Best overall		Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder		SEE IT	The Bird Buddy offers stylish design, quality images, and a fun app with real-time notifications.
Best for hummingbirds		BirdDock Hummingbird Feeder Camera		SEE IT	The nectar attachment of this feeder can be swapped out to hold seed as well.
Best budget		WYZE Cam v3		SEE IT	This budget option lets you see the birds without any extras.

Bird feeder cameras make documenting our feathered friends fun and easy, but they aren’t created equally. Some are best for bird-watching in your own backyard, while others are better suited to remote locations. More expensive models have features like solar panels, video options, and smart bird identification, while basic, budget models make feeder photography accessible for just about everyone. No matter what you are looking for, the best bird feeder cameras will allow you to capture quality images of the birds who call your area home. 

• Best overall: Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder
• Best trail camera: TECHNAXX Full HD Birdcam TX-165
• Best for bird boxes: Hawk Eye HD Nature Cam
• Best for hummingbirds: BirdDock Hummingbird Feeder Camera
• Best for bird identification: Netvue Birdfy Pro
• Best budget: WYZE Cam v3

How we chose the best bird feeder cameras

There are dozens of bird feeder cameras on the market. Though many of them have the same basic features, they don’t all offer the same level of important features like durability, battery life, and accuracy of species detection. 

To arrive at our top picks, we relied on our own assessment of each device, including hands-on experience with multiple models. Because bird feeder cameras must be durable, weatherproof, and offer long-lasting performance, we also leaned heavily on user experiences and favored well-reviewed products. 

Features like accurate bird identification, solar panel availability, and useful accessories also helped push some models into the limelight. Other options like real-time notification and color night vision were nice to have but not essentials. Still, they didn’t tend to figure into our final decision simply because of their somewhat limited value for bird photography. 

The best bird feeder cameras: Reviews & Recommendations

Choosing a bird feeder camera can be tough. There are dozens of available models, and the prices can range from less than $50 all the way up to $400 or more. The key to finding the right bird feeder camera is not necessarily shopping by price but knowing which features are must-haves and which are not. Not everyone will benefit from AI, for example. You may even prefer to use your own knowledge to identify the birds in your photographs. Below are our favorite options, suitable for a range of situations and users. 

Best overall: Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder

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Specs

• AI: Yes, identifies more than 1,000 bird species 
• App compatibility: Android and iOS
• Resolution: 5-megapixel photos, 720p video
• Battery: 4000 mAh rechargeable lithium-ion battery, optional solar panel

Pros

• Sharp images with a 120-degree field of view
• Weatherproof from -5°F to 120°F
• The smartphone app allows you to see feeders all over the world
• Compatible with an optional solar panel and lots of accessories
• Three mounting options

Cons

• No local storage, so it can’t be used without Wi-Fi
• Video resolution is lower than some competitors

The Bird Buddy bird feeder camera is relatively new, but it has much to offer, so it earns our top spot. The bird feeder is attractively designed, so it will look nice in your yard or on your deck with some solar lights, which is an important feature for many. It’s available in blue or vibrant yellow, so you can choose an option that fits your style best. I really enjoy the look of the blue Bird Buddy on the side of my porch, which is a big plus. 

The camera module is removable, which is important when it comes time to clean the feeder. It can take five-megapixel photos or offers 720p live-streamed video. The image quality won’t be that of your dedicated mirrorless or DSLR camera, but it is nicely detailed and properly exposed even in backlit situations. And being able to tune in to watch live as a bird chows down is pretty neat. 

The camera’s 120-degree field of view is wide enough to capture birds hanging out on the feeder’s side. You can also buy multiple accessories through Bird Buddy to extend the perch or feed different species. With the solar roof (the model we thoroughly tested and reviewed), you’ll never need to think about charging the camera. Without the solar roof, you’ll need to charge the camera every 5 to 15 days.

The Bird Buddy relies on AI to automatically recognize over 1,000 species of birds. The Bird Buddy app notifies you when you have new visitors to your feeder, which is always exciting. You can even browse other Bird Buddy devices all over the world to see species that you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. Plus, the images from your device contribute to migration information for conservation databases. You’ll be helping science progress while getting fun images of your feathered friends. 

Best trail camera: TECHNAXX Full HD Birdcam TX-165 

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Specs

• AI: None
• App compatibility: N/A, no app available
• Resolution: 8-megapixel photos, full HD 1080p video
• Battery: 4 AA batteries give it a working time of up to 6 months

Pros

• Sturdy trail-cam style feeder
• 6-month battery life
• Removable water basin means it can be a feeder or a birdbath
• Captures slow-motion video

Cons

• No smartphone app or bird identification features
• Memory card storage is less convenient than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth

This hybrid bird feeder camera is as tough as any trail camera. However, unlike most trail cameras, it can focus as close as 2 to 6 inches and offers a 100-degree field of view. This means you’ll get much better images of visiting birds than you would with a typical trail cam. The TX-165 takes standard AA batteries but has a working time of up to 6 months. You can leave it in a secure, remote location for a long time without worrying about the battery going flat.

The TX-165 also has a few features you won’t find on other bird feeder cameras. You can fill it with birdseed or fill the removable basin with water and turn it into a birdbath camera. It also takes impressive eight-megapixel images and full HD 1080p video. It’s also capable of 25 frames per second for slow-motion videos. 

Best for bird boxes: Hawk Eye HD Nature Cam

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Specs

• AI: None
• App compatibility: N/A, no app available
• Resolution: 700 tvl (television lines)
• Battery: None (includes a 75-foot power cable)

Pros

• Compact, so you can hide it almost anywhere
• Night vision lets you capture clear images in poor light 
• Durable and temperature-tolerant to between 35°F and 105°F

Cons

• Only shoots video 
• Not waterproof
• Needs to be plugged into a power supply

Birds do a lot more than just eat birdseed, so at some point, you might want to step up to a birdhouse camera. Because the Hawk Eye Nature Cam isn’t built into a feeder, it’s much more flexible than most bird cams. Its small size means you can put it anywhere—on treetops, fence posts, or even in animal burrows (though please exercise caution when putting it down a snake hole). Or it can be wired discreetly into a bird box for a 24/7 look at growing bird families, from egg to fledgling. 

The Hawk Eye Nature Cam is meant for live-streaming to your television set. The video resolution is clear and sharp, with 700 tvl (television lines) and 10 infrared diodes. This lets you view clear video even in the darkened environment of a typical bird box. Note, however, that you will need an RCA to USB adapter if you have a modern TV. 

The Hawk Eye does have a few drawbacks. It has no battery, so you’ll have to mess with a long extension cord to get it set up. It also isn’t waterproof. If you want to attach it to an unsheltered location, you’ll have to build waterproof housing or limit your use to dry weather. Finally, you can connect the camera to your PC and use additional software to grab photos and video segments from the live stream, but it’s not designed to capture high-resolution stills.

Best for hummingbirds: BirdDock Hummingbird Feeder Camera

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Specs

• AI: Yes, identifies species and alerts you when birds approach 
• App compatibility: Android and iOS
• Resolution: 2-megapixel photos, full HD 1080p video
• Battery: 6400 mAh rechargeable batteries provide 20 to 30 days of operating time 

Pros

• AI can recognize around 5,000 different species, including hummingbirds
• Rechargeable batteries provide 20 to 30 days of use
• Hummingbird attachment is removable

Con:

• Still photos are much lower resolution than those shot by similar feeders 
• The app is clunky and difficult to use

The BirdDock is a flexible bird feeder camera that isn’t limited to just capturing photos of seed-eaters. It also offers a removable hummingbird attachment featuring five flower-shaped feeding ports with 0.16-inch holes to keep bees and other insects out.  When you want to switch to photographing songbirds, you can remove the hummingbird feeder and fill the device with seeds. 

Like other AI feeders, the BirdDock will identify species and alert you when one is approaching the feeder. It has night vision, too, which could help you identify other critters that visit your feeder overnight. This bird feeder camera features a 160-degree field of view and can be used with or without an SD memory card. It provides an impressive battery life of up to 30 days. You can also purchase a separate solar panel to keep the device charged in sunny weather.

The BirdDock has two primary drawbacks: It captures still photos at a relatively low resolution of only two megapixels (though it does also capture full HD 1080p video). It also doesn’t have an especially user-friendly app. Some users complain that the bird identification feature isn’t accurate and that the app frequently disconnects from the camera.

Best for bird identification: Netvue Birdfy Pro

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Specs

• AI: Yes, identifies more than 6,000 different species 
• App compatibility: Android and iOS
• Resolution: Full HD 1080p video
• Battery: 5000 mAh rechargeable batteries 

Pros

• Can identify more than 6,000 different species 
• Long battery life (the manufacturer claims up to six months of use)
• Extra features like squirrel recognition and color night vision

Cons

• The bird identification service costs extra
• Storing photos on the cloud requires a subscription

The Netvue Birdfy rivals the Bird Buddy with features like ease of use, durability, and photo quality. It has an impressive array of extra features like color night vision. The AI can recognize squirrels, and the built-in microphone lets you yell at them when they’re caught robbing the feeder. You can also upgrade your feeder with add-ons like a solar panel, hummingbird feeder, and perch extension.

The Birdfy has the same features as most other feeders, including automatic capture/motion detection and real-time notification. It takes clear video at close range, provides a 135-degree field of view, and even offers 8x magnification if you want to study the fine details.

Birdfy has an impressive database of 6,000 species, though reviewers note that it isn’t always accurate. When it does misidentify a bird, you have the option to submit a report via the app. This is evidence that Netvue is constantly working to improve its software. 

The primary drawback of the Netvue bird feeder camera is you may have to pay for various subscriptions depending on what features you want access to. For example, if you want to take advantage of the bird identification feature, you must pay for a subscription. Likewise, a subscription is required if you want to store photos on the Netvue Cloud for longer than 30 days. 

Best budget: WYZE Cam v3

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Specs

• AI: No species identification
• App compatibility: Android and iOS
• Resolution: 1080p full HD video
• Battery: No battery

Pros

• Affordable
• Weatherproof 
• Compact for easy mounting

Cons

• Minimum focus distance is around 12 inches
• No battery; needs to be plugged into a power supply

Bird feeder cameras with all the bells and whistles can be expensive. A $200 feeder might be outside your budget, or you may not need all the features that expensive bird feeder cameras offer. The WYZE Cam v3 is essentially an outdoor security camera. You won’t be able to fill it with birdseed or attach a hummingbird accessory. But you can mount this sturdy little camera next to any commercial bird feeder or install it close to a high-traffic part of your backyard. 

The WYZE Cam v3 offers all the basic features you need in a bird cam. It’s weatherproof with an IP65 rating. It takes photos when it senses motion, and it has an app so you can see what’s happening outside in real-time. 

The WYZE Cam does have a few drawbacks. One of these is the focus distance. While most dedicated bird cams can focus on subjects as close as a few inches, the WYZE Cam isn’t designed for closeups. You’ll have to mount it at least a foot away from your feeder, meaning you won’t see a lot of detail in your photos. 

The WYZE Cam is also wired. It comes with a weatherproof six-foot USB cable, so you’ll have to install it close to your home. On the plus side, once installed, you won’t have to worry about changing or recharging the battery or losing your video stream on a cloudy day.

Things to consider before buying a bird feeder camera

If you love bird watching but don’t want to sit waiting with your binoculars, a bird feeder camera will allow you to capture photos and videos of birds even when you aren’t around.

A bird feeder camera is meant for permanent outdoor use. This means it needs features you probably don’t consider when shopping for other photography gear. Here are some of the most important things you’ll want to think about when shopping for a bird feeder camera.

Durability

Bird feeder cameras can be subject to some serious abuse. The sun’s UV rays and hot temperatures can degrade plastic casings over time. These devices must also withstand storms and sprinklers, remaining waterproof from season to season. Of course, they should also be tough enough to handle the beaks and claws of visiting critters—not just the birds they’re intended for but other potential visitors like squirrels and mice.

Image quality

The image quality of bird feeder cameras is dependent on a few things. Resolution is the first thing most think of, and indeed, it is important with these devices. If you want clear, sharp images, look for bird feeder cameras with higher resolution. These compact cameras won’t offer numbers you may be used to in smartphones or mirrorless cameras, though. Five to eight megapixels for stills and 1080p for video tend to be the highest available at the moment.  However, if you aren’t concerned with high levels of detail, you could save some money and opt for a device with a less impressive resolution. 

The second factor of image quality is close focusing distance. The majority of shots taken by a bird feeder camera will be up-close. As a result, look for a device capable of getting clear photos at a very short distance. Even as close as a few inches is ideal.  Finally, birds don’t tend to sit still for long. Because of this, the camera should be able to freeze action, even in low light conditions like early morning or cloudy days. 

WiFi connectivity

WiFi isn’t necessarily a critical feature, but it’s something to consider if you’re going to keep your feeder close to your house. Most people don’t want to trek outside daily to download photos or swap out a memory card. A WiFi connection will let you see what your camera captured at any time of day in any weather. Treating it like a smart-home device will save you from having to venture into the cold, heat, or rain unless you need to change the battery or add birdseed.

Pay attention to the range of the device, too. Shy birds won’t approach your device if it is too close to your home. If it’s too far away, you won’t be able to view your photos without exiting your home.

Mounting options

Each bird feeder camera will have somewhat different requirements for how you install them. Some require a pole, some can be mounted to a fence post, and others can be hung. Depending on where you want the feeder and what tools you have available for installation, some of these options may be better than others for your particular needs.

Battery life

Some bird feeder cameras take basic replaceable AA batteries; others rely on solar panels to power internal rechargeable batteries. Either way, you’ll want to pick a camera that isn’t power-hungry. A good battery will ensure you aren’t constantly changing batteries or missing photos because your camera goes dark on a cloudy day. 

Choosing a camera with motion detection is a good place to start. These cameras only activate when there’s something to take a photo of, which helps the battery last longer.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best bird feeder cameras

• Best overall: Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder
• Best trail camera: TECHNAXX Full HD Birdcam TX-165
• Best for bird boxes: Hawk Eye HD Nature Cam
• Best for hummingbirds: BirdDock Hummingbird Feeder Camera
• Best for bird identification: Netvue Birdfy Pro
• Best budget: WYZE Cam v3

Once limited to nature photographers with long telephoto lenses and lots of patience, bird feeder cameras have made bird photography nearly effortless and available to almost anyone. That doesn’t necessarily mean any camera will do, though. Thinking about what you want to get out of your investment is an important first step in choosing a feeder. If you’re hoping to get up-close, detailed shots, pay attention to the example shots provided by the manufacturer and uploaded by users. Consider how important good battery life is to you, and ask yourself if you really need a camera that will identify already familiar local birds.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best bird feeder cameras in 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Bird watching seems like one of those rites of passage as you get older. You reach a certain age and boom—you suddenly like studying our avian amigos. I have, apparently, reached that age. But I don’t always have time to tromp through fields with binoculars to catch fleeting feathers. Luckily, bird watching these days is extremely easy thanks to the arrival of bird feeder cameras. These devices are built with compact, weather-resistant cameras that typically detect motion to snap photos and videos when a bird comes to feast. They provide close-up views of the snacking species that wouldn’t be possible any other way.

One of the more popular bird feeder cameras—Bird Buddy—was launched as a Kickstarter and has taken the world of bird feeder cameras by storm. It offers an attractive yet practical design and pairs with an easy- and fun-to-use app. The Bird Buddy camera allows you to capture high-quality photos and videos of birds that visit your feeder, and AI even identifies them for you. I’ve had one up for a few months to put it through its paces and have been impressed with the device.

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Overview

• The Bird Buddy is a modern-looking bird feeder with a removable camera that automatically snaps photos and videos of birds that come to snack. 
• The easy-to-use app notifies you when you have a visitor and automatically identifies over 1,000 species of birds.
• The feeder holds 3.5 cups of birdseed and comes with a scoop.
• It comes with a few different ways to mount the feeder. Additional accessories are available for purchase separately.
• A Bird Buddy Pro membership unlocks certain app features and higher video quality and costs $2.50 monthly for an annual membership or $2.99 for a monthly plan. 
• The base-level Bird Buddy costs $239, but we suggest upgrading to the version with a solar roof for unlimited battery life for $299.

Pros

• Attractive, modern design
• Very little assembly required
• Lots of accessories available
• App is easy and fun to use
• AI features automatically identify birds and other critters
• Livestream is available
• Records quality, highly-detailed photos and videos
• Holds plenty of birdseed
• Camera is removable for easy washing
• Optional solar roof does away with charging the battery
• Bird Buddy provides frequent updates

Cons

• Requires a WiFi connection
• Water pools in the bird feeder, resulting in moldy birdseed
• Some features are locked behind a subscription paywall

Verdict

The Bird Buddy is one of the best bird feeder cameras available thanks to its excellent app usability, advanced AI, and high-quality images and videos. The sleek design is easy to install, clean, and fill, and the removable camera is a nice addition. The reliance on WiFi won’t work for everyone, but smart-home devices are increasingly common, and it allows for immediate access to your camera’s feed.

Bird Buddy setup

Setting up the Bird Buddy involves two parts: Connecting to a WiFi router along with the app and physically installing the bird feeder. The Bird Buddy doesn’t offer any onboard storage, so you’ll need access to a WiFi connection to use the camera and AI features. It uses an 802.11 b/g/n connection at 2.4 GHz plus Bluetooth for connection to the app. You’ll want to install the Bird Buddy app and pair your camera to the app before installing the bird feeder in your yard. 

I had substantial issues pairing my Bird Buddy to my WiFi and connecting it to the app, and had to call customer support for assistance. Luckily, the customer support team was incredibly helpful and patient in working through the troubleshooting, and we eventually got it all set up. It is worth noting that I had an early model, so Bird Buddy has likely solved some of those issues to make the pairing process smoother.

Physical installation is simple, depending on how and where you place your bird feeder. You can hang it, mount it to a one-inch pole with the included bottom mount, or purchase a separate wall mount for attaching to fences or walls. The camera slots right into the designated slot, and it’s easy to plug it into the solar roof (if you opt for that). 

Bird Buddy design & build quality

The Bird Buddy bird feeder features a sleek, modern design with smooth curves. Though looks are subjective, I think it looks much more polished than other bird feeder cameras. It’s available in blue or vibrant yellow. Bird Buddy says it features a “bird-friendly design,” though it doesn’t specify what exactly that means. The perch features a raised bird footprint pattern, providing some grip for talons. 

The birdseed compartment—which holds 3.8 cups—is enclosed by clear plastic on both sides, allowing you and the birds to see the seed level inside. A back door at the top opens to fill the bird feeder up, though it requires careful maneuvering to get the seed inside and not spill it everywhere since it is a rather small opening. The entire back also comes off for easier cleaning. 

Bird feeders and bird feeder cameras are, naturally, outdoor items. As a result, they need to be durable, rugged, and built to withstand the elements. The Bird Buddy ticks those marks nicely. It is made of new and recycled BPA-free plastic and feels solid and sturdy. I have had it up for a handful of months, and after a quick cleaning, it looks brand new. That’s even despite the intense Florida sun constantly beating down on it.

Water issues

My main frustration with the design of the Bird Buddy is regarding keeping rain out. There are holes in the bottom that drain water in the event of rain, but they are extremely tiny. Of course, that keeps the small seeds from falling out. Butt hose same seeds can clog the holes, preventing thorough draining. Also, the protective roof helps keep some rain out but doesn’t extend beyond the feeder very much. If there is any wind blowing the rain, it will end up in the feeder. As a result, I had issues with water saturating the birdseed and mold forming. 

Granted, this may be a function of where I reside in Florida—a state where strong thunderstorms are a near-daily occurrence in the summer and humidity levels are intense. I had to change the birdseed every week because of the molding. Birds do not like moldy seeds, so I don’t get as many visitors. That’s especially true if I don’t stay on top of cleaning things out. It also means that I’m dumping out seed regularly and cleaning the feeder frequently. Neither of these is ideal and keeps birds away for longer. It may be less of an issue with different birdseed mixes or locations, but it has severely limited the number of birds I attract. 

Camera module details

The Bird Buddy’s camera is housed inside a plastic case. It is weather-resistant, though Bird Buddy doesn’t provide an IP rating. It does say that it can operate in temperatures between -5°F and 120°F. As a result, it will work in most locations throughout the year. The camera module measures 5.1 x 2 x 1.5 inches and fits securely in the bird feeder with the help of a magnet in the back.

The camera takes five-megapixel photos and 720p HD live-streamed video. It is capable of 1080p video clips, though you’ll need to pay for a Bird Buddy Pro membership ($2.50 per month for an annual membership or $2.99 per month for a monthly plan). The 120-degree field of view is wide enough to capture birds hanging out on the side of the feeder. There’s also a built-in microphone for recording bird songs as well, which is a fun addition.

Motion detection

Bird Buddy also built a laser motion detector into the camera. This senses movement on the perch and triggers the camera to take photos or videos when a visitor is present (much like a wireless security camera). I don’t have my bird feeder in a location where I can easily keep watch to test how well the motion detection works. But every time I heard a bird making noise, I received a “postcard” (Bird Buddy’s way of telling you a bird was at your feeder), so it seemed just sensitive enough.

You can switch to Power Saver Mode in the app settings if you want fewer notifications or conserve battery. Or turn on Frenzy Mode to see anything and everything, though you’ll have to pay for a Pro membership. 

Power

For power, the Bird Buddy camera utilizes a 4000 mAh rechargeable lithium-ion battery. Bird Buddy says it will last between five and 15 days. Of course, that depends on how many photos it takes, how much you stream live video, and the weather. When it needs a charge, it uses a USB-C cable. I was using the solar roof, which results in infinite battery life. If you want to save some money and don’t opt for the solar roof, the camera is fully removable. That means you won’t need to bring the entire bird feeder (along with any tiny creatures or germs) inside for charging.

Bird Buddy app

I’ve been very impressed with the Bird Buddy app during my testing. It is well-designed in design and usability, with many playful components. It is intuitive to use and easy to find what you need very quickly, even as you are getting used to it. It’s clean and minimal, without too many extra things going on.

The app uses AI to automatically identify over 1,000 species, which includes squirrels and rare birds. Unfortunately, I have only had Red-Winged Blackbirds at my feeder, so I haven’t been able to test how accurate the AI identification is beyond that single species. But it always got the Red-Winged Blackbird right, so there’s that. 

When a bird visits your feeder, the app notifies you with a “postcard.” These postcards are then saved to your gallery so you can pull them back up anytime. They can even show multiple photos or videos of the same bird if they stick around for a bit. Should there be photos in a set that aren’t worth saving, you can discard them to keep your gallery from getting too cluttered.

Your gallery is sorted by bird type. Tapping on each lets you open all photos and videos the camera has captured over time of that particular species. The page for each bird species will also provide information on that bird so that you can learn more. That includes personality type, what they eat, where they are typically found, how big they are, and what they sound like. For example, the Red-Winged Blackbird page tells me that they are brawlers, open lovebirds, and social butterflies who like to eat insects and seeds and are as big as a slice of pizza.

Community features

Beyond content from your feeder, you can see photos and videos from feeders worldwide in a few different ways. First, you can add some to your list of feeders and receive postcards from them like it is your own feeder. However, if you want to add more than one feeder for more than 72 hours, you’ll need a Pro membership.

If you don’t want to add a feeder, you can still scroll through photos and videos from the community. It’s like social media just for bird content. Birdbuddy TV is a video feed of publicly shared videos from Bird Buddy users. Or you can scroll through photos from the community, applauding people’s results. You can even help identify species by tapping the Wingbuddy link at the top of the Community page. 

Image & video quality

A bird feeder camera doesn’t do much good if the photos aren’t clear enough so you can actually see your avian visitors. The five-megapixel resolution may not seem very impressive, especially compared to smartphones and dedicated cameras. While you won’t be able to print these images to poster size by any means, the camera does offer plenty of quality for viewing on your phone. 

The images are clear and sharp, especially when the bird hangs out on the perch. The camera can’t focus much closer than that, though. My main visitor liked to sit right in the birdseed, so it was frequently out of focus, but even still, I could see good amounts of detail with vibrant colors. The auto exposure overall does great, even in extremely high-contrast lighting situations. There were times that the bird was blurry from moving during the exposure, but that wasn’t the norm. 

The Bird Buddy video quality is also really good. The footage is clear and well-exposed. If you want higher-quality video, you can upgrade to a Bird Buddy Pro membership, though I have not tested it, so I can’t comment on how much better that video looks. 

So, who should buy the Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder? 

Bird feeder cameras are becoming more and more popular, with new options seeming to pop up regularly. Spending $299 (for the solar roof version) may seem pricey for a bird feeder camera. But the Bird Buddy is priced similarly to other devices, including its closest competitor, the Netvue Birdfy Pro. So, what makes the Bird Buddy stand out? 

The Bird Buddy includes a durable yet attractive build, an integrated solar panel for infinite battery life, multiple mounting options, and an easy-to-clean design with a removable camera, which gives it the edge for most users. It’s also remarkably easy to install, with essentially no assembly beyond popping the camera into the feeder. Add to that the easy-to-use and fun app with minimal features behind a paywall, and it takes a clear lead. It’s a connected device that makes you feel a bit more connected with the natural world. If you are interested in keeping an eye on the bird species in your area, it’s hard to beat Bird Buddy. 

The post Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder review: A camera that’s not just for the birds appeared first on Popular Science.

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A group of paleontologists, park rangers, and geologists have discovered a new species of ancient shark in the rock layers of Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. It was uncovered in a large fossil deposit that includes at least 40 different species of shark and their relatives, and even well-preserved skeletal cartilage. 

[Related: Megalodons were likely warm-blooded, despite being stone-cold killers.]

The new species is named Strigilodus tollesonae and is a petalodont shark. These extinct  sharks had petal-shaped teeth and lived about 337 million years ago. According to the National Park Service, it is more closely related to present day ratfish than sharks or rays and it was identified from teeth found in the cave’s walls. Strigilodus tollesonae likely had teeth that included one rounded cusp used for clipping and a long, ridge inert side that crushed prey the way molars do. Paleontologists believe that it likely lived like modern day skates and fed on worms, bivalves, and small fish. 

Strigilodus tollesonae translates to “Tolleson’s Scraper Tooth” and it is named after Mammoth Cave National park guide Kelli Tolleson for her work in the paleontological study that uncovered the new species. 

The limestone caves that make up the 400-mile long Mammoth Cave System were formed about 325-million-years ago during the Late Paleozoic. Geologists call this time period the Mississippian Period, when shallow seas covered much of North America including where Mammoth Cave is today. 

In 2019, the park began a major paleontological resources inventory to identify the numerous types of fossils associated with the rock layers. Mammoth Cave park staff reported a few fossil shark teeth that were exposed in the cave walls of Ste. Genevieve Limestone in several locations. Shark fossils can be difficult to come by, since shark skeletons are made of cartilage instead of bone. Cartilage is not as tough as bone, so it is generally not well-preserved in the fossil record. 

The team then brought in shark fossil specialist John-Paul Hodnett of the Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission to help identify the shark fossils. Hodnett and park rangers discovered and identified multiple different species of primitive sharks from the shark teeth and fine spine specimens in the rocks lining the cave passages.

“I am absolutely amazed at the diversity of sharks we see while exploring the passages that make up Mammoth Cave,” Hodnett said in a statement. “We can hardly move more than a couple of feet as another tooth or spine is spotted in the cave ceiling or wall. We are seeing a range of different species of chondrichthyans [cartilaginous fish] that fill a variety of ecological niches, from large predators to tiny little sharks that lived amongst the crinoid [sea lily] forest on the seafloor that was their habitat.”

[Related: This whale fossil could reveal evidence of a 15-million-year-old megalodon attack.]

In addition to Strigilodus tollesonae, the team have identified more than 40 different species of sharks and their relatives from Mammoth Cave specimens in the past 10 months. There appear to be at least six fossil shark species that are new to science. According to the team, those species will be described and named in an upcoming scientific publication.

The majority of the shark fossils have been discovered in areas of the park that are inaccessible to the public, so photographs, illustrations, and three-dimensional models have been made to display the discovery. The park also plans to celebrate the new shark fossils with multiple presentations and exhibits on Monday October 23. 

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On July 1, 2022, a National Park Service biologist named Jeff Arnold was hauling nets through a slough off the Colorado River, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, when he captured three greenish fish lined with vertical black stripes. He texted photos of his catch to colleagues, who confirmed his fears: The fish were smallmouth bass, voracious predators that have invaded waters around the West. Worse, they were juveniles. Smallmouth weren’t just living below the dam—they’d likely begun to breed. 

It was a grim discovery. Smallmouth bass, whose native range encompasses rivers and lakes in much of the Eastern United States and Great Lakes, have long plagued the Colorado River. State agencies and anglers probably began stocking them in the watershed in the mid-1900s, and they’ve since conquered much of the basin, including Lake Powell, the reservoir that sloshes above Glen Canyon Dam. Downriver from the dam, however, lies the Grand Canyon, whose sandstone depths have historically provided a bass-free haven for native fish—most of all, the humpback chub, a federally threatened species endowed with an odd dorsal bulge. Now, biologists realized, neither the canyon nor its chub were safe.

