s perspective, it seems to blend well with plants in its environment, but we wanted to test whether their body coloration served as camouflage to protect against predators.”

To better understand how these ant-inspired theatrics help the spiders avoid becoming dinner, the team collected wild ant-mimicking spiders from four spots in southern Hainan, China, and brought them back to the lab. They also collected another type of jumping spider that does not mimic ants as a comparison and five co-occurring ant species as potential models.  

The team then compared and characterized how the insects and arachnids moved in terms of how they used their individual limbs, their speed, acceleration, and whether they followed a straight path or took a more roundabout way. 

Inside of jumping like most jumping spiders, S. collingwoodi scuttle around like ants. They raise their front legs to mimic an ant’s antennae, bob their abdomens, and lift their legs to walk more ant-like. Out of the five ant species studied, the spider’s style of walking more closely resembled three of the smaller ant species that are closer in size.

“S. collingwoodi is not necessarily a perfect mimic, because its gait and trajectory showed high similarity with multiple ant species,” said Zeng. “Being a general mimic rather than perfectly mimicking one ant species could benefit the spiders by allowing them to expand their range if the ant models occupy different habitats.”

Then it was time to test these defenses against two likely predators. Portia labiata and the praying mantis. Portia labiata is a similarly sized jumping spider with color vision who specializes in preying upon other spiders. The praying mantis is a more generalist predator that has a monochromatic visual system–meaning it has trouble telling multiple colors apart. 

[Related: Jumping spiders might be able to sleep—perchance to dream.]

To see how the color camouflaging was working, they modeled how the two predators would perceive S. collingwoodi relative to the other prey species. They used a background of two plants that the spiders live on—the red-flowering West Indian jasmine and the Fukien tea tree The ant-mimicking spiders were better camouflaged from both predators on the jasmine plant than on the tea tree plant.

The predators were more likely to attack the non-mimicking spider than the ones that imitate ants. Out of 17 trials, the spider launched five attacks—all of them were launched towards a non-mimicking spider. However, praying mantises attacked both prey species with equal readiness.

“We initially thought that both predators would behave similarly in the anti predation experiments, but in fact the simulated ant locomotion of Siler collingwoodi only worked for the jumping spider predator, while the praying mantis showed indiscriminate attacks on both ants and mimics,” co-author and Peking University evolutionary ecologist Wei Zhang said in a statement. 

It is possible that this difference might be driven by each predator’s likelihood of being injured if they eat an ant. The praying mantises are much larger than their prey, and they have a better chance of eating spiny ants without risking catastrophic injury. Predatory spiders do not have this margin for error. 

“For the spider predator, a random attack on an ant could result in injury,” says Zhang, “so they are very careful predators and will only attack if they can distinguish S. collingwoodi from ants with a high degree of certainty.”

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Forging strong social relationships can help mitigate the effects of traumatic childhood events in human adults, but also in baboons. A study published May 17 in the journal Science Advances drew on 36 years of data from almost 200 baboons in southern Kenya and found that even though early adversity can take years of their lifespans, stronger social bonds in adulthood can help get these years back. 

[Related: Baboon poop shows how chronic stress shortens lives.]

“It’s like the saying from the King James Apocrypha, ‘a faithful friend is the medicine of life,’” co-author and Duke University biologist and evolutionary anthropologist Susan Alberts said in a statement.

Studies have consistently found that people who go through more bad experiences growing up, such as neglect or abuse,  are more likely to die early. However, the mechanisms behind how early adversity leads to a premature death has been harder for researchers to pin down, according to Alberts. Some of the limitations to earlier research is the reliance on self-reported memories which can be imprecise and subjective. 

Enter our primate cousins. Baboons share more than 90 percent of their DNA with humans and researchers have followed individual baboons near Amboseli National Park in Kenya since 1971. 

In this new study, the researchers analyzed how early life experiences and adult social connections affected long-term survival in 199 female baboons between 1983 and 2019.

Baboon childhood is certainly different from human childhood, but young baboons still face hardships. The team in the study tallied up each female’s exposure to six potential sources of early adversity, including whether she had a low-ranking or socially isolated mother or if her mother died before she reached maturity. It was also noted if she was born in a drought year or into a large group, and if she had a sibling close in age, which could contribute to more competition for both maternal attention and resources.

The team found that stressful experiences are very common for the baboons growing up in the semi-arid and unpredictable landscape of Amboseli. Of the 199 baboons in the study, 75 percent suffered through at least one stressor, and 33 percent had two or more.

Their results confirm previous findings that the more hardship a female baboon faces, the shorter her lifespan. Monkeys who experienced more upheaval at a young age were also more socially isolated as adults.

[Related: Monkeys with close friends have friendlier gut bacteria.]

However, the researchers showed that 90 percent of the dip in survival was due to the direct effects of early adversity, not to the weakened social bonds that continued into adulthood.

No matter how strong their bonds were with other baboons, each additional hardship translated to 1.4 years of life lost. Those who went through four bad experiences growing up died close to 5.6 years earlier than those who didn’t face any. Since the average female baboon lives to age 18, this is a large drop in lost years.

But an unfortunate start in life does not mean that a baboon will absolutely live a short life. 

“Females who have bad early lives are not doomed,” co-author and biologist at SUNY Oswego Elizabeth Lange said in a statement. “We found that both early life adversity and adult social interactions affect survival independently. That means that interventions that occur throughout the lifespan could improve survival.”

In baboons, strong social bonds are measured by how often they groom with their closest friends. Those with strong social bonds added 2.2 years to their lives, no matter what adversity they had faced in their earlier years. The baboons whose mothers died before they reached maturity and then forged strong friendships in adulthood showed the best ability to bounce back. 

However, the flip side is also true. Weak social bonds can magnify early life adversity, according to the study. 

It is not clear yet if these results can be translated to adult humans, but it suggests that early intervention is not the only way to overcome childhood trauma and its lingering effects. 

“If you did have early life adversity, whatever you do, try to make friends,” Alberts said.

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Up until 100 million years ago, butterflies were night creatures. Only nocturnal moths were living on Earth until some rogue moths began to fly during the day. These enterprising members of the order Lepidoptera took advantage of the nectar-rich flowers that had co-evolved with bees by flying during the day. From there, close to 19,000 butterfly species were born.

[Related: Save caterpillars by turning off your outdoor lights.]

In 2019, a large-scale analysis of DNA helped solve the question of when they evolved. Now,  the mystery of where in the world colorful winged insects evolved plagues lepidopterists and museum curators. A study published May 15 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution found that butterflies likely evolved in North and Central America, and they forged strong botanical bonds with host plants as they settled around the world.

Getting to this conclusion took a four-dimensional puzzle that makes 3D chess look like a game of Candyland. Scientists from multiple countries had to assemble a massive “butterfly tree of life” using 100 million years of natural history on their distribution and favorite plants, as well as the DNA of more than 2,000 species representing 90 percent of butterfly genera and all butterfly families. 

Within the data were 11 rare butterfly fossils that proved to be crucial pieces to the story.  Butterflies are not common in the fossil record due to their thin wings and very threadlike hair. The 11 in this study were used as calibration and comparison points on the genetic trees, so the team could record timing of key evolutionary events.

They found that butterflies first appeared somewhere in central and western North America. 100 million years ago, North America was bisected by an expansive seaway called the Western Interior Seaway. Present day Mexico was joined in an arc with the United States, Canada, and Russia. North and South America were also separated by a strait of water that butterflies had little difficulty crossing.

The study believes that butterflies took a long way around to Africa, first moving into Asia along the Bering Land Bridge. They then radiated into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and eventually the Horn of Africa. They were even able to reach India, which was an isolated island separated by miles of open sea at this time. 

[Related: The monarch butterfly is scientifically endangered. So why isn’t it legally protected yet?]

Australia was still connected to Antarctica, one of the last remnants of the supercontinent Pangaea. Butterflies possibly lived in Antarctica when global temperatures were warmer, and made their way north towards Australia before the landmasses broke up. 

Butterflies likely lingered along the western edge of Asia for up to 45 million years before making the journey into Europe. The effects of this pause are still apparent today, according to the authors. 

“Europe doesn’t have many butterfly species compared to other parts of the world, and the ones it does have can often be found elsewhere. Many butterflies in Europe are also found in Siberia and Asia, for example,” study co-author and curator of lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History Akito Kawahara said in a statement. 

Once butterflies were established all over the world, they rapidly diversified alongside their plant hosts. Nearly all modern butterfly families were on Earth by the time dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago. Each butterfly family appears to have had a special affinity for a specific group of plants.

“We looked at this association over an evolutionary timescale, and in pretty much every family of butterflies, bean plants came out to be the ancestral hosts,” Kawahara said. “This was true in the ancestor of all butterflies as well.”

Over time, bean plants have increased their roster of pollinators to include multiple types of bees, flies, hummingbirds, and mammals, while butterflies have similarly expanded their palate. These botanical partnerships helped make butterflies blossom from a minor offshoot of moths to one of the world’s largest groups of insects, according to the study.

“The evolution of butterflies and flowering plants has been inexorably intertwined since the origin of the former, and the close relationship between them has resulted in remarkable diversification events in both lineages,” study co-author and Florida Museum curator Pamela Soltis said in a statement. 

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A dark side effect of the electricity that helps society run around the clock is the pollution caused by our increasing numbers of lights at night. Light pollution can obscure stargazing, confusing sea turtles when they hatch, and also could be harming coral reefs.   

[Related: The switch to LEDs in Europe is visible from space.]

The light pollution from cities along the coast can trick the reefs into spawning outside of their optimal reproductive times, according to a study published May 15 in the journal Nature Communications.

“Corals are critical for the health of the global ocean, but are being increasingly damaged by human activity. This study shows it is not just changes in the ocean that are impacting them, but the continued development of coastal cities as we try and accommodate the growing global population,” Thomas Davies, a study co-author and conservation ecologist at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom,  said in a statement. 

The moon’s cycles trigger coral to spawn. During these spawning events, hundreds of eggs are released on certain nights of the year. These nights are critical to maintain and recover coral reefs after mass bleaching or other adverse events.

By using a combination of spawning observations and data on light pollution, an international team of researchers showed that the corals exposed to artificial light at night (ALAN) are spawning about one to three days closer to the full moon compared to reefs that are not.

If coral spawn on different nights, coral eggs are less likely to be fertilized and survive to produce adult corals. Population growth is needed now more than ever to help the population recover after disturbing events like bleaching.

The study builds on research from 2021 that mapped out the areas of the ocean that are most affected by light pollution. It found that at 3.2 feet deep, over 7 million square miles of coastal ocean are exposed to biologically important ALAN.  

“This study further emphasizes the importance of artificial light pollution as a stressor of coastal and marine ecosystems, with the impacts on various aspects of biodiversity only now being discovered and quantified,” Tim Smyth, a co-author and biogeochemist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, said in a statement. 

The team paired their new data with a global dataset representing 2,135 coral spawning observations taken over the last 23 years. They saw that ALAN is possibly advancing the triggers for spawning by creating a fake illuminance between sunset and sunrise on the nights after the full moon. 

[Related: The best ways to reduce light pollution and improve your quality of life.]

The study looked at coastal regions around the world, but the coral reefs of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf in the Middle East are particularly affected by light pollution. These coastlines have been heavily developed in recent years, putting the reefs near the shore at risk. 

“Despite the challenges posed by ALAN, corals in the Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba are known for their thermal tolerance and ability to withstand high temperatures. However, a disturbance in the timing of coral spawning with the moon phases can result in a decline in new coral recruits and a reduction in the coral population,” Oren Levy, co-author and marine ecologist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said in a statement. 

Some individual methods to reduce light pollution, especially for those along the coast, include removing nighttime lighting that is not necessarily needed for public safety, removing all unnecessary light even if it is just one in a backyard, and switching away from white lights to more muted red lights that are less intense.

“By implementing measures to limit light pollution, we can protect these vital habitats and safeguard the future of the world’s oceans. It’s our responsibility to ensure that we preserve the biodiversity of our planet and maintain a healthy and sustainable environment for generations to come,” said Levy.

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In an environment without light, or where sight is otherwise useless, some creatures have learned to thrive by sound. They rely on calls, clicks, and twitters to create a kind of map of their surroundings or pinpoint prey. That ability is called echolocation, and a simple way to understand how it works is to crack open the word itself. 

What is echolocation?

Imagine an echo that locates things. The sound hits an object and bounces back, relaying information about a target’s whereabouts or cues for navigation. When Harvard University zoologist Donald Griffin coined the word “echolocation” in the journal Science in 1944, he was describing how bats rely on sounds to “fly through the total darkness of caves without striking the walls or the jutting stalactites.”

In the decades since, scientists have identified many other animals that use echolocation, aka biosonar. For example, at least 16 species of birds echolocate, including swiftlets and nocturnal oilbirds, which roost deep in South America’s caves. Laura Kloepper, an expert in animal acoustics at the University of New Hampshire, calls this shared ability an example of convergent evolution, in which “you have two unrelated species evolve the same adaptive strategy.” 

How does echolocation work?

To find fish in deep waters, or avoid crashing in the inky night, whales and bats produce loud ultrasonic sounds at frequencies all the way up to 200 kilohertz. That is way beyond human hearing (most adults can’t perceive pitches above 17 kilohertz). 

[Related on PopSci+: 5 sounds not meant for the human ear]

Why do specialized echolocators use ultrasonic sound? “High-frequency sounds give really fine spatial resolution,” Kloepper explains. Hertz is a measure of the distance between each acoustic wave: The higher the hertz, the tighter the wave, and the smaller the detail captured by the vibration of energy in the air. If you were to echolocate in a room, a big, low-frequency wave might simply reflect off a wall, Kloepper says, while an echo from a higher-frequency sound could tell you where the doorway or even the knob was.

Echoes, if you know how to interpret them, are rich in information. As Kloepper explains it, when an animal with the ability hears a reflection, it examines that sound against an “internalized template” of the call it sent out. That comparison of echo versus signal can yield the distance to a target, the direction it might be traveling in, and even its material make-up.

Ultrasonic calls give another bats boost, too—they rely on next-level frequencies to find mates. Many species of moths hunted by bats have evolved ears attuned to these frequencies as a means of survival.

[Related: How fast is supersonic flight?]

To make ultrasound, a bat vibrates a specialized organ in its throat called a larynx. It’s not too different from how the human voice box works, except the bat produces a much higher frequency sound. Certain bat species then release the sound from their mouths, while others screech from the snout, using an elaborate nasal structure nicknamed a nose-leaf. 

Whales

Dolphins, orcas, and other toothed whales echolocate for the same reasons as bats do: to chase down tasty prey and navigate through darkness. But these aquatic mammals emit ultrasound in a completely different way. Inside whale heads, often close to their blowholes, sit lip-like flaps. When the animals push air across the flaps, the appendages vibrate, producing clicks. “It’s just like if you inflate a balloon and let all the air out of that balloon. It makes a pbbft noise,” Kloepper says. 

The curves of dolphin skulls propel that noise into fatty structures at the front of their heads, called melons. These, in turn, efficiently transmit vibrations in seawater. The waves bounce off prey or other objects, but the whales don’t rely on external ears to hear the echo (their ear canals are plugged up with wax). Instead, the vibrations are channeled via their jawbones, where sound is received by fat-filled cavities so thin that light can pass through them. The cavities are near the whales’ inner ears, which sense the echoing clicks. The process can reveal all sorts of details: where a fish is, where it’s going, and how fast it’s swimming.

Shrews

Shrews have sensitive whiskers but poor eyesight. To supplement their senses as they explore their forest and grassy meadow habitats, they might use a coarse form of echolocation, which Sophie von Merten, a mammalogist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, calls “echo-orientation” or “echo-navigation.” This ability could “give them a hint that there is an obstacle coming,” she says, such as a fallen branch detected by the shrews’ twitters. Their bird-like sounds are faint, but audible to humans. 

The extent of shrew echo-navigation isn’t entirely clear. In a 2020 “experiment, von Merten and a colleague found that, when shrews are introduced to new environments, the wee mammals twitter more frequently. Von Merten says it’s likely they are sensing the unfamiliar location by these vocalizations, but another interpretation could be that the captive animals are stressed. That’s a hypothesis she doesn’t find very convincing, though her ongoing research will measure shrew stress, too.

Could there be other undiscovered creatures out there that echolocate? “I think it’s very likely,” Kloepper says. She adds that it’s hard to tell which animals beyond mammals and birds display the behavior, given “just how little we know about vocalizations of many cryptic species.”

Humans

Unlike bats, people aren’t born with the innate power of echolocation—but we can still make it work. In his original 1944 paper, Griffin discussed a, such as captains listening for echoes of ship horns against cliff faces, or those who are blind following the taps of their canes. 

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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.

Bleaching occurs when a stressed marine creature, most commonly a coral, expels its symbiotic algae and turns a ghostly white, often in response to a warming sea. But bleaching affects more than just corals. Giant clams—massive mollusks that can grow more than 1.2 meters in diameter and weigh as much as 225 kilograms—can bleach, too. And in recent research, scientists have learned more about how bleaching disrupts these sessile giants, affecting everything from their nutrition to their reproduction.

Giant clams live on coral reefs and are the largest bivalves on Earth. Like corals, giant clams bleach when they’re stressed, often as a response to excessively warm water. As with a coral, a bleached giant clam expels the algae, called zooxanthellae, that live inside it. These algae dwell in the soft tissue of the clam’s mantle and provide energy for the animal through photosynthesis, leaving a bleached clam with less energy and nutrients. At worst, bleaching can kill giant clams through food deficiency.

Scientists have been studying bleaching in giant clams for decades. In 1997 and 1998, during a brief period that saw extensive coral bleaching worldwide with corals succumbing in at least 32 disparate countries, bleached giant clams were observed from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to French Polynesia after water temperatures in the South Pacific rose significantly. In 2010, similar temperatures in the water off Thailand’s Ko Man Nai Island also led to scores of deaths.

Of the 12 species of giant clams, some are more resistant to heat stress than others. But as scientists are finding, even when a giant clam survives bleaching, other physiological functions can still be severely impaired.

A recent study in the Philippines of wild clams, for example, found that bleaching can hamper their reproduction. Bleaching reduces the number of eggs giant clams produce, and the more severe the bleaching, the fewer eggs they make. Reproducing “takes a lot of energy. So instead of using that energy for reproduction, they just use it for their survival,” says Sherry Lyn Sayco, the lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan.

Mei Lin Neo, a marine ecologist and giant clam expert at the National University of Singapore who was not involved in the study, says the work contributes to the story of how climate change can have “repercussions on the longevity of species.”

In general, she says, we know much more about how climate change affects corals than marine species with similar physiologies. “By understanding how other symbiotic species respond to climate change, each species becomes a unique indicator on how the overall reef ecosystem is doing.”

Bleached giant clams, it turns out, are often better than corals at coping with bleaching. Near Ko Man Nai Island, 40 percent of the bleached clams re-colored after a few months as the zooxanthellae repopulated in their tissues when temperatures cooled again. After the 1997–1998 bleaching event, over 95 percent of the 6,300 bleached clams near Australia’s Orpheus Island recovered.

Giant clams seem amenable to restocking, too. In the Philippines, where the largest species, Tridacna gigas, went locally extinct in the 1980s, restocking has brought it back.

“Clams are not just any organism,” Sayco says. “It’s not that we are just conserving them for them to be there,” she adds, “they have lots of benefits and ecosystem services, such as [boosting] fisheries [and] tourism.”

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After an asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs struck the Earth, the prehistoric giants lost their dominion over the planet. The mammals that rose up about 66 million years ago during the Eocene Epoch had some big shoes to fill—and they certainly grew into the challenge over time.

[Related: We’re one step closer to identifying the first-ever mammals.]

In a study published May 11 in the journal Science, found that a family of extinct rhinoceros-like herbivores called brontotheres began their time on Earth about the size of a dog, but evolved to reach elephant size over a relatively short amount of time. Brontotheres also may have not reached its full size potential before it went extinct roughly 34 million years ago due to changes in their environment.

With the dinosaurs gone at the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago), the mammals of the world had significantly less competition for resources, and scientists believe this led to their success as a family. Brontotheres was one of the biggest winners among mammals, and grew from about coyote-sized, 40 pound creatures into 2,000 pound goliaths. According to the study, they did this over a period of only 16 million years, which is very quick in evolutionary terms.

Brontothere means “thunder beasts,” and their powerful name was inspired by Lakota oral histories of violent thunderstorms accompanied by giants, according to the National Park Service.The animals lived in Asia, Europe, and North America. Most species weighed over a ton, but the biggest roamed what is now the South Dakota Badlands. These giants clocked in at about 8 feet tall and 16 feet long. They are the relatives of modern tapirs, horses, and rhinos, and were equipped with Y-shaped horns on their noses. 

The team of researchers on this brontothere size evolution study peered back at the evidence from the family’s fossil record and a family tree of 276 known brontothere individuals. They were fortunate that the fossil record shows most of their evolutionary record, and the team generated computer models to track how the genetic traits of different brontothere species changed. 

They also conducted phylogenetic analysis, or an evaluation of the evolutionary avenues that causes a new species to take shape. This helped them determine how such evolutionary changes may be linked or connected to their increase in body size. 

The data showed that body size actually evolved in both directions across brontothere species. Some would evolve bigger, while other times a species would evolve smaller. They found that the smaller species were more prone to extinction compared to their bigger cousins, and a trend of bulkier brontotheres persisted longer than the smaller species emerged.  

[Related from PopSci+: An ancient era of global warming could hint at our scorching future.]

Towards the end of the Eocene, the remaining brontotheres were true thunder beasts. Their status as megaherbivores likely benefited the beasts, with the smaller animals being more vulnerable to become a carnivore’s dinner. Competition from other big and small herbivores could hardly stand up to the beasts, according to the study.

Unfortunately, at this same time, the climate drastically changed from a more humid herbivore’s paradise to something much more dry. The brontotheres thus lost their evolutionary advantages when the previously lush and green ecosystem dried up. They eventually went extinct about 34 million years ago.

Further research into this family could model the ecological factors like ancient climate shifts that affected how much edible vegetation covered the planet and how it led to the demise of these megaherbivores.

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It’s been just about 20 years since Finding Nemo was released in theaters and the lost “little clownfish from the reef” swam his way into our hearts. However, there is way more to coral reef fish than their beautiful scales and fictional tales. 

[Related: This rainbow reef fish is just as magical as it looks.]

A study published May 11 in the open access journal PLOS Biology found that some of the fish that live in anemones and reefs go through intense physiological changes when they switch from speedy swimming in the open ocean as larvae to settling down to life on the reef.  

Nemo and his young sea turtle pal named Squirt may have had a bit more in common than their age. Like sea turtles, many coral reef fish spawn away from where the animals will eventually settle and live. Adult coral reef fish spawn their larvae in the open ocean and the larvae swim against strong currents to get back to the reef where they will live as adults. Other bottom dwelling marine organisms like sea stars, corals, and urchins also follow this pattern. 

“These first weeks of life can be the most vulnerable for coral reef fishes, and if they don’t make it, that means they cannot grow up to be healthy adults and contribute to coral reef ecosystems,” co-author and James Cook University marine biologist Jodie L. Rummer told PopSci.

All of this swimming demands a lot of energy from the tiny fish, but then once they are settled on the reef floor, they must drastically switch gears and survive in a low-oxygen, or hypoxic, environment at night. 

To learn more about how this adjustment  works, the team collected daily measurements of the cinnamon anemonefish (Amphiprion melanopus) larvae’s swimming speed, oxygen update, and hypoxia tolerance. They observed them in a laboratory setting from the time that they hatched until when they settled down, usually around day nine of life.

“Coral reef fishes, including anemonefishes, as larvae are swimming among the fastest relative to their body size,” study co-author Adam Downie told PopSci. Downie is currently an animal physiologist at the University of Queensland in Australia and conducted the research as part of his PhD at James Cook University. “In our study, maximum speeds were over 12 centimeters [4.7 inches] per second, but for a fish that is the size of your pinky finger nail, that is 10-12 body lengths per second. Comparatively, relative to their size, larval coral reef fishes, including clownfish, outcompete most other marine life in a swimming test and all humans!”

Additionally, they saw that their hypoxia tolerance in the fish increased around day five while their oxygen intake decreased. To investigate how their bodies cope with these lack of oxygen, they sequenced mRNA from larvae of different ages to look for changes in gene activity that occurs during development. These physiological changes were correlated to areas of the gene where hemoglobin are produced and the activity of 2,470 genes changed during development.

[Related: Invasive rats are making some reef fish more peaceful, and that’s bad, actually.]

“These baby fish can change the expression patterns of certain genes that code for oxygen transporting and storage proteins just in time to cope with such low oxygen conditions on the reef,” said Rummer. “These proteins, like hemoglobin and myoglobin, are found in our bodies too and are important in getting oxygen from the environment and delivering it to the muscles, heart, and other organs. Indeed, timing is everything!”

The study found that relative to their body size, cinnamon anemonefish (also called cinnamon clownfish) larvae have the highest oxygen uptake rate of any bony fish currently measured. The genetic changes they can make to take in more oxygen underpin how reef fish can swim at speeds that would make even the most decorated Olympians envious. According to Downie, some studies have clocked clownfish at up to 50 body lengths per second, compared with Michael Phelps’ just under two body lengths per second. 

Since the effects of climate change threatens all marine life, the team believes that warmer ocean temperatures could impair clownfish swimming since the energy demands are so high. The warming waters put reef ecosystems at even more risk, in addition to coral bleaching, ocean acidification, disease, and more. 

“Next steps would be to see how different climate change stressors, such as temperature and pollutants may impact swimming performance of larval clownfishes and their ability to successfully transition from the open ocean to coral reefs,” said Downie. 

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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.

Onboard the Song of the Whale, spotting a cetacean comes with perks. “There is always a competition,” says Niall MacAllister, the boat’s skipper. Whoever sees the first whale, or the most whales, might be treated to a pint the next time the sailboat docks. Not that the people on this specially designed research vessel need extra motivation to watch for whales.

Since being built in 2004, the extra-quiet Song of the Whale and its crew have studied whales in western Europe, the Mediterranean, Greenland, and elsewhere. Right now, they’re off the coast of Massachusetts, where they’ve been trying to ensure a future for the North Atlantic right whale, a species in dire danger of extinction. That effort recently had them searching the water for a chemical clue they think might help predict the whales’ movements—and hopefully protect them from danger.

North Atlantic right whales have been called the “urban whale” because they live mostly along the bustling east coast of North America. Once nearly eradicated by whalers, the species bounced back to around 500 by the year 2010. But ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear continued to plague the whales, and they encountered further trouble in the past decade when the warming ocean pushed their prey northward. Following their food, the whales suddenly showed up in large numbers in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence.

“There weren’t any protections, and there wasn’t an expectation that they were going to be there. And it resulted in some pretty tragic deaths,” says Kathleen Collins, the marine campaign manager for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

As the whales had even more run-ins with ships, ropes, and other human hazards, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared an unusual mortality event starting in 2017. Today, there are thought to be fewer than 340 of the animals alive, with under 70 breeding females.

With the clock ticking, IFAW sent the Song of the Whale on a mission to follow the North Atlantic right whales up North America’s east coast. It’s a bid to learn what they can about the whales’ movements—including how to anticipate where they’ll be ahead of time.

In some ways, we know these whales intimately. Researchers can identify every living North Atlantic right whale by sight, and they maintain a catalog of the whales’ biographies. In other ways, though, the whales’ affairs are a mystery.

“One of the leading questions that we have in the larger scientific community is, Where are these right whales right now, and where are they going?” Collins says. “They’re notoriously hard to track.”

To protect them, it would be helpful to understand not just where the whales are now, but where they’re headed next. Scientists at NOAA’s Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary have put their hopes in the chemical dimethyl sulfide (DMS).

The molecule is made by phytoplankton, microscopic ocean algae. Its importance in understanding ocean food chains became apparent in the 1990s when Gabrielle Nevitt, a sensory ecologist at the University of California, Davis, was studying how certain Antarctic seabirds find krill to eat. The birds don’t seek out the fishy smell of the krill themselves, she found. Instead, the seabirds follow DMS. “They would track it like a little bloodhound,” Nevitt says.

Why follow DMS? The chemical tells seabirds that their prey are nearby having a meal of their own. DMS comes out of the tiny algae when krill or any other of the ocean’s miniature animals, called zooplankton, are eating them. “So as zooplankton crunch on phytoplankton, this DMS gas is just released into the water,” says David Wiley, a marine ecologist and research coordinator at Stellwagen.

Some fish also follow the smell of DMS to find food in coral reefs. Given the importance of DMS for various predators, Wiley and others wondered if right whales might be using the same cue.

Right whales are baleen whales, which means they fuel their massive bodies with minute crustaceans that they filter from gulps of seawater. We know what they eat, says Wiley, but “we don’t really know how whales find their food.”

Using a device that repeatedly tests the concentration of DMS in the water, Wiley and his colleagues have shown that higher concentrations of DMS correspond to denser patches of zooplankton. It’s not proof that whales, like birds and fish, follow the trail of DMS to find food. However, it shows that following that trail would work.

That’s why, this spring, Wiley joined the crew of the Song of the Whale to continue studying whether North Atlantic right whales are following the scent of DMS. As in his previous research, Wiley sampled the water for DMS. The team also recorded the locations of whales and, if they could, embarked on a smaller inflatable boat to sample the water closer to the animals.

Wiley says his preliminary data from this and other recent experiments shows that right whales—as well as another species called sei whales—are more likely to turn up in areas with higher DMS, suggesting they sniff the chemical out. “So far, all the data point to yes,” he says.

The crucial step will be to put this hypothesis into action. Now that Wiley and his colleagues have a strong suspicion that North Atlantic right whales are following DMS to find food, they hope their studies will reveal a specific threshold of DMS that predicts where the whales might soon come to feed.

If they can determine that, scientists could use sensing buoys or even satellite observations to gauge DMS concentrations in the ocean and warn local authorities, which could call for vessels to slow down or take other measures to limit the hazards to whales.

Such a system could someday join other ways scientists are trying to predict where whales will be, such as a project that tracks blue whales by modeling their movements based on environmental conditions, or one that finds humpbacks by looking for congregations of seabirds.

Nevitt, who discovered DMS sensing in seabirds, says working with DMS and getting timely, ecologically relevant measurements can be tricky. When it comes to following whales’ food, she says, “there might be less subtle indicators that are easier to measure.”

Whether it’s by following DMS or something else, efforts to predict North Atlantic right whales’ movements could help keep the teetering species alive so that future generations can spot them, too—perks or no.

“I’m optimistic that right whales, if left alone, can do fine,” Wiley says. “We just have to find ways to leave them alone.”

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Sadly, vitamins and supplements will not really keep the mosquitoes from biting you this summer, but scientists are still trying to figure out why the insects seem to love sucking some blood more than others.

[Related: How can we control mosquitos? Deactivate their sperm.]

In a small study published May 10 in the journal iScience, a team of researchers looked at the possible effects that soap has on mosquitoes. While some soaps did appear to repel the bugs and others attracted them, the effects varied greatly based on how the soap interacts with an individual’s unique odor profile.

“It’s remarkable that the same individual that is extremely attractive to mosquitoes when they are unwashed can be turned even more attractive to mosquitoes with one soap, and then become repellent or repulsive to mosquitoes with another soap,” co-author and Virginia Tech neuroethologist Clément Vinauger said in a statement.

Soaps and other stink-reducing products have been used for millennia, and while we know that they change our perception of another person’s natural body odor, it is less clear if soap also acts this way for mosquitoes. Since mosquitoes mainly feed on plant nectar and not animal blood alone, using plant-mimicking or plant-derived scents may confuse their decision making on what to feast on next.  

In the study, the team began by characterizing the chemical odors emitted by four human volunteers when unwashed and then after they had washed with four common brands of soap (Dial, Dove, Native, and Simple Truth). The odor profiles of the soaps themselves were also characterized. 

They found that each of the volunteers emitted their own unique odor profile and some of those odor profiles were more attractive to mosquitoes than others. The soap significantly changed the odor profiles, not just by adding some floral fragrances. 

“Everybody smells different, even after the application of soap; your physiological status, the way you live, what you eat, and the places you go all affect the way you smell,” co author and Virginia Tech biologist Chloé Lahondère said in a statement. “And soaps drastically change the way we smell, not only by adding chemicals, but also by causing variations in the emission of compounds that we are already naturally producing.”

The researchers then compared the relative attractiveness of each human volunteer–unwashed and an hour after using the four soaps–to Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. These mosquitoes are known to spread yellow fever, malaria, and Zika among other diseases. After mating, male mosquitoes feed mostly on nectar and females feed exclusively on blood, so the team exclusively tested the attractiveness using adult female mosquitoes who had recently mated. They also took out the effects of exhaled carbon dioxide by using fabrics that had absorbed the human’s odors instead of on the breathing humans themselves.   

[Related from PopSci+: Can a bold new plan to stop mosquitoes catch on?]

They found that soap-washing did impact the mosquitoes’ preferences, but the size and direction of this impact varied between the types of soap and humans. Washing with Dove and Simple Truth increased the attractiveness of some, but not all of the volunteers, and washing with Native soap tended to repel mosquitoes.

“What really matters to the mosquito is not the most abundant chemical, but rather the specific associations and combinations of chemicals, not only from the soap, but also from our personal body odors,” said Vinauger. “All of the soaps contained a chemical called limonene which is a known mosquito repellent, but in spite of that being the main chemical in all four soaps, three out of the four soaps we tested increased mosquitoes’ attraction.”

To look closer at the specific soap ingredients that could be attracting or repelling the insects, they analyzed the chemical compositions of the soaps. They identified four chemicals associated with mosquito attraction and three chemicals associated with repulsion. Two of the mosquito-repellers are a coconut-scented chemical that is a key component in American Bourbon and a floral compound that is used to treat scabies and lice. They combined these chemicals to test attractive and repellent odor blends and this concoction had strong impacts on mosquito preference.

“With these mixtures, we eliminated all the noise in the signal by only including those chemicals that the statistics were telling us are important for attraction or repulsion,” said Vinauger. “I would choose a coconut-scented soap if I wanted to reduce mosquito attraction.”

The team hopes to test these results using more varieties of soap and more people and explore how soap impacts mosquito preference over a longer period of time. 

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The piercing and malevolent gaze of Sauron, the powerful villain The Lord of the Rings, is being honored in a way that may even make Gandalf’s heroic eagles envious. A new genus of butterflies has been named Saurona in honor of one of fiction’s greatest villains.

[Related: Scientists Calculate Calories Needed To Walk To Mordor.]

With their fiery orange hindwings and piercingly dark eyespots, Saurona triangula and Saurona aurigera are the first two species described in this new genus, described in a study published April 10 in the journal Systematic Entomology. Scientists believe that there are more species within this genus waiting to be described.  

“Giving these butterflies an unusual name helps to draw attention to this underappreciated group,” study co-author and Senior Curator of Butterflies at London’s Natural History Museum Blanca Huertas said in a statement. “It shows that, even among a group of very similar-looking species, you can find beauty among the dullness. Naming a genus is not something that happens very often, and it’s even more rare to be able to name two at once. It was a great privilege to do so, and now means that we can start describing new species that we have uncovered as a result of this research.”

Saurona triangula and Saurona aurigera are the first butterflies to be named after the epic villain, but they are not the only animals named after Sauron and other characters from JRR Tolkien’s epic trilogy. A dinosaur (Sauroniops pachytholus) and an insect (Macropsis sauroni), and has also been named after the antagonist and his eye that constantly surveys the lands of Middle Earth. Sauron’s foil and heroic wizard Gandalf also has some animals named for him, including a species of crab, moth, and beetle and a group of fossil mammals. The tragic and troubled creature Gollum has fish, wasps, and fish named after him. 

Naming animals after fictional characters can help draw attention to them in the real world. A recent example comes from the devastating 2019-202 wildfires that struck Australia. The fires burned over 42 million acres and harmed 3 billion animals. Three Australian beetles that were devastated by the fires were named after Pokémon in an effort to attract conservation funding.

The Saurona butterflies are found in the southwestern Amazon rainforest and belong to a butterfly group Euptychiina. This group is difficult to tell apart by their physical characteristics alone, and the scientists on this study used genetic sequencing to help differentiate the new species.

“These butterflies are widely distributed in the tropical lowlands of the Americas, but despite their abundance they weren’t well-studied,” Blanca said. “Historically, the Euptychiina have been overlooked because they tend to be small, brown, and share a similar appearance. This has made them one of the most complex groups of butterflies in the tropics of the Americas.”

[Related: How are dinosaurs named?]

Even with major advances in DNA sequencing like target enrichment and Sanger sequencing that can produce vast amounts of DNA from samples, it took the team over 10 years to assess more than 400 different butterfly species. 

They deciphered the relations between groups and described nine new genera including one called Argenteria. In English, Argenteria translates to “silver mine,” and was named by Blanca and her team due to the silver scales on their wings. Argenteria currently has six species within the genus, but there are likely more out there waiting to be discovered.

The researchers on this study estimate they uncovered up to 20 percent more uncovered species than there were before the project began, and they hope to describe even more. More description will help scientists to better understand the relationships between the different species and the issues they face. 

“It’s important to study groups like the Euptychiina because it reveals that there are many species we didn’t know about, including rare and endemic ones,” said Blanca. “Some of these species are threatened with extinction, and so there’s a lot to do now we can put a name to them. There are also many other butterfly and insect groups that need attention so that they can be better understood and protected.”

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Scientists in Australia have just begun vaccinating wild koalas against chlamydia. This field trial in the state of New South Wales is an effort to protect one of Australia’s most beloved animals against the disease that can cause blindness, infertility, and death. The chlamydia epidemic in koalas has been ravaging populations of the marsupial since the 1990s. 

[Related: A new vaccine may curb the koala chlamydia epidemic.]

Koalas along the east and southeast Australian coasts have been particularly affected, with some populations having infection rates of up to 100 percent. In 2021, Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital veterinarian and research coordinator Amber Gillett called chlamydia one of the most significant threats to koalas and treatment after infection is not enough to save them. “Although many koalas with chlamydia can be treated using traditional antibiotics, some animals cannot be saved due to the severity of their infection. Having a vaccine that can help prevent both infection and the severity of the disease is a critical element in the species’ conservation management.”

While origins of the disease is koalas aren’t fully confirmed, but scientists believe that marsupials possibly caught the disease from exposure to the feces from infected cattle and sheep. Chlamydia then spread via sexual contact or was passed from mother to offspring.  

This single-shot vaccine has been designed just for koalas and was tested in a few hundred fluffy specimens in wildlife rescue centers. For this new field trial, the team hopes to catch, vaccinate, and subsequently monitor about half of the koala population living in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales–about 50 koalas. 

“It’s killing koalas because they become so sick they can’t climb trees to get food, or escape predators, and females can become infertile,” Samuel Phillips, a microbiologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast who helped to develop the new vaccine, told the Associated Press.

The first koalas were caught and vaccinated in March, and the effort is expected to last for three months. To find them, the team spots koalas in eucalyptus trees to then build circular enclosures around the base of the trees with doors that lead into cages. Eventually, the koalas climb down from one tree to get more eucalyptus leaves from another tree and wander into the traps.

They are then given a check-up to assess their health and given anesthesia before getting the vaccine. They are kept under observation for 24 hours after waking up to check for unexpected side effects, according to Jodie Wakeman, the veterinary care and clinical director at Friends of the Koala. The nonprofit organization runs a wildlife hospital where the koalas are getting vaccinated.

[Related: How to handle a koala-chlamydia epidemic.]

The koalas are marked with a pink dye on their backs so that the same animals are not caught twice before being released back into the wild. 

Australia’s federal government declared that the koalas in the eastern regions of New South Wales, Queensland, and the Australian Capital Territory were endangered. A 2020 report from the New South Wales government found that the unique creatures could become extinct by 2050 due to disease, road collisions, and habitat loss. Climate change is only exacerbating the problem.

The trial was approved by multiple Australian governing bodies balancing the risk of disturbing the marsupials against the danger of allowing chlamydia to continue to spread unchecked. It is one of only a few worldwide examples of scientists attempting to inoculate endangered wildlife for the purposes of conservation. In 2016, a team began to vaccinate Hawaiian monk seals morbillivirus and in 2020, biologists in Brazil started vaccinating golden lion tamarins against yellow fever.

“Vaccination for wildlife is certainly not routine yet,” Jacob Negrey, a biologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine told the AP. “But whether it should be used more often is a fundamental question that conservation biologists are really wrangling with right now.”

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The humble sea star is an ancient marine creature that possibly goes back about 480 million years. They are beloved in touch tanks in aquariums for their celestial shape, spongy skin, and arm suckers. These beautiful five-limbed echinoderms are also helping scientists figure out a crucial life process called tubulogenesis. 

[Related: What’s killing sea stars?]

A study published May 9 in the journal Nature Communications, examined this process of hollow tube formation in sea stars that provides a blueprint for how the organs of other creatures develop.

Tubulogenesis is the formation of various kinds of hollow, tube-like structures. in the body. These tubes eventually form blood vessels, digestive tracts, and even complex organs like the heart, kidneys and mammary glands. It is a basic and crucial process that occurs in the embryo stage, and abnormalities during these processes can cause dysfunctional, displaced, or non-symmetrical organs and even regeneration defects in structures like blood vessel. 

Little is known about the general mechanisms of the hollow tube formation during embryogenesis since animals all use very different strategies to form these tubular structures.

That’s where the sea star comes in. Their process of tubulogenesis is relatively easy to observe since their embryos are very transparent and can be observed without disturbing them. Not to mention, they breed in large numbers year round. This new study reveals the initiation and early stages of tube formation in the sea star Patiria miniata or bat star.

“Most of our organs are tubular, because they need to transport fluids or gasses or food or blood. And more complex organs like the heart start as a tube and then develop different structures. So, tubulogenesis is a very basic step to form all our organs,” study co-author and cell biologist Margherita Perillo of the University of Chicago-affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory said in a statement. 

Not only is the sea star an ideal because of its translucence, the researchers needed an animal that was along the base of the tree of life and evolved before the phylum Chordata– vertebrates including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, Perillo adds.

Perillo and her colleagues used CRISPR gene editing and other techniques to analyze the gene functions in the sea stars and long time-lapse videos of developing larvae. The team worked out how the sea star generates the tubes that branch out from its gut. From these observations, they could define the basic tools needed for more advanced chordate tubular organs that may have developed. Now, they are getting closer to answering how organisms developed up from one cell into the more complex 3D tubular structures that make up various organisms. 

According to Perillo, in some organisms such as flies, “there is a big round of cell proliferation before all the cells start to make very complex migration patterns to elongate, change their shapes, and become a tube.”

[Related: These urchin-eating sea stars might be helping us reduce carbon levels.]

In other animals, including mammals, cell proliferation and migration occur together. The team found that in sea stars, cells can also proliferate and migrate at the same time in order for the tubes to form the way they do in vertebrate formation. The mechanism behind making organs must have already been established at the base or root of chordate evolution, according to the team. 

Beyond providing evolutionary insights into organ formation, sea stars can also aid in biomedical research. Perillo found that a gene called Six1/2 is a key regulator of the branching process in tube formation. If Six1/2 is taken out of mice, their kidneys form abnormally, but the mice that lack the gene also resist tumor formation, even if they are injected with tumor cells. Understanding this gene, that is overexpressed in cancer cells, may lead to new ways to study disease progression.  

“I can now use this gene to understand not only how our organs develop, but what happens to organs when we have a disease, especially cancer,” said Perillo. “My hope is that, in five to 10 years maximum, we will be able to use this gene to test how organs develop cancer and how cancer becomes metastatic.”

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This article was originally published on Undark.

In 2018, news spread around Saroj Duru’s village that four elephants had gathered at a nearby lake. Such creatures didn’t typically visit her region in central India — they were known to stay further north in more forested habitats — and so, out of curiosity, Duru and her neighbors walked down to see them.

The elephants rested in the water as people jostled at the shore, trying to get a closer look. Others climbed trees for a better view. After an hour of savoring the thrill of seeing such large animals, Duru headed back home. She was not sure when she would see them again.

Instead, that same day, a herd rampaged through the village’s farms. “They tore our boundary wall and tore up our banana tree,” Duru said. “They uprooted the gate.”

She was terrified, and, like many of her neighbors, climbed up to her roof for safety. No villagers were killed that night, but the elephants ate budding rice seedlings, damaging the season’s crop.

Around three decades ago, elephants began to push into Chhattisgarh, the state where Duru is from, migrating southwest from their historical habitats. Scientists aren’t sure why they began to move, but some think they were pushed out as mining and other human activities devastated their home forests. India lost 1.6 million acres of forest between 2015 and 2020, second only to Brazil.

Those shifts have generated friction between humans and the pachyderms: Each year, elephants kill around 400 people in India, according to a 2020 study. Around 150 elephants die due to conflict with humans as well, with many more electrocuted by fences or struck by trains.

Now, many people — from farmers to forest service employees to elephant scientists — are working to understand the movements and behaviors of a species that’s been subject to decades of intensive conservation work. As farmers like Duru try to come to terms with their new neighbors, many researchers are developing a nuanced view of elephant life — one which focuses on them less as pests out to eat people’s hard-earned crops, and more as members of complex communities, with distinctive traditions and cultures, undergoing a series of pressures that can have tragic consequences.

In studying human-elephant conflict, researchers have often focused on mapping the animals’ movements and numbers, studying whole populations rather than zooming in on how a single elephant might weigh risk and reward.

“We’ve not really taken behavior as a core or the basis for our decisions,” said Nishant Srinivasaiah, an elephant behavior ecologist based in south India. While group data is also important, he and his colleagues believe researchers should pay more attention to how individual elephants make decisions, understanding them as highly intelligent animals attempting to navigate a changing environmental and social landscape.

An old debate in Indian conservation circles is whether humans have the right to their lives and livelihood in areas where they come up against wildlife, or whether the state should sometimes evict people to protect the animals. This already contentious argument fractures in places like Chhattisgarh, where the state is grappling with how to protect both communities.

Researchers across Asia, like Srinivasaiah, are trying to bridge this gap by gathering data to help understand the complex internal lives of elephants — and what interventions humans can make to nudge the animals away from conflict. When — and whether — those interventions might make a significant difference is still an open question.

It’s a blazing hot afternoon in December 2022, and Srinivasaiah deftly pilots his rugged Maruti Suzuki Gypsy through the narrow one-lane road of a village near the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary in south India. He eventually pulls up to a white concrete house, home to the field office of the Frontier Elephant Program, an interdisciplinary research group.

Srinivasaiah works in the southern state of Karnataka, far from Chhattisgarh. But he and his colleagues want to answer questions that are relevant to people like Duru: How do elephants make decisions about where to forage or migrate? Why has their social behavior changed over time? And how can the animals be nudged away from conflict?

Inside the group’s village office are two cots and a wide table where Srinivasaiah and his colleagues set up their laptops. The heart of the group’s tracking operations hangs on a wall: A large whiteboard that lists the status of the dozens of camera traps that the team has seeded in the deciduous forest near the village.

The devices are installed on trees at about four to five feet off the ground, and take photos when they detect movement. Researchers also follow elephants on foot to photograph them and observe their behavior. These thousands of images create a library of the activities, movement, and habits of hundreds of elephants in and around the 250,000-acre wildlife sanctuary. After spending countless hours sifting through photos, Srinivasaiah and his colleagues can often recognize an individual from the shape of an ear, a chipped tusk, a scar.

The team divides observed behaviors into three categories — affiliative interactions, when elephants bond with each other; agonistic behavior, when they exert dominance; and neutral or self-directed behavior, such as eating, flapping their ears, or dusting themselves. They track how often elephants engage in these behaviors, and the precise places they do them.

Using this information, the team can tease out subtleties of elephant interactions. For instance, researchers have long understood that adolescent male Asian elephants disperse from their natal herds, and generally live a relatively solitary lifestyle until they enter musth, the period during which they seek to mate. But Srinivasaiah has found that in areas populated by humans, bulls are starting to form long-lasting cohesive groups even when they are not raiding crops. In a 2019 study, Srinivasaiah and several colleagues speculated that the male elephants may choose to band together to survive threats from human development.

His team has also observed that, while elephants communicate audibly in forested areas, when they are near humans they switch to infrasound communication at a frequency below the range of human hearing. “Elephants are exhibiting something that is called third-order behavior, which is ‘I know that you know that I am here’,” he said. Only a few other species, such as dolphins and chimpanzees, exhibit this kind of plasticity, Srinivasaiah said.

Understanding these types of behaviors, he and other elephant researchers say, represents a shift in the field of human-elephant conflict. Rather than seeing the species as a monolith that responds to stimuli without variation, researchers are getting a better view of their complexity, which could in turn inform how the government designs interventions to reduce conflicts.

Srinivasaiah said that a newly popular intervention in India, born from the careful observation of elephant decision-making, might help to reduce conflicts. Elephants can dismantle regular electrified fences within months of encountering them for the first time, often just by pushing them down with large branches. In response to this behavior, a new kind of fence consists of lightly electrified wires, suspended several feet above the ground. The free-hanging wires sway in the breeze so that the elephants find it difficult to tear them down, even as they get buzzed by them.

Srinivasaiah’s hope is that the elephants will conclude the reward of passing a fence isn’t worth the pain and hassle. A prototype fence that the Frontier Elephant Program installed around a mango orchard in their study area has successfully kept elephants away for three years now. Elephants had previously raided the same orchard 38 times in the span of two years.

Increased development — such as urbanization and mining projects — means that more undisturbed elephant habitat will be converted to human use, leading to more human-elephant interactions, Srinivasaiah said. “Knowing elephants and how they are deciding their next move, that is critical for us,” he added.

In the 1980s, when researchers began to study how Asian elephants come into conflict with humans, the elephants themselves were on the move, part of a series of massive changes that have reshaped elephant — and human — life in India.

Entire elephant clans, led by their matriarchs, decided to move away from their original habitats in forested areas in southern and eastern India. One of the first recorded elephant migrations in India was in the early 1980s, when around 50 elephants moved from Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, across state boundaries to Andhra Pradesh.

Raman Sukumar, a pioneering elephant ecologist in India, had been observing that clan in a particular valley. “In 1983, my area’s elephants were suddenly not there,” he said.

Researchers outside of India have also noticed the strain that environmental pressures and poaching seem to put on elephant communities, leading to upheaval. Clans have moved to new places. Elephant behavior has shifted. In Kruger National Park in South Africa, researchers found that young elephants who had survived a mass culling suffered psychological distress similar to PTSD.

“Elephant society in Africa has been decimated by mass deaths and social breakdown from poaching, culls, and habitat loss,” a group of researchers wrote in Nature in 2005.