Scientists have long dreaded this development. As Lake Powell has shrunk over the past two decades, drained by overallocation and chronic drought, its diminishment has created prime conditions for bass to infiltrate the Grand Canyon. But Brian Healy, a postdoctoral researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey and Grand Canyon National Park’s former fish biologist, said that even though he and his colleagues expected the species to eventually become a problem, “we didn’t realize it would be an issue so quickly.”

Preventing a bass takeover won’t be simple, biologically or politically. The Colorado’s users expect it to simultaneously serve as a pipeline for water conveyance, a source of cheap electrons, a recreational playground, and, not least, suitable habitat for native fish. For decades, the river’s human managers have uneasily balanced these often contradictory purposes—and now they must also work to exclude smallmouth bass, an immense challenge that may well compete with the river’s many other functions. “The best way to think about this is that everything in the Colorado River is connected to everything else,” said Jack Schmidt, a watershed scientist and emeritus professor at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. “Everything has a ramification.” 

FORTY MILLION PEOPLE rely on the Colorado River’s largesse, from Wyoming ranchers to the residents of sprawling Arizona subdivisions to the lettuce farmers in California’s Imperial Valley. Less visibly, the river is also a lifeline for 14 native species of fish. They are rarely seen by humans—the river they inhabit is as turbid as coffee and they’re rarely fished for sport—yet they require a healthy Colorado as much as any Angeleno or Tucsonan. 

Today, however, four of those fish—the humpback chub, the Colorado pikeminnow, the razorback sucker and the bonytail—are federally listed as threatened or endangered. Lake Powell commandeered the Colorado’s payloads of silt and stymied natural floods, erasing channels and backwaters where chubs and suckers once spawned and reared. And smallmouth bass and other invasive species devastated native fish in tributaries like the Yampa River. (“Smallmouth” is a misnomer: Bass have maws so cavernous they can gulp down prey more than half their own size.) Bass arrived in Lake Powell in 1982, courtesy of a hatchery manager who, on a lark, dumped 500 spare smallmouth into the reservoir. The bass, he crowed decades later, “performed magnificently,” adding, “Anglers have caught millions of smallmouth bass over the past 30 years.”

Through it all, the Grand Canyon remained a bass-less sanctuary—thanks, paradoxically, to Glen Canyon Dam. Although smallmouth teemed in Lake Powell, they stayed in the reservoir’s warm, sunlit upper strata, well above Glen Canyon Dam’s penstocks, the massive tubes that convey water through its hydropower turbines and thence downriver. Bass never reached the Grand Canyon because they never swam deep enough to pass through the dam.

As Lake Powell withered, however, so did the Grand Canyon’s defenses. By the spring of 2022, two decades of climate change-fueled drought had lowered the lake’s surface by more than 150 feet, drawing its tepid, bass-filled top layer ever closer to the penstocks. At the same time, the warmer water flowing through the dam and downstream made the Grand Canyon more hospitable to bass. “The temperature was ideal for them,” said Charles Yackulic, a research statistician at the U.S. Geological Survey.

Last summer, after bass swam through Glen Canyon Dam’s penstocks, slipped past its whirling turbines, and apparently reproduced, managers hastened to control the incipient invasion, netting off the slough where Arnold discovered the juveniles as though it were a crime scene. The Park Service also doused the backwater with a fish-killing poison. When biologists electroshocked the river that fall and the following spring, though, they found hundreds more juveniles. The slough wasn’t an isolated beachhead; it was merely a battleground in a broader invasion.

If there is a saving grace, it is that the bass remain concentrated above the cold, clear stretch of river known as Lees Ferry. Humpback chub, by contrast, have their stronghold deep in the Grand Canyon, some 75 miles downriver from the dam, where bass haven’t shown up—at least not yet. “The worry is that you got them in Lees Ferry and they’re reproducing,” Yackulic said. “And then suddenly, you’ve just got all these babies dispersing downstream.”

THE COLORADO RIVER is at once in a state of crisis and rebirth. The decline of Lake Powell has revealed Glen Canyon, the gorgeous red-rock labyrinth that the reservoir drowned in the 1960s. Ironically, the forces behind this restoration are also imperiling native fish. “Last year was the closest we’ve had to a natural thermal regime in more than 50 years,” Yackulic noted. But for the humpback chub, it was a catastrophe.

River managers thus face a conundrum: How do you preserve native species in a broken ecosystem? In February 2023, the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that controls Glen Canyon Dam, released a draft environmental assessment evaluating four options for manipulating river flows to deter smallmouth bass. The plans are variations on a theme: When the Colorado gets dangerously warm, the agency  releases cold water to lower its temperature below the threshold where bass spawn. Two options—favored by conservation groups like the Center for Biological Diversity—include high-intensity “flow spikes” designed to freeze bass out of sloughs and backwaters. “We need flows that are cold enough for long enough that it prevents smallmouth bass from spawning,” said Taylor McKinnon, the center’s Southwest director. “Not disrupt reproduction—prevent reproduction.”

Managing the Colorado River to thwart bass, however, could conflict with Reclamation’s other goals. For one thing, all four options would release water through Glen Canyon Dam’s “bypass tubes,” outlets closer to Lake Powell’s frigid bottom. But the bypass tubes, as their name suggests, don’t pump water through the dam’s hydroelectric turbines — which, as the agency acknowledges, could lead to “a reduction in the revenue generated from power proceeds.” That possibility doesn’t thrill the Colorado River Energy Distributors Association, which represents electric utilities and co-ops and has warned of “measurable financial impacts” to ratepayers.

Some environmentalists may find themselves at odds with bass deterrence, too. For years, the Glen Canyon Institute has called on river managers to “Fill Mead First,” letting Lake Powell shrivel while sending Colorado’s water downstream to Lake Mead, the river’s other massive reservoir. As scientists pointed out in a 2020 paper, however, this strategy could “lead to warmer water temperatures throughout Grand Canyon” and render invasive fish control “especially problematic.” Indeed, if your sole goal were to protect humpback chub in the immediate term, Lake Powell—whose deep, chilly waters staved off bass for 40 years—might be the first reservoir you’d fill. “The decisions of where you store water in the system are going to determine the fate of native fish,” said Utah State’s Schmidt.

Although last winter’s strong snowpack should ultimately raise Lake Powell’s surface by around 70 feet, the invasion continues. Scientists have so far pulled 667 bass from the slough this year, along with thousands of carp and sunfish, two other warm-water nonnatives. The Park Service poisoned the slough again in late August, but that fix is clearly neither complete nor lasting. In February 2023, a group of researchers convened to study the bass problem by the Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Geological Survey recommended outfitting Glen Canyon Dam with “fish exclusionary devices”—basically fancy nets—to keep bass from swimming through the penstocks. That’s hardly a new idea—biologists first recommended that the Bureau “pursue means” of preventing invasive fish from passing through the dam in 2016 —but, at an August meeting of federal managers and researchers, one Reclamation official claimed that an effective screen design is still at least five years away.

Ultimately, staving off the bass crisis may call for even more ambitious fixes. In one paper, Schmidt and his colleagues raised the idea of drilling colossal diversion tunnels that would funnel water and sediment around Glen Canyon Dam and thus restore the silty, flood-prone conditions that favor native fish. Re-engineering the Colorado would be neither simple nor cheap, but, in recent comments to the Bureau, McKinnon and other conservationists claimed that the “climate-inevitable obsolescence” of Glen Canyon Dam calls for drastic measures. If bass take over an ever-warmer river, McKinnon said, “it’s game over.”

Ben Goldfarb is a High Country News correspondent and the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. His next book, on the science of road ecology, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2023.

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Honeybees are a model of teamwork in nature, with their complex society and hives that generate enough energy to create an electrical charge. They also appear to be some of the rare animals that display a unique trait of altruism, which is genetically inherited. The findings were described in a study published September 25 in the journal Molecular Ecology.

[Related: Bee brains could teach robots to make split-second decisions.]

Giving it all for the queen bee

According to the American Psychological Association, humans display altruism through behaviors that benefit another individual at a cost to oneself. Some psychologists consider it a uniquely human trait and studying it in animals requires a different framework for understanding. Animals experience a different level of cognition, so what drives humans to be altruistic might be different than what influences animals like honeybees to act in ways that appear to be altruistic.

In this new study, the researchers first looked at the genetics behind retinue behavior in worker honeybees. Retinue behavior is the actions of worker bees taking care of the queen, like feeding or grooming her. It’s believed to be triggered by specific pheromones and worker bees are always female. 

After the worker bees are exposed to the queen’s mandibular pheromone (QMP), they deactivate their own ovaries. They then help spread the QMP around to the other worker bees and they only take care of the eggs that the queen bee produces. Entomologists consider this behavior ‘altruistic’ because it benefits the queen’s ability to produce offspring, while the worker bees remain sterile. 

The queen is also typically the mother of all or mostly all of the honeybees in the hive. The genes that make worker bees more receptive to the queen’s pheromone and retinue behavior can be passed down from either female or male parent. However, the genes only result in altruistic behavior when they are passed down from the female bee parent.

“People often think about different phenotypes being the result of differences in gene sequences or the environment. But what this study shows is it’s not just differences in the gene itself—it’s which parent the gene is inherited from,” study co-author and Penn State University doctoral candidate Sean Bresnahan said in a statement. “By the very nature of the insect getting the gene from its mom, regardless of what the gene sequence is, it’s possibly going to behave differently than the copy of the gene from the dad.”

A battle of genetics 

The study supports a theory called the Kinship Theory of Intragenomic Conflict. It suggests that a mothers’ and fathers’ genes are in a conflict over what behaviors to support and not support. Previous studies have shown that genes from males can support selfish behavior in mammals, plants, and honeybees. This new study is the first known research that shows females can pass altruistic behavior onto their offspring in their genes. 

[Really: What busy bees’ brains can teach us about human evolution.]

Worker bees generally have the same mother but different fathers, since the queen mates with multiple male bees. This means that the worker bees share more of their mother’s genes with each other. 

“This is why the Kinship Theory of Intragenomic Conflict predicts that genes inherited from the mother will support altruistic behavior in honeybees,” Breshnahan said. “A worker bee benefits more from helping, rather than competing with, her mother and sisters—who carry more copies of the worker’s genes than she could ever reproduce on her own. In contrast, in species where the female mates only once, it is instead the father’s genes that are predicted to support altruistic behavior.”

Pinpointing conflict networks

To look closer, the team crossbred six different lineages of honeybees. Bresnahan says that this is relatively easy to do in mammals or plants, but more difficult in insects. They used honeybee breeding expertise from co-author Juliana Rangel from Texas A&M University and Robyn Underwood at Penn State Extension to create these populations.

Once the bee populations were successfully crossed and the offspring were old enough, the team assessed the worker bees’ responsiveness to the pheromone that triggers the retinue behavior. 

“So, we could develop personalized genomes for the parents, and then map back the workers’ gene expression to each parent and find out which parent’s copy of that gene is being expressed,” Bresnahan said.

The team identified the gene regulatory networks that have this intragenomic conflict, finding that more genes that have a parental bias were expressed. These networks consisted of genes that previous research showed were related to the retinue behavior.

“Observing intragenomic conflict is very difficult, and so there are very few studies examining the role it plays in creating variation in behavior and other traits,” study co-author and Penn State entomologist Christina Grozinger said in a statement. “The fact that this is the third behavior where we have found evidence that intragenomic conflict contributes to variation in honeybees suggests that intragenomic conflict might shape many types of traits in bees and other species.”

The team hopes that this research will help provide a blueprint for more studies into intragenomic conflict in other animals and plants.

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The endangered Texas ocelot is in serious trouble due to a combination of over-hunting, habitat loss, inbreeding, and getting hit by cars. Only two populations of these bobcat sized spotted and striped carnivores remain in Texas and they’re isolated from a larger population living in northwestern Mexico by highways and buildings. 

[Related: Watch bobcats, bears, and even birds use fallen logs as bridges.]

One conservation measure to help endangered ocelots and other animals near busy roads are special wildlife exits. A study published October 13 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution found that 10 mammal species use these special structures, which could help prevent more collisions with traffic.

Chain-link fencing along Texas highways has been used to reduce wildlife mortality from colliding with cars and trucks. However, this fencing can trap animals that get on the highway if they jump over or burrow under the fencing. In 2018, the Texas Department of Transportation built 10 exits for the endangered ocelots in an effort to keep the animals from getting trapped. The openings in the fencing are about 18 inches across and 23 inches wide and are funnel shaped to encourage the ocelots to move away from the highway and into the surrounding habitat. 

This new study tested if these wildlife exits are used by medium-sized carnivores in Texas. Two automatic cameras were installed at each of the 10 wildlife exits along a 7.3-mile stretch of State Highway 100 between Los Fresnos and Laguna Vista. The cameras were inspected every month between February 2019 and November 2020 and a team of scientists downloaded the images and sorted them into species. 

They found that the wildlife exits were used by 10 mammal species to get off the highway. The species ranged from the smaller black-tailed jackrabbits and Virginia opossums up to bobcats and coyotes. For the coyotes and bobcats, their activity peaked around 10 PM and then again between midnight and dawn.

“Here we show that a range of species, including middle-sized carnivores such as bobcats and coyotes, successfully use wildlife exits, a new type of mitigation structure specifically designed for the US endangered ocelot,” study co-author and former University of Texas Rio Grande Valley graduate student said in a statement. 

While the ocelots themselves were not photographed using the exits due to their small numbers, other automatic cameras near the highway saw them. About 43 percent of bobcats, a surrogate species for the ocelot, used the exits. According to the team, observing bobcats and coyotes using the exits implies that the endangered ocelots are likely to do so as well. 

[Related: Grizzlies are getting killed by roads, but the risks are bigger than roadkill.]

“We anticipated that the extreme rarity of ocelots would limit the amount of data collected on that species,” study co-author and conservation biologist  at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Kevin Ryer said in a statement. “For this reason, we also focused on more common bobcats and coyotes, as they have similar habitats, diets, body sizes, and behaviors as ocelots, with overlapping home ranges between them.”

The largest local species including white-tailed deer, nilgai, and javelina, could not use the narrow wildlife exits. Tunnels and crossing girds are the best methods for helping these bigger animals avoid traffic collisions. 

While the exits appear to function as designed, additional research could create improvements that prevent wildlife from going in the wrong direction. These wildlife exits also have the potential to be a valuable conservation measure on Texas highways.

“Wildlife collision mitigation is less expensive to implement during the construction phase of highways than retrofitting mitigation after construction,” study co-author and University of Texas Rio Grande Valley biologist Richard Kline said in a statement. “Although the entire wildlife community near the highway should be considered when planning mitigation, endangered species should be the focus.”

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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 the late 19th century, whalers, settlers, and pirates changed the ecology of the Galapagos Islands by poaching some native species—like Galapagos giant tortoises—and introducing others, like goats and rats. The latter species became pests and severely destabilized the island ecosystems. Goats overgrazed the fruits and plants the tortoises ate while rats preyed on their eggs. Over time, the tortoise population plummeted. On Española, an island in the southeast of the archipelago, the tortoise count fell from over 10,000 to just 14. Along the way, with goats eating all the plants they could, Española—once akin to a savanna—turned barren.

A century later, conservationists set out to restore the Galapagos giant tortoise on Española—and the island ecosystem. They began eradicating the introduced species and capturing Española’s remaining tortoises and breeding them in captivity. With the goats wiped out and the tortoises in cages, the ecosystem transformed once again. This time, the overgrazed terrain became overgrown with densely packed trees and woody bushes. Española’s full recovery to its savanna-like state would have to wait for the tortoises’ return.

From the time those 14 tortoises were taken into captivity between 1963 and 1974 until they were finally released in 2020, conservationists with the NGO Galápagos Conservancy and the Galapagos National Park Directorate reintroduced nearly 2,000 captive-bred Galapagos giant tortoises to Española. Since then, the tortoises have continued to breed in the wild, causing the population to blossom to an estimated 3,000. They’ve also seen the ecology of Española transform once more as the tortoises are reducing the extent of woody plants, expanding the grasslands, and spreading the seeds of a key species.

Not only that, but the tortoises’ return has also helped the critically endangered waved albatross—a species that breeds exclusively on Española. During the island’s woody era, Maud Quinzin, a conservation geneticist who has previously worked with Galapagos tortoises, says that people had to repeatedly clear the areas the seabirds use as runways to take off and land. Now, if the landing strips are getting overgrown, they’ll move tortoises into the area to take care of it for them.

The secret to this success is that—much like beavers, brown bears, and elephants—giant tortoises are ecological architects. As they browse, poop, and plod about, they alter the landscape. They trample young trees and bushes before they can grow big enough to block the albatrosses’ way. The giant tortoises likewise have a potent impact on the giant species of prickly pear cactuses that call Española home—one of the tortoises’ favorite foods and an essential resource for the island’s other inhabitants.

When the tortoises graze the cactus’s fallen leaves, they prevent the paddle-shaped pads from taking root and competing with their parents. And, after they eat the cactus’s fruit, they drop the seeds across the island in balls of dung that offer a protective shell of fertilizer.

The extent of these and other ecological effects of the tortoise are documented in a new study by James Gibbs, a conservation scientist and the president of the Galápagos Conservancy, and Washington Tapia Aguilera, the director of the giant tortoise restoration program at the Galápagos Conservancy.

To study these impacts up close, they fenced off some of the island’s cactuses, which gave them a way to assess how the landscapes evolve when they’re either exposed to or free from the tortoises’ influences. They also studied satellite imagery of the island captured between 2006 and 2020 and found that while parts of the island are still seeing an increase in the density of bushes and trees, places where the tortoises have rebounded are more open and savanna-like.

As few as one or two tortoises per hectare, the scientists write, is enough to trigger a shift in the landscape.

Dennis Hansen, a conservation ecologist who has worked with the tortoises native to the Aldabra atoll in the Indian Ocean, says that while the findings line up with what conservationists expected, it was nice to have their suspicions confirmed. The results bode well for other rewilding projects that include giant tortoise restoration as a keystone of their efforts, he says, such as those underway on other islands in the Galapagos archipelago and on the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean.

But on Española itself, though the tortoises have been busy stomping shoots and spreading seeds, they have more work to do. In 2020, 78 percent of Española was still dominated by woody vegetation. Gibbs says it may take another couple of centuries for Española’s giant tortoises to reestablish something like the ratio of grasses, trees, and bushes that existed before Europeans landed in the archipelago. But that long transformation is at least underway.

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

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To avoid the amphibian pile-up that often comes with mating, some female frogs take drastic measures. According to research published October 11 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, female European common frogs will lay completely still and play dead to fend off potential mates. 

[Related: Check out some of the weirdest warty frogs in North America.]

In the study, a team from the Natural History Museum of Berlin in Germany placed a male frog in a box with one large female and one small female and recorded the mating behavior. They observed 54 instances of female frogs being clutched by the males and 83 percent of females tried rotating their body when gripped. About 48 percent of clasped females emitted “release calls” like squeaks and grunts and all of these vocal frogs rotated their bodies. 

Thirty-three percent of the frogs clasped by male expressed tonic immobility. This is when a frog stiffens its outstretched arms and legs to appear dead. The immobility tended to occur alongside both rotating and calling. Smaller females more frequently used all three tactics together than the bigger frogs. 

Interestingly, this unusual behavior had actually been seen centuries before. “I found a book written in 1758 by Rösel von Rosenhoff describing this behavior, which was never mentioned again,” study co-author Carolin Dittrich told The Guardian. “It was previously thought that females were unable to choose or defend themselves against this male coercion. Females in these dense breeding aggregations are not passive as previously thought.”

The team acknowledges that this behavior could also be a way to test a male’s strength and endurance, as those traits could boost their survival chances. They also point out that a larger sample size is needed to see if smaller females are more successful at escaping. 

This playing tactic is also used by other animals as a way to avoid being eaten.

The phrase “playing possum”  refers to a tactic deployed by the North American opossum found in the United States and Canada. When this marsupial is threatened by a predator, it will throw itself onto its back, bare its teeth, drool, and excrete a very bad smelling liquid out of its anal glands to get out of danger. 

North American wood ducks and colorful mallard ducks can immediately collapse when confronted with predators. In a 1975 experiment, 29 out of 50 different wild ducks played dead when they were exposed to captive red foxes. The ducks would also stay still long enough to be brought back to the fox’s den and wait until later to escape. The veteran foxes quickly learned that they needed to quickly deal a fatal injury to ducks that appeared dead.

[Related: Why some tiny frogs have tarantulas as bodyguards.]

Despite being apex predators, multiple species of sharks and rays also exhibit tonic immobility. Lemon sharks will turn onto their back and exhibit labored breathing and an occasional tremor when facing danger. Zebra sharks will also do this and will even stay immobile when being transported. 

Male nuptial gift-giving spiders will display a different death feigning behavior called thanatosis. It’s part of a courtship ritual that begins before mating with potentially cannibalistic female spiders. In a 2006 experiment, the males would “drop dead” when a female approached with interest. When entering thanatosis, the males would collapse and remain completely still, while retaining a gift of prey the male has already caught and wrapped in silk The male only cautiously begins to move when the female ate the gifts and initiated copulation.

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Bear enthusiasts of the world have spoken—128 Grazer was just crowned the winner of Fat Bear Week 2023. This is Grazer’s first time wearing the crown, and she beat out runner up 32 Chunk in the fierce Fat Bear Tuesday final by over 85,000 votes.

[Related: It’s Fat Bear season again! This is the best feed to keep up with these hairy giants.]

According to the National Park Service, Grazer is a large adult female, boasting a long straight muzzle, light brown summer fur, and blond ears. During late summer and fall, she is often one of the fattest bears to feed on the plentiful salmon in the Brooks River in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve.

She is also a particularly defensive mother bear who has raised two litters of cubs. Grazer is known for preemptively confronting and attacking much larger bears—even the large and dominant adult males—to keep her cubs safe. One of Katmai’s adult males named 151 Walker even avoids her, even though she did not have any cubs to protect this season. 

Grazer is the third female bear, or sow, to win the tournament. In 2019, 435 Holly was dubbed fattest bear and 409 Beadnose wore the prestigious crown in 2018. Beadnose is believed to have died in the five years since. 

“The girls did really well this year,” media ranger at Katmai National Park and Preserve Naomi Boak told The Washington Post. “It was the year of the sow.”

Like any competition, this year’s voting was packed with twists and turns. Four-time Fat Bear Week Champion 480 Otis was ousted on Friday October 6. Otis is the oldest and among the park’s most famous bears. This year, he arrived at Brooks River very skinny, but transformed into a thick bear. Otis was beaten by bear 901, a new mom and the 2022 runner up. 

On Saturday October 7, the 2022 winner bear 747 was defeated by Grazer, who went on to beat 901, Holly, and Chunk in the Final Four. 

[Related: How scientists try to weigh some of the fattest bears on Earth.]

First launched by the National Park Service in 2014 as Fat Bear Tuesday, Fat Bear Week is an annual tournament-style bracket competition where the public votes for their favorite chubby bear. Its goal is to celebrate the Brooks River brown bears at Katmai in southern Alaska and its remarkable ecosystem. It was expanded Fat Bear Week in 2015, following the first year’s success. In 2022, over one million votes were cast all around the world. 

At Katmai, bears are drawn to the large number of salmon readily available from late June through September. Salmon have long since been the lifeblood of the area, supporting Katmai’s people, bears and other animals. Fat bears exemplify the richness of this area, a wild region that is home to more brown bears than people along with the largest, healthiest runs of sockeye salmon left on the planet. The daily lives of the Brooks River bears can be followed via eight live-streaming cameras on explore.org from June through October. 

The winners, and all the bears, now get six months of restful solitude as winter approaches. 

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A new marine snail that would make the late great Jimmy Buffet proud has been discovered in the Florida Keys. The lemon-colored snail is named Cayo margarita after the Spanish word for “small, low island” and the tropical drink Buffet sings about in one of his biggest hits. The new and real resident of the fictional Margaritaville is described in a study published October 9 in the journal PeerJ.

[Related: This cone snail’s deadly venom could hold the key to better pain meds.]

Marine smells are distantly related to the land-dwelling gastropods in gardens around the world. The margarita snails come from a group nicknamed worm snails, since they spend many of their lives living in one place. Worm snails also do not have a protective covering found in other snails called an operculum. This body part allows the snails to retreat further inside their shell and keep their bodies moist.

“Worm snails are just so different from pretty much any other regular snail,” study co-author Rüdiger Bieler tells PopSci. “These guys are sitting in the middle of the coral reef where everybody is out trying to eat them. And they’ve given up that protection and just advertise with their bright colors.”

Bieler is a marine biologist and curator of invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago who has spent 40 years studying the Western Atlantic’s invertebrates. Even after decades studying the region, these worm snails were hiding in plain sight during dive trips, largely because these snails are kind of the ultimate introverts.

Once juvenile worm snails find a spot to hunker down and they cement their shell to a hard surface never really move again. “Their shell continues to grow as an irregular tube around the snail’s body, and the animal hunts by laying out a mucus web to trap plankton and bits of detritus,” Bieler explains. 

Bieler and the rest of the international team of researchers came across the lemon-yellow snails in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and a similar lime-colored snail in Belize. Within the same species of snails, it is possible to get many different colors. There can also be color variations in a single population or even cluster of snails. Bieler believes that they may do this to confuse some of the coral reef fish that can see color so that they do not have a clear target. Some may use their hue as a warning color.  

The team initially believed that the lime-green and lemon-yellow snails were different species, but DNA sequencing revealed just how unique they are. This new yellow species belongs to the same family of marine snails as the invasive snail nicknamed the “Spider-Man” snail. This same team found these snails in 2017 on the Vandenberg shipwreck off the Florida Keys.

[Related: Invasive snails are chomping through Florida, and no one can stop them.]

The snails in this new Cayo genus also share a key trait in common with another worm snail genus called Thylacodes. The species Thylacodes bermudensis is found near Bermuda, and while only distantly related to their Floridaian and Belizean cousins, they have small colored heads and mucus that pop out of tubular shells. This might work as a deterrent to keep corals, anemones, and other reef fish from getting too close. The mucus has some nasty metabolites in it which might explain why these snails risk exposing their heads. 

The study and the new snails described in it help illuminate the stunning biodiversity of the world’s coral reefs, which are under serious threat due to climate change and the record warm ocean temperatures this summer. 

“These little snails are kind of beacons for biodiversity that need to be protected because many of them are dying out before we even get a chance to study them,” says Biler. 

It is also an important lesson in always looking right under your nose for discovery.

“I’ve been doing this for decades. We still find new species and previously unknown morphologies right under our feet,” says Biler. “This [discovery] was at snorkeling depth and in one of the most heavily touristed areas in the United States. When you look closely, there are still new things.”

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The internet has recently fallen in love with South America’s charismatic rodents called Capybaras. From catchy songs to memes, it’s hard not to see the chunky charmers in your feed these days. Here are some fun facts about these captivating creatures to inform your scrolling.

[Related: Capybara spent a month on the lam after escape from Toronto Zoo.]

Where can I see a capybara in the wild?

Capybaras are the largest rodent in the world can be found east of the Andes Mountains and the riverbanks in Central and South America from Panama to Argentina. Since they are semi-aquatic like beavers and hippos, capybaras typically live beside ponds, swamps, marshes, or wherever standing water is available. They are also called “water hogs” or “capys” and can even stay under water for more than five minutes to escape from predators like anacondas and jaguars. 

They have been known to encroach further into human territory as their habitat is dwindling. Since 2020, hundreds of capybaras have taken over Nordelta, a private and gated neighborhood outside of Buenos Aires. The rodents had always been around, but remained hidden. The lockdowns triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic enabled the furry capys to spread and flourish in the posh neighborhood’s parks. 

Multiple zoos in the United States, including the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden (also home to some famous hippos), Southwick’s Zoo in Massachusetts, and the Cape May County Park and Zoo in New Jersey, are home to a handful of adorable specimens as well. 

Do capybaras really eat their own poop?

Yes, among other things. They eat their poop for beneficial bacteria that helps their stomach break down the thick fiber from their other food sources such as reeds and grains, according to the San Diego Zoo. 

Like other rodents, capybaras have ever-growing front teeth. They use their sharp and long chompers to graze on grass and water plants. When fresh grasses and water plants dry up during the dry season, they eat squashes, melons, reeds, and grains. An adult can eat about six to eight pounds of grasses per day. 

How big are capys?

There are two known species of capybara: Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris and Hydrochoerus isthmius.  Of the two, H.hydrochaeris is the largest living rodent in the world. It can grow up to 4.3 feet long and weigh a whopping 174 pounds. H. isthmius is a bit smaller. It can grow to about 3 feet long and weigh closer to 62 pounds.

[Related: These prehistoric rodents were social butterflies.]

Can I own a capybara as a pet in the United States?

It depends what state you call home. They are currently legal with restrictions in some states including Texas, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. California and New York have more stringent rules, including that the animals can only be obtained by those with an approved scientific or educational reason. While ownership may be legal at the state, it may be illegal at the city level. 

Yahoo Finance estimates that the initial cost to buy a capy on the exotic animal market is about $1,000 per animal, while other estimates place the cost at $8,000. Vet bills can easily stretch between $600 to $1,000 each year?? and owners need to keep in mind the six to eight pounds of food that they can eat per day. Capybaras are also social animals, so owners need to be prepared to take in more than one for their pet to thrive. 

What are capys all over my feed?

Basically, capybaras are kind of the new Baby Shark. The song Capybara from Russian artist Сто-Личный Она-Нас went viral on TikTok earlier this year. Listen at your own risk, as it is a textbook earworm that will be stuck in your head for days.

Popular videos include a capybara sparring with a platypus and jumping into above ground pools. They are also the stars of pop culture memes, including one celebrating the billion dollar hit movie Barbie. 

They are also known for being some of the friendliest critters in the animal kingdom. They are very social and live together in herds of 10 to 20 animals. They spend time together cuddling, playing, socializing, and grooming one another. They have even been known to try to use alligators to hitch a ride. 

It also doesn’t hurt that they are really cute. In an era of doom scrolling, sometimes it’s just nice to look at their hippo-like eyes and ears as they look above the water. 

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On October 5, operators of Japan’s derelict Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant resumed pumping out wastewater held in the facility for the past 12 years. Over the following two-and-a-half weeks, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) plans to release around 7,800 tons of treated water into the Pacific Ocean.

This is TEPCO’s second round of discharging nuclear plant wastewater, following an initial release in September. Plans call for the process, which was approved by and is being overseen by the Japanese government, to go on intermittently for some 30 years. But the approach has been controversial: Polls suggest that around 40 percent of the Japanese public opposes it, and it has sparked backlash from ecological activists, local fishermen, South Korean citizens, and the Chinese government, who fear that radiation will harm Pacific ecosystems and contaminate seafood.

Globally, some scientists argue there is no cause for concern. “The doses [or radiation] really are incredibly low,” says Jim Smith, an environmental scientist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. “It’s less than a dental X-ray, even if you’re consuming seafood from that area.”

Smith vouches for the water release’s safety in an opinion article published on October 5 in the journal Science. The International Atomic Energy Agency has endorsed TEPCO’s process and also vouched for its safety. But experts in other fields have strong reservations about continuing with the pumping.

“There are hundreds of clear examples showing that, where radioactivity levels are high, there are deleterious consequences,” says Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina.

[Related: Nuclear war inspired peacetime ‘gamma gardens’ for growing mutant plants]

After a tsunami struck the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, TEPCO started frantically shunting water into the six reactors to stop them from overheating and causing an even greater catastrophe. They stored the resulting 1.25 million tons of radioactive wastewater in tanks on-site. TEPCO and the Japanese government say that if Fukushima Daiichi is ever to be decommissioned, that water will have to go elsewhere.

In the past decade, TEPCO says it’s been able to treat the wastewater with a series of chemical reactions and cleanse most of the contaminant radioisotopes, including iodine-131, cesium-134, and cesium-137. But much of the current controversy swirls around one isotope the treatment couldn’t remove: tritium.

Tritium is a hydrogen isotope that has two extra neutrons. A byproduct of nuclear fission, it is radioactive with a half-life of around 12 years. Because tritium shares many properties with hydrogen, its atoms can infiltrate water molecules and create a radioactive liquid that looks and behaves almost identically to what we drink.

This makes separating it from nuclear wastewater challenging—in fact, no existing technology can treat tritium in the sheer volume of water contained at Fukushima. Some of the plan’s opponents argue that authorities should postpone any releases until scientists develop a system that could cleanse tritium from large amounts of water.

But TEPCO argues they’re running out of room to keep the wastewater. As a result, they have chosen to heavily dilute it—100 parts “clean” water for every 1 part of tritium water—and pipe it into the Pacific.

“There is no option for Fukushima or TEPCO but to release the water,” says Awadhesh Jha, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Plymouth in the UK. “This is an area which is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. They can’t store it—they have to deal with it.”

Smith believes the same properties that allow tritium to hide in water molecules means it doesn’t build up in marine life, citing environmental research by him and his colleagues. For decades, they’ve been studying fish and insects in lakes, pools, and ponds downstream from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. “We haven’t really found significant impacts of radiation on the ecosystem,” Smith says.

[Related: Ultra-powerful X-rays are helping physicists understand Chernobyl]

What’s more, Japanese officials testing seawater during the initial release did not find recordable levels of tritium, which Smith attributes to the wastewater’s dilution.

But the first release barely scratches the surface of Fukushima’s wastewater, and Jha warns that the scientific evidence regarding tritium’s effect in the sea is mixed. There are still a lot of questions about how potent tritium effects are on different biological systems and different parts of the food chain. Some results do suggest that the isotope can damage fish chromosomes as effectively as higher-energy X-rays or gamma rays, leading to negative health outcomes later in life.

Additionally, experts have found tritium can bind to organic matter in various ecosystems and persist there for decades. “These things have not been addressed adequately,” Jha says.

Smith argues that there’s less tritium in this release than in natural sources, like cosmic rays that strike the upper atmosphere and create tritium rain from above. Furthermore, he says that damage to fish DNA does not necessarily correlate to adverse effects for wildlife or people. “We know that radiation, even at low doses, can damage DNA, but that’s not sufficient to damage how the organism reproduces, how it lives, and how it develops,” he says.

“We don’t know that the effects of the water release will be negligible, because we don’t really know for sure how much radioactive material actually will be released in the future,” Mousseau counters. He adds that independent oversight of the process could quell some of the environmental and health concerns.

Smith and other proponents of TEPCO’s plan point out that it’s actually common practice in the nuclear industry. Power plants use water to naturally cool their reactors, leaving them with tons of tritium-laced waste to dispose. Because tritium is, again, close to impossible to remove from large quantities of H₂0 with current technology, power plants (including ones in China) dump it back into bodies of water at concentrations that exceed those in the Fukushima releases.

“That doesn’t justify that we should keep discharging,” Jha says. “We need to do more work on what it does.”

If tritium levels stay as low as TEPCO and Smith assure they will, then the seafood from the region may very well be safe to eat. But plenty of experts like Mousseau and Jha don’t think there is enough scientific evidence to say that with certainty.

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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.

Eight years ago, I first met with researchers from the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program (STDP) in Tasmania, Australia, to learn about their work to protect the endangered marsupials. Since then, I’ve continued to follow this story, including tracking how the Forestier Peninsula devils—the focus of my original article published in late 2015—fared in their “new life.”

Contagious cancers like devil facial tumor disease (DFTD) are virtually unheard of in vertebrates, yet understanding how they’re transmitted and how they evade immune systems has implications for both conservation and oncology. For that research to take place, there needs to be a healthy population of Tasmanian devils. That’s why in late 2015 and early 2016, the STDP released 49 devils bred in captivity on the isolated Forestier Peninsula, to join the estimated 30 wild devils already living on the adjacent Tasman Peninsula. Establishing a new, managed, disease-free population of devils (with another already existing on Maria Island, located just off the east coast of Tasmania) would buy researchers more time to develop a vaccine.

Their release should have been a moment of hope for the endangered species, but it was marred by a discovery some 50 kilometers west, across the sea, on another Tasmanian peninsula. A local spotted a devil with a large facial tumor: the calling card of DFTD.

Routine tests returned an unsettling result—it was a new cancer.

Called DFT2, the new disease is genetically distinct from DFT1 (the original cancer). Its method of transmission and symptoms are the same, and it poses a severe additional threat to the species.

The discovery of DFT2, however, provides a critical clue to the cancer’s puzzle. Devils, it turns out, aren’t victims of bad luck—they are particularly prone to DFTD. There are three known wild infectious cancers in vertebrates in the world, and Tasmanian devils have two of them.

“It was a big surprise. We thought that transmissible cancers were really rare—like lightning striking—and that devils were just a very unfortunate species,” says Elizabeth Murchison, who researches genetic and transmissible cancers at the University of Cambridge in England. It’s likely that DFT1 and DFT2 weren’t the first cancers to emerge in devils and are unlikely to be the last.

The habit the devils have of biting each other helps spread the disease, and their low genetic diversity creates ideal conditions for the cancers to evade the marsupial’s immune system. Another factor in the devils’ inability to fight the infections could be an issue with their peripheral nervous systems, where both DFT1 and DFT2 seem to originate. What’s likely not to blame, however, is environmental pollutants as suggested in my original article. According to Murchison, the imprint mutations left on devil DNA indicate the two cancers are natural occurrences. “There’s nothing to suggest any external exposure to a chemical or radiation or anything like that,” she says.

Fortunately, the discovery of the second cancer hasn’t slowed vaccine development. Andrew Flies—a senior research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research—says the cancers have similarities that will make it easier for his team to develop a vaccine for both. In 2024, tests on an experimental DFT1 vaccine will begin, with the development of a vaccine that targets both cancers already underway. To reach devils, officials will distribute bait drops containing the vaccine through Tasmania’s vast wilderness.

Rollout is still several years away, but devils no longer appear to be at imminent risk of extinction. Exact numbers are unknown, but thanks in part to pilot projects to improve genetic diversity through the release of healthy devils, their population is holding strong in many areas—at least for now.

“Disease doesn’t really make a species go extinct. Diseases push the species to the very edge, and then everything else just comes along and takes them out,” says Carolyn Hogg, a researcher at the University of Sydney, who has been working with threatened species in Australia, including Tasmanian devils, for over 25 years.

For devils, “everything else” includes low genetic diversity, loss of habitat, and road fatalities. The nocturnal scavengers can’t resist the lure of rotting roadside carcasses, easy pickings in the roadkill capital of the world. In 2021, motorists killed more than 100 devils on just one 25-kilometer stretch of road in northwest Tasmania.

“If you’ve only got five breeding females in a small population and two get hit by cars on the road, you’ve lost 40 percent of your breeding population in one event,” says Hogg.

That’s exactly what happened to the Forestier Peninsula devils I wrote about in my original article. Drivers killed 16 of the 49 individuals within six weeks of their release. Through subsequent tracking, Hogg and her team discovered that devils raised in captive facilities for generations were more likely to use roadways than wild devils.

“You can’t release them anywhere near any major road systems, because behaviorally they’re used to the sound of vehicles,” says Hogg.

Since then, the STDP has done 11 more releases of healthy Tasmanian devils throughout the state to improve genetic diversity of existing wild populations. What’s changed is that instead of releasing devils bred in captivity, it now relies on the wild offspring of the disease-free population on Maria Island. A national park where there are no cars (save for those used by park rangers), Maria Island has wild devils that aren’t habituated to the sound of traffic and are more likely to survive.

Relying on Maria Island’s wild devils is the best option for building up a population of wild devils until a vaccine is developed. But the introduction of the marsupials to the island—which was devil-free until 2012—still has critics, much as it did back in 2015. In 2021, BirdLife Tasmania reported that over a decade, the introduced devils wiped out the island’s 3,000 breeding pairs of little penguins. Little penguins are found in abundance in the wild: Tasmania has hundreds of offshore islands, with an estimated 110,000 to 190,000 breeding pairs.

“We knew that was going to happen,” says Hogg. A risk assessment, she says, determined that the benefits of having a place to breed wild devils disease-free and improve their genetic diversity was “greater than the loss of the birds.”

The news, however, is not all bad. Researchers believe that introducing the carnivore has allowed Maria’s population of eastern barred bandicoots—listed as an endangered species on the mainland—to thrive, by pushing predatory possums up into trees. Cape Barren geese—which dropped in numbers following the marsupial’s introduction—have also learned to coexist with devils. As for the population of little penguins? The Maria Island population began to decline around the same time as one on a neighboring island, suggesting additional environmental factors were likely at play.

Yet, the conservation of endemic species and how to best manage them—from little penguins to Tasmanian devils—remains both a controversial and emotional topic in Australia. It’s rumored that conservation “vigilantes” are covertly rewilding Australia’s mainland with devils smuggled from Tasmania. But Hogg says any mainland devils are just as likely to develop a new cancer, given how susceptible they are to the disease. And without the protection of natural barriers that isolate populations of devils—like the narrow isthmuses on the Forestier and Tasman Peninsulas or the waters around Maria Island—preventing the cancer from spreading is impossible.

For now—until a vaccine is deployed—Maria Island’s disease-free population will be what stands between the devils and extinction.

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

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Lions are often incorrectly called the “king of the jungle,” and not just because most live in plains and grasslands or because lionesses do most of the hunting. These days, the giant cats are not feared as much as another “super predator”—the animals living in an ecological park in South Africa now fear humans more than lions, according to a study published October 5 in the journal Current Biology. Roughly 95 percent of the mammals living among lions are more afraid of human voices than the big cats or hunting sounds. 

[Related: The rare case of a lioness with a mane.]

The study focused on Greater Kruger National Park in South Africa. It’s a protected area of about 1,328 square miles and is home to one of the world’s largest remaining roaming lion populations. African lions have been considered endangered since 2015, but lions are still among the biggest group-hunting land predators on Earth. However, humans are battling their supremacy, as multiple studies have shown that humans kill prey at higher rates than lions do. This new research compares the fear animals have of humans versus lions to see which species causes more fear.

In the study, a team of biologists observed how 19 mammal species reacted to a series of recordings. The sounds included human voices, lion vocalizations to signal the presence of a top non-human predator, and barking dogs and gunshots associated with hunting. The clips of human voices were played at a more conversational volume, came from radio or TV recordings, and included four of the most commonly used languages in the region (Tsonga, Northern Sotho, English, and Afrikaans). 

“The key thing is that the lion vocalizations are of them snarling and growling, in ‘conversation’ as it were, not roaring at each other,” Western University conservation biologist Michael Clinchy said in a statement. “That way the lion vocalizations are directly comparable to those of the humans speaking conversationally.”

The team used a waterproof camera system that had enough battery life to record day and night over the course of several months and captured 15,000 videos. The observations were also taken during the dry season and the team put the systems at waterholes to get recordings of all the animals coming by to drink. 

“One night, the lion recording made this elephant so angry that it charged and just smashed the whole thing,” study co- author and Western University conservation biologist Liana Y. Zanette said in a statement. 

When the animals heard human sounds, they were twice as likely to run and ditch the waterhole than they were when lions or hunting noises were played. About 95 percent of species, including giraffes, leopards, hyenas, warthog, impala, elephants, and rhinoceroses, ran more often or abandoned waterholes more quickly in response to human sounds than lions.  

“There’s this idea that the animals are going to habituate to humans if they’re not hunted. But we’ve shown that this isn’t the case,” said Clinchy. “The fear of humans is ingrained and pervasive, so this is something that we need to start thinking about seriously for conservation purposes.”

[Related: How a 19-year-old lion fathered 35 cubs in 18 months.]

The team is now looking into whether their sound systems could be used to steer endangered species like the Southern white rhino away from poaching areas in South Africa. Efforts to keep rhinos away from certain areas through the use of human voices have seen success in some early studies.

“I think the pervasiveness of the fear throughout the savannah mammal community is a real testament to the environmental impact that humans have,” says Zanette. “Not just through habitat loss and climate change and species extinction, which is all important stuff. But just having us out there on that landscape is enough of a danger signal that they respond really strongly. They are scared to death of humans, way more than any other predator.”

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Over 1,500 animal species, from bonobos to sea urchins to penguins are known to engage same-sex sexual behavior. Still, scientists don’t understand exactly how it came to be or why it happens. While some say the behavior might have existed since the animal kingdom first arose more than half a billion years ago, it may have actually evolved repeatedly in mammals. A study published October 3 in the journal Nature Communications suggests that the behavior possibly plays an adaptive role in social bonding and reducing conflict, and evolved multiple times.

[Related: A massive study confirms no one ‘gay gene’ controls sexual preference.]

The behavior is particularly prevalent in nonhuman primates. It has been observed in at least 51 species from small lemurs up to bigger apes. For one population of male macaques, same-sex sexual behavior may even be a common feature of reproduction and is related to establishing dominance within groups, handling a shortage of different-sex partners, or even reducing tension following aggressive behavior. 

In this new study, the team from institutions in Spain surveyed the available scientific literature to create a database of records of same-sex sexual behavior in mammals. They traced the behavior’s evolution across mammals and tested for any evolutionary relationships with other behaviors. 

The team found that same-sex sexual behavior is widespread across mammal species, occurs in similar frequency in both males and females, and likely has multiple independent origin points. This analysis found that the behavior helps establish and maintain positive social relationships in animals including chimpanzees, bighorn sheep, lions, and wolves.

“It may contribute to establishing and maintaining positive social relationships,” study co-author José Gómez told The New York Times. “With the current data available, it seems that it has evolved multiple times.” Gómez is an evolutionary biologist at the Experimental Station of Arid Zones in Almería, Spain. 

Importantly, they caution that the study should not be used to explain the evolution of sexual orientation in humans. This research focused on same-sex sexual behavior defined as short-term courtship or mating interactions, instead of a more permanent sexual preference. 

Additionally, male same-sex sexual behavior was likely evolved in species with high rates of male adulticide–-when adult animals kill other adults. The team believes that this suggests the behavior may be an adaptation meant to mitigate the risks of violent conflict between males.

Harvard University primatologist Christine Webb, who did not participate in the study, told The Washington Post that the findings add to other research and widen the scope of what it means for a behavior to be considered adaptive.

[Related: Same-sex mounting in male macaques can help them reproduce more successfully.]

“This general question of evolutionary function—that behavior must aid in survival and reproduction—what this paper is arguing is that reaffirming social bonds, resolving conflicts, managing social tensions, to the extent that same-sex sexual behavior preserves those functions—it’s also adaptive,” Webb said. 

Webb also added that it makes sense that other animals would have sex for a variety of reasons the way that humans do.

The authors caution that these associations could also be driven by other evolutionary factors. Same-sex sexual behavior has also only been carefully studied in a minority of mammal species, so our understanding of the evolution of same-sex sexual behavior may continue to change as more mammalian species are studied.

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Earth’s amphibians are in serious trouble, but there is still time to save this unique class of animals. A study published October 4 in the journal Nature finds that two out of five amphibians are threatened with extinction and they continue to be the most threatened class of vertebrates. However, the new research also found that since 1980, the extinction risk of 63 species has been reduced due to conservation interventions.

[Related: Why you can’t put a price on biodiversity.]

“This proves that conservation works and it’s not all bad news,” Jennifer Luedtke, a study co-author and the manager of IUCN Red List Assessments at conservation organization Re:wild, said during a press conference. “We found that habitat protection alone is not sufficient. We need to mitigate the threats of disease and climate change.”

A check-up for amphibians

The findings are part of Global Amphibian Assessment II, an international series of conservation analyses based on evaluations of the 8,011 amphibian species listed on the IUCN Red List. The first Global Amphibian Assessment was published in 2004 and found that amphibians are Earth’s most threatened class of vertebrates. This second report confirms that the smooth-skinned animals are still more threatened than birds or mammals.

In the study, the team found that 118 species have been driven to extinction between 2004 and 2022. About 40 percent of the species studied are still categorized as threatened. This study also covers about 94 percent of the known amphibian species in 2022. According to Luedtke, about 155 new amphibian species are discovered every year, so there will likely be more species to add to the next Global Amphibian Assessment. 

Climate change and associated habitat loss are the primary driver of these declines. The team estimates that current and projected climate change effects are responsible for 39 percent of status deteriorations since 2004. Habitat loss has affected roughly 37 percent of species in the same period. 

Why amphibians are so vulnerable to climate change

Amphibians’ unique skin puts them in more danger in the face of a changing planet, since they use their skin to breathe. Increased frequency and intensity of storms, floods, droughts, changes in moisture levels and temperature, and sea level rise can all affect their very important breathing sites.

“They don’t have any protection in their skin like feathers, hair, or scales. They have a high tendency to lose water and heat through their skin,” Patricia Burrowes, a study co-author and herpetologist formerly with the University of Puerto Rico, said during a press conference. “The majority of frogs are nocturnal, and if it’s very hot, they will not come out because they will have lost so much water even in their retreat sites that they don’t have the energy to go out to feed. They won’t grow and won’t have energy to reproduce. And that can have demographic impacts.”

[Related: Hellbender salamanders may look scary, but the real fright is extinction.]

Extinctions have continued to increase with 37 documented in 2022. By comparison 23 species were reported extinct by 1980 and 33 in 2004. According to the report, the most recent species to go extinct were the frogs Atelopus chiriquiensis from Costa Rica and western Panama and Taudactylus acutirostris from Australia.

“Amphibians are essential parts of the ecosystem in a variety of ways, one of them being their role in the food web,” Kelsey Neam, study co-author and Re:wild’s Species Priorities and Metrics Coordinator, said during a press conference. “Amphibians are prey for many species and without amphibians, those animals lose a major source of their food and they are preying upon other animals like insects and other invertebrates. Without them to fulfill that niche, we will see a collapse of the food web.”

Amphibian pandemics

The most heavily affected amphibians were salamanders and newts, with three out of five salamander species at risk for extinction. While habitat loss is also the primary threat to salamanders, they are also particularly vulnerable to a disease called chytridiomycosis. It is caused by a fungal pathogen caused by the chytrid fungus that disrupts amphibian’s skin and physiological functions. When infected, amphibians can’t rehydrate properly, which creates an electrolyte imbalance that causes fatal heart attacks.

“Droughts exacerbate the infection intensity,” said Burrowes. “When the frogs have the potential to present some kind of defense mechanism, that defense mechanism is monitored by changes in precipitation and temperature.”

North America is home to the world’s most biodiverse community of salamanders, including a group of lungless salamanders in the Appalachian Mountains. This has conservationists concerned about what would happen if another deadly fungal disease called Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, or B.sal, arrives in the Americas from Asia or Europe.

‘We know what to do’

The report highlights that the time to help these critical animals is now. The authors point to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted by 190+ signatory countries at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in December 2022. The signing nations committed to halting all human induced extinctions, reversing and reducing the extinction risk of species tenfold, and to recovering populations to a healthy level.

“We know what to do. It’s time to really commit the resources to actually achieving the change that we say we want,” said Luedtke. “Amphibians will be the better for it and so will we.”

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New quadrupedal robots, based on years of research alongside some amphibian inspiration, could one day crawl and shimmy their way into search-and-rescue operations. As detailed in a new paper recently published in Nature Communications, the robotic trio developed by a team at Colorado State University can swim, walk, and crawl depending on their environments’ obstacles—thanks in large part to lightweight artificial muscles that don’t require heavy onboard power sources.

[Related: Four-legged dog robots could one day explore the moon.]

The new systems, which have been in development since 2017, were designed by a team led by CSU Department of Mechanical Engineering professor Jianguo Zhao, and rely on materials that change rigidity depending on temperature.

“Our embedded morphing scheme uses a lightweight artificial muscle similar to a human muscle, and it contracts when electricity is applied,” Zhao explained in the project’s October 2 announcement. “By embedding these artificial muscles in the spine of the robot or in its skin, we can achieve a variety of shape-types. Altogether, this approach offers a promising path towards developing robots that can navigate and work in difficult environments.”

Aside from the electrical properties, the robots owe their movements in large part to frogs—or, rather, frogs’ multiple life stages. “They start as tadpoles with tails for swimming before developing legs that let them jump, crawl or swim,” Zhao continued. “We take inspiration from those transformations, but achieving animal-like embedded shape morphing in robots remains challenging and is something we hope this work will continue to address.”

Judging from the video montage, it’s easy to see the frog analogy. Depending on its surroundings and terrain, the robots can curve their limbs to “swim,” then adjust them accordingly to scale a rocky hurdle that mimics a shoreline. On dry land, Zhao’s robots can “hop” along by repeatedly rotating their limbs 360 degrees to push forward. A third version of the robot can flatten itself to skitter through small openings, as well as hang onto a ledge to help transition across gaps.

For now, however, the robots require remote control, but future iterations could rely on sensor- and camera-based analysis of their environments for navigation, and even morph as needed to handle their surroundings.

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Parrots are the chatterboxes of the animal kingdom. These famously social birds can learn new sounds throughout their lives and even produce calls that can be individually recognized by other members of their flock. A new study of monk parakeets found that individual birds have a unique tone of voice similar to humans called a “voice print.” The findings are described in a study published October 3 in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

[Related: The next frontier in saving the world’s heaviest parrots: genome sequencing.]

“It makes sense for monk parakeets to have an underlying voice print,” Simeon Smeele, a co-author of the study and biologist studying parrot social and vocal complexity at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, said in a statement. “It’s an elegant solution for a bird that dynamically changes its calls but still needs to be known in a very noisy flock.”

In humans, our voice print leaves a unique signature in the tone of our voice across every word we say. These voice prints remain even though humans have a very complex and flexible vocal repertoire. Other social animals also use similar cues to recognize one another. Individual dolphins, bats, and birds have a “signature call” that makes them identifiable to other members of their groups. However, signature calls encode identity in only one call type, and there hasn’t been much evidence that suggests animals have unique signatures that last throughout their entire repertoire of calls. 

Parrots use their tongue and mouth to modulate calls similar to the way humans speak. According to Smeele, “their grunts and shrieks sound much more human than a songbird’s clean whistle.” 

Parrots also live in large groups with fluid membership where multiple birds vocalize at the same time. Members need a way to keep track of which individual is making what sound. The question became if the right physical anatomy coupled with the need to navigate complex social lives, helped parrots evolve a voice print. 

In the study, Smeele and his team traveled to Barcelona, Spain—home to the largest population of individually marked parrots in the wild. The parakeets are considered an invasive species and they swarm Barcelona’s parks in flocks with hundreds of members. The Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona has been marking the parakeets for 20 years and have individually identified 3,000 birds.

The team used microphones to record the calls of hundreds of individuals and collected over 5,000 vocalizations in total. They also re-recorded the same individuals over a period of two years, which revealed the stability of the calls over time.

Using a set of computer models, they detected how recognizable individual birds were within each of the five main call types given by this species (contact, tja, trrup, alarm, and growl). They found high variability in the “contact call” that birds use to broadcast their identity. According to the team, this overturned a long-held assumption that contact calls contain a stable individual signal. The new findings suggested that the parakeets are actually using something else for individual recognition.

[Related: These clever cockatoos carry around toolkits to get to food faster.]

To investigate if voice prints were at play, the team used a machine learning model widely used in human voice recognition. The model detects the identity of the speaker using the quality, or timbre, of their voice. The team trained the model to recognize calls of individual birds that were categorized as “tonal” in sound. They then tested to see if the model could detect the same individual from a separate set of calls that were classified as “growling” in sound. The model was able to identify the individual parrots three times better than expected, providing evidence that monk parakeets do actually have a recognizable, individual voice print. 

While exciting, the authors caution that this evidence is still preliminary. Future experiments and analyses could use the parrot tagging work from the team in Barcelona. The GPS devices could help determine how much individuals overlap in their roaming areas.

“This can provide insight into the species’ remarkable ability to discriminate between calls from different individuals,” study co-author and ecologist from Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona Juan Carlos Senar said in a statement.

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Stories about solar-powered robotic wolves first surfaced back in 2017 after Japanese researchers began testing prototypes to combat wild boars’ devastating encroachment into farmlands. Since then, a company called Wolf Kamuy expanded sales of its sentry products featuring menacing fangs, fur, flashing red LED “eyes,” and a head capable of shaking side-to-side while emitting a 90 decibel howl. But boars aren’t the only problem plaguing rural Japanese communities. According to recent reports, Wolf Kamuy is now offering many of its faux-wolves as bear deterrence.

[Related: How to watch Alaska’s fat bears.]

It turns out the “Super Monster Wolf” isn’t just effective at protecting farmers’ crops—it’s also pretty good at protecting the farmers themselves. As reported October 1 via the BBC, bears are an increasingly difficult, sometimes even deadly nuisance in many areas of Japan thanks to a combination of serious factors, including climate change, deforestation,and urban expansion. What’s more, bear populations in regions such as Hokkaido appear to be actually increasing as Japan faces an aging population and declining birth rates. According to the BBC, some researchers estimate a total of over 22,000 bears located around Hokkaido. Because of all this, the region recorded at least 150 bear attacks over the past six decades—with four fatalities in 2021 alone. Meanwhile, bears continue to wander into more crowded towns and cities bordering wildlife areas.

Enter: the Super Monster Wolf. By installing the guard bots in urban locales, experts hope to deter bears from wandering into populated areas to potentially harm both humans and themselves. Researchers previously estimated that a robo-wolf’s howls effectively deterred bears from encroaching within approximately 1-square-km (about 0.38 square mi) of its installation—arguably better than many electric fence perimeters. With strategic placement, Super Monster Wolves could help elderly communities, and protect the bears.