Similar shifts, happening over decades, are felt keenly in places like Gudrudih, where Duru and her neighbors have to adjust to new elephants.

In the nearby village of Borid, which sits adjacent to the Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary, elephants are a constant threat. People have changed their cultivation patterns after learning that elephants prefer some crops, such as rice, to others.

Locals feel like they have limited recourse. Under India’s Wild Life (Protection) Act of 1972, killing an elephant is punishable by three to seven years in prison which makes people wary of more violent action against the large mammals.

“We have no traditional way to chase elephants,” said Dashrath Khairwar, a farmer. Like others in the area, he believes that the government has conspired to relocate the elephants here from another forest.

Residents say the state has done little to help them adjust to their new neighbors. Though the state’s Forest Department has publicized a helpline for elephant sightings, locals say that they do not always get assistance when they call. Instead, they have to settle for compensation for crop losses of 500 to 700 rupees ($6 to $9) per acre. Saroj Duru said she received the equivalent of about $120 for three years of crop damage, and nothing at all for rebuilding her home compound.

Government officials told Undark in an interview that their interventions have been effective in cutting down on crop damage and loss of life. In 2019, state officials recorded damage to nearly 4,000 acres of agricultural land in Mahasamund district. Between January and July 2022, the state recorded only 2.2 acres of damage in the same district. However, Saroj Duru says that in 2022, around 10 to 15 people in just her village reported crop damage.

Pankaj Rajput, the highest-ranking forest official of the district, attributes the reduction in casualties and damage to a central government initiative called the Gaj Yatra, which roughly translates to Elephant Journey. Based on research by the Wildlife Trust of India, Gaj Yatra — which launched in 2017 — aims to sensitize people to protect elephants. The Forest Department alerts citizens about elephant movements through WhatsApp and educates people about how to engage with them.

In the 14 months since they implemented Gaj Yatra in his district, Rajput said in December, “we have had zero human deaths, zero human injuries and zero elephant deaths or injuries.”

In January 2022, however, a young elephant was killed in an illegal electrified fence in Mahasamund district, said resident Hemlata Rajput. Three people who set up the fence, she said, have been charged.

But, villagers said, the elephants are still there — and still feel like a constant threat.

In Borid, as in Gudrudih village, people are grappling with their own questions. Where did the animals come from? Are they going to be here forever? And can the villagers ever coexist with the elephants?

Like Srinivasaiah, other researchers are now working to understand individual elephant behavior in order to address those questions. “There is a growing focus on how ecological and behavioral data can be applied directly to human-elephant conflict mitigation,” said Joshua Plotnik, a comparative psychologist at Hunter College who studies elephants in Thailand.

In a 2022 paper, Plotnik and his colleagues reported on how elephants’ decisions to raid crop fields or interact with humans can be influenced by sensory information from scents or sounds. Mitigation strategies might target these senses, such as by burning chilies to prevent elephants from smelling crops; or by playing audio of matriarchal elephant groups — which male elephants tend to avoid when not sexually active — to deter the bulls from venturing to human settlements.

Such strategies tap into what researchers already know or are beginning to learn about disgust or disease-avoidance in elephants, as Plotnik and colleagues wrote about in a 2023 paper for the Journal of Animal Ecology.

But while scientists hope such research could lead to engineering solutions that minimize conflict, the fruits of their labor have not yet quite come to pass. Most interventions still rely on a one-size-fits-all approach rather than the more tailored technique that researchers such as Plotnik and Srinivasaiah envision.

If and when such interventions are developed, it’s also not certain that elephants won’t outsmart them. “It becomes sort of like an arms race,” as each new crop raiding solution is bested by the animals, said T.N.C. Vidya, a researcher of elephant socioecology and behavior at the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research.

“When you have things like conflict, usually the problem is that people are looking at the conflict from the human point of view,” said Vidya. It’s important, she added, to examine their behavior independent of humans and outside of conflict, “because that probably influences what they’re doing when they’re coming into conflict.”

Frontier elephants exist at the boundary of human-use landscapes, which makes clashes inevitable. And as those boundaries expand, such clashes are likely to increase in frequency.

For now, many people in India feel stuck — uncertain of how to respond to the elephants, reliant on government aid that they said is often not forthcoming, and forced to invest in costly interventions that may have limited effect.

Many of the measures that they can take to protect themselves imply huge long-term investments. In Nandbaru village, close to the Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary, a resident said the village government spent 250,000 rupees, or $3,000, to set up an electrified fence around their village over three years. At one point, an elephant got trapped inside that fence, leaving the entire village stuck inside the perimeter until the Forest Department was able to extricate it.

If elephants decide to move on, this will have been only a temporary deterrent. After a research team in Chhattisgarh radio collared elephants in the northern part of the state, they found that some of them have since moved further, leaving behind only the lingering memories of fear and uncertainty.

Khairwar, the farmer from Borid, lamented the indifference of the Forest Department. When people call helpline numbers for help to chase elephants away from fields, officials do not often come. “They come only after an incident happens,” he said. Resigned to having to deal with elephants for years to come, he added, “They are here to stay.”

Mridula Chari is an independent journalist covering development and the environment from Mumbai, India.

Reporting for this story was supported in part by a grant from the Keystone Foundation, an environmental and conservation advocacy organization based in Tamil Nadu, India, that focuses on sustainable development and indigenous rights.

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

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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.

Dead fish were everywhere, speckling the beach near town and extending onto the surrounding coastline. The sheer magnitude of the October 2021 die-off, when hundreds, possibly thousands, of herring washed up, is what sticks in the minds of the residents of Kotzebue, Alaska. Fish were “literally all over the beaches,” says Bob Schaeffer, a fisherman and elder from the Qikiqtaġruŋmiut tribe.

Despite the dramatic deaths, there was no apparent culprit. “We have no idea what caused it,” says Alex Whiting, the environmental program director for the Native Village of Kotzebue. He wonders if the die-off was a symptom of a problem he’s had his eye on for the past 15 years: blooms of toxic cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae, that have become increasingly noticeable in the waters around this remote Alaska town.

Kotzebue sits about 40 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, on Alaska’s western coastline. Before the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue had his name attached to the place in the 1800s, the region was called Qikiqtaġruk, meaning “place that is almost an island.” One side of the two-kilometer-long settlement is bordered by Kotzebue Sound, an offshoot of the Chukchi Sea, and the other by a lagoon. Planes, boats, and four-wheelers are the main modes of transportation. The only road out of town simply loops around the lagoon before heading back in.

In the middle of town, the Alaska Commercial Company sells food that’s popular in the lower 48—from cereal to apples to two-bite brownies—but the ocean is the real grocery store for many people in town. Alaska Natives, who make up about three-quarters of Kotzebue’s population, pull hundreds of kilograms of food out of the sea every year.

“We’re ocean people,” Schaeffer tells me. The two of us are crammed into the tiny cabin of Schaeffer’s fishing boat in the just-light hours of a drizzly September 2022 morning. We’re motoring toward a water-monitoring device that’s been moored in Kotzebue Sound all summer. On the bow, Ajit Subramaniam, a microbial oceanographer from Columbia University, New York, Whiting, and Schaeffer’s son Vince have their noses tucked into upturned collars to shield against the cold rain. We’re all there to collect a summer’s worth of information about cyanobacteria that might be poisoning the fish Schaeffer and many others depend on.

Huge colonies of algae are nothing new, and they’re often beneficial. In the spring, for example, increased light and nutrient levels cause phytoplankton to bloom, creating a microbial soup that feeds fish and invertebrates. But unlike many forms of algae, cyanobacteria can be dangerous. Some species can produce cyanotoxins that cause liver or neurological damage, and perhaps even cancer, in humans and other animals.

Many communities have fallen foul of cyanobacteria. Although many cyanobacteria can survive in the marine environment, freshwater blooms tend to garner more attention, and their effects can spread to brackish environments when streams and rivers carry them into the sea. In East Africa, for example, blooms in Lake Victoria are blamed for massive fish kills. People can also suffer: in an extreme case in 1996, 26 patients died after receiving treatment at a Brazilian hemodialysis center, and an investigation found cyanotoxins in the clinic’s water supply. More often, people who are exposed experience fevers, headaches, or vomiting.

When phytoplankton blooms decompose, whole ecosystems can take a hit. Rotting cyanobacteria rob the waters of oxygen, suffocating fish and other marine life. In the brackish waters of the Baltic Sea, cyanobacterial blooms contribute to deoxygenation of the deep water and harm the cod industry.

As climate change reshapes the Arctic, nobody knows how—or if—cyanotoxins will affect Alaskan people and wildlife. “I try not to be alarmist,” says Thomas Farrugia, coordinator of the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network, which researches, monitors, and raises awareness of harmful algal blooms around the state. “But it is something that we, I think, are just not quite prepared for right now.” Whiting and Subramaniam want to change that by figuring out why Kotzebue is playing host to cyanobacterial blooms and by creating a rapid response system that could eventually warn locals if their health is at risk.

Whiting’s cyanobacteria story started in 2008. One day while riding his bike home from work, he came across an arresting site: Kotzebue Sound had turned chartreuse, a color unlike anything he thought existed in nature. His first thought was, Where’s this paint coming from?

The story of cyanobacteria on this planet goes back about 1.9 billion years, however. As the first organisms to evolve photosynthesis, they’re often credited with bringing oxygen to Earth’s atmosphere, clearing the path for complex life forms such as ourselves.

Over their long history, cyanobacteria have evolved tricks that let them proliferate wildly when shifts in conditions such as nutrient levels or salinity kill off other microbes. “You can think of them as sort of the weedy species,” says Raphael Kudela, a phytoplankton ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Most microbes, for example, need a complex form of nitrogen that is sometimes only available in limited quantities to grow and reproduce, but the predominant cyanobacteria in Kotzebue Sound can use a simple form of nitrogen that’s found in virtually limitless quantities in the air.

Cyanotoxins are likely another tool that help cyanobacteria thrive, but researchers aren’t sure exactly how toxins benefit these microbes. Some scientists think they deter organisms that eat cyanobacteria, such as bigger plankton and fish. Hans Paerl, an aquatic ecologist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, favors another hypothesis: that toxins shield cyanobacteria from the potentially damaging astringent byproducts of photosynthesis.

Around the time when Kotzebue saw its first bloom, scientists were realizing that climate change would likely increase the frequency of cyanobacterial blooms, and what’s more, that blooms could spread from fresh water—long the focus of research—into adjacent brackish water. Kotzebue Sound’s blooms probably form in a nearby lake before flowing into the sea.

The latest science on cyanobacteria, however, had not reached Kotzebue in 2008. Instead, officers from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game tested the chartreuse water for petroleum and its byproducts. The tests came back negative, leaving Whiting stumped. “I had zero idea,” he says. It was biologist Lisa Clough, then from East Carolina University and now with the National Science Foundation, with whom Whiting had previously collaborated, who suggested he consider cyanobacteria. The following year, water sample analysis confirmed she was correct.

In 2017, Subramaniam visited Kotzebue as part of a research team studying sea ice dynamics. When Whiting learned that Subramaniam had a long-standing interest in cyanobacteria, “we just immediately clicked,” Subramaniam says.

The 2021 fish kill redoubled Whiting and Subramaniam’s enthusiasm for understanding how Kotzebue Sound’s microbial ecosystem could affect the town. A pathologist found damage to the dead fish’s gills, which may have been caused by the hard, spiky shells of diatoms (a type of algae), but the cause of the fish kill is still unclear. With so many of the town’s residents depending on fish as one of their food sources, that makes Subramaniam nervous. “If we don’t know what killed the fish, then it’s very difficult to address the question of, Is it safe to consume?” he says.

I watch the latest chapter of their collaboration from a crouched position on the deck of Schaeffer’s precipitously swaying fishing boat. Whiting reassures me that the one-piece flotation suit I’m wearing will save my life if I end up in the water, but I’m not keen to test that theory. Instead, I hold onto the boat with one hand and the phone I’m using to record video with the other while Whiting, Subramaniam, and Vince Schaeffer haul up a white-and-yellow contraption they moored in the ocean, rocking the boat in the process. Finally, a metal sphere about the diameter of a hula hoop emerges. From it projects a meter-long tube that contains a cyanobacteria sensor.

The sensor allows Whiting and Subramaniam to overcome a limitation that many researchers face: a cyanobacterial bloom is intense but fleeting, so “if you’re not here at the right time,” Subramaniam explains, “you’re not going to see it.” In contrast to the isolated measurements that researchers often rely on, the sensor had taken a reading every 10 minutes from the time it was deployed in June to this chilly September morning. By measuring levels of a fluorescent compound called phycocyanin, which is found only in cyanobacteria, they hope to correlate these species’ abundance with changes in water qualities such as salinity, temperature, and the presence of other forms of plankton.

Researchers are enthusiastic about the work because of its potential to protect the health of Alaskans, and because it could help them understand why blooms occur around the world. “That kind of high resolution is really valuable,” says Malin Olofsson, an aquatic biologist from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, who studies cyanobacteria in the Baltic Sea. By combining phycocyanin measurements with toxin measurements, the scientists hope to provide a more complete picture of the hazards facing Kotzebue, but right now Subramaniam’s priority is to understand which species of cyanobacteria are most common and what’s causing them to bloom.

Farrugia, from the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network, is excited about the possibility of using similar methods in other parts of Alaska to gain an overall view of where and when cyanobacteria are proliferating. Showing that the sensor works in one location “is definitely the first step,” he says.

Understanding the location and potential source of cyanobacterial blooms is only half the battle: the other question is what to do about them. In the Baltic Sea, where fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture has exacerbated blooms, neighboring countries have put a lot of effort into curtailing that runoff—and with success, Olofsson says. Kotzebue is not in an agricultural area, however, and instead some scientists have hypothesized that thawing permafrost may release nutrients that promote blooms. There’s not much anyone can do to prevent this, short of reversing the climate crisis. Some chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, show promise as ways to kill cyanobacteria and bring temporary relief from blooms without affecting ecosystems broadly, but so far chemical treatments haven’t provided permanent solutions.

Instead, Whiting is hoping to create a rapid response system so he can notify the town if a bloom is turning water and food toxic. But this will require building up Kotzebue’s research infrastructure. At the moment, Subramaniam prepares samples in the kitchen at the Selawik National Wildlife Refuge’s office, then sends them across the country to researchers, who can take days, sometimes even months, to analyze them. To make the work safer and faster, Whiting and Subramaniam are applying for funding to set up a lab in Kotzebue and possibly hire a technician who can process samples in-house. Getting a lab is “probably the best thing that could happen up here,” says Schaeffer. Subramaniam is hopeful that their efforts will pay off within the next year.

In the meantime, interest in cyanobacterial blooms is also popping up in other regions of Alaska. Emma Pate, the training coordinator and environmental planner for the Norton Sound Health Corporation, started a monitoring program after members of local tribes noticed increased numbers of algae in rivers and streams. In Utqiaġvik, on Alaska’s northern coast, locals have also started sampling for cyanobacteria, Farrugia says.

Whiting sees this work as filling a critical hole in Alaskans’ understanding of water quality. Regulatory agencies have yet to devise systems to protect Alaskans from the potential threat posed by cyanobacteria, so “somebody needs to do something,” he says. “We can’t all just be bumbling around in the dark waiting for a bunch of people to die.” Perhaps this sense of self-sufficiency, which has let Arctic people thrive on the frozen tundra for millennia, will once again get the job done.

The reporting for this article was partially funded by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing Taylor/Blakeslee Mentored Science Journalism Project Fellowship.

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There is truly no shortage of interesting courting and mating rituals throughout the animal kingdom. From trilobites “jousting” to win mates to the important pee sniffing rituals of giraffes, getting it on is serious business. And so is winning over a mate. 

[Related: Male California sea lions have gotten bigger and better at fighting.]

For the first time, scientists have found direct evidence that adult male woolly mammoths experienced an event called musth. Musth comes from the Hindi and Urdu word for intoxicated, and in the case of giant mammals like adult elephants, this is a testosterone-fueled event where the male sex hormone surges and aggression against rival males is heightened. 

The study, published online May 3 in the journal Nature, found evidence that testosterone levels are recorded within the growth layers of both elephant and mammoth tusks. In living male elephants, blood and urine tests recognized the elevated testosterone, but musth battles from its extinct relatives has only been inferred from to fossilized consequences of testosterone-fueled battle, such as pieces of tusk tips and skeletal injuries. 

In the study, an international team of researchers report the presence of annually recurring testosterone surges (up to 10 times higher than baseline levels) are present within a permafrost-preserved woolly mammoth tusk. 

The team sampled tusks from one adult African bull elephant from Botswana and two adult woolly mammoths: a male who roamed Siberia over 33,000 years ago and a roughly 5,597 year-old female that was discovered on Wrangel Island. This Arctic Ocean island used to be connected to northeast Siberia and is the last place where woolly mammoths survived up until about 4,000 years ago. 

“This study establishes dentin as a useful repository for some hormones and sets the stage for further advances in the developing field of paleoendocrinology,” study co-author and paleontologist at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology Michael Cherney said in a statement. “In addition to broad applications in zoology and paleontology, tooth-hormone records could support medical, forensic and archaeological studies.”

Hormones are signaling molecules that help regulate physiology and behavior. Testosterone in male vertebrates is part of the steroid group of hormones. Testosterone circulates throughout the bloodstream and accumulates in various tissues.   

[Related: How much acid should you give an elephant? These scientists learned the hard way.]

According the authors, their findings demonstrate that steroid records in teeth can provide scientists with meaningful biological information that can even persist for thousands of years.

“Tusks hold particular promise for reconstructing aspects of mammoth life history because they preserve a record of growth in layers of dentin that form throughout an individual’s life,” study co-author and U-M Museum of Paleontology curator Daniel Fisher said in a statement.  “Because musth is associated with dramatically elevated testosterone in modern elephants, it provides a starting point for assessing the feasibility of using hormones preserved in tusk growth records to investigate temporal changes in endocrine physiology.”

They team used CT scans to find the annual growth increments deep within the tusks, like tree rings. Modern elephant and ancient mammoth tusks are elongated upper incisor teeth, and only hold on to traces of testosterone and other steroid hormones. The chemical compounds are all incorporated into dentin, which is the mineralized tissue that makes up the interior portion of teeth. 

The study also required new methods to extract steroids from the tusk dentin with a mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometers identify chemical substances by sorting the ions present by their mass and charge. 

“We had developed steroid mass spectrometry methods for human blood and saliva samples, and we have used them extensively for clinical research studies. But never in a million years did I imagine that we would be using these techniques to explore ‘paleoendocrinology,'” study co-author and U-M endocrinologist Rich Auchus said in a statement. 

The results and the new measuring technique will likely further new approaches to investigating reproductive endocrinology, life history, and even disease patterns in modern and prehistoric context.

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The tiny country of Wales on the western coast of Great Britain may now be home to one of the world’s most unexpected fossil sites. Scientists found an “unusually well-preserved”  deposit of over 150 species from 462 million years ago. Interestingly enough, many of them have miniature bodies. The findings by an international team of scientists from the United Kingdom, China, Sweden are detailed in a study published May 1 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

[Related: These weird marine critters paved the way for the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of species.]

The “marine dwarf world,” as dubbed by the research team, is located in Castle Bank near Llandrindod, central Wales. Two of the study’s authors, Joe Botting and Lucy Muir,  found the site in 2020. Castle Bank is a rare site where the soft tissues and complete organisms are preserved. These specimens help scientists observe how life evolved over time. 

Similar fossil sites like the Burgess Shale fossil deposits in Canada date back 542 to 485 million years ago during the Cambrian period, when recognizable animals first appear in the fossil record. This period is known for a huge explosion of life on Earth. During the Cambrian, the origins of major animal groups still around today, such as mollusks, arthropods, and worms, occurred in what scientists call the Cambrian Explosion. 

The fossilized time capsule from Castle Bank is from the middle of the succeeding Ordovician Period, about 462 million years ago. The Ordovician was a critical time in the history of life when extraordinary diversification of animals occurred and more familiar ecosystems like coral reefs began to appear at the end of the period. Until now, a big gap has existed between thes Cambrian and Ordovician eras. Some of the fauna found at Castle Bank dating back to the middle of this time interval will help fill in evolutionary mysteries about animal shifts over time. 

The more than 150 species found at Castle Bank are almost all new. Many are less than an inch long, but contain tiny details in their bodies. They range from arthropods like crustaceans and horseshoe crabs to worms, sponges, starfish, and more. 

In some animals in the study, internal organs like digestive systems, the limbs of tiny arthropods, delicate filter-feeding tentacles, and even nerves have been preserved. According to the authors, exquisite detail like this is known from Cambrian specimens, but not previously from the Ordovician.

The range of fossils also includes several unusual discoveries, including unexpectedly late examples of animals from the Cambrian that look like the strange looking proto-arthropod opabiniids and slug-like wiwaxiids. Some of the early fossils also resemble modern goose barnacles, possible marine relatives of insects and cephalocarid shrimps, which have no fossil record at all.

[Related: This fossilized ‘ancient animal’ might be a bunch of old seaweed.]

“It coincides with the ‘great Ordovician biodiversification event’, when animals with hard skeletons were evolving rapidly,” Muir, a paleontologist and research fellow from the National Museum Wales, told the BBC. “For the first time, we will be able to see what the rest of the ecosystem was doing as well.”

These findings also have important implications for the evolution of sponges, particularly Hexactinellida. Also called a glass sponge, this animal is considered a transitional interval between sponges that the team have been studying for years. 

“Despite the extraordinary range of fossils already discovered, work has barely begun,” Botting, a paleontologist and research fellow at the National Museum Wales and Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the BBC. “Every time we go back, we find something new, and sometimes it’s something truly extraordinary. There are a lot of unanswered questions, and this site is going to keep producing new discoveries for decades.”

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BUMS. HEINIES. FANNIES. DERRIERES. Few muscles in the human body carry as much cultural clout as the gluteus maximus. “Butts are a bellwether,” writes journalist Heather Radke in her 2022 book Butts: A Backstory. Radke goes on to explain that our feelings about our hindquarters often have more to do with race, gender, and sex than with the actual meat of them. Unlike with a knee or an elbow, Radke argues, when it comes to the tuchus, we’re far more likely to think about form than function—even though it features the largest muscle in the human body. 

For all the scrutiny we spare them (outside of when we’re trying on new jeans) our butts aren’t mere aesthetic flourishes. A booty is, in fact, a unique feat of evolution: Out of any species, humans have the most junk in their trunks. Many other creatures have muscle and fat padding their backsides, and some even have butt cheeks. But none pack anything close to the same proportions as us.

So why did our ancestors develop such a unique cushion? Evolutionary biologists’ best guess is that our shapely rears help us walk upright. The curved pelvic bone that gives the butt its prominence likely developed as our weight moved upward and our muscular needs shifted. Research increasingly suggests that more massive muscles in the vicinity of the buttocks make for faster sprinting and better running endurance too. “The butt is an essential adaptation for the human ability to run steadily, for long distances, and without injury,” Radke writes. 

That said, the gluteus maximus does more than just keep us on our feet. The fat that sits atop it affects how we feel whenever we sit or lie down. The organs nestled behind those cheeks also have a massive influence on our health and wellbeing. Here are a few of the ways our bums factor into scientific understanding, lifesaving medicine, and the future of engineering. 

Digging deep for ancient backsides 

For as long as humans have been making art, they’ve been thinking about bodacious butts. The 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf is a famous pocket-size figurine carved by a Western European civilization during the Upper Paleolithic. The statuette, which some archaeologists suspect served as a fertility charm, immortalizes a body too thick to quit.

Scientists also love peeping at the actual posteriors of our early ancestors, which hold a broader archaeological significance in telling the stories of ancient people and their lifestyles. Differences in the pelvis and other sat-upon bones have long been used to determine the sexes of unearthed skeletal remains, though we know now there isn’t as clear-cut a binary as researchers long assumed. In 1972, anthropologist Kenneth Weiss flagged that experts were 12 percent more likely to classify skeletons found at dig sites as men versus women, which he blamed on a bias for marking indeterminate skeletons as male. Recent research bears that out, with anthropologists now designating many more remains as having a mix of pelvic characteristics (or simply being inconclusive) than they did historically. Still, while the distinction isn’t completely black and white, the signs of a body primed for or changed by childbirth are useful in figuring out the age and sex of ancient remains. Butt bones can also tell us about how people lived: This March, archaeologists published the oldest known evidence for human horseback riding in the journal Science Advances. They identified their 5,000-year-old equestrians—members of the Yamnaya culture, which spread from Eurasia throughout much of Europe around that same time—with the help of signs of wear and tear to hip sockets, thigh bones, and pelvises. 

Supporting heinies of all shapes and sizes

As Sharon Sonenblum, a principal research scientist at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, puts it, “What could be better than studying butts?” The Rehabilitation Engineering and Applied Research Lab that she’s part of is perhaps more aptly referred to by its acronym: REAR. 

Stephen Sprigle, a Georgia Tech professor in industrial design, bioengineering, and physiology, started REARLab with better solutions for wheelchair users in mind. A decade ago, he and Sonenblum saw the potential for an engineering-minded solution to the serious clinical problem of injuries from sitting or lying down for extended periods. Pressure sores and ulcers are a risk whenever soft tissue presses against a surface for a prolonged time, and they become more dangerous in hospital settings—where antibiotic-resistant bacteria often lurk—and in people with conditions that hinder wound healing, like diabetes. 

Sonenblum recalls that they set out to answer a deceptively simple question: What makes one backside different from another? To answer it, they had to put a whole lot of booties into an MRI scanner. Those imaging studies and others (including some done on supine patients) have provided an unprecedented amount of data about butt cheeks and the stuff inside them. 

The big headline, Sprigle says, is that “we’re big bags of water.” “What the skeleton does in that big bag of goo is totally fascinating,” he says. 

The work proved particularly humbling for Sonenblum, who’d intended to spend her career studying how the gluteus maximus affects seating. Instead, she and her colleagues figured out that humans don’t rest on muscle at all—the fat is what really counts. Sonenblum and the rest of the REARLab team are investigating how the natural padding in our rears changes over time, particularly in people who spend a lot of time sitting or supine.

Today, REARLab creates more precise computer models and “phantoms” to help cushion testing—mainly for wheelchair seats, but also for ergonomic chairs of all stripes—better account for real-world bums. Phantoms aren’t quite faux butts; they’re simple and scalable geometric shapes, almost like the convex version of a seat cushion designed for your tuchus to nestle into. They don’t account for bodies’ individual differences either. 

“Phantoms are always a tricky balance between time and representation,” Sonenblum says. “You want to represent the population well, but you can’t have too many or you’ll spend your entire life running tests.”

REARLab’s current approach is to use two shapes—elliptical and trigonometric—to represent a fuller backside and one more likely to pose biomechanical problems when seated, respectively. It would be reasonable to assume the trigonometric butt is the bonier of the two, Sonenblum says, but the reality isn’t so simple. Large individuals with lots of adipose tissue can still lose the round cushioning when they sit. 

“I’ve seen scans of butts that look like this, and when I do, I think, Wow, that’s a high-risk butt,” Sonenblum explains. It comes down to the quality of the tissue, she adds. “If you touch a lot of butts, you’ll find that the tissue changes for people who are at risk [of pressure injuries]. It feels different.”

Sonenblum and Sprigle hope that continued work on backside modeling, cushion-testing standards, and adipose analysis will help wheelchair users and patients confined to their beds for long stretches stay safer and more comfortable. But their work has implications for absolutely anyone who sits down. When asked what folks should take away from their studies, they’re both quick to answer: Move. People with limited mobility may not be able to avoid the loss of structural integrity in their butt tissue, but anyone with the ability to get up often and flex their muscles can keep that natural padding in prime health. 

Finding better bellwethers for bowel cancer

When it comes to protecting your posterior, it’s not just the bodacious bits of the outside that count. One of the biggest backside-related issues scientists are tackling today is the sharp rise in colorectal cancer, which starts with abnormal cell growth in the colon or rectum. It’s already the third-most-common cancer and second leading cause of cancer death, but it represents a mounting threat, especially for millennials. New cases of young-onset colorectal cancer (yoCRC)—defined as a diagnosis before age 50—have gone up by around 50 percent since the mid-1990s. 

Blake Buchalter, a postdoctoral fellow at Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute focused on cancer epidemiology, says that the most troubling thing about this recent uptick in cases is how little we know about what’s causing it. He and his colleagues suspect that 35- to 49-year-olds who die from colorectal cancer may share many of the same demographics and risk factors—higher body weight, lower activity levels, smoking, alcohol use, and diets high in processed and red meats—seen in patients aged 50 and older. But those under the age of 35 don’t follow those patterns as closely as expected. 

“This indicated to us that mortality among the youngest colorectal cancer patients may have different drivers than among older populations,” Buchalter says. “Our future work in this space aims to identify underlying factors that might be driving higher incidence and mortality among certain age groups in particular geographic regions.” 

Buchalter hopes that more granular data will encourage more granular screening guidelines too. While he was heartened to see the US Preventative Services Task Force shift the recommended colon cancer screening age down from 50 to 45 in 2021, it’s clear that some populations are at risk for the disease earlier, he says. Buchalter and his colleagues hope to zero in on who should be getting screened in their 20s and 30s. 

But colonoscopies, the most commonly recommended form of detection, present a major hurdle in themselves. A 2019 study found that only 60 percent of age-eligible US adults were up to date on their colorectal cancer screenings, with others citing fear, embarrassment, and logistical challenges such as transportation to explain their delayed colonoscopies. At-home fecal tests offer a less invasive alternative, but research shows that fear of a bad diagnosis and disgust with the idea of collecting and mailing samples still keep many folks from using them. Blood tests and colon capsule endoscopy (CCE), in which patients swallow a pill-size camera to allow doctors to examine the gastrointestinal tract, both show promise in supplementing, and perhaps someday replacing, the oft-dreaded colonoscopy.

For now, it’s worth going in for the physical screening if you can manage it. While blood and stool tests can accurately detect signs of the cancer, colonoscopies can actually help prevent it. During a standard colonoscopy, gastro­enterologists are able to identify and remove potentially precancerous polyps known as adenomas on the spot. No DIY kit can manage that.  

Tracking microbiomes with futuristic commodes

Meanwhile, other researchers are uncovering health secrets from long-ago water closets. In 2022, archaeologists uncovered what they believe to be the oldest flush toilet ever found, in Xi’an, China. The 2,400-year-old lavatory features a pipe leading to an outdoor pit. Researchers believe the commode, which was located inside a palace, allowed servants to wash waste out of sight with buckets of water. Flush toilets wouldn’t appear in Europe until the 1500s, and wouldn’t become commonplace until the late 19th century. Up until that point, major US cities employed fleets of “night soil men” to dig up and dispose of the contents of household privies and public loos.

As far as we’ve come from the days of night soil, the future of the humble toilet looks even brighter. Sonia Grego, an associate research professor in the Duke University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, says she’s “super-excited” to see commodes enter the 21st century. 

“Smart” toilets boast everything from app-controlled heated seats to detailed water-usage trackers, and could grow into a $13.5 billion industry by the end of the decade. But Grego’s team—the Duke Smart Toilet Lab at the Pratt School of Engineering—is focused on turning waste flushed down porcelain bowls into a noninvasive health tool. She envisions a future in which your toilet can warn you of impending flare-ups of gut conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, flag dietary deficiencies, and even screen for signs of cancer. 

“When we first started to work on the smart toilet for stool analysis, laboratory scientists were skeptical that accurate analytical results could be obtained from specimens that had been dropped in a toilet instead of a sterile collection container,” Grego recalls. “The perspective is very different now.”

Drawing inspiration from wild butts 

Humans may be unusually blessed in the butt-cheek department, but that doesn’t mean other animals’ rears hold less scientific appeal. From modeling the evolution of the anus to cracking the code on climate-friendly gut microbes, scientists are keeping close tabs on all sorts of animal bottoms. Some researchers are even hoping to harness the power of butt breathing—yes, actually breathing through your butt—for future applications in human medicine. 

We’ll circle back to backside breathing in a moment. First, let’s consider the wombat. While it’s true enough that everybody poops, these marsupials are the only animals known to drop cubes. For years, no one was quite sure how they managed to get a square peg out of a round hole. Some even assumed the wombat must have an anus designed for squeezing out blocks instead of cylinders. In 2020, mechanical engineers and wildlife ecologists at Georgia Tech teamed up to publish a surprising new explanation for the shape in the aptly named journal Soft Matter. They’d borrowed roadkill from Australia to do the first-ever close examination of a wombat’s intestines. By inflating the digestive tract and comparing it to more familiar pig intestines, they were able to show that the marsupial’s innards have more variation in elasticity: Instead of being fairly uniform throughout, the organs have some inflexible zones. The team’s findings suggest that a few nooks within the digestive system—some stretchy, others stiff—provide a means to shape the refuse into a square. 

Wombat butts themselves, by the by, are veritable buns of steel. Their rumps contain four fused bony plates surrounded by cartilage and fat and can be used to effectively plug up the entrance to a burrow when potential predators come sniffing around. While this has yet to be caught happening live, some scientists think wombats can even use their powerful bums to crush the skulls of intruders like foxes and dingoes who manage to make it inside. 

So now we have more clarity on how wombats poop cubes, but the question of why remains unanswered. Experts have posited that wombats communicate with one another by sniffing out the location of poop cubes, making it advantageous to produce turds less likely to roll out of place. Others argue that the unusual shape is a happy accident: Wombats can spend as long as a week digesting a single meal, with their intestines painstakingly squeezing out every possible drop of moisture to help them survive the arid conditions Down Under. Their entrails, when unwound, stretch some 33 feet—10 feet more than typical human guts—to help facilitate the frugal squeezing. When the species is raised in captivity with loads of food and water, their poops come out moister and rounder. 

Elsewhere in the world of scat science, folks are working to understand the secrets of nonhuman gut microbiomes. Earlier this year, biotechnologists at Washington State University showed that baby kangaroo feces could help make beef more eco-friendly. Joey guts contain microbes that produce acetic acid instead of methane, which cows burp out in such abundance that it significantly worsens climate change. By reseeding a simulated cow stomach with poop from a newborn kangaroo, researchers say they successfully converted the gut to a factory of acetic acid, which doesn’t trap heat in the atmosphere. They hope to try the transfer out in a real bovine sometime soon. 

Going back to the butt breathing, scientists are hoping to suss out how to give humans a superpower already exhibited by catfish and sea cucumbers. In 2021, Japanese researchers reported in the journal Med that they’d been able to keep rodents alive in oxygen-poor conditions by ventilating them through their anuses. Inspired by loaches—freshwater fish that can take in oxygen through their intestines—the scientists are trying to find new ways to help patients who can’t get enough air on their own. They’ve moved on to study pigs, which they say do wonderfully with a shot of perfluorodecalin (a liquid chemical that can carry large amounts of oxygen) up the bum. 

From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not all that surprising that our outbox can handle the same duties as our inbox. Though it’s still not clear which came first, it’s well established that the anus and the mouth develop out of the same rudimentary cell structures wherever they appear. Some of the most basic animals still use a single opening for all their digestive needs. And one creature—just one, as far as we know—has a “transient anus.”

In 2019, Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, demonstrated that the warty comb jelly creates new anuses as needed. Whenever sufficient waste builds up—which happens as often as every 10 minutes in young jellies—the gut bulges out enough to fuse with the creature’s epidermis, creating an opening for defecation. Then it closes right back up. It’s possible that the world’s first anuses followed the same on-demand model, proving yet again that the butt and its contents are worthy of our awe, curiosity, and respect.  

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It’s hard to imagine life without the nightshade family. It includes the likes of tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplants—some of the essential ingredients for a healthy diet–and delicious recipes. But, it turns out one of these tasty flowering plants has a longer history in North America than scientists previously believed. 

According to a March paper in the journal New Phytologist, the chili pepper may have been growing roots in present-day Colorado at least 50 million years ago—quite a bit earlier than scientists originally believed.  Previously, the chili pepper’s origin was placed 15 million years ago in South America. The newest theory emerged when a postdoc and an undergraduate student at University of Colorado-Boulder discovered a fossil of a plant that uncannily resembles the chili pepper, notably through its spiky ends on a fruiting stem called the calyx. 

“The world has maybe 300,000 plant species. The only plants with that kind of calyx is this group of 80 or 90 species,” Stacey Smith, senior author of the paper and associate professor of evolutionary biology at CU Boulder, said in a press release.

[Related: 5 heirloom foods that farmers want to bring back from obscurity.]

The well-preserved specimen was revealed in the Green River Formation, a site chock full of Eocene fossils and discoveries. But, it ended up not being as rare as the authors thought at first—two more similar chili pepper deposits from Green River were hidden in the CU Boulder collections and another at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. These fossils were uncovered in the 1990s, but it certainly isn’t unheard of for discoveries to lay in wait until the right scientists come along. 

The Green River Formation is a marvel for capturing the Eocene, which lasted from around 34 to 56 million years ago and marked the beginning of the era of mammals. During this epoch, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere was around double that of today, paving the way for palm trees to grow in Alaska and a lack of ice driving sea levels 500 feet higher than they are currently. 

So what could’ve happened that caused the gap between when chili peppers were evolving in Colorado and when they appeared in South America during the Miocene? The authors theorize that modern birds, which have been able to fly long distances for some 60 million years, could’ve carried seeds and plants in their poop or stuck to their bodies. 

Through birds, chili peppers would’ve made their way to South America. Since the latest discovery puts the evolution of chili peppers back to the days of Gondwana, transoceanic travel may have been unnecessary. Birds could simply fly across shorter watery distances or via a chain of volcanic islands, the scientists wrote in the new paper. 

[Related: Oldest evidence of digested plants in a roughly 575-million-year-old creature’s gut.]

Nevertheless, this discovery puts the oldest chili peppers in a place that no longer has many native nightshades or any chili peppers at all. “These chili peppers, a species that we thought arose in an evolutionary blink of an eye, have been around for a super long time,” Smith added. “We’re still coming to grips with this new timeline.”

So next time you break out a meal of Colorado-style chili, that bowl of goodness might have even more local roots that anyone realized.

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It wasn’t snakes on a plane to the Pacific islands of Tahiti and Moorea, but some very special snails. Over 5,000 of partula snails bred and raised at zoos in London, Scotland, and Missouri were flown over 9,000 miles to be reintroduced in the wild. 

[Related from PopSci+: Beavers, snails, and elephants are top grads from nature’s college of engineering.]

These ‘extinct in the wild’ partula snails (also called Polynesian tree snails) eat decaying plant tissue and fungi. They also play an important role in maintaining forest health. When invasive African giant land snails took over some islands in French Polynesia, the rosy wolf snail was introduced to solve the problem. Unfortunately, the rosy snails hunted down the native partula snails instead.

Returning partula snails back to the wild, in coordination with the French Polynesian Government’s Direction de l’environnement, is a step towards restoring some ecological balance in these islands.

“Despite their small size, these snails are of great cultural, ecological and scientific importance— they’re the Darwin’s finches of the snail world, having been researched for more than a century due to their isolated habitat providing the perfect conditions to study evolution,” the London Zoological Society curator of invertebrates Paul Pearce-Kell said in a statement. 

The nocturnal snails that measure less than an inch long were individually marked with a dot of red reflective paint before being released, so that the conservationists can track them better. The team reintroduced eight species and subspecies classified as Extinct-in-the-wild, Critically Endangered, or Vulnerable.

In the early 1990s, the last few surviving individuals of several Partula species were rescued and brought back to the London and Edinburgh Zoos for an international conservation breeding program that brought together 15 zoos. 

“After decades of work caring for these species in conservation zoos—and working with the Direction de l’environnement to prepare the islands for their return—we began releasing Partula snails back into the wild nine years ago,” said Pearce-Kell.

[Release: Large, destructive snails have invaded Florida.]

Eleven snail species have since been saved, including the last known individual of the Partula taeniata sumulans. This lone snail was brought to Edinburgh zoo in 2010 and was bred back to several hundred individuals. Unfortunately, the Partula faba wasn’t as lucky. The nine individuals at Edinburgh could not successfully breed in captivity and the species became extinct in 2016.

The zoos worked with the French Polynesian government to prepare the islands for their return to the wild nine years ago.

“Since then, we’ve reintroduced over 21,000 Partula snails to the islands, including 11 Extinct-in-the-wild species and sub-species: this year’s was the largest reintroduction so far, thanks to the incredible work of our international team efforts with collaborators,” said Pearce-Kell.

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This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

From the brightly colored poison frogs of South America to the prehistoric-looking newts of the Western US, the world is filled with beautiful, deadly amphibians. Just a few milligrams of the newt’s tetrodotoxin can be fatal, and some of those frogs make the most potent poisons found in nature.

In recent years, scientists have become increasingly interested in studying poisonous amphibians and are starting to unravel the mysteries they hold. How is it, for example, that the animals don’t poison themselves along with their would-be predators? And how exactly do the ones that ingest toxins in order to make themselves poisonous move those toxins from their stomachs to their skin?

Even the source of the poison is sometimes unclear. While some amphibians get their toxins from their diet, and many poisonous organisms get theirs from symbiotic bacteria living on their skin, still others may or may not make the toxins themselves — which has led scientists to rethink some classic hypotheses.

Deadly defenses

Over the long arc of evolution, animals have often turned to poisons as a means of defense. Unlike venoms — which are injected via fang, stinger, barb, or some other specialized structure for offensive or defensive purposes — poisons are generally defensive toxins a creature makes that must be ingested or absorbed before they take effect.

Amphibians tend to store their poisons in or on their skin, presumably to increase the likelihood that a potential predator is deterred or incapacitated before it can eat or grievously wound them. Many of their most powerful toxins — like tetrodotoxin, epibatidine and the bufotoxins originally found in toads — are poisons that interfere with proteins in cells, or mimic key signaling molecules, thus disrupting normal function.

That makes them highly effective deterrents against a wide range of predators, but it comes with a problem: The poisonous animals also have those susceptible proteins — so why don’t they get poisoned too?

It’s a question that evolutionary biologist Rebecca Tarvin took up when she was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Tarvin opted to study epibatidine, one of the most potent poisons of the thousand-plus known poison frog compounds. It’s found in frogs such as Anthony’s poison arrow frog (Epipedobates anthonyi), a small, ruddy creature with light-greenish-white splotches and stripes. Epibatidine binds to and activates a receptor for a nerve-signaling molecule called acetylcholine. This improper activation can cause seizures, paralysis and, eventually, death.

Tarvin hypothesized that the frogs, like some other poisonous animals, had evolved resistance to the toxin. She and her colleagues identified mutations in the genes for the acetylcholine receptor in three groups of poison frogs, then compared the activity of the receptor with and without the mutation in frog eggs. The mutations slightly changed the receptor’s shape, the team found, making epibatidine bind less effectively and limiting its neurotoxic effects.

That helps to solve one problem, but it presents another: The mutations would also prevent acetylcholine itself from binding effectively, which would disrupt normal nervous system functions. To address this second problem, Tarvin found, the three groups of frogs each have another mutation in the receptor protein that again changes the receptor’s shape in a way that allows acetylcholine to bind but still rejects epibatidine. “This is a series of very slight tweaks,” Tarvin says, which make the receptor less sensitive to epibatidine while still allowing acetylcholine to perform its usual neural duties.

Tarvin, now at the University of California, Berkeley, is researching how animals evolve to cope with toxins, using a more tractable experimental organism, the fruit fly. To that end, she and her colleagues fed food containing toxic nicotine to two lineages of fruit flies that differed in their ability to break down nicotine.

When the researchers exposed fly larvae to predators — parasitic wasps that laid eggs in the flies — both groups of flies were protected by the nicotine they ate, which killed off some of the developing parasites. But only the faster-metabolizing flies benefited from their toxic diet, because the slower-metabolizing flies suffered more from nicotine poisoning themselves.

Tarvin and her students are now working on an experiment to see if they can induce the evolution of adaptations, such as those she identified in the frogs’ proteins, by exposing generations of flies to nicotine and wasps, then breeding the flies that survive.

Fishing for poisons

Poisonous animals must do more than survive their own toxins; many of them also need a way to safely transport them in their bodies to where they’re needed for protection. Poison frogs, for instance — which obtain their toxins from certain ants and mites in their diet — must ship the toxins from their gut to skin glands.

Aurora Alvarez-Buylla, a biology PhD student at Stanford University, has been trying to nail down which genes and proteins the frogs use for this shipping. To do so, Alvarez-Buylla and her colleagues used a small molecule she describes as a “fishing hook” to catch proteins that bind to a toxin — pumiliotoxin — that the frogs ingest. One end of the hook is shaped like pumiliotoxin, while the other end bears a fluorescent dye. When a protein that would normally bind to pumiliotoxin instead latches onto the similar hook, the dye allows the researchers to identify the protein.

Alvarez-Buylla expected her hook to catch proteins similar to saxiphilin, which is thought to play a role in transporting toxins in frogs, or other proteins that transport vitamins. (Vitamins, like toxins, are usually scavenged from the diet and then moved around the body.) Instead, she and her fellow researchers found a new protein, similar to a human protein that transports the hormone cortisol. This new transporter, they found, can bind to multiple different toxic alkaloids found in different species of poison frogs. The similarity suggests that the frogs have borrowed the hormone-transporting system to also transport toxins, says Lauren O’Connell, Alvarez-Buylla’s PhD advisor at Stanford and a coauthor of the paper, which is still to be formally peer-reviewed.

This may explain why the frogs aren’t poisoned by the toxins, O’Connell says. Hormones often become active only when an enzyme cleaves their carrier, releasing the hormone into the bloodstream. Similarly, the new protein may bind to pumiliotoxin and other toxins and prevent them from coming into contact with parts of the frog nervous system where they could cause harm. Only when the toxins reach the right spot in the frogs’ skin would the toxin-carrying protein release them, into skin glands where they can be safely stored.

In future work, the scientists aim to understand exactly how the new protein can bind to several different types of toxins. Other known toxin-binding proteins, like saxiphilin, tend to bind tightly to just a single toxin. “What’s special about this protein is that it’s a little bit promiscuous in who it binds to, but also there’s some selectivity there,” says O’Connell. “How does that work?”

Turning toxic

While poison frogs definitively get their toxins from the food they eat, the source of toxins used by other poisonous amphibians is not always clear-cut. Amphibians such as toads, it appears, may make their own poisons.

To show this, TJ Firneno, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Denver, and his colleagues manually emptied the toxin glands of 10 species of toads by squeezing the glands (“It’s like popping a zit,” Firneno says, and is harmless to the toads), then looked at which genes were most active in those glands 48 hours later. The hypothesis, says Firneno, was that genes especially active after the glands are emptied could be involved in toxin synthesis.

Firneno and his colleagues identified several activated genes that are known to be part of metabolic pathways for creating molecules related to toxins in plants and insects. The genes they identified, Firneno says, can help point scientists in the right direction for further investigations into how toads may make their toxins.

Other amphibians may rely on symbiotic bacteria for their toxins. In the United States, newts of the genus Taricha are among the country’s most toxic animals. Though they look harmless, individual newts from some populations of these ancient creatures contain enough tetrodotoxin to kill numerous people. Many scientists believed the newts made the toxin themselves. But when a team of researchers collected bacteria from the newts’ skin, then cultured individual microbial strains, they found four types of tetrodotoxin-producing bacteria on the amphibians’ skin. That’s similar to other tetrodotoxin-containing species, such as crabs and sea urchins, where scientists agree that bacteria are the source of the toxin.

The origin of the toxin in these newts has broader ramifications, because they — and the garter snakes that eat them — are poster animals for what has been considered a classic example of coevolution. The snakes’ ability to eat the highly toxic newts is evidence that they have coevolved with the newts, gaining resistance so that they can continue to eat them, some scientists think. Meanwhile, the newts, the idea goes, have been evolving ever-greater toxicity to try and keep the snakes at bay. Scientists refer to this kind of escalating competition as an evolutionary arms race.

But in order for the newts to participate in such an arms race, they have to have genetic control of the amount of toxin they produce so that natural selection can act, says Gary Bucciarelli, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis, who coauthored a re-evaluation of the arms race idea in the 2022 Annual Review of Animal Biosciences. If the tetrodotoxin actually comes from bacteria on the newts’ skin, it’s harder to see how the newts could turn up the toxicity. The newts could conceivably coerce the bacteria to pump out more tetrodotoxin, Bucciarelli says, but there’s no evidence that this happens. “It’s certainly not this very tightly linked, antagonistic relationship between newts and garter snakes,” he says.

Indeed, at the field sites where Bucciarelli works in California, he’s never actually witnessed a garter snake eating a newt. “If you follow the literature, you’d think that there are snakes just picking off newts like crazy at the edge of a stream or a pond. You just don’t see that,” he says. Instead, the snakes’ resistance to tetrodotoxin could have arisen for some other reason, or even by evolutionary happenstance, he says.

The newts’ toxin source is far from nailed down, though. “Just because you have bacteria that do something that live on your skin, doesn’t mean that’s the source in newts,” says biologist Edmund Brodie III, who was among the scientists that first put forward the arms race hypothesis between the snakes and newts more than 30 years ago. Brodie notes that other researchers have found that newts contain molecules that, based on their structures, may be part of a biological pathway for newts to synthesize their own tetrodotoxin. Still, Brodie says of the study showing that bacteria found on the newts can produce tetrodotoxin, “it’s the best thing we have so far.”

Brodie’s instinct is that one way or the other, the newts control their tetrodotoxin production, whether that’s by making the tetrodotoxin themselves or somehow manipulating their bacteria. The presence of bacteria as a third player in the newt-snake war would just make it an even more interesting system, he says.

One major barrier in determining whether the newts can make tetrodotoxin on their own is that no full genome has been published for Taricha newts. “They have one of the largest genomes of any animal we know of,” says Brodie.

Studying the ways that poison animals adapt and use toxins, just like much basic science research, has inherent interest for researchers who seek to understand the world around us. But as climate change and habitat destruction contribute to an ongoing loss of biodiversity that has hit amphibians especially hard, we’re losing species that not only have intrinsic importance as unique organisms but are also sources of potentially lifesaving and life-improving medicines, says Tarvin.

Epibatidine, tetrodotoxin and related compounds, for example, have been investigated as potential non-opioid painkillers when administered in tiny, controlled doses.

“We’re losing these chemicals,” Tarvin says. “You could call them endangered chemical diversity.”

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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.

They found the victims floating in the water. Some had eyeballs full of air bubbles, others had their stomachs pushed up into their mouths. Many had severe internal bleeding.

Volcanoes can be life-threatening for fish. A major eruption in 2011 in Chile, for instance, killed 4.5 million of them. Researchers have studied how lava flows, hot gases, and deadly debris can cause mass die-offs or even cut fish off from the sea in suddenly landlocked lakes. But few have been able to document in detail the grisly fates experienced by the unlucky fish that find themselves at the mercy of an angry volcano. That’s why when one erupted underwater off the coast of El Hierro in the Canary Islands for 150 days in late 2011 and early 2012, researchers including Ayoze Castro Alonso at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria saw the perfect opportunity to study the intricacies of these piscine casualties.

Ten years later, the devastating eruption of a terrestrial volcano on nearby La Palma, another of the Canary Islands, gave Alonso and his colleagues a chance to see an altogether different way that volcanoes can butcher unsuspecting fish—by overwhelming them with debris.

The scientists detail in a new paper the shocking injuries suffered by 49 fishes killed by the El Hierro eruption and 14 fishes killed by the volcanism near La Palma. “It’s a volcanic eruption in both cases, but the pathological syndromes are completely different,” says Alonso. “One is acute, the other is chronic.”

The underwater eruption near El Hierro superheated the water by as much as 19 °C, reduced the oxygen level, and rapidly acidified the ocean. Alonso and his colleagues found fishes with gas bubbles in their bodies. The team concluded the injuries occurred while the fishes were still alive because the scientists found inflammatory cells indicative of physical trauma and a severe build-up of blood in the fishes’ tissues.

The researchers’ detailed necropsies also hint that the fishes made a fateful dash for safety. Once the El Hierro eruption was underway, Alonso says, the fishes ascended rapidly. “They tried to escape,” he says.

As the fishes swam upward, sudden depressurization likely caused the gases dissolved in their bodies to bubble out, accounting for the bubbles in their eyes and under their skin. Depressurization would also explain why the animals’ stomachs were pushed up into their mouths and why some had overinflated swim bladders. These gas-filled organs expand when fish rise toward the surface.

On La Palma, though, molten lava flowed over land and into the ocean where the sudden clash with cold water quenched it into a glassy rock known as hyaloclastite. Within a week, huge clouds of volcanic ash settled into the water. Fish died after their gills became clogged with ash, or after their digestive tracts were impacted with fragments of glassy hyaloclastite.

Some of the findings are familiar to Todd Crowl, an ecosystem scientist at Florida International University who was not involved in the current study but who witnessed an eruption on Dominica in the Caribbean during the 1990s. A few centimeters of ash fell on the island, Crowl says, contaminating streams and killing thousands of filter-feeding shrimp. “All that ash just completely clogged up [the shrimp’s] filters,” he says.

Alonso and his colleagues’ research is the first to analyze the wounds fish suffer during a volcanic eruption in such detail—in part because getting access to the victims while their bodies are still fresh is incredibly difficult. After the eruptions at El Hierro and La Palma, local officials gathered up stricken fishes and shipped them on ice to the researchers within a matter of days.

Crowl says this rapid collection let the scientists conduct their analyses before the fishes rotted away. “We get fish kills all the time in Florida because of algal blooms and stuff like that,” Crowl says. “But by the time we get the specimens, there’s lots of degradation.”

Volcano ecologist Charlie Crisafulli, formerly of the US Forest Service, who was not involved in the work, agrees that the study of such fresh victims is novel: “We haven’t seen this before.” However, Crisafulli isn’t certain that the fishes killed by the El Hierro eruption actively tried to flee. Alternatively, they might have been stunned by the rapid changes in their environment and simply floated upward in a state of shock.

Though all of this seems deeply unpleasant, Crisafulli stresses there is a bigger picture here worth thinking about. Volcanoes kill, but they also create. Eruptions contribute nutrients to the environment, and lava flows build new land—sometimes entire islands.

“With this so-called destruction and loss of life, also there’s the creation of new habitats,” Crisafulli says. “What was initially a loss ends up becoming a gain through time.”

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

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This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Driving north on state Highway 66 through the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in central Montana, it’s easy to miss a small herd of bison lounging just off the road behind an 8-foot fence. Each winter, heavy snows drive bison out of Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park – the only place in the U.S. where they have lived continuously since prehistoric times – and into Montana, where they are either killed or shipped off to tribal lands to avoid conflict with cattle ranchers.

In the winter of 2022-2023 alone, over 1,500 bison have been “removed,” about 25% of Yellowstone’s entire population. The bison at Fort Belknap are refugees that have been trucked 300 miles to the reservation from past Yellowstone winter culls.

Although bison are the U.S. national mammal, they exist in small and fragmented populations across the West. The federal government is working to restore healthy wild bison populations, relying heavily on sovereign tribal lands to house them.

Indeed, tribal lands are the great wildlife refuges of the prairie. Fort Belknap is the only place in Montana where bison, critically endangered black-footed ferrets and swift foxes, which occupy about 40% of their historic range, all have been restored.

But Indigenous communities can’t and shouldn’t be solely responsible for restoring wildlife. As an ecologist who studies prairie ecosystems, I believe that conserving grassland wildlife in the U.S. Great Plains and elsewhere will require public and private organizations to work together to create new, larger protected areas where these species can roam.

Rethinking how protected areas are made

At a global scale, conservationists have done a remarkable job of conserving land, creating over 6,000 terrestrial protected areas per year over the past decade. But small has become the norm. The average size of newly created protected areas over that time frame is 23 square miles (60 square kilometers), down from 119 square miles (308 square kilometers) during the 1970s.

Creating large new protected areas is hard. As the human population grows, fewer and fewer places are available to be set aside for conservation. But conserving large areas is important because it makes it possible to restore critical ecological processes like migration and to sustain populations of endangered wildlife like bison that need room to roam.

Creating an extensive protected area in the Great Plains is particularly difficult because this area was largely passed over when the U.S. national park system was created. But it’s becoming clear that it is possible to create large protected areas through nontraditional methods.

Consider American Prairie, a nonprofit that is working to stitch together public and tribal lands to create a Connecticut-sized protected area for grassland wildlife in Montana. Since 2004, American Prairie has made 37 land purchases and amassed a habitat base of 460,000 acres (about 720 square miles, or 1,865 square kilometers).

Similarly, in Australia, nonprofits are making staggering progress in conserving land while government agencies struggle with funding cuts and bureaucratic hurdles. Today, Australia is second only to the U.S. in its amount of land managed privately for conservation.

Big ideas make room for smaller actions

Having worked to conserve wildlife in this region for over 20 years, I have seen firsthand that by setting a sweeping goal of connecting 3.2 million acres (5,000 square miles, or 13,000 square kilometers), American Prairie has reframed the scale at which conservation success is measured in the Great Plains. By raising the bar for land protection, they have made other conservation organizations seem more moderate and created new opportunities for those groups.

One leading beneficiary is The Nature Conservancy, which owns the 60,000-acre Matador Ranch within the American Prairie focal area. When the conservancy first purchased the property, local ranchers were skeptical. But that skepticism has turned to support because the conservancy isn’t trying to create a protected area.

Instead, it uses the ranch as a grassbank – a place where ranchers can graze cattle at a low cost, and in return, pledge to follow wildlife-friendly practices on their own land, such as altering fences to allow migratory pronghorn to slip underneath. Via the grassbank, ranchers are now using these wildlife conservation techniques on an additional 240,000 acres of private property.

Other moderate conservation organizations are also working with ranchers. For example, this year the Bezos Earth Fund has contributed heavily to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s annual grants program, helping to make a record $US16 million available to reward ranchers for taking wildlife-friendly actions.

A collective model for achieving a large-scale protected area in the region has taken shape. American Prairie provides the vision and acts to link large tracts of protected land for restoring wildlife. Other organizations work with surrounding landowners to increase tolerance toward wildlife so those animals can move about more freely.

Instead of aiming to create a single polygon of protected land on a map, this new approach seeks to assemble a large protected area with diverse owners who all benefit from participating. Rather than excluding people, it integrates local communities to achieve large-scale conservation.

A global pathway to 30×30

This Montana example is not unique. In a recent study, colleagues and I found that when conservationists propose creating very large protected areas, they transform conservation discussions and draw in other organizations that together can achieve big results.

Many recent successes started with a single actor leading the charge. Perhaps the most notable example is the recently created Cook Islands Marine Park, also known as Marae Moana, which covers 735,000 square miles (1.9 million square kilometers) in the South Pacific. The reserve’s origin can be traced back to Kevin Iro, an outspoken former professional rugby player and member of the islands’ tourism board.

While some individual conservation organizations have found that this strategy works, global, national and local policymakers are not setting comparable large-scale targets as they discuss how to meet an ambitious worldwide goal of protecting 30% of the planet for wildlife by 2030. The 30×30 target was adopted by 190 countries at an international conference in 2022 on saving biodiversity.

Critics argue that large protected areas are too complicated to create and too expensive to maintain, or that they exclude local communities. However, new models show that there is a sustainable and inclusive way to move forward.

In my view, 30×30 policymakers should act boldly and include large protected area targets in current policies. Past experience shows that failing to do so will mean that future protected areas become smaller and smaller and ultimately fail to address Earth’s biodiversity crisis.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In response to climate change, a lot of animals—such as polar bears and birds like sparrows—appear to be getting smaller in size. However, male California sea lions have increased their average body size even as their population has grown and the competition for food and resources has increased. 

In a study published April 27 in the journal Current Biology found that sex selection was a strong driving force for the male sea lions to strengthen the neck and jaw muscles that they use to fight for mate and to grow larger. Additionally, both male and female sea lions responded to food shortages by diversifying their diets and foraging further from the shore in some cases.

[Related: Fish populations thrive near marine protected areas—and so do fishers.]

Numerous marine species have rebounded a bit since the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in 1972, but California sea lions are notable for the size and duration of their population increase. The number of breeding females have tripled since the 1970s and the population growth is only beginning to plateau now. 

“Body size reduction is not the universal response to population increase in marine predators,” co-author and University of California Santa Cruz and the Smithsonian Institution paleoecologist  Ana Valenzuela-Toro said in a statement. “California sea lions were very resilient over the decades that we sampled and were able to overcome increasing competition thanks to prey availability. They’re like the raccoons of the sea: they can consume almost everything, and they can compensate if something is lacking.”

In the study, the team analyzed museum specimens of adult male and female California sea lions that were collected between 1962 and 2008. To estimate changes in body size, they then compared the overall size of over 300 sea lion skulls, taking into account other skull features like the size of muscle attachment points, to assess the changes made in both neck flexibility and biting force.

To get an idea of where the sea lions were foraging and what they were eating, the team took tiny bone samples from the skulls and measured their stable carbon and nitrogen isotope composition. “Carbon provides information about habitat use—whether they’re foraging along the coast or offshore—and nitrogen provides insights about the trophic level of their prey, for example if they’re consuming smaller or larger fish,” said Valenzuela-Toro.

The team found that overall the male sea lions have increased in size, while females have remained stable. They believe that the sex difference is likely due to the fact that size matters more for a male in terms of mating success. “One male can breed with many females, and males in the breeding colony fight with each other to establish their territory,” said Valenzuela-Toro. “Bigger males are more competitive during physical fights, and they can go longer without eating, so they can stay and defend their territory for longer.”

[Related: For marine life to survive, we must cut carbon emissions.]

The male sea lions also increased their biting force and neck flexibility over this same time period. This allows them to move their heads more with greater agility and bite harder when fighting other males. 

The isotopic analyses showed that both sexes managed to meet nutritional needs through diet diversification and going further north for food. Female sea lions consistently had a more diverse diet than the male sea lions, and the authors suggest that this flexibility in food choice may be what allowed females to maintain average body size. 

The flexibility can only take sea lions so far, however, and climate change is putting their future in jeopardy. The dynamics that allowed for this growth occurred when their prey of sardines and anchovies were plentiful, and the populations of both fish have collapsed in recent years. The California sea lions have continued to diversify their diets to compensate, but are struggling. 

“As climate change progresses, prey availability of sardines and anchovies will decrease even more, and eventually we will have more permanent El Niño-like warming conditions, reducing the size and causing a poleward shift of these and other pelagic fishes,” said Valenzuela-Toro “It will be a really hostile environment for California sea lions, and eventually we expect that their population size will stop growing and actually decline.”

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Looking at poop can tell us a lot. Poop offers a window into all sorts of hidden worlds: bird microbiomes, clam habitats, recovering coral forests, and more. 

Excrement can also tell us about how and when animals went extinct thousands of years ago. A study published April 26 in the journal Quaternary Research looked at the fungal spores in the dung of the large animals, such as 20-foot-tall ground sloths and 1,000 pound armadillo-looking animals called armored glyptodonts, that roamed the Colombian Andes in South America during the Pleistocene. 

[Related: Ancient poop proves that humans have always loved beer and cheese.]

They found that the animals became extinct in not one, but two waves. The megafauna in this study first became locally extinct at Pantano de Monquentiva, a valley in Colombia surrounded by hills and near a bog, about 23,000 years ago and then again in the same area about 11,000 years ago. 

Spores of coprophilous fungi pass through the guts of these megafauna during their life cycle. The presence of these spores in sediment samples provides evidence that these long-extinct animals lived in a certain place and time. 

The team used samples found in a peat bog in Pantano de Monquentiva, about 37 miles from Bogota, Colombia. The findings offer a window back in time to better understand how the disappearance of large animals could transform ecosystems like they did all those millennia ago. 

“We know that large animals such as elephants play a vital role in regulating ecosystems, for example by eating and trampling vegetation,” Dunia H. Urrego, co-author and University of Exeter biologist and geographer, said in a statement. “By analyzing samples of fungal spores, as well as pollen and charcoal, we were able to track the extinction of large animals, and the consequences of this extinction for plant abundance and fire activity.

The team found that the Monquentiva ecosystem changed dramatically when the megafauna disappeared, with different plant species thriving and increased wildfires. The analysis of the fungal spores didn’t tell exactly which large animals were present, but it’s possible that the animals were either the giant sloth and armadillo, or even macrauchenids and toxodonts, two peculiar extinct animals reminiscent of today’s camels and rhinoceroses.

[Related: Our bravest ancestors may have hunted giant sloths.]

The study also found that when all of this plentiful megafauna disappeared, it had major effects on the ecosystem. Roughly 5,000 years after their disappearance, the megafauna began to live again. This reprieve was short lived, and they all went extinct in a second wave of extinction 11,000 years ago. While the team does not know the direct causes of this, a number of factors like plant extinctions, climate changes, increased hunting by humans, and even a meteorite spike are potential causes.

“After the megafauna vanished, plant species at Monquentiva transitioned, with more woody and palatable plants (those favored by grazing animals), and the loss of plants that depend on seed dispersal by animals,” co-author and geographer also at the University of Exeter Felix Pym said in a statement.  “Wildfires became more common after the megafauna extinctions – presumably because flammable plants were no longer being eaten or trampled upon. 

With the planet’s current biodiversity crisis in mind, the study points to the importance of conserving local plants and watching fire activity before the value humans gain from nature completely disappears. 

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The unusual looking mudskipper has a startling face, and a fascinating backstory. The fish is actually amphibious and has evolved traits that ensure its survival in both water and on land. They have eyes on the top of their heads for better aerial vision and also use oxygen from their water stored in their gill chambers to breathe on land. However, the mudflat-dwelling fish’s ability to blink its eyes is shedding light on how our own ancestors evolved from living in the water to walking on land.

A study published April 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that the blinking behavior serves many of the same functions of our blinking, and it may be part of that suite of traits that allowed tetrapods to evolve on land. Tetrapods are the group of animals, including today’s amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals, that evolved to exist on land in a rapid turn of events roughly 375 million years ago.

[Related: Our four-legged ancestors evolved from sea to land astonishingly quickly.]

Animals blink to keep the eyes wet and clean and protect them from injury. Sometimes, blinking can even be a form of communication. Humans and other tetrapods blink constantly through the day and despite it being a subtle action, it is quite complex. Strangely enough, mudskipper’s blink lasts roughly the same length of time as a human’s. 

“Studying how this behavior first evolved has been challenging because the anatomical changes that allow blinking are mostly in soft tissues, which don’t preserve well in the fossil record,” co-autor and Penn State University biologist Thomas Stewart said in a statement. “The mudskipper, which evolved its blinking behavior independently, gives us the opportunity to test how and why blinking might have evolved in a living fish that regularly leaves the water to spend time on land.”

To better understand how mudskippers evolved the ability to blink, the team analyzed blinking using high-speed videos. They compared the mudskippers’ anatomy with a closely related water-bound fish that doesn’t blink. Mudskippers blink with eyes that bulge out of the top of their heads, similar to a frog’s eyes. They momentarily retract their eyes down into the sockets, when they are covered by a sketchy membrane called a dermal cup. 

“Blinking in mudskippers appears to have evolved through a rearrangement of existing muscles that changed their line of action and also by the evolution of a novel tissue, the dermal cup,” co-author and Seton Hall University biologist Brett Aiello said in a statement. “This is a very interesting result because it shows that a very rudimentary, or basic, system can be used to conduct a complex behavior. You don’t need to evolve a lot of new stuff to evolve this new behavior — mudskippers just started using what they already had in a different way.”

To understand why the mudskippers blink on land, the team looked to the roles that blinking plays in other tetrapods. Tears in humans are critical to keeping the eye’s cells oxygenated and healthy, so the team looked to see if mudskippers blink to keep their eyes wet when exposed to the air.  

[Related: Tiktaalik’s ancient cousin decided life was better in the water.]

“We found that, just like humans, mudskippers blink more frequently when confronted with dry eyes,” said Aiello. “What’s incredible is that they can use their blinks to wet the eyes, even though these fish haven’t evolved any tear glands or ducts. Whereas our tears are made by glands around our eyes and on our eyelids, mudskippers seem to be mixing mucus from the skin with water from their environment to produce a tear film.”

They also found that blinking in mudskippers is triggered to protect the eye from injury as well as  clearing their eyes from possible debris. The finding suggests that mudskipper blinking appears to fulfill blinking’s three major functions—protecting, cleaning, and maintaining moisture.

“Based on the fact that mudskipper blinking, which evolved completely independently from our own fishy ancestors, serves many of the same functions as blinking in our own lineage, said Stewart. “We think that it was likely part of the suite of traits that evolved when tetrapods were adapting to live on land.”

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Is the phase “nice guys finish last” actually true? Unfortunately for all the soft-hearted among us, brutish behavior can be an effective path to power and dominance in both humans and chimpanzees. A study published April 24 in the journal PeerJ Life and Environment found that the male chimpanzees who exhibited greedy, irritable, and bullying personalities reached a higher social status. These rascals were also more successful at producing offspring. 

[Related: Adolescent chimpanzees might be less impulsive than human teens.]

However, the team is still plagued by a puzzling question from these findings: if being mean is the key to success, why isn’t every chimp a bully? 

For the study, the team followed 28 male chimpanzees living in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. A previous study had found that  these particular chimpanzees had a few members that  are more sociable whereas others are loners. Some of the chimps had overbearing personalities, and some were more easy-going. And, of course, there are a handful that are more quick to pick fights with others. 

Tanzanian field researchers performed personality assessments on the chimpanzees based on years of near-daily observations of how each animal interacted with others and behaved among the group. They found that a personality combination of high dominance and low conscientiousness helped the male chimpanzees fare better in life than the others, but it still doesn’t answer the evolutionary puzzle of why personality differences exist at all. 

A long held theory is that different personality traits matter at different points in an animal’s life or that certain traits that are a liability when an animal is young may pay off in old age. 

“Think of the personality traits that lead some people to peak in high school versus later in life,” Alexander Weiss, co-author and comparative psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, said in a statement. “It’s a trade-off.” 

The team tested the theory using almost 40 years of data that goes back to famed primatologist Jane Goodall’s early research at Gombe. Across the lifespan, the same personality traits were linked to both high reproductive success and high social rank. 

[Related: Popular chimpanzees set hand-holding trends for the whole group.]

Something else must be behind the diversity of chimpanzee personality. The “best” personality to have could depend on social or environmental conditions. Gender could matter too—a trait that is beneficial to males could cost a female. If this is true, then “genes associated with those traits would be kept in the population,” Weiss said. Further study is needed to confirm this idea. 

The suggestion that animals have distinct personalities was considered taboo not too long ago, with Goodall herself accused of anthropomorphism with her descriptions. Scientists have studied animals ranging from squid to birds, finding evidence of distinct personalities. These quirks, idiosyncrasies, and ways of relating to the world around them remain reasonably stable over time and across situations.

Like with measures of human personality, personality ratings for animals have also been proven to be as consistent from one observer to the next. “The data just doesn’t support the skepticism,” Weiss said.

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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.

Industrial mining in the deep ocean is on the horizon. Despite several countries including Germany, France, Chile, and Canada calling for a pause on the field’s development, the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the organization tasked with both regulating and permitting deep-sea mining efforts, is nearing the deadline to finalize rules for how companies will operate. Companies, meanwhile, are busy testing the capabilities of their machines—equipment designed to collect polymetallic nodules, rocks rich in cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese that litter some parts of the seafloor.

Top of mind for many scientists and politicians is what ramifications deep-sea mining might have on fragile marine ecosystems, including those far from the mining site. At the heart of the debate is concern about the clouds of sediment that can be kicked up by mining equipment.

“Imagine a car driving on a dusty road, and the plume of dust that balloons behind the car,” says Henko de Stigter, a marine geologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. “This is how sediment plumes will form in the seabed.”

Scientists estimate that each full-scale deep-sea mining operation could produce up to 500 million cubic meters of discharge over a 30-year period. That’s roughly 1,000 six-meter-long shipping containers full of sediment being discharged into the deep every day, spawning from a field of mining sites spread out over an area roughly the size of Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, and Germany.

These sediment plumes threaten to smother life on the ocean floor and choke midwater ecosystems, sending ripples throughout marine ecosystems affecting everything from deep-sea filter-feeders to commercially important species like tuna. Yet discussions of the plumes’ potential consequences are clouded by a great deal of uncertainty over how far they will spread and how they will affect marine life.

To clarify just how murky deep-sea mining will make the water, scientists have been tagging along as companies conduct tests.

Two years ago, Global Sea Mineral Resources, a Belgian company, conducted the first trials of its nodule-collecting vehicles. Scientists working with the company found that more than 90 percent of the sediment plume settled out on the seafloor, while the rest lingered within two meters of the seabed near the mined area. Other studies from experiments in the central Pacific Ocean found that the sediment plumes reached as far as 300 meters away from the disturbed site, though the thickest deposition was within 100 meters. This is a shorter spread than earlier models, which predicted deep-sea mining plumes could spread up to five kilometers from the mining site.

Beyond the sediment kicked up by submersibles moving along the seafloor, deep-sea mining can muddy the water in another way.

As polymetallic nodules are lifted to the surface, the waste water that’s sucked up along with the nodules is discharged back into the ocean. Doug McCauley, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says this could potentially create “underwater dust storms” in upper layers of the water column. Over the course of a 20-year mining operation, this sediment could be carried by ocean currents up to 1,000 kilometers before sinking to the seabed.

Some particularly fine-grained particles could remain suspended in the water column, traveling long distances with the potential to affect a wide range of marine animals. According to another recent study, it’s these tiny particles that are the most harmful to filter-feeders like the Mediterranean mussel.

To avoid these consequences on midwater ecosystems, at least, scientists are advising would-be deep-sea miners to discharge waste water at the bottom of the ocean where mining has already created a disturbance. This would be a departure from the ISA’s messaging, which is to not specify at what depth waste water should be released.

For its own trials last December, the Metals Company (TMC), a Canadian company, says it worked hard to minimize the amount of sediment discharged in the waste water it released at a depth of 1,200 meters.

“We’ve optimized our system to leave as much sediment on the seabed as possible,” says Michael Clarke, environmental manager at TMC. Clarke says he’s skeptical of previously published research projecting vast sediment plumes. “When we were trying to measure the [midwater] plume a few hundred meters away from the outlet, we couldn’t even find the plume because it diluted so much.”

Clarke says the company is currently analyzing both baseline and impact data for its test mining, including looking at how far small particles spread and how long they remain suspended. The results will be submitted to the ISA as part of an environmental impact assessment.

As deep-sea mining inches closer and scientists ramp up their research efforts, it’s important to keep one thing clear: “I can tell you that we’re not going to discover that deep-sea mining is good for marine ecosystems,” McCauley says. “The question is, How bad will it be?”

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

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When entering into disaster scenarios, robots still have a major downside—their inability to recover when they inevitably crash into things. Scientists, however, have taken a page out of biology’s playbook, as they often do, to create a drone that can bounce back when met with various obstacles. 

Think of a bird landing on a tree branch—in order to do so, they likely have to collide with a few smaller branches or leaves in the process of touching down. But, their joints and soft tissues cushion these bumps along the way, and their feet are built precisely to lock themselves in place without straining a muscle. When a drone opts for a similar route, taking on a bunch of collisions on the way to their destination, it’s a little bit more dramatic. “They don’t recover; they crash,” Wenlong Zhang, an associate professor and robotics expert at Arizona State University said in a release. 

“We see drones used to assess damage from high in the sky, but they can’t really navigate through collapsed buildings,” Zhang added. “Their rigid frames compromise resilience to collision, so bumping into posts, beams, pipes or cables in a wrecked structure is often catastrophic.” 

Zhang is an author of a recent paper published in Soft Robotics wherein a team of scientists designed and tested a quadrotor drone with an inflatable frame, apparently the first of its kind. The inflatable frame acts almost like a blow-up suit, protecting the drone from any harsh consequences of banging into a wall or another obstacle. It also provides the kind of soft tissue absorption necessary for perching—the team’s next task.

[Related: Watch this bird-like robot make a graceful landing on its perch.]

After studying how birds land and grip onto branches with their taloned feet, the team developed a fabric-based bistable grasper for the inflatable drone. The grasper had two unpowered “resting states,” meaning it can remain open or closed without using energy, and reacts to impact of landing by closing its little feet and gripping hard onto a nearby object.

“It can perch on pretty much anything. Also, the bistable material means it doesn’t need an actuator to provide power to hold its perch. It just closes and stays like that without consuming any energy,” Zhang said in the release. “Then when needed, the gripper can be pneumatically retracted and the drone can just take off.”

A more resilient type of drone is crucial for search and rescue scenarios when the path forward may be filled with debris, but the authors could also see this kind of creation being useful in monitoring forest fires or even exploration on other planets.

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A herd of African elephants stands above a cliff nearly 600 feet tall in the first episode of the new documentary series Secrets of the Elephants. After a brutal dry season in Zimbabwe, an elephant matriarch must guide her herd down the cliff in search of water. Their enormous three-to-four-ton bodies are not built for this kind of expedition—they use their trunks to test the ground. To complicate the descent, they must be mindful of the younger elephants, and reassure and soothe the babies with their tails along the way. Everyone is tense as they navigate the steep path of the gorge, including  the wildlife experts and filmmakers watching from the sidelines. 

“It was amazing, even for me, to see that,” veteran conservationist and elephant advocate Paula Kahumbu tells PopSci during a recent interview. In the 30-something years she’s studied African elephants, Kahumbu had never seen them inching down a cliff this way. In the documentary, she described how just watching the process made her legs feel weak and her body unsteady, and couldn’t imagine what it must be like for these giants of the savanna.

Broken into four episodes—Savanna, Desert, Rainforest, and Asia—Secrets of the Elephants presents the lives and issues that elephants face as incredibly nuanced and interconnected. Human-caused climate change and decades of ivory poaching have taken its toll, but beneath that lies the more complex and interwoven problems of disappearing elephant range, fences that impede their movements, and culling individuals who encroach on farmland. When people are killed or injured by the powerful mammals, Kahumbu says governments are then forced to take actions due to the loss of property or life. 

“Retaliation and intolerance towards elephants is now by far, the number one threat to elephants across east Africa” says Kahumbu. Most of Africa’s elephants live in the eastern and southern part of the continent in various habitats. Both species of African elephants are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature; their latest assessment found that the number of African forest elephants fell by more than 86 percent over the last 31 years, and the population of African savanna elephants decreased by at least 60 percent over the last 50 years. Their Asian relatives are listed as endangered, with an estimated 48,000 to 50,000 left in the wild.

The series explores this tension between two incredibly smart terrestrial mammals, elephants and humans—but more importantly, the striking similarities between them. Their parallel existence goes back millennia, as both humans and elephants evolved out of Africa at the same time. Elephants are incredible problem solvers and mirror human adaptability so well that they can typically figure out any deterrent or barrier that communities devise to keep them out. The elephants then pass the knowledge down generations. 

Their innate intelligence and ability to pass down survival skills can also benefit conservation efforts. As an example, Kahumbu cites successful elephant underpasses that help link one group of elephants found near Mount Kenya with their relatives in the forests, plains, and the Aberdares Mountains, while keeping them away from the area’s enormous wheat farms. “Once the elephants figured out that that’s the safe way to get from this mountain to the other mountain, they started not only using it, but teaching each other to use it. There are very few animals which will teach each other and elephants are one of them,” she explains.

[Related: Ivory poaching has triggered a surge in elephants born without tusks.]

Despite being one of the most studied animals on the planet, elephants keep surprising experts with their unique features and complex behaviors. They rarely get sick, with less than five percent getting cancer compared to about 25 percent of humans, and are even known to self medicate with the plants around them. Female elephants also do not fade into obscurity or die once they are unable to reproduce. In both African and Asian species, they likely play an integral grandmother role similar to that of humans and possibly orca whales. Kahumbu describes elephant matriarchs as the knowledge keepers: They know where to eat and find water, where to rest, and even keep internal maps of the vast landscapes they traverse.

The series depicts the female elephants’ ability to take generational insights and adapt it to the constant challenges and changes, sometimes with bizarre results. In one rare case, an elephant in Zimbabwe named Nzou who lost her entire family to poachers when she was two years old now finds herself the matriarch to a herd of buffalo at age 50. “It’s very hard to say much because it’s just such a one-off strange thing that happened,” Kahumbu explains. “We’re increasingly seeing unusual wild animal behaviors. Adopting buffaloes is kind of funny, and it’s also quite sad.”

She didn’t fit in with other groups of elephants when rescuers tried to rehome her, but she found her place among a more unique family. Now, she has to figure out how to manage an unusual herd without the benefit of the years of living among older female elephants—but her instinct to lead is still strong.  

“In a way, it teaches us that just like humans, there are certain needs we all have, and we’re going to have to get them somehow,” says Kahumbu.

[Related: Elephants and monkeys are fighting climate change in ways humans can’t.]

Another central theme of the four-part series is the value that local people’s wisdom holds for both conservation and science communication. Experts from Namibia in southern Africa and Borneo in southeast Asia made the documentary possible through their historic observations of elephants and guidance. “A lot of things which we filmed have never been filmed or seen on camera before, but actually, a lot of it has been known by local people on the ground for a very long time,” says Kahumbu. “We are asking people for local knowledge, but we’re involving them in the series and getting them on camera as well.”

Engaging communities on the ground and connecting the rest of the world with their stories through film could be a big step in further protecting elephants. Reaching younger and wider audiences, particularly in Africa, is part of why Kahumbu has seamlessly moved from the research space into more policy, advising, and education in an effort to save elephant lives.

“What’s shifted for me dramatically is this realization that we’re running out of time,” says Kahumbu. “I think that unleashing young people with their own creativity to identify how they can help is what I’d love to see happen as a result of this TV series. That connection is very powerful and very important.”

Secrets of the Elephants premieres on Friday, April 21 on National Geographic. All four episodes will stream on Earth Day (April 22) on Disney+ and Hulu. 

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This article was originally published on Undark.

Approximately 300 miles south of New Zealand, the Auckland Islands lie in a belt of winds known as the Roaring Forties. In the late 19th century, sailing ships departing Australasia would catch a ride back to Europe by plunging deep into the Southern Ocean to ride the westerlies home.

But these seas were poorly charted, and weather conditions frequently horrendous.

Sometimes, navigators miscalculated the islands’ position and, too late, found their vessels thrown upon the islands’ rocky ramparts. Ships were torn to pieces and survivors cast ashore on one of the most remote and inhospitable places on the planet. These castaways soon found out they were not alone.

The main land mass in the Auckland archipelago, Auckland Island, was — and still is — home to pigs, initially introduced in the first half of the 19th century by European hunters and explorers, as well as a group of Indigenous New Zealanders fleeing conflict.

The pigs have no natural predators, and over time, they have wrought destruction upon Auckland Island’s flora and fauna. Government conservationists now want them gone — but there’s a twist: These once domesticated farm animals have evolved into ultra-resilient, disease-free pigs that have caught the eye of scientists who study xenotransplantation, a type of medical procedure in which cells, tissues, or organs from one species are transferred into another species.

Last year, for the first time, surgeons transplanted pig hearts and pig kidneys into humans. Such procedures have not yet been tested in clinical trials, and they are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or regulatory agencies in New Zealand. But researchers say that xenotransplantation could eventually prove effective at treating a range of conditions and may alleviate the huge global need for donor organs. The Auckland Island pigs, with their unique genetics, may be especially well-suited for this purpose.

Some of the hardy quadrupeds are now housed in a research facility on the New Zealand mainland. Meanwhile, conservation authorities are preparing a massive effort to eradicate those left in the wild.

The first European ship to reach the Auckland Islands (known as Maukahuka or Motu Maha in the Māori language) was the whaler Ocean, in 1806. The ship’s captain returned the following year to drop off a team of seal hunters. During this visit, pigs were first released as a food source. Subsequent introductions continued, and in the late 1800s, with the tales of shipwreck and survival piling up, the New Zealand and Australian governments got involved, releasing additional pigs for the castaways.

The pigs, which were of mostly European and Asian origin, had to learn to live with the persistent cold, rain, and wind — far from ideal conditions for animals bred for sheltered barnyards. But because pigs produce up to two litters each year, they can adapt relatively quickly, said Michael Willis, of the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of New Zealand. Soon, Auckland Island’s pigs formed one unique strain.

In the winter, they survived by eating the island’s endemic plants and scavenging carrion. In the summer, their fortunes changed, and they gorged on plump albatross chicks and protein-filled penguin eggs. Twenty-five species of seabird breed on the Auckland Islands, but after two centuries of pig predation, their numbers have fallen. New Zealand conservationists are increasingly wary of the porcine prowlers.

The archipelago is “an immensely special place,” said Stephen Horn, a project manager at New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. It’s the biggest remaining stronghold of the yellow-eyed penguin, the world’s rarest penguin species, and the Gibson’s wandering albatross, which breeds there exclusively. (Currently, said Horn, seabirds on Auckland Island nest only on the precipitous edges of the land, where even the most tenacious pig won’t venture.)

The pigs have also taken a toll on the spectacular flowering plants known as megaherbs, which are now “almost non-existent” on Auckland Island, Horn said. “They’re absent until you get to the extremely steep cliff areas. Then you can see patches of green that are out of reach” of the pigs.

Horn believes there are between 700 and 1,500 pigs on the island, with the population fluctuating widely. Survival to breeding age, he said, is low. Those that do make it have to be tough and adaptable. “On one hand, super admirable,” he said, “the way they’re able to adapt and survive in those conditions.” And on the other hand, incredibly damaging. “They use the coastline pretty heavily,” he said. “They’ll eat anything that turns up, scavenging things like dead whales and seals or even krill and squid.”

Mindful of the Department of Conservation’s long-held wish to eradicate the pigs, the Rare Breeds Conservation Society sent a team to retrieve some in 1999. Using dogs, they managed to catch 17. “Hunger appeared to be the pigs’ constant companion,” wrote team member Peter Jackson for New Zealand Geographic. “The suckling sows had only two or three teats producing milk, which told how few piglets survived.”

The team loaded the pigs on a boat and brought them back to the southern New Zealand town of Invercargill. There, the animals were put into a quarantine facility, intended to protect the country’s domestic pig herd from potential diseases.

Keeping the pigs in quarantine required money the Society didn’t have, so they prevailed upon Invercargill’s then-mayor, Tim Shadbolt, a colorful former left-wing activist, who dipped into his contingency fund for the approximately 2,300 in today’s New Zealand dollars, or $1,400, needed to feed them.

During the first year of quarantine, the pig population ballooned. “They dined on porridge and swedes and they became raging sexual beasts, producing larger litters than they did on the Auckland Islands,” Shadbolt recalled in a 2008 article in the Otago Daily Times. The pig’s food bill increased tenfold — an expenditure that whipped up a political storm in Invercargill, with councilors and constituents railing against what they characterized as a scandalous waste of public money. Shadbolt was unceremoniously stripped of his contingency fund.

The mayor, though, would be vindicated. These pigs from a previous century soon found an unlikely home in the futuristic world of xenotransplantation.

Globally, the demand for transplant organs is overwhelming. Every year, thousands of people die waiting for a new heart, liver, kidney, or lung that never arrives. In the United States alone, around 17 people on the organ waiting list die every day. For decades, xenotransplantation has been seen as a possibility to bridge this shortfall.

Since the 1960s, surgeons have transplanted chimpanzee and baboon parts into a small number of humans with life-threatening conditions, but these efforts have had little success. The biggest challenge is getting the human body’s immune system to accept the new organ.

The use of non-human primates for biomedical research is controversial, so over time, researchers looked to pigs. “Their organs, their tissues, and their physiology are sufficiently close to humans,” said Paul Tan, founder and CEO of New Zealand xenotransplantation research company NZeno. “Their cells function in a manner that is very close to humans. So their blood sugar levels and our blood sugar levels are pretty close.”

In the late 1980s, New Zealand pediatrician Bob Elliott and colleague David Collinson started a company called Diatranz to investigate whether pig islet cells could be used to treat Type-1 diabetes. For Collinson, the quest was personal. His son suffered from the disease.

Islet cells are found in the pancreas and produce insulin, but in Type-1 diabetes patients, are destroyed by the immune system. Trial transplants of human islet cells had met with mixed results, and in any case, with millions of Type-1 diabetes sufferers globally, there were nowhere near enough human donors to meet demand.

Diatranz aimed to surgically implant pig islet cells, encapsulated in a seaweed-derived polymer that shielded them from the human immune system, into the pancreases of diabetes patients. In the 1990s, though, the work stalled amid fears of disease.

Xenotransplantation, of both cells or organs, carries the risk of bacterial or viral infections crossing from the donor animal into humans. Pigs are not as closely related to humans as apes and baboons, a circumstance that makes transplanted pig parts less likely to spread disease to humans. Still, the risk persists.

While common diseases might be eliminated with medicines, a more serious risk was thought to come from viruses that essentially gatecrash the genetic material of the host animal. These are called retroviruses; they include HIV as well as viruses that cause certain cancers.

Some retroviruses, called endogenous retroviruses, have, in the deep past, even insinuated themselves into the DNA of sperm and egg cells — they are therefore part of the animal’s genetic makeup, replicated in every cell in the body and passed down through generations. There is currently no medication to eliminate retroviruses.

The concern was that pig tissues could secrete infectious particles of a porcine endogenous retrovirus, or PERV, which could then infect human cells to create a new, transmissible human disease. In the worst-case scenario, it was feared, such an event could trigger a global pandemic.

In the late 1990s, a London-based research team confirmed that, in a laboratory setting at least, PERVs could infect human cells.

The discovery, for a time, “killed xenotransplantation,” said Björn Petersen, a xenotransplantation researcher with the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, the German government’s animal-disease research center. “Pharmaceutical companies withdrew their money from the research.”

Around the world, the hunt was on for pigs that were as disease-free as possible.

In 1998, Diatranz partner Olga Garkavenko turned on her radio and got wind of Invercargill’s new arrivals. She decided to investigate.

The company obtained tissue samples from the quarantined pigs for analysis. The islands’ harsh conditions, it seemed, had been tough on disease.

“They remained isolated and therefore they remained free of a lot of common infections that you have in pigs,” said Tan. “The pigs that were weak were probably wiped out. Only the fittest survived.”

The pigs also have an unusually low number of retrovirus copies in their genome. Petersen noted that the population is also completely free of a type of PERV called PERV-C, which may pose the biggest risk to human transplant recipients. This was possible “because they were isolated for a long time and they never had contact with other pigs.”

Joachim Denner, a xenotransplantation researcher from the Free University of Berlin, said the Auckland Island pigs had another major advantage over other pig breeds — their small stature. At around 90 pounds in weight, he said, “they are the right size for transplantation.” A domestic pig weighs 300 to 700 pounds, and its organs, he added, are too large.

In 2004, Elliott, Tan, and others set up a company called Living Cell Technologies, or LCT, which absorbed Diatranz and took over the pigs’ care, building an expensive facility near Invercargill to keep them in medical-grade isolation while they were selectively bred for xenotransplantation.

The animals housed in quarantine were suddenly reputed to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each, much to then-Mayor Shadbolt’s barely-concealed glee.

The project brought jobs and millions of dollars of investment to Invercargill. “It has all come to fruition,” Shadbolt said in the 2008 Otago Daily Times article. “I rub it into those people who didn’t support me at every opportunity.”

By the 2010s, concerns around PERVs were lessening, as multiple clinical trials of cell transplants suggested not only that pig cells could be effective in treating diabetes, but also that PERVs weren’t passing to humans. New gene-editing technology also meant that retrovirus genes could be rendered non-functional before an animal was born.

With these advancements, the race to successfully implant pig organs in humans has gathered pace. Groups around the world now breed pigs for this purpose. It’s big business — a recent report estimated the global xenotransplantation market could be worth $24.5 billion by 2029.

In January 2022, a University of Maryland group, using a pig organ from the U.S. company Revivicor, conducted the first successful transplant of a pig heart into a living patient. The patient survived for two months. While the cause of his death is still being examined, evidence of a disease called porcine cytomegalovirus was found during the autopsy. The pig used in the transplant, said Tan, would have been rigorously screened for the virus, which, he added, shows the importance of breeding pigs that are genuinely free from such diseases.

Paul Tan now runs NZeno, which has taken over the breeding and keeping of the Auckland Island pigs. LCT, meanwhile, has switched its focus to Parkinson’s disease and recently began clinical trials of a treatment that involves inserting capsules containing pig brain cells into the human brain to repair nerve damage.

NZeno supplies pig cells to LCT and is also trying to establish itself as a major player in the organ game. “We like to think that our strain of pigs, derived from the Auckland Islands, further developed at Nzeno, would be the ideal pig strain for human organ xenotransplantation,” said Tan. Their cells, he noted, have already been used in humans for years, and have a very good track record of safety. The small number of retrovirus copies in the pigs’ genomes, he said, also require less gene editing compared to other breeds.

NZeno recently provided its pig cells to a team at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, which aims to have a genetically-modified pig ready for a pig-human heart transplant by 2025. NZeno is also working with another xenotransplantation group in China that aims to develop kidneys for transplant.

Petersen agreed that there is a solid rationale for minimizing gene editing. “The more genetic modifications you do,” he said, “the more side effects you can maybe expect.” But, he added, there may be cases in which it doesn’t make sense to prioritize the minimization of gene editing. For example, “if you want to have a universal donor” — an animal that can supply a variety of suitable organs or cells for human transplant — “then you need to have a pig with more genetic modifications right from the beginning.”

Denner said the Auckland Island pigs, which he describes as the most disease-free pigs in the world, may yet prove their true worth. But he cautioned against viewing them — or any pig — as a silver bullet. “All these studies have limitations,” he said. “The real effect of PERVs on humans, we will see when we perform the first transplants of organs.”

For now, wild Auckland Island pigs continue to run free in their storm-battered home, but the clock is ticking. Over the last five years, New Zealand’s Department of Conservation has been preparing for eradication.

Stephen Horn leads the team charged with this enormous task. Previous work attached GPS trackers to pigs, trying to learn their movements, and Horn’s team has trialed various methods of killing them. The plan is to wipe out the pigs using a combination of traps, poisoning, and hunters shooting from helicopters and on foot.

“The approach is really high intensity, as quickly as possible,” said Horn, “and try to keep the population as naive as possible.

“You need a suite of tools,” he continued, “because pigs are smart. Not every pig is going to be vulnerable to the same technique.”

Compounding the difficulty is the island’s size and isolation. It is several days’ dangerous sail from the mainland and, aside from a few uninhabitable hut shelters, the islands have no infrastructure to support human life. Once ashore, movement through the dense undergrowth and shoulder-high grasses is extraordinarily difficult.

“It’s rugged, remote, and massive,” said Horn. “It’s pretty overwhelming when you’re looking at it through a lens of animal pest control.”

Not everyone is thrilled at the prospect of the pigs’ demise. The animals are “very much part of our heritage,” said Willis of the Rare Breeds Conservation Society. The organization argues more effort should be made to preserve at least some of them. Perhaps the pigs could be fenced off, so as not to disrupt the entire island, said Willis. Or some could be relocated to another island, where they might not pose as much of a problem. As far as he is aware, however, these options are not being considered.

Paul Tan said he would also jump at the chance to retrieve more pigs.

The Department of Conservation, said Horn, has fielded inquiries about recovering pigs, but the logistics of retrieving them from the Auckland Islands, as well as the enormous costs involved in quarantine, are major hurdles to overcome.

Horn said that while staff are actively discussing options for retrieving pigs, their focus is eradication. With a plan in place, the department just needs to secure enough funding to make it happen, he said, “to undo some of the damage that was done by people, on what is an extremely fragile, but important place.”

Bill Morris is a documentary filmmaker, wildlife cameraman, and science journalist based in Dunedin, New Zealand. He is a regular contributor to New Zealand Geographic magazine and his work has also appeared on the BBC and Animal Planet.

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

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Northern elephant seals are challenging the world record for the mammal that sleeps the fewest hours a day. The current record holder is the African elephant, who rests a measly two hours daily. Now scientists report that elephant seals also sleep an average of two hours a day when they’re out at sea and do this by splitting their slumber into a series of nap-like “sleeping dives.” 

These findings were published today in the journal Science. 

Elephant seals divide their time between land and sea, though it’s unequal. They spend an average of seven months out of the year in the open ocean and only resurface to breed, molt, and rest. Because they spend so much time in open waters, scientists figured these marine mammals must have developed some way of getting the sleep they need while avoiding detection from predators like the orca whales and great white sharks. But exactly how they do this has been poorly understood.

[Related: Take the best naps, with science]

One challenge in understanding the sleep behavior of elephant seals is finding a device that’s both waterproof and can handle deep-sea pressure. To overcome this, the study team created a flexible head cap that can respond to seals’ twisting and flexing motions. It’s also made up of a synthetic rubber called neoprene, the same material found in wetsuits. The scientists used this cap to monitor the seals’ brain activity, heart rate, and three-dimensional spatial movement.

Scientists outfitted 13 wild seals with the cap. Five were kept in a lab, while the other eight could freely roam around Monterey Bay, California. The EEG recordings collected from the head cap represented brain activity during different sleep stages. 

“We can take the data and use it to recreate what the sleeping dives look like, and also what’s happening within the animal brain, how fast its heart is beating, etcetera,” says lead study author Jessica Kendall-Bar, a Scripps postdoc scholar at the University of California, San Diego.

How do seals sleep in the ocean?

The collected data indicates elephant seals sleep about two hours a day while at sea, though not all at once. When it was time to get a little shut-eye, seals dove hundreds of meters below the surface—the maximum depth was about 1,200 feet—where they would take quick naps lasting less than 20 minutes. 

Kendall-Bar says this “degree of flexibility and sleep duration has really only been demonstrated in birds and is pretty much unprecedented in mammals.”

Dive naps likely evolved as a way for seals to avoid getting attacked since their natural predators lurk near the surface, explains Kendall-Bar. They are also more vulnerable than other marine mammals when resting because they undergo bilateral sleep. This means both halves of the elephant seal’s brain rest when they sleep. Human beings also experience bilateral sleep. 

Meanwhile, fur seals and sea lions experience unihemispheric sleep—one brain hemisphere rests while the other stays awake and monitors for predators.

Different stages of underwater sleep

The study data suggests seals go through one complete sleep cycle during each nap-like “sleeping dive.” When these brief sleep cycles end, the seals return to the surface. This process allows them to rest at depths with lower predation risk while staying vigilant in more dangerous waters. 

During nap dives, the seals entered slow-wave sleep while maintaining an upright posture. They then turned upside down while their sleep cycle transitioned from slow-wave sleep to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. 

“The sleep state of the animal is actually reflected in its movement through the water,” explains Kendall-Bar. 

Once the cycle was complete, the seals immediately woke up and returned to the surface to find food.

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

Since muscle paralysis from REM sleep leaves seals exposed and defenseless, they took the shortest naps possible and compensated for the lack of sleep after reaching land again. As a result, the seals slept five times longer ashore than they did in the water. Some seals even slept up to 14 hours a day on land.

“What really stood out for me is the fine-scale analysis the researchers did to identify the different sleep states and how they were able to translate this analysis to estimate sleep patterns in seals at sea,” says Cassondra Williams, a comparative physiologist at the National Marine Mammal Foundation who was not involved in the study. “This will be an important tool for future behavior studies of pinnipeds freely diving at sea.”

Most diving naps took place just near the shore. While northern elephant seals are not currently endangered (in the 1800s, they were almost hunted to extinction), Kendall-Bar and her team are concerned that shipping traffic and traps on the seafloor may be disturbing their habitats. Understanding when and where seals slumber could help conservation efforts and ensure seals get all two hours of their beauty sleep.

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For at least 22,000 years, the African penguin has been struggling to survive because of habitat loss.  Scientists are now peering into the past to learn more about why to better help the lovable feathered creatures  today and in the future. A study published April 20 in the African Journal of Marine Science paints a paleo-historical picture of where these climate change survivors lived and moved to as the last Ice Age came to a close—and how that changed over time. 

According to the study, the African penguin,also called the black-footed penguin, the Cape penguin, or the Jackass penguin, lived on 15 large islands off the coast of southern Africa more than 20,000 years ago. During this period called the Last Glacial Maximum, massive ice sheets dominated a huge portion of the Earth, and it ended about 15 to 20,000 years ago. Upon this climate shift sea levels began to rise as ice melted, effectively sinking the islands. The rising water reduced the suitable nesting habitat for the penguin colonies by tenfold over the next 22,000 years. 

[Related: The march of the penguins has a new star: an autonomous robot.]

To help them paint this picture, the team used topographical maps of the ocean floor to find potential former islands that lay 32 to 426 feet below today’s sea levels. Penguins use islands as breeding spots to escape predators on the mainland and also need suitable foraging grounds for sardines and anchovies within about a 12 mile radius. 

With the assumption that sea levels were lower during the last Ice Age, the team identified 15 large islands that possibly stood off the southwest coast of Africa, with the largest being about 115 miles long and laying 426 feet below the surface of the sea. When taking the rate of sea level rise over the past 15,000 to 7,000 years into account, they found 220 islands that would have been suitable nesting spots for penguins. 