Of course, humanity cannot solely rely on an army of robot wolves to protect us from bear attacks. Bears (not to mention countless other species) face immense existential threats in the face of ongoing climate change calamities, and it’s not the bears’ fault they are increasingly desperate to find food sources. The best remedy, therefore, is to continue focusing on climate solutions like conservation, renewable energy, and sustainable urban planning, rather than stopgaps like the (admittedly rad) Super Monster Wolf.

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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.

Hiking through dense vegetation in Brazil’s Parnaíba Delta, Flávia Miranda stops suddenly and plucks a wheat-colored ball of fur from the tangle of mangrove branches. Startled from its slumber, the tennis ball–sized silky anteater raises its forepaws defensively like a boxer. Miranda, a researcher in conservation medicine at the State University of Santa Cruz in Brazil, carefully takes samples of blood and fur, then releases the elusive animal back into the forest.

Silky anteaters are the smallest anteaters and were the first to evolve, between 30 and 40 million years ago. Largely solitary and nocturnal, these fluffy little canopy dwellers inhabit low-altitude rainforests and mangroves from southern Mexico to northern Bolivia. When they’re not gorging on ants and termites, they spend much of their two-year life span sleeping.

Until recently, scientists believed that all silky anteaters belonged to the same species. But in 2017, Miranda published an analysis of silky anteater DNA from across the Americas, revealing seven distinct species.

“I always had this feeling that there was more than one species,” says Miranda, who has studied Brazil’s sloths, anteaters, and armadillos for 30 years. “I’d noticed differences in the fur color of populations in different regions.”

Now, Miranda is investigating the possibility that the sleepy animal she sampled in the Parnaíba Delta, roughly 280 kilometers east of São Luís, is a member of an eighth species.

The delta’s silky anteaters are isolated, living thousands of kilometers from their nearest known kin in the Amazon Basin, to the northwest, and a swath of tropical rainforest to the southeast, along Brazil’s Atlantic coast. This population, Miranda says, may be a relic left over from 11,000 years ago, when the Amazon rainforest stretched to the Parnaíba Delta.

So far, Miranda’s genetic analysis indicates that the delta population has been diverging from other silky anteater species for roughly two million years. However, the DNA tests need to be corroborated with physical characteristics to confirm that the delta’s anteaters form a new species. That’s why Miranda and her field assistant Alexandre Martins are continuing to collect blood samples and take measurements of animals that they find in the mangroves. “At the very least, we’re certain that this population is evolutionarily distinct and in the process of becoming [a separate species],” she says.

Mariella Superina, who chairs the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s group of anteater experts, describes Miranda’s research as groundbreaking. “Silky anteaters are the most understudied of all the [sloths, anteaters, and armadillos],” she says.

The Parnaíba Delta’s dense mangroves make it almost impossible for Miranda and her colleagues to count how many delta anteaters there might be. But since Miranda first visited in 2009, it has become clear that the delta is not a safe refuge for anteaters. Local people harvest the mangroves for fencing, housing, and boats. Farmers also let their cows and pigs range freely in the delta, where the livestock overgraze and trample young trees.

In 2011, Miranda began recruiting the community to reforest the mangroves. Locals started growing propagules, or mangrove seedlings, in a nursery for replanting in the delta and fenced these areas off from livestock. Quickly, the forest began to grow back. Although residents are mostly focused on protecting mangroves, their ongoing efforts are also benefitting the silky anteater and other wildlife.

“Our community’s survival is threatened by climate change, rising sea levels, and storms,” says Paulinho Morro do Meio, a fisherman, tour guide, and one of Miranda’s collaborators. “[The mangroves] are our best defense, and we work hard to restore them.”

For Miranda, though, the delta has sparked a bigger interest in yet-undiscovered silky anteaters, perhaps occupying the dry forests between the Parnaíba Delta and the distant rainforests. “I’ve got a feeling there are more ‘missing link’ populations,” she says.

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

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Despite only eating fish, the Southern Resident orcas of the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea are known for a perplexing behavior. They harass and even kill porpoises without eating them and scientists are not really sure why. A study published September 28 in the journal Marine Mammal Science looked at over 60 years of data to try and solve this ongoing mystery.

[Related: Raising male offspring comes at a high price for orca mothers.]

While their relatives called transient killer whales eat other organisms including squid, shark, and porpoises, the Southern Resident orcas exclusively eat fish, particularly Chinook salmon. The strange porpoise-harassing behavior was first scientifically documented in 1962. The new study analyzed 78 documented incidents and found three plausible explanations.

Orcas at play

The behavior may be a form of social play for orcas. Like many intelligent species including dogs, elephants, and kangaroos, these whales sometimes engage in playful activities as a way to bond, communicate, or just simply enjoy themselves. Going after porpoises might benefit their group coordination and teamwork.

This theory may be reminiscent of the orcas who became famous for sinking boats in Spain and Portugal. While the Southern Resident killer whales and the whales from the Iberian Peninsula are two different populations with distinct cultures, their affinity for play could be something both populations share, according to the authors of the study. 

Hunting practice

Going after a larger animal like porpoises might help these whales hone their critical salmon-hunting skills. They may view porpoises as moving targets to practice their hunting techniques, even if a meal is not the end result.

Mismothering behavior

The orcas may be attempting to provide care for porpoises that they perceive as either sick or weak. This could be a behavioral manifestation of their natural inclination to help others within their pod. Female orcas have been observed carrying their deceased calves and have been observed carrying porpoises in a similar manner.  

Scientists also call mismothering behavior displaced epimeletic behavior. It could be due to their limited opportunities to care for their young, according to study co-author and science and research director at Wild Orca Deborah Giles. 

“Our research has shown that due to malnutrition, nearly 70 percent of Southern Resident killer whale pregnancies have resulted in miscarriages or calves that died right away after birth,” Giles said in a statement.

An endangered group

Southern Resident killer whales are considered an endangered population. Currently, only 75 individuals exist and their survival is essentially tied to Chinook salmon. A 2022 study found that these orcas have been in a food deficit for over 40 years and another study found that the older and fatter fish are also becoming more scarce in several populations.

“I am frequently asked, why don’t the Southern Residents just eat seals or porpoises instead?” said Giles. “It’s because fish-eating killer whales have a completely different ecology and culture from orcas that eat marine mammals—even though the two populations live in the same waters. So we must conclude that their interactions with porpoises serve a different purpose, but this purpose has only been speculation until now.”

Even with these three theories for the behavior, the team acknowledges that the exact reason behind porpoise harassment may always remain a mystery. What is clear is that porpoises are not a part of the Southern Resident killer whale diet, so eating them is highly unlikely. 

“Killer whales are incredibly complex and intelligent animals. We found that porpoise-harassing behavior has been passed on through generations and across social groupings. It’s an amazing example of killer whale culture,” Sarah Teman, a study co-author and marine mammal biologist with the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine’s SeaDoc Society, said in a statement. “Still, we don’t expect the Southern Resident killer whales to start eating porpoises. The culture of eating salmon is deeply ingrained in Southern Resident society. These whales need healthy salmon populations to survive.”

However, this research does underscore the importance of salmon conservation in the Salish Sea and the Southern Resident’s entire range. They generally stay near southern Vancouver Island and Washington State, but their range can extend as far as the central California coast and southeastern Alaska.  Maintaining an adequate salmon supply will be vital to their survival and well-being of the Salish Sea ecosystem as a whole.

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Sea turtles have been around for at least 110 million years, yet relatively little is known about their evolution. Two of the most common sea turtles on Earth are olive ridley and Kemp’s ridley turtles that belong to a genus called Lepidochelys that could help fill in some of the gaps of sea turtle biology and evolution. A team of paleontologists not only discovered the oldest known fossil of turtle from the Lepidochelys genus, but also found some traces of ancient turtle DNA. The findings are detailed in a study published September 28 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

[Related: 150 million-year-old turtle ‘pancake’ found in Germany.]

The DNA comes from the remains of a turtle shell first uncovered in 2015 in the Chagres Formation on Panama’s Caribbean coast. It represents the oldest known fossil evidence of Lepidochelys turtles. The turtle lived approximately 6 million years ago, curing the upper Miocene Epoch. At this time, present day Panama’s climate was getting cooler and drier, sea ice was accumulating at Earth’s poles, rainfall was decreasing, sea levels were falling.

“The fossil was not complete, but it had enough features to identify it as a member of the Lepidochelys genus,” study co-author and Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia paleontologist Edwin Cadena tells PopSci. Cadena is also a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

The team detected preserved bone cells called osteocytes. These bone cells are the most abundant cells in vertebrates and they have nucleus-like structures. The team used a solution called DAPI to test the osteocytes for genetic material.

“In some of them [the osteocytes], the nuclei were preserved and reacted to DAPI, a solution that allowed us to recognize remains of DNA. This is the first time we have documented DNA remains in a fossilized turtle millions of years old,” says Cadena.

According to the study, fossils like this one from vertebrates preserved in this part of Panama are important for our understanding of the biodiversity that was present when the Isthmus of Panama first emerged roughly 3 million years ago. This narrow strip of land divided the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean and joined North and South America. It created a land bridge that made it easier for some animals and plants to migrate between the two continents.

[Related: Hungry green sea turtles have eaten in the same seagrass meadows for about 3,000 years.]

This specimen could also have important implications for the emerging field of molecular paleontology. Scientists in this field study ancient and prehistoric biomatter including proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, and DNA that can sometimes be extracted from fossils. 

Molecular paleontology aims to determine if scientists can use this type of evidence to determine more about the organisms than their physical shape, which is typically what is preserved in most fossils. Extracting this tiny material from bones was critical in sequencing the Neanderthal genome, which earned Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo the 2022 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.

“Many generations have grown up with the idea of extracting and bringing back to life extinct organisms,” says Cadena. “However, that is not the real purpose of molecular paleontology. Instead, its goal is to trace, document, and understand how complex biomolecules such as DNA and proteins can be preserved in fossils.”

This new turtle specimen could help other molecular paleontologists better understand how soft tissues can be preserved over time. It could also shift the idea that original biomolecules like proteins or DNA have a specific timeline for preservation in fossils and encourage re-examining older specimens for traces of biomolecules. 

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Despite having the critical and even miraculous ingredients to sustain life from microscopic viruses up to big blue whales, planet Earth likely has a future that spells some doom for most, if not all, species of mammals—including humans. A study published September 25 in the journal Nature Geosciences made the bold prediction that in about 250 million years, all of Earth’s major land masses will join together as one. When they do, it could make our planet one extremely hot and almost completely uninhabitable for mammals.

[Related: Mixing volcanic ash with meteorites may have jump-started life on Earth.]

“Widespread temperatures of between 40 to 50 degrees Celsius [104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit], and even greater daily extremes, compounded by high levels of humidity would ultimately seal our fate,” study co-author and University of Bristol paleoclimatologist Alexander Farnsworth said in a statement. “Humans—along with many other species—would expire due to their inability to shed this heat through sweat, cooling their bodies.”

The models in this study predict that CO₂ levels would rise to between 410 parts per million and 816 parts per million in a few million years This is roughly the same as today’s level, which is already pushing the planet into dangerously hot water, or up to twice as high.

“They do explain quite nicely that it’s a combination of both those factors, kind of a double whammy situation,” geophysicist Ross Mitchell of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in the study, told Science magazine. “If there’s any disagreement I have with this paper, it’s that they’re more right than they thought they were.”

This prediction aligns well with Earth’s past periods of mass extinction and the volatile history of our planet. Here are some other times that mammalian and human life on Earth was almost completely wiped out.

The Pleistocene Ancestral Bottleneck

About 800,000 to 900,000 years ago, the population of human ancestors drastically dropped. A study published in August estimates that there were only about 1,280 breeding individuals alive during this transition between the early and middle Pleistocene. About 98.7 percent of the ancestral population was lost at the beginning of this ancestral bottleneck that lasted for roughly 117,000 years.

During this time, modern humans spread outside of the African continents and other early human species like Neanderthals began to go extinct. The Australian continent and the Americas also saw humans for the first time and the climate was generally cold. 

Some of the potential reasons behind this population drop are mostly related to extremes in climate. Temperatures changed, severe droughts persisted, and food sources may have dwindled as animals like mammoths, mastodons, and giant sloths went extinct. According to the study, an estimated 65.85 percent of current genetic diversity may have been lost due to this bottleneck.

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

The Great Dying

About 250 million years ago, massive volcanic eruptions triggered catastrophic climate changes that killed 80 to 90 percent of species on Earth. The Permian-Triassic mass extinction, or the “Great Dying,” paved the way for dinosaurs to dominate Earth, but was even worse than the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

According to a study published in May, saber-toothed creature called Inostrancevia filled a gap in southern Pangea’s ecosystem, when it was already devoid of top predators. Eventually, Inostrancevia also went extinct about 252 million years ago, as Earth’s species fought to gain a foothold on a changing planet. 

This example of how the past is prologue also bears a warning for our future, since the team says The Great Dying is the historical event that most closely parallels Earth’s current environmental crisis.

“Both involve global warming related to the release of greenhouse gasses, driven by volcanoes in the Permian and human actions currently,” study co-author museum curator and paleontologist Christian Kammerer told PopSci in May. “[They] represent a very rare case of rapid shifts between icehouse and hothouse Earth. So, the turmoil we observe in late Permian ecosystems, with whole sections of the food web being lost, represents a preview for our world if we don’t change things fast.”

The Ultimate Mammalian Survivor

Despite Earth constantly trying to kill us, life finds a way. Some of our very early ancestors potentially even shared a brief moment with Titanosaurs and the iconic Triceratops. These distant mammalian relatives also survived the Earth’s most famous mass extinction event: the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs on a spring day about 66 million years ago.

[Related: This badger-like mammal may have died while trying to eat a dinosaur.]

A study published in June revealed that a Cretaceous origin for placental mammals, the diverse group that includes humans, dogs, and bats, briefly co-existed with dinosaurs. After an asteroid struck the Earth near Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the devastation in its wake wiped out all of the non-avian dinosaurs and many mammals, such as a Madagascan rodent-looking animal named Vintana sertichi  that weighed up to 20 pounds Scientists have long debated if placental mammals were present with the dinosaurs before the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction, or if they only evolved after the dinosaurs died out. 

This study used statistical analysis that showed groups that include primates, rabbits and hares (Lagomorpha), and dogs and cats (Carnivora) evolved just before the K-Pg mass extinction and the impact that the modern lines of today’s placental mammals started to take shape after the asteroid hit. As with other mammals, they likely began to diversify once the dinosaurs were out of the picture.

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One of the most enduring mysteries about our earliest ancestors and extinct human relatives is how they ate and procured enough food to sustain themselves millions of years ago. We believe that archery first arrived in Europe about 54,000 years ago and Neanderthals were cooking and eating crab about 90,000 years ago, but scavenging was likely necessary to get a truly hearty meal. A modeling study published September 28 in the journal Scientific Reports found that groups of hominins roughly 1.2 to 0.8 million years ago in southern Europe may have been able to compete with giant hyenas for carcasses of animals abandoned by larger predators like saber-toothed cats.

[Related: An ‘ancestral bottleneck’ took out nearly 99 percent of the human population 800,000 years ago.]

Earlier research has theorized that the number of carcasses abandoned by saber-toothed cats may have been enough to sustain some of southern Europe’s early hominin populations. However, it’s been unclear if competition from giant hyenas (Pachycrocuta brevirostris) would have limited hominin access to this food source. These extinct mongoose relatives were about 240 pounds–roughly the size of a lioness–and went extinct about 500,000 years ago. 

“There is a hot scientific debate about the role of scavenging as a relevant food procurement strategy for early humans,” paleontologist and study co-author Jesús Rodríguez from the National Research Center On Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain tells PopSci. “Most of the debate is based on the interpretation of the scarce and fragmentary evidence provided by the archaeological record. Without denying that the archaeological evidence should be considered the strongest argument to solve the question, our intention was to provide elements to the debate from a different perspective.”

For this study, Rodríguez and co-author Ana Mateos looked at the Iberian Peninsula in the late-early Pleistocene era. They ran computer simulations to model competition for carrion–the flesh of dead animals–between hominins and giant hyenas in what is now Spain and Portugal. They simulated whether saber-toothed cats and the European jaguar could have left enough carrion behind to support both hyena and hominin populations—and how this may have been affected by the size of scavenging groups of hominins. 

They found that when hominins scavenged in groups of five or more, these groups could have been large enough to chase away giant hyenas. The hominin populations also exceeded giant hyena populations by the end of these simulations. However, when the hominins scavenged in very small groups, they could only survive to the end of the simulation when the predator density was high, which resulted in more carcasses to scavenge.  

[Related: Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree.]

According to their simulations, the potential optimum group size for scavenging hominins was just over 10 individuals. This size was large enough to chase away saber-toothed cats and jaguars. However, groups of more than 13 individuals would have likely required more carcasses to sustain their energy expenditure. The authors caution that their simulations couldn’t specify this exact “just right” group size, since the numbers of hominins needed to chase away hyenas, saber-toothed cats, and jaguars were pre-determined and arbitrarily assigned.

“The simulations may not determine the exact value of the optimum, but show that it exists and depends on the number of hominins necessary to chase away the hyenas and of the size of the carcasses,” says Rodríguez.

Scavenged remains may have been an important source of meat and fat for hominins, especially in winter when plant resources were scarce. This team is working on simulating the opportunities hominins had for scavenging in different ecological scenarios in an effort to change a view that scavenging is marginal and that hunting is a more “advanced” and more “human” behavior than scavenging. 

“The word for scavenger in Spanish is ‘carroñero.’ It has a negative connotation, and is frequently used as an insult. We do not share that view,” says Rodríguez. “Scavengers play a very important role in ecosystems, as evidenced by the ecological literature in the last decades. We view scavenging as a product of the behavioral flexibility and cooperative abilities of the early hominins.”

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

In a sunny meadow just beyond Portland, Oregon’s western sprawl, mounds of white lupine buzzed in the late June heat. From bloom to bloom, bumblebees moved up and around the stalks of fading petals. A yellow-faced bumblebee—Bombus vosnesenskii, or “voz” for short—hugged the edges of one slipper-shaped bloom and bumped pollen dust onto its belly. On a nearby stalk, a giant B. nevadensis did the same. The B-52 bomber of bumbles—its yellow and black body half the size of a human thumb—rose and dropped on the breeze. 

Kevin Schafer swung at the bomber, tenting his insect net over the lupine. On his bucket hat and vest pocket, two enamel bumblebee pins glinted in the sun. In his net, two real bees crawled upward. He looked closely at the hint of a rust-colored patch on one, and said, excited, “I think it’s a brown-belted!” It would be the only Bombus griseocollis he’d caught all morning; they’re not common in this area. He nudged each bee and a lupine bloom into a plastic tube, and dropped them, buzzing, into his pocket. “Let’s ask the maestro.”

For six summers, Schafer—a retired photographer—and hundreds of volunteers like him have wandered through meadows and mountains across the Northwest, documenting wild bumblebees and the plants they’re foraging for the Pacific Northwest Bumble Bee Atlas. A quarter of North America’s almost 50 bumblebee species are at risk of extinction due to human-caused habitat loss and climate change, and most of them live in the Northwest. Unlike honeybees, they buzz when they pollinate plants — a pollen-releasing method that some plants require, making it essential for whole ecosystems to function. Beyond that, scientists know very little about them.

“The data that we had prior to this project, it’s basically just a bunch of collectors that have gone out and collected insects, killed them, and put them on pins,” said Rich Hatfield, Schafer’s bee “maestro” and the biologist who started the Atlas program at the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Dead specimens reveal few of the details that matter for conservation: What do they eat? Where do queens spend the winter? Why is this meadow full of voz and nevadensis, and yet the once-ubiquitous Western bumblebee—Bombus occidentalis—hasn’t been seen here in two decades? There aren’t enough scientists to capture the data, Hatfield said. Volunteers like Schafer help fill the gaps.

This year, the Atlas program hit a milestone: Washington’s Department of Fish and Wildlife used its data to adopt a conservation strategy covering eight at-risk species in the state, including occidentalis, which many expect the federal government will add to the U.S. endangered species list next year. Washington is one of the few states that can prioritize wild bees: Unlike most, the state’s laws allow officials to manage insects as wildlife, not just as pests.

“We collectively saw (those species) as a shared priority and wanted to identify things we could do,” said Taylor Cotten, who manages conservation assessments for the state wildlife department and partnered with the Xerces Society and federal agencies to develop the strategy. The resulting document outlines regions of high priority for conservation—a horseshoe around the Columbia Plateau; the swath of lowlands from Portland to Puget Sound. It also outlines protective measures, like timing mowing and prescribed burns around nesting periods and planting the specific flowers that bees need.

Julie Combs, a state wildlife employee whose job is to prevent pollinator extinction, called the new conservation plan foundational. “I can’t emphasize enough how many questions I get about: OK, now we know where the bees are, we know they’re in decline, but what do we do?”

This year, when state officials sit down to hash out plans for burning and planting vegetation at any of their conservation sites, she’ll come armed with more than 200 pages of best practices to help bees.

“OK, now we know where the bees are, we know they’re in decline, but what do we do?”

At the edge of the meadow, Hatfield unzipped a cooler half full of ice. He and Schafer pulled tubes from every bulging pocket, then pushed each into the ice to daze the bees, waiting until they were still enough to handle. Then, one by one, Hatfield gently prodded and photographed each motionless bee, examining its fur pattern and jaw length to confirm its ID while Schafer scratched tally marks and plant names onto a worksheet.

Voz on spirea, nevadensis on lupine, voz on wild rose: Between the two men, they’d netted 31 bees, including, Hatfield confirmed, Schafer’s single griseocollis. Carefully placed on the table beside petal fragments and other dazed bees, the griseocollis slowly shivered back to life. For Hatfield, this program is about more than just the data. “We’re building a community of people that now see these animals in a totally different way,” he said: As beautiful, important, fragile.

The bee bobbed its rust-belted abdomen up and down, up and down, then stretched its wings, rubbed its pollen-laden legs against its body, and flew away.

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The natural circles that pop up on the soil in the planet’s arid regions are an enduring scientific debate and mystery. These “fairy circles” are circular patterns of bare soil surrounded by plants and vegetation. Until very recently, the unique phenomena have only been described in the vast Namib desert and the Australian outback. While their origins and distribution are hotly debated, a study with satellite imagery published on September 25 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) indicates that fairy circles may be more common than once realized. They are potentially found in 15 countries across three continents and in 263 different sites. 

[Related: A new study explains the origin of mysterious ‘fairy circles’ in the desert.]

These soil shapes occur in arid areas of the Earth, where nutrients and water are generally scarce. Their signature circular pattern and hexagonal shape is believed to be the best way that the plants have found to survive in that landscape. Ecologist Ken Tinsly observed the circles in Namibia in 1971, and the story goes that he borrowed the name fairy circles from a naturally occurring ring of mushrooms that are generally found in Europe.

By 2017, Australian researchers found the debated western desert fairy circles, and proposed that the mechanisms of biological self-organization and pattern formation proposed by mathematician Alan Turing were behind them. In the same year, Aboriginal knowledge linked those fairy circles to a species of termites. This “termite theory” of fairy circle origin continues to be a focus of research—a team from the University of Hamburg in Germany published a study seeming to confirm that termites are behind these circles in July.

In this new study, a team of researchers from Spain used artificial intelligence-based models to look at the fairy circles from Australia and Namibia and directed it to look for similar patterns. The AI scoured the images for months and expanded the areas where these fairy circles could exist. These locations include the circles in Namibia, Western Australia, the western Sahara Desert, the Sahel region that separates the African savanna from the Sahara Desert, the Horn of Africa to the East, the island of Madagascar, southwestern Asia, and Central Australia.

The team then crossed-checked the results of the AI system with a different AI program trained to study the environments and ecology of arid areas to find out what factors govern the appearance of these circular patterns. 

“Our study provides evidence that fairy-circle[s] are far more common than previously thought, which has allowed us, for the first time, to globally understand the factors affecting their distribution,” study co-author and Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology of Seville soil ecologist Manuel Delgado Baquerizo said in a statement. 

[Related: The scientific explanation behind underwater ‘Fairy Circles.’]

According to the team, these circles generally appear in arid regions where the soil is mainly sandy, there is water scarcity, annual rainfall is between 4 to 12 inches, and low nutrient continent in the soil.

“Analyzing their effects on the functioning of ecosystems and discovering the environmental factors that determine their distribution is essential to better understand the causes of the formation of these vegetation patterns and their ecological importance,” study co-author and  University of Alicante data scientist Emilio Guirado said in a statement. 

More research is needed to determine the role of insects like termites in fairy circle formation, but Guirado told El País that “their global importance is low,” and that they may play an important role in local cases like those in Namibia, “but there are other factors that are even more important.”

The images are now included in a global atlas of fairy circles and a database that could help determine if these patterns demonstrate resilience to climate change. 

“We hope that the unpublished data will be useful for those interested in comparing the dynamic behavior of these patterns with others present in arid areas around the world,” said Guirado.

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Scientists in Thailand have discovered a new species of tarantula with a very unique blue hue. The tarantula is named Chilobrachys natanicharum and is also called the electric blue tarantula. The findings were described in a study published September 18 in the journal ZooKeys 

[Related: Before spider mites mate, one of them gets their skin removed.]

The new colorful arachnid was discovered in southern Thailand’s Phang-Nga province. It follows the identification of another new species of tarantula called Taksinus bambus, or the bamboo culm tarantula.

“In 2022, the bamboo culm tarantula was discovered, marking the first known instance of a tarantula species living inside bamboo stalks,” study co-author and Khon Kaen University entomologist Narin Chomphuphuang said in a statement. “Thanks to this discovery, we were inspired to rejoin the team for a fantastic expedition, during which we encountered a captivating new species of electric blue tarantula.”

The team that found the first not-so-blue bamboo culm tarantula included a local wildlife YouTuber named JoCho Sippawat. This year, Chomphuphuang joined up with Sippawat for a surveying expedition in the province to learn more about tarantula diversity and distribution. They identified this new species by this very distinctive coloration during the expedition.

“The first specimen we found was on a tree in the mangrove forest. These tarantulas inhabit hollow trees, and the difficulty of catching an electric-blue tarantula lies in the need to climb a tree and lure it out of a complex of hollows amid humid and slippery conditions,” Narin said. “During our expedition, we walked in the evening and at night during low tide, managing to collect only two of them.”

The color blue is very rare in nature. It can even exist in other animals that aren’t usually this color, including the blue lobsters that have recently been found in Massachusetts and France. Some animals also evolved wild colors including blues, yellows, and reds to appear poisonous to try and keep other animals from eating them.  

In order for an organism to appear blue, it must absorb very small amounts of energy while reflecting high-energy blue light. Since penetrating molecules that are capable of absorbing this energy is a complex process, the color blue is less common than other colors in the natural world. 

According to the study, the secret behind the electric blue tarantula’s wild color comes from the unique structure of their hair and not from a presence of blue pigment. Their hair incorporates nanostructures that manipulate the light shining on it to create the blue appearance. Their hair can also display a more violet hue depending on the light, which creates an iridescent effect. 

[Related: Blue-throated macaws are making a slow, but hopeful, comeback.]

This species was previously found on the commercial tarantula market, but there hadn’t been any documentation describing its natural habitat or unique features. 

“The electric blue tarantula demonstrates remarkable adaptability. These tarantulas can thrive in arboreal as well as terrestrial burrows in evergreen forests,” Narin said. “However, when it comes to mangrove forests, their habitat is restricted to residing inside tree hollows due to the influence of tides.”

To name the new species, the authors conducted an auction campaign and the scientific name of Chilobrachys natanicharum was selected. It is named after executives Natakorn and Nichada Changrew of Nichada Properties Co., Ltd., Thailand and the proceeds of the auction were donated to support the education of Indigenous Lahu children in Thailand and for cancer patients in need of money for treatment.

The authors say that this discovery points to the continued importance of taxonomy as a basic aspect of research and conservation. It also highlights the need to protect mangrove forests from continued deforestation, as the electric blue tarantula is also one of the world’s rarest tarantulas. 

“This raises a critical question: Are we unintentionally contributing to the destruction of their natural habitats, pushing these unique creatures out of their homes?” the researchers ask in their conclusion.

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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.

To see a great white shark breach the waves, its powerful jaws clasping a shock-struck seal, is to see the very pinnacle of predatory prowess. Or so we thought. Several years ago, in South Africa, the world was reminded that even great white sharks have something to fear: killer whales.

Long before they started chomping on yachts, killer whales were making headlines for a rash of attacks on South African great white sharks. The killings were as gruesome as they were impressive. The killer whales were showing a deliberate sense of culinary preference, consuming the sharks’ oily, nutrient-rich livers but leaving the rest of the shark to sink or wash up on a nearby beach.