By comparison, some of the largest modern-day islands with penguins off the southwest coast of Africa are Robben Island less than two miles long, Dassen Island less than one mile, and Possession Island also less than a mile long, which all clock in at less than two miles long.

The study estimates that between 6.4 million and 18.8 million individual penguins could have lived among these islands during the Last Glacial Maximum, before the numbers began to plummet. 

These changes in habitat availability over the past 22,000 years “could have had a massive effect on penguin populations,” co-author and Stellenbosch University ecologist Heath Beckett said in a statement. “These populations are now experiencing additional human pressures on top of this in the form of climate change, habitat destruction, and competition for food.” 

According to Beckett, this new paleo-historical image of penguins all over the islands of southern Africa stands in contrast to the current reality of a post-1900 collapse of the African penguin population. Dassen Island was once teeming with about 1.45 million penguins, but South Africa’s entire African penguin population collapsed to 21,000 breeding pairs by 2011. As of 2019, they dropped even further to 13,600, and roughly 97 percent of the current population in South Africa is supported by seven breeding colonies.

[Related: Ceramic ‘igloos’ could keep African penguins cool and cozy.]

“Changing sea levels would have necessitated the need for multiple relocations of breeding colonies of African penguins on time-scales of centuries, if not even shorter time-scales, and intense competition for breeding space as island habitat became greatly reduced in size,” said Beckett. “This historical flexibility of response provides some leeway for conservation managers to make available suitable breeding space, even in mainland sites, as long as appropriate nesting sites are made available.”

Some further questions brought on by this research surround relocation for the penguins, and analyzing just how much more the species can handle as human pressures continue to rise and food competition heats up. 

However, despite the alarming drops in population and their continued struggle, the team points out that these findings highlight the African penguin’s resilience as a species and that this could be leveraged for its conservation and management in an uncertain climate.

“It’s a total survivor and given half a chance, they will hang on,” co-author and Stellenbosch University biologist Guy Midgley concluded in a statement.  “Island hopping saved it in the past, they know how to do this.” 

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How well do you know your pets? Pet Psychic takes some of the musings you’ve had about your BFFs (beast friends forever) and connects them to hard research and results from modern science.

ONE AFTERNOON several years ago, a Moluccan cockatoo named Harpo arrived at Midwest Avian Adoption & Rescue Services in St. Paul, Minnesota. As Galiena Cimperman sat quietly with him and scratched his head, the bird started to talk.

This was perfectly normal. Harpo, like others of his species and the parrot family to which it belongs, was a very vocal creature and gifted mimic. Cimperman, the sanctuary’s executive director, was accustomed to him keeping up a semicoherent monologue of under-his-breath babble. But a long while after their first meeting, he shared something unexpected.

“I hate this bird,” Harpo said, loudly and clearly. He repeated it twice more. “I hate this bird. I hate this bird.”

Harpo had certainly heard that insult before, likely in unpleasant circumstances. But what did the cockatoo mean by it? According to Cimperman, the words didn’t have the same significance for him that they would for us; Harpo was repeating the sounds, not using them as language. But that doesn’t mean the outburst was insignificant.

Cimperman believes the phrase reflected traumas the cockatoo experienced earlier in life and that uttering them was part of his recovery. “I’m hesitant to say, because I don’t have any scientific backing on this,” she explains, “but I think he was probably working through stuff.”

Her diagnosis of Harpo—and many other residents of MAARS, one of 100 or so sanctuaries in the US that provide lifetime homes to abused and abandoned parrots—indeed comes without a seal of scientific approval. Although there’s plenty of research on parrot memory, problem-solving, and communication (the cognitive sophistication of some species is likened to that of human children), the birds’ emotions are largely unstudied.

That makes the relationship between parrots and people all the more difficult. The birds’ intelligence, physiology, and social nature often makes it difficult for them to flourish in captivity—yet there are more than 50 million parrots in households and zoos worldwide. Many are ultimately dumped at overwhelmed rescue operations, where volunteers like Cimperman have to piece together their pasts to help them find solace in the present.

As for whether the animals’ suffering can lead to psychological trauma—defined as an ongoing emotional response to an intensely distressing event—there’s even less research on that than on their feelings. But between their emotions and their excellent long-term memories, they do possess the cognitive capacities necessary to experience extended trauma.

One of the only scientific papers about parrot trauma, in fact, emerged from a collaboration between MAARS caretakers and Gay Bradshaw, the psychologist and ecologist best known for identifying PTSD in orphaned elephants who witnessed their parents and elders being killed. Presented more than a decade ago at a conference of avian veterinarians, the paper describes how parrots at the sanctuary frequently meet the criteria for the disorder.

What Bradshaw learned is that the birds undergo intensely distressing experiences, beginning in most cases at birth. Unlike parrots in the wild, whose parents provide close, attentive care from hatching through fledging, commercially bred individuals often start life in isolation. They receive little attention except for intermittent tube feeding.

“I really think their whole lives are, in some form or another, traumatic,” Cimperman says. “The way people raise them is completely absent of everything they should have.” In a review of standard commercial breeding methods, bird vet Michelle Curtis Velasco likened them to the infamous Romanian orphanages where, in the near absence of human contact, infants went on to develop severe behavioral disorders.

Then, at an age when their wild counterparts meet other young flock members while continuing to receive parental instruction, fledgling parrots enter a human home. They have evolved to live in large groups, but as pets, just one or a few often-absent people become their entire social world. These situations are intrinsically fraught; even well-meaning guardians may ignore or punish their parrots after tiring of unwittingly powerful bites and earsplitting cries for company. Sometimes keepers are not so well-meaning, and the situation devolves into full-blown abuse.

The birds are ill-equipped to cope, says Cimperman, and stress is magnified by helplessness and an inability to escape. Many parrots, especially the larger ones, either have their wings clipped to prevent flight or never learn to fly at all; they lack the sense of security that mobility provides.

Little wonder that some parrots arrive at MAARS with symptoms of severe psychological disturbance: tics like picking their feathers out and even wounding themselves, extreme aggression, hypersensitivity to everyday noises, repetitive movements, incessant screaming, constant agitation, catatonic unresponsiveness, and so on. In extreme cases, parrots have stayed in their cages for years, avoiding eye contact and trembling when humans approach.

When seen in people, those behaviors raise concerns about PTSD. “I know this hasn’t been borne out scientifically to the degree that it should be, but I don’t know what else it adds up to,” Cimperman says. So MAARS adapts insights on human PTSD into its treatment regime. New arrivals are initially kept separate from the flock; as they begin to acclimatize, grooming, eating, and showing curiosity about their surroundings, caretakers work with them to develop a sense of trust in humans.

It’s important that the birds feel control over their own lives, says Cimperman. “So much of a parrot’s life in captivity is without choice,” she says. “We try to give everyone a sense of free agency as much as possible, closer to what they would have in the wild.” Later they may be exposed to reminders of past trauma—the sight of a garbage bag, for example, for a bird delivered to the sanctuary inside one—as they learn to regulate their feelings. The process may take months or even years.

In Harpo’s case, the details of his early life are murky. He had one guardian before arriving at a sanctuary in Texas; there Harpo killed several birds and left volunteers with wounds requiring medical treatment, at which point MAARS took him in. “We couldn’t have him out for more than five minutes. He would just kind of implode and start flying at your face or attacking anything he could get his beak on,” Cimperman recalls.

By the time Harpo said, “I hate this bird,” she had worked with him for three years. He still had episodes when “he would just kind of blank out and kind of go into attack mode,” but he was improving. He felt safe around Cimperman, and she saw that utterance—delivered with the pinned-back feathers and slit-eyed glare that signify intensely negative feelings—as part of the process. To her, it signified a mental reenactment of his past. “I think they store a lot of stuff that’s happened to them. And to be able to move forward, there has to be some getting out of stuff,” she says.

Erin Colbert-White, a comparative psychologist at the University of Puget Sound in Washington who has studied how African grey parrots use words, says she’s open to the possibility that parrots experience PTSD. She cautions, however, that Harpo’s invective is difficult to parse as a recollection of his trauma because we don’t know the context in which he first heard the disparaging phrase. “It’s such a complex conclusion to draw that I would want to somehow be able to study it systematically. I’m not saying it’s not true. I would just have more questions. The scientist in me says, ‘Proceed with caution.’”

Colbert-White also warns that the expectation that another species will “experience psychological disorders in ways that humans do is a big assumption.” Rigorous, without-a-doubt scientific evidence may be unobtainable, though; it would require inflicting trauma on captive parrots in controlled conditions. “There’s no way to ethically reproduce these sorts of situations,” Colbert-White says.

Even granting that uncertainty, just the possibility that parrots experience psychological effects that resemble humans’ adds to the urgency of protecting them—not just in captivity, notes Cimperman, but also in the wild. Half of all parrot species are declining, and one-quarter are threatened with extinction, yet they receive relatively little conservation attention. Thriving populations are frequently persecuted for the wildlife trade or in the name of “pest management.”

By the end of Harpo’s life in 2021, nine years after his arrival at MAARS, he was one of the friendliest feathered guests there. He ran to greet people and was positively joyful. “I think who Harpo was and who he ended up being were completely different birds,” Cimperman says. “He was literally unrecognizable.” And whatever he’d meant when he said “I hate this bird,” he had stopped saying it.

We hope you enjoyed Brandon Keim’s column, Pet Psychic. Check back on PopSci+ in June for the next article.

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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.

In Dick Ogg’s 25 years of commercial fishing, he’s had a few close encounters with whales—mostly while pulling Dungeness crab pots off the ocean floor. “I’ve had whales right next to me,” within about five meters, says Ogg. “They follow me, they watch, they’re curious. And then they go on about their business.”

Ogg is fortunate his interactions have been so leisurely. For nearly a decade, California’s whales and crabbers have been locked in a persistent struggle. From 1985 to 2014, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported an average of 10 whales were entangled in fishing gear each year along the west coast of the United States. But between 2015 and 2017, that number jumped to 47 entanglements per year. Since 2015, most of the identifiable gear found on entangled whales has been from crab pots. For crabbers, efforts to protect whales from entanglement often hit their bottom line.

The Dungeness crab fishery is one of California’s largest and most lucrative; until recently, it was considered one of the most sustainable fisheries in the state. In recent years, managers have sought a balance between protecting whales and ensuring crabbers’ livelihoods. But as climate change transforms the northeast Pacific and whales are increasingly at risk of being entangled in crabbers’ lines, that delicate balance is beginning to unravel.

The 2015 crabbing season was a catastrophe for both crabbers and whales. A marine heatwave nurtured a bloom of toxic algae that pushed anchovies close to shore, and the whales followed. That year, NOAA recorded 48 entangled whales along the US west coast—nearly five times the historical average. The algae also rendered the crabs inedible, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) delayed the start of the fishing season by several months. The federal government declared the failed season a fishery disaster.

In 2017, the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity sued the CDFW over the spate of entanglements, prompting the department to set up a rapid risk assessment and mitigation program that closes portions of the Dungeness crab fishery when whales are nearby. The new approach has decreased entanglements, but it’s come at a high price for commercial fishers.

The CDFW has a handful of other tools they can use to protect whales, such as shortening the crabbing season and limiting the number of traps crabbers can drop. But according to a recent study, the only measure that could have effectively protected whales during the heatwave—shortening the crabbing season—is the one that would have hampered crabbers the most. And even then, these strong restrictions would have only reduced entanglements by around 50 percent.

If a similar marine heatwave hits again, entanglements could spike, too, says Jameal Samhouri, a NOAA ecologist and author of the paper. “It’s going to be really hard to resolve these trade-offs,” he says. “There may be some hard choices to make between whether we as a society want to push forward conservation matters or allow the fishery.”

Every year since the CDFW set up its mitigation program, the fishery has faced closures. Since 2015, the crabbing season has only opened on time once. Though the heatwave is gone, a boom of anchovy has kept whales close to shore.

For Ogg, the most difficult part of the season is waiting to go fish and not having any income. “It’s been really, really tough for a lot of guys,” he says. Another recent study calculates that in 2019 and 2020, whale-related delays cost California Dungeness fishers US $24-million—about the same as they lost during the heatwave in 2015.

Smaller boats, the study showed, were most severely impacted by the closures. It’s a trend Melissa Mahoney, executive director of Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, has seen firsthand. While a large boat might set hundreds of crab pots in a day, smaller vessels can’t make up for a shortened season. “I just don’t know how long a lot of these fishermen can survive,” Mahoney says.

With climate change, marine heatwaves are now 20 times more frequent than they were in preindustrial times. As the Earth grows warmer, heatwaves that would have occurred every 100 years or so could happen once a decade or even once a year. In this hotter world, balancing the needs of both crabbers and whales will only grow more difficult.

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

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Snails are notoriously slow, excellent ecosystem engineers, and invasive and destructive pests in many gardens and on farms. Their eating methods are also pretty gnarly if you can get up close and personal. A German photographer named Jens Braun from YouTube channel Another Perspective released a video of a snail munching on a strawberry, with close-up details offering a fresh perspective on an unusual mollusk.

Brown garden snails are about one inch in diameter at maturity and have a brown and gray color pattern. They are most active when the air and ground are damp, mostly sliding around during the nighttime and early morning hours. They are native to Great Britain, Western Europe, and along the borders of the Black and Mediterranean seas, but can now be found across most of the southeastern US and both coasts. 

[Related from PopSci: Sea snail venom could lead to better insulin for diabetics]

Snails typically are omnivores, but the main staples of their diet are ornamental plants, flowers, weeds, veggies, and of course fruits.  Snails and their close relatives, the slugs, eat with their jaw and a flexible band of microscopic teeth called a radula. During a process called rasping, thousands of radula scrape up food particles, then they use their jaw to cut off larger pieces of food like leaves to be rasped.

Part of why snails are considered such a pest is that they can severely damage orchards by feeding on ripening and ripe fruit, as well as the leaves and bark growing on young trees. The telltale signs of fruit damage are circular chewed areas of the fruit’s rind, and leaves typically appear chewed along their margins. 

Citrus orchards are particularly vulnerable to becoming snail buffets since their watering methods and weed control creates a moist environment where snails can thrive. Last summer was a particularly rough snail year in South Florida, after snails that can be the size of a fist bounced back after a decade-long battle to eradicate them.  

[Related: It’s still a mystery how snails ended up scattered around the globe.]

Snails are also hermaphroditic—meaning all snails that reach reproductive age can lay eggs. This happens up to six times during a mating season, typically in the late spring and early summer. They lay up to 80 eggs per month in shallow depressions in the topsoil after mating. The eggs hatch after being in the soil for 14 to 40 days, and they will eat their eggs and even the eggs of their siblings to get enough calcium to harden their shells. 

While many snails are harmless to humans aside from being a garden pest, cone snails contain a paralyzing venom that can even be fatal in humans. When injected, the venom puts the victim into excitotoxic shock, which makes them unable to move within only a few seconds. Then, the snail opens its mouth wide to engulf all of the prey in a slow and painful death. Understanding how this venom works could help scientists produce better pain medication.

If you are keen to keep snails from eating your produce, raking over soil, using study plants in pots instead of seedlings, and searching for the pests during damp and mild evenings and transporting them to a compost heap can help.

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For animals spread all across the realms–air, land, and water–traveling speed is affected by how well they can cool off. The findings of a study published on April 18 in the open access journal PLOS Biology found that an animal’s traveling speed is limited by how effectively they can shed the excess heat generated by its muscles, particularly for animals that weigh over one ton. 

Travel is crucial to the survival of many animals, and certain physical features can dictate how far animals can migrate and where they find food. This is becoming even more challenging in a human-dominated world with more fragmented habitats and climate changing limiting food and water resources. 

[Related: We are eating large animals into extinction.]

In this study, the team used data on 532 species to develop a computerized model to look at the relationship between an animal’s size and traveling speed. The data only included freely moving animals in the wild based on radar tracking devices or video recordings, excluding studies on animals in captivity. 

As animals became larger, the traveling speeds increased, until they reached one ton, or about 2,000 pounds. At that point, the traveling speeds leveled off and began to decrease. When looking for possible reasons why the animals were slowing down, they concluded that the larger animals needed to slow down to avoid overheating changed the shape of the curve in the results. 

The results were the same for aquatic animals even though they live in water, which can cool the body down. Medium-sized animals, such as wolves, typically showed the fastest sustained speeds. 

“The new study provides a way to understand animal movement capacities across species and can be used to estimate any animal’s traveling speed based on its size,” co-author and biologist Alexander Dyer from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research said in a statement. “For example, this approach can be applied to predict whether an animal might be able to move between habitats fragmented by human development, even when the details of its biology are unknown.”

[Related: Ceramic ‘igloos’ could keep African penguins cool and cozy.]

In theory, increased temperatures due to climate change will affect all animals and not just the larger ones. Some animals are already evolving smaller bodies in response to the heat. According to the World Meteorological Organization, an eight year period from 2014 to 2022 were the eight warmest years on Earth’s record. 

“We anticipate that large animals are potentially more susceptible to the effects of habitat fragmentation in a warming climate than previously thought and therefore more prone to extinction. But this needs further investigation,” co-author and biologist also at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Myriam Hirt said in a statement.

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

The high seas — the ocean waters that begin 230 miles offshore — cover 43% of the planet’s surface and are home to as many as 10 million species, yet remain one of the least understood places on Earth. Among the region’s many mysteries are how Pacific salmon, one of the West’s most beloved and economically important fish, spend the majority of their lives — and why many populations are plummeting. Combined with how little we know about what climate change is doing out there, such questions make the area an international research and conservation priority.

These sprawling waters, though, are a mostly lawless zone, beyond the reaches of any national authority and governable only by international consensus and treaties. They face tremendous challenges that no nation can address alone: Climate change is causing marine heat waves and acidification, while overfishing and pollution are crippling ecosystems, even as pressure grows from companies and nations eager to drill and mine the ocean depths. In early March, negotiators representing nearly 200 nations came to a historic agreement aimed at protecting the ocean’s creatures and ecosystems. When the new United Nations High Seas Treaty was announced, marine scientists and conservationists around the globe rejoiced.

But what will the treaty actually mean for conservation in a region about which humanity knows less than the moon? When it comes to Pacific salmon, will the new treaty’s tools — and the international symbolism and momentum involved in agreeing to them — aid efforts to manage and protect them? Do the provisions go far enough? Here’s what the experts say.

The treaty’s protective tools may not be what salmon need

The treaty’s top provision establishes a road map for creating marine protected areas (MPAs) in international waters. Like national parks for the ocean, MPAs are zones that typically limit fishing or other activities to preserve ecosystems and species. When adequately enforced, they are widely considered to be a powerful tool for ocean and coastal conservation. They are also seen as key to reaching the U.N.’s goal to protect 30% of the planet’s oceans by 2030 — a goal the world is woefully behind on, with just 3% to 8% currently protected.

But when it comes to Pacific salmon, it is unclear whether MPAs can do anything at all. Salmon fishing in international waters has been banned since the 1990s, so future MPAs there will not reduce fishing. And while boosting enforcement of fishing bans may benefit other species, many believe illegal salmon fishing on the high seas is extremely low.

Still, some salmon experts believe that high seas marine preserves could provide indirect protection: By limiting other fishing, they could prevent salmon from being caught accidentally. They might also help preserve important marine food webs, though such ecosystems are vast, mobile and hard to monitor.

“If salmon used those (protected areas) as part of their migration and ocean habitat, then, yes, it could be beneficial,” said Brian Riddell, retired CEO and current science advisor to the Canadian nonprofit Pacific Salmon Foundation. “But to associate changes in marine survival to (an MPA), I think would be very, very difficult.”

MPAs also don’t address climate change or the marine heat waves that many researchers believe are a key factor in recent salmon declines. Matt Sloat, science director at the Oregon-based Wild Salmon Center, said that limiting global emissions would do more to protect salmon.

Although much remains unknown, recent research suggests that salmon ranges in the ocean are shifting or shrinking because of temperature changes. Salmon are also getting smaller, suggesting there may be more competition for fewer resources. “And then (hatcheries) are putting billions more hungry mouths into that smaller area,” Sloat said, referring to the sometimes-controversial state, federal and tribal hatcheries in the U.S. and other countries that raise and release quotas of juvenile salmon each year to maintain local fisheries. He believes that improving international coordination of the scale of those releases, rather than governing remote ocean habitats, might also improve salmon survival in the ocean.

It may boost collaboration and high seas research

Another section of the treaty bolsters collaborative research in international waters. Although the treaty’s language is directed more at support for developing nations — to ensure that new knowledge reflects the priorities of more than just the wealthiest coastal nations — salmon researchers hope that any overall increase in funding and interest in high seas research could help solve the mystery of what actually happens to salmon there.

While much is known about the environmental factors affecting salmon in their coastal and riverine habitats, scientists call the open ocean a “black box” into which salmon disappear for years. “We don’t even know where our salmon are,” said Laurie Weitkamp, a research biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 2022, seeking answers, she led an expedition that was part of the largest-ever high seas salmon research effort in the North Pacific, during which five vessels and more than 60 international scientists surveyed 2.5 million square kilometers (nearly 1 million square miles) in the Gulf of Alaska.

The open ocean has always been a bottleneck for salmon survival; Weitkamp said that, even historically, “95% of the salmon that enter the ocean never come back.” Once, those numbers were predictable based on coastal and river conditions. Now, she said, scientists’ guesses are often wildly wrong. All known conditions will point to a good return, Weitkamp said, “And then it’s just like, where are they? What happened?”

Researchers have been trying to understand what they’re missing in salmon’s ocean habitats, but work on the high seas is extremely expensive: Expeditions cost tens of thousands of dollars a day, but can collect only small amounts of data because salmon are widely dispersed and hard to find. She said the scale of the information gathered during the 2019-2022 expeditions she was part of was possible only because so many ships and nations worked together. It’s the kind of collaboration the treaty may help to inspire — directly in some cases, and symbolically in others — as nations sign on.

“Collaboration is absolutely essential,” said Riddell, who was also part of the 2019-22 expeditions. “We need a dedicated, ongoing program,” to understand what’s happening to salmon and to strengthen ocean and climate models. He hopes the High Seas Treaty will lead to more support and interest in that work.

Ratification and Indigenous inclusion are not guaranteed

This year, many salmon runs are expected to hit record lows, impacting the ecosystems, economies and communities that depend on them. Chinook returns in Oregon, California and Alaska are forecast to be so low that offshore recreational and commercial fishing this spring has been cancelled in many areas. The Klamath River chinook run, upon which the Yurok Tribe relies for cultural and economic security, is expected to be the lowest in history.

“International effort to preserve and protect ocean habitat is critical to restoring these historic salmon runs,” said Amy Cordalis, an attorney, fisherwoman and Yurok tribal member who has served as the tribe’s general counsel. But “those efforts must accommodate traditional uses of those areas.”

In 2020, during negotiations on what became the High Seas Treaty, a group of scientists published a report calling on the United Nations to better incorporate Indigenous management perspectives, which they said were not adequately represented in discussions at that time. The final treaty, which includes language recognizing Indigenous rights, did better than most to include Indigenous peoples and traditional knowledge, said Marjo Vierros, a coastal policy researcher at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the report. “How that plays out in implementation is of course a different question.”

The draft treaty, which is now being proofread, still must be ratified by member nations — a political process that may yet stall out in the U.S. Due to conservative Republican opposition, the United States has yet to ratify the 40-year-old U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea — the last treaty to govern international waters — though U.S. agencies say the country observes the law anyway.

That treaty drew the current boundary between state-controlled waters and the high seas, established rights for ships to navigate freely in international waters, and created an international body to develop deep-sea mining rules — a process that also remains, for now, unfinished. 

Researching at sea, “you gain a whole new understanding for how big (the ocean) really is,” Weitkamp said, and how much of its influence on salmon, climate and humanity remains unknown. “The ocean, especially the North Pacific, is just enormous.”

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For spiders, spinning their silky webs is a matter of survival. Those that don’t weave good enough silk to spin an insect-trapping web will have a much tougher, or even impossible, time getting enough food to eat. Since spiders are found throughout world, the more fine-tuned their webs are to their environment, the better they will work. 

In a study published April 18 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, biologists found that the glue that makes orb weaver spiders’ webs so sticky actually evolves faster than the spiders’ genes. 

[Related: Black widows battle their even deadlier cousins in a brutal spider war.]

“Discovering the sticky protein components of biological glues opens the doors to determining how material properties evolve,” study co-author and Washington and Lee University biologist Nadia Ayoub said in a statement. “Spider silk fibers and glues represent a fantastic model for answering such questions since they are primarily made of proteins and proteins are encoded by genes.”

Like the individual threads of a tapestry, each strand in an orb weaver spider’s web works to capture food. The web’s stiff frame absorbs the impact of the prey before it is trapped by the sticky lines so that the spider can tackle its food. A special glue that is synthesized in the spider’s aggregate glands makes the lines of the web sticky by absorbing water from the atmosphere. The glue should be altered to achieve the best stickiness for the amount of humidity in the air in the region where the spider lives. Since there are numerous species of orb weaver spiders living in many environments, the team on this study believed their glue must adapt to humidity levels. 

To investigate this glue adaptation strategy, the team focused on two species– Argiope argentata (A. argentata) and Argiope trifasciata (A. trifasciata). A. argentata lives in dry environments and is native to Southern California. The team had them build webs in a lab, but were fed a diet comparable to their prey and compared the glue droplet volume found in nature to make sure they were equivalent to what they weave in nature. A. trifasciata lives in humid environments all over the world and the team collected webs from them in the wild. 

They analyzed the proteins in the glue and the droplets’ material properties and found that the droplets from the dry-living A. argentata spiders are smaller than those from the more humidity prone A. trifasciata, and also absorb less water as local humidity increases. A. argentata’s glue also had smaller protein cores that occupied a smaller proportion of the droplet’s volume and absorbed less water from the atmosphere. 

[Related: How researchers leveled up worm silk to be tougher than a spider’s.]

The stiffness of these protein cores in the droplets affected the toughness of the glue droplets and the toughness of A. argentata’s protein core decreased as the humidity went up. A. argentata thread glue droplets were generally sticker and  more closely spaced.

When the team analyzed the proteins in the glue to understand how these differences in their material properties arise from these proteins, they found that the proteins appeared in different proportions, even though they were similar. A. argentata glue had the protein products of four genes which didn’t appear in A. trifasciata glue. The extra proteins and a more balanced ratio of the glue’s key AgSp1 and AgSp2 proteins may explain the greater toughness of this glue and its lower capacity for water absorption.

“Despite the dramatic differences in material properties, the two species share most of their protein components,” co-author and Virginia Tech biologist Brent Opell of Virginia Tech said in a statement. “The sequences of these proteins are also similar between species, but the relative abundance of individual proteins differs. Modifying the ratios of proteins is likely a rapid mechanism to adjust material properties of biological glues.”

According to the team, one of the limitations to this study includes that it only looked at two species, and the relationship between proteins and web material properties are not quite to scale yet. To address this, the team is documenting protein components and the material properties of a diverse set of species.

More study on spider silk and their properties could also have some wider scientific and technological applications. “Spider silks and glues have huge biomimetic potential. Spiders make glues with impressive properties that would have applications in industry, medicine, and beyond,” said Opell.

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Scientists have found dozens of species of coastal invertebrates organisms thriving Oscar the Grouch style in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Roughly 620,000 square miles long, or twice the size of Texas, the floating garbage heap is located between Hawaii and California. Five large spinning circular currents constantly pull trash towards the center of the patch, and it is considered the largest accumulation of ocean plastic on Earth.

These creatures found thriving in trash like crabs and anemones are normally found along the coasts, but the study published April 17 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution says that dozens of species have been able to survive and reproduce on the plastic garbage.  

[Related: A close look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reveals a common culprit.]

“This discovery suggests that past biogeographical boundaries among marine ecosystems—established for millions of years—are rapidly changing due to floating plastic pollution  accumulating in the subtropical gyres,” co-author and marine ecologist Linsey Haram said in a statement. Haram conducted this research while working at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

The team only recently discovered these “neopelagic communities,” or floating communities of organisms living in deep ocean waters. Organic matter in the ocean decomposes within a few years at most. But plastic debris lasts significantly longer, thus giving the animals a place to live and procreate.  

The team analyzed 105 plastic samples that were collected by The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization that is working on scalable solutions to get rid of ocean plastic, during their 2018 and 2019 expeditions. The samples were found in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a large zone that makes up most of that northern Pacific Ocean and is the largest ecosystem on Earth. Incredibly, 80 percent of the plastic trash that the team looked at showed signs of being colonized by coastal species. Some of the coastal species were even reproducing in their plastic homes, such as the Japanese anemone.

“We were extremely surprised to find 37 different invertebrate species that normally live in coastal waters, over triple the number of species we found that live in open waters, not only surviving on the plastic but also reproducing,” said Haram. “We were also impressed by how easily coastal species colonized new floating items, including our own instruments—an observation we’re looking into further.”

[Related: Ocean plastic ‘vacuums’ are sucking up marine life along with trash.]

While biologists already knew that coastal species can travel towards the open ocean on floating debris or on ships, it was long believed that these species couldn’t thrive or establish new communities at sea. Differences in temperature, water salinity, and the available nutrients between these two environments seemed too vast, but human-caused changes to the ocean ecosystems have forced marine biologists to rethink these ideas. 

“Debris that breaks off from this [garbage] patch constitutes the majority of debris arriving on Hawaiian beaches and reefs. In the past, the fragile marine ecosystems of the islands were protected by the very long distances from coastal communities of Asia and North America,” co-author and UH Mānoa oceanographer Nikolai Maximenko said in a statement. “The presence of coastal species persisting in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre near Hawai‘i is a game changer that indicates that the islands are at an increased risk of colonization by invasive species.”

According to data from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the world produces roughly 460 million tons of plastic annually and this figure could triple by 2060 if government action is not taken soon. Some individual actions to reduce plastic use is shopping more sustainably, limiting use of single-use plastic like water bottles and plastic utensils, and participating in beach and river clean-ups.

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Selfies occasionally go viral, but they’re not typically taken by an animal. So the fact that a black bear’s encounter with a motion-activated wildlife camera in Boulder, Colorado, in 2022 resulted in more than 400 of them—including an undeniably cute one with its tongue hanging out—is especially intriguing. Most creatures ignore camera traps. The question is: Why didn’t this bear?

​​It may be tempting to think of this selfie moment as an animal blunder, but this anecdote captures more than meets the eye. Research suggests bears, much like elephants and great apes, are more intelligent than previously assumed. The selfie bear is a unique reminder of a type of animal cognition scientists are just starting to understand. 

“Bears are probably more naturally curious about how things work than some other species,” says Jennifer Vonk, a psychology professor at Oakland University. 

Bears are generally impressive. They have an excellent sense of smell, seven times better than a bloodhound’s. Grizzly bears can run up to 35 miles per hour, beating the fastest human sprint by over 25 percent. Despite their bulk, bears are very dexterous—they can open screw-top jars, manipulate door latches, and even operate touchscreen computers with a talent that outpaces animals more closely related to people. 

Vonk discovered this when she and a colleague trained captive-bred black bears to select a larger or smaller set of dots that stayed in place or moved around the screen. Although the ability to count or distinguish between different quantities has been tested in many animals, scientists didn’t think ursines had this ability because they are a solitary, rather than social, species. The “social intelligence hypothesis” suggests social animals are likelier to be smarter than solitary species because interactive environments offer more cognitive challenges. 

[Related: Hibernating bears hold many secrets for better human health.]

The experiment proved otherwise. During the study, the size of the dots varied—in some trials, for example, the larger set of dots covered more area than the smaller set of dots. Conversely, the larger set could also cover a smaller area, which ultimately tested if black bears were making choices based on area or the number of dots. The animals performed above chance on all trials, showing they could use numbers to guide their choices. In other words, they could count. These results were published in the journal Animal Behavior. 

“I was surprised how quickly the bears took to responding on the computer because we were training animals that had never done any kind of experiments,” says Vonk. “On literally the first day we tested, the dominant male went right to the images that moved around the screen without making any errors. And with almost every task we gave him, he learned faster than the chimps and gorillas I was working with at the same time.”

While bears have one of the largest relative brain sizes of any carnivore, there’s surprisingly little research regarding their cognitive abilities. This oversight may be due to logistics more than anything else. Most cognitive research happens in a laboratory; the animals that do well in these environments are smaller creatures, like rats, mice, and pigeons. Facilities that allow controlled testing with bears are scarce. 

Despite these challenges, Vonk’s lab at Oakland University has worked to fill this gap in our understanding of bears since 2012. Another study conducted by Vonk suggests bears also recognize images on computer screens as real objects: During it, a captive black bear named Migwan was able to show that she prefers grapes over beets. While bears can recognize features of real objects in their virtual images, the researchers emphasized this doesn’t necessarily mean bears fully grasp what pictures are. 

Another touchscreen study from the Vonk lab suggests bears can distinguish between different categories of things, such as animals versus non-animals. The bears were trained (with the help of a few treats) to choose between two rather odd and different groups: supermodels and Planet of the Apes characters. After that task was mastered, the bears were tested on more difficult subjects. For instance, the studied black bears could tell polar bears from other species of bears, primates from hoofed animals, or a chameleon from a car. They performed surprisingly well, even for the most abstract categories of distinguishing animals from non-animals.

Other research suggests black bears aren’t the only intelligent bear. For example, in a study of tool use published in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior, brown bears had to manipulate logs and boxes to reach a tempting reward: glazed donuts. Six of the eight bears in the study successfully completed the pastry-acquiring task and usually did so out in less than two minutes, explains lead author Lynne Nelson, a professor of veterinary cardiology at Washington University. 

For decades, tool use was considered to be the defining characteristic of humans—something that proved how smart we are. The fact that bears can also use tools subsequently suggests some advanced intelligence.

Several factors may explain why bears are smart, though “more work needs to be done before we really know whether social structure or foraging ecology better predicts overall intelligence,” Vonk says. 

“I think people are only starting to recognize that it’s an interaction of all these things,” she adds.

For now, there are some promising theories. Overall most animals living in social groups, like primates, exhibit high levels of intelligence. Scientists hypothesize that social animals evolved to have mental abilities that help them cooperate and understand others’ intentions. But bears, generally, are solitary. Their brains are less of a response to their social situation and more of a response to the challenging environments that they live in. Their ability to make quick, adaptive responses to these conditions may explain why their brains are relatively large compared to their body weight—a proportion that suggests intelligence. 

Bear intelligence may also be the result of their early development; cubs start off life as curious little troublemakers. Gordon Burghardt, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, experienced this firsthand when two rescued black bear cubs stayed in his house for several weeks. He describes the inquisitive youngsters opening kitchen cabinets and sliding glass doors, climbing into the shower, and running off with purses. The cubs were also fond of playing with each other, which he posits helps with their development. Play is often thought to facilitate learning and mental development, as well as being a method of exercise and stress relief. 

Black bears and brown bears are both generalists, showing great versatility in the food they eat, how they get it, and where they find it, Vonk explained. They hunt, scavenge, and also seek out plants, nuts, and fruit. Bears also adjust to a seasonally changing environment, gaining weight in the fall and hibernating in winter. This variable and unpredictable environment may have led to bears’ greater intelligence. 

“Bears live in a vast range of environments from the deserts to the tropics and the Arctic,” Nelson adds. “Animals must exhibit a certain level of intelligence to be able to earn a living almost anywhere on the earth.”

[Related: What an ancient jawbone reveals about polar bear evolution]

The giant mammals face considerable challenges because of people too: the development of their habitats, hunting, pollution, cars, and climate change all put them at risk. Studying bear intelligence, in turn, does more than explain a natural wonder—it increases the likelihood that they’ll survive. Some scientists argue that people are more likely to protect animals when they realize the species are intelligent. 

Bears, meanwhile, will continue to be as curious as ever. After the selfie black bear went viral, Canadian park rangers tweeted out their own celebrity: the selfie polar bear.

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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.

Offshore wind is one of the fastest-growing sources of renewable energy, and with its expansion comes increasing scrutiny of its potential side effects. Alessandro Cresci, a biologist at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway, and his team have now shown that larval cod are attracted to one of the low-frequency sounds emitted by wind turbines, suggesting offshore wind installations could potentially alter the early life of microscopic fish that drift too close.

Cresci and his colleagues made their discovery through experiments conducted in the deep fjord water near the Austevoll Research Station in Norway. The team placed 89 cod larvae in floating transparent mesh chambers that allowed them to drift naturally, then filmed as they subjected half the fish in 15-minute trials to the output of an underwater sound projector set to 100 Hz to mimic the deep thrum put out by wind turbines.

When left to their own devices, all of the cod larvae oriented themselves to the northwest. Like the closely related haddock, cod have an innate sense of direction that guides their ocean swimming. When the scientists played the low-frequency sound, the baby fish still had a northwest preference, but it was weak. Instead, the larvae favored pointing their bodies in the direction of the sound. Cresci thinks the larvae may be attracted to the 100-Hz sound waves because that low frequency is among the symphony of sounds sometimes part of the background din along the coastline or near the bottom of the ocean where the fish might like to settle.

As sound waves propagate through water, they compress and decompress water molecules in their path. Fish can tell what direction a sound is coming from by detecting changes in the motion of water particles. “In water,” says Cresci, fish are “connected to the medium around them, so all the vibrations in the molecules of water are transferred to the body.”

Like other creatures on land and in the sea, fish use sound to communicate, avoid predators, find prey, and understand the world around them. Sound also helps many marine creatures find the best place to live. In previous research, scientists have shown that by playing the sounds of a thriving reef near a degraded reef they could cause more fish to settle in the area. For many species, where they settle as larvae is where they tend to be found as adults.

Even if larval fish are attracted to offshore wind farms en masse, what happens next is yet unknown.

Since fishers typically can’t safely operate near turbines, offshore wind farms could become pseudo protected areas where fish populations can grow large. But Ella Kim, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego who studies fish acoustics and was not involved with the study, says it could go the other way.

Kim suggests that even if fish larvae do end up coalescing within offshore wind farms, the noise from the turbines and increased boat traffic to service the equipment could drown out fish communication. “Once these larvae get there,” Kim says, “will they have such impaired hearing that they won’t be able to even hear each other and reproduce?”

Aaron Rice, a bioacoustician at Cornell University in New York who was not involved with the study, says the research is useful because it shows that not only can fish larvae hear the sound, but that they’re responding to it by orienting toward it. Rice adds, however, that the underwater noise from real wind turbines is far more complex than the lone 100-Hz sound tested in the study. He says care should be taken in reading too much into the results.

As well as noise pollution, many marine species are also at risk from overfishing, rising ocean temperatures, and other pressures. When trying to decide whether offshore wind power is a net benefit or harm for marine life, says Rice, it’s important to keep these other elements in mind.

“The more understanding that we can have in terms of how offshore wind [power] impacts the ocean,” he says, “the better we can respond to the changing demands and minimize impacts.”

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

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It’s hard to identify individual members of another species, unless they have sufficient visual distinctions. Every squirrel looks more or less the same, herd animals seem like a hoard of clones, and you may have once mistaken a lookalike stray for your pet. But when you look closely, small details characterize an individual from the rest of their species. Researchers at the University of California Berkeley proved the same applies for a rare species of octopus. 

The team discovered that the Pygmy zebra octopus has stripe patterns as unique as human fingerprints, allowing even humans to tell them apart. They also found that after about two weeks of age, their stripe patterns become permanent and distinctive. They published their recent findings in PLOS One.

[Related: What human and octopus brains have in common]

Octopuses’ intelligence, complex behavior, and color-changing abilities have led the animal into the limelight, both inside academia and out. There are over 300 species that live off the coasts of every continent. One is the Pygmy zebra octopus (Octopus chierchiae), also known as the lesser pacific striped octopus, coming in at about the size of a grape when fully grown. It has brown and tan stripes, fitting its name, and is native to the Pacific coast of Central America. 

Researchers confirmed that each individual has a stripe pattern unique to them by photographing 25 Pygmy zebra octopuses in a lab for nearly two years. They took photos of the specimens every week, from hatching to adulthood. Then, they gathered 38 untrained volunteers to participate in a survey to see whether or not they could identify individual octopuses based on their stripes. The survey consisted of 20 photo comparisons, each taken no more than 25 weeks apart.

The volunteers’ average accuracy was 84.2 percent, and about half of all participants scored at least 90 percent. Additionally, no individual question was answered incorrectly by a majority of participants. By analyzing stripe patterns, the volunteers’ accuracy shows that a majority of people can discern one individual from another. Given the time difference between photos, the results also indicate that people can identify an individual after several months have passed, even between juvenile to adult life cycle stages. 

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

Tracking wild animals is a challenge for many researchers, but octopuses are especially challenging to monitor. Their reclusive and mysterious behavior make them hard specimens to track. And without some sort of tag or marker, researchers struggle to identify individuals if seen again. Cephalopod researchers employ various, sometimes invasive identification techniques, including tagging, tattooing, and branding. All these practices at the very least risk harming octopuses’ soft, delicate tissues and causing unnecessary pain. Tagging, one of the least harmful options, is also imperfect. Octopuses can easily slip out of tags without bones, and if it’s attached to their flesh, they can even rip them off.

If researchers could track octopuses by photography alone, it could be a game changer for the field. In the study, the researchers highlight photography as a “a largely inexpensive, non-invasive, non-extractive, and widely accessible technique to produce high-quality data” and recommend it as an identification and tracking method for future research. 

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Sitting for too long is harmful to your health—even if you don’t feel it at the moment, your body will remember. Staying motionless for at least four hours has been linked to an increased risk of blood clotting in humans. 

But there are some exceptions. People with permanent paralysis don’t show an elevated risk for blood clotting while those who are temporarily immobile—like being stuck in a hospital bed or in a cramped airplane seat—are more susceptible to clot formation. 

A new study published today in the journal Science probes this blood-circulation question in brown bears, a species known to withdraw in their dens for five to eight months out of the year and emerge clot-free. Hibernating bears avoided blood clots by reducing a protein in their body that triggers the blood clotting process. Humans also have this protein, it turns out, and can regulate it under certain circumstances.

[Related: Scientists stuck grizzly bears on treadmills and confirmed they hate hills as much as we do]

“I would have never thought to go to bears, but it’s an excellent idea to turn to nature for studying human biology,” says Mirta Schattner, the director of the Instituto de Medicina Experimental del CONICET in Argentina who wrote an accompanying perspective piece on the study, but wasn’t involved in the research. 

An international team led by scientists from Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich ran tests on brown bears and people who have long-term mobility issues to compare anti-clotting strategies. They collected blood samples from 13 free-ranging brown bears during hibernation and again when they were awake during spring. When analyzing the contents of the blood samples, the authors noticed hibernating bears showed more signs of an anti-clotting mechanism. It worked by lowering several protein levels, including heat shock protein 47 (HSP47), which regulates immune responses. Reducing HSP47 tamps down inflammation that would have otherwise started the process of blood clotting.

To see if chronically immobilized humans have a similarly helpful reaction, the authors extracted blood from 23 people with spinal cord injuries and compared it to the blood of 23 able-bodied adults. Just like with the hibernating bears, people with spinal cord injuries showed a decrease in HSP47 levels and fewer clumped platelets that form clots. 

The similar process in bears and humans suggests prolonged immobility is the trigger that switches on the anti-clotting strategy. In situations where you might be bedridden for only a couple of days, Schattner says the inflammatory proteins are more powerful than this protective mechanism. “It would be interesting to know if it’s worth blocking the clotting mechanism in patients with acute immobilization,” she theorizes. “It’s a new pharmacological target to access.”

[Related: Heart disease-related deaths rise in extreme heat and extreme cold]

Anti-clotting mechanisms are one of many adaptations biologists can study from bear hibernation. The ursine body has developed different tactics to remain dormant throughout the winter without waking up to a horde of health problems. For example, bears use their fat to break down energy without reducing their muscle mass. They also limited the renewal of damaged bone cells to prevent osteoporosis in their sleep. Another feature includes changing biological processes like heart rate when entering hibernation. Studying how bears lower their heart rate for months at a time could help doctors better understand the mechanisms that drive cardiac diseases in humans.

But the opportunity to look at these body-regulating strategies might be short-lived. Warmer temperatures and shorter winters from climate change are affecting bear hibernation patterns, says Heather Johnson, a wildlife biologist for the United States Geological Survey Alaska Science Center who was not involved in the study. “We’re seeing that bears are hibernating for a shorter period and having longer active periods.” The warmer winters signal to bears that there is less of a need to sleep when the conditions are fine to go foraging for food. 

There have also been a few anecdotal observations of bears not needing to hibernate at all, for example, because they have access to human food all winter. Johnson says that while it’s too soon to predict how climate change will affect bear survival, we are already seeing indirect effects by having more bears awake during open hunting season and getting into more conflicts with humans. As bears adjust to the changing climate, there’s no telling how their bodies will adapt. The anti-blood-clotting mechanisms they have today may be gone tomorrow—a disadvantage for the animals and a loss for potential thrombosis treatments.

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A team of scientists from the United States and the Netherlands have discovered a new species of bat based on the oldest bat skeletons ever discovered. The findings are described in a study published April 12 in the journal PLOS One. 

The new species is named Icaronycteris gunnelli (I. gunnelli) in honor of the late Gregg Gunnell, a Duke University paleontologist who died in 2017 and is remembered for his contributions to understanding fossil bats and evolution. 

[Related: How killing vampire bats to slow rabies can go wrong.]

The now extinct I. gunnelli lived in Wyoming roughly 52 million years ago and the current scientific consensus is that bats rapidly diversified on multiple continents during this time in history. There are currently over 1,460 living bat species  found almost all over the world, except for the Earth’s polar regions and a few remote islands. 

The bat skeletons are about 1.5 inches long and were found near Kemmerer, Wyoming in the Green River Formation. The formation spans parts of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah and is home to an extensive fossil deposit from the early Eocene—about 56 million to 47.8 million years ago.  Scientists have found more than 30 bat fossils in the last 60 years within the formation. Until finding this new species, however, they believed all of them were from the same two extinct species, Icaronycteris index and Onychonycteris finneyi.

“Eocene bats have been known from the Green River Formation since the 1960s. But interestingly, most specimens that have come out of that formation were identified as representing a single species, Icaronycteris index, up until about 20 years ago, when a second bat species belonging to another genus was discovered,” study co-author Nancy Simmons, curator-in-charge of the American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) Department of Mammalogy said in statement. Simmons helped describe the second species named Onychonycteris finneyi in 2008, but always thought that there might be even more Eocene bats out there. 

Recently, scientists from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands began to look closely at Icaronycteris index by collecting measurements and other data from museum specimens to put together a dataset.

“Paleontologists have collected so many bats that have been identified as Icaronycteris index, and we wondered if there were actually multiple species among these specimens,”  co-author and evolutionary biologist Tim Rietbergen said in a statement. “Then we learned about a new skeleton that diverted our attention.”

[Related: Both bats and humans test out talking as infants.]

The well-preserved I. gunnelli skeleton in this study was purchased by a private collector in 2017 and was subsequently purchased by AMNH. The team compared the skeleton with Rietbergen’s extensive bat dataset and saw that it clearly stood out as a new species.

A second fossilized Icaronycteris gunnelli skeleton that was discovered at this same quarry in 1994. It eventually made its way to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and was also identified as this new species. 

While there are fossilized bat teeth from Asia that are slightly older than these skeletons, the two I. gunnelli fossils represent the oldest bat skeletons ever found, according to the team. The I. gunnelli skeletons are also the oldest bat fossils that have been recovered from the Green River Formation, but they are not the most primitive, meaning not the earliest on the bat evolutionary tree. According to the team, this supports the idea that the bats in the region evolved separately from other Eocene era bats.

“This is a step forward in understanding what happened in terms of evolution and diversity back in the early days of bats,” said Simmons.

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Plenty of species have traits evolved for more than one purpose. Deer antlers are built-in weapons as well as seductive doe-magnets. Octopus suckers can trap prey in their suction but also taste and smell. Bright colors in frogs signal danger to predators while flaunting reproductive viability to potential mates. The Luna moth has uniquely shaped wings that thwart predation from bats, but what else might they be good for? How does one determine the evolutionary role of a trait? 

In two recent complementary studies published in Behavioral Ecology and Biology Letters earlier this year, researchers expanded our understanding of the adaptation by testing the role of wing tails against sexual selection and bird predation.

Luna moths are native to the Eastern half of North America. Like all silk moths, they have distinctive long, trailing tails on their hindwings, or “twisted, cupped paddles” as lead author of both studies and doctoral student at the Florida Museum of Natural history Juliette Rubin said in a statement. Bats use echolocation to detect the position of objects with reflected sound, but the moth’s wing shape reflects sound waves in a way that makes the flying mammals aim for the ends of their wings. In a flap of a wing, the moth just barely dodges their predators. 

[Related: What bats and metal vocalists have in common]

First, the researchers wanted to see if the wing tails also played a role in sexual selection. When female Luna moths are ready to mate, they perch in one spot and release pheromones. Males, with extremely sensitive antennae, can detect and follow a pheromone trail, according to the University of Florida’s entomology department. Then, the female has her pick of suitors. 

In the first experiment, researchers placed a female moth in a flight box with two males: one with intact wings and one with the wing tails removed. Initial data suggested that females preferred tails over no-tails, but further trials demonstrated otherwise. When researchers removed tails by clipping them, the resulting damage may have hindered these males’ performance in the first trial, allowing the intact males to mate successfully.

They recreated the tail/no-tail experiment by removing tails from both males, and re-gluing them to one male, while placing glue only on the hindwings of the other. Researchers found no significant difference in mating success between them. 

To ensure the glue did not confound the results, researchers conducted an additional experiment with two intact males, one with glue on the hindwings. Similarly, they had equal mating success.

Though their elegance is attractive to us humans, the experiment revealed that Luna moth wing tails aren’t the result of sexual selection. 

Then, researchers wanted to see if the moths’ tails had any obvious drawbacks. They help moths to survive bats, a species that relies on echolocation, but what about visually-oriented predators? 

Luna moths sit still during the day, since flying in broad daylight with their large bright green wings would make them easy targets. To test whether or not their tails would have any impact on daytime predation, researchers wrapped pastry dough around mealworms and molded them to the size and shape of real Luna moths. They attached full wings and wings without tails to each half. They placed the replicas around branches and leaves in an aviary, and introduced Carolina wrens. 

The wrens ate the fake moths at the same rate regardless of wing type, indicating that the tails had no effect on whether or not birds could locate them. Some research suggests that birds rely on search images, mental representations of objects, when they are searching for prey. They use visual cues, such as the shape of moth wings, to distinguish between the prey from patterns in the background. So, the wrens may ignore the hindwing tails, using the overall shape of Luna moths to identify food, according to the press release.

[Related: A new technique reveals how butterfly wings grow into shimmery wonders.]

These experiments show that despite being a noteworthy feature to humans, the Luna moths’ tails do not play a role in attracting a mate, nor do they affect predation by birds.

“When we see these really obvious physical features in animals, we’re often drawn into stories we’ve heard about them,” Rubin said in the statement. “A trait that’s obvious to us, as visual creatures, might not stand out to the predators that hunt them, and the traits that we think are dynamic and alluring might not seem that way to a potential mate.”

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If the black long sea cucumber  (Holothuria leucospilota) was a superhero, they might have quite a bit in common with a famous blue and red web slinger from Queens, New York. This sea cucumber has a comedic, but incredibly useful, way to ward off the hungry predators that stalk these strange creatures. When provoked, they will tear a hole in the wall of their butts and shoot out a tangle of sticky, noodle-like goo.  

The process is described in a study published April 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and the unique defense mechanism can entangle and stop predators in their tracks. The expendable tangles are called the Cuvierian organ and look like a mass of white spaghetti that the cucumber has expelled from its butt. 

The organ is made of amino acids in repeating sequences. These proteins give the organ some strength and have unique arrangements of the proteins. Repeating amino acid sequences are also found in silkworm threats and spider webs. 

The Cuvierian organ is at the bottom of the sea cucumber’s respiratory tree, where the cucumbers breathe as well as poop. The organ contains hundreds of dangling tubes, and the sea cucumber can self-amputate it and fully regrow it in as quick as 15 days.

[Related: Sea cucumbers have a secret superpower.]

For the study, the team followed the molecular pathway that triggers the Cuvierian organ’s deployment, and found that piercing the area with a needle or grazing the skin activated the goopy sensation. However, applying direct pressure didn’t cause the reaction.  

These tubules can expand up to 20 times their original length with water pumping inside from the respiratory tree. The tubules become sticky upon contact with any surface and cling to the who or whatever is touching it. After being entangled in the butt goo, the aggressor sometimes even dies of starvation. 

Once a sea cucumber is safe from attack, it will likely crawl away from the deadly butt goo web. Scientists often find them partially hidden under clumps of seaweed, corals, or boulders. They then go back to their usual behaviors,  filtering organic matter from the sand and recycling nutrients like calcium back into the water by pooping them out. Corals and other animals can then eat up the nutrients. 

[Related: Watch these tiny bugs catapult urine with their butts.]

The team also found amyloid-like patterns in the proteins located within the Cuverian organ’s outer membrane. The brains of human patients with Alzheimer’s disease typically contain higher levels of amyloid plaques, but these proteins are used by marine organisms like barnacles as a strong adhesive. 

“This study provides the first genomic insights into defensive ensnarement in a representative species of [sea cucumber],” they write.

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Climate change has deteriorated the habitats of many migratory birds, permanently altering the timing of their expeditions. However, birds may be fighting back by changing their own plans. 

A study published April 11 in the journal Ecology finds that birds can partially compensate for these changes. They do so by delaying the start of spring migration and completing the journey faster, but this strategy does come with the cost of a decline in overall survival. 

“We found that our study species, the American redstart, can migrate up to 43 percent faster to reach its breeding grounds after delaying departure from wintering grounds in Jamaica by as much as 10 days,” co-author and Georgetown postdoctoral fellow Bryant Dossman said in a statement. “But increased migration speed also led to a drop of more than 6 percent in their overall survival rate.”

[Related: Migratory birds in the Eastern US are struggling to adapt to climate change.]

American redstarts breed in the trees and woodlands of southern Canada and the northeastern United States. They can lay two to five eggs at a time and both parents feed their young. According to the National Audubon Society, warblers like the redstart are often called ‘the butterflies of the bird world,’ for their ability to flit among treetops. The iconic redstart may live up to that nickname more than other warblers for its speed and colorful wings.

Some of the ways that birds like the redstarts can speed up the migration are by flying faster and making fewer or shorter stops to refuel. The speedier voyages  help compensate for the delayed departures, but can’t entirely make up for the lost time. According to the team on this study, individuals can recover about 60 percent of the lost time to a 10-day delay, but the birds will still be late to their breeding grounds. 

Jamaica, where some of the redstarts spend their non-breeding seasons, has become an increasingly dry climate in recent decades. The dryness means fewer insects, which are the mainstay of the redstart’s diet. It now takes the birds longer to get into the physical condition needed for the rigors of migration. Climate change is also causing the plants to bloom sooner and the insects to emerge sooner on the breeding grounds. 

“On average, migratory songbirds only live a year or two, so keeping to a tight schedule is vital. They’re only going to get one or two chances to breed,” said Dossman. “Longer lived birds are less likely to take the risk of speeding up migrations because they have more chances throughout their lives to breed and pass on their genes.”

The team from Cornell University, the University of Maryland, and Georgetown University used 33 years of American redstart migration departure data in tandem with automated radio tracking and light-level tags. They compared the birds’ expected departure date with their actual departure date to see how it has changed over time. 

[Related: Birds are so specialized to their homes, it shows in their bones.]

“Understanding how animals can compensate is an important part of understanding where the impacts of climate change will play out,” said co-author and Georgetown University biologist Peter Marra, in a statement.  “In this case, we may not lose a species entirely, but it is possible that populations of some species may go extinct locally due to climate change.” 

Activities at the redstart’s wintering grounds, such as not having enough food to eat, also carry over into the bird’s breeding season. While the redstart population is stable and increasing in much of its breeding range, eBird trend maps show that the species is declining in southern Quebec, Canada, and the northeastern US. 

“The good news is that birds are able to respond to changes in their environment,” Dossman said. “They have some flexibility and variation in their behaviors to begin with, but the question is, have they reached the limit of their ability to respond to climate change?”

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Microplastics wreak havoc on fish in myriad ways, disrupting everything from eating behavior to brain development. While it’s clear these pesky particles can cause animals a world of trouble, scientists have found it much harder to pin down exactly how they cause so many problems.

“We know that if you expose animals to plastics, then oftentimes we’ll see pathology,” says Andrew Wargo, a disease ecologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS). “But what we don’t really know are the secondary effects.”

That, however, is starting to change.

In controlled laboratory experiments, Wargo and his VIMS colleagues have shown how microplastics leave rainbow trout more vulnerable to a common salmonid disease, infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV). The effect can be dramatic: by exposing trout to a high concentration of either polystyrene beads or nylon microfibers for one month and then subjecting them to IHNV, the scientists found that fish were three to six times more likely to die, respectively, than IHNV-infected fish that hadn’t been exposed to plastics.

As well as increasing the lethality of IHNV, the microplastics also caused the exposed fish to have higher viral loads and shed more virus.

Taking tissue samples from the fish at different points in the experiment, the scientists found that the plastics were damaging the fish’s gills and provoking an inflammatory response. This likely makes it easier for the virus to invade the fish’s body, leading to more severe disease.

“There’s this kind of priming happening with some plastics,” says Meredith Evans Seeley, an environmental chemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the study’s lead author. “That allows the pathogens to be more successful at colonizing the host.”

“Understanding the mechanism of how microplastics can increase the virulence of a virus? That’s pretty new,” says Bettie Cormier, an aquatic ecotoxicologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who was not involved in the work.

The deadly synergy between microplastics and viruses could be especially troubling in aquaculture operations, Wargo says. Infections spread easily on fish farms, and farmed fish frequently encounter plastics such as nylon and polystyrene, which are used for buoys and nets.

Wild fish encounter microplastics and viruses, too, Cormier adds, so similar interactions between microplastics and pathogens could be having ecosystem-level effects.

“Plastics and pathogens are everywhere,” Wargo says. “I think if we want to understand the effects of both, we probably need to consider them together.”

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

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Unlike most primates, elephants will happily munch on a banana without removing its peel. However, one special female elephant at the Berlin Zoo named Pang Pha has taught herself how to peel a banana, according to a new study published April 10 in the journal Current Biology. Pang Pha reserves the task for bananas that are yellow-brown in color and first breaks the fruit before shaking it out and then collecting the pulp. The thick peel is left behind, possibly for for someone else to slip on.  

The authors of the study believe that she likely learned this peeling behavior by watching her caretakers feed bananas to her, and the findings show how elephants in general have some special manipulative and cognitive abilities.

[Related: Scientists may have figured out why elephants exhibit complex emotions.]

“We discovered a very unique behavior,” co-author and Humboldt University of Berlin neuroscientist Michael Brecht said in a statement. “What makes Pang Pha’s banana peeling so unique is a combination of factors—skillfulness, speed, individuality, and the putatively human origin—rather than a single behavioral element.”

Pha eats green or yellow bananas whole, completely rejects the brown ones and peels the brown spotted bananas that are typically perfect for baking banana bread before eating them. The team first noticed this after Pha’s caretakers mentioned this unusual banana peeling talent, but when they brought her nice green and yellow bananas, she didn’t peel them 

“It was only when we understood that she peels only yellow-brown bananas that our project took off,” said Brecht.

Additionally, Pha will change her behavior when yellow-brown bananas are offered to a group of elephants, and she will eat many whole bananas first and save the last one to peel later. Anecdotal reports and online videos have shown other elephants peeling bananas, but more studies and observations are needed to determine how common a phenomenon it really is. None of the other Berlin Zoo elephants engaged in peeling, according to the study. 

[Related: Ivory poaching has triggered a surge in elephants born without tusks.]

Earlier studies show that some African elephants can interpret human pointing gestures and even classify people into different ethnic groups. The team on this study believe that human-derived manipulation behaviors like peeling a banana appear to be unique. “Elephants have truly remarkable trunk skills and that their behavior is shaped by experience,” said Brecht.
The team found it surprising that Pha alone picked up on the behavior and are curious if habits like this are passed down in elephant families. They are now looking into other sophisticated trunk behaviors like tool use.

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This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

Pushing off from the dock on a boat called the Capelin, Sandy Milner’s small team of scientists heads north, navigating through patchy fog past a behemoth cruise ship. As the Capelin slows to motor through humpback whale feeding grounds, distant plumes of their exhalations rise from the surface on this calm July morning. Dozens of sea otters dot the water. Lolling on backs, some with babes in arms, they turn their heads curiously as the boat speeds by. Seabirds and seals speckle floating icebergs in this calm stretch of Alaska’s Glacier Bay.

Some two hours later, the craft reaches a rocky beach where Wolf Point Creek meets the sea. The creek is a relatively new feature on the landscape: Land at its mouth first became ice-free in the 1940s due to the melting and retreat of a glacier. It took shape through the 1970s, fed by a mountain lake that slowly formed as an isolated chunk of glacier ice slowly melted. Wolf Point Creek is special because almost its entire life span — from the first, sparse trickles melting out under the ice edge to a mature stream ecosystem teeming with aquatic life, from tiny midge larvae to small fish, and with willows and alder weaving along its edges — is known in intimate detail, its history painstakingly documented.

Milner, a stream ecologist at the University of Birmingham in the UK, has returned almost annually to this spot since the 1970s to catalog how life — particularly aquatic invertebrates — has arrived, thrived and changed over time. He was here to observe meager midges in 1977 and to spot a hundred prospecting pink salmon in 1989. A decade later, his team cataloged 10,000 of the fish spawning in Wolf Point Creek.

The creek now supports all manner of creatures that make their living on its riches, from tiny algae to midges to salmon and their predators. Salmon will soon be arriving, and some of their ardent fans are here today. As National Park Service boat captain Justin Smith idles the motor, preparing to let the crew wade ashore, he casually mentions that a mother brown bear and cubs were recently sighted. Sweeping the crescent-shaped shoreline from left to right with binoculars, he stops and announces, “There she is,” pointing to the far side of the beach. Perhaps 500 meters away, a massive, sandy-brown head chomps on tall grass as three dark brown cubs scamper at her feet.

“Do you still want me to drop you off?” Smith asks. Milner nods and vocalizes consent. The wader-clad crew disembarks into shallow water and heads to the beach, backpacks loaded with collecting gear.

This spot — where Wolf Point Creek meets Muir Inlet — is a dynamic place. Once entirely icebound, Muir Inlet is now a watery expanse over 20 miles long. The inlet is part of the even more massive Glacier Bay that boasts more than a thousand glaciers — at least for now. Over the past 200 years, the glaciers here have receded rapidly as the planet has warmed. Alaskan glaciers are among the fastest-shrinking on Earth, making this place a natural laboratory for ecologists.

How will the ecosystems change? Glacial melting is shining a spotlight on the science of ecological succession, the name given to the patterns of arrival of one species after another as they show up in habitats previously lacking in life. There are longstanding ecological debates around succession that the work by Milner and others may help to settle.

And how will salmon adapt? Though wild salmon are known for their homing instincts, not all return to their natal streams. That’s important in a warming climate, because the fish that stray can colonize new streams that form where glaciers are melting — places long covered in ice. As streams in traditional salmon spawning grounds to the south become increasingly inhospitable with warming waters, some fish are, indeed, dispersing to new regions, filling new niches that open up.

New streams are creating conundrums, too, including for Indigenous people whose livelihoods depend heavily upon salmon. Some now find salmon shifting to spawn in places unprotected from development. Tribes and nations may be excluded from fishing access to these new habitats, even when their rights, on paper, are legally enshrined.

Succession: An ecological obsession

Milner first arrived in Glacier Bay in 1977 as a University of London graduate student in his mid-twenties, lured by a Time-Life book about the region and captivated by the opportunity to witness a fundamental ecological process in real time. He wanted to better understand how natural systems gradually change: how species arrive, survive and persist to form communities in brand new habitats like these young streams, how one community gives way to another.

Known as primary succession, this process of change is one of the oldest concepts in ecology, engrossing scientists since the discipline’s dawn. After the dramatic 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, for example, life in the volcanic blast zone started fresh. At first, the catastrophically altered landscape appeared lifeless. But over time, lightweight seeds and insects swept in on the breeze. Seeds grew into plants, attracting more insects, plus birds, deer and elk. Heavier seeds got carried in on droppings or feathers. Today, some of that formerly barren landscape is regaining its forest.

When the young Milner first arrived, there had been no studies of stream succession, he says. Glacier Bay seemed the perfect spot to start such a project. Today, his is the longest-running research program in Glacier Bay National Park, a protected area of mountain peaks, lush temperate rainforest and shifting glaciers melting into cavernous fjords. This dynamic birthplace for new waterways is the site of one of the longest continuous studies anywhere of stream community formation.

Milner has returned most summers since then, missing one to get married, one when he was in Japan and two when travel was pandemically paused. Documenting the aquatic invertebrates lurking on Wolf Point Creek’s riverbed each year and sampling less frequently in other streams of various ages, he has cataloged the minutiae of incremental change for more than four decades. His silver-stubbled face and slow gait underscore this passage of time as he wades the stream again on this summer’s day.

A century ago, the beach where we stand bore the weight of the ice of Muir Glacier, thousands of feet thick. But even then, Muir was in rapid retreat. An 1888 note in the journal Science reported that this ice river was melting out at a rate of 65 to 72 feet per day. As late as the 1980s, tourists on boats could see icebergs from Muir Glacier calving into the bay, but today Muir no longer meets the tidewater. It terminates on land, about a mile from the sea.

As our team plods upstream from the creek’s mouth, the stream is flanked by alder and cottonwood trees. When Milner first walked here, “there was no vegetation,” he says. Now its banks support a forest. To get upstream, we forcefully maneuver through dense brush. Shouting is futile, inaudible above the rushing river, so Milner periodically sounds an air horn, warning wildlife of human interlopers.

So much has changed here, a point underlined as we push and shove our way through eye- and leg-poking alder thickets. First detected in the stream after the stream mouth emerged from glacial ice were larvae of chironomids, cold-loving midges. Later, other invertebrates came. Arriving in the 1980s were mayflies, stoneflies and caddis flies; stream ecologists call this trio EPT, from the orders Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera and Tricoptera.

The first plant life to establish near the stream was a few mats of mountain avens, a hairy, nitrogen-fixing Dryas plant with delicate white-petaled flowers, related to the rose. On top of the Dryas mats, Milner later found clumps of tiny alder and willow trees establishing themselves. Young cottonwood and Sitka spruce began taking hold on the wider floodplain. What happens in the stream and beside it is tightly linked, Milner found: Willow catkins are food for caddis flies, and alder roots provide chironomids with safe homes.

The year of 1987 brought a critical event, the first appearance of fish — insect larva-loving Dolly Varden char. Two years later, coho and pink salmon showed up.

The salmon sighting came in 1989, during a regionally massive pink run. That year, a hundred pink salmon found their way to the stream. “Then it really took off,” says Milner. By 1997, he counted more than 10,000 spawning pinks. Now they consistently return to Wolf Point Creek in the thousands. Pink salmon don’t need food in the stream in order to establish, explains Milner, just a place to lay their eggs, since their fry make their way straight to the ocean after emergence. But other salmon, like sockeye, need streams that lead up to lakes, and food in the water that feeds their babies, like plankton or insects. Wolf Point Creek’s waterfalls more than 30 meters high mean sockeye will never live here. They need more gradual, navigable paths to lakes in order to feel at home.

After more than an hour of wading and bushwhacking, we arrive at the sampling site. Our quarry are macroinvertebrates — backboneless animals like midge, mayfly and stonefly that are visible to the naked eye.

Ecologist Fred Windsor of Wales’ Cardiff University, Milner’s former graduate student, is brimming with excitement to see this legendary stream for the first time. He teaches National Park intern Sofia Elizarraras to brace a square-rimmed sampling trap against streambed rocks. Reaching down, long gloves protecting arms from frigid waters, Windsor gently shakes and rubs trapped rocks to dislodge clinging creatures. The flow of water sweeps the harvest to the back of the net. Windsor takes the catch to Milner, seated on gravel nearby. Milner extracts the critters and their twiggy sludge, then preserves and bags them.

EPT are today’s main haul. These are useful indicator species of stream health and community complexity, explains Windsor, because of their sensitivity to things like water flow, temperature and oxygen. Back at the lab, Milner will microscopically examine them and identify the species.

In the Rockies, more change

Living things farther down the ecological food chain also change as streams mature. Almost a thousand kilometers to the south, ecologist Karson Sudlow clambers the Rocky Mountains examining algal diversity in glacial streams.

Sudlow lights up about algae. “Algae are amazing!” he says. At multiple stream sites, his team has an unusual technique for systematically scrubbing rocks to collect them: an electric toothbrush run through one 30-second brushing cycle. Scrubbings are rinsed into a tray, then poured into a storage vial for microscopy and analysis.

Streams coming straight from glaciers are cold, nutrient-poor, turbid and fast-flowing. “All of this creates an ecosystem that is extremely hard to live in,” says Sudlow. So these newborn streams have very limited algal diversity, supporting mostly diatoms — species of small, single-celled algae with glass-like silica shells. Clinging tightly to rocks, “they can handle the worst conditions,” says Sudlow. Streams less influenced by glaciers have more diverse communities with more green algae and cyanobacteria, but with fewer cold-tolerant diatoms. Glacial streams become more akin to them as the ice recedes. Sudlow’s research underlines what others have found, too: Over time, as glaciers melt and streams warm, we gain stream diversity.

These Rocky Mountain streams melting out from glacial ice, with algae their main life form, may be what Wolf Point Creek was like in its very early days, before Milner arrived.

There are gaping holes in our understanding of ecological change after glaciers recede, says zoologist Gentile Francesco Ficetola of the Università degli Studi di Milano in Milan, Italy, who co-wrote an article about the ecology of glacial retreat in the 2021 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. His own work in the Alps, where the shrinking and disappearance of glaciers has been hard to ignore, is that “every glacier is different,” he says. Compounding the challenges of understanding ecological patterns as glaciers disappear is that the ecosystems that form afterwards are complex, like puzzles that build over time by assembly of thousands of pieces.

And though plants, microbes, insects and larger organisms all interact, field studies — for practical reasons — tend to focus on just one puzzle piece, generating an incomplete understanding of the ecosystem as a whole.

Succession as a theory has changed, and continues to change. As Ficetola explains, early work on succession was largely focused on plants. And it was proposed that succession led eventually to a “climax” community — a single stable endpoint based on an area’s climate and geography. Ecologists today recognize that succession is less predictable. Three different successional models dating back to the 1970s were put forward to explain how communities change. Early on, ecologists ardently defended one model over another, but today it seems that these models, and newer ones, are not mutually exclusive or universally supported: Some arrivals fit one model and others, another.

One model, facilitation, argues that early arriving “pioneer” species modify the environment to make it more suitable for later colonizers. Pioneer species do this by increasing habitat suitability and likelihood of survival. For example, when a glacier first recedes there is no soil, explains Ficetola. So if an arriving plant or microorganism can convert nitrogen from the abundant but inaccessible nitrogen gas in the air to its biologically useful ammonia form, this pioneer can facilitate establishment of more plant species later on because of improved soil nutrition. Those later species often, in turn, make life tougher for the pioneers.

A second model, inhibition, suggests that early colonizers make the environment less suitable for later arrivals. In this model, species that reproduce quickly and disperse easily are likely to get there first, but which of those organisms win real estate over time is a matter of chance. An example of inhibition in action is early-arriving plants that release growth inhibitors into the soil.

In a third model, tolerance, interactions among arriving organisms are more neutral. Any species, and not specifically pioneers, can start the succession. Under tolerance, later arriving species are more likely to successfully establish and persist if they can live with limited resources, enabling them to outcompete or exist alongside species already there. So succession under the tolerance model sees the steady arrival of species over time, with a progressive tolerance of incoming species to the changing environment.

Milner has found that what matters most to stream life gradually shifts. Physical factors are the most important at first — especially water temperature and channel stability. Once the water warms, other factors may come into play. And once vegetation takes hold near the stream, it helps to buffer changes in water flow and to facilitate the development of stream ecosystems.

His catalog of the shifts in macroinvertebrates in Wolf Point Creek, made through season after season of trapping and painstaking lab microscopy for identification, provides what he and colleague Anne Robertson argue is a rare example of tolerance.

If facilitation had been occurring in Wolf Point Creek, there would have been more extinctions — species disappearing. If inhibition had been a major driver, the number of species would have remained stable or increased only slowly with stream development. That’s not what they found. Instead, they found marked increases in diversity, with few extinctions. With the exception of the stream’s cold-tolerant first colonizers that disappeared due to competition as waters warmed, Milner’s team found that once organisms arrived, they tended to stay, unless disturbed by a dramatic event such as periodic flooding.

On the second day of fieldwork in Glacier Bay, we head to another stream Milner has studied over decades. Rush Point Creek is more than two centuries old, much older than Wolf Point Creek. This stream lost its glacial source long ago. Unlike Wolf Point, it has no high-elevation lake moderating its drainage. That makes it prone to severe flooding, and as we wade up its course, the carnage is obvious. This stream is strewn with mammoth conifers felled into the water as the banks were violently undercut.

Lakes above streams, including those fed by glaciers, help to regulate whether stream communities can remain stable and maintain the species gains made little by little. Flooding, Milner and colleagues found, acts like a stream time machine. A major flood in 2005 at Wolf Point Creek washed out species and reset stream life to a simpler community like the one in existence 15 years earlier. For salmon, though they’re adapted to breed in fast-flowing streams, the extreme flows of floods can scour and wash away eggs and tiny fish.

Milner’s team has found that the timing of arrival for species in a new stream is partly due to chance, and partly due to distance from a source. It took nearly half a century after stream formation for salmon to colonize Wolf Point Creek, for example, but they colonized another stream in Milner’s study more quickly. At Stonefly Creek, which emerged from a glacier in the 1970s, pink salmon were counted just 10 years after stream formation.

Milner also discovered that the arrival of fish represents a pivotal moment for new streams. To spawn, salmon dig small depressions called redds to lay their eggs. This disturbance can evict some invertebrates, like chironomids, from streambed homes, but favor persistence of others, like blackfly larvae, which spin silken tethers to affirm their rocky grip in fast-flowing waters. And because salmon die after spawning, their carcasses contribute nutrients like nitrogen to the stream, especially when trapped by woody debris that falls in as bankside trees mature.

Ghosts of last year’s salmon bounty are still visible along Wolf Point Creek as skeletons and bones in the gravel bars. Nutrients that salmon bring after formative years in the ocean stimulate algae production, supporting an entire community of algae, invertebrates, small fish and bigger fish — all the way up the food chain.

Climate change, salmon and the new north

As climate change marches on, how widespread are new salmon habitats in deglaciating areas? Kara Pitman and Jon Moore at Simon Fraser University, along with 10 colleagues including Milner, examined exactly that. With a computer model, they digitally peeled back the ice from 46,000 glaciers in southern British Columbia, Canada and south-central Alaska. Taking into account ice thickness, they could examine the land terrain underneath and apply mechanical movements and physics to see what future streams might have a path with a gradient not too steep for salmon to swim up.

They estimated from this exercise that glacier retreat will create over 6,000 kilometers of new Pacific salmon streams by 2100. That could mean, within the area that they studied, 27 percent more salmon habitat compared with today. “We hear so much about loss of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest,” says Milner. But melting glaciers are “creating unique opportunities for new salmon populations to form.”

Will salmon habitat gains outweigh habitat losses? “This is a key piece in understanding salmon futures,” says Pitman. Of course, salmon success depends on more than just the freshwater habitats where they spawn — conditions in the oceans where they pass their adult lives matter keenly, and those waters are warming too, bringing with them the ecological turbulence and uncertainty of climate change. But broadly speaking, it appears as though salmon that spawn in some northern regions like Glacier Bay are poised to be climate change winners, gaining more streams to breed in following their youthful years at sea.

Northern gains will be paralleled by southern losses, though. Indeed, farther south in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California, salmon streams are already rapidly warming, leaving cold-loving salmon like sockeye physiologically challenged. And on a local scale, that may make a food source people once relied on reliable no longer.

Some 300 miles to the south of Wolf Point Creek, that’s a reality already being experienced by the Gitanyow First Nation in northern British Columbia. The Gitanyow have long depended on the sockeye salmon spawning habitat of the Hanna and Tintina rivers, and a land use plan signed in 2012 by the Gitanyow and the British Columbia government protects these streams.

But in the decade since protection, salmon preferences have changed. In three out of eight recent summers, returning salmon have found the Hanna and Tintina rivers dry. Now streams to the west, like Strohn Creek, fed by the rapidly melting Bear glacier near British Columbia’s Alaskan border, provide new, more favorable spawning habitat. So salmon have begun going there instead.

“We’ve just completed a glacier study in our entire territory,” to examine changes expected by 2050 or 2100 due to glaciers melting, said Chief Malii/Glen Williams, Gitanyow president, in a press conference. The study predicts that Hanna and Tintina creeks will continue to warm and to dry out more frequently. Strohn creek, more shaded and fed by north-facing slopes, is likely to remain cooler into the future.

Recognizing this salmon shift, and to safeguard this increasingly important habitat for salmon and food security, in August 2021 the Gitanyow declared the Meziadin Indigenous Protected Area to protect the region including Strohn Creek. But the British Columbia government has yet to recognize this new protected area or fulfill the Gitanyow request to prohibit mining near the stream. Retreating ice also exposes tantalizing mineral riches that mining companies have their sights on.

Succession: The human story

Back at the beach, our days of sampling complete, we board the Capelin to head back to base. En route, Smith points to a recently fractured mountainside; evidence of a gigantic landslide. As glaciers recede here, it’s not just new streams that form. Sometimes the underlying land, no longer covered in ice, gives way to instabilities as water and gravity take their toll. Melting glaciers are changing our world in myriad ways.

Glaciers are, by nature, on the move, I’m told by glaciologist Taryn Black, a recent doctoral graduate at the University of Washington who studied glaciers in Greenland and Alaska. People often think of them as moving slowly, she says, at “a glacial pace,” but they are actually really dynamic. And the dynamics of glacial advancement and recession have profoundly affected human ecology.

For thousands of years, from time immemorial, Huna Tlingit people lived year-round on the rich lands that today lie in Glacier Bay National Park. Khudeiyatoon/Darlene See, cultural program manager for the Huna Indian Association, explains that the land near National Park headquarters and the dock at Bartlett Cove, where we set off on our boat trip, was once wide open marshland by a key salmon river. “We had a year-round village there,” she says, called S’é Shuyee (Edge of the Glacial Silt).

“In the mid-1700s, the glacier came down and destroyed the village site,” says See. The Huna Tlingit fled. By 1750, the peak of the Little Ice Age, Glacier Bay was entirely filled with ice. From their new home 30 nautical miles southeast in Xunniyaa (Hoonah) meaning “sheltered from the north wind,” scouts would periodically check the glacial ice, says See. In the early to mid-1800s, Huna Tlingit did return to Sít’ Eeti Gheeyí, the “Bay in Place of the Glacier,” finding a land transformed.

But the declaration of a national monument, then national park, kept the Huna Tlingit out. National parks were a conception for protecting wildlife and plants, not Indigenous people.

The icy relationship between the National Park Service and the Huna Tlingit has begun to warm with collaboration on building projects like commemorative totems and the park’s Huna Tribal House. Though the tribe still requires the park’s permission to harvest traditional foods like the salmon that are recolonizing streams on their ancestral homeland, there have been small advances — such as reestablishment of the annual Huna Tlingit harvest of glaucous-winged gull eggs.

As our boat approaches the dock at Bartlett Cove one last time, Milner is reticent when asked whether he will return next year. He is equipping Windsor, his young protégé, to succeed him and take this project into the future. I ask Milner why his research matters. “It helps us better understand one of the most fundamental concepts in ecology,” he says. Yet it is much more than that. Succession following glacial retreat is not only a scientific curiosity. It affects countless living beings, including ourselves.

Glaciers are transient. Climate is changing. Some streams are drying up. Others are forming. In our warming world, there is much still to learn about the enigmatic ways succession ushers in new life, upturning our ancient ways.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems.

Kit saw the ocean for the first time on an iron-skied February afternoon. My wife and I had spent the last three years in eastern Washington State, a region landlocked by 600 kilometers of forests, sagebrush, and wheat fields. For most of that time, we’d cohabited with Kit, an affectionate piebald mutt we’d adopted from a local shelter. Now we were moving to another inland environment—Colorado—via a circuitous road trip that took us through San Francisco. Our brief time in California, we realized, might be Kit’s first and last chance to lay her protuberant eyes upon the sea.

We drove to an ocean beach that some literal-minded city father had named Ocean Beach. I walked Kit onto the damp sand and watched her scrape at the stuff, as though trying to find its bottom. I unclipped her leash and Kit began to saunter, then run, one step ahead of the frothy surf, like a sandpiper. The wind pinned her floppy ears against her head, and she flung herself down to roll ecstatically in some dead washed-up thing. She looked happy; she looked free; she looked right.

In that, Kit wasn’t alone: most dogs love the beach. But the beach doesn’t love our dogs. A growing body of literature suggests that Canis lupus familiaris has become a significant force of disturbance along the world’s shorelines—not just the packs of feral dogs who roam some less regulated shores, but the domestic pooches whose well-meaning owners, like me, turn them loose for a romp in the sand. Dogs have been known to maul seal pups, outcompete eagles for dead fish, and dig up turtle nests. They save their worst harms for shorebirds, killing chicks, crushing eggs, and forcing migrating birds to burn more calories than they can spare. “Man’s best friend,” researchers concluded in 2011 with typical scientific understatement, “may not be wildlife’s best steward.”

In response to these harms, coastal managers have implemented leash laws, seasonal restrictions, and even outright dog bans. But limiting when and where our mutts can move invites controversy. After politicians enacted a partial dog ban on one Australian beach, aggrieved pet owners claimed that they’d become “criminals in [their] own backyards.” Others gripe that even strict laws are rarely enforced: in San Diego, where beach dogs are subject to a passel of regulations, vigilantes seem to take perverse pleasure in videotaping scofflaws. While our pets are the nominal causes of these conflicts, however, the real culprits aren’t Akitas and Airedales, but us—and our mastiff-sized blind spots around our furry family members. The dogs, of course, are just being dogs.

When we think about destructive pets, cats come first to mind. Whether feral or free-range, cats are swift, silent assassins, responsible for the deaths of up to four billion birds and 22 billion mammals each year in the United States alone. Dogs, by contrast, seem more goofy than lethal, hilariously distant from their wolfish origins. (Does a Shih Tzu really strike terror in any other animal?) In The World Without Us, author Alan Weisman postulated that, should humankind abruptly disappear, cats would fare just fine. Dogs, however, would vanish alongside their people, unable to survive without their twice-daily bowls of kibble.

Yet dogs, the world’s most abundant carnivores, exert immense impacts in their own right. In Mongolia, they kill antelopes and gazelles; in New Zealand, they’ve hampered the recovery of imperiled kiwis. Australian researchers have shown they scare off enough animals to “cause a depauperate local bird fauna.” In Russia’s Lake Baikal, they once transmitted a deadly virus to freshwater seals.

In 2019, on a reporting trip to Tasmania, Australia, I heard a firsthand account that exemplified the dangers of dogs. One evening, I met up with the founder of a group devoted to safeguarding the colonies of little blue penguins that nest along the state’s north coast. As we watched penguins—stout as bowling pins, feathered in glossy indigo, plump with sardines—waddle ashore after several days at sea, the advocate outlined the measures he’d taken to protect his beloved birds. He had erected fencing along a coastal highway to keep them from wandering into traffic and cleaned hundreds of the birds after a tanker ran aground and befouled the beach with oil. Yet he felt powerless to save penguins from the domestic dogs that occasionally escaped their owners, wandered down to the beach, and, on stumbling upon such vulnerable prey, instinctively began to slaughter. (Even friendly dogs can kill: penguins are so easily stressed that “playing” with them can induce cardiac arrest.) The year I visited, six separate dog attacks on four colonies had claimed the lives of more than 250 penguins.

“We don’t have dog attacks in Tasmania—we have dog massacres,” the group’s leader, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal from local dog owners, told me. “It takes two to 10 minutes for a dog to kill 40 or 50 penguins.”

Granted, little blue penguins are uniquely easy victims; not even the fastest greyhound is likely to catch an adult gull or dunlin. But the mere presence of dogs is enough to send birds into flight: after all, what’s a poodle but an unusually curly-haired fox, coyote, or wolf? In Chile, scientists have observed dogs pursuing whimbrels, a graceful shorebird that probes mudflats with a long, curved bill. On Mediterranean beaches, dog walkers flush plovers from their nests far more often than humans alone, exposing eggs to predators and thermal stress.

“Certain dog owners seem not just to allow it, but to take their dogs to the beach so that they can chase birds,” says David Newstead, bird program director at the Texas-based nonprofit Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program. “These are otherwise conservation-minded people.”

Hounding birds on the beach seems like a benign behavior, or even a wholesome form of play: picture a euphoric golden retriever, tongue lolling and paws kicking up sand, merrily dispersing a flock of terns into a summer sky. Yet even a few brief flights can have big impacts. On the Gulf Coast beaches where Newstead works, many shorebirds are migrants—red knots, piping plovers, sanderlings—who have come to Texas to refuel during epic transcontinental journeys. They spend their days alternately resting and gorging on marine invertebrates, a cycle that’s critical to building the energy stores that migration requires. Dogs disrupt this loafing and feeding, leaving birds less equipped to complete their voyages.

“Every time you’re forcing birds to fly down the beach, the gas tank is going toward empty,” Newstead says. “If they can’t take in more energy than they’re expending on that beach, they’re eventually going to leave. It’s functional habitat loss.” When Newstead gently reprimands dog owners, he appeals to analogy and sympathy: imagine you’ve just gotten home from work and want nothing more than to chill on the couch with a beer—and then a pack of barking dogs tears into the house and chases you outside, over and over again. “Sometimes they grudgingly put their dog back on a leash,” he says. “Sometimes they just say to hell with you.”

Dogs also disturb ecosystems in stranger, subtler ways. In the fall of 2020, Brooke Maslo, an ecologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, embarked on an ambitious study of how coastal scavengers dispose of carrion. She and her collaborators set out motion-activated cameras on beaches along the Jersey Shore, then baited each with three fish carcasses acquired from tackle shops. “They would always get a big kick out of it,” Maslo says. “‘What do you want 150 dead menhaden for?’”

Maslo’s intent wasn’t to study dogs—it was to monitor the wildlife that came to beaches to feed, from red foxes and raccoons to corvids and laughing gulls. Yet dogs inevitably appeared. Sometimes Maslo’s cameras caught owners dragging their pooches away from the dead fish or placing the carcasses back on the ground, presumably after prying them from their pets’ jaws. More often the dogs urinated or defecated around the menhaden, as though claiming the carrion as their own.

At first, Maslo admits, the constant canine presence was frustrating: here she was, trying to document wild scavengers, and her cameras were clogged with domestic ones instead. As she watched more videos, though, a pattern emerged: When dogs appeared during the day, other scavengers steered clear that night, likely scared off by the scent-marking of an apex canid. Raccoons, skunks, and grackles were completely absent from dog-infested beaches, and foxes, black-backed gulls, and ghost crabs were rare. Maslo and her colleagues observed last year in Scientific Reports that nocturnal scavengers took 34 percent longer to find the dead fish after dogs had come around and ate far smaller portions when they finally showed up.

Why does this matter? Coastal necrophages play a crucial and salutary role, consuming the dead and thus preventing beaches from being strewn with carcasses. What’s more, Maslo says, mobile scavengers like gulls distribute carrion across beaches, spreading out nutrients and thus supporting ecosystems—not unlike dying salmon gifting their nitrogen and phosphorus to the forests in which they spawn. By claiming beaches for their own, dogs inhibit this breakdown and dispersal. You might not find a dachshund particularly intimidating, yet our pets are creating landscapes of fear, monopolizing food sources, and disrupting life’s fundamental processes.

In fairness, coastal managers aren’t blind to dogs’ impacts. Not long after I visited Tasmania, the state government raised the fines for owners whose dogs entered penguin colonies more than 20-fold, a measure that dramatically reduced the rate of attacks. Still other beaches require dogs to be leashed, restrict the hours in which they’re permitted to run loose, or are altogether dog-free. Oregon, for instance, bars even leashed dogs from snowy plover nesting grounds between March 15 and September 15. After an off-leash dog killed a piping plover chick in Scarborough, Maine, in 2013, the town hired plover police to post signs and educate beachgoers about leash laws. “I was expecting to be getting a lot more negativity,” a plover cop cheerfully told reporters.

But Scarborough’s plover guards are more exception than rule—for when dog regulations arrive, controversy usually follows. Few people know that better than Karen Harper, a councilor in Saanich, a municipal district on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. For years Harper had fielded complaints from coastal homeowners who’d witnessed dogs harassing wildlife and people along Cadboro Bay, an inlet whose beaches lie within a federal bird sanctuary. Although Canadian law prohibited off-leash dogs in the sanctuary, Saanich’s own regulations permitted them. In early 2020, Harper, hoping to resolve the contradiction, formally requested that Saanich’s staff study dogs’ impacts and review its bylaws.

“And then,” she says, “all hell broke loose.”

Angry emails poured into the council: Saanich residents urged Harper to “stop wasting staff time,” called her concerns “unfounded and largely irrelevant,” and described her request as “bogus procedure.” (Other commenters applauded Harper for confronting the degradation of “precious and priceless natural areas.”) On Facebook, Harper says, residents derided her as a “dog hater,” though she’d long owned dogs, most recently a pair of German shepherds. One local had dog feces flung into her yard. The situation got so volatile that animal-control officers started going to the beaches in pairs.

Harper was grappling with a persistent conundrum in coastal management: we know a lot more about how dogs harm beaches than how to get people to rein in their pets. In one typical study, researchers in southeast Australia found that just one-third of dog walkers felt “strongly obliged” to leash dogs. “While wildlife protection is important to dog owners,” the scientists added, “greater importance is given to the benefits of unleashed exercise for dogs.” Per one survey, 85 percent of American dog owners consider their pets part of the family; no wonder we privilege our own animals’ happiness over the welfare of wild creatures.

Other scientists have sought the answer in one of humanity’s most powerful motivators: peer pressure. In 2018, researchers interviewed nearly 900 coastal dog walkers in Maine, New York, and South Carolina. People didn’t just let their dogs roam free to exercise and sniff other mutts, they realized, but because social and personal norms sanctioned it. To change the attitudes of dog owners, the researchers proposed modeling different behavioral norms. Perhaps a group of volunteers could parade Spot and Rex around on leashes, each dog outfitted with a vest that reads “This Dog Shares the Shore with Shorebirds.” Social media loves nothing so much as a puppy (well, aside from a cat); maybe #ThisDogSharesTheShore will someday go viral on Instagram.

Still, the most sure-fire solution to averting dog conflict is also the most draconian—an outright ban of even leashed dogs. “Canadians are theoretically compliant types, but if you have leash-only areas, people ignore it,” Harper says. “It’s kind of discouraging.” The temptation to let dogs run free may be irresistible; better, perhaps, to proscribe our pooches altogether.

Ultimately, it’s hard not to conclude that the furor over dogs is a red herring—for the real problem isn’t our mutts, but our cognitive dissonance. Just as we forgive the foibles of our human relatives, we ignore the casual harm wrought by our four-legged children. (“Sure, those other dogs might chase birds, but my Duke would never hurt a fly.”) Perhaps because our dogs’ behaviors are a direct reflection of us, we harbor the delusion that they’re under our control; I recently saw an off-leash collie take a healthy bite of a jogger’s butt, even as the animal’s owner yelled at her to stand down. We rationalize their misdeeds, overrate their training, prioritize their pleasure over other beings’ right to exist. Love is not only blind, it’s blinding.

Much though I believe in protecting the natural world from our pets, I’m as guilty of this myopia as anyone. Earlier this winter, a year after Kit experienced the Pacific Ocean, I took her skiing near our new home in Colorado—unleashed. For a few minutes she trotted beside me, sniffing scat and eyeing squirrels, and, as always, I felt joy to see her happy and stimulated. Then she veered into a jumble of windblown logs and scrabbled at the snow with her paws. I slogged over and dragged her away, but it was too late; she’d unearthed and killed a hibernating vole, soft and warm as a newborn’s cheek. I felt grief, then momentary anger at Kit, but it wasn’t her fault—she was merely doing what her ancestors had been bred to do. The responsibility was entirely mine.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

The post Dog’s are a human’s best friend—and a shorebird’s worst enemy appeared first on Popular Science.

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While the extinct woolly mammoth and present day elephants may be similar in size and many physical features, scientists are still learning more about what makes the giant elephant ancestors stand apart. The Woolly mammoth went extinct around 4,000 years ago, possibly due to changes in the Earth’s climate, when the vegetation that they survived on became too wet to consume when ice melted, but scientists have uncovered samples of its DNA from specimens preserved in ice and other fossils. 

Scientists found that many of the animal’s trademark features–like large fat deposits and woolly coats–were genetically encoded in the earliest woolly mammoths, but became more defined over 700,000 years of evolution. While woolly mammoths lived in northern parts of America and Eurasia, the specimens in this study came from an area now known as Siberia. The study published April 7 in the journal Current Biology also located a gene with several mutations that may have been responsible for the woolly mammoth’s tiny ears.

[Related: This is the most-complete woolly mammoth ever found in North America.]

“We wanted to know what makes a mammoth a woolly mammoth,” said study co-author and paleogeneticist David Díez-del-Molino of the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden in a statement. “Woolly mammoths have some very characteristic morphological features, like their thick fur and small ears, that you obviously expect based on what frozen specimens look like, but there are also many other adaptations like fat metabolism and cold perception that are not so evident because they’re at the molecular level.”

The team compared 23 Siberian woolly mammoth genomes with 28 modern-day Asian and African elephant genomes. Though woolly mammoths are hypothesized to have been on Earth as long as 2.4 million years ago, their genes had accrued a large number of mutations specifically during those 700,000 years in Siberia. Twenty-two of the woolly mammoths in the study had relatively “modern” genomes, meaning that they had lived within the past 100,000 years. One sample named Chukochya was from an animal that lived roughly 700,000 years ago and is one of the oldest known woolly mammoths scientists have discovered.

[Related: Scientists made a woolly mammoth meatball, but don’t grab your fork yet.]

“Having the Chukochya genome allowed us to identify a number of genes that evolved during the lifespan of the woolly mammoth as a species,” study co-author and evolutionary geneticist Love Dalén from the the Centre for Palaeogenetics said in a statement. “This allows us to study evolution in real time, and we can say these specific mutations are unique to woolly mammoths, and they didn’t exist in its ancestors.”

The team found highly evolved genes related to fat storage and metabolism, like the ones modern-day polar bears and reindeer have, even though those animals are not related to woolly mammoths. According to Díez-del-Molino, this is a sign of convergent evolution–the evolution of two lineages that are similar, but it is not linked to a common ancestor–for the genes in cold-weather adapted mammals. 

[Related: Researchers retraced a woolly mammoth’s steps 17,000 years after it died.]

The relatively large woolly mammoth genome sample size helped the team pinpoint the genes that were common across the species. These genes were likely adaptive–which arise in response to a specific situation–instead of a naturally occurring variation. These genes also may have only been present in the single individual animal studied.

“We found that some of the genes that were previously thought to be special for woolly mammoths are actually variable between mammoths, which means they probably weren’t as important,” said Díez-del-Molino.

Compared with the newer woolly mammoth genomes, the Chukochya genome shared roughly 91.7 percent of the mutations that caused protein-coding changes in the more modern woolly mammoths. This high overlap shows evidence that their thick fur, fat metabolism, and cold-perception abilities were likely already present when the woolly mammoth first diverged from its ancestor the steppe mammoth, between 800,000 to 600,000 years ago.

Older woolly mammoths like Chukochya also likely had larger ears and a different wool type and texture and those traits continue to develop over time. The more modern genomes also had several immune mutations in T cell antigens that were not present in Chukochya. The team believes that these mutations were likely related to developing better immune responses to emerging viruses. 

All the woolly mammoth genomes were from specimens collected in Siberia, but the researchers hope to branch out and compare them with North American specimens. “We showed a couple of years ago that there was gene flow between woolly mammoths and the ancestors of Colombian mammoths, so that’s something that we will need to account for because North American woolly mammoths might have been carrying non-woolly mammoth genes as well,” said Dalén.

The post Woolly mammoths evolved tiny ears over 700,000 years in Siberia appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article originally published on High Country News.

Justin Binfet, a biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, strode down a sagebrush-covered hill in the Deer Creek Range of central Wyoming, his phone in his hand. The mid-June sun beat down as the wind picked up. Binfet hopped across a clear, rocky creek and climbed hundreds of feet up the opposite ridge. He stopped occasionally to course-correct after checking his phone, which showed dozens of dots on a map, indicating that a mountain lion had been hanging out near the area. A female lion usually sticks around for one of two reasons: She’s made a den and has kittens, or she killed something big and is taking her time dining. 

Binfet hoped for the latter. Wind and hot sun can make quick work of a carcass, so he didn’t dawdle.  

He and a few other biologists had fitted the wild cat with a GPS collar 18 months earlier so they could track her movements. Her collar collected her location every three hours, and the data was sent to a satellite daily. A complicated algorithm analyzed those pings and alerted the scientists if the lion had likely killed something. 

Binfet reached the top of the ridge, where sagebrush flowed into a few robust junipers that abutted the limestone bluffs above him. His truck sat far below along the vague two-track we’d driven in on, the only sign of humans for miles.

“I’m looking for a kill in some pretty open stuff,” Binfet said. 

Minutes later, he found it: the remains of an elk calf, baking in the sun a few feet away from a juniper as tall as a house. Binfet wanted to know whether a lion had killed this calf, and if so, whether the calf was infected with chronic wasting disease, or CWD, when it died.

Tufts of fur were buried in a bed of needles and duff beneath the tree — signs of a lion cache. The only way to tell if the calf had been infected was to examine its lymph nodes, which Binfet hoped hadn’t yet decomposed into slime. He turned to the calf, stretched blue surgical gloves over his hands and set to work, using a scalpel to dissect the several-day-old carcass that was already melting into the earth. 

Any information gleaned from it would provide one small piece of a much greater puzzle — the question of whether, and how, predators affect the spread of CWD, a disease that kills every animal it infects. Binfet’s work was part of a study he’s helping to lead, to figure out if lions select their prey from the sick and weak — as many people assume — or if they choose stronger and healthier individuals, just like human hunters do. In short, do mountain lions influence how the disease moves among other wildlife?

To find out, biologists have tracked, darted and collared 26 mountain lions, then used the information to find and sift through the freshly killed carcasses of their prey. Other researchers collared newborn fawns and are tracking their movements until adulthood. Now the scientists are trying to use all this data to better understand how chronic wasting disease operates across a vast landscape and multiple species. It’s not easy. Lions don’t want to be darted and collared and often give biologists the slip. Collars stop working, complicated algorithms don’t always spit out accurate kill locations, and sometimes those locations come with a lion and kittens unhappy to see human intruders. Even when scientists can locate the lions’ prey, dead animals don’t stay fresh enough for valid disease samples in the 90-degree heat for long. That day in the field, Binfet found maggot-filled mush instead of lymph nodes.  

And then there are humans. State regulations permit unlimited mountain lion hunting in parts of central Wyoming. One winter morning, Binfet loaded GPS locations for each of the study’s collared lions onto his laptop before heading into the field. One collar — and the lion it belonged to — turned up east of Casper, off Interstate 25, in the parking lot of the Hat Six Travel Center. Likely in the back of a truck. 

Technically speaking ,chronic wasting disease is a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. The condition results from microscopic misfolded proteins called prions, which cause other proteins to mutate into prions as well. This buildup of mutated proteins eventually kills cells and leaves holes in an animal’s brain, making it look like Swiss cheese under a microscope. All infected individuals die. Most wither or waste away, though because the disease slows reaction time and movements, some are hit by cars or killed by predators first. No cure exists.

CWD isn’t caused by a virus or bacteria, so it can’t be combated by antivirals or antibiotics. There’s no vaccine. The prions that cause it stick to metal, particularly stainless steel, and can only be destroyed by being doused in lye, soaked in bleach or heated to temperatures greater than 900 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Researchers first recognized the symptoms of CWD in 1967, in captive Colorado mule deer. Years later, it appeared in wild herds in southeast Wyoming. No one knows how it started or where, exactly, it came from. Since then, the disease has crept from county to county, state to state, region to region. It has leapt to Pennsylvania and even South Korea through imported captive elk and deer. CWD has now been documented in 30 states from Texas to New York. In the West, it was most recently identified among wild deer in Montana, in 2017, and Idaho in 2021.