From the initial news of the attacks, the situation only got weirder. Great white sharks started disappearing from some of their best-known habitat around South Africa’s False Bay and Gansbaai regions, in the country’s southwest.

“The decline of white sharks was so dramatic, so fast, so unheard of that lots of theories began to circulate,” says Michelle Jewell, an ecologist at Michigan State University Museum. In the absence of explanation, pet theories abounded. Some proposed that overfishing of the sharks’ prey to feed Australia’s fish and chips market led to the shark’s declines. Other activists misinterpreted that idea and went on to campaign against what they thought was the recent inclusion of great white shark meat as a surprise ingredient in Australian fish and chips. That idea was, fortunately, thoroughly debunked.

Others thought the disappearance was directly caused by the killer whales. Perhaps they were killing all the sharks?

“Any time you see large population declines in local areas, it’s cause for conservation concern,” says Heather Bowlby, a shark expert with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “In a place where animals used to be seen very regularly, and suddenly they’re not there anymore, some were concerned that they all died.”

Now, though, scientists finally know what happened. In a recent paper, Bowlby and her colleagues show that the sharks’ disappearance was, actually, caused by the killer whales. But the sharks aren’t dead. They just moved. Across South Africa, the scientists found, the white shark population has taken a pronounced eastward shift.

To Jewell, who wasn’t involved in the research, this makes sense. “We know that predators have a huge influence on the movement and habitat use of their prey, so this isn’t really surprising,” she says. “The issue is that lots of people weren’t used to thinking of great white sharks as prey.”

Alison Kock, a marine biologist with South African National Parks and a coauthor of the study, says they cracked the mystery after reports started flowing in from sites farther east that white sharks were showing up unexpectedly. “As False Bay and Gansbaai had major declines, other places reported huge increases in white shark populations,” she says. “Too rapid to be related to reproduction, since they don’t reproduce that fast.”

“It had to be redistribution,” she says, adding: “The white sharks moved east.” Places like Algoa Bay and the KwaZulu-Natal coastline had seen great white sharks before but not anywhere near this many.

In the white sharks’ absence, South Africa’s west coast is changing. New species like bronze whalers and sevengill sharks have moved into False Bay. For the tour operators who ran shark dives in the area, however, the shift has been difficult. Some have survived by switching to offering kelp forest dives—driven in part by the popularity of the documentary My Octopus Teacher. Many, though, have gone under.

But what of the great white sharks’ new home farther east? No one quite knows how these regions are adapting to a sudden influx of apex predators, but scientists expect some significant ecological changes. They’re also warning of the potential for increased shark bites, since people living in the white shark’s new homes are not as used to shark-human interactions.

We may never know exactly how many white sharks died in killer whale attacks. The prized, presumably tasty, livers targeted by the killer whales help white sharks float, which means many dead white sharks may have sunk uncounted. Overall, though, Kock is glad to see the mystery solved.

“This has been very worrying for me, and it was good to see evidence that they hadn’t all died,” says Kock. “But it’s still unbelievable to me that I can go to [False Bay’s] Seal Island and not see any white sharks. It’s something I never expected, and I miss them a lot.”

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

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More than 4 million miles of roads crisscross the US. So it’s little surprise that roadkill makes up a big chunk of the country’s animal deaths: By 1998 it had surpassed hunting as “the leading direct human cause of vertebrate mortality on land.” Today, wildlife officials in California are concerned that vehicle collisions are killing mountain lions faster than they can reproduce. Moose keep getting struck on roads in Alaska and even Connecticut. But while hit-and-runs with big mammals are gruesome and significant, they’re just one way roads are detrimental to nature. 

Grizzly deaths

In a paper published on September 20 in the journal Wildlife Monographs, scientists used GPS tracking and DNA data from fur samples collected between 1998 and 2005 to monitor the grizzly bear population in southeastern British Columbia, Canada, and study which variables affect their distribution—and their mortality. They found that the grizzly  population density was 2.6 times higher in areas with less than .37 miles of roads per mile of land. The reason? Roads drive bears away from areas that are filled with perfectly good food sources like huckleberry bushes, and increase the risks of deaths just by putting the creatures closer to people. 

[Related: Watch bobcats, bears, and even birds use fallen logs as bridges]

Southeastern British Columbia largely has dirt roads with low speed limits, says Michael Proctor, an independent research ecologist and lead author of the new paper, but you can still “see that bears get killed around forestry roads in the backcountry for a variety of reasons.” For one, the routes give people access to more wilderness—to the detriment of bears. The vast majority of grizzlies that are killed in the wild (both legally and non-legally) are shot within 1,600 feet of an open backcountry road.

Roadkill patterns

When we move from backcountry roads to more paved roads and highways, that’s when we see more vehicles hitting animals. The resulting collision rates are affected by a whole slew of variables. 

In a 2022 study in the journal Current Biology that included more than 1 million deer killed on roads in the US, researchers found that collisions are most likely to happen within an hour or two after it gets dark. “It’s kind of the coincidence of a period of the day when humans are driving a lot, and a time when animals are moving around a lot,” says co-author Calum Cunningham, a wildlife ecologist and postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Tasmania who studies animal-vehicle collisions in various countries. Ungulates like deer and elk are crepuscular, so they tend to be most active around dawn and dusk. “That’s kind of the perfect storm for creating very high periods of collisions,” Cunningham explains.

In their study, Cunningham and his team also noted that collisions were more common in places located on the eastern side of a time zone, where the sun sets earlier. A strategy like implementing pushing the clock back an hour all year, he says, would not only reduce these accidents, but save about $1.2 billion associated with injury costs, vehicle damage, and insurance. (Researchers say wildlife-vehicle collisions cause more than 9,000 injuries and 440 fatalities among Americans each year.) 

[Related: All the ways daylight saving time screws with you]

In another paper, Cunningham and colleagues found that moose collisions in Alaska, the Yukon Territory, British Columbia, and Alberta ramp up during the winter likely due to low visibility, increased moose activity on roads (which are easier to walk on than snow-laden wilderness), and the difficulties of driving and controlling a car in the winter. More recently, researchers from the University of California, Davis calculated that cars kill about 70 mountain lions a year on California highways alone. That estimate is likely an undercount because it didn’t include incidences on city or county roads, and because many hit-and-runs with mountain lions go unreported.

A prevention plan

Fortunately, some interventions can bring down the number of large mammals dying on or near roads. Underpasses and overpasses have successfully slashed roadkill rates around the US, especially when fenced. And while overpasses can be quite expensive to build, Cunningham says, they are one-off costs that pay for themselves by saving collision costs over time. 

Another strategy includes reduced speed limits, even on a seasonal basis, Cunningham explains.  But that only works if drivers adhere to those limits, which often isn’t the case. More public awareness of the benefits of speed limit for wildlife and people could help increase animal survival, Cunningham says. 

Proctor, the grizzly bear researcher, wants to see more drastic change. “The solution is to close a portion of the roads,” especially in the backcountry where valuable food supplies are, he says. “But that’s a very unpopular idea and is challenging to do.” At the least, in places of especially high conservation concern, we need to be thinking about all the ways roads disturb elements of wildlife behavior, he notes. Though roadkill is a sobering sight, sometimes, the damage is far less visible.

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Jellyfish are an undeniable evolutionary success story, surviving at least 500 million years in Earth’s oceans. They are even poised to handle climate change very well in some areas of the world, all without a centralized brain like most animals. Despite this lack of a central brain, trained Caribbean box jellyfish can potentially remember their past experiences the way that flies, mice, and humans do, and learn to spot and dodge previously encountered obstacles in a tank. The findings are reported in a study published on September 22 in the journal Current Biology.

[Related: Jellyfish may have been roaming the seas for at least 500 million years.]

This species of jellyfish is ubiquitous in the waters of the Caribbean Sea and the central Indo-Pacific Ocean, but are generally just about a half inch in diameter. Box jellyfish like these are members of a class of jellyfish that are known for being among the most poisonous animals in the world and their stings can cause paralysis and even death in extreme cases. 

To keep up their stinging and navigate their watery world, jellyfish don’t have a centralized brain like most members of the animal kingdom. They have four parallel brain-like structures with roughly 1,000 nerve cells in each. By comparison, a human brain has approximately 100 billion nerve cells. Caribbean box jellyfish are equipped with a complex visual system of 24 eyes embedded into their bell-shaped body. They use this unique vision to steer through the murky waters of mangrove swamps, looking for prey and diving under underwater tree roots. 

“It was once presumed that jellyfish can only manage the simplest forms of learning, including habituation–i.e., the ability to get used to a certain stimulation, such as a constant sound or constant touch,” study co-author and University of Copenhagen neurobiologist Anders Garm said in a statement. “Now, we see that jellyfish have a much more refined ability to learn, and that they can actually learn from their mistakes. And in doing so, modify their behavior.”

In this study, the team used a round tank outfitted with gray and white stripes to mimic the jellyfish’s natural habitat. The gray stripes were mimicking mangrove roots that would appear to be distant at the start of the experiment. For 7.5 minutes, the team observed the jellyfish in the tank. Initially, the jelly swam close to these seemingly far away stripes and bumped into them frequently. However, by the end of the experiment, the jelly increased its average distance to the wall by roughly 50 percent, quadrupled the number of successful pivots to avoid collision with the fake tree, and cut its contact with the wall by half. 

The findings suggest that jellyfish can learn from experience and could acquire the ability to avoid obstacles through a process called associative learning. In this process, organisms form mental connections between sensory stimulations and behaviors. 

“Learning is the pinnacle [of] performance for nervous systems,” Jan Bielecki, a co-author of the study and a neuroscientist at Kiel University in Germany, said in a statement.

Bielecki added that in order to teach jellyfish a new trick, “it’s best to leverage its natural behaviors, something that makes sense to the animal, so it reaches its full potential.”

[Related: Italian chefs are cooking up a solution to booming jellyfish populations.]

The team then looked into pinpointing the underlying process of jellyfish’s associative learning by isolating the animal’s visual sensory centers called rhopalia. Each rhopalia houses six eyes that control the jellyfish’s pulsing motion. This motion spikes in frequency when the jelly swerves away from an obstacle. 

They showed the stationary rhopalium moving gray bars to mimic how the jelly approaches objects and the rhopalium did not respond to light gray bars, seemingly interpreting the bars as distant. The researchers then trained the rhopalium with some weak electric stimulations that mimicked the mechanical stimuli that occur when colliding with an object. Following the electric stimulation, the rhopalium started to generate obstacle-dodging signals in response to the light gray bars as they got closer. 

The findings from this stage of the experiment showed that combining visual and mechanical stimuli is necessary for associative learning in jellyfish and that the rhopalium is likely serving as the animal’s learning center.

“For fundamental neuroscience, this is pretty big news. It provides a new perspective on what can be done with a simple nervous system,” said Garm. “This suggests that advanced learning may have been one of the most important evolutionary benefits of the nervous system from the very beginning.”

The team plans to do a deeper dive into the cellular interactions of jellyfish nervous systems to tease apart the process of memory formation and also hope to understand how the mechanical sensor in the jellyfish’s body works to paint a more complete picture of its associative learning.

“It’s surprising how fast these animals learn; it’s about the same pace as advanced animals are doing,” says Garm. “Even the simplest nervous system seems to be able to do advanced learning, and this might turn out to be an extremely fundamental cellular mechanism invented at the dawn of the evolution nervous system.”

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The oceans cover more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, but humans have only visited and mapped 5 percent of them. They remain one of the greatest, deepest mysteries close to home. With the help of scientists and photographers, however, we’re uncovering more wildlife and more about the flows and balances in oceans day by day. While we might never know everything that unfolds beneath the great blue waves, we can always keep our curiosities and appetites alive.

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In an increasingly noisy world, some primates are pushing to be noticed with another sense. A study published September 20 in the journal Ethology Ecology & Evolution found that pied tamarin monkeys use scent markings to communicate more often so they can compensate for noise pollution generated by humans. 

[Related: Noise pollution messes with beluga whales’ travel plans.]

Pied tamarins are 11 to 12 inch long monkeys with furry bodies and bare faces. The species is currently listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. They live in a very narrow geographic range in central Brazil. Most of their territory now lies within the city of Manaus, a port city of about 2.6 million residents. The expansion of the city has restricted individual groups of monkeys to small patches that are surrounded by noisy urban spaces. 

Communicating with other groups of monkeys is crucial for their survival, so in addition to long vocal calls, pied tamarins use multiple types of scent markings to send messages. The scent markings have different functions, including passing along territorial and reproductive information. Pied tamarins have special glands above their genitals and near their stomachs that emit these scents that leave behind an olfactory message to other monkeys. This practice is also not unique to pied tamarins. Domestic and wild felines can use their famously pungent spray to mark territory, as do dogs and red pandas to name a few other mammals.

In the new study, a team from the Universidade Federal do Amazonas in Brazil and Anglia Ruskin University in England looked at the behavior of nine separate groups of wild pied tamarins. They followed each group for 10 days using radio tracking and the most common source of anthropogenic noise was road traffic. There was also noise pollution from park visitors, aircraft, and military activity.

The team found that the frequency of scent marking directly increased with decibel levels, which suggests that scent marking is being used more frequently as their vocal communication becomes more drowned out by human noise. 

“Many species depend on acoustic signals to communicate with other members of the same species about essential information such as foraging, mate attraction, predators, and territorial defense,” study co-author and Universidade Federal do Amazonas biologist Tainara Sobroza said in a statement. 

Their long vocal calls are generally used to mark territory and for communications between members of the group. In Manaus, they are important since the forest landscape is fragmented and urban areas are encroaching on their territory. The authors believe that this increase in scent marking is directly tied to this increase in urbanization. 

[Related from PopSci+: Why your dog needs to smell the world.]

“Humans have contributed many additional stimuli to the soundscapes that animals have evolved to deal with, and anthropogenic noise is increasingly drowning out natural sounds,” study co-author and Anglia Ruskin University behavioral ecologist Jacob Dunn said in a statement. “The increased use of scent marking by pied tamarins is likely to be a flexible response towards this environmental change. This is an interesting result from a conservation perspective as it shows pied tamarins are adapting their behavior in response to city noise.

One of the advantages scent marking has over vocal communication is that the information can be passed on over several days, instead of just after making a call. On the other hand, vocal calls are a better way of communicating over long distances. 

“As the pied tamarins’ range is becoming more fragmented and groups are becoming more isolated, this could potentially have a detrimental impact on a species which is already critically endangered,” said Dunn.

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After getting bit by a bat bug at a recent conference, Armin Scheben had a literal and figurative itch to study bats. The blood-sucking insect is one of many disease-causing parasites that latch themselves onto the flying mammals—yet, bats rarely get sick in the same way humans do. 

Mammalian immune systems evolve fast as species are always challenged with new pathogens in their environment. “You need to constantly keep pace with new bad guys that are trying to infect and hurt you,” says Scheben, who is a postdoctoral fellow in population genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (and has since recovered from the bite). And while he has studied the genetic adaptations of several mammals, they pale in comparison to the ones that have given bats the ability to fight off infections so effectively.

In a new study published today in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, Scheben and his team have identified the genes that have contributed to bats’ rapidly evolving immune system and their unique ability to evade deadly viruses and even cancer. Understanding how bats survive diseases could inspire new immune treatments for humans and potentially help prevent another pandemic. 

[Related: A ‘living’ cancer drug helped two patients stay disease-free for a decade]

The authors analyzed the DNA of 15 different bat species to get a clearer picture of how their genes evolved over time. They fully sequenced the genomes of two bat species, the Jamaican fruit bat and the Mesoamerican mustached bat, and gathered the other species from preexisting datasets. 

They then compared the bat genomes to that of humans, mice, and other cancer-susceptible mammals, focusing their attention on the sequences that encode proteins responsible for causing or preventing diseases. To start, they lined up the homologous genes, or shared genes among different species inherited from a shared evolutionary ancestor. (It’s like comparing apples with apples, explains Scheben.) With each homologous gene, they hypothesized two scenarios: if bats lost it or if it mutated. If the flying mammals completely lost the gene, it suggests that the omission is important in fighting disease. But if it remained with subtle changes in the DNA sequence that are only found in bats, it could show a change in gene function that somehow helps the group stay healthy.

In the end, the most striking changes the team detected were in type one interferon (IFN) genes, which are important for controlling inflammatory responses to infections. Specifically, they observed a shift in the number of antiviral IFN-α and IFN-ω genes. For instance, three bat species seemed to have lost all of their IFN-α while increasing the number of IFN-ω genes.

According to Scheben, the most surprising finding was observing the loss of IFN-α and addition of more IFN-ω genes, “which hadn’t been reported at all before.” The results suggest the new IFN-ω and missing IFN-α genes are important in bats for resisting viral infections while preventing overactive inflammatory responses—a feature that has made inflammation a double-edged sword in humans.

But while the findings have put geneticists one step closer to understanding how bats evolved their unique ability to resist cancer and viruses, it doesn’t paint a complete picture. The study focuses only on the genetics of innate immunity (the immediate immune response to infected cells), says Tony Schountz, a professor at the Center of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases at Colorado State University, who was not involved in the study. It does not include information about bats’ adaptive immunity, which consists of the antibody and T-cell responses that many mammals use to fight diseases. “These are two very different, but complementary components of immunity,“ Schountz explains. “Nearly all of the focus on bat immunity to date has been on innate immunity, principally because the study of adaptive immunity requires live animals, which few groups have and is much more complicated.”

Even without a full set of information, understanding the changes in the bats’ innate immune system could help scientists develop genetic treatments for humans that decrease susceptibility to certain illnesses. We can also learn which genes drive bats’ 20- to 30-year lifespans, or how their bodies have adapted to process sugar-rich foods without developing the negative consequences seen in people with diabetes. 

[Related: What bats and metal vocalists have in common]

And though bats have gained a notorious reputation for their purported role in spreading COVID, Scheben hopes that these new findings could point researchers in the right direction in understanding how the animals host such potent viruses and parasites without getting very sick. One day, he says, that information could be used to prevent our species from suffering major symptoms when infected. “It’s absolutely not misplaced to believe that studying bats could help us prevent another pandemic.”

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Just in time for spooky season, scientists have learned more about how a tiny parasitic flatworm called the lancet liver fluke infects and controls the brains of ants. With their complex four-step cycle, the flukes could be cunningly adjusting to daily changes in air temperatures to infect more hosts. The findings were recently published in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

[Related: Mind-controlling ‘zombie’ parasites are real.]

Step 1: The Zombie Ant

The parasite hijacks an ant’s brain after an ant eats a ball of snail mucus infested with fluke larvae. The larvae then mature inside the brain, where the parasite can make the ant climb up a blade of grass and clamp down on the blade. This strategic height makes it easier for the parasite’s next potential host—a cow, sheep, deer, or other grazer—to eat the flukes and offer it another place to live and breed. This new study found that the liver fluke can even get the ant to crawl back down the blade of grass when it gets too hot.

“Getting the ants high up in the grass for when cattle or deer graze during the cool morning and evening hours, and then down again to avoid the sun’s deadly rays, is quite smart. Our discovery reveals a parasite that is more sophisticated than we originally believed it to be,” University of Copenhagen biologist and study co-author Brian Lund Fredensborg said in a statement. Fredensborg conducted the research with his former graduate student Simone Nordstrand Gasque, now a PhD student at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

In their study, the team tagged several hundred infected ants in the Bidstrup Forests near Roskilde, Denmark. “It took some dexterity to glue colors and numbers onto the rear segments of the ants, but it allowed us to keep track of them for longer periods of time,” said Fredensborg.

The team observed how the infected ants behaved to humidity, light, time of day, and temperature and it was clear that temperature has an effect on their behavior. During cooler temperatures, the ants were more likely to be attached to the top of a blade of grass. When the temperature rose, the ants let go of the grass and crawled back down. 

“We found a clear correlation between temperature and ant behavior,” said Fredensborg. “We joked about having found the ants’ zombie switch,’”

Step 2: The Grazer

Once the liver fluke infects the ant, several hundred parasites invade the insect’s body. Only one of these parasites will make it to the brain where it then influences the ant’s behavior. The remaining liver flukes conceal themselves in the ant’s abdomen inside of its intestine. There, the liver flukes find their way through the bile ducts and into the liver, where they suck blood and develop into adult flukes that begin to lay eggs. 

[Related: ‘Brainwashing’ parasites inherit a strange genetic gap.]

“Here, there can be hundreds of liver flukes waiting for the ant to get them into their next host. They are wrapped in a capsule which protects them from the consequent host’s stomach acid, while the liver fluke that took control of the ant, dies. You could say that it sacrifices itself for the others,” said Fredensborg. 

The eggs are then excreted in the host animal’s feces.

Step 3: The Snail

Once the fluke eggs have been excreted, they remain on the ground waiting for a snail to crawl by and eat the feces. When the eggs are inside the snail, the eggs develop into larval flukes that reproduce asexually and can multiply into several thousand. 

“Historically, parasites have never really been focused on that much, despite there being scientific sources which say that parasitism is the most widespread life form,” said Fredensborg. “This is in part due to the fact that parasites are quite difficult to study.”

Step 4: The Slime Ball

To exit the snail and move on to their next host, the larval flukes make the snail cough. The flukes are then expelled from the snail in a lump of mucus. The ants are attracted to this moist ball, eat it, and unwittingly ingest more fluke larvae and the cycle begins all over again.

The tiny liver fluke is widespread in Denmark and other temperate regions around the world and researchers are still trying to understand more of the mechanisms behind how they take over a host’s brain. 

“We now know that temperature determines when the parasite will take over an ant’s brain. But we still need to figure out which cocktail of chemical substances the parasite uses to turn ants into zombies,” Fredensborg said. “Nevertheless, the hidden world of parasites forms a significant part of biodiversity, and by changing the host’s behavior, they can help determine who eats what in nature. That’s why they’re important for us to understand.”

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The world’s oldest living aquarium fish is actually even older than scientists initially believed. According to an analysis by the California Academy of Sciences, the Steinhart Aquarium’s beloved Australian lungfish named Methuselah is estimated to be about 92 years old, with a high-estimate of over 100.

[Related: Hogfish ‘see’ using their skin.]

Meet Methuselah

Native only to two river systems in Australia, this type of lungfish can actually breathe air. They use a single lung when the streams they live in are more dry than usual or when the water quality changes, according to the Australian Museum. They typically have olive green, black, or brown scales and a body shaped like a torpedo with a flattened snout. While the species is over 100 million years old, they are listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. They are very sensitive to human-caused changes to its habitat, primarily damming, that can increase sediment levels in the water. 

Methuselah first arrived at the San Francisco aquarium in 1938, aboard a Matson Navigation Company liner. She has outlived the 231 other fish from Australia and Fiji that arrived with her, back when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in his second term as President of the United States and Back to the Future’s Christopher Llloyd was only a baby. 

In the many decades since, Methuselah has become famous in the area for not only her advanced age, but a seemingly charming personality and a puppy-like love of belly rubs. The knowledge of her age is helpful in the context of a larger study on how to more accurately determine the age of lungfish in the wild and help conservation efforts. She was previously estimated to be about 84 years old.

“Although we know Methuselah came to us in the late 1930s, there was no method for determining her age at that time, so it’s incredibly exciting to get science-based information on her actual age,” Steinhart Aquarium’s Curator of Aquarium Projects Charles Delbeek, said in a statement. “Methuselah is an important ambassador for her species, helping to educate and stoke curiosity in visitors from all over the world. But her impact goes beyond delighting guests at the aquarium: Making our living collection available to researchers across the world helps further our understanding of biodiversity and what species need to survive and thrive.”

[Related: Trumpetfish use other fish as camouflage.]

How scientists determined the age of the oldest living aquarium fish

Estimating ages for ancient and long-lived fish like lungfish is technically challenging and has traditionally relied on more invasive and sometimes lethal methods to determine the age of fishes, including removing scales and examining inner ear bones called otoliths. The new age detection method used to estimate Methuselah’s age only uses a small tissue sample from a fin clip and the team believed that this method can be applied to other threatened species, without impacting threatened populations or the animal’s health.

The DNA analysis for this new estimate was led by Ben Mayne of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and David T. Roberts of Australian water authority Seqwater. Their upcoming study included Methuselah, two other lungfish belonging to the California Academy of Sciences (ages 54 and 50), and 30 other lungfish from six institutions in Australia and the United States. It created a catalog of living lungfish with the goal of advancing more accurate DNA-based age clocks for the species native to Australia.  This new analysis also found that she could be as old as 101.

“For the first time since the Australian lungfish’s discovery in 1870, the DNA age clock we developed offers the ability to predict the maximum age of the species,” said Mayne. “Accurately knowing the ages of fish in a population, including the maximum age, is vital for their management. This tells us just how long a species can survive and reproduce in the wild, which is critical for modeling population viability and reproductive potential for a species.”

Their original paper detailing how this age prediction method works was published in June 2021 in the journal Molecular Ecology Resources and offers a description of how threatened fish can be safely aged with DNA methylation methods.

“Methuselah’s age was challenging to calculate as her age is beyond the currently calibrated clock. This means her actual age could conceivably be over 100, placing her in the rare club of fish centenarians. While her age prediction will improve over time, she will always live beyond the calibrated age clock, as no other lungfish we know is older than Methuselah,” said Roberts.

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Under towering palms and tangled mangroves, coil-shelled creatures slowly crawl across damp leaves and mossy rocks. As these invasive snails take advantage of the hot, wet ambiance of southern Florida, they leave glistening trails of slime across backyards, parks, forests, and gardens. The Sunshine State is a paradise for snails from other parts of the world who are being shipped in for the pet trade, outcompeting native species, spreading disease, and wreaking havoc overall.   

“Florida has become a hotspot for invasive snails because of its tropical climate in the south end and enormous amount of freshwater springs for aquatic species,” says Lori Tolley-Jordan, an invertebrate zoologist at Jacksonville State University who specializes in freshwater invertebrate biodiversity. “While Alabama has the most diversity of [freshwater] snails, Florida’s environment and climate temperatures are very suitable for land and aquatic snails because it is not much different than their homes in southeast Asia and other tropical areas.”

[Related: Experience the uncomfortable weirdness of a snail eating fruit]

In turn, visitors like the giant African land snail from East Africa, one of the largest snails in the world, have found Florida to be a home away from home. As wide as the size of an adult hand with a unique brown lined shell, they make for a charismatic terrarium pet and are available for sale on websites like Amazon. That means they typically arrive through one of the 16 seaports in Florida that aid the multi-billion-dollar wildlife trafficking business. “It’s one of the largest ports of entry into the US,” Tolley-Jordan says.

Some time after an imported species like the giant African snail or spotted apple snail arrives at its new home, the buyer may decide to release the snail into the wild, thinking it’s the humane thing to do. However, the critters become an issue with their ability to spread quickly and quietly, munching on essential plants and crops along the way. 

“One of the [indicators] for species that are the most invasive, if anything, is their ability to reproduce quickly,” says Tolley-Jordan. 

The giant African snail first came to Florida in the 1960s. It was forcibly wiped out from the state in the 1970s, but made a comeback through seaports in 2011. As the population expands its range, it has begun to impact the environment and the survivability of its native counterparts, including the Florida apple snail. With the ability to populate quickly, a hermaphroditic giant African snail or dioecious exotic apple snail can produce as many as 500 eggs every one to two weeks. Inversely, a native apple snail needs to find a mate to reproduce as little as 20 eggs per clutch every few weeks. 

“There are several species of non-native snails in Florida, but most of them are locally restricted and have been confined in Florida for decades. So they only have gotten out by people having them as pets,” says Robert Fletcher, a professor in wildlife ecology at the University of Florida and principle investigator of a snail kite monitoring research team. “But, the [exotic apple snail] is a different story.” 

A snail-sized apocalypse

As the alien snail species pump out numerous eggs, their sticky capsules become sneaky stowaways, clinging to unsuspecting humans and animals that whisk them away to new areas. Within weeks, the newly hatched babies will overwhelm their surroundings. 

“Even if a person hasn’t released that species, that species can happen to be found on other plants when they are being sold or moved around that their eggs are attached to,” Tolley-Jordan says. “Either intentionally or unintentionally, they move everywhere.” 

Already, shady exotic drifters like the trumpet snail and island apple snail have extended their ranges and colonized new ecosystems in multiple parts of the US. They also end up bringing extra company with them: parasites. Notorious for pathogens, species like the trumpet snail serve as vectors for the lung fluke, a flatworm that causes meningitis-like symptoms in humans and can sometimes be deadly to wildlife. Meanwhile, the giant African land snail carries roundworms, which can trigger intestinal issues. 

The devastation wrought by these snails can be felt up the food chain, too. Non-native apple snails, for example, are outcompeting Florida apple snails, which are the primary food source for Everglade snail kites. This highly specialized bird of prey has been on the federal endangered species list since the 1960s, and has a relatively small population that is confined to southern Florida. The kite uses its unique hook-shaped beak to pry open snail shells, and has just started to crack into the larger invasive apple snails.