CWD infects deer, elk and, occasionally, moose. Other species have their own variations: Mad cow disease, for example, affects cattle and made headlines after people ate infected meat and developed a deadly variant of the disease in the United Kingdom in the ’90s. CWD has never been documented in humans, but scientists worry about the possibility of a similar transmission through eating meat from a sick animal. The most well-known prion disease that affects humans, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is also incurable and fatal. As a precaution, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells hunters not to eat animals that test positive for CWD. Most state wildlife agencies, including the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, offer free testing for animals killed by hunters, and some states and hunting areas either require or strongly encourage it. Right now, however, the main consequence of the disease is its devastating impact on wildlife herds.

Scientists largely agree that once CWD is established in a herd, it likely can’t be eradicated. What researchers don’t know is how to stop it. 

The best way to control the disease may be to slow its spread, wrote biochemist Sandra Pritzkow in a 2022 review paper published in the journal Viruses. CWD moves in part through feces, urine and infected carcasses, which deposit mutated proteins in the soil, where the prions remain infectious for years. In addition, CWD prions bind to plants, and might even be transmitted by earthworms as they inch through dirt. Prions also shed through saliva and nose-to-nose contact, which is how gregarious deer and elk say hello. 

It’s unclear whether animal-to-animal contact or environmental contamination is the bigger problem. But little can be done about prions lurking in the soil. So, one of the most promising — and practical — ideas involves thinning wild herds to keep animals from commingling and spreading the disease. Wyoming and Montana have tried issuing more hunting licenses in order to decrease the density of deer in certain areas. 

Another option is to allow more hunting by other predators, such as wolves, bears or lions. But humans have reduced predator numbers since pre-colonial times. It’s possible that boosting or restoring predator populations — no matter how counterintuitive it may seem — could help bolster deer numbers. A small-scale study in Colorado published in 2010 suggested that lions may prefer to prey on infected deer, but Binfet and others are diving deeper, tracking more lions and collaring deer and fawns in order to better understand whether predators can help or hinder CWD spread.

“What do you do when a disease gets to be endemic?” asked Rhiannon Jakopak, a research scientist with the University of Wyoming who is studying how CWD moves among mule deer. “Do you just watch the herd decline? Or do you try to tinker with it a little bit?” 

Jakopak and a technician named Erika Schwoyer stood on top of Chalk Mountain, a bluff in central Wyoming about 50 miles from Binfet’s elk carcass. They moved quietly, closing the doors of their truck with barely more than a click. Like Binfet, they had a signal to follow. Unlike Binfet, they hoped to find the animal or animals associated with it alive. 

The two researchers whispered to each other as they pulled an H-shaped radio receiver and binoculars out of their backpacks and jammed in sampling test kits — plastic bags full of syringes, vials and other gear. Then they picked their way over to a clump of pine trees near a pile of sandstone rocks. Schwoyer held the receiver in the air, hoping for a ping, but no sounds broke the stillness of the unusually windless day. 

A deer had given birth in the area the night before, and in the process had dropped a small plastic and metal vaginal implant transmitter that biologists had inserted in the spring. When the transmitter hit the ground, it sent a signal that triggered a satellite, which sent an email to Jakopak. An ultrasound performed in the field had shown that the doe was pregnant with twins, and the researchers needed to find the fawns and collar them before the spindly-legged creatures ran away. 

Newborn fawns’ best defense against predators is to hide and stay absolutely still. But, if scared enough, they will flee; Jakopak once watched a less than half-a-day-old fawn race away across a swampy field. 

Jakopak wanted to know if infected mothers pass CWD to their fawns at birth or shortly after, or whether some fawns escape the disease completely. If they aren’t infected, she wondered, why not?

We scrambled down the rocky hillside, pausing every few minutes to listen for pings from the dropped transmitter and scan the sagebrush-covered valley below. Jakopak has spent years searching Wyoming’s mountains and plains for baby animals. She knew the fawns would be impossible to see from a distance, so she watched for movement from the mother; the newborns would be nearby. 

Midway down the hill, we heard the firstping. The tempo of the receiver’s “beep, beep, beep” began to speed up as we reached the valley below, indicating that the transmitter was close. Moments later, Schwoyer found it in a patch of green grass. 

Now the search became even trickier and more urgent. We hadn’t spied the mother, which meant the fawns were either hiding or had taken off, likely never to be found. Then Jakopak waved to us and pointed to the ground a couple of yards away.

Curled up in an almost perfect circle was a tiny brown fawn marked with white spots. She lay motionless in a divot next to a knob of sagebrush — out in the open, yet completely camouflaged. She barely breathed; even her wide-open eyes stayed still.

Jakopak gently wrapped her hands around the fawn, its legs shooting out in all directions in a last-ditch attempt to escape. She carefully wrangled the spidery limbs, then placed the baby in a gray cloth grocery bag and hooked the bag’s handles to the bottom of a scale. 

“Eight pounds,” she said to Schwoyer, who noted the weight on a clipboard. Jakopak scooped the fawn out of the bag and placed her back on the ground, keeping her hand gently on the newborn’s chest so she couldn’t run away. 

Schwoyer wrote down the length of the deer’s body and the bottom section of one of her back legs as Jakopak called out the measurements. Jakopak filled several vials with blood for potential CWD testing later. (A blood test for CWD is currently awaiting USDA approval.) Finally, she wriggled an elastic GPS collar around the fawn’s neck. As the deer grows, thin pieces of thread constraining the collar will break, allowing it to expand so researchers can track the fawn to adulthood. A battery pack attached to the GPS unit may last for upwards of nine months. If either dies — the battery or the fawn — a satellite will email Jakopak, letting her know. 

While Binfet and his team concentrate on lions, Jakopak focuses on deer. She isn’t sure how much predators curb the spread of CWD, but she knows any reduction means more time to find a cure or a better management strategy. Even a small difference, she said, could be important — saving just one deer from this awful disease would be worth it.

“You can tell when they have died from CWD,” she said, though she noted that a formal diagnosis requires lab testing. “It looks like they were standing and pushed over, but pushed over by nothing. Sometimes they get scavenged, and your heart sinks. You can see their ribs sticking out, and hipbones. They look like they were skin and bones, and they toppled over.”

Jakopak is especially interested in the fawns’ teenage years. Males tend to wander off by nine months or so, while females might roam around a little before settling somewhere nearby. Ecologists rarely focus on this period — after the fawns have left their mom and before they settle — but it could be critical in understanding CWD contagion. During this time, young deer likely interact with other family units or even join different herds, exchanging saliva — and possibly CWD. That kind of contact, along with time in new environments, are prime opportunities for spreading disease. But researchers don’t know exactly where teenage fawns go.

“That’s one of the missing pieces,” Jakopak said.

She’s also tracking how and why the fawns or their moms die. They’ve collared 68 adult female deer so far and lost nearly a third of them. Of those that died and have been tested, 11 had confirmed CWD; eight died from it, while predators killed the other three. Still, CWD likely contributed to their deaths, Jakopak said. One was killed by a coyote, which rarely kill adult mule deer.

Once the fawn was collared, Jakopak returned her to the notch where she’d found her. The fawn pressed herself into the ground, then stilled.

“Science is so incremental,” Jakopak said. “We’re trying to control for as much as we can and explore one little piece of the puzzle. And, hopefully, after someone’s entire career, we might have the bottom left corner.”

In midwinter, Binfet, riding shotgun in a small white pickup, bumped down a winding dirt road in the central Wyoming’s Deer Creek Range. Snow-covered red clay, sagebrush and junipers surrounded the truck, and a few deer bounded up a nearby hill. Binfet was looking for a collared mountain lion whose GPS signal kept fading in and out. The truck’s driver, Ryan Rohrer, who owns a large ranch in the area, talked about his appreciation for lions — unlike most Wyoming ranchers, who generally loathe the large predators, partly because they occasionally kill livestock, mainly sheep. 

“Mountain lions are one of the coolest creatures on the landscape, in my opinion,” he said. “They’re just so elusive, and it’s a 150-pound athlete that makes a living off killing things four times its size, you know? And you never see them. They’re just — they’re just super cool.”

Rohrer has never had issues with lions eating his cattle or horses. In early February, in fact, a collared female spent a few days behind his horse barn, near 300 weaned calves. Rohrer’s horses were there, too, eating hay. The cat killed a deer and a skunk but left the livestock alone. Perhaps, he said, mountain lions don’t need domestic animals in an area with such a rich supply of wild food.

So when Binfet called Rohrer a couple of years ago asking if he could study lions on his land, Rohrer agreed. Much of the West — more than 600 million acres, including roughly half of Wyoming — is public, but everything else is private. That means researchers often need the cooperation of private landowners to get much done. 

For most of Binfet’s career, he managed deer herds with CWD. About a dozen years ago, he worked on a project testing deer from a herd just south of Douglas, Wyoming, for the disease. The head researcher, Melia DeVivo, later published a paper suggesting that the herd could decline by as much as 50%. One worst-case scenario predicted that CWD, if left unchecked, could wipe it out completely. Today, the herd is relatively stable, but still just half the size that the Wyoming Game and Fish Department believes the landscape can support.

DeVivo also noted that 20 of the deer in the study with CWD were killed by mountain lions, making the big cats the primary source of mortality for CWD-positive deer. Binfet wondered if he could use the ponderosa- and juniper-covered rolling mountains of central Wyoming to measure the impact of predators on deer numbers in an area already saturated with the disease. Members of the public tended to call for killing predators whenever deer numbers waned, but in the presence of CWD, that might only worsen the situation. Binfet also wanted to know if anecdotal stories about lions and coyotes avoiding the carcasses of deer killed by CWD were true, or just that — stories.

So he sat down with a Game and Fish large-carnivore biologist, Justin Clapp, to develop the current project: a plan to spend almost four years tracking dozens of mountain lions to see what’s on their menu. 

Early one morning, my phone buzzed with a message from Jakopak. We were supposed to meet for coffee to discuss how many fawns in the study had died, among other topics. But at the last minute, she emailed to say she had tested positive for COVID-19. Her housemates had been sick for the last 10 days. She’d quarantined with them, testing negative for the duration, then woken up sick. It didn’t make sense. But the last three years of this pandemic have demonstrated how confounding diseases can be, and how much can remain unknown — even after years of global efforts.

The Wyoming study hopes to address some of CWD’s unknowns. But even so, it’s unclear what wildlife officials will do with the data. Would they be willing to impose lion-hunting quotas in an area where the culture is steeped in anti-predator ideologies?

Potentially, said Dan Thompson, the Game and Fish Department’s large carnivore section supervisor, if the data is clear enough. “We’re open to what we will learn from this study,” he said. “I think it would only make sense if the results suggest there’s something we can do from the lion perspective that would be beneficial for mule deer.

“A lot of people are using the predation standpoint for their agendas. Some groups say predation will fix everything and some say predators ruin everything, and until we have answers that are well quantified, we’re playing the middle game.”

Regardless, every sample or drop of blood taken by Jakopak, Binfet and others will add to the growing body of work on CWD from across the world. 

It’s also possible that modern wildlife managers have been looking at this in the wrong way from the beginning, said Jason Baldes, an Eastern Shoshone tribal member and executive director for the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. “In Western thought, we silo everything and think it should be broken down in pieces,” Baldes said. “But when you look at it whole, it’s not siloed. It’s one system together.”

Imagine if the pieces of this particular puzzle had never been scattered by CWD. If the predators that keep herds healthy by weeding out the sick had never been removed, Baldes said, this terrible disease, with its unknown origins, might never have had the chance to spread.

That’s partly why tribal nations like the Eastern Shoshone traditionally didn’t allow predator hunting on the reservation — though there is currently a hunting season for lions — and why tribal leaders continue to oppose hunting grizzly bears and wolves. It’s also why Baldes and others are working so hard to restore the buffalo. Only a complete ecological system can ensure that all species have a chance against threats like disease and even climate change. 

“We can’t continue to think we have an answer when we don’t look at it holistically,” Baldes said. 

A pair of blue tick hounds ran across lion tracks in the snow as the sun cracked the horizon on a late January morning, north of where Binfet sorted through the elk calf carcass. The dogs followed the big cat for miles over sandstone boulders, up hills and down ridgelines, across a road and a bridge and then yet more hills.

Their human handlers watched the dogs’ progress on GPS trackers. The crew of Wyoming state biologists wanted to get a collar on the lion so they could add its movements — and its dining habits — to the study. 

Barking and howling erupted in the distance. Minutes later, the handlers hiked up a ridge and found the source: The dogs had treed the lion on a thumb of rock about halfway down a 400-foot precipice, hanging above a frozen river. 

The lion had careened down a narrow, steep couloir etched into the side of the cliff, then skirted an impossibly small ledge to reach a lone ponderosa growing from a crevice in the rock. The dogs followed. There all three remained for almost an hour. Then, in a flash of fur and claws, the lion bailed from the tree and streaked back along the ledge with the dogs in pursuit. One grabbed the lion’s neck in its mouth. The lion spun around, planted her teeth in the hound’s face, and the two began to roll. 

The crew at the top of the cliff — now including a search and rescue team the biologists had called to help the dogs — gasped and watched, helpless.

Somehow the animals separated and made it to the bottom of a gully, where the lion flew into another ponderosa and the dogs once again waited below. 

The lion’s clear blue eyes remained fixed on the humans at the top of the rim, unblinking. 

It was late afternoon now, and the sun was sinking. The rescuers decided to rappel down the cliff, fit the dogs in cloth slings and winch them back up. The lion, the biologists decided, would not be sedated and collared after all; it was too close to dark. She would go free, untraceable. 

Minutes later, the dogs safely back with their human companions, she fled. 

In late March, small latches in the remaining lion collars unclicked, and the collars dropped to the ground. The lions will once again fade into shadows and tracks, rarely seen by humans — another piece in the very large puzzle of a disease that won’t stop moving.  

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Discovered in 2014, stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) has rapidly spread in the warm waters of the Caribbean. The mysterious ailment that targets hard corals has harmed more than 22 species of stony corals in Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Cases have been confirmed in at least 20 other countries and territories. A 2022 study of the coral species Pseudodiploria strigosa estimated a between 60 and 100 percent mortality rate in the Caribbean alone. 

While the precise cause is unknown, scientists are working to develop effective treatments. In a study published April 6 in the journal Communications Biology, a team of scientists describes the first effective bacterial probiotic for treating and preventing SCTLD. Using a probiotic provides an alternative to using the broad-spectrum antibiotic amoxicillin. So far, using amoxicillin has only been proven to treat the disease, and also runs the risk of promoting antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

[Related: Disease-resistant super corals can save vulnerable reefs.]

Once coral is infected with SCTLD, its colony of polyps can die within only a few weeks. “It just eats the coral tissue away,” Valerie Paul, co-author of the study and a marine biologist and chemical ecologist at the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce, Florida, said in a statement. “The living tissue sloughs off and what is left behind is just a white calcium carbonate skeleton.”

While probing how the disease spreads, Paul and a team noticed that some fragments of great star coral (Montastraea cavernosa) quickly developed SCTLD’s characteristic lesions and died, while other pieces didn’t get sick at all. While the precise cause of the disease is unknown, pathogenic bacteria was a suspected culprit in the disease’s progression, since antibiotics were an effective treatment for the disease.

With this in mind, the team collected samples of the naturally occurring, non-pathogenic bacteria present on a pair of disease-resistant great star coral fragments. After testing the samples, the team tried to identify if there were any naturally occurring microorganisms protecting some great star corals from the SCTLD.     

The team used three strains of harmful bacteria from corals that had previously been infected to further test 222 bacterial strains from the disease-resistant corals. While they found that 83 strains that had some antimicrobial activity, a strain named McH1-7 particularly stood out. Further chemical and genetic analysis of McH1-7 confirmed the compounds behind its antibiotic properties and the genes behind those compounds.

[Related: Scientists grow stunning, endangered coral in a lab.]

When they tested McH1-7 with live pieces of great star coral, the tests revealed a final piece of decisive proof: McH1-7 stopped or slowed the progression of the disease in 68.2 percent of the 22 infected coral fragments. It even prevented the sickness from spreading during in all 12 transmission experiments.  

Some next steps for the team are to develop better delivery mechanisms to use this probiotic method at scale in the ocean. The primary method of applying this coral probiotic now is to wrap the coral in plastic to create a makeshift mini aquarium and then inject the helpful bacteria, which would not be feasible on a large scale. It is also not clear if this bacterial strain isolated from the great star coral will have the same effects for other coral species.

To the team, it is still a welcome bit of news, as it could help prevent inadvertently spawning an antibiotic resistant bacteria and help corals in an ever changing climate.  “Between ocean acidification, coral bleaching, pollution and disease there are a lot of ways to kill coral,” Paul said. “We need to do everything we can to help them so they don’t disappear.”

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A team of scientists from Australia and Japan didn’t need a super-long fishing pole to catch the deepest fish ever recorded. All it took was a camera, some bait, and a deep-sea submersible support vessel. The team managed to snap a photo of an unknown snailfish species from the genus Pseudoliparis  at a record-breaking 27,349 feet below the ocean’s surface. 

In August 2022, the team boarded the research ship DSSV Pressure Drop for a two-month long expedition to explore three deep trenches of the northern Pacific Ocean: the 23,950 feet deep Ryukyu trench, the 26,246 feet deep Japan trench, and the 30,511 feet deep Izu-Ogasawara trench. The research was part of a 10 year-long study into the deep sea dwelling fish populations. 

[Related: Researchers found signs of human pollution in animals living six miles beneath the sea.]

The small fish was caught on camera in the In the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, south of Japan. This deep sea dweller beats the previous record of 26,830 feet  set in 2017 by a Mariana snailfish found in the Mariana trench near Guam. 

The team also collected two fish in traps a few days later, this time in the Japan trench at a depth of 26,318 meters. These snailfish named Pseudoliparis belyaevi are believed to be the first fish collected from depths greater than 26,000 feet and have only ever been seen at a depth of 25,272 feet back in 2008.

“The Japanese trenches were incredible places to explore; they are so rich in life, even all the way at the bottom,” University of Western Australia marine biologist Alan Jamieson said in a statement. “We have spent over 15 years researching these deep snailfish; there is so much more to them than simply the depth, but the maximum depth they can survive is truly astonishing. In other trenches such as the Mariana Trench, we were finding them at increasingly deeper depths just creeping over that 8,000m [26,246 feet] mark in fewer and fewer numbers, but around Japan they are really quite abundant.”

Jamieson also discovered the previous record winner in 2017 discovery and worked with a team from the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology to deploy the baited cameras in the deepest parts of the trenches.

According to the team, despite a large and “somewhat lively” population of fish that dwell at these intense depths, the solitary Pseudoliparis individual that they found was a very small juvenile. Most young snailfish are typically found living at greater depths than the adults, unlike other deep-sea fish. 

“Because there’s nothing else beyond them, the shallow end of the range overlaps with a bunch of other deep-sea fish, so putting juveniles at that end probably means they’ll get eaten,” Jamieson told The Guardian. “When you get down to the mega deep depths, 8,000 plus [meters or [26,246 feet], a lot of them are very, very small.”

[Related: Millions of dead crabs ended up in the deep sea. Scientists still aren’t sure why.]

Almost 10 years ago, Jamieson and his colleagues had hypothesized that it may be biologically impossible for fish to survive at depths greater than this, but after 250 deployments at sea, it seems to be getting closer to becoming a more solid hypothesis.

“The real take-home message for me, is not necessarily that they are living at 8,336m [26,246 feet], but rather we have enough information on this environment to have predicted that these trenches would be where the deepest fish would be,” Jamieson said. “In fact until this expedition, no one had ever seen nor collected a single fish from this entire trench.”

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Wander through your backyard or walk along a stream and it’s likely you’ll see a snail – small, squishy animals with shells on their backs.

Snails are found in water, whether in salty oceans, rivers or lakes. They’re also on land: in forests, grasslands and even your garden.

As you explore your yard or woods, you can also encounter slugs, which are slow-moving animals related to snails. They look like them too, except that slugs lack shells.

Not only can you find slugs crossing sidewalks or on plants at the park – some are in our oceans.

All told, an estimated 240,000 species of snails and slugs live all over the world. But no matter what continent they’re on, or what ocean they’re in, there’s one thing they all have in common: They move slowly.

Here’s an example of just how slow they are: The World Snail Racing Championships, held in the United Kingdom, pits the quickest snails against one another in a “foot” race.

The fastest snail on record sped through the course at a blazing 0.06 miles per hour.

Or to look at it another way – if you were that slow, it would take about three minutes to get a bite of food from your plate to your mouth.

Mollusks are everywhere

Why is it that snails and slugs are in no hurry?

As researchers who specialize in the study of plants and animals, we’ve learned the answer is more complicated than you might think.

Snails and slugs are members of a large group of related animals known as mollusks, which also includes clams, oysters, squids and octopuses.

Within mollusks, there’s a smaller set of related animals called gastropods; this includes snails and slugs.

Because they live in such diverse places, different gastropods have evolved to consume almost every type of food. Some species are herbivores – they eat living plants. Some are detritivores – they feed on dead or decomposing plants. Others are carnivores or scavengers – they eat other animals.

The reasons for slowness

The lack of speed of snails and slugs can be attributed to at least three factors: how they move, what they eat and what eats them.

First, while some animals fly, jump or slither, snails and slugs move using what biologists call the “ventral foot.” But the word “foot” here can be confusing. A snail or slug foot is nothing like a human foot.

Instead, it’s a band of muscle that runs along the underside of their body and is covered in sticky mucus. When contracted, this muscle ripples, sending tiny waves from the animal’s tail to its head. These waves compress the mucus on the bottom of the foot into a slippery liquid, allowing the snail or slug to glide over the ground or climb plants.

It’s a unique way to move, and it forces snails and slugs to go slowly because their speed is limited by the number of foot contractions and the amount of mucus they can make.

And snails and slugs don’t need to rush to find their food anyway.

Many animals, particularly predators, must move fast to catch a meal; a cheetah needs to outrun a gazelle, for example. But most slugs and snails eat plants, decaying matter or marine animals, like sponges, which are anchored in place. None move around much, so dinner’s not going anywhere – no rush.

Dealing with predators

Nor do snails and slugs need to be fast to avoid predators. They’ve evolved other ways to evade mice, birds, shrews and other enemies.

Typically, snails withdraw into their shells to hide until the predator passes.

Land slugs hide in plain sight. Most are shades of gray, tan or brown and blend in well with their surroundings. Predators simply don’t notice them.
They also have an additional layer of protection. Land slugs are covered with a sticky mucus, similar to the mucus that lubricates their movement. But this version is so gooey that it can gum up the mouths of predators and make it hard to chew. Not to mention that most predators probably wouldn’t find the slime very tasty.

In contrast, sea slugs are often easy to see because they are colorful. But these bright colors advertise to predators that they should stay away, because the slugs are protected with nasty-tasting poisons.

Treat snails and slugs with respect

Snails and slugs, small as they are, are big contributors to the health of their ecosystems.

By feeding on seeds and young plants, they can control which plants grow in an area. By eating decaying matter, they help recycle nutrients that growing plants can use. And despite their best efforts, snails and slugs do often become food for other animals.

So the next time you see a snail or slug hanging from a plant, dawdling in your yard or gliding across a concrete sidewalk, stop and observe. Remember its remarkable biology, the unique way it moves and looks, and the many ways it benefits the environment.

And then, let them be. These small animals help keep our world running.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Wild elephants could be the next animals to join an exclusive list of species that show signs of self-domestication. A study published April 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that elephant self-domestication may have led to some of their advanced traits, such as mourning their dead, helping sick or injured elephants, and even recognizing themselves in mirrors. 

According to  the self-domestication hypothesis, humans have gone through a process of “selection against aggression,” that was self-induced and not forced.  

“The theory of self-domestication is hard to test,” study co-author and Max Planck Institute evolutionary biologist Limor Raviv said in a statement. “This is because only one other species besides humans has been argued to be self-domesticated: bonobos.”

[Related: A DNA tool designed to solve murders is exposing elephant poachers.]

Raviv and her colleagues looked at how African savannah elephants compared with humans and bonobos on 20 different measures. They found that all three species share some of the same physical features and display the same habits. Elephants play, are social, have a long childhood, and “babysit” for the offspring of other members of their groups. Both bonobos and humans also do this. Additionally, wild African elephants’ have a shortened jawbone, which is a trait shared by domesticated animals such as cats.  They also appear to be able to restrain themselves from being aggressive to others.

Elephants can also learn from each other. Knowledge like what to eat and how to raise their young are socially transmitted, versus being innate like they are in other animals. For example, spiders are born knowing how to spin silk, same goes with birds building nests. Elephants also have a sophisticated and varied communication system. Their extensive vocal repertoire ranges from roars to low-frequency rumbles to trumpets and roars to low-frequency rumbles. Elephants in Kenya even have a different alarm call for bees than they do for humans. 

The team also found several candidate genes associated with domestication in elephants. They compared the genomes of wild elephants with studies of 261 domesticated mammals and created a list of the genes that are frequently associated with domestication. Of the 674 genes that the team says have a high likelihood of being passed down from earlier elephant generations, 79 genes were associated with domestication in other species. This could suggest that domestication can evolve in multiple branches of the mammal evolutionary tree. 

[Related: ‘Zombie genes’ could be why so few elephants die of cancer.]

The team hypothesizes that self-domestication in elephants might be related to their large size and relative strength. “This means that elephants are generally less worried about evading or fighting other animals for their survival,” Raviv said. “This kind of ‘safe environment’ could relax selective pressures for aggression, free cognitive resources, and open up more opportunities for exploration, communication, and play.”

Some scientists remain wary about self-domestication in general and future studies are needed to further test this hypothesis. Melinda Zeder, an emeritus archaeologist and domestication expert at the Smithsonian Institution told Science, “it’s nice to see the correlations with bonobos and humans and the genetic similarities tied to the reduction of aggression,” but she is still skeptical of the self-domestication idea in general. She adds that self-domestication is a “meaningless term that muddies the waters,” and that domestication requires “two to tango,” meaning a domesticator and a domesticate.

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Similar anatomy, not a shared sense of humor, might be key for experiencing deception from a pretty common magic trick. In a new study, a team of psychologists tested a sleight-of-hand trick called the French drop on three species of monkeys with different hand structures. In this trick, an object appears to vanish when a spectator assumes it is taken from one hand by the hidden thumb of the other hand.  

The monkeys without opposable thumbs did not fall for the assumption and were aware of the whereabouts of the treats a magician tried to “make disappear.” But, the monkeys with opposable thumbs were duped. The findings were published April 4 in the journal Current Biology.

[Related: A centuries-old magic trick is helping us make holograms we can feel.]

From the results, it appears that in order to deceive, a conjuror needs a similar anatomy to their audience. Sharing a particular biomechanical ability may be necessary to accurately anticipate and predict the movements of another with the same limbs. This phenomenon turns out to be true even when the apparently accurate predictions end in confusion at the hands of an illusionist. 

“Magicians use intricate techniques to mislead the observer into experiencing the impossible. It is a great way to study blind spots in attention and perception,” study author Elias Garcia-Pelegrin said in a statement. “By investigating how species of primates experience magic, we can understand more about the evolutionary roots of cognitive shortcomings that leave us exposed to the cunning of magicians.”

Garcia-Pelegrin, now a psychology professor at the National University of Singapore, has practiced magic for a decade and conducted these experiments during his PhD work at Cambridge University. 

The French drop is often one of the first tricks budding magicians set out to master. In the trick, a coin is displayed in one hand. The other hand then reaches over and grabs the coin. The palm of the second hand faces inwards, with the magician’s thumb concealed behind fingers. The viewer knows the thumb is lurking and ready to grip, so they assume the coin has been taken when it is no longer visible. Their attention then follows the second hand, only to find it empty. Meanwhile, the magician had secretly dropped the coin into the palm of the original hand.

In this study with monkeys, morsels of food replaced coins and the treats were given as a reward– but only if the monkey guessed the correct hand. Going into the experiment, the team predicted that monkeys with opposable thumbs would act like human audiences and assume that the hidden thumb had grabbed the treat, and then select the incorrect hand.

[Related: Time passes faster for smaller, quicker animals.]

The team repeatedly performed the French drop for 24 monkeys from three species– capuchins, squirrel monkeys, and marmosets. 

The eight capuchin monkeys were tested using peanuts. This species boasts noteable dexterity and uses stone tools to crack open nuts in the wild. Capuchins can also waggle each finger and have opposable thumbs which allow “precision grip” between thumb and forefingers.  They were fooled by the French drop about 81 percent of the time, mostly choosing the empty second hand.

While less dexterous than their capuchin counterparts, squirrel monkeys have limited thumb rotation, but can oppose their thumbs. They are typically familiar with a hidden thumb interacting with fingers, but they cannot cannot perform a precision grip the way capuchins and humans do. The squirrel monkeys were tested with mealworms and were fooled 93 percent of the time. 

Marmosets do not have opposable thumbs and have thumbs that align with their fingers to make five equidistant digits. These are ideal for climbing up thick tree trunks. They were fooled only 6 percent of the time. They chose the hand that initially held a tasty marshmallow was initially placed and stuck with it for this experiment.

The team tried to nullify the tricks by actually completing the hand-to-hand transfers, instead of using misdirection. When this occurred, the capuchins and squirrel monkeys anticipated correctly, while the marmosets missed out on their reward.

As a last step, the team devised their own version of the French drop called the “Power drop”. It utilizes a full fist grab, which is a hand action that all the monkey species could perform to varying degrees. They found that the power drop fooled all of the monkey species the vast majority of the time.

[Related: Monkeys with close friends have friendlier gut bacteria.]

“There is increasing evidence that the same parts of the nervous system used when we perform an action are also activated when we watch that action performed by others,” co-author and Cambridge psychologist Nicola Clayton said in a statement. “This mirroring in our neural motor system might explain why the French drop worked for the capuchins and squirrel monkeys but not for marmosets.”

The team adds that how fingers and thumbs move helps space the way an individual thinks and the assumptions made about the world around us. 

“Our work raises the intriguing possibility that an individual’s inherent physical capability heavily influences their perception, their memory of what they think they saw, and their ability to predict manual movements of those around them,” said Clayton. 

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Watching a bird leap around on its crooked legs before it takes off into the air is kind of  like turning back the evolutionary clock and watching a theropod dinosaur. Numerous paleontologists believe that theropod group, which includes the spinosaurus, tyrannosaurus rex, and velociraptor, evolved into the birds we see on Earth today. This would make them the only dino-descendants that survived catastrophic extinction 66 million years ago.

Like birds, theropod dinos also laid eggs, and scientists are beginning to fill in evolutionary gaps by studying the shelly remains. A study published April 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) examined the calcium carbonate left behind in the eggs of a funky theropod called Troodon and found that the dinosaurs laid four to six eggs in communal nests. 

[Related: Newly found titanosaur eggs reveal dino nurseries once teemed with baby giants.]

Troodon was a carnivorous dinosaur over six feet long that lived in North America about 75 million years ago. It had some bird-like features, particularly its light and hollow bones, two legs, and fully developed feathery wings. However, the dinosaur’s relatively large size kept it from flying, but it likely ran very fast and caught prey in strong claws. 

Troodon females also laid eggs that are more similar in shape to the asymmetric eggs laid by  modern birds than to the round reptile eggs. Their eggs were blue-green colored like other theropod eggs, and they have been found half buried into the ground. The international team of scientists on this study believes that mother Troodons sat and brooded on them.

To learn more, the team examined the calcium carbonate left behind in some well-preserved Troodon eggshells. They used a method developed in 2019 called “dual clumped isotope thermometry.” 

With this technique, they could measure the extent to which heavier isotopes of oxygen and carbon clump together in carbonate minerals. Isotopic clumping is temperature-dependent, and the prevalence of this clumping helped the team determine the temperature at which the carbonates crystallized. The eggshells were likely produced at temperatures of 107 degrees Fahrenheit and then deduced down to 86 degrees, which is very similar to modern birds. 

[Related: A fossilized egg laid by an extinct, human-sized turtle holds a rare jackpot.]

The team then compared  the isotopic compositions of reptile egg shells (alligator, crocodile, and multiple turtle species) with modern birds (chicken, sparrow, wren, emu, kiwi, cassowary, and ostrich) to see if Troodon was closer to either birds or reptiles. Two different isotopic patterns were revealed. The reptile eggshells have isotopic compositions matching the temperature of the surrounding environment, since they are cold-blooded and form their eggs slowly. Birds leave a recognizable non-thermal signature in the isotopic composition, which is evidence of quick eggshell formation. 

“We think this very high production rate is connected to the fact that birds, unlike reptiles, have a single ovary. Since they can produce just one egg at the time, birds have to do it more rapidly,” study author and geochemist from Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany Mattia Tagliavento said in a statement. 

The team compared these results to the remains of Troodon eggshells and did not not detect the isotopic composition which is typical for birds. According to Tagliavento,  “this demonstrates that Troodon formed its eggs in a way more comparable to modern reptiles, and it implies that its reproductive system was still constituted of two ovaries.”

As a last step, the researchers combined their results with existing knowledge about body and eggshell weight and determined that Troodon only produced only four to six eggs per reproductive phase. They found this observation particularly notable because Troodon nests are typically large and have up to 24 eggs, so the team believes that this means they laid their eggs in communal nests. This communal egg nesting behavior is seen in modern day ostriches.  

“Originally, we developed the dual clumped isotope method to accurately reconstruct Earth’s surface temperatures of past geological eras,” study co-author, geochemist, and developer of the new thermometry method Jens Fiebig, said in a statement. “This study demonstrates that our method is not limited to temperature reconstruction, it also presents the opportunity to study how carbonate biomineralization evolved throughout Earth’s history.”

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This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

It’s evening at the northern tip of the Red Sea, in the Gulf of Aqaba, and Tom Shlesinger readies to take a dive. During the day, the seafloor is full of life and color; at night it looks much more alien. Shlesinger is waiting for a phenomenon that occurs once a year for a plethora of coral species, often several nights after the full moon.

Guided by a flashlight, he spots it: coral releasing a colorful bundle of eggs and sperm, tightly packed together. “You’re looking at it and it starts to flow to the surface,” Shlesinger says. “Then you raise your head, and you turn around, and you realize: All the colonies from the same species are doing it just now.”

Some coral species release bundles of a pinkish- purplish color, others release ones that are yellow, green, white or various other hues. “It’s quite a nice, aesthetic sensation,” says Shlesinger, a marine ecologist at Tel Aviv University and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat, Israel, who has witnessed the show during many years of diving. Corals usually spawn in the evening and night within a tight time window of 10 minutes to half an hour. “The timing is so precise, you can set your clock by the time it happens,” Shlesinger says.

Moon-controlled rhythms in marine critters have been observed for centuries. There is calculated guesswork, for example, that in 1492 Christopher Columbus encountered a kind of glowing marine worm engaged in a lunar-timed mating dance, like the “flame of a small candle alternately raised and lowered.” Diverse animals such as sea mussels, corals, polychaete worms and certain fishes are thought to synchronize their reproductive behavior by the moon. The crucial reason is that such animals — for example, over a hundred coral species at the Great Barrier Reef — release their eggs before fertilization takes place, and synchronization maximizes the probability of an encounter between eggs and sperm.

How does it work? That has long been a mystery, but researchers are getting closer to understanding. They have known for at least 15 years that corals, like many other species, contain light-sensitive proteins called cryptochromes, and have recently reported that in the stony coral, Dipsastraea speciosa, a period of darkness between sunset and moonrise appears key for triggering spawning some days later.

Now, with the help of the marine bristle worm Platynereis dumerilii, researchers have begun to tease out the molecular mechanism by which myriad sea species may pay attention to the cycle of the moon.

The bristle worm originally comes from the Bay of Naples but has been reared in laboratories since the 1950s. It is particularly well-suited for such studies, says Kristin Tessmar-Raible, a chronobiologist at the University of Vienna. During its reproductive season, it spawns for a few days after the full moon: The adult worms rise en masse to the water surface at a dark hour, engage in a nuptial dance and release their gametes. After reproduction, the worms burst and die.

The tools the creatures need for such precision timing — down to days of the month, and then down to hours of the day — are akin to what we’d need to arrange a meeting, says Tessmar-Raible. “We integrate different types of timing systems: a watch, a calendar,” she says. In the worm’s case, the requisite timing systems are a daily — or circadian — clock along with another, circalunar clock for its monthly reckoning.

To explore the worm’s timing, Tessmar-Raible’s group began experiments on genes in the worm that carry instructions for making cryptochromes. The group focused specifically on a cryptochrome in bristle worms called L-Cry. To figure out its involvement in synchronized spawning, they used genetic tricks to inactivate the l-cry gene and observe what happened to the worm’s lunar clock. They also carried out experiments to analyze the L-Cry protein.

Though the story is far from complete, the scientists have evidence that the protein plays a key role in something very important: distinguishing sunlight from moonlight. L-Cry is, in effect, “a natural light interpreter,” Tessmar-Raible and coauthors write in a 2023 overview of rhythms in marine creatures in the Annual Review of Marine Science.

The role is a crucial one, because in order to synchronize and spawn on the same night, the creatures need to be able to stay in step with the patterns of the moon on its roughly 29.5-day cycle — from full moon, when the moonlight is bright and lasts all night long, to the dimmer, shorter-duration illuminations as the moon waxes and wanes.

When L-Cry was absent, the scientists found, the worms didn’t discriminate appropriately. The animals synchronized tightly to artificial lunar cycles of light and dark inside the lab — ones in which the “sunlight” was dimmer than the real sun and the “moonlight” was brighter than the real moon. In other words, worms without L-Cry latched onto unrealistic light cycles. In contrast, the normal worms that still made L-Cry protein were more discerning and did a better job of synchronizing their lunar clocks correctly when the nighttime lighting more closely matched that of the bristle worm’s natural environment.

The researchers accrued other evidence, too, that L-Cry is an important player in lunar timekeeping, helping to discern sunlight from moonlight. They purified the L-Cry protein and found that it consists of two protein strands bound together, with each half holding a light-absorbing structure known as a flavin. The sensitivity of each flavin to light is very different. Because of this, the L-Cry can respond to both strong light akin to sunlight and dim light equivalent to moonlight — light over five orders of magnitude of intensity — but with very different consequences.

After four hours of dim “moonlight” exposure, for example, light-induced chemical reactions in the protein — photoreduction — occurred, reaching a maximum after six hours of continuous “moonlight” exposure. Six hours is significant, the scientists note, because the worm would only encounter six hours’ worth of moonlight at times when the moon was full. This therefore would allow the creature to synchronize with monthly lunar cycles and pick the right night on which to spawn. “I find it very exciting that we could describe a protein that can measure moon phases,” says Eva Wolf, a structural biologist at IMB Mainz and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and a collaborator with Tessmar-Raible on the work.

How does the worm know that it’s sensing moonlight, though, and not sunlight? Under moonlight conditions, only one of the two flavins was photoreduced, the scientists found. In bright light, by contrast, both flavin molecules were photoreduced, and very quickly. Furthermore, these two types of L-Cry ended up in different parts of the worm’s cells: the fully photoreduced protein in the cytoplasm, where it was quickly destroyed, and the partly photoreduced L-Cry proteins in the nucleus.

All in all, the situation is akin to having “a highly sensitive ‘low light sensor’ for moonlight detection with a much less sensitive ‘high light sensor’ for sunlight detection,” the authors conclude in a report published in 2022.

Many puzzles remain, of course. For example, though presumably the two distinct fates of the L-Cry molecules transmit different biological signals inside the worm, researchers don’t yet know what they are. And though the L-Cry protein is key for discriminating sunlight from moonlight, other light-sensing molecules must be involved, the scientists say.

In a separate study, the researchers used cameras in the lab to record the burst of swimming activity (the worm’s “nuptial dance”) that occurs when a worm sets out to spawn, and followed it up with genetic experiments. And they confirmed that another molecule is key for the worm to spawn during the right one- to two-hour window — the dark portion of that night between sunset and moonrise — on the designated spawning nights.

Called r-Opsin, the molecule is extremely sensitive to light, the scientists found — about a hundred times more than the melanopsin found in the average human eye. It modifies the worm’s daily clock by acting as a moonrise sensor, the researchers propose (the moon rises successively later each night). The notion is that combining the signal from the r-Opsin sensor with the information from the L-Cry on what kind of light it is allows the worm to pick just the right time on the spawning night to rise to the surface and release its gametes.

Resident timekeepers

As biologists tease apart the timekeepers needed to synchronize activities in so many marine creatures, the questions bubble up. Where, exactly, do these timekeepers reside? In species in which biological clocks have been well studied — such as Drosophila and mice — that central timekeeper is housed in the brain. In the marine bristleworm, clocks exist in its forebrain and peripheral tissues of its trunk. But other creatures, such as corals and sea anemones, don’t even have brains. “Is there a population of neurons that acts as a central clock, or is it much more diffuse? We don’t really know,” says Ann Tarrant, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who is studying chronobiology of the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis.

Scientists are also interested in knowing what roles are played by microbes that might live with marine creatures. Corals like Acropora, for example, often have algae living symbiotically within their cells. “We know that algae like that also have circadian rhythms,” Tarrant says. “So when you have a coral and an alga together, it’s complicated to know how that works.”

Researchers are worried, too, about the fate of spectacular synchronized events like coral spawning in a light-polluted world. If coral clock mechanisms are similar to the bristle worm’s, how would creatures be able to properly detect the natural full moon? In 2021, researchers reported lab studies demonstrating that light pollution can desynchronize spawning in two coral species — Acropora millepora and Acropora digitifera — found in the Indo-Pacific Ocean.

Shlesinger and his colleague Yossi Loya have seen just this in natural populations, in several coral species in the Red Sea. Reporting in 2019, the scientists compared four years’ worth of spawning observations with data from the same site 30 years earlier. Three of the five species they studied showed spawning asynchrony, leading to fewer — or no — instances of new, small corals on the reef.

Along with artificial light, Shlesinger believes there could be other culprits involved, such as endocrine-disrupting chemical pollutants. He’s working to understand that — and to learn why some species remain unaffected.

Based on his underwater observations to date, Shlesinger believes that about 10 of the 50-odd species he has looked at may be asynchronizing in the Red Sea, the northern portion of which is considered a climate-change refuge for corals and has not experienced mass bleaching events. “I suspect,” he says, “that we will hear of more issues like that in other places in the world, and in more species.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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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.

Standing at the foot of a rocky sandstone cliff, biologist Michelle Wainstein inspected her essentials: latex gloves, two long cotton swabs, glass vials, and tubes filled with buffer solution. She placed them in a blue dry bag, rolled it up, and clipped it to a rope wrapped around her waist. It was late afternoon, and she was slick with dirt and sweat from navigating the dense terrain. Her destination lay across the frigid river: two small logs of otter fecal matter resting on a mossy boulder. In she plunged.

The river, the Green-Duwamish in Washington State, trickles out of the Cascade Range and empties 150 kilometers downstream into Puget Sound. The last eight kilometers of the run—known as the lower Duwamish—is so polluted the US Environmental Protection Agency designated it a Superfund site in 2001. For a century, Seattle’s aviation and manufacturing industries routinely dumped waste chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) into the water.

“A lot of the river is still really polluted,” says Jamie Hearn, the Superfund program manager at Duwamish River Community Coalition. “The mud is thick and black, and you can smell it.”

Despite the pollution, river otters are everywhere along the waterway, even in the most contaminated areas near the river’s mouth. “I would be walking the docks looking for scat,” remembers Wainstein, “and a couple of times we were lucky enough to see moms with their pups.”

For several weeks in the summer of 2016 and 2017, Wainstein surveyed otter poop she collected from a dozen sites along the river. Comparing contaminant concentrations in the otters’ poop between the river’s industrial and rural zones, Wainstein uncovered the lingering legacy of the region’s toxic past. The poop from otters in the lower Duwamish contained nearly 26 times more PCBs and 10 times more PAHs than poop from their cousins in cleaner water upstream. PCBs disrupt hormonal and neurological processes and affect reproduction in mammals. Both PCBs and PAHs are human carcinogens.

The discovery that otters along the lower Duwamish are living with such high levels of contamination upends a common narrative: that river otters’ return to a once-degraded landscape is a sign that nature is healing.

In Singapore, where smooth-coated otters have reappeared in canals and reservoirs, they have been embraced as new national mascots. “It plays into that rhetoric that government agencies want to project,” says environmental historian Ruizhi Choo, “that we’ve done such a good job that nature is coming back. That image of a city in nature is the new marketing branding.”

In Europe, the once-common Eurasian otter similarly began reappearing in the late 20th century following successful river cleanup campaigns. Conservationist Joe Gaydos at the SeaDoc Society thinks that this phenomenon has helped form the mental link between otters and ecosystem health.

“The number of animals is our first indicator,” Gaydos says. But few seem to ask the next question: are those animals healthy?

As Wainstein’s study suggests, perhaps not. The otters she analyzed in the lower Duwamish have some of the highest concentrations of PCBs and PAHs ever recorded in wild river otters. Previous research has found a correlation between PCB exposure and health risks in wild river otters, including increased bone pathologies, reproductive and immunological disorders, organ abnormalities, and hormonal changes.

Even so, the contamination is not manifesting in physically obvious ways. “They’re not washing up on shore with tumors all over their bodies,” Wainstein says, and neither is their population dwindling. “They’re not setting off this direct alarm with a big change in their ability to survive.”

The otters’ ability to bear such a heavy contaminant burden suggests that a population resurgence alone may not reflect the quality of an environment. They just become as toxic as the environments they inhabit.

However, their localized bathroom habits, mixed diet of fish, crustaceans, and mammals, and persistence in the face of pollution make them useful indicators of environmental contamination.

River otters have played this role before. Following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, river otters lingered in oil-drenched waterways, allowing scientists like Larry Duffy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to track the effectiveness of the oil cleanup. In 2014, scientists in Illinois discovered dieldrin in otter organ tissue even though the insecticide had already largely been banned for 30 years. In these cases, the collection of long-term pollution data was made possible by the creatures’ resilience in contaminated waterways. Wainstein wants to similarly use the Green-Duwamish River otters as biomonitors of the Superfund cleanup over the next decade.

Watching workers dismantle a portion of the river’s levied banks to make channels for salmon, Wainstein thinks about the seabirds, shorebirds, and small mammals, like beaver and mink, that were driven out by industrial contamination. She wonders if one day the rumbling machinery dredging up clawfuls of sediment from the riverbed will be taken over by the piercing cries of marbled murrelets, the croaks of tufted puffins, and the bubbling twittering of western snowy plovers.

“How long will it take? And will it actually work?” she says of the cleanup effort. The otters might hold the answer.

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

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Over half a century since she was captured in the Pacific Ocean near Puget Sound, Lolita the Orca may return to her home waters. Lolita, also known by her Lummi name Tokita or Toki, was captured in Penn Cove off the coast of Washington State in 1970 when she was roughly 4 years old. She is believed to be the oldest orca in captivity.

The Miami Seaquarium in Florida announced its plans to move Lolita home at a press conference with nonprofit group Friends of Lolita and philanthropist and owner of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, Jim Irsay, on March 30. The move comes after growing pressure from animal rights groups, lawsuits from groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and anger and possible lawsuits from the Lummi Nation.

[Related: A baby orca sparks a glimmer of hope for an endangered group of whales.]

Irsay did not say how much the relocation would cost, only citing a “big number.” 

“I’m excited about being part of Lolita’s journey,” Irsay told reporters, according to NPR. “Ever since I was a little kid I’ve loved whales, just loved whales because [of] the power, the greatness of them and how gentle they are. She’s lived this long to have this opportunity and my only mission … is to help this whale to get free.”

While this is welcome news, many obstacles remain, particularly the logistics of transporting the ailing 7,000 pound whale from Florida up to Washington State, as well as preparing the 57-year-old to live back in the wild after living in captivity for over 50 years. 

According to the Miami Herald, the goal is to place Lolita back in the sea and reunite her with her family, the L pod of southern resident orcas. This unique group of orcas spend the summer and autumn months in Puget Sound and were added to the endangered species list in 2005. Their population has “fluctuated considerably” since the 1970s, with pods “reduced during 1965-75 because of captures for marine parks,” according to NOAA Fisheries. 

“If she is healthy enough to be transported, the issue is her skill set,” Miami-Dade Commissioner Raquel Regalado, who has been an advocate for Lolita and improvements at Seaquarium, told the Herald. “She doesn’t know how to catch or hunt. We’re not really sure if she can communicate with other whales because she’s been alone. Now we kind of have to retrain her.” 

The team will likely borrow methods used to move Keiko, the orca from the 1993 movie Free Willy. Keiko was moved from a tank at a marine park in Mexico to an aquarium in Oregon, and then on a US Air Force cargo plane to a sea pen in Iceland. Keiko eventually swam to Norway and lived in the ocean for five years. He died of pneumonia in 2003.

[Related: California Bans Captivity, Breeding Of Orcas.]

MS Leisure, who owns the Miami Seaquarium, announced in March 2022 that Lolita, who had fallen ill, would no longer be put on display for shows in the whale stadium. In June 2022, an assessment from two veterinarians not affiliated with the seaquarium found that Lolita’s condition had improved. 

She now lives in an 80-foot-long by 35-foot-wide by 20-foot-deep tank, which inspectors from the US Department of Agriculture have closed to visitors until the stands and tank are repaired.

Some animal rights activists hailed the decision as a long time coming and hope other marine parks follow suit. 

“If Lolita is finally returned to her home waters, there will be cheers from around the world, including from PETA, which has pursued several lawsuits on Lolita’s behalf and battered the Seaquarium with protests demanding her freedom for years,” the PETA Foundation’s vice president and general counsel for animal law Jared Goodman, said in a statement.  “If the Seaquarium agrees to move her, it’ll offer her long-awaited relief after five miserable decades in a cramped tank and send a clear signal to other parks that the days of confining highly intelligent, far-ranging marine mammals to dismal prisons are done and dusted.”

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

Along the eastern coast of North America, North Atlantic right whales and boats navigate the same waters, which can get dicey for both. Fully grown, the whales can top out at more than 50 feet and weigh 140,000 pounds. A midsize, 58-foot-long pleasure yacht weighs about 80,000 pounds and can cost more than $1 million. “No mariner wants to collide with a whale,” said retired Coast Guard officer Greg Reilly. “For obvious reasons.”

Still, the North Atlantic right whale is particularly vulnerable to boat strikes. Since 2017, the large whales have been increasingly found dead off the eastern United States and Canada, often after getting hit by a vessel. In response, in 2017, NOAA Fisheries declared an Unusual Mortality Event for the species, which under the Marine Mammal Protection Act “demands immediate response.”

The whales kept dying. By 2021, only an estimated 340 remained. The next year, NOAA Fisheries proposed changes to speed limits that are meant to reduce boat-whale collisions. The proposal would implement a mandatory speed limit of 10 knots in places where whales are spotted, and, for the first time, impose speed restrictions on many recreational and commercial fishing boats.