“There are lots of concerns about whether or not this non-native snail is going to further contribute to the decline of snail kites, and maybe push it to the brink of extinction,” says Fletcher. “[But] we have seen so far that this non-native highly invasive snail has essentially provided a Band-Aid for the snail kite.”

With the non-native apple snails increasing more rapidly than the native one, Fletcher says that his research team thinks it’s possible the invasive prey is “playing towards the increase in sort of the reversal of this population trend” in the snail kite—a glimmer of hope for the species.

As the battle for holding the balance between native and nonnative species in Florida continues, another slimy creature may soon enter this picture and add to the damage. “The assassin snail could wipe out entire populations of Florida’s unique spring snails if introduced,” says Tolley-Jordan.

The bumble bee-striped assassin snail doesn’t have an appetite for the plants in Florida like the apple snails, but will prey on smaller native species like Florida apple snails. It currently ranks as a top predator in its homeland of Malaysia, and will likely make its way to Singapore, a hotpot of global transport of invasive species, Tolley-Jordan notes. The zoologist has no doubt that it would thrive in the “Lion City” and New Zealand. 

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

As far as experts know, the assassin snail hasn’t entered Florida yet. But it’s a rising star on the pet market, so it might only be a matter of time. 

Doing the detective work

One way scientists are able to determine if an invasive critter is getting too cozy in the Sunshine State is through environmental DNA or eDNA. For early detection, they can take water samples and look for traces of a specific species genetic material. The tool has been used in other parts of the US such as in the Mississippi River to detect black carp and the New Zealand mud snails. 

Eradicating snail squatters can be tricky: Once they’ve spread through an ecosystem, they can be hard to find, catch and prevent from reproducing. This June, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services began to treat in Broward County and other southern properties such as in ​​Broward County for giant African snails with a pesticide called metaldehyde, a.k.a. snail bait. Once applied to crops and certain residential areas, the pesticide works by interfering with a snail’s ability to make mucus, ultimately impacting its mobility and digestion. Within days the target dies from dehydration. Officials also use specially trained canine units to sniff out the offenders.

Prevention through early detection, public outreach, and ecological management has proven to be the best strategy against the Sunshine State’s slimy epidemic. But of course, the best way to keep Florida from being taken over by alien snails is for pet owners to make smarter decisions, both for themselves and for the local wildlife and environment. “The public oftentimes is just not aware,” Tolley-Jordan says, “ It’s one of our biggest problems.”

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Jet lag isn’t just an unpleasant side effect of travel for humans. It could also affect the internal circadian clock of captive giant pandas living outside of their natural habitat range in China. A study published September 18 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found that outdoor cues like changes in temperature and daylight are particularly important for giant pandas. Some problems can arise when their environments and natural body clock don’t match up. 

[Related: Pandas weren’t always bamboo fiends.]

Animals’ internal circadian clocks are generally regulated by cues from the environment and are linked to changes in their behavior and physiology. For humpback whales in the North Atlantic, the decrease in the daylight around the autumnal equinox likely signals that it’s time for the whales to migrate south to their breeding grounds in the Caribbean. Several species of migratory birds use variation in temperature to time their migrations and delaying their departures may help them navigate climate change, but at a cost. 

“Animals, including humans, have evolved rhythms to synchronize their internal environment with the external environment,” University of Stirling PhD student and study co-author Kristine Gandia said in a statement. “When internal clocks are not synchronized with external cues like light and temperature, animals experience adverse effects. In humans, this can range from jet lag to metabolic issues and seasonal affective disorder.” 

For the pandas in this study, those living outside of their latitudinal ranges were observed performing fewer activities than they would in the wild and responding to some human-based cues that only exist in captivity. 

Giant pandas in the wild live highly seasonal lives, where spring is time for migrations to find new shoots of their preferred bamboo. Migration season is also mating season, possibly because finding mates is easier when pandas are all after the same bamboo shoots. Pandas are also a favorite in zoos around the world and their public webcams make them easier to observe. 

In this new study, scientists set out to understand how pandas in zoos are affected by the “jet lag” of living in latitudes they did not evolve in, since important conditions such as daylight and temperature ranges will be different in these areas. According to Gandia, the latitudinal range for giant pandas is between 26 and 42 degrees north and matching latitudes could be between 26 and 42 degrees south, since these latitudes mirror the temperature and lighting conditions further north. Other latitudes will have different amounts of sunlight and varying temperatures, which could alter the panda’s internal clocks and changes to their behaviors, such as, looking for a mate. The study also looked at whether or not anthropogenic cues like regular visits from keepers could also affect their circadian clock. 

The team of 13 observers used webcams to monitor 11 giant pandas born in captivity at six zoos both inside and outside pandas’ natural latitudinal range. Every month for one year, they carried out one day’s worth of hourly focal sampling–watching one animal for a set length of time and recording everything the animal does–to see how their behavior changed across a day and how that changed across a year. The observers noted general activity, sexual behavior, and abnormal behavior.

Daylight and temperature changes were particularly important cues for pandas and were closely associated with general activity in latitudes that matched their natural range in China. Just like their wild counterparts, pandas in captivity showed three peaks of activity over 24 hours, including a peak at night. Sexual behaviors were only displayed by adult pandas during the day, which possibly makes it easier to find mates in the wild.

[Related: The science behind our circadian rhythms, and why time changes mess them up.]

The pandas living outside their home latitude were less active, correlating to the different temperature and daylight cues in these newer latitudes. 

“When giant pandas are housed at higher latitudes—meaning they experience more extreme seasons than they evolved with—this changes their levels of general activity and abnormal behavior,” said Gandia. One of the abnormal behaviors included reacting to zoo-specific cues, such as becoming very active during the early morning. This indicates that the pandas may be anticipating a keeper visiting with fresh food.  

Additionally, the pandas’ abnormal and sexual behaviors fluctuated at similar points. The team believes that this could represent frustration that the pandas can’t mate or migrate in captivity as they would in the wild. The pandas living in mismatched latitudes performed fewer abnormal behaviors related to mating, potentially because they weren’t getting the same environmental cues for sexual behaviors.

“To expand on this research, we would want to incorporate cycles of physiological indicators,” said Gandia. “Importantly, we would want to assess sexual hormones to understand the effects the environment may have on the timing of release. This could help us further understand how to promote successful reproduction for a vulnerable species which is notoriously difficult to breed.”

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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.

For commercial fishers, losing gear is part of doing business. Fishing lines and nets break and wear out over time or have to be cut loose when gear snags on the seafloor. By one estimate, at least 50,000 tonnes of nets, lines, and traps disappear into the water globally each year. In California alone, as many as 14,000 crab traps are lost or discarded each season. Most of this material is plastic, and lots of it is still partially functional, meaning it can go on catching and killing marine life for centuries—a process known as ghost fishing.

For several years, scientists, fishers, and conservations have been eyeing a not-so-novel solution: biodegradable fishing gear. Made of things like microalgae fibers or biodegradable polyesters, this equipment can be broken down by aquatic microorganisms. Yet while these environmentally friendly nets offer benefits, recent field trials conducted largely in Norway and South Korea show that biodegradable nets catch significantly fewer fish than synthetic ones.

Benjamin Drakeford, a marine resource economist at the University of Portsmouth in England, puts it bluntly: “Biodegradable gear right now is not very good.”

In Atlantic cod fisheries, for instance, nylon nets catch as much as 25 percent more fish than biodegradable alternatives. One team of scientists attributed such shortfalls to biodegradable materials’ tendency to be more elastic and stretchy, potentially allowing fish to wiggle free.

But Drakeford and his colleagues wanted to look at the bigger picture: if biodegradable nets and traps reduce fishers’ catches—but they also lessen the environmental damage from lost and discarded gear—is that a financial hit worth taking? After all, fishers have a vested interest in keeping fish populations healthy. The scientists analyzed prior studies of biodegradable fishing gear’s effectiveness, then interviewed 29 fishers, boat owners, and representatives from fishing industry groups in England about their expenses, profits, and other financial details.

In conclusion, Drakeford and his colleagues write in a recent paper, an industry shift to biodegradable nets would not lessen the impacts of ghost fishing enough to offset fishers’ reduced catches. Biodegradable nets would leave more fish in the water and reduce rates of ghost fishing, helping fishers with future catches. But to make up for the reduced landings, fishers would need financial incentives.

But, the scientists say, if biodegradable gear can be improved, the benefits “over traditional fishing gear would grow exponentially.”

One big problem, the scientists reason, is that a certain degree of ghost fishing is currently locked in: the gear is already lost. Even if fishers everywhere replace their gear, the decrease in ghost fishing—and resultant bump in fish stocks—wouldn’t happen for years. So rather than improving their catch by cutting down on ghost fishing, fishers would be trading environmental sustainability for a lower catch without seeing much of an immediate benefit.

Brandon Kuczenski, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who wasn’t involved in the work, suggests this lack of cost-effectiveness could be overcome with government subsidies.

Drakeford and his team’s analysis comes amid mounting concern over marine plastic pollution, which is pouring into the world’s oceans at alarming rates and is liable to haunt marine ecosystems essentially forever. Large pieces of plastic can choke and strangle marine life, while tiny micro- and nanoplastics—the inevitable result of plastic breaking down—can have more insidious impacts.

Geoff Shester, a campaign director for the conservation organization Oceana, says that while he endorses efforts to develop biodegradable gear, he thinks it would be easier and faster to implement a penalty and reward system to incentivize fishers to not lose or litter gear in the first place. Such a system, he says, would require registering and tracking all commercial fishing equipment.

“If you put out fishing gear, you should have to demonstrate that you’re getting it back,” he says. Right now, he adds, there is no penalty for fishers who lose their gear other than having to buy new gear. He thinks such a system could be more effective in reducing waste.

There is another option, too: holding net manufacturers financially accountable for plastic gear pollution and the costs to fishers of shifting to biodegradable gear. This concept, known as extended producer responsibility, is briefly discussed in Drakeford’s paper.

For his part, Drakeford believes biodegradable nets’ lower efficiency is a speed bump on the road to widescale adoption. He thinks the gear will follow the path of electric vehicles—getting better and better and better. In just a decade, he points out, the range of electric vehicles has doubled several times.

Drakeford sees some irony in the fact that switching to biodegradable gear is, in concept at least, not so much a leap forward as it is a step back.

“In the past, we used biodegradable materials to make crab pots and fishing nets and such,” he says. “We know the answer to this—we just need to go back to what we used to do.”

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

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

Ask any parent—welcoming a new baby to the family is exciting, but it comes with a lot of work. And when the new addition is a pair of babies—twins—parents really have their work cut out for them.

For many animal species it’s the norm to have multiple babies at once. A litter of piglets can be as many as 11 or more!

We are faculty members at Mississippi State University College of Veterinary Medicine. We’ve been present for the births of many puppies and kittens over the years—and the animal moms almost always deliver multiples.

But are all those animal siblings who share the same birthday twins?

Twins are two peas in a pod

Twins are defined as two offspring from the same pregnancy.

They can be identical, which means a single sperm fertilized a single egg that divided into two separate cells that went on to develop into two identical babies. They share the same DNA, and that’s why the two twins are essentially indistinguishable from each other.

Twins can also be fraternal. That’s the outcome when two separate eggs are fertilized individually at the same time. Each twin has its own set of genes from the mother and the father. One can be male and one can be female. Fraternal twins are basically as similar as any set of siblings.

Fraternal twins originate in two eggs fertilized separately, while identical twins originate in a single fertilized egg that divides to create two embryos. Veronika Zakharova/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

Approximately 3 percent of human pregnancies in the United States produce twins. Most of those are fraternal – approximately one out of every three pairs of twins is identical.

Multiple babies from one animal mom

Each kind of animal has its own standard number of offspring per birth. People tend to know the most about domesticated species that are kept as pets or farm animals.

One study that surveyed the size of over 10,000 litters among purebred dogs found that the average number of puppies varied by the size of the dog breed. Miniature breed dogs—like chihuahuas and toy poodles, generally weighing less than 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms)—averaged 3.5 puppies per litter. Giant breed dogs—like mastiffs and Great Danes, typically over 100 pounds (45 kilograms)—averaged more than seven puppies per litter.

When a litter of dogs, for instance, consists of only two offspring, people tend to refer to the two puppies as twins. Twins are the most common pregnancy outcome in goats, though mom goats can give birth to a single-born kid or larger litters, too. Sheep frequently have twins, but single-born lambs are more common.

Horses, which are pregnant for 11 to 12 months, and cows, which are pregnant for nine to 10 months, tend to have just one foal or calf at a time—but twins may occur. Veterinarians and ranchers have long believed that it would be financially beneficial to encourage the conception of twins in dairy and beef cattle. Basically the farmer would get two calves for the price of one pregnancy.

But twins in cattle may result in birth complications for the cow and undersized calves with reduced survival rates. Similar risks come with twin pregnancies in horses, which tend to lead to both pregnancy complications that may harm the mare and the birth of weak foals.

DNA holds the answer to what kind of twins

So plenty of animals can give birth to twins. A more complicated question is whether two animal babies born together are identical or fraternal twins.

Female dogs and cats ovulate multiple eggs at one time. Fertilization of individual eggs by distinct spermatazoa from a male produces multiple embryos. This process results in puppies or kittens that are fraternal, not identical, even though they may look very much the same.

Biologists believe that identical twins in most animals are very rare. The tricky part is that lots of animal siblings look very, very similar and researchers need to do a DNA test to confirm whether two animals do in fact share all their genes. Only one documented report of identical twin dogs was confirmed by DNA testing. But no one knows for sure how frequently fertilized animal eggs split and grow into identical twin animal babies.

And reproduction is different in various animals. For instance, nine-banded armadillos normally give birth to identical quadruplets. After a mother armadillo releases an egg and it becomes fertilized, it splits into four separate identical cells that develop into identical pups. Its relative, the seven-banded armadillo, can give birth to anywhere from seven to nine identical pups at one time.

There’s still a lot that scientists aren’t sure about when it comes to twins in other species. Since DNA testing is not commonly performed in animals, no one really knows how often identical twins are born. It’s possible—maybe even likely—that identical twins may have been born in some species without anyone’s ever knowing.

Michael Jaffe is an associate professor of small animal surgery at Mississippi State University. Tracy Jaffe is an assistant clinical professor of veterinary medicine at Mississippi State University

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

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The jury may still be out on plant-based meat alternatives’ economic and environmental viability, but experts largely agree that the seafood industry in its current form is untenable. Overfishing presents countless ecological problems, including plastic pollution and the potential for a wholesale collapse of marine biodiversity. Researchers have been experimenting with seafood alternatives for years, but one company is finally ready to bring its offering to market—and it represents a major moment within the industry.

Austrian-based food-tech startup Revo Foods announced this week that its 3D-printed vegan fish filet “inspired by salmon” is heading to European grocery store shelves—a first for 3D-printed food. According to the company’s September 12 press release, the arrival of “The Filet” represents a pivotal moment in sustainable food, with 3D-printed consumables ready to scale at industrial volumes. Revo Foods’ Filet is likely to be just the first of many other such 3D-printed edible products to soon hit the market.

[Related: Scientists cooked up a 3D printed cheesecake.]

“Despite dramatic losses of coral reefs and increasing levels of toxins and micro plastic contaminating fish, consumer demand for seafood has paradoxically skyrocketed in recent decades,” the company announcement explains. “One promising solution to provide consumers with sustainable alternatives that do not contribute to overfishing is vegan seafood. The key to success of these products lies in recreating an authentic taste that appeals to [consumers].”

The Filet relies on mycoprotein made from nutrition-heavy filamentous fungi, and naturally offers a meat-like texture. Only another 12 ingredients compose Revo’s Filet, such as pea proteins, plant oils, and algae extracts. With its high protein and Omega-3 contents, eating a Revo Filet is still very much like eating regular salmon—of course, without all the standard industrial issues. And thanks to its plant-based ingredients, the Filet also boasts a three-week shelf life, a sizable boost from regular salmon products.

“With the milestone of industrial-scale 3D food printing, we are entering a creative food revolution, an era where food is being crafted exactly according to the customer’s needs,” Revo Foods CEO Robin Simsa said via this week’s announcement.

While Revo’s products are currently only available for European markets, the company says it is actively working to expand its availability “across the globe,” with Simsa telling PopSci the company hopes to enter US markets around 2025. Until then, hungry stateside diners will have to settle for the Revo Salmon dancehall theme song… yes, it’s a real thing.

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What does it mean to be intelligent? If it’s defined by having the biggest brain, then sperm whales—whose noggins are a hefty 20 pounds—would be the brightest creatures on Earth. But, more likely, it’s how a brain is wired. Viewed in this way, intelligence is what gives an organism the best chance to survive and thrive in an environment. Language may be one of the best ways to demonstrate that kind of smarts. 

Though all animals can communicate with others, humans are one of the few species to have a spoken language. Using speech, we could share complex ideas, pass knowledge through generations, and create communities. Whether spoken language actually helped us evolve as species into more advanced beings, however, has never really been tested.

“Language allowing humans to be a more advanced species is an assumption that somebody came up with one day without really trying [to prove] it,” says Erich Jarvis, a professor at Rockefeller University who studies the neurobiology of vocal learning. The idea stuck around, but so have other common beliefs that are not really supported with evidence—like the myth that we only use 10 percent of our brains at any point in time, he points out. 

But Jarvis and his colleagues were able to examine this hypothesis with the help of songbirds. Jarvis’ new study, published today in Science, provides some of the first evidence that vocal learning—one of the crucial components for a spoken language—is associated with problem-solving. Vocal learning is the ability to produce new sounds by imitating others, relying on experience rather than instinct. Birds who could do this and solve problems had bigger brain sizes, the research team found.

The team performed seven cognitive experiments on 214 songbirds from 23 different species. Of these, 21 species were caught from the wild in New York. Two songbirds studied, zebra finches and canaries, are domesticated. The behavioral tests examined the birds’ problem solving, for instance by figuring out how to remove an object to access the food reward. The researchers also gauged two other skills often associated with intelligence: learning by association, plus what’s called reversal learning, in which an animal adjusts its behavior to get a reward.. They then looked at whether being vocal learners helped develop the three skills, comparing 21 bird species to two others, which were vocal non-learners (these birds learned sounds only during a brief developmental period).

[Related: What does brain size have to do with intelligence?]

The biologists noticed a strong relationship between vocal learning and problem-solving skills. Vocal learning bird species could come up with innovative ideas, such as getting seeds or a worm trapped under a cup by removing the obstacle, piercing it, or pulling it apart. “It’s pretty surprising that these two skills are related to intelligence but not the other traits we measured,” explains Jean-Nicolas Audet, an ecologist and neurobiologist at Rockefeller University who served as the lead study author. All three abilities—problem solving, associative learning, and reversal learning—are typically considered “components of intelligence,” he says.

This doesn’t mean that the two bird species who were not vocal learners were stupid. Instead, it shows they did not evolve this one particular form of intelligence. “We have to be careful and very specific when we talk about intelligence because it really depends on which traits we are talking about,” Audet explains.

[Related: Wild birds don’t need your backyard feeders to survive]

Brain size was another benefit to vocal learning that may have supported these problem-solving abilities. The 21 vocal-learning species had slightly larger brains, relative to their body size, than the two who weren’t. Jarvis says it’s possible these big-noggined birds packed more neurons. Or perhaps they evolved to have larger skull space, which gave rise to extra circuits for more advanced vocal learning and problem-solving skills. “This suggests to me that there’s something special about problem solving,” he says. “Like spoken language, it made some species more advanced than others.”

One question left unanswered is why there’s such a strong relationship between problem-solving abilities and vocal learning. The brain areas in charge of vocal learning are not the same ones that get activated when we need to troubleshoot an issue, says Audet. The next step for this team is to take a deeper look into the brains of songbirds and figure out what genes or other brain regions connect these two areas. Some bridge yet undiscovered helps form this type of intelligence.

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A fish with “hands” might seem like an evolutionary oddity—until you remember that all limbs formed from fins. Spotted handfish, which are related to anglerfish, aren’t known so much for their swimming, but instead walk around on the seafloor with modified pectoral fins that look like little fingered flippers. They also use their strange human-like appendages to clean and care for their eggs. The species is so rare today, only 2,000 or so left in the wild in places like the lower Derwent River estuary and Frederick Henry Bay in southeast Australia, according to CSIRO research technician Carlie Devine. 

“We may only see one or two fish over a 60-minute dive, and sometimes none,” Devine said in a recent press release by the Australian government’s science agency. This is why it was such a big deal when runner Kerri Yare bumped into one on the beach in Primrose Sands, Tasmania. The spotted handfish is one of seven handfish species local to Tasmania and one of 14 in the world. But up until this discovery, the spotted handfish was believed to be extinct in Primrose Sands because there hadn’t been a sighting in nearly 20 years.

[Related: An endangered fish’s story follows the vanishing waters of the Rio Grande.]

Beyond their endearing, all-over freckles and unique method of locomotion, spotted handfish are also known as the first marine fish to be flagged as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Prior to the 1990s, it was a pretty common creature in Tasmanian waters, but has since been split up into nine isolated populations. The biggest threat to these walking water beasts is dredge fishing boats in the area searching for scallops, and simultaneously, wrecking the handfish’s habitat and turning them into bycatch. Dredging is also a problem for dolphins, sea turtles, and other marine life. Invasive species like the North Pacific sea star, which love to snack on bottom-dwelling scallops, oysters, and mussels, have only made things worse for the spotted handfish by targeting the sea squirts that they wrap their eggs around. 

Thankfully, dedicated scientists like Devine are keeping the species from teetering into extinction through methods like artificial spawning habitats and in-lab breeding programs. “We also have what we call an insurance population: fish that we collected from the wild that live in commercial aquariums,” Devine said in the statement. “This is so we can keep the species from going extinct. But [it’s] also to breed the fish, keep the juveniles safe until they are a bit older, and put them back in the river in hopes we can increase numbers in the wild. Through this program we’ve already released a small number of juveniles into the wild, and we are excited to see the ongoing impact of our work. We’re not done yet.”

Correction (September 15, 2023): The article previously stated that North Pacific sea stars prey on spotted handfish and their eggs, rather than just the substrate for their eggs.

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Dogs and wolves are well known for their incredible sense of smell, but some new research suggests that they do not solely rely on their olfactory gifts to find food. In a study of multiple wolves and dogs published September 13 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, a team of researchers found that both animals performed better at finding hidden food if they visually observed it being hidden by a human. This suggests that they could be remembering where the food was, and not just following their noses alone. 

[Related from PopSci+: Why your dog needs to smell the world.]

Social learning is an important way for many species—such as chimpanzees, octopuses, and rats—to transmit information. In social learning, one individual learns by observing or interacting with another. Some earlier research has suggested that both wolves and dogs are capable of a form of social learning called observational spatial memory. This is where an individual animal can remember where another individual has hidden food and then snatch it. However, there are still several knowledge gaps to fill in about these abilities and how they may differ between wolves and domesticated dogs. 

In the study, a team from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria used nine timber wolves and eight mongrel or mutt dogs living at the Wolf Science Center in Ernstbrunn, Austria. They tested the ability of each animal to find four, six, or eight caches of food, after either seeing a human hiding them or without seeing the food be hidden.

They found that both dogs and wolves found more of the first five food caches more quickly and with less distance traveled if they had seen the food compared to scenarios where they didn’t observe a human hiding the cache. The authors believe that this suggests that the wolves and dogs didn’t just use their noses to find the treats and provides more support to the theory that wolves and dogs are capable of observational spatial memory.

[Related: Old dogs need to learn new tricks. Here’s why.]

Additionally, wolves outperformed dogs at finding the cache, whether or not they saw the food being hidden. The team believes that this difference in performance may not be due to differing observational spatial memory abilities between wolves and dogs, but from differences in other traits like persistence and food-related motivation.

“While domestication probably affected dogs’ willingness to adjust to humans, the results of the current study collaborate previous findings suggesting that cognitive abilities do not differ very much between dogs and wolves,” the authors wrote.

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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 several quiet rooms in a marine lab in southwest France, dozens of Pacific oysters sit in large glass tanks, quietly living their oyster lives. Each morning, the lights come up slowly, carefully mimicking the rising sun, but at night the rooms never fully darken. The dim glow simulates the light pollution that increasingly plagues many marine species—even in natural habitats.

The results of the experiment, which were recently published, found that artificial light at night can disrupt oyster behavior and alter the activity of important genes that keep the animals’ internal clocks ticking.

Damien Tran, a marine scientist at the Paris-based French National Centre for Scientific Research, and one of the study’s authors, was surprised that even the lowest level of nighttime light that they tested—“below the intensity of the full moon,” he says—was enough to throw off the oysters’ circadian rhythm.

It’s especially remarkable, Tran says, when you remember that oysters don’t have eyes.

How oysters see is a bit of a mystery. While related bivalves, such as scallops, have eye-like organs, oysters likely use patches of specialized cells on their skin to detect light, though scientists have yet to identify the cells or figure out exactly how they might work.

In the recent study, Tran and his colleagues put four tanks of oysters in different rooms and exposed each to a different intensity of artificial light at night. The researchers compared the oysters’ responses with the responses of animals in a control tank that experienced complete nighttime darkness.

Tran’s colleague and coauthor, marine scientist Laura Payton, explains that shell movement is really the only oyster behavior that can be observed. The team fitted half of the oysters in each tank with electrodes to determine when the animals opened their shells—something oysters do to feed, breathe, and mate. In the control tank, oysters were most active in the middle of the day but started to close when the lights went out.

But exposure to artificial light at night caused the oysters in the other four tanks to stay open at inappropriate times, with activity peaking in the early evening. And while oysters have certain genes that typically turn “on” during the day and others that turn on at night, exposure to nighttime light eliminated the difference. For example, the oyster equivalent of a mammal gene that helps make melatonin is usually more active at night, but the researchers observed that the gene stayed highly active during the day, eclipsing the natural circadian rhythm.

In human terms, that’s called insomnia. In oysters, as Payton explains, this response could negatively affect their health, possibly making the animals more vulnerable to disease over the long term. Although, she concedes, many of the specific consequences have yet to be studied.

If oyster populations do suffer, so would the ecology and economy of many regions worldwide, where oysters filter water, protect shorelines from storms, and, as a commercially grown species, provide food and jobs to communities.

Emily Fobert, a marine ecologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved in the research, says the results are compelling. But she critiqued the researchers’ choice to expose just one tank of oysters to each level of artificial light. That means there’s a chance that the study results were caused by something else in the tank, rather than the light alone, she says. Fobert doesn’t question that the changes in oyster behavior and gene expression were due to the artificial light, but having multiple tanks per light level would have made the study more robust, she says.

Nevertheless, artificial light at night is a growing concern for many marine species. Oysters in particular need our help, Payton says, because they can’t run away when their environment is disturbed.

Technologically, Fobert says, it’s completely in our power to improve conditions for the health and well-being of marine species that are affected by light pollution. “We have huge opportunities to get it right.”

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

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Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London.

From the tops of Mount Olympus in Pieria, Greece, to the sandy floors of Rijeka, Croatia, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition explores nature’s magic through the “eyes” of cameras. With each shot and submission, photographers reveal unique moments in the great outdoors in luminous detail, letting us catch a glimpse of the hidden lives of animals, plants, and other natural elements. Maybe it’s from the bow of a weathered fishing boat, encrusted in sea salt, as a local fisherman hauls in the day’s catch under the Ecuadorian sunlight. Or maybe it’s from a chilly prairie covered in fresh snow, as a shaggy bison shakes powdery flakes from its fur.

As the founder and long-time organizer of Wildlife Photographer of the Year, the National History Museum in London has remained committed to sharing entries from eminent photographers who documented natural history subjects, expeditions, and museum exhibits. The winners of the 59th contest will be announced in October and will be followed by a new gallery at the museum. Until then, enjoy these highly commended images selected from thousands of award-worthy images by the judging panel.

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The lives of corvid, or the family of birds that include crows, are shockingly complex. They hold ‘monogamish’ relationships, build tools, hold funerals, solve puzzles, and may even have their own form of democracy. Now, researchers have provided the latest peek into corvid life that adds a new element to their intricate and complicated lives—social climbing. Yes, even birds will ditch their old friends if something better comes along, according to a new study published September 11 in Nature.

For their recent experiment, scientists at universities of Exeter and Bristol utilized the Cornish Jackdaw Project to split a group of jackdaws, members of the crow family found in Europe, western Asia and North Africa, into two randomly sorted groups—A and B. They then tagged the birds with transponder chips, worn like little anklets, to tell who was who. 

[Related: Crows and ravens flexed smarts and strength for world dominance.]