There is strong science documenting the plight of the right whales and the connection between boat speed and deadly collisions. But opposition from industry groups and fishing advocates, as well as potential difficulties with implementation and enforcement, may stall the new rules — if they get approved at all.

According to Kathleen Collins, marine campaign manager at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a global nonprofit, pushback from the recreational boating sector has already slowed attempts to lower the speed limit. In December, several nonprofits filed emergency petitions with NOAA Fisheries and the Department of Commerce to enact new speed limits as a placeholder until the full rules could be approved, but in mid-January 2023, the Biden administration rejected the request.

The petitions didn’t fail because of a “lack of scientific understanding of right whales,” Collins said, but because industry groups lobbied lawmakers, primarily out of concerns for their members’ livelihoods. Mike Leonard, vice president of government affairs for the American Sportfishing Association — a trade organization representing sportfishing manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers, and media — confirmed via email that the group shared concerns about the proposed speed rules with members of Congress.

Another group opposing the proposed rules is the Recreational Fishing Alliance, which published a letter against the amendments, and encouraged its members to leave public comments. The RFA’s website says it is a “grassroots political action organization” meant to protect the rights of recreational fishers; however, its board is made up of boating and fishing industry executives, and it was founded by Bill and Bob Healey, who founded the yacht manufacturer Viking Yacht Company. The current RFA chairman is Bob Healey Jr., the current chairman of Viking Group. The RFA did not respond to an emailed request for comment, and several calls to the group went unanswered.

NOAA Fisheries told Undark a decision on the proposed changes is forthcoming in 2023. In an email, spokesperson Katie Wagner wrote that the agency is “prioritizing efforts to develop effective, long-term North Atlantic right whale vessel strike reduction measures.”

Any whale can be the victim of a vessel strike, but North Atlantic right whales are especially vulnerable because they tend to spend time near the coast and at the water’s surface. Hunted to near extinction in the late 1800s by whalers who called them the “right” whales to kill for being such easy targets, the population didn’t recover after whaling was banned in 1971.

By 1972, the species was listed for protection in the U.S. under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, with enforcement falling under NOAA Fisheries.

Gregory Silber worked as the national coordinator of recovery activities for large whales at NOAA Fisheries from 1997 to 2017, following a five-and-a-half year stint with the Marine Mammal Commission, an independent government agency created by the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972. “About 80 to 90 percent of my time was spent on North Atlantic right whales,” Silber said, “because of their dire situation.” Right whales are most at risk from entanglement in commercial fishing gear and from being struck by boats. Because of the powerful fishing lobby and the complexity of the entanglement issue, Silber said, he felt his best bet was to focus on vessel strikes.

The first paper to raise the possibility that speed may influence boat-whale collisions published in 2001. The researchers scoured the historical record to detail 58 documented cases of ships hitting great whales. They found that the most lethal and severe collisions tended to occur when the ship was moving 14 knots or faster, and that more often than not, the whale was not spotted beforehand. How exactly speed played a role wasn’t clear, Silber said, but the paper inspired him to look into the issue himself.

In 2005, Silber and a colleague, Richard Pace, analyzed data from more recent whale-ship collisions. The duo found that the probability of a strike killing or seriously maiming a whale increased dramatically with speed — a 50 percent risk at 10.5 knots jumped to a 90 percent risk at 17 knots. And boats traversing North Atlantic right whale territory tended to travel between 10 and 20 knots. Silber had seen enough: It was time to set speed limits.

Off the coast of the southeastern U.S., where vessel strikes are the greatest threat to North Atlantic right whales (entanglement is the bigger issue in the north, due to lobster fishing), the International Fund for Animal Welfare and other organizations educate the maritime community and local governments about right whales in an effort to get boaters to slow down. In 2008, NOAA Fisheries successfully enacted mandatory speed limits of 10 knots in so-called seasonal management areas, where boats must slow down at certain times of the year, and voluntary slow-downs in dynamic management areas, which are created by NOAA Fisheries where three or more right whales have been spotted and last for 15 days.

But compliance can be low. In a 2021 report, the nonprofit Oceana analyzed vessel speed data from 2017 to 2020 and found only about 10 percent of boats stayed within the limit in mandatory zones and 15 percent did so in voluntary zones. These rules apply only to boats at least 65 feet in length, which are mainly shipping vessels. According to NOAA Fisheries, the 2008 rule served as a model for other nations, like Canada, to implement rules of their own. Spain, New Zealand, and Panama have also enacted either mandatory or voluntary speed limits.

Even with low compliance, studies have consistently found that speed limits help protect whales. A 2006 study expanded on the original 2005 analysis, confirming that strikes at faster speeds are deadlier; a 2013 study by Silber and Paul Conn, a NOAA researcher, estimated that the 2008 speed rule reduced right whale mortality risk from ship strikes by 80 to 90 percent (research suggests that even though many boats weren’t following the speed limit, they still may have slowed down enough to help improve the whale’s chances); similarly, a 2018 analysis of a voluntary speed rule in Canada’s St. Lawrence Estuary found that it resulted in boats going slower and an up to 40 percent reduction in risk of lethal strikes with fin whales; and a 2020 study using computer simulations of boats hitting whales indicated that, while lower speeds are safer, even a collision at the 10 knot speed limit could probably still do serious harm. These simulations also suggested that boats of all sizes — not just those bigger than 65 feet — could kill right whales.

In 2010, Silber took his efforts to prove that speed kills to their logical end. Along with Jonathan Slutsky, of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, and Shannon Bettridge, of NOAA Fisheries, Silber put a model whale made of thermoplastic resin in a basin of water the size of almost seven Olympic swimming pools. They then rammed this half-meter-long scale replica of a North Atlantic right whale with a model container ship from various angles and speeds while an accelerometer stuffed inside recorded the force of impact. The hits were worse at faster speeds, but with a ship that large, the forces resulting from a collision could be deadly even at a slow pace. “It became clear right off the bat,” Silber recalls Slutsky telling him, “that whale is toast at any speed.”

Critics of the proposed speed limit amendment cite safety concerns such as being unable to outrun inclement weather, though mariners would be allowed to break the speed limit in such cases, as they are under the original rule. But the primary worry, according to Leonard from the American Sportfishing Association, comes down to the economic impact. NOAA estimates the total annual cost of the changes to be about $46 million, with more than a third affecting the shipping industry. At least some of the remainder would fall on the recreational and sportfishing industry, many members of which left public comments warning that including their boats in the speed rules will negatively affect their livelihoods (the new rules would affect any boat 35 feet and up).

One commenter, a charter boat operator in North Carolina, wrote that “the speed limit would effectively double” their travel time and that “my customers are paying to fish, and catch fish, not just for an extended boat ride.” Leonard said that while the ASA has worked with NOAA Fisheries on fishing regulations in the past, there was no such collaboration on the new speed rules. “It was a very stark contrast,” he said.

In an email from Wagner, NOAA Fisheries told Undark “we engage our partners, including the fishing and shipping industries, as we develop regulations and management plans” and pointed to the public comment period.

A report by the consulting firm Southwick Associates commissioned by the American Sportfishing Association says NOAA Fisheries underestimated the economic impact and number of vessels the new rules would affect, while overestimating the risk of a boat-whale strike. The report does not dispute the relationship between vessel speed and collision severity or the perilous status of right whales.

Silber told Undark that when he pitched the initial 2008 rule up the chain of command, he was asked point-blank by the George W. Bush-appointed head of NOAA what the economic impact would be to consumers. After a “full-blown economic analysis,” he said, he came back with an answer: prices would go up by 6 cents for every dollar. Silber, now retired, supports the attempts by NOAA Fisheries to update the initial speed rules that he helped craft, but cautioned in his own public comments that the proposed changes will be difficult to implement and enforce. While previous reports have suggested a decision could come as early as June 2023, Silber guesses that there will be delays and modifications to the final rule.

Greg Reilly, the retired Coast Guard officer, now works for the International Fund for Animal Welfare to try to convince mariners to slow their boats. “It’s pretty well-recognized that nobody wants to go out and harm a right whale,” he said

“All of our research right now,” he later added, “indicates that the way to prevent whale strikes is slower speeds.”

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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Scientists are only beginning to scratch the surface of understanding the over 7,000 species of bioluminescent organisms on Earth. Animals, such as glowing worms and some crustaceans, use their natural glow for multiple purposes, including attracting both mates and prey. Some species like fireflies and millipedes even use their natural shimmer as a way of scaring off predators. 

These glowing, unique critters are difficult to classify, which limits the amount of research that can be conducted on them. While working on taxonomic research that sought to better classify these shiny organisms, scientists from Japan’s Nagoya University have discovered three new species of bioluminescent polycirrus worms from different parts of Japan. Polycirrus are small, soft-bodied worms that are known for their bright bioluminescence and are typically found in shallow coastal waters of Japan. 

[Related: We finally know why sea pickles glow.]

The three new species are described in a study published March 29 in the journal Royal Society Open Science. 

Taxonomist Naoto Jimi and biochemist Manabu Bessho-Uehara led a research group with members from Japan’s Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, the Olympus Corporation, and Japan Underwater Films Corporation with the goal to organize the species within the genus Polycirrus by their diversity. 

“Initially, the bioluminescent organisms used in our study were believed to belong to a single species, but it turned out that there were actually three new species,” Jimi told PopSci. “This discovery was crucial for improving the accuracy of our research.”

The three new species, newly named Polycirrus onibi, Polycirrus aoandon, and Polycirrus ikeguchii emit blue-violet light and also have unique backstories behind their names. The team turned to Japan’s rich folk tales for the first two species that have a hazy violet-blue bioluminescence. The yokai are a various ghosts, monsters, demons, tricksters, shapeshifters, and other supernatural beings in Japanese folklore. 

Onibi–or “demon fire”– is a will-o’-the-wisp type of yokai that is shaped like a small, floating ball of light. Onibi is believed to lead travelers in mountains and forests astray. The worm Polycirrus onibi is named after this mischievous and ghostly being.  

[Related from PopSci+: Cave worms could hold the secrets to a better life.]

The “aoandon” in the species Polycirrus aoandon means “blue lantern,” which refers to a ghost-like yokai that appears in folklore as a woman wearing a white kimono, but with sharp teeth and horns. The ghost yokai haunts the lanterns in Japanese homes by turning their light an unnatural blue color 

The specimens of Polycirrus ikeguchii were collected in the Notojima region on the west coast of Japan and honors Shinichiro Ikeguchi, the former director of the Notojima Aquarium, who helped the team find the worm specimen.

According to Jimi, the next steps for the team include examining the new species’ behaviors, ecology, and distribution and what drives their bioluminescence on a genetic and molecular level.

“Understanding these luminescence mechanisms contributes to medical and life science research,” said Jimi. “Bioluminescence is a treasure trove of interesting and unusual chemistry. We intend to use our findings to deepen our understanding of the molecular nature of this phenomenon and apply this knowledge to the development of new life sciences technologies.” 

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Windows can be a death trap for birds—after all, their eyesight makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish between glass and clear flying space. Millions of birds crash into windows along their annual migratory paths and the collisions kill somewhere between 365 million to nearly one billion birds in the United States alone each year. 

Volunteers and scientists throughout the years have collected the fallen birds around the country every spring and fall to rehabilitate  injured birds and document the dead.  The bodies contain valuable scientific information, especially when they are compared over time.

[Related: How to help birds avoid crashing into your windows.]

A study published March 28 in the journal Molecular Ecology is helping scientists better understand the relationship between birds and the multiple microbes in their guts by using these unique specimens.

“In humans, the gut microbiome—the collection of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes living in our digestive tracts—is incredibly important to our general health and can even influence our behavior. But scientists are still trying to figure out how significant a role the microbiome has with birds,” co-author Heather Skeen, a biologist and research associate at Chicago’s Field Museum, said in a statement.

Different mammal species tend to have their own signature microbes living in their gut. The microbes help them digest food and fight disease, with evidence that these relationships can go back millions of years. Researchers have been finding that bird microbiomes likely play by a whole different set of rules.

“Bird gut microbiomes don’t seem to be as closely tied to host species, so we want to know what does influence them,” said Skeen. “The goal of this study was to see if bird microbiomes are consistent, or if they change over short time periods.”

Skeen focused on four common species of songbirds called thrushes, but there are dozens of species found throughout Chicago after crashing into the city’s buildings. She took samples from 747 birds over three years and included samples from the thrushes summer breeding grounds in Manitoba in Canada and the Midwestern states of Michigan and Minnesota.

To get inside of the bird bellies, she made a small incision into the abdomen to reach the bird’s intestines and squeezed out what was inside.  She then transferred bird poop from the intestines to specialized filter paper cards that preserve DNA. The genetic material was then sent away for bacteria classification. 

[Related: Puffy unicorn stickers could save millions of migrating birds each year.]

“Analyzing the bacterial DNA present in the poop allowed us to determine exactly what kinds of bacteria were present,” said Skeen. “It turns out, there were about 27,000 different types of bacteria present.”

The team looked for trends in the bacteria present across the whole sample, and found that the different bird species didn’t seem to have their own unique set of microbes—unlike mammals. Instead, time was the clearest link between the birds and the bacteria present in their microbiomes. Gut microbiomes had significant differences in the composition of the bacteria season to season and year to year.

The results suggest that bird microbiomes might have more to do with their environment than the inborn, consistent relationship that is seen in most mammal species. 

Shannon Hackett, associate curator of birds at the Field Museum and a co-author of the paper, says the museum has been scooping birds killed by buildings for 40 years and that this study helps show why museum collections are valuable for research

“At the time, people were like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But the fact that he’s been doing this for forty years means we have a unique opportunity to study birds across fairly short periods of time. We have more than 100,000 window-killed birds at this point, it’s an incredibly rich resource,” Hackett said in a statement. “And as technology evolves and new scientists like Heather come up, we broaden what we’re able to do with these resources.”

Some ways to help birds avoid crashing into your windows include using decals and films on them that are invisible to birds while also letting light in, supporting bird-safe buildings, and turning off interior lights at night.

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As the saying goes, “everything’s bigger in Texas.” That extends to one of the state’s famed roadside shopping hubs. Buc-ee’s boasts the world’s largest convenience store, largest car wash, and even the world’s cleanest restrooms among its numerous offerings to motorists traveling the Lone Star and six other states.

The travel center selling everything from jerky to gas grills can now boast that it has a species of ancient beaver named after its smiling cartoon beaver  mascot. A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin (UT)  found the fossilized beaver specimen in the school’s collection and named it Anchitheriomys buceei (A. buceei) after Buc-cee’s semi aquatic salesman. 

[Related from PopSci+: Beavers, snails, and elephants are top grads from nature’s college of engineering.]

“Buc-ee’s was founded in 1982, but we may need to rethink our beginnings,” Arch “Beaver” Aplin III, the founder and CEO of Buc-ee’s, said in a statement regarding the company mascot’s place in Texas’ history.

The new species is described in a study published in the March issue of the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.

While driving down a highway in 2020, UT research associate and study co-author Steve May spotted a Buc-ee’s billboard that said “This is Beaver Country.” May thought back to fossils of the beaver fossils he studied at the university’s Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections.

“I thought, ‘Yeah, it is beaver country, and it has been for millions of years,’” May said in a statement.

The new paper describes A. buceei and another much smaller species of beaver and provides an overview of beaver occurrences along the Texas Gulf Coast from 15 million to 22 million years ago.

A. buceei roamed Texas about 15 million years ago during the Miocene. A previous study described the “Texas Serengeti” at the time, where large elephant-like animals, alligators, antelopes, and rhinos roamed the state. A. buceei was about 30 percent larger than the modern beavers scurrying across current-day Texas. 

The UT collections includes A. buceei fossils from six sites in Texas, but most of what the researchers could learn about the old beaver comes from a unique partial skull from the eastern town of Burkeville, Texas. That fossil is a fusion of bone and brain cast that formed when sediment naturally seeped into the beaver’s brain cavity. This created a rock replica of the animal’s brain as a specimen fossilized. 

[Related: Wolves and beavers can have magical ecosystem effects—if they have space to thrive.]

The team took high-resolution X-ray images of the skull to get a better look at the small anatomical details of the skull which  helped May and co-author  Matthew Brown, a paleontologist at UT, confirm that the skull belonged to a new species. 

However, this team was not the first to suspect that this was a distinct new species of ancient beaver.  When the skull was originally collected in 1941, a museum curator named Curtis Hesse from Texas A&M University noted that he intended to name it a new species. However, Hesse died in 1945 before he could complete his study and publish his findings. Eighty years later, a team equipped with new technology and more understanding of the fossil record picked right up where Hesse left off.  

“New discoveries in the field capture lots of attention, but equally as valuable are the discoveries made in existing museum collections,” Brown said in a statement. “We know that these opportunities are littered throughout the drawers in these cabinets.”

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This article was originally featured on Grist.

As the world increasingly turns toward natural climate solutions like reforestation and grassland restoration to sequester carbon, it may be overlooking a crucial ally: animals. 

Protecting existing populations and restoring others to their natural habitats often improves the natural capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide within ecosystems, according to a study published today in the journal Nature Climate Change. Robust populations of just nine species, such as sea otters or gray wolves, or genera, including whales, could lead to the capture of 6.41 gigatons of CO₂ annually, the researchers found. That’s about 95 percent of the amount needed to be removed annually to ensure global warming remains below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

In “Trophic rewilding can expand natural climate solutions,” led by the Yale School of the Environment and the Global Rewilding Alliance, 15 international experts compare the carbon content in savannas, forests, and other ecosystems when their wildlife populations were healthy and when they were below historical numbers. They found multiple cases in which thriving populations of certain species, particularly large vertebrates, through acts like foraging, burrowing, and trampling, increased an ecosystem’s carbon storage capacity by as much as 250 percent.

The researchers argue that these essential species disperse seeds, facilitating the growth of carbon-sequestering trees and plants. Others trample or eat the vegetation that would otherwise rob those trees of space and nutrients. Predators prey on herbivores that, without predation, might adversely impact that essential fauna.

“Ecological science has had a long history of overlooking the role of animals as an important driver of the biogeochemistry of ecosystems,” Oswald Schmitz, an ecologist at the Yale School for the Environment and an author of the study, told Grist. “What we say is that we know animals can change the vegetation makeup of ecosystems, and a lot of ecosystem ecologists say vegetation is important for ecosystem function and carbon cycling, then surely the animals must be important, too.” 

According to the study, keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels not only requires reducing fossil fuel emissions but removing around 500 gigatons of atmospheric CO₂ by 2100. Natural solutions, like protecting and restoring forests, wetlands, and grassland ecosystems can help, but such measures, implemented at their current pace, will not do the job in time. Restoring animal populations, or “trophic rewilding,” can accelerate the rates of sequestration and storage in a process called “animating the carbon cycle.”

“Instead of taking 77 years to get that 500 gigatons out, we could actually have that in 35 years,” Schmitz said. “We could do it if we really made a concerted effort to rebuild these populations.”

In Africa, every increase of 100,000 animals in the Serengeti raises the amount of carbon sequestered by 15 percent. Wildebeest are particularly effective allies in the climate fight. More than 1 million of the ungulates migrate across almost 10,000 square miles of savanna. They consume carbon contained in the grasses they eat, then excrete it in their dung. That carbon is then integrated into the soil by insects. They also manage the grasses, mitigating the risk of wildfires. When disease wiped the wildebeest population in the early 1900s, fires grew more frequent and intense, releasing more carbon, transforming the Serengeti from a carbon sink to a carbon source. When the wildebeest population recovered beginning in the 1960s, the Serengeti became a carbon sink again. 

Similar examples exist across a wide range of ecosystems. In the Arctic, herds of caribou and other large animals compact snow, preventing permafrost melt. Whales feed in deep waters and release nutrients in their waste at shallower depths, stimulating the production of phytoplankton, which are essential to fixing carbon in the ocean. The animals also are enormous carbon sinks in their own right.

Yet many of these populations face increasing threats from overfishing, habitat loss, impediments to their migratory patterns, and other risks. Losing these species, or even seeing their historic range or numbers decrease, risks transforming the ecosystems they inhabit from carbon sinks into carbon sources.

While animating the carbon cycle has the potential to be a powerful accelerant of carbon removal, the study’s authors warn that trophic rewilding cannot be done without considering unintended consequences. Gray wolves can help carbon removal in boreal forests because they prey on the moose that browse on carbon-storing trees, but they can hurt carbon stores in grasslands, where they eat the elk that stimulate plant production through their grazing. Increases in populations of large animals can increase methane release, an issue that can be offset by reducing domestic livestock populations, according to the study. 

Balancing livestock and wildlife populations also raises another central consideration of trophic rewilding: its impact on local human populations. Schmitz said the key to successful trophic rewilding programs is to cater them to local conditions and needs.

Bison, which once roamed North America by the millions, could help store huge amounts of CO₂ in grasslands, but cattle ranchers often resist restoration efforts because of the health threats they can pose for cattle. 

“It’s about having people think about themselves as stewards of the land, and we ought to also compensate them for that stewardship,” said Schmitz. “If we would come up with a carbon market that paid the ranchers for the amount of carbon that these bison sequester, they could maybe make more money by being carbon ranchers than they could by cattle ranching.”

What must come first, Schmitz said, is a change in how the global climate community approaches natural carbon solutions. “One of the big frustrations in the conservation game is you’ve got the U.N. Convention on Climate Change, and then you also have the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity, and they don’t talk to each other,” he said. “One is trying to save biodiversity, and the other is trying to save the climate. And what we’re saying is you can do both, with the same thing, in the same space.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/article/sequester-carbon-save-wild-animals/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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This article was originally featured on Field and Stream.

How fast can a bear run? To fully understand, it helps to use this comparison: During a 2009 race in Berlin, Usain Bolt set a world record for the 100-meter dash of 9.58 seconds, a record that stands to this day. In that race, he was clocked going 27.8 mph. (He reached that speed between 60 and 80 meters.) That’s about 4 mph better than his average sprinting speed and 10 mph faster than the average human can sprint. So when you are in a bar and some knucklehead tells you he has $10 that says Bolt could outrun a bear, take that bet. Take it because a grizzly bear can run 35 mph, which, literally, is inhumanly fast. And even a black bear—top speed 30 mph—is faster than the world’s fastest man. 

There’s also this: a sprinter can only maintain top speed for a second or two. A griz, on the other hand, can maintain a speed of 25 to 28 mph for two miles. A black bear is 5 mph slower over that distance but can also keep up the pace. Also—and contrary to some of the myths about bears out there—a bear is just as fast going downhill as up. 

Table of contents

• How Many Species of Bears Are There
• How Fast Can a Polar Bear Run? 
• How Fast Can a Grizzly Bear Run? 
• How Fast Can a Black Bear Run? 
• How to Survive a Bear Attack

How many species of bears are there?

All told, there are eight species of bears. After looking at the list below, you might think I left out the koala bear. But it’s classified as a marsupial—it carries its young in a pouch. The word koala comes from the Dharug, an Australian aboriginal language, word gula, meaning no water. Koalas get most of their water from eucalyptus leaves, although they do drink water. Colonists called the creature the koala “bear” because it sort of looks like a bear. But koala—not koala bear—is its proper name. 

The 8 species of bears and their top speeds

• North American black bear – The most common species in the world. Black bears can run 30 mph. 
• The Asiatic black bear – Slightly smaller than our black bears and one that lives in trees. Asiatic black bears can run 25 mph. 
• The brown bear – Of which the grizzly is a subspecies. Brown bears can run 35 mph. 
• The polar bear – Confined primarily to the Arctic Circle, they are the world’s biggest bear and biggest land-based carnivore. Polar bears can run 25 mph.  
• The giant panda – Native to China, with a diet almost exclusively of bamboo. Pandas can run 20 mph. 
• The sloth bear – Native to the Indian subcontinent and feeds on fruit, ants, and termites. Sloth bears can run 20 mph. 
• The sun bear – The smallest bear, native to tropical forests of Southeast Asia, also arboreal (tree-dwelling). Sun bears can run 30 mph. 
• The spectacled bear – The only living bear native to South America (the Andes Mountains of western South America, to be exact), primarily a herbivore. Spectacled bears can run 30 mph. 

How fast can a polar bear run? 

Polar bear top speed: 25 mph

The biggest bear, and the largest land carnivore, is the polar bear (Ursus maritimus), which lives almost exclusively inside the Arctic Circle. Polar bears have been clocked at 25 mph, but only for short distances. They are big, heavy seal specialists and marvelous swimmers. They would quickly overheat if they sprinted distances. Their normal walking speed is about the same as ours, 3.5 mph, and they can swim at 6 mph, which is really booking. By comparison, Michael Phelps managed about 4.7 mph in the 200-meter sprint.

The largest polar bear ever taken, according to Guinness, was shot in Alaska in 1960. It weighed 2,209 lbs. and stood 10 ft., 4 in. tall. It is now on display outside the coffee shop in the former Historic Commercial Hotel in Elko, NV. 

[Related: How to survive a grizzly encounter.]

Because they are so big and heavy, polar bears quickly overheat when sprinting, so they don’t do a lot of it. Bears spend the majority of their lives on sea ice (their Latin name, Ursus maritimus, means, naturally, “maritime bear”) and scientists have theorized that their gait gives them better balance on ice. Polar bears live on sea ice in order to hunt seals, their primary food. Climate change and the disappearance of sea ice is already having an effect on polar bear populations. 

The longest polar bear swim lasted more than 9 days and covered 425 miles—the distance between Washington, D.C., and Boston. The swim was made in the Beaufort Sea, where sea ice is diminishing due to climate change. The 2011 study says that the bear lost 22 percent of her body weight during the swim, as well as a cub that was accompanying her. Scientists say polar bears are being forced to swim longer distances now that there is less sea ice.

There are about 22,000 polar bears left. They live in five countries: the U.S., Russia, Denmark, Norway, and Canada. Polar bears are believed to have resulted from a population of brown bears that became isolated in Siberia during the Pleistocene. Their molar teeth are significantly different from those of brown bears. 

How fast can a grizzly bear run? 

Grizzly bear top speed: 35 to 40 mph

Brown bears (Ursus arctos) are found across Eurasia and in North America. Their range includes parts of Russia, China, Scandinavia, Iran, and Romania. Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) are a subspecies of brown bear found in North America. They’re found primarily in Alaska and Canada, with small populations in Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming. The total population is around 60,000. 

There are three other kinds of brown bears in North America: the Kodiak bear, the Kamchatka bear, and the peninsular grizzly. The largest hunted grizzly on record was a Kodiak bear that weighed 1700 lbs. It’s on display at the Anchorage Airport. I have seen it, and would definitely let it pre-board on my flight. The largest Kodiak in captivity lived in a zoo in Bismarck, North Dakota. He was named Clyde, lived 22 years, and weighed 2,130 lbs. at death. His fat was measured at 9 inches thick. A year earlier, he was thought to have weighed even more, 2,400 lbs. 

Grizzlies are distinguished from black bears in a number of ways. Unlike black bears, they have a hump of muscle on their backs that helps them dig, which is what grizzlies do while searching for roots and insects or when making dens. They have what’s commonly described as a “dished in” face with rounded, short ears. A black bear, by contrast, has a straighter-profiled face and pointier, longer ears. The griz also has a rump that, when standing, is lower than its shoulders, while a black bear’s rump is taller than its shoulders. If you get really close, you can also distinguish grizzlies by their longer claws, although this is not recommended. A grizzly’s claws measure 2-4 inches, while a black bear’s claws measure just 1-2 inches. 

Both black bears and grizzly bears can climb trees, so hiding in a tree isn’t a good way to avoid either species. Black bears are more instinctive climbers, but a grizzly after prey has no qualms about climbing trees. Scientists think that this ability is what allowed black bears to escape mega-predators like saber-tooth tigers and dire wolves during their evolution, when other ground-dwelling bears died out. The average brown bear encounter is 20 times (according to the National Bear Center) more likely to result in injury than the average black bear encounter. 

Grizzly bears evolved in treeless environments. Their strategy has always been to confront and neutralize threats. Being neutralized by a grizzly can be highly uncomfortable. 

How fast can a black bear run? 

Black bear top speed: 30 mph

The black bear (Ursus americanus) is native to North America and is more closely related to the Asiatic black bear than to the grizzly or polar bear. Whereas other specialized mega-predators of the last Ice Age—two species of the larger short-faced bear and the aforementioned saber tooth tigers and dire wolves—died out, the omnivorous black bear is still with us and found in most of its historic range of forested lands. 

The biggest black bear on record was a male from New Brunswick that was shot in 1972. Its dressed weight was 902 lbs., meaning that it probably weighed 1,100 lbs when alive. In 1921, a cow-killing black bear weighing 899 lbs. was shot in Arizona. There have been a number of bears over 800 lbs. killed by hunters in recent years, some of them from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, places where they were nearly hunted out of existence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

[Related: Simple tips for getting black bears to leave you alone.]

About 10 years ago, A black bear study challenged the long-held idea that a mother bear with cubs is the most dangerous black bear. Of the 63 fatal attacks by black bears that had occurred between 1902 and 2011, 88 percent involved a bear “on the prowl, likely hunting for food.” A whopping 92 percent of those bears were male.

The study’s lead author, Stephen Herrero said that mama bears will act aggressively, swatting the ground and false charging. “They want to make you think they’ll eat you alive, but they’ll almost always stop.” They are more interested in keeping their cubs safe than attacking you.

American black bears are smart and good with their paws. They are, for example, capable of opening screw-top jars. Personally, I was almost 11 before I mastered this. Like all bears, they are crazy strong. A 120-pound juvenile was documented overturning flat rocks weighing 310-325 lbs. using a single paw. 

How to survive a bear attack 

There were just 48 fatal bear attacks in North America between 2000 and 2017, according to the Alaska News Source. Twenty-five attacks were from black bears and 21 from grizzly bears. Given that there are 15 times as many black bears (900,000 in North America, according to the Fur Institute of Canada) as grizzlies, it’s obvious that, bear for bear, grizzly bears are much more dangerous than black bears. According to the National Park Service, if you see a bear, talk to it in a calm voice to let it know you’re human and not a prey animal. Stand your ground—if possible, get to higher ground to make yourself appear bigger—and wave your arms slowly. If the bear stands on its hind legs, it’s usually just curious. 

Don’t run, as that’s what prey does, and is likely to set off the bear’s predatory instincts. Screams can do the same thing. Instead, keep talking in a low voice and move away slowly. If possible don’t retreat directly, but instead at an angle. Sideways movement is generally interpreted by bears as non-threatening, whereas a direct retreat is more likely to be associated with prey animal behavior. 

How to survive a grizzly bear attack 

• If a bear attacks you, leave your pack on—it will protect your back—and play dead. 
• Lie flat on your stomach, hands clasped behind your head to protect your neck, feet spread wide to make it harder for the bear to roll you over. 
• Remain still. You are going to get bloodied, but usually, the bear will leave when you don’t respond. Normally, fighting back just increases the ferocity of the attack.
• IF the attack persists or the bear comes back, fight back as hard as you can, striking the bear in the face. 

How to survive a black bear attack 

• As with a grizzly, talk calmly, wave your arms slowly, and make yourself look as big as possible. Mothers with cubs are best handled by giving them space and retreating slowly while talking calmly.
• Shout at the bear, throw rocks, and try to escape to a car or building if possible, all while looking at the bear. Do not turn and run away.
• If the bear attacks, fight back using any object available, aiming your blows at the bear’s face and muzzle.
• NEVER PLAY DEAD. 

If any bear attacks you in your tent or stalks you prior to an attack, fight back immediately with anything you have. Such attacks are rare but very serious because the bear is looking for food and thinks you are prey. If you are among people who don’t think bears are dangerous, get out of there as fast as possible. There are lots of YouTube videos of people ignoring bear safety rules. They have seen too many Disney movies. 

Correction (March 27, 2023): The article previously stated that grizzly bears can maintain a speed of 25 to 28 mph for two miles. It should be two hours, not two miles.

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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.

As humans age, our bodies are often graced with fine lines, gray hairs, and flecks of hyperpigmentation on our skin known as age spots. Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins get spots with age, too. And as scientists have revealed in a recent study, the onset of dolphins’ speckling is so predictable it can be a noninvasive way to gauge the dolphins’ age.

Age is a crucial metric for understanding dolphin populations. Many ways of calculating a dolphin’s age exist, such as counting the layers of dental material in their teeth or analyzing DNA from a skin sample. But they’re all somewhat invasive. That’s why developing a model for estimating age by simply looking at dolphins’ dots is so interesting.

Ewa Krzyszczyk, a dolphin researcher at Bangor University in Wales who was not involved in the study, says the new technique “is a really useful tool.” By estimating a dolphin’s age, Krzyszczyk says, scientists can answer important questions, such as when a dolphin stops weaning, when it reaches sexuality maturity, or when a dolphin shows signs of deterioration from old age. “It gives a more well-rounded idea of what’s going on in your population that can then help with conservation,” she says.

The discovery that dolphins’ dots reflect aging stems from research led by Genfu Yagi, a marine mammal researcher at Mie University in Japan. Previously, Yagi had analyzed a compendium of underwater footage taken of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Mikura Island, near central Japan. Since many of the individual dolphins were known from birth, Yagi could trace how their speckles emerged as they grew.

“The speckles first appear around the genital slit at 6.5 years of age,” says Yagi. Over time, he says, this treasure trail expands toward the head and up toward the back. By the time dolphins are around eight years old, speckles start on their chest, and by around 17, the spots reach their jaw. Wild bottlenose dolphins typically live between 30 and 50 years.

To use these speckles to estimate age, Yagi created a new system that quantifies the density of speckles on various parts of the body. This weighted speckle density score is then correlated with age. Yagi says his speckle-counting method works for dolphins between the ages of seven and 25 and has a margin of error of 2.58 years—more accurate than estimating age from DNA samples.

“The strength of this study is that it does not require special techniques, facilities, high costs, or any invasive surveying,” says Yagi. “Anyone can estimate a dolphin’s age.”

At the moment, Yagi’s formula can only be used for the Mikura Island Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin population because speckling onset could differ between geographic locations. He says, however, that the same modeling technique could work for other dolphin populations.

So far, dolphins are the only cetacean known to develop spots, with pantropical and Atlantic spotted dolphins getting dark spots on their bellies and light spots on their backs. Yagi says scientists don’t know exactly how or why these speckles form.

“This is a very rare trait, as few mammals other than dolphins continue to change body coloration throughout their lives,” he says.

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

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As winter melts into the spring, flowers start to bloom and  some unique animals also begin to change color. The white-tailed jackrabbit is one of close to 20 species of animals and birds that have evolved to change colors with the seasons. The rabbit is not white all year, changing from its winter white into spring and summer brown with the season. It’s a survival tactic, as darker hued animals stand out to predators in snowy climates. 

A team of researchers from the United States and Portugal sought out to learn more about the genetics involved in these colorful seasonal changes. Their study, published today in the journal Science, details the evolution of winter camouflage in white-tailed jackrabbits. They uncovered how the genes that control this winter color variation could be a key to their survival as the planet warms and snow cover reduces.

[Related: How a peculiar parasitic plant relies on a rare Japanese rabbit.]

“Several members of the research team live and work in the Rocky Mountains, with a close connection to nature and the incredible changes that we are all experiencing year to year in the intensity of extreme weather and climate,” study co-author and ecologist/evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Good from the University of Montana, told PopSci. 

When beginning this research over a decade ago, Good said that a team member discovered a natural history study from 1963 which described more complicated, but intriguing patterns of continuous color variation in a white-tailed jackrabbit population in Colorado.

Study lead author and evolutionary biologist Mafalda Sousa Ferreira from BIOPOLIS-CIBIO at the University of Porto in Portugal was conducting this research as part of her PhD and took a closer look. “This made this part of my PhD project a bit risky,” Sousa Ferreira told PopSci. “If the paper was correct, we could explain something very unique, but if we couldn’t sample the specimens to characterize it, I might have to rethink part of my thesis.” 

With this half a century old clue in tow, they used museum specimens collected over the years to characterize the variations in color. The oldest of their 196 specimens dated back from 1906, sourced  from multiple museums including the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Importantly, they confirmed the study from 1963 on color variation in white-tailed jackrabbits.

“It is very exciting to see something described years earlier materialize like that before your eyes. The high-risk project was actually possible, and eventually successful!” said Sousa Ferreira.

[Related: This hybrid hummingbird’s colorful feathers are a genetic puzzle.]

After categorizing the fur color variation, the team then used genetic sequencing and determined that the jackrabbits’ color variation in winter is primarily determined by three genes (EDNRB, CORIN, and ASIP) that control the production and localization of melanin pigments.

“Fur coat color is determined by pigments that are produced in special cells in the skin (melanocytes). You can think of these cells as pigment factories. How active these factories are—what type of pigment (black and brown, red and yellow) and how much is produced determines the color of hair,” explained Good. 

This process is quite common across mammals and are the same pigments that determine the color and darkness of hair in humans. Jackrabbits can display white, brown, or more intermediate-colored coats depending on what versions they get from their parents. 

After establishing how winter color variation, the environment, and the rabbit’s genetics were related, they combined these results with climate projections on expected snow loss due to climate change.

Surprisingly, they found that rabbit populations with higher variability in their color genes should be well prepared to face snow loss over the next 100 years. These projections indicate that the winter-brown jackrabbits will actually expand their range and could even help rescue the whole species from decline. 

It was a welcome bit of positive news, but the team still cautions that human-caused threats (disease, habitat loss, etc.) put this adaptability in jeopardy and highlights the importance of conservation at the species level.

“The jackrabbits and their coat colors show how understanding and preserving the genetic diversity of a species is just as important, particularly in this rapidly changing natural world,” said Good.

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I was 8 years old when I first learned the term “goose egg” can be used to identify more than an unhatched gosling. It can also describe the welt that develops after the goose that laid those eggs chases you away from its nest and bites you squarely on the meaty part of your behind.

After this educational experience, I was extra cautious around this goose (it lived by my grandparents’ pond), but did not realize I had escaped relatively unscathed. Unbeknownst to me, every spring brings fresh reports of people being attacked by what would appear to be angry geese. Those attacks often result in bruises, cuts, concussions, and stitches, many of which are far more serious than a welt on the backside.

Fortunately, there have been no documented cases of a goose killing a human in the US, but the creatures still inspire fear—or at least caution—in the hearts of many. There’s a reason cultures around the world have used geese in place of guard dogs.

But if you’d prefer to avoid being chased by a large bird as you stroll around the neighborhood park, follow this advice the next time you try to walk past a goose.

Why geese attack

Geese, like other animals, aren’t naturally aggressive—at least as humans generally define the word. These birds aren’t out to get upright bipeds; they have no particular vendetta that makes them want to bite soft young flesh or beat cyclists with their wings. Still, the animals will chase down just about anything: children, adults, bicycles, even cars, and frequently knock humans and other predators to the ground in impressive feats of agility and strength.

But when a goose lashes out, it’s not because it’s angry or mean. “Geese are typically only defensive when they have a nest they’re protecting or are defending their young,” says Vanessa A. Williams, a wildlife biologist and animal behaviorist who works with Wild Goose Chase, an Illinois-based company that specializes in wild bird management. “And they’ll attack anything they see as a threat to their nest or their babies.”

[Related: How birds of a feather flock together]

That’s because geese, unlike ducks, are monogamous—they mate for life and work with their partner to take care of their nest and babies. That means that while the female is incubating, the male is standing guard, ready to defend the nest and protect his mate. After the goslings hatch, he will fight to protect his whole brood.

If you look at the data, you’ll see most adverse human-goose encounters occur almost exclusively in the spring when nesting season begins and stop entirely by fall when goslings are fully mobile, WIlliams says.

Although goose attacks occasionally occur for other reasons, like if a goose or its mate is injured, this is rare, you can reduce your chances of getting rushed by one of these birds by simply staying away from their young and places you know they’re nesting.

How geese attack

Anyone who’s worried about getting chomped by a goose bill lined with tooth-like cartilage should know that according to Williams, my childhood encounter isn’t the norm. Geese rarely bite as a defensive strategy. Instead, they charge, using their strong wings as weapons.

I hear you: Bird wings may not seem all that threatening. After all, like most other birds that fly, the bones in goose wings are hollow. But because geese can weigh up to 25 pounds, the muscles in those wings are incredibly strong. They have to be to lift such a heavy bird into the air and carry it hundreds of miles at a time during migration.

So you really don’t want to be pummeled by those wings—they can quickly knock down a full-grown adult and cause scrapes, stitches, even broken bones. All of these injuries have been reported after goose assaults.

How to know when you might get attacked by a goose

But geese rarely go directly into blitz mode. They’ll warn you of impending doom first. If you get too close, they’ll hiss. Continue to approach and they’ll start honking, too. If you still haven’t left, they will spread their wings and charge. “If they hit you with one of those wings, it’s going to hurt,” Williams warns.

Fortunately, those initial warnings often lead to little more than a bluff charge as long as you respond by vacating the area as soon as possible. But how you do so matters.

Here’s what Williams advises: When a goose first lets you know you’re not welcome, start backing away—not slowly, but don’t run. If the animal stands down, you’re likely in the clear. If not, make yourself look large and menacing by holding your hands over your head or waving your backpack in the air. If you’re wearing a jacket, unzip it and hold it open, flapping the sides like wings. Keep facing the goose, because as long as you do, the animal will likely perceive you as a threat and do little more than bluff charge.

Whatever you do, Williams implores, don’t turn your back on the bird while it’s charging. You’ll make yourself an easy target, the goose may decide it’s safe to attack, and you might find yourself on the ground under a barrage of wings.

Instead, she says to continue backing away until the bird stops following you. When it does, you can turn around, but keep an eye on the goose to make sure it leaves you alone for good.

How to avoid an encounter with a defensive goose

If you’d rather avoid an encounter altogether—and who wouldn’t—the first rule of sharing space with wild animals is to keep your distance. How much depends on the bird. According to Williams, some geese will flee their nest immediately while others will start to feel threatened when you’re as far as 50 yards from them. So keep plenty of distance between yourself and geese, and the sooner you can create space between you and them, the better. And just generally be alert and listen for hissing.

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Thom van Dooren is a field philosopher at the University of Sydney and the University of Oslo. He is the author of several books, including “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, “The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds,” and “A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions,” from which this article is adapted.

This excerpt was originally featured on MIT Press Reader.

There have been surprisingly few experimental efforts to explore the possible avenues by which Hawai‘i’s snails might have crossed oceans to arrive in their new home. In fact, to date there has been precisely one study on this topic of which I am aware. In 2006, Brenden Holland, a researcher in the biology department at Hawai‘i Pacific University, placed a piece of tree bark with 12 live snails of the species Succinea caduca into a saltwater aquarium. This is one of Hawai‘i’s nonendangered snail species; in fact, it is one of the few species that is found on multiple islands and seems to be doing okay. It is a coastal species, and the individuals enrolled into the study were from populations living as little as 10 meters from the beach. Brenden explained to me: “After heavy rain, they are commonly seen in gullies by the coast so there’s no question that they are going to get washed down pretty frequently.”

The purpose of Brenden’s experiment was to determine whether, when this happens, it might be possible for these snails to move around by sea and successfully establish themselves in new places. The answer, it seems, is yes. Brenden and his colleague Rob Cowie reported that: “After 12 h of immersion, all specimens were alive, indicating that sea water is not immediately lethal and suggesting the potential for rafting between islands on logs and vegetation.”

Why, you might wonder, does this matter? Far from being an abstract, albeit fascinating, scientific curiosity, I am convinced that attending to snail biogeography and evolution is particularly important at our present juncture. Hawai‘i was once home to one of the most diverse assemblages of land snails found anywhere on the planet, over 750 species. Today, however, the vast majority of these species are extinct, and most of those that remain are headed in the same direction. As they disappear from their island homes en masse, my hope is that paying attention to the deep-time processes of snail movement that brought them all here in the first place could help us to understand and appreciate these snails in new ways. As the writer Robert Macfarlane has argued, a deep time perspective can offer “a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking.”

Beyond Hawai‘i’s shores there have been numerous efforts to experimentally explore or otherwise interrogate the puzzle that is the evolution and distribution of island land snails. Charles Darwin, in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace in 1857, summed up the situation succinctly: “One of the subjects on which I have been experimentising and which cost me much trouble, is the means of distribution of all organic beings found on oceanic islands and any facts on this subject would be most gratefully received: Land-Molluscs are a great perplexity to me.” Or, as he put it in a letter to another correspondent a year earlier: “No facts seem to me so difficult as those connected with the dispersal of land Mollusca.”

“No facts seem to me so difficult as those connected with the dispersal of land Mollusca,” Darwin wrote in 1857.

In an effort to address this perplexity, Darwin submerged land snails in saltwater to discover whether and how long they might survive. Among his other findings was the fact that estivating snails of the species Helix pomatia recovered after 20 days in seawater. The fact that these snails were estivating is important. During these periods snails can create a thin layer of mucus to cover their aperture and prevent them drying out. As long as they are sealed up inside their shells in this way, it seems that many snails can survive being submerged in saltwater for weeks at a time.

Inspired by Darwin, a French study in the 1860s placed 100 land snails of 10 different species in a box with holes and immersed it in seawater. Roughly a quarter of the snails, from six different species, survived for 14 days — which was calculated to be about half the time it would take for an object like a log to float across the Atlantic.

All of these years of submerging snails — of gastropods drowned and survived — have produced one primary, albeit tentative, finding: It is at least possible that land snails are floating around the world to establish themselves in distant places. We just don’t know enough about Hawai‘i’s snails to know how likely a vector this is for their movements; we have a single, short-term study on one of the over 750 known species.

But floating is by no means the only mode of transportation open to snails. In fact, most of the biologists I spoke to were of the view that it probably isn’t the primary way in which they have moved across large distances. While snails have possibly floated around within the Hawaiian archipelago, between islands, it is thought to be unlikely that the first snails to arrive did so in this way: The distances of open ocean are just too vast. But here, things get even stranger, and even less amendable to experimentation.

As we walked along a winding path around the summit of Pu‘u ‘Ōhi‘a on a cool, rainy, afternoon, Brenden Holland and I discussed some of these other potential modes of snail movement across oceans. He explained to me that not all of these possibilities are immediately obvious if we look only at organisms in their current forms. Many species change after arriving on islands; some, for example, undergo processes of “gigantism” or “dwarfism” in which their new environmental conditions lead to a significantly increased or decreased body size. Alongside these kinds of changes, many entirely new species evolve on islands after initial arrival events. In the case of Hawai‘i’s snails, phylogenetic analysis indicates that the vast majority of species evolved in the islands in this way, a single arrival giving rise to multiple new species over a few million years (these analyses compare genetic material to determine how closely related species on different islands are to one another, and in this way piece together their histories of arrival and evolutionary divergence). Some of these new island species will continue to look a great deal like the ancestor that made that initial oceanic crossing; others will not.

As we walked that day, Brenden pointed out to me tiny snails of the species Auriculella diaphana, moving around among the introduced ginger plants. It was these snails he had brought me here to see. He explained that despite their very different appearance, these snails are actually close relatives of the much larger, brightly colored, Achatinella tree snails that have become the poster-children of endangered snail conservation in Hawai‘i. The former is about 7 millimeters in length, the latter about 2 centimeters. But, Brenden told me, Auriculella and Achatinella have a smaller common relative still, and phylogenetic analysis indicates that it is an even more likely candidate for having made the initial trip to the islands. There, among the ginger leaves, we were lucky enough to also encounter some of these tiny beings, members of the subfamily Tornatellidinae.

The Tornatellidinae snails we saw that day, along with some other species within this subfamily, reach a maximum size of about 2 millimeters in length, roughly the size of a grain of rice. But this size difference is more significant than these simple length measurements imply. As Rob Cowie explained to me, the mass of a snail is roughly equivalent to the cube of its length. As such, one of the tiny Tornatellidinae snails might be as much as 1,000 times lighter than its Achatinella brethren. If a minute creature similar to these tiny snails was the ancestor that first made its way to the Hawaiian Islands, then it might have had many other modes of transportation open to it. It might even have arrived by bird.

At some point in the distant past, a tiny snail climbed on board a migratory bird, perhaps a golden plover, as it perched or nested overnight.

In numerous conversations with biologists, again and again I was told with varying degrees of confidence that the most likely answer to the puzzle of Hawai‘i’s snails is that the first ones flew here. Everybody narrated this hypothetical scene a little differently, but the main events remained the same. At some point in the distant past, a tiny snail climbed on board a migratory bird, perhaps a golden plover, as it perched or nested overnight. As snails are nocturnal, it makes sense that they might encounter a perched bird in this way, and that this wayward passenger might then be able to hunker down, deep in the bird’s feathers, sealing itself up. Days or weeks later, having rested through the exhausting crossing, the snail then climbed off the bird in its new home.

I must admit that on first hearing this explanation I was somewhat dubious. This sequence of events just seemed so horribly unlikely. I reminded myself, though, that in the vastness of evolutionary time, “horribly unlikely” is actually pretty decent odds. But as I continued to talk to scientists and read the literature, I discovered an unseen world of surprising snail journeys. For the most part, scientists have not deliberately gone looking for snails on birds, but in a handful of articles published over the last several decades they have nonetheless reported on their accidental encounters with them, usually in the course of routine bird banding or observation. In these cases, it seems, snails have sometimes been present with surprising regularity and abundance.

Across several studies, the snail Vitrina pellucida has been found on a variety of migratory birds in Europe, while Succinea riisei has been found on three different types of birds in North America, with anywhere from one to 10 snails on a single bird. In one particular study, focused on migratory birds in Louisiana, snails were found on three different bird species. The main focus of the research was the woodcock, and it was only on these birds that the researchers really monitored snail presence: “Of the 96 woodcock checked, 11.4% had snails present,” they report. “Of those, the average number of snails per bird was 3.”

In Hawai‘i, there has never been a targeted scientific search for snails on birds, so it is hard to know which species might be climbing on board and with what kinds of frequency. Partway through my research, however, Nori Yeung at the Bishop Museum came across and shared with me a tantalizing snippet from a field notebook. The collecting note was made in 1949 by Yoshio Kondo who was at the time in Nori’s current position as curator of the museum’s malacology collection. There at the top of a grid-lined page, in neat cursive writing, he reported: “a juvenile sooty tern on which were Succinea and Elasmias. Brought bird back. Unfortunately, did not keep shells on bird separate.”