As many animal studies go, there’s got to be some kind of snack involved. This time, the scientists set up a feeding source with two locked doors—one filled with grain, a merely okay morsel for a hungry crow, and the other with a much yummier rendition of some grain and some dried mealworms. If a bird visited alone, only the low-quality snack door opened. With a buddy from the same-tagged group, say two As or two Bs, either both doors unlocked or just the high-quality snack door. But when a jackdaw visited the snack dispenser with a member of the opposite-tagged clique, there were no goodies for anybody.

The choice for the birds then was either loyalty or tasty treats. 

“The jackdaws turned out to be very strategic, quickly learning to hang out with members of their own group and ditching old ‘friends’ from the other group so they could get the best rewards,” author Alex Thornton, a professor of cognitive evolution at Exeter, said in a release.

The same couldn’t always be said for familial relationships. Despite the potentially disappointing outcome, jackdaws would still stick with their offspring, siblings, or mating partners. Some long-term relationships, it turns out, were more important to the feathery creatures than a chance at a delicious morsel. 

“The fundamental idea is that if you need to keep track of interactions you have had with other individuals, remember the outcomes of those interactions and use those to adjust your [behavior],” Thornton told the Guardian. “What we were able to do here was test the idea: can individuals keep track of the outcomes of past interactions and update their relationships. It turns out they can.”

For the authors, these results can give us clues to the evolution of intelligence, memory, and social status in the animal kingdom—and even in the human world. 

“Our findings also help us to understand how societies emerge from individual decisions,” author and Exeter PhD student Josh Arbon said in a release. “The balance between strategically playing the field for short-term benefits and investing in valuable long-term partners ultimately shapes the structure of animal societies, including our own.”

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Climate change is often in the form of extremes in weather like sweltering heat domes, devastating inland flooding or record breaking wildfire seasons, which puts lives and livelihoods at risk for humans. However, the world’s animals who are on the front lines of an ever changing planet experience these changes a little differently. 

[Related: We don’t have a full picture of the planet’s shrinking biodiversity. Here’s why.]

“When we see climate change in the news, we often think of big storms or major weather events but animals are vulnerable to the smallest changes,” wildlife filmmaker and host Bertie Gregory tells PopSci. 

In the new series “Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory,” viewers can get a look into these subtleties and changes. In one episode, the team is searching a dive spot in Indonesia for the elusive devil ray, when a swarm of hundreds of jellyfish approaches.

“Avoiding their stingers was like playing a video game! We were told that huge jellyfish plumes like that were becoming a more regular sight in these tropical waters, which is not a good sign,” Gregory says. 

When Gregory checked the dive thermometer, it read 87.8 degrees Fahrenheit, in water that should have been about 82 degrees. A few degrees might not always sound like much, but has an outsized impact on animals.  “Jellyfish are thought to tolerate climate change better than other species, hence their huge numbers on that day. For us, it meant no other signs of life,” says Gregory.

[Related: Maine’s puffins show another year of remarkable resiliency.]

The series spans the planet and uses high-tech drones and cameras that Gregory calls a “game changer” for wildlife filmmaking. The tech allows the filmmakers to catch a glimpse of the outer lives of animals and even some of their more inner workings.

“We also used a military grade thermal imaging camera to film elephants at night in the depth of the jungle in the Central African Republic—it uses heat to “see” in the dark and elephant ears look incredible as you can see all their veins!” says Gregory.

The series also captures just how difficult it is for terrestrial animals like the pumas of Patagonia and marine mammals like Antarctica’s orca whales to get a solid meal and how climate change continues to threaten vital food sources. 

An episode features a group of Antarctic orcas known as the B1s during what Gregory says was the warmest Antarctic trip he has ever experienced. These killer whales are known for a unique strategy to hunt seals resting on the ice that might remind some orca enthusiasts of the hydroplaning killer whales near Argentina’s Valdés peninsula who thrust their 8,000 to 16,000 pound bodies up onto the beach to catch seals. 

Instead of using surf, sand, and rocks like their Argentinian cousins, these Antarctic killer whales work together as a team to create waves that wash the seals into the water. 

“We witnessed and filmed the staggering intelligence and adaptability of a group of killer whales. There are thought to be just 100 of these unique killer whales in existence, and during filming it was clear they were struggling to ‘wave wash’ seals from ice because there wasn’t much ice,” says Gregory.

[Related: Orcas are attacking boats. But is it revenge or trauma?]

The whales had to constantly adapt their strategy just to get a single seal, sometimes risking an escape from their prey in order to teach the younger whales strategies to carry on to the next generation. 

These constant struggles offer up sobering reminders of the macro and micro ways that the planet is changing and making life more difficult for almost every living thing.. Over one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction, a rate of loss that is 1,000 times greater than previously expected. The  United Nations agreed upon a biodiversity treaty at the end of 2022 pledging to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s wild land and oceans by 2030. Currently, only about 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of marine areas are protected through legislation.

The same location in Indonesia where Gregory and his team encountered the stingy jellyfish swarm is home to the Misool Marine Reserve. Despite climate change’s constant challenges, the area is a conservation success story thanks to community-led initiatives to protect the area from overfishing by implementing specific parts where fishing is allowed.

“Now, Misool is one of the few places on earth where biodiversity is increasing. What they’ve managed to do could be a blueprint for how we can protect oceans around the world and proof that if given the chance, nature can make an amazing comeback,” says Gregory. “It’s good news for wildlife and good news for people.”

“Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory” premieres September 13 on Disney+.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

In 2008, polar bears had the dubious distinction of being the first animal placed on the United States’ endangered species list due to climate threats, specifically the loss of Arctic sea ice. 

But that same year, President George W. Bush’s Interior Department adopted a new policy that prevented federal agencies from considering the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on polar bears, despite those emissions being the main driver of the climate threat to the keystone Arctic predators. Every new ton of emissions leads to more melting of the sea ice that the bears live on. 

The policy-setting 2008 memo was written by Dave Bernhardt, a former fossil fuel industry lobbyist then working as solicitor for the Interior Department who would go on to be President Donald Trump’s secretary of the interior. It required that the projected emissions impacts to polar bears from new proposals, like pipelines or drilling permits, be separated from the effects of historical cumulative emissions.

That set what seemed an impossibly high scientific bar at the time because researchers hadn’t yet fully identified the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions from specific projects on threatened species. But science has cleared that hurdle, said Steven Amstrup, an adjunct biology professor at the University of Wyoming and co-author of a new peer-reviewed paper in Science that could help “close the loophole” in the Endangered Species Act by showing how emissions from new projects on federal lands result in more days during which polar bears can’t feed because of declining sea ice.

The paper establishes a direct link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and cub survival rates using a methodology that can “parse the impact of emissions by source,” said Amstrup, also the chief science officer for Polar Bears International, a nonprofit conservation organization.

For example, the new paper notes that the hundreds of power plants in the U.S. combined will emit more than 60 gigatons of carbon dioxide over their 30-year lifespans. By calculating the amount of warming that carbon will drive, and the amount of Arctic sea ice that heat will melt, they estimate that those emissions will reduce polar bear cub recruitment in the Southern Beaufort Sea population by about 4 percent. By using that formula, they can measure how greenhouse gas emissions from a new project would affect polar bear populations, a calculation that wasn’t as clear when polar bears were listed as vulnerable. 

And the same type of analysis could be applied to measure the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on habitat and demographic changes for other species listed as endangered, Amstrup said.

Emerging Science Supports Climate Lawsuits

Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said a current legal challenge to the Willow oil and gas drilling project in northern Alaska uses a similar argument. 

“Our view is this,” Burger said. “Science supports drawing a causal connection from emissions from specific sources to climate change impacts in specific places. Studies like this one without question reinforce the argument.”

The specific impacts of greenhouse gas emissions are “particularly evident” when it comes to loss of sea ice and the impact on polar bears, the Sabin Center noted in an amicus brief submitted in support of plaintiffs challenging the Willow project, he said.

In the brief, the Sabin Center alleges that the Bureau of Land Management ignored the effect of greenhouse emissions on endangered and threatened species due to the “misconception” that science could not establish “causal links” between emissions and impacts to at-risk species. But since 2008, when the Interior Department’s memo tried to ban consideration of greenhouse gas impacts on listed species, research has made the causal connections more clear, he added. 

“What’s more, climate models and detection and attribution methods can be used to quantify the relative contributions of specific GHG sources to climate change impacts,” Burger wrote in the brief. In some cases, he said, it’s even possible to isolate the per-ton effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as was the case with a 2016 study showing that each additional metric ton of carbon dioxide results in the sustained loss of about 3 square meters of September sea ice in the Arctic.

A 2021 report from the Sabin Center summarizes the scientific findings about the impacts of climate change on endangered species, and the new study “provides useful new methodologies and evidence,” to describe those effects, said Michael Gerrard, an environmental law expert and co-founder of the Sabin Center.

Scientists and legal scholars have been telling federal agencies for quite some time that the Bernhardt Memo is incorrect, said Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute with the Center for Biological Diversity. There are pending lawsuits that have raised that point, but no rulings yet, and the new paper adds extra scientific support to such cases.

“It is a very big deal,” said Siegel, who wrote the petition for listing polar bears as endangered species in 2004. “It’s the first time scientists have actually done the analysis and published their findings in one of the world’s leading scientific journals.”

Amstrup did the original research for the U.S. government that supported the listing of polar bears, she said. The science was so clear that the George W. Bush administration had no choice but to list the species.

But the lack of any meaningful action to protect polar bears since then has been frustrating to Siegel.

“I’m feeling a lot of grief, and I’m feeling a lot of anger, like a lot of people,” she said. “But what keeps me going is that there is still time to make a difference. There’s nothing more important than the actions taken right now to reduce greenhouse pollution.”

She said the failure of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which implements the Endangered Species Act, to properly analyze the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on polar bears and other listed species is “a form of climate denial. It’s going against the science, and it is breaking the law.” 

“Hopefully the publication of this paper will finally convince the Biden administration to follow the science and the law,” she added.

In 2021, scientists and law professors petitioned the Biden Administration to rescind any rules that prevent agencies from considering the impacts of greenhouse gases. Failing to consider them “leaves the government blindfolded in its effort to protect threatened species,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation scientist at Duke University who signed the petition. 

Shaye Wolfe, climate director for the Center For Biological Diversity,said the polar bear is an example of how rules like Bernhardt’s memo have weakened climate action. Without such policies, which the Trump Administration tried to further enshrine in 2019 when Bernhardt was secretary of the interior, “agencies would have another mechanism to consider and reduce carbon emissions,” Wolf said.

“Greenhouse gases are no different from mercury, pesticides or anything else that accumulates in the land, air or water and harms species,” she added. “It’s simply ridiculous not to take them into account.”

Global Warming Increasing Mass Extinction Risk

Right now, there are 1,497 animals on the U.S. endangered species list and the best available science shows that nearly every one of them faces climate-related threats, as do 1 million other species on the planet. 

The number, distribution and density of species—biodiversity—is declining rapidly in an unfolding mass extinction that could equal dramatic die-offs recorded in fossil records and attributed to planetary system-changing events like ice ages, meteor crashes or intense, massive and persistent volcanic eruptions. 

The current wave of species declines and extinctions could have profound impacts on human societies. Food security will be threatened if pollinators, seed-spreading birds or important food fish disappear. About 4 billion people rely primarily on natural medicines for their health care, while about 70 percent of drugs used to treat cancer are natural or are synthetic products inspired by nature. 

And if global warming changes the reproductive cycles of fundamental organisms like plankton, bacteria and fungi, it would have a huge effect on how much carbon dioxide oceans, fields and forests remove from the atmosphere, potentially driving even faster warming of the climate. 

Some groups of animals have been particularly hard hit, with 40 percent of amphibians and about a third of corals and marine mammals facing possible extinction, according to a 2019 United Nations global biodiversity report, which acknowledged that “Nature is essential for human existence and good quality of life.” 

“Most of nature’s contributions to people are not fully replaceable, and some are irreplaceable,” the report added.

Seen as a global call to action, the report concluded that nature is deteriorating worldwide. “The biosphere, upon which humanity as a whole depends, is being altered to an unparalleled degree across all spatial scales,” the report noted. “Biodiversity—the diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems—is declining faster than at any time in human history.”

There are numerous scientific red flags. A 2022 study showed that the current rate of ocean warming could bring the greatest extinction of sea life in 250 million years. And it’s also clear that the loss of biodiversity and the climate crisis must be addressed hand-in-hand, as a 2021 report from the United Nations noted. Global warming is an overarching threat to nearly all species, and if biodiversity collapses, some of the planet’s best natural mechanisms to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and slow atmospheric heating will fail, the report explained.

Every Ton of CO2 Brings New Misery, and Not Just to Polar Bears

Research shows that Human activities are responsible for declining polar bear habitat and most of the damage to the rest of the life-sustaining web of ecosystems and species, and those activities often intensify each other’s effects. Land impacts like urban development and industrialized agriculture strip away carbon-sequestering vegetation and destroy habitat. Greenhouse gas emissions are making parts of the ocean too hot for many fish and melting the snow that sustains wolverines high in the Rocky Mountains of the western United States.

Research like the new study could provide scientific support to get more protection for the few remaining wolverines that depend on a deep mountain snowpack for denning, said Matthew Bishop, the Rocky Mountains office director with the Western Environmental Law Center. 

Climate models and observations show most of those snowfields retreating rapidly, making it crucial to protect any remaining pockets as climate refugia. But despite the models, the federal government claims it doesn’t know enough about how wolverines will respond to the shrinking snow to act on the science, Bishop said. 

“We know they are snow dependent species and that snow is going to be gone,” he said. “That’s enough and the court agrees, but the agencies keep coming back and saying they need to know more.” At some point soon, it’s going to be too late for wolverines and many other climate-sensitive species, he added. 

“When in doubt, any kind of uncertainty should err on the side of protection for the species, and doing what we can to limit all the non-climate stressors,” he said. “Let’s give them a chance to make it. Ultimately, it may not matter. But let’s do everything we can in our power to make sure they stay on the landscape.”

For polar bears, like for wolverines, that means protecting parts of their habitat that might persist for the next 50 or 100 years, even if the outcome beyond that is uncertain. But most of all, as last week’s paper in Science emphasized, it means cutting greenhouse gas emissions immediately and quickly. 

Pairing a biologist and a climatologist for the new paper on how greenhouse gas emissions affect polar bears seemed a logical choice, said co-author Ceclilia Bitz, a scientist at the University of Washington, who studies the connection between climate, sea ice and wildlife habitat.

Focusing on the direct link between greenhouse gas emissions and polar bear habitat makes the paper policy relevant and helps paint a clear picture of the impacts of sea ice decline, she said.

“We’re saying that every additional 23 gigatons of CO2 that we emit as a world causes an additional day that the polar bears have to fast,” she said. “Currently we’re emitting about 50 gigatons per year as a planet.”

That increases the time polar bears go without eating by more than a day each year in each of their populations, she said.

“That’s huge. Imagine if you’re already hungry, going an extra day without eating,” she said. “It’s relentless. As humans, we’re emitting so much CO2 that it’s having these really perceptible and serious consequences.”

Amstrup said the new study gives people one more reference point for understanding the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Polar bears depend on thresholds,” he said. “If they fast for over a certain amount of days, they simply can’t survive.”

The findings again show how closely linked the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis are, Siegel added. “They cannot be separated,” she said. “The survival of all life on Earth, including ours, is at stake.”

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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.

Peter Kyne sits down at his desk to write a eulogy for a fish he’s never met. It’s summer 2019. No scientist has seen signs of the critically endangered Rhynchobatus cooki, or clown wedgefish, since a dead one turned up at a fish market in 1996. Kyne, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University in Australia who studies wedgefish, has worked only with preserved specimens of the spotted sea creature. “This thing’s dust,” Kyne thinks, feeling defeated as he writes the somber news in a draft assessment of the global conservation status of wedgefish species for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Wedgefish are a type of ray. They look like sharks that swam head first into a panini press, with flat faces and sharkish tails. The clown wedgefish is the runt of the 11 known species, about as long as a baseball bat. Along with their cousins, sawfish and guitarfish, wedgefish are among the most endangered animals in the sea, thanks largely to fishers who supply the shark fin trade. Fetching up to US $1,000 per kilogram, wedgefish’s spiny fin meat is some of the most highly sought in this ecocidal economy because it’s perfect for shark fin soup, a delicacy favored by wealthy East Asian seafood connoisseurs.

Wedgefish’s pointy snouts are easily snagged in fishing nets, so they’re also a frequent, unintended casualty of other commercial fisheries. This double whammy has led to the near eradication of wedgefish worldwide. Nine species are critically endangered. Kyne is about to add an extinction to that list.

Just hours before submitting the final assessment, though, Kyne learns that a dead clown wedgefish has just shown up at a Singapore fish market. Relieved, he and his colleagues revise their work. But the swift action necessary to help the species won’t be possible without more information. The scientists don’t even know the critter’s habitat requirements. Somehow, they must find out where the last holdouts live.

Kyne mentions the problem in a Zoom meeting about wedgefish conservation. Luckily for Kyne, his friend Matthew McDavitt is among the attendees. McDavitt is an amateur academic well versed in an emerging research methodology that turns the virtual sea of social media posts into information scientists can use to track the world’s rarest species. His curiosity ignited, McDavitt gets to work. Kyne doesn’t know it yet, but the hunt for the clown wedgefish is on.

Matthew McDavitt happens to be an expert on wedgefish and their relatives, but he’s no scientist. He grew obsessed with sawfish as a kid, when the ray’s long, toothy snout hooked his curiosity. At university, McDavitt studied archaeology and became fascinated with ancient cultural ties to sawfish when he learned the Aztecs buried sawfish snouts under their temples and rendered the fish’s likeness in paintings.

After graduating, he wanted to study the sawfish’s importance to other cultures around the world. But sawfish-adjacent ethnozoologist jobs weren’t exactly falling from the sky, so McDavitt pivoted to a legal career. He earned his law degree and became a research attorney, ghostwriting trial briefs and law articles for other attorneys, judges, and mediators, but he never gave up his passion. He started obsessing over guitarfish and wedgefish, too, cramming his marine studies into what little free time he had, sometimes unable to touch them for months. “I do it on breaks. I put in the time when I can,” he says. “I do it on weekends sometimes.”

In the early 2000s, as the internet gained traction and social media began its rise, McDavitt mined a treasure trove of information about wedgefish and sawfish—fishing-trip photos, sightings, ancient art, whatever he could find. Over two decades, he compiled thousands of pictures and posts about various species and stored them on his computer.

At first, McDavitt served only his own curiosity about different cultures’ connections to his favorite fish. But along the way, as he contacted ecologists who studied sharks and rays to ask questions and share his findings, he discovered species in locations where they hadn’t been formally recorded before. In some cases, he found what his new ecologist friends suspected were entirely new species. “I’ll often get into work and there, in my inbox, there’s something else he’s found,” says Kyne, who met McDavitt at a sawfish conservation workshop. “I’m like, Matt, how do you do this?” McDavitt began to realize his ethnozoological research could be used to study and protect imperiled marine animals.

McDavitt was practicing what is now known as iEcology, which relies on online public data sources to study the natural world. Scientists can download thousands of records of the species they’re studying without setting foot in the field. “It’s a huge amount of data,” says Ivan Jarić, a professor at Université Paris-Saclay in France and one of iEcology’s most devout advocates. “It is, in many cases, freely available, so it’s easy and cheap to obtain it.”

Many social media posts come tagged with dates and locations, allowing scientists to track animals through space and time to study movement patterns, interspecies behavior, and the abundance and spread of invasive or endangered species. One study used pictures and videos from Italian tourists to track blue sharks along the Mediterranean coast over a decade. Another used Facebook and Instagram posts to count whales on their annual migrations along the coast of Portugal. Scientists in Hawai‘i have used tourist photos to monitor critically endangered Hawaiian monk seal populations.

iEcology’s origins trace back to at least 2011, but the method began to gain traction in the past several years, as Jarić and other scientists proselytized its advantages. It got another boost in 2020, when the pandemic scuttled fieldwork for many scientists, as iEcology offered them a remote way to continue their research. “It basically saved two years of my career,” says Valerio Sbragaglia, a behavioral ecologist at the Spanish National Research Council’s Institute of Marine Science, who spent the COVID-19 lockdown using amateur angler videos to monitor the spread of an invasive grouper species as it pushed north through a warming Mediterranean Sea.

There are other advantages, too. Field studies can be a constant game of catch-up, where data may become outdated before ecologists can publish their analyses. But iEcology allows them to monitor animals in near real time. These tools also make ecological surveys more accessible to scientists who can’t secure funding for expensive field trips. In Brazil, for instance, researchers used YouTube videos to find examples of people releasing pet fish into wild waterways, where they multiplied and became invasive. “For a developing country,” Sbragaglia says, “it’s a first source of information that can support future research.”

McDavitt’s iEcology skills have earned him a reputation among marine ecologists as a sort of super citizen scientist. His research has been cited in scientific papers detailing the illegal shark fin trade, and he has published his own research on the importance of sawfish to Indigenous peoples in Australia. McDavitt’s work was cited numerous times in a 2007 proposal that convinced the governing body behind the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, to restrict the trade of seven species of endangered sawfish. “I’m good at finding weird things,” he says.

McDavitt begins his search for the clown wedgefish shortly after his 2019 Zoom meeting with Kyne. The first thing he does is create a methodology for sifting through social media posts. The known clown wedgefish sightings are all at fish markets in either Jakarta or Singapore. McDavitt figures the creatures must live somewhere between the two places, a vast stretch of sea dotted with thousands of islands, occupied by millions of people.

With this in mind, McDavitt compiles a list of about 25 common names for wedgefish from the local Indonesian, Chinese, and Malay dialects spoken across the western Indonesian archipelago. He targets the islands lining the coasts of Sumatra and Borneo, sometimes narrowing his queries to individual towns and villages he finds on Google Maps. His searches produce thousands of posts, many by local subsistence fishers showing off their catches. Dozens include wedgefish, but they’re all the wrong species. “I’m just going through picture after picture after picture, and most of it is, of course, not useful to me,” McDavitt says.

In August, several weeks after Kyne almost wrote off the clown wedgefish, McDavitt hunches over a desk buried in teetering piles of legal paperwork, scrolling through Facebook posts. He pauses on yet another wedgefish photo. “It looked weird,” McDavitt says. The picture, from a 2015 post, shows a somber young Indonesian man hefting a small, flat fish. The white-edged fins and playful polka dots are unmistakable. McDavitt has found the clown wedgefish.

He jumps up from his desk and shouts for his wife. Then he emails Kyne, who has no idea what his friend has been up to until he receives the message. “If it was in the morning, I would’ve had coffee. If it was late at night, I would’ve had red wine. In either case, I probably did spit some out,” Kyne remembers.

The photo comes from Lingga Island, part of a cluster of islands wedged between Sumatra, Singapore, and Borneo. Kyne hurries to apply for grants to fund a full field study of the area. McDavitt keeps combing the web. Over the next few months, he finds five more photos of clown wedgefish from local fishers; some pictures are only a few weeks old. He and Kyne map their findings, establishing for the first time in Western science the clown wedgefish’s range, and publish their work in 2020.

Kyne also taps Charles Darwin University PhD candidate Benaya Meitasari Simeon, who’s spent years researching other wedgefish species, to spearhead the study’s local initiatives. Simeon grew up eating wedgefish, a traditional Indonesian food. Now she’s vowed to protect them; she even sports a wedgefish tattoo on one arm. Simeon musters a team of students and locals to hang illustrated wedgefish guides—scientific wanted posters—in areas where the fish has shown up on Facebook, to help local fishers identify clown wedgefish in their catch and report sightings.

A big part of Simeon’s job is convincing locals to participate in the project. Some are wary of conservationists because they fear new fishing restrictions could harm their livelihoods. The key, Simeon says, is explaining to fishers that “if it’s gone, it’s gone forever and your kids cannot see it anymore.” Her efforts pay off: her network reports around 10 clown wedgefish catches. All are dead.

In early 2023, Simeon travels from her home in Jakarta to a Sumatran hotel room where her colleagues have a juvenile clown wedgefish for her to inspect. She takes the palm-sized spotted carcass into the hotel bathroom for a closer look. She cries as she touches it. “I saw hope,” she says.

As popular platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram become major sources of research material, scientists must grapple with new challenges. Even experts can misidentify species in amateur photos when they can’t measure, touch, or see the creature for themselves. Researchers must meticulously review and confirm the records they’ve gathered to avoid false identifications. Some have been less thorough than others.

Last year, a group of European scientists published a paper claiming to have found the first record of a young goblin shark in the Mediterranean, a deep-sea species with a face straight out of a Ridley Scott sci-fi flick. They based their conclusion on a photo taken on a Mediterranean beach. But some experts noticed that the juvenile “shark” appeared to be missing a gill and was strangely rigid for a dead fish. McDavitt spotted the fraud immediately. The proof was on his living room shelf: a plastic goblin shark toy that matched the supposed animal in the picture. The authors retracted their paper after McDavitt and others raised concerns.

Scientists using social media data to study species that have been nearly eradicated by poaching run the risk of exposing those animals to further harm. “If it’s a very rare species, you don’t want to publicize the location where the species can be found because of potential misuse,” Jarić says. And the research raises a familiar ethical conundrum. In a social media–saturated world where personal privacy is itself endangered, how do you ethically scrape pictures and videos provided by the masses without their consent? For now, scientists manage this by anonymizing posts, blurring profile photos, and removing usernames.

And there is always the prospect of misinformation and falsehoods making it into data sets. Artificial intelligence (AI) may prove a complicated partner in this regard. Researchers like Sbragaglia have recruited coders to develop machine-learning models for disseminating massive arrays of data about a specific species. They hope these AI models will pull, in a matter of hours, databases of pictures and videos that the McDavitts of the world would need months to compile. But with the alarming advance of artificially generated images, AI could also hinder scientists’ ability to tell real pictures from fake ones. “This is terrifying,” Sbragaglia says. “But I think for the moment, it’s far away.”

On a windy day in June 2023, Kyne dives into the turquoise waters off the coast of Singkep Island, just south of the location where McDavitt discovered the first clown wedgefish post in 2019. Jungle-clad mountains loom in the distance. Palm trees lean drunkenly over white sand beaches. Simeon and other scientists watch from the boat as Kyne disappears into the depths, clutching an empty one-liter bottle. Fleets of commercial fishing boats dot the surrounding sea, underscoring the urgency of the task.

Kyne and Simeon are here to collect samples for an eDNA study, supported by three years of funding that the Save Our Seas Foundation supplied for the wedgefish search, thanks in large part to McDavitt’s findings. When a creature swims through the water, it sheds genetic material that can reveal its presence once water samples taken from that area are analyzed. When the survey results are back in six months to a year, the scientists hope they can zero in on where clown wedgefish are hiding. Ultimately, they hope to convince the Indonesian government to enact laws that specifically protect the species. They have some traction: officials have already sought Simeon’s advice on where to implement stricter protections for endangered marine animals.

As Kyne swims toward the ocean floor, the water grows thick with debris. He can barely see the bottle in his hand when he reaches the sandy bottom, unscrews the lid, and fills it with seawater that he hopes will contain the next clue in his team’s long quest. The clown wedgefish may remain a shrinking target in a murky sea, and Kyne has yet to see one alive. But now, as he caps the bottle and swims for the surface, he’s confident the species is still hanging on, somewhere beyond the silt and trash. McDavitt keeps finding evidence of the fish on Facebook, including several specimens from a new location on the Sumatran coast. All the team has to do is find them IRL—in real life.

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

The post How an internet sleuth rekindled hope for the survival of the clown wedgefish appeared first on Popular Science.

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Australia is currently home to the only living species of their endangered and iconic koalas, but there once were multiple species spread across the continent. Now, the discovery of another marsupial ancient relative is helping scientists fill in a 30 million year evolutionary gap. The findings are detailed in a study published September 4 in the journal Scientific Reports.

[Related: With bulging eyes and a killer smile, this sabertooth was an absolute nightmare.]

In 2014 and 2020, study co-author Arthur Crichton, a PhD student at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, found fossil teeth of the new species, named Lumakoala blackae, at the Pwerte Marnte Marnte fossil site in central Australia. The teeth are believed to be roughly 25 million years old. 

“Our computer analysis of its evolutionary relationships indicates that Lumakoala is a member of the koala family (Phascolarctidae) or a close relative, but it also resembles several much older fossil marsupials called Thylacotinga and Chulpasia from the 55 million-year-old Tingamarra site in northeastern Australia,” Crichton said in a statement. 

According to Chrichton, it was previously suggested that the enigmatic Thylacotinga and Chulpasia may have been more closely related to marsupials from South America.  This new discovery of Lumakoala suggests that they could actually be early relatives of herbivorous Australian marsupials including possums, kangaroos, koalas, and wombats.

“This group (Diprotodontia) is extremely diverse today, but nothing is known about the first half of their evolution due to a long gap in the fossil record,” said Crichton. 

If the study’s hypothesis is correct, the diprotodontian fossil record would be aged back by another 30 million years. Additionally, wombats, kangaroos, koalas and possums split off from other marsupials between roughly 65 million and 50 million years ago.

“These Tingamarran marsupials are less mysterious than we thought, and now appear to be ancient relatives of younger, more familiar groups like koalas,” Robin Beck, study co-author and evolutionary biologist at the University of Salford in England, said in a statement. “It shows how finding new fossils like Lumakoala, even if only a few teeth, can revolutionize our understanding of the history of life on Earth.” 

The study also raises some new questions, including whether these relatives of herbivorous marsupials in Australia once lived in Antarctica and South America. According to Beck, some South American fossils look very similar to the marsupials found at the Tingamarra site. 

[Related: This 500-pound Australian marsupial had feet made for walkin.’]

It also reports that two other types of koala called Madakoala and Nimiokoala lived alongside Lumakoala and filled in different ecological niches in the forests that flourished in central Australia about 25 million years ago. The late Oligocene (about 23–25 million years ago) was  “kind of the koala heyday,” according to the Flinders University paleontologist and study co-author Gavin Prideaux.

“Until now, there’s been no record of koalas ever being in the Northern Territory; now there are three different species from a single fossil site,” Prideaux said in a statement. “While we have only one koala species today, we now know there were at least seven from the late Oligocene – along with giant koala-like marsupials called ilariids.”  

At this time, iliariids were the largest marsupials living in Australia, weighing in at up to 440 pounds. Iliariids lived alongside a strong-toothed wombat relative named Mukupirna fortidentata and a strange possum named Chunia pledgei.

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The mechanics of how athletes like New York Giants quarterback Daniel Jones’ are able to throw a perfect spiral or how wide receiver Darius Slayton may extend his elbow to reach for the catch may have ancient roots. These skills may have first evolved as a natural braking system for our primate ancestors who simply needed a safe way to get out of trees. 

[Related: Chilly climates may have forged stronger social bonds in some primates.]

In a study published September 6 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, a team from Dartmouth found that apes and early human ancestors likely evolved free-moving shoulders and flexible elbows as a way to slow their descent from trees while gravity pulled down on their bodies. Versatile appendages that could throw spears for hunting and defense, climb trees, and gather food were essential for survival—especially as early humans left forests for grassy savannas.

“There’s a lot we still don’t understand about the origin of apes,” study co-author and Dartmouth University paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva tells PopSci. “There was a common ancestor to monkeys and apes that lived about 25 to 30 million years ago and then there was a divergence and now we have these two different kinds of primates. But why the convergence?”

One of the possibilities is different ecological, physical, and behavioral niches related to primate size. The first apes evolved about 20 million years ago and are bigger than other early primates. Getting out of a tree presented a new set of challenges for these bigger primates, since typically the bigger the animal, the greater the risk of injury from a fall. Natural selection would have eventually favored anatomies that allowed early apes to safely descend from the trees. 

In the study, the team used sports-analysis and statistical software to compare videos and still-frames of chimpanzees and small monkeys called mangabeys climbing in the wild. They saw that mangabeys and chimps climbed up the trees similarly, with their shoulders and elbows mostly bent close to the body. 

However, when it was time to climb down, chimpanzees extended their arms above their heads to hold onto branches, similar to how a person going down a ladder, as their weight pulls them down. This process called “downcliming” appears to be significant in the evolution of apes and early humans.

“Our study broaches the idea of downclimbing as an undervalued, yet incredibly important factor in the diverging anatomical differences between monkeys and apes that would eventually manifest in humans,” study co-author and Dartmouth graduate student Luke Fannin said in a statement. 

[Related: How to hike downhill safely and comfortably.]

These flexible shoulders and elbows passed on from ancestral apes would have allowed early humans such as Australopithecus to climb into trees at night for safety and then come down in the daylight unscathed. Once Homo erectus could use fire to protect itself at night, the human form took on the broader shoulders capable of a 90-degree twist that worked with free moving shoulders and elbows to make human ancestors excellent shots with a spear for hunting.

“The idea that downclimbing could be such a strong evolutionary force as to change the nature of how our bones and range of motion evolved was very fascinating,” study co-author Mary Joy tells PopSci. “Not a lot of the field really thinks about downclimbing as its own motion with implications on natural selection.” Joy brought her experience as a trail runner and athlete to the study to bring in a different perspective to looking at biological sciences and evolution. 

The team also used skeletal collections from Harvard University to study the anatomical structure of chimpanzee arm alongside remains in The Ohio State University’s collections to study  mangabey arms. Chimpanzees are more like humans than mangabeys and have a shallow ball-and-socket shoulder that allows for a greater range of movement. Chimps can also fully extend their arms due to a reduced length of bone located just behind the elbow called the olecranon process.

Mangabeys and other monkeys are built more like four-legged animals like cats and dogs, with deep pear-shaped shoulder sockets and elbows that have a protruding olecranon process, which makes the joint look like the letter L. These joints are more stable, but they have a more limited range of movement and flexibility.

The analysis showed that the angle of a chimp’s shoulders was 14 degrees greater during their descent than when scaling a tree. The arm also extended outward at the elbow 34 degrees more when climbing down a tree than climbing up. The angles at which the mangabeys positioned their shoulders and elbows were only about four degrees or less when ascending a tree versus downclimbing.

“If cats could talk, they would tell you that climbing down is trickier than climbing up and many human rock climbers would agree. But the question is why is it so hard,” study co-author and 

anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Nathaniel Dominy said in a statement. “The reason is that you’re not only resisting the pull of gravity, but you also have to decelerate. 

[Related: Lucy, our ancient human ancestor, was super buff.]

According to DeSilva, the question of “how did we not see this before” in regards to downclimbing was one of the most surprising parts of the study. The fresh eyes of both Joy and graduate student Fannin were crucial in uncovering one of evolution’s hidden wonders. 

“Our evolutionary ancestry is this wonderful example of how evolution just sort of tinkers and tweaks pre-existing forms,” says DeSilva. “Our bodies are bodies that have been just tweaked and modified through natural selection over millions of years, to give us the bodies we have now, but there are all these wonderful echoes of our ancestry in our bodies today.”

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New Zealand’s quirky and critically endangered kākāpō have begun to return to the country’s mainland for the first time in almost 40 years. Kākāpōs are the heaviest parrots in the world, with some exceeding six pounds, and they have a lifespan of up to 90 years. Like penguins and ostriches, they can’t fly, so kākāpōs climb trees and forage on the ground for nuts and seeds to eat.  

[Related: A flightless parrot is returning to mainland New Zealand after a 40-year absence.]

The big, green, nocturnal birds used to be widespread across New Zealand, but were hunted to near extinction and threatened by non native predators like cats and dogs. Popular Science magazine described these “curious” green birds as already being “doomed to early extermination” all the way back in April 1895. 

The roughly 250 or so individual birds that are left are managed by New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC) and the South Island’s Ngāi Tahu tribe on five islands that are free of predators. Now equipped with 21st Century genetic science, research platform Genomics Aotearoa is funding high-quality genetic sequencing of almost the entire kākāpō population. The results of an early study of how these full genomic sequences will help manage the health of these iconic birds was published August 28 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Establishing genetic sequencing methods is not expected to only play a part in kākāpō survival, but other endangered species throughout New Zealand and the rest of the world. Conservation genomics is part of a growing trend in the field. In 2019, a team from San Diego and the University of Hawaii used advanced DNA sequencing technology to create a nearly complete genome assembly for Hawaii’s only remaining lineage of the crow family ‘alalā (Corvus hawaiiensis). The sequencing gave conservationists critical clues into the disease susceptibility, population-level diversity, and genetic load of the alalā to better inform their policies.

The same information could help the kākāpō thrive. This work over the last year has produced two very significant outcomes. First, it has given the team an in-depth understanding of kākāpō biology. It has also produced a high-quality code and reusable pipeline, which allows other researchers to rapidly use these methods in their own work and advanced New Zealand’s genomic capability.

“Kākāpō suffer from disease and low reproductive output, so by understanding the genetic reasons for these problems, we can now help mitigate them,” Andrew Digby, the DOC’s Science Advisor for Kākāpō Recovery, said in a statement. “It gives us the ability to predict things like kākāpō chick growth and susceptibility to disease, which changes our on-the-ground management practices and will help improve survival rates.”

[Related: Eavesdropping on pink river dolphins could help save them.]

Diby added that the Kakapo125+ project is another example of how genetic data can assist population growth. The 125 refers to the number of kākāpō living when the project began in 2015. “The novel genetic and machine learning tools developed can be applied to improve the productivity and survival of other taonga under conservation management,” said Digby.

The sequencing technique was developed by University of Otago microbial scientist Joseph Guhlin and an international team of researchers and could have impacts outside of New Zealand. 

“Using technology created by Google, we have achieved what is likely the highest quality variant dataset for any endangered species in the world,” said Guhlin. “This dataset is made available, through DOC and Ngai Tahu, for future researchers working with kākāpō.”

The post The next frontier in saving the world’s heaviest parrots: genome sequencing appeared first on Popular Science.

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For the second year in a row, the Atlantic puffins living on the rocky islands off Maine’s coast had a rebound year for fledgling chicks, all in the face of record warm waters due to climate change. This second consecutive rebound year is welcome news, after 90 percent of nesting puffins failed to raise a single chick in 2021 while the climate change in New England has put this species, and others like humpback whales and the zooplankton at the base of the Gulfs food web, in jeopardy.

[Related: Cyclones can be fatal for seabirds, but not in the way you think.]

The Gulf of Maine and its bays are among the world’s fastest-warming bodies of water. Since the early 1980s, it has warmed about four degrees Fahrenheit, while the global ocean has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the same period of time. The rising heat has affected the fish stocks in the area that puffins and other species rely on. Haddock used to make up a large portion of puffin diets, but populations have fluctuated in recent years, first increasing in 2017 due to federal management to this year showing signs of a decrease. 

However, a small eel-like fish called the sand lance has been abundant this year. The fish are only about four to eight inches long, but are high in fats and make them a great forage fish for seabirds. A 2020 study found that 72 Atlantic Ocean animal species from whales to bluefish to gannets eat sand lances in the waters from Greenland to North Carolina. 

According to the Maine Monitor, the sand lance were less abundant in the region by mid-July, but the puffins were found feasting on a mixture of haddock, hake, and redfish depending upon where they were. Don Lyons, the director of conservation science at National Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute, told the Maine Monitor, “I can’t offhand recall such a seamless transition from one fish to another. It tells you a lot about the resourcefulness of puffins and at the same time, it’s a reminder of how much we still don’t know of when and where food is for seabirds, and how fast that all can change.”

Lyons estimated that there are now as many as 3,000 puffins in Maine, what he calls a stable population. In 2022, about two-thirds of the puffins fledged—or developed wing feathers that are large enough for flight. While they didn’t reach that number this year, they had a better season than the catastrophic 2021 season despite a rainy and hot summer. The Audubon Society’s Project Puffin has been monitoring the population for 50 years and uses decoys, mirrors, and recordings to attract the birds to suitable nesting sites to raise the next generation of birds.

Maine’s puffin population was once as low as 70 pairs on Matinicus Rock 25 miles off the coast. They were hunted for their feathers and meat in the early 20th Century, but by the 1970’s Audubon conservationists worked to grow puffin colonies in the state, by bringing chicks from Canada to Maine’s Eastern Egg Rock. Puffins still call that tiny rock home, in addition to Seal Island and Petit Manan Island. Live cams keep an eye on them and volunteers and scientists monitor their progress every year.

Currently, Maine’s population are the only breeding Atlantic puffins in the United States. The species lives in areas of the North Atlantic from Maine and Canada eastward to Europe. Iceland, a country well known for its puffins, has seen the puffin populations decline by 70 percent in 30 years largely due to lack of food due to warming oceans.

[Related: Emperor penguins suffer ‘unprecedented’ breeding failure as sea ice disappears.]

While this ability to reproduce despite huge environmental changes does speak to their resiliency as a species, puffins are still at risk of long term dangers from marine heat waves, sea level rise threatening nesting sites, and a loss of food.  

“The problem with climate change is these breeding failures and low breeding productivity years are now becoming chronic,” Bill Sydeman, president and chief scientist of the California-based Farallon Institute, told the AP. “There will be fewer young birds in the population that are able to recruit into the breeding population.”

Some of the ways to help Maine puffin population and other coastal birds in the face of this constant uncertainty include Audubon’s adopt-a-puffin program and advocating for your local seabirds by contacting regional elected officials.

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Weeks before we even think about getting sandbags or boarding up windows to prevent hurricane damage, an underwater evacuation begins. Sharks, sea snakes, and other wildlife will make preparations to escape becoming trapped or hurt as massive storms approach a coast. 

Much of Florida’s aquatic life—including species as diverse as manatees and alligators—know what to do in a storm like Hurricane Idalia. After all, these native animals have had millions more years of practice than us. But those age-old skills will only become more useful as hurricanes become more intense from climate change. 

“Aquatic animals respond to storms for the same reason we do—to avoid injury, death, and the destruction from hurricanes,” says Bradley Strickland, a postdoctoral researcher who studies aquatic animal response to hurricanes and climate change at William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Still, some animals are better equipped to weather or evade the storms than others. And sharks are among the best. 

[Related: Sharks are learning to love coastal cities]

Even when a hurricane is far on the horizon, the atmosphere changes: the barometric pressure drops. “From two weeks out of a hurricane, sharks can actually detect the change and start heading for deeper water,” says Neil Hammerschlag, director of the shark research and conservation program at the University of Miami. The air around a hurricane decreases in pressure as a storm strengthens and wind speeds increase. Sharks can sense that, allowing them to flee long before Florida’s human residents were given mandatory evacuation orders. 

“Similar to the way we use meteorological technologies and observations about the changing wind and temperature before a storm, aquatic animals have ways to sense the approach of a storm,” Strickland says. Sharks use their sensitive inner ears to detect a gathering storm’s pressure changes, he adds. And, because of their incredible swimming abilities (some can swim up to 45 miles per hour), they can quickly escape oncoming storms—that is, if they choose to. 

Smaller shark species and juveniles opt to escape to deeper water to avoid the turbulence near the shore. For them, “staying in shallow water would be like a shark tornado,” Hammerschlag says, because hurricanes can push currents up to 300 feet below the ocean’s surface. For smaller sharks that remain in the shallows, they risk being swept inland.

Yet other larger predators, like tiger sharks that grow up to 14 feet and 1,400 pounds, view hurricanes as an opportunity for the ultimate sea smorgasbord. By tracking tiger sharks during and after Hurricane Irma, Hammerschlag noticed that “not only did they not run away, but they may have been taking advantage of the things that were dying, either birds that got washed into the water or fish and invertebrates that collided with debris.” After the storm, he adds, there were “higher numbers of tiger sharks in the area for about two weeks.”

For aquatic and semi-aquatic animals that can’t ride out the storm or swim beyond its reach, finding shelter may be the superior option for survival. “Sea snakes will seek refuge in volcanic rocks to avoid typhoons,” Strickland says. “Alligators likely hunker down to weather a storm by finding easy to get in and out of places,” he adds. Some smaller gators may get swept away by hurricanes; others might change their foraging patterns altogether to stay safe. 

Other species may be less lucky. After Hurricane Ian struck Florida in 2022, clean-up crews had to remove debris from the holes where burrowing owls live, since the threatened birds can’t claw through the trash on their own, as one wildlife rehabilitation expert told CNN. And when storms shove salty seawater inland, increases in salinity can disturb trees or turtles that dwell in freshwater ecosystems.

Along the coast, graceful manatees, too, have been found in particularly sticky situations post-hurricane. Although weight-wise they are comparable to a tiger shark, speed-wise they are definitely not, cruising up to 15 mph only if they really push it. And try as they might to hunker down before a storm, this doesn’t always work out for them. Instead, they may get swept out of coastal waters by floods. Others, curious to explore new streams, have been found stuck in smaller ponds, forests, or even by roads after post-storm swims through flooded areas. Yet hurricanes rank low on the dangers to manatees, a threatened keystone species in Florida often imperiled by watercraft.

Even if Hurricane Idalia is the first big tempest that a Floridian animal will experience, the odds are good it will take some kind of action. “We see animals evacuating the places they call home in advance of a major storm despite, in some cases, having never experienced a hurricane within their lifetime,” Strickland says. “This shows just how innate it is to protect yourself from a storm by preparing or fleeing compared to just waiting it out.”

This post has been updated. It was originally published on September 28, 2022.

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A newly discovered three-eyed relative is disappointingly unrelated to the eerie three-eyed ravens of Game of Thrones. But this Cambrian-era beast is a relative of today’s insects and boasts some fearsome limbs. The unique fossilized animal was described in a study published August 28 in the journal Current Biology. 

[Related: This ancient ‘mothership’ used probing ‘fingers’ to scrape the ocean floor for prey.]

The animal, scientific name Kylinxia, was found in 520 million year old rocks in a fossil deposit called the Cambrian Chengjiang biota near the town of Chengjiang in southern China. More than 250 species of exceptionally well-preserved fossil organisms have already been described from this location, which gives scientists a glimpse of what was going on in the world’s oceans as they developed. 

Importantly, Kylinxia is filling in some evolutionary gaps in our understanding of the evolution of animals known as arthropods. This phylum of animals includes insects, crabs, shrimp, scorpions, spiders, and centipedes among others. Arthropods have an exoskeleton made of a tough material called chitin that is mineralized with calcium carbonate, as well as a body divided into segments and paired jointed appendages. They are considered some of Earth’s most successful species and over 85 percent of all known animal species are classified as arthropods.

Kylinxia was about the size of a large shrimp, had a pair of limbs that it likely used to catch prey, and a signature trio of eyes on its head. 

“Most of our theories on how the head of arthropods evolved were based on these early-branching species having fewer segments than living species,” Greg Edgecombe, a co-author of the study and arthropod evolution expert at London’s Natural History Museum, said in a statement. “Discovering two previously undetected pairs of legs in Kylinxia suggests that living arthropods inherited a six-segmented head from an ancestor at least 518 million years ago.”

After its initial discovery, Kylinxia was imaged using a CT scanner. The scan revealed that more soft parts of the animals’ anatomy were also buried in the rock. While there are plenty of species of arthropods preserved in the fossil record, most fossils only preserve the hard skeletons. 

[Related: Newly discovered fossils give a whole new meaning to jumbo shrimp.]

“The preservation of the fossil animal is amazing,” study co-author and University of Leicester PhD student Robert O’Flynn said in a statement. “After CT-scanning we can digitally turn it around and literally stare into the face of something that was alive over 500 million years ago. As we spun the animal around, we could see that its head possesses six segments, just as in many living arthropods.”

This new specimen was nearly complete, which enabled the team to identify the six segments that made up its body: the head, a second segment with its grasping limbs, and the other four segments which have a pair of jointed limbs.

“Robert and I were examining the micro-CT data as part of his doctoral thesis in the hope of refining and correcting previous interpretation of head structures in this genus, Kylinxia,” study co-author and Yunnan Key Laboratory for Palaeobiology paleobiologist Yu Liu said in a statement. “Amazingly, we found that its head is composed of six segments, as in, e.g., insects.”

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A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a live, three inch-long worm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman in June 2022. The roundworm Ophidascaris robertsi is native to Australia and its larvae were also present in other organs in the patient’s body, including the liver and lungs. This is the first known human case of this parasitic infection and it is described in a case study published in the September 2023 issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

[Related: Rare parasites found in 200 million-year-old reptile poop.]

The patient was first admitted to her local hospital in late January 2021 after experiencing three weeks of diarrhea and abdominal pain, followed by dry cough, night sweats, and fever. By June 2022, she was also experiencing forgetfulness and depression, and was referred to Canberra Hospital. While there, she underwent brain surgery when an MRI revealed some abnormalities.

Neurosurgeon Hari Priya Bandi was performing a biopsy when she used forceps to pull the parasite out of the woman’s brain. She immediately contacted Canberra Hospital infectious diseases physician Sanjaya Senanayake, saying “Oh my god, you wouldn’t believe what I just found in this lady’s brain—and it’s alive and wriggling,” Bandi said, according to The Guardian.

According to the case study, this is the first known human Ophidascaris infection and the first to involve the brain of a mammalian species. These worms are common to carpet pythons and they typically live in a python’s stomach and esophagus. Humans infected with Ophidascaris robertsi larvae would be considered accidental parasite hosts.

“Normally the larvae from the roundworm are found in small mammals and marsupials, which are eaten by the python, allowing the life cycle to complete itself in the snake,” Senanayake, who is also one of the co-authors of the case study, said in a statement. 

The researchers believe that the woman from southeastern New South Wales likely caught the roundworm after collecting Warrigal greens next to a nearby lake where a python had shed the parasite via its feces. The patient used the Warrigal greens for cooking and was probably infected with the parasite directly from touching the native grass or after consuming the greens.

According to the team, this world-first case highlights the danger of zoonotic transmission, or  diseases and infections that pass from animals to humans. This risk is growing as humans and animals start to live more closely together and habitats continue to overlap. 

“There have been about 30 new infections in the world in the last 30 years. Of the emerging infections globally, about 75 percent are zoonotic, meaning there has been transmission from the animal world to the human world. This includes coronaviruses,” Senanayake said. “This Ophidascaris infection does not transmit between people, so it won’t cause a pandemic like SARS, COVID-19, or Ebola. However, the snake and parasite are found in other parts of the world, so it is likely that other cases will be recognised in coming years in other countries.”

[Related: Mind-controlling ‘zombie’ parasites are real.]

The patient was sent home following the surgery with antiparasitic drugs and has not returned to hospital since, but they are monitoring her since this is such a new infection.  

Despite this case being extremely rare and spine-tingling, parasitic infection is actually extremely common. One of the most widespread types is pinworm (Enterobius vermicularis or threadworm), and some estimates say it is present in over one billion people around the world. They are specific to humans and can cause intense itching and are passed from person-to-person.

Two types of hookworm—Necator americanis and Ancylostoma duadonale—are found in soil. Ancylostoma duodenale only lives in Australia typically in more remote communities. These worms typically enter the bloodstream through the feet.

According to Vincent Ho, an associate professor and clinical academic gastroenterologist at Western Sydney University, the best ways to avoid a parasitic infection include avoiding undercooked or raw pork, avoiding swimming or jumping into warm fresh bodies of water, practicing good hand washing, and wearing shoes in rural areas. 

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The Earth’s South Pole is at a climate change crossroads, with Antarctica’s quickly melting ice and expected consistent ocean heat waves. Now, one of its signature species is in trouble. A study published August 24 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment found that some Emperor penguin colonies saw an unprecedented breeding failure in a region of the continent that experienced a total loss of sea ice in 2022.

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

Four out of five Emperor penguin colonies in the Bellingshausen Sea on the western side Antarctica did not see any chicks survive to successfully fledge in the spring of 2022. Emperor penguin chicks typically fledge at four months old, when they’ve developed their first set of waterproof feathers. 

All of the colonies in this study have been discovered in the last 14 years using satellite imagery, and there has only been one previous instance of breeding failure among these penguin populations. 

“We have seen the occasional colony have bad sea ice and early break up, but this most unusual thing in this study is that a whole region has had extremely poor sea ice,” Peter Fretwell, a remote sensing expert and environmental scientist with the British Antarctic Survey and co-author of the study, tells PopSci. 

Similarly, the Halley Bay penguin colony, which was not included in this study and lives in a different part of Antarctica, failed to raise any chicks between 2016 and 2019. That failure was also attributed to sea ice loss. 

From April to January, Emperor penguins depend on stable sea ice that is firmly attached to the shore or ‘land-fast’ ice. Once they arrive at their chosen breeding site, penguins will lay eggs during the Antarctic winter (May to June) in the ice. Eggs will hatch after 65 days, but the chicks do not fledge until December to January during Antarctic summer. 

“This year the ice in the Bellingshausen Sea did not form until late June–when the birds should already be on their eggs. It may be that in future this region could be one of the first to become unsuitable breeding habitat,” says Fretwell.

Between 2018 and 2022, 30 percent of the 62 known Emperor penguin colonies living in Antarctica were affected by partial or total sea ice loss. The British Antarctic Survey said that it is difficult to immediately link specific extreme seasons to climate change, but a longer-term drop in sea ice extent is expected based on current climate models.  

[Related: The march of the penguins has a new star: an autonomous robot.]

By early December 2022, the Antarctic sea ice matched the previous all-time low set in 2021. The central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea region saw the worst of it, with 100 percent sea ice loss.

“Right now, in August 2023, the sea ice extent in Antarctica is still far below all previous records for this time of year,” Caroline Holmes, a British Antarctic Survey polar climate scientist who was not involved in the study, said in a statement. “In this period where oceans are freezing up, we’re seeing areas that are still, remarkably, largely ice-free.”

Previously, Emperor penguins have responded to this sea ice loss by moving to a more stable site the next year. However, this strategy won’t work if the loss of sea ice habitat extends to an entire region. 

These populations have also not been subject to large scale hunting or overfishing and other direct interactions with humans, and climate change is considered to be the only major influence on their long-term population changes. More recent efforts to predict Emperor penguin population changes paint a bleak picture, showing that if the present rate of warming persists, more than 90 percent of colonies will be quasi-extinct by the end of this century.

Daniel P. Zitterbart, a physicist by training and an Emperor penguin remote sensing expert from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved in the study called it a very important and timely investigation. 

“The sad part is we had all been expecting this, but we expected this later. It happened for so many colonies in just one year, just because of changing weather patterns,” Zitterbart tells PopSci. “Peter points out that this is likely due to La Niña and change in wind patterns, but the study can show us how increased extremes can have an immediate impact on those colonies that are further up north.”

As their habitat is expected to shrink over the next century, scientists are unsure if the areas that they are moving to will have enough resources to host all of the penguins coming in. Studies like this one continue to ring the alarm that Antarctica and its wildlife remain vulnerable to extremes.

“Hopefully, this is a one year thing for now and with the weather pattern changing back to El Niño, the sea ice in this location this year and next year will grow back to what it normally is,” says Zitterbart. “But we all know that this year we had the first 6.4 Sigma event, which means that the sea ice in Antarctica is very low.”

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The pointy-snouted and reef dwelling hogfish that dot the Atlantic Ocean between North Carolina and Brazil are known for their color-changing skin. These chameleons of the sea can quickly switch from white to a reddish brown to blend in with reefs, but their skin may be hiding something else.

[Related: Octopus change color as they shift between sleep phases.]

A study published August 21 in the journal Nature Communications looked deeper into the hogfish’s sensory feedback system and found that the fish could be using their skin to help see underwater. They can also use this to take mental photographs of themselves from the inside.

University of North Carolina Wilmington biologist Lori Schweikert was inspired to study this phenomenon after she witnessed it first hand in the Florida Keys. When she saw that a hogfish could continue this camouflage act even after it had died, she wondered if hogfish could detect light using only their skin, versus relying on their eyes and brain. 

In an earlier study, Schweikert and Duke University biologist Sönke Johnsen found that hogfish carry a gene for a light-sensitive protein called opsin that is activated in their skin. This gene is different from the opsin genes that are found in their eyes. Squid, geckos, and other color-changing animals also make light-sensing opsins in their skin, but scientists are unsure how they help the animals change color. One hypothesis is that light-sensing skin helps animals take in their surroundings, but it also could be a way that the animals view themselves. 

In this new study, Schweikert and Johnsen took pieces of skin from different parts of the hogfish’s body and took images of them under a microscope. Up close, each dot of color on the skin is a specialized cell called a chromatophore. These cells have granules of pigment inside them that can be black, yellow, or red.

The movement of these pigment granules changes the skin color. When they are spread out across the cell, darker colors appear. The cell becomes more transparent when they cluster together into a tiny spot. 

Next, the team used a technique called immunolabeling to find the light sensing opsin proteins within the skin. They saw that in hogfish, the opsins aren’t produced in the color-changing chromatophore cells. The opsins actually reside in other cells that are located directly beneath them.

Images taken with a transmission electron microscope showed a previously unknown cell type below the chromatophores that are full of opsin protein.

[Related: Some sea snakes may not be colorblind after all.]

According to Schweikert, the light striking the skin must pass through the pigment-filled chromatophores first before it gets to the light-sensitive layer. She and the team estimate that the opsin molecules in the hogfish are most sensitive to blue light. This is the wavelength of light that the pigment granules in the hogfish absorb best. 

The fish’s light-sensitive opsins are somewhat like an internal roll of Polaroid film, that captures changes in the light and then can filter through the pigment-filled cells when the pigment granules fan out or scrunch up. 

“The animals can literally take a photo of their own skin from the inside,” Johnsen said in a statement. “In a way they can tell the animal what its skin looks like, since it can’t really bend over to look.”

Eyes do more than merely detect light and work to form images, so it’s not enough to say that hogfish