But there is another fascinating, albeit equally speculative, avenue by which tiny snails might move around the globe. They might fly without the aid of birds, blown on leaves and other debris, or just on their own, sealed up in their shells. Indeed, there is significant evidence from sampling, conducted with nets attached to airplanes, that rock particles the size and weight of some of these tiny snails can move around in this way, sometimes being found at altitudes of more than 2,000 meters. Drawing on these findings, some scientists have argued that it is not at all unreasonable to think that snails might travel in similar ways, definitely over shorter distances but perhaps also for transoceanic journeys. At least a couple of the scientists I spoke to, including Brenden and Rob, were holding open the possibility that the progenitors of at least some of Hawai‘i’s snail families may have blown to the islands in this way, perhaps even carried by the winds of a hurricane.

Of course, once a snail species has made that first giant leap across oceans, a range of other options open up for the shorter, inter-island, movements that genetic analysis indicates have taken place at various points in the past. As we have seen, some snails might survive a floating journey between islands. Others, it seems, might be making these briefer trips inside birds: studies in various parts of the world have now shown that a variety of snail species — including as least one species of the Tornatellidinae — can survive passage through avian digestive tracts at a relatively high frequency.

These are, undoubtedly, all rather unreliable ways to travel. For every snail that successfully arrived in a strange new land on a bird or a floating branch, countless millions must have been washed, blown, or flown out to sea without such luck. The odds must be slightly better traveling by bird than log: At least in theory, if you hop onto or into a migratory bird in a forest, you are reasonably likely to be taken to another forest. Of course, for those snails unfortunate enough to be traveling inside the bird, they would have to survive the journey through the digestive system too.

However they travel, snails are largely at the whim of external forces in these movements, subject to what biologists call “passive dispersal.” As Brenden helpfully summed it up for me: “biogeographically, snails are plants” — both groups share many of the same vectors for movement, the latter usually by seed or spore. This is clearly a “system” of island dispersal that can hope to achieve results only with immense periods of time at its disposal. Over millions of years, a few lucky snails made these journeys successfully. We can’t know for certain how many times this happened in the Hawaiian Islands. But by tracing species back to their common ancestors in Hawai‘i and beyond its shores, Brenden and Rob have estimated that things must have worked out for around 20, and likely fewer than 30, intrepid travelers, or groups of travelers, over roughly the past 5 million years (when Kaua‘i, the oldest of the current high islands with suitable snail habitat, formed). All of the rest of Hawai‘i’s incredible gastropod diversity is thought to have evolved in the islands from this small number of common ancestors.

While there is undoubtedly something very “passive” about this dispersal of snails — always at the whim of others, be they birds, storms, or tides, traveling under their steam and direction — this isn’t the whole of the story. Deep evolutionary histories have produced these possibilities. Snails’ modes of passive movement only “work” because they have evolved some remarkable traits for dispersal, survival, and reproduction, across and into isolated new lands: from epiphragms that seal them up inside their shells and sticky eggs that can attach themselves to birds and debris, to hermaphroditism, sperm storage, and self-fertilization which all potentially allow a single snail introduced to a new land to begin reproducing. While not all snails can do all of these things, where these traits are present, they are surely a huge advantage. Millions of years and countless generations of more or less successful journeying have selected for those individuals that survived and established themselves best.

There is a profound kind of evolutionary agency at work here, a creative, experimental, adaptive working-out of living forms with particular capacities and propensities. For the most part, individual snails are indeed relatively passive in all this. They’re not, however, irrelevant. The particular actions of those snails that crawled onto a bird, that opted to seal up their apertures, that safely stored away sperm for future use, mattered profoundly. But neither are snails involved in the more active, sometimes even deliberate, dispersal undertaken by many other animals.

Instead, if we pay attention, snails amaze with their capacity to move so far, to spread so widely, while doing so little. This, it seems to me, is one of the real marvels of snail biogeography. Individuals do not need to exert great effort because natural selection has acted for them, acted on them, acted with them, to produce these beings that are so unexpectedly but uniquely suited to a particular form of deep time travel, drifting. From such a perspective, rather than being any kind of deficiency, the highly successful passivity of snails might be seen as a remarkable evolutionary achievement.

It’s likely that in the history of these islands, on average one successful snail arrival event has taken place every few hundred thousand years.

There is so much more to learn here, so much to learn about not just the vectors but the patterns under which dispersal takes place: Are they laid down by atmospheric and oceanic currents, or by the inherited paths of avian migration? And yet to some extent this must remain a space of uncertainty and even mystery. How can one really study processes of biogeography that take place across such vast periods of time and space? As Brenden reminded me, it’s likely that in the history of these islands, on average one successful snail arrival event has taken place every few hundred thousand years. Put simply, it’s not something that any of us are likely to ever see, let alone study, firsthand.

It is hard to really make sense of the vast, deep-time assemblage of Hawaiian snail life. I imagine it as something like a giant network with strands stretching out across the Pacific Ocean and beyond, extending back over evolutionary and geological time frames. Each strand represents one of hundreds of unique species. Millions of years of unlikely journeys — nestled into a bird’s feathers, or perhaps tucked away in the crevice of a floating log — heading to destinations unknown. Millions of years that have produced these intrepid, even if somewhat unlikely, island dispersers with the reproductive and other adaptations that made these movements possible. These are at least some of the processes that have produced the breathtakingly diverse, utterly unrepeatable assemblage of snail life in Hawai‘i.

To labor to hold this network in mind, however imperfectly, however impossibly, might offer us a glimpse into one of the reasons why these snails matter, and so the significance of what is being lost in their extinction. Doing so might remind us that each of the fragile, fleshy, little individuals of Auriculella diaphana or Achatinella mustelina is not so much a “member” of a species as it is a “participant” in a lineage, one link in a vast, improbable, intergenerational project. These are projects — made up of the lives, histories, and possibilities of diverse snail species — that are today being radically truncated, or simply shorn off, all within the space of a few generations of human life. With them is disappearing countless unique ways of life and the vast evolutionary heritage — to borrow Loren Eiseley’s apt term, the “immense journey” — that they together comprise.

The post It’s still a mystery how snails ended up scattered around the globe appeared first on Popular Science.

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Artificial light at night can wreak havoc on a number of animals, from confusing moonlight-following sea turtle hatchlings to disrupting the sleep patterns of free-living animals like birds, to even stressing out caterpillars and making them age quicker.

Scientists are continuing to look more at the effects of artificial night light on insect larvae–like caterpillars.  A study published this month in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences found that even moderate levels of artificial light attract more caterpillar predators and reduce the chance that their larvae grow up into moths. Moths are part of the order lepidoptera that also contains butterflies and skippers ,and their larvae can serve as food for larger prey like birds, wasps, and some small amphibians. 

[Related: The switch to LEDs in Europe is visible from space.]

To test this light theory, scientists from Cornell University placed 552 lifelike caterpillar replicas made of soft clay in a forest in New Hampshire, gluing them to leaves to look as real as possible. They were made from a green clay that mimics the color and size of two moth caterpillars: Noctuidae (owlet moths) and Notodontidae (prominent moths). The marks of predators like birds, other insects, and arthropods can be left in the soft clay if they tried to take a bite of the fake caterpillars. 

Some of the models were placed on experimental lots that had 10 to 15 lux LED lighting, or roughly the brightness of a streetlight. The lights stayed on at night for about seven weeks in June and July 2021.

Of the 552 caterpillars deployed, 521 models were recovered. Almost half (249 fake caterpillars) showed predatory marks from arthropods, during the summer-long nighttime study. Additionally, they found that the rate of caterpillar predation was 27 percent higher on the experimental plots compared with the control areas that didn’t have the LED lighting.

Since the night sky is getting increasingly more polluted with artificial light, this poses another ecological problem for lepidopterans. These creatures already suffer from  threats like  habitat loss, chemical pollutants used in farming, climate change, and increasingly prevalent invasive species, according to the team.

[Related: ‘Skyglow’ is rapidly diminishing our nightly views of the stars.]

These findings are particularly worrisome for caterpillars at a larval stage when they are eating leaves to ensure that they grow into their next stage of development. Study co-author and research ecologist Sara Kaiser told the Cornell Chronicle, “When you turn on a porch light, you suddenly see a bunch of insects outside the door. But when you draw in those arthropod predators by adding light, then what is the impact on developing larvae? Top-down pressure – the possibility of being eaten by something.”
Some simple ways to reduce artificial light are by using smart lighting control to remotely manage any outside lighting, making sure that lights are close to the ground and shielded, and using the lowest intensity lighting possible.

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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.

Last fall, hundreds of birders rushed to Bryher, a tiny island off the coast of Cornwall, England. They came to see a Blackburnian warbler, a bird with a flaming orange throat and a high-pitched, trilled song. Blackburnian warblers are hardly ever seen in the United Kingdom—their home is 4,800 kilometers away in the pine forests of North America. Though they’re adept fliers, these birds typically overwinter in South America. So how did the bird get to Bryher?

Blackburnian warblers are small. Each weighs about as much as four pennies. It’s incredibly unlikely this vagrant warbler could have flown to Bryher under its own steam. Equally unlikely, says Roger Lederer, an ornithologist emeritus at California State University, Chico, is that the bird climbed eight or more kilometers into the sky and was blown off course by the jet stream. According to Lederer, this leaves just one possibility: the warbler took a boat.

Birds are often unexpected stowaways on ships around the world. Freighter crews have long told stories of sparrows and nightjars, owls, and herons settling on their boats’ decks, some for minutes, others for days. There’s video footage of a whole flock of starlings landing on a fishing boat in the North Sea. And after conservationists tagged a young osprey in Scotland, they watched with bemusement as the bird’s tracking signal showed its voyage to Spain involved riding on a cargo ship. The bird switched to a second vessel mid-journey before finishing the trip on its own.

The phenomenon has a name: ship-assisted migration. But few researchers paid much attention to how frequently birds hitchhike on ships—at least in a systematic way—until Maurizio Sarà took a month-long research cruise in the Mediterranean.

In 2021, Sarà, a zoologist at the University of Palermo in Italy, planned to observe dolphins, turtles, and other marine species. But he kept noticing terrestrial birds, like wagtails and wheatears, landing on the boat. He started keeping track. On average, he saw three birds arrive on the boat every day. Their median stopping time was 42 minutes but several stayed overnight. Extrapolating from his observations to the thousands of ships that travel the Mediterranean every day and the billions of birds that cross the sea during their migrations, Sarà estimates that as many as four million birds may be taking rest stops on boats during their spring migrations across the Mediterranean.

Something similar probably happens on other oceans as well, he thinks. Globally, some 4,000 bird species migrate, with many battling headwinds or storms as they travel thousands of kilometers. Where their voyages lead across oceans, the birds must go without water and food for long stretches. They rest on islands to refuel or wait out bad weather. Islands, however, are more scarce than boats.

Even counting only the commercial shipping fleet, around 90,000 ships are regularly crisscrossing the world’s waters. Sarà speculates that birds developed a new migration strategy for this modern era, one where they use the abundant freighters, tankers, and cruise ships as stepping stones on transcontinental flights. Even a short stop “can be enough to avoid the most tiring part of traversing a low atmospheric pressure cell, or to recover from the physiological stress that the migratory flight entails,” Sarà writes in the recent paper.

Alexander Lees, a conservation biologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in England who wasn’t involved in the research, says ship-assisted migration “is something that would be absolutely worth studying more.”

While Lees thinks Sarà’s estimate of four million birds using ships on their voyages across the Mediterranean is somewhat high, he has noticed that the Records Committee of the British Ornithologists’ Union, on which he sits, gets two or three reports a year that birds such as northern mockingbirds or brown thrashers have been sighted in the United Kingdom, even though they’re neither native to the area nor adapted for long-distance migrations. In about half of these cases, Lees says, the committee suspects the bird has arrived with the help of a boat.

It’s surprising how well birds can survive even entire ocean crossings on deck, Lees says. “Grain eaters tend to get handouts from people, such as crisps. And insectivores may find windblown insects. Raptors use the boat as a perch to hunt seabirds,” he says.

Every so often, this could allow a species to colonize a new region. The best evidence of ship-assisted colonization comes from a bird that doesn’t usually migrate at all: the Indian house crow. In recent years, so many of these birds stowed away on boats to the Netherlands from their native South Asia that they’ve established a breeding colony near Rotterdam.

None of this made the Blackburnian warbler on Bryher any less sensational. But there may come a day when the sight of a flame-throated bird on the island is much more common.

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

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Starting around seven million years ago, the Thylacosmilus atrox, also known as the “marsupial sabertooth,” prowled South America with canine teeth so large that they reached the top of their skull. The hypercarnivore, meaning it had a diet of at least 70 percent meat, and possibly used its tongue to slurp out the innards of its prey. Thylacosmilus went extinct about 3 million years ago and was a member of Sparassodonta, a group of carnivorous mammals that related to living marsupials.

The 200 pound beast had wide-set eyes like a cow, which are considerably different compared to the forward facing eye sockets of cats.  The strange setup helped the creature see in stereoscopic vision (or 3D).

[Related: Giant wombats the size of small cars once roamed Australia.]

With eyes like this, objects do not overlap sufficiently for the brain to integrate them in three-dimensions. Scientists have long been perplexed as to why the ferocious hunter would evolve such a strange adaptation in its skull. 

Now, a study published March 21 in the journal Communications Biology answers a few questions on how this extinct animal with a unique skull could see and hunt in its ancient world. 

Scientists from Argentina and the US used CT scanning and 3D virtual reconstructions to assess how the nasal cavities were organized in both modern and fossilized mammals.  The scans and reconstructions enabled the team to compare Thylacosmilus’ visual system with other carnivores or other mammals in general and study orbital convergence. This is the way the eyes move together and point inward when they look at objects that are close by. 

Thylacosmilus had an orbital convergence value as low as 35 degrees, which is pretty extreme compared to that of a typical predator at around 65 degrees. 

“Thylacosmilus was able to compensate for having its eyes on the side of its head by sticking its orbits out somewhat and orienting them almost vertically, to increase visual field overlap as much as possible,” said co-author Analia M. Forasiepi, from Instituto Argentino de Nivología, Glaciología, y Ciencias Ambientales (INAGLIA) and a researcher at the Argentinian science and research agency, in a statement. “Even though its orbits were not favorably positioned for 3D vision, it could achieve about 70 percent of visual field overlap—evidently, enough to make it a successful active predator.”

According to the team, how Thylacosmilus was able to compensate for low orbital convergence appears to be the key to understanding how this extinct marsuipial’s skull was put together. The growth patterns in their canines during early stages of development would have moved the eye sockets away from the face, resulting in the wide-set eyes seen in adults. 

“You can’t understand cranial organization in Thylacosmilus without first confronting those enormous canines,” said Charlène Gaillard, a Ph.D. student also at INAGLIA and study co-author, in a statement. “They weren’t just large; they were ever-growing, to such an extent that the roots of the canines continued over the tops of their skulls. This had consequences, one of which was that no room was available for the orbits in the usual carnivore position on the front of the face.”

[Related: Koalas use their noses to find friends and avoid enemies.]

The strange placement of the eye sockets was not the only modification that Thylacosmilus developed to accommodate its enormous canines. Since their eyes are much closer to their chewing muscles, these muscles risk getting deformed while eating. The eyes on the side of the skull also brings them closer to the mouth’s chewing muscles, possibly resulting in a deformation of the mouth muscles. Some mammals, including primates and Thylacosmilus, have developed a bony structure that closes off the eye sockets from the side as a way to control this. 

Now, a new question remains—why would the animal develop huge, constantly growing teeth that required its whole skull to be re-engineered? 

“It might have made predation easier in some unknown way,” said Gaillard. “The canines of Thylacosmilus did not wear down, like the incisors of rodents. Instead, they just seem to have continued growing at the root, eventually extending almost to the rear of the skull.”

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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 Ice Age was kind to large mammals. From about 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago, they had the space—and the time—to roam far. Lions, for instance, were once found around the world. After evolving in eastern Africa, the big cats padded through Europe and Asia and eventually crossed into North America by way of Beringia, a now-sunken continent that once connected Siberia to Alaska and Yukon.

Lions prowled North America for tens of thousands of years before going extinct. Today, no lions lounge in southern Alberta canola fields or chase prey through Yukon grasslands—so what happened?

Cave lions and their larger relatives, American lions, first entered North America during the last ice age, toward the end of the Pleistocene. Already part of the landscape in Europe, humans painted and carved portraits of these enormous lions in caves, including the famed Chauvet Cave in France.

Cave art has provided scientists with information about what these lions may have looked like and how they lived, says Julie Meachen, a vertebrate paleontologist at Iowa’s Des Moines University who specializes in big cats and other mammalian carnivores. The cave paintings depict big maneless lions with reddish coats living in groups.

Fossil evidence also indicates that, as with modern African lions, male Pleistocene lions were significantly larger than the females, Meachen explains. The maximum size of a male American lion was about 420 kilograms, she says, noting that modern lions only get up to 270 kilograms. “They probably would have been able to kill just about anything they wanted to kill—minus a fully grown [male] mammoth,” she says.

Alexander Salis, a vertebrate zoology postdoctoral researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, took a closer look at the story of lions in North America as part of his research at the University of Adelaide in Australia. In collaboration with Meachen and a team of colleagues, Salis analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of 39 Pleistocene lions from North America and Eurasia. He determined that lions migrated into North America on at least three separate occasions. But their adaptability faltered when faced with climate and habitat change.

Each wave of lion migration seemed to correspond to changes in global climate and sea level, Salis explains. As the planet fluctuated between periods of freezing and melting, sea levels rose and fell, and Beringia was exposed and flooded many times. During glacial periods, expanding ice caused sea levels to drop, opening the route into North America, which lions took advantage of—each bringing DNA markers revealing where they came from and when.

The first lions to amble into North America around 165,000 years ago were a lineage of cave lions. When a warmer period led Beringia to flood, the lions were cut off from Asian populations, and they evolved into the American lion, Salis explains. American lions didn’t spend much time in the north and instead headed for what is now the United States, he says. Nearly all American lion remains have been found south of the ice sheets that once covered much of the continent—save for one 67,000-year-old specimen from a Yukon site. Salis identified this as the oldest-known American lion.

About 63,000 years ago, Salis says, a second wave of cave lions crossed into eastern Beringia—now Alaska and Yukon. For some reason, these cave lions stayed above the ice sheets, remaining separate from American lions that had already dispersed south. Salis’s research revealed that this lion lineage went extinct around 33,000 years ago.

That extinction of cave lions in eastern Beringia could be attributed to a warming trend in the region, Salis says. Sea levels rose and damp weather arrived, key ingredients for the growth of peat. The expansion of peatlands in eastern Beringia would have fragmented habitats and altered the vegetation, heavily impacting herbivores and leaving cave lions and other carnivores scrambling to find prey. The American lions that had spread south were unaffected.

Lions reappeared in eastern Beringia’s fossil record about 22,000 years ago when the final wave of cave lions arrived from Asia. But they ran into some bad luck.

At the end of the last ice age, the temperature rose and megafauna across the continent began to die out, helped along by the presence of humans who quickly began to alter the environment. This one-two punch would have triggered vegetation loss and a drop in prey populations, leading to the demise of American and cave lions, Meachen says.

Andrew Cuff, a paleontologist and former lecturer at the University of Liverpool in England who was not involved in Salis’s research, says it makes sense that lions entered North America in multiple waves, taking advantage of the extra territory each time Beringia was passable. He notes that many animals, including dinosaurs, used the route to move between continents.

Cuff adds that it’s nice when the data comes together like this to tell a coherent story that also aligns with glacial, fossil, and DNA records.

Lions weren’t the only cats roaming North America during the Pleistocene. Cougars (also known as panthers, pumas, and mountain lions) and several now-extinct species, including various saber-toothed cats, radiated across the Americas long before lions arrived. North American cougars were a casualty of the post–Ice Age megafauna extinction, but South American populations survived, Meachen says. Once deer and elk began to repopulate North America, cougars returned.

North America was densely populated by an incredible diversity of species before the end of the Ice Age, Meachen says. In learning what has been lost, she hopes more people come to understand the importance of biodiversity and the need to preserve it.

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

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Over 60,000 years ago, an eagle relative with an almost 10 foot wingspan stalked the skies over southern Australia. Dynatoaetus gaffae (Gaff’s powerful eagle) had talons that could even snatch a koala or small kangaroo for dinner. The massive bird of prey was likely the largest continental eagle the world had ever seen. 

A study published March 16 in the Journal of Ornithology details how a team of fossil hunters from Flinders University in Australia put together this bird’s story. Four large fossilized bones were collected in Mairs Cave southern Australia’s Flinders Ranges  as far back as 1956 and 1969. The authors found an additional 28 bones scattered among the boulders in the site whoch helped them create a better picture of this giant extinct bird. 

[Related: This dragon-like reptile once soared over Australia.]

This now extinct raptor is closely related to Old World vultures that prowled Africa and Asia during the Pleistocene. In today’s fauna, its closest relative is likely the critically endangered monkey-munching Philippine Eagle. During the late Pleistocene Epoch, when giant megafauna like the mammoth roamed the Earth and ice sheets and glaciers were growing, Dynatoaetuswas likely the top avian predator on the planet. 

“It’s often been noted how few large land predators Australia had back then, so Dynatoaetus helps fill that gap,” said study author and Flinders University paleontologist Ellen Mather, in a statement.  “This discovery reveals that this incredible family of birds was once much more diverse in Australia, and that raptors were also impacted by the mass extinction that wiped out most of Australia’s megafauna.”

Dynatoaetus and another recently described smaller bird named Cryptogyps represent a new genera of raptors that are unique to Australia. 

“[Dynatoaetus] was humongous. Larger than any other eagle from other continents, and almost as large as the world’s largest eagles once found on the islands of New Zealand and Cuba, including the whopping extinct 13kg [28 pound] Haast’s eagle of New Zealand,” said Trevor Worthy, a study co-author and paleontologist at Flinders University, in a statement. 

[Related: Giant wombats the size of small cars once roamed Australia.]

Dynatoaetus also coexisted with the Wedge-tailed Eagle, a species that currently lives in Australia. The team says that this has interesting implications.

“Given that the Australian birds of prey used to be more diverse, it could mean that the Wedge-tailed Eagle in the past was more limited in where it lived and what it ate,” said Mather. “Otherwise, it would have been directly competing against the giant Dynatoaetus for those resources.”

Most of Australia’s eagles and vultures like the Dynatoaetus went extinct about 50,000 years ago, along with most of the continents’s megafauna.  One 2020 study found that a possible explanation is extreme environmental change and deterioration (loss of water, increased burning of trees and grass, etc.) that wiped out at least 13 super-sized megafauna species, including the world’s largest wombats and kangaroos.

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Deep in the South American rainforest lives one of the brightest colored amphibians in the world: the poison dart frog. But don’t take their dazzling appearance as an invitation to come closer. These hues are a warning that they are not worth attacking. Touching the skin of a poison dart frog—among the most toxic animals in the world—can induce nausea, swelling, and paralysis, even in humans. 

Predators to these frogs have learned to see bright shades as poisonous or unappetizing. But associating color with danger takes time, leaving evolutionary biologists with a paradoxical problem. How did prey species survive long enough to evolve colors as warning signals while living among predators who can better spot them and had not yet learned to avoid them?

[Related: These buff frogs never skip arm day]

One theory is that colorful warning signals, also known as aposematism, evolved indirectly and through gradual stages. A study published today in the journal Science suggests some creatures permanently adapted to vivid skins, by first using hidden signals to give predators plenty of time to learn that these colors should be treated with caution. These colors were often concealed in their bellies or undersides.

“If you’re the first conspicuous individual in a chemically defended lineage, it will be very difficult for that mutation to take hold in the population, because predators have no way of knowing your coloration is associated with chemical defense,” says Changku Kang, an assistant professor at Seoul National University in South Korea and study coauthor.

To study how colors evolved in animals, the study authors ranked over 1,000 species of frogs and salamanders into five groups. Most studies on the evolution of animal coloration try to place animals in one of two categories—either conspicuous or camouflaged—which limits the complex understanding of animal coloration, says Karl Loeffler-Henry, a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University in Canada who served as lead study author. 

Instead, this research looked at those two extremes as well as other adaptations animals could have developed. Animals with colors that make them stand out like reds, yellows, and bright blue skins were classified as conspicuous. Animals that developed colors meant to camouflage into the environment were cryptic. Partially conspicuous animals were those with colors that were somewhat hidden in limbs and other body areas. Fully conspicuous critters had bright colors fully tucked away in their underbellies and other hidden regions. Amphibians with both cryptic and conspicuous forms were placed under the polymorphism category.

The biologists then tested nine different evolutionary models to reconstruct the evolutionary pathways their ancestors took, including when they developed both aposematism and toxicity as a defense strategy. 

The path to aposematism was not a straight line. Instead of evolving directly from a camouflage strategy, aposematism had an important transitional state. “The conditions favoring the evolution of this type of coloration are likely to be much less restrictive, and yet they provide a clear pathway to the evolution of overall bright coloration,” says Kyle Summers, an evolutionary biologist at East Carolina University who was not involved in the study. When animals first developed vivid pigments, they initially concealed them in body parts such as the limbs or the underbelly. 

[Related: Could reptiles and amphibians hold the key to the fountain of youth?]

If threatened, these animals would lift up their limbs or bodies to expose the colors that eventually served as warnings to predators who naively ate these creatures. “Aposematism has evolved independently many times in separate lineages of amphibians,” explains Loeffler-Henry. “Hidden signals give an answer to how this is happening and unravel a fascinating story of how the evolutionary process took place.”

“The study offers a novel solution to the long-standing paradox of evolution of conspicuous antipredator warning signals,” adds Alice Exnerová, an assistant professor of zoology at Charles University in Prague who was also not affiliated with the research. What’s more, she says the findings show the value of exploring alternative and overlooked evolutionary strategies, which can advance our understanding of diverse antipredator defense strategies in the natural world.

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Air pollution is messing with the love lives of fruit flies, warns a new study published on March 14 in the journal Nature Communications. Male common fruit flies had trouble in recognizing their female counterparts after breathing in toxic gas, causing them to make a move on another male. 

Though there’s been some research hinting at bisexuality among fruit flies, the current results suggest it has to do more with ozone pollution. Even brief exposure to O₃ was enough to alter the chemical makeup of pheromones, a unique trails insects use to detect and attract mates. Increasing levels of air pollutants from cars, power plants, and industrial boilers around the world could stop common fruit flies from reproducing, causing a dramatic decline in the insect species.

[Related: Almost everyone in the world breathes unhealthy air]

The chemical ecologists placed 50 male flies into a tube and exposed them to 100 parts per billion (ppb) of ozone—global ozone levels range from 12 ppb to 67 ppb—for two hours. After two hours, fruit flies showed reduced amounts of a pheromone called cis-Vaccenyl Acetate (cVA) in compounds involved in reproductive behavior.

A closer look revealed that ozone seems to have changed the chemical structure of pheromones. Most insect pheromones have carbon double bonds, explains Markus Knaden, a group leader for insect behavior at the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology in Germany and study author. Whenever a compound has carbon double bonds, it becomes highly sensitive to oxidization by ozone or nitric oxide and starts to separate. The explanation is in line with their findings of high amounts of the liquid heptanal in the flies, a product that emerges after cVA breaks down. 

Did the altered pheromones affect a male’s chances at finding a partner? It appears so. A separate experiment exposed male flies to 30 minutes of either ozone ranging from 50 to 200 ppb or regular air with a much lower amount ozone before being placed them with female fruit flies. While males from both groups wasted no time in trying to court females, ozone-exposed fruit flies had more trouble getting a mate. 

“The male advertises himself with pheromones. The more he produces, the more attractive he becomes to the female,” says Knaden. Losing the chemical aphrodisiac made ozone-exposed males a less desirable option to females, who took nearly twice as much time choosing from the corrupted bachelors than the clean ones.

Not only is ozone pollution hampering the males’ ability to get female attention, it’s also affecting how they identify other individuals. Knaden says his team expected the altered pheromones to affect the ability for male fruit flies to distinguish between a male and a female, but what they didn’t expect were males to jump on each other. “In the beginning, it was a very funny observation to see really long chains where one male was courting the next and then the next down the line,” he describes. With the altered pheromones, “the male basically jumps on everything that is small and moves a little bit like a fly, regardless of what it is.”

“Very little is known about how air pollution interferes with insect sex pheromone signaling, so it is great to see this work underway,” says James Ryalls, a research fellow in the Center for Agri-environmental Research at the University of Reading in England, who was not affiliated with the research. “The study demonstrates how disruptive air pollution can be to insect communication, with potential ecological ramifications such as reduced biodiversity.”

[Related: Flies evolved before dinosaurs—and survived an apocalyptic world]

Getting rid of the buggers that crowd your bananas and melons might seem like a good idea at first glance. However, Ryalls warns that these agricultural pests contribute greatly to the world’s ecosystem. As nature’s clean-up crew, fruit flies help decompose rotting fruit, releasing nutrients for plants, bacteria, and fungi to use. They also serve as food for other animals like birds and spiders. Lastly, they are a common insect model used in biomedical research and have contributed to countless neuroscience and genetic discoveries.

Fruit flies are not the only ones feeling the effects of air pollution. Knaden says he has seen dangerous ozone levels affecting flower volatile compounds, which are used as cues for pollinators. His 2020 study found moths were less attracted to flower odors from plants exposed to the gas, resulting in less pollination. 

“Insects are on the decline, and we thought it was from pesticides and habitat loss,” says Knaden. “It seems there are more screws we have to turn, one of them being air pollutants.”

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Humans have been experimenting with mind-altering plants for many millennia now. . Modern-day drugs such as opium were being used in Europe around 5,700 BCE, and cannabis seeds started showing up in archeological digs in Asia some 10,000 years ago. Some studies have shown that ancient hominids have been using psychotropic plants and drugs as far back as 200 million years ago.

While tripping might seem like an exclusively human desire, it turns out that some of our closest great ape relatives might also find ways to switch up their state of mind—but instead of using plants and other substances, they just twirl around really quickly. For  research published today in the journal Primates, researchers watched 40 videos of great apes spinning around just to get dizzy. And they think these actions could have some clues into why people have often seeked innovative ways to get a little high, drunk, and what have you.

[Related: Why do humans talk? Tree-dwelling orangutans might hold the answer.]

“Every culture has found a way of evading reality through dedicated and special rituals, practices, or ceremonies,” study author Adriano Lameira, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Warwick, said in a press release. “This human trait of seeking altered states is so universal, historically, and culturally, that it raises the intriguing possibility that this is something that has been potentially inherited from our evolutionary ancestors.”

Inspired by a viral video of a male gorilla spinning in a pool, the team found dozens of videos of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans going round and round, often using ropes or vines. The researchers then analyzed the movements, finding that on average the apes spun 5.5 times per session, with an average speed of 1.5 revolutions per second. Most animals then repeated the session three times in a row. This is about as fast as professional dancers, circus artists, and Dervish Muslims twirl, according to the authors. 

The apes themselves would often be so dizzy after a bout of twirling that they were noticeably dizzy and likely to lose their balance. To understand the feeling of euphoria after such a feat, the team tested out twirling at the same speed and intensity themselves, and actually struggled to get to the third round due to dizziness. 

[Related: These long-fingered lemurs pick and eat their boogers, just like humans.]

Previous studies on why humans crave self-induced dizziness have focused on alcohol and drug use, but the authors of this study argue that simple spinning could be worth a deeper look. After all, the ability to make or find mind-altering substances requires knowledge, skills, and tools that we aren’t sure humans or pre-humans had access to, Lameira added. Additionally, there could be links with mental state and boredom, as the videos recorded were mostly of captive apes. 

“What we wanted to try to understand through this study is whether spinning can be studied as a primordial behavior that human ancestors would have been able to autonomously engage in and tap into other states of consciousness,” Lamiera said. “If all great apes seek dizziness, then our ancestors are also highly likely to have done so.”

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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.

Camilla Rathsach walked along the lichen-covered sand, heading out from the lone village on Denmark’s remote Anholt island—a spot of land just a few kilometers wide in the middle of the Kattegat Strait, which separates the Danish mainland from Sweden. As Anholt Town’s 45 streetlights receded into the distance, moonlit shadows reached out to embrace the dunes. Rathsach looked up, admiring the Milky Way stretching across the sky. Thousands of stars shone down. “It’s just amazing,” she says. “Your senses heighten and you hear the water and feel the fresh air.”

This dark-sky moment was one of many Rathsach experienced while visiting the island in 2020 for work on her master’s thesis on balancing the need for outdoor lighting and darkness. Having grown up in urban areas, Rathsach wasn’t used to how bright moonlit nights could be. And after speaking with the island’s residents, who value the dark sky deeply and navigate with little outdoor light, she realized that artificial lighting could be turned down at night depending on the moon’s phase.

At Aalborg University in Denmark, she worked with her graduate supervisor, Mette Hvass, to present a new outdoor lighting design for Anholt’s church. Rathsach and Hvass picked the church for their project because it is a central meeting place for the community yet it currently has no outdoor lights. They thought lighting would make it easier for people to navigate but wanted to preserve the inviting ambiance of moonlight.

One of the guiding principles of designing sustainable lighting is to start with darkness, and add only the minimum amount of light required. Darkness and natural light sources are important to many species, and artificial light can be downright dangerous.

“Lights can attract and disorient seabirds during their flights between colony and foraging sites at sea,” says Elena Maggi, an ecologist at the University of Pisa in Italy who is not involved in the project. Anholt’s beaches host a variety of breeding seabirds, including gulls and terns, and the island is a stopover for many migrating birds. The waters around the island are also home to seals, cod, herring, and seagrass. Though scientists have made progress in understanding the effects of artificial light at night on a range of species, such as turtles, birds, and even corals, there is still more to learn.

“We still don’t know exactly how artificial light might interact with other disturbances like noise and chemical pollution, or with rising ocean temperatures and acidification due to climate change,” says Maggi.

The scientists’ final design for the church includes path lighting and small spotlights under the window arches, along with facade lighting under the eaves shining downward. To preserve the dark sky, path lighting would turn off on bright moonlit nights, and facade lighting would shut off on semi-bright or bright nights. The window lighting would stay on regardless of the moon’s phase.

The adaptive lighting cooked up by Camilla Rathsach and Mette Hvass would automatically adjust to the availability of moonlight, tweaking this church’s lighting automatically to balance visibility and darkness. Mock-ups show how the church would be lit under no moonlight (first) and a full moon (second). Illustrations courtesy of Camilla Rathsach

“The contrast between the moon’s cold white light reflecting off the church’s walls and the warm orange lights in the windows would create a cozy, inviting experience,” says Rathsach.

The moonlight adaptive lighting design project is part of a growing effort to balance the need for functional lighting in the town and to protect the darkness. Recently, the town’s public streetlights were swapped for dark-sky friendly lamps, says Anne Dixgaard, chairman of Dark Sky Anholt.

Dixgaard also organizes a yearly walk out to Anholt’s beach, where skywatchers can learn about the night sky. “People really value Anholt’s dark sky and want to preserve it,” she says.

Rathsach and Hvass are working on the moonlight adaptive design project in hopes that it will be implemented one day, but they still have some challenges to overcome. Moonlight is a relatively faint light source, so detecting it using sensors is challenging, and lights would need to adjust automatically on nights with intermittent cloud cover. Yet big initiatives often begin with small steps.

“This work is something new and unexpected,” says Maggi. “It’s a very interesting approach to mitigating the negative effects of artificial light at night.”

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

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Seaweed is one of the most variable, sustainable substances on earth. Scientists have used it to make new plastics, medical devices, food, biofuels, and more. But right now, one variety of aquatic plant is also making a giant toxic bloom that can be seen from space. 

Meet the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt—a nearly 5,000-mile-long, thickly matted sheet of sargassum algae floating between Mexico and West Africa. Sargassum, a genus of large brown seaweed, is pretty much harmless —or even beneficial—out in the open ocean. But when it creeps up on beaches, it can be a serious problem. And it’s growing. 

While these seaweed mounds may serve as carbon sinks and fish habitats when floating asea, as the mass inches closer to land, it can diminish water and air quality, smother coral reefs, and restrict oxygen for coastal fish. Huge piles of the seaweed typically turn up on Florida beaches around May, but the seaweed is already starting to swamp beaches in Key West, Brian LaPointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, tells NBC. As of last week, 200 tons of the marine plant are expected to wash up on beaches in the Mexican Caribbean. 

[Related: This fossilized ‘ancient animal’ might be a bunch of old seaweed.]

With these pile-ups come even more pile-ups—of dead fish. According to the Independent, around 1,000 pounds of fish were cleared from Florida’s St. Pete Beach this month, and 3.5 tons of dead fish have already been removed in the past two weeks from the state’s Manatee County Parks.

The seaweed can be a huge problem for infrastructure. “Even if it’s just out in coastal waters, it can block intake valves for things like power plants or desalination plants, marinas can get completely inundated and boats can’t navigate through,” Brian Barnes, an assistant research professor at the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, tells NBC. Not to mention, one 2022 paper linked the hydrogen sulfide that rotting seaweed emits to serious pregnancy complications, alongside headaches and eye irritation. 

[Related: Horrific blobs of ‘plastitar’ are gunking up Atlantic beaches.]

While some types of seaweed make for awesome, sustainable products, this kind of sargassum is virtually useless. Using it as a fertilizer or compost is tricky, thanks to its high heavy metal content. Some scientists have argued for sinking the massive carpet of algae to the bottom of the ocean to use as carbon capture and storage. 

“There is a lot of carbon biomass associated with sargassum–about 3m tonnes in the Great Sargassum Belt,” Columbia University oceanographer Ajit Subramaniam tells The Guardian. 

For now, it’s probably best to keep an eye out for beach closures, event cancellations, and warnings as the season attracts more people—and smelly seaweed—toward the coast. 

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It can be pretty tough to be a bug, especially for spiders that have a not so great reputation. While black widow spiders (Latrodectus hesperus) and their venomous bites are a common fear for humans, spiders who call parts of the southern United States home have quite a bit to fear themselves. Brown widow spiders (Latrodectus geometricus) don’t seem to get along with their cousins from the same genus, and over the past few decades scientists have observed brown widow spiders increasingly displacing black widows. 

But like any family drama, it’s more complicated than fighting over food or habitat. A new study published March 13 in the journal Annals of the Entomological Society of America suggests that brown widow spiders seek out and kill nearby black widows for reasons that scientists are still trying to really understand.

[Related: Jumping spiders might be able to sleep—perchance to dream.]

“We have established brown widow behavior as being highly aggressive towards the southern black widows, yet much more tolerant of other spiders within the same family,” Louis Coticchio, a former zookeeper who specialized in venomous animals a University of South Florida undergraduate student who led the study, said in a statement. 

Scientists believe that brown widow spiders were native to Africa before being introduced to every continent except Antarctica. The black widows native to North America have two closely related species, the western black widow (Latrodectus hesperus) and the southern black widow (Latrodectus mactans).

While Coticchio was collecting wild spiders in Florida, he noticed that  areas brown widows displaceding black widows, but they didn’t conquer regions populated with other related spider species. He and his advisor devised a study to look at what was driving this displacement. The mathematical modeling used in the study showed both species are much more likely to die from being eaten than from food scarcity.

While comparing growth rates and fertility, they saw that sub-adult brown widow females were 9.5 percent larger than black widows, and adult female brown widows reached reproductive maturity 16 percent earlier and were about twice as fertile as black widows. Brown widow males are smaller than their black widow counterparts, but become fertile in a shorter time.

[Related: These male spiders fling into the air to escape post-coital cannibalism.]

The team designed experiments that paired brown widow spiders in a contained habitat with related cobweb spider species.They found that the brown widows were 6.6 times more likely to kill their roommates if they were southern black widows versus any other related species. 

While living with the red house spider, sub-adult brown widow females simply cohabitated with other females in 50 percent of pairings. The red house spiders killed and consumed the brown widows in 40 percent of the observed pairings. 

Brown widows peacefully cohabitated with triangulate cobweb spiders (Steatoda triangulosa) in 80 percent of pairings ,and they were killed in just 10 percent of the observed pairings. 

However, when sub-adult brown and black widow females were put together, the brown widows killed and ate the black widows in 80 percent of pairings. Adult black widows were killed in 40 percent of trials, but they defensively killed brown widows in 30 percent of trials, and simply cohabitated during the remaining 30 percent.

“We didn’t expect to find such a dramatic and consistent difference in the personalities of the brown widow and the black widow,” said co-author and biologist Deby Cassill, in a statement. “Brown widows are boldly aggressive and will immediately investigate a neighbor and attack if there is no resistance from the neighbor. For two bold spiders, the initial attack is often resolved by both individuals going to separate corners and eventually being OK with having a nearby neighbor. The black widows are extremely shy, counterattacking only to defend themselves against an aggressive spider.”

The team is still uncovering what is driving this aggression towards a closely related species, noting that invasive species can typically outcompete native species through fertility, growth, dispersal, or defenses against predators. 

“One question I would love to answer is how brown widows interact with other species of spiders, more specifically black widows in Africa, where brown widows are believed to have originated,” Coticchio said. “I would love to see if their behavior and displacement of black widows is something that they have adapted here in North America, or if this behavior is something they exhibit naturally even in areas where they have coevolved with black widows for much longer periods of time.”  

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This article was originally featured on Field & Stream.

Deer antlers are among the fastest-growing appendages in the Animal Kingdom. Growing as fast as 3/4 of an inch per day during the peak spring growing cycle, cervid headgear can develop fully in just a few short months. Scientists at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China have been looking for ways to harness the rapid growth rate of antler tissue by implanting stem cells from Sika deer antlers into the foreheads of lab mice. Their experiments have yielded some bizarre-looking rodents with small outgrowths on their heads that the journal Nature referred to as “mini antlers.” According to a research paper published on February 24, 2023, the results could one day be adapted to heal bone injuries and regrow lost limbs.

The Xi’an researchers started by investigating the cellular make-up and gene expression dynamics of antler tissue throughout various stages of growth. Once they’d isolated stem cell populations with the most potency and potential for regenerative effects, they started inserting those cells directly into the heads of their test mice.

They found that the most effective cell implants were those derived from shed antlers that were no more than 5 days old. Those cells were harvested from the antler pedicle—where the base of the antler connects to the skull plate—cultured in a petri dish, and then transplanted between the ears of hairless mice. Within 45 days of implantation, the mice had begun to develop “antler-like” structures of their own.

It’s not the first time that Chinese scientists have grown something akin to a deer antler on the noggin of a mouse. In a similar study published in the Journal of Regenerative Biology and Medicine in August 2020, researchers surgically removed antler tissue from living deer then used something called a cryogenic freezer mill to process the antler material before inserting it into nude mice. That study produced similar results with the mice sprouting visible, antler-like protrusions atop their heads.

Read Next: Florida Researchers Tracked Down and Killed a Giant Burmese Python After it Ate a Collared Possum

The researchers behind the more recent study say that their work extends the catalog of mammalian stem cell systems that are known to science. With these newly-identified stem cell types, they’re hoping to expand the capacity of modern medicine. “Our results suggest that deer have an application in clinical bone repair,” the authors wrote in the study’s conclusion. “Beyond that, the induction of human cells into [anlter-like] cells could be used in regenerative medicine for skeletal injuries or limb regeneration.”

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Social learning and knowledge sharing from generation to generation is a hallmark of a culture among living things. While it’s been documented in many animals including tiny naked mole rats, songbirds, sperm whales, and humans, early social learning has only just been demonstrated in insects. 

A study published March 9 in the journal Science is offering evidence that generational knowledge is fundamental for honeybees.

[Related: The first honeybee vaccine could protect the entire hive, starting with the queen.]

“We are beginning to understand that, like us, animals can pass down information important for their survival through communities and families. Our new research shows that we can now extend such social learning to include insects,” said study co-author and University of California San Diego biologist James Nieh, in a statement. 

Nieh and a team of researchers took a deeper look at a bee’s “waggle dance.”  Bees have a highly organized community structure and use the waggle dance to tell hivemates where critical food resources are located with an intricate series of movements. In the waggle dance, bees circle around in figure-eight patterns, while wagging their bodies during the central part of the dance. It’s kind of like a breakdance performed at a breakneck speed, with each bee moving a body length in less than one second. 

The very precise motions in the dance translate visual information from the environment around the hive, Sending accurate information is especially remarkable since bees must move rapidly across an often uneven honeycomb hive surface. The team discovered that this dance is improved by learning and can be culturally transmitted. 

Nieh and fellow researchers Shihao Dong, Tao Lin, and Ken Tan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences created colonies with bees that were all the same age as an experiment to watch how experienced forager bees pass this process down to younger, less-experienced nestmates. 

Bees typically begin to dance when they reach the right age and always follow the lead of experienced dancers first, but in these experimental colonies, they weren’t able to learn the waggle dance from older bees.

[Related: Bees choose violence when attempting honey heists.]

By comparison, the bees that shadowed other dancers in the control colonies that had a mix of different aged bees didn’t have problems learning to waggle. The acquired social cues stayed with them for the roughly 38 day lifespan of the bees in the study. 

Those that didn’t learn the correct waggle dance in that critical early stage of learning could improve by watching other dancers and by practicing, but they couldn’t correctly encode the distance which created distinct “dialects.” The dialect was then maintained by the bees for the rest of their lives. 

“Scientists believe that bee dialects are shaped by their local environments. If so, it makes sense for a colony to pass on a dialect that is well adapted to this environment,” said Nieh. The results therefore provided evidence that social learning shapes honey bee signaling as it does with early communication in many vertebrate species that also benefit from learning.

The next steps for this research is better understanding the role that the environment plays in shaping bee language. Additionally, the team would like to know more about external threats like pesticides to bees that could disrupt early language learning. 

“We know that bees are quite intelligent and have the capacity to do remarkable things,” said Nieh. “Multiple papers and studies have shown that pesticides can harm honey bee cognition and learning, and therefore pesticides might harm their ability to learn how to communicate and potentially even reshape how this communication is transmitted to the next generation of bees in a colony.”

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The exterior paint on a building is often a major factor in keeping their indoors appropriately warm or cool, and a lot of work goes into developing new concoctions to improve insulation. Unfortunately, the volatile organic compounds found in modern synthetic paint have been shown to have harmful effects on both the environment and humans. On top of all that, air conditioning still contributes to over 10 percent of all electricity consumption in the US. Thankfully, we have butterflies and squid.

Those species and others inspired a researcher at University of Central Florida’s NanoScience Technology Center to create an ultra-lightweight, environmentally safe “plasmonic paint.” The unique paint relies on nanoscale structural arrangements of aluminum and aluminum oxide instead of traditional pigments to generate its hues. As detailed in Debashis Chanda’s recent paper published in Science Advances, traditional pigment paint colorants rely on their molecules’ light absorption properties to determine colors. Chanda’s plasmonic paint, in contrast, employs light reflection, absorption, and scattering based on its nanostructural geometric arrangements to create its visual palettes.

[Related: Are monarch butterflies endangered in the US?]

“The range of colors and hues in the natural world are astonishing—from colorful flowers, birds and butterflies to underwater creatures like fish and cephalopods,” said Chanda in a statement on Wednesday. Chanda went on to explain that these examples’ structural color serves as their hue-altering mechanism, as two colorless materials combine to produce color.

Compared to traditional available paint, Chanda’s plasmonic version is both dramatically longer lasting, eco-friendly, and efficient. Normal paints fade as their pigments lose the ability to absorb light electrons, but plasmonics’ nanostructural attributes ensure color could remain as vibrant as the day it was applied “for centuries,” claimed Chanda.

A layer of plasmonic paint can achieve full coloration at just 150 nanometers thick, making it arguably the lightest paint in the world, and ensuring magnitudes less is needed for projects. Chanda estimated that just three pounds of plasmonic paint would cover an entire Boeing 747 jet exterior—a job that usually requires around 1,000 pounds of synthetic paint.

[Related: A new paint can reflect up to 98.1 percent of sunlight.]

And then there’s the energy savings. Plasmonic paint reflects the entire infrared spectrum, thereby absorbing far less heat. During testing, a surface layered with the new substance typically remained between 25 and 30F cooler than a surface painted with commonly available commercial options. That could save consumers’ bucket loads of cash, not to mention dramatically cut down on energy needed to power A/C systems.

Chanda said fine-tuning is still needed to improve plasmonics’ commercial viability, as well as scale up production abilities to make it a feasible replacement for synthetic paint. Still, natural inspirations like butterflies could be what ultimately help save their beauty for centuries to come.

“As a kid, I always wanted to build a butterfly,” said Chanda. “Color draws my interest.”

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Fossils can help us peer deep into the planet’s past. But that doesn’t mean that the interpretations of them are set in stone—in fact, experts often change their minds on what a fossil really is depending on new analysis and discoveries. In 2021, for instance, scientists decided that a 515-million-year-old fossil showed the earliest evidence of an animal group called the bryozoans, named Protomelission gatehousei. This discovery put the origin of the simple, filter-feeding colonies of aquatic invertebrates over 35 million years earlier than previously thought, putting their evolution around the same time as the Cambrian explosion. This period, taking place some 541-530 million years ago, marks the origins of most modern animal life. 

But, a second look at these fossils might indicate that’s not such a great fit after all. A new study published in Nature suggests that the Protomelission gatehousei fossil isn’t a bryozoan, or even an early animal after all. Experts from Durham University in the UK, as well as Yunnan University and Guizhou University in China determined, instead, that the fossil is just that of a dasyclad green algae. 

[Related: Scientists find 319-million-year-old fossilized fish brain.]

For their research, the international team of scientists looked at a new specimen discovered in China’s Xiaoshiba Biota, known for well-preserved Cambrian fossils. The new, larger specimens make it appear that Protomelission probably isn’t a bryozoan, considering the fossils don’t have bryozoan type tentacles—instead they had little cactus-like projections. That’s not ideal for animals, Martin Smith, author of the new study and associate professor in paleontology at Durham, tells New Scientist, but it could be helpful for photosynthesis.

Even as dasyclad algae, the fossils are still pretty exciting. According to the authors, seaweeds were previously believed to be rare in the early Cambrian, but these fossils (and similar fossils called cambroclaves, which are abundant across the world but have uncertain origins) may actually point to a bit of an earlier seaweed renaissance.

“It could even be speculated that the diversification of seaweed could have contributed to the diversification of animals we see during the Cambrian,” Smith said in a release.  

[Related: This fossil-sorting robot can identify millions-year-old critters for climate researchers.]

Of course, there’s still plenty of debate—Paul Taylor, a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum in London and author of the 2021 paper, argues that these new findings aren’t enough to nix their bryozoan theory. After all, tentacles are often made of soft tissue, he told The Guardian, which doesn’t fossilize well. 

Either way, the fossils have quite a story to tell. On one hand, they could hold the key to bryozoan early roots. On the other hand, if the fossil is simple algae, it still  shows how evolution still kept its “creative touch” even after the incredibly unique Cambrian period. Until more fossils are found, the algae versus animal debate isn’t history yet.

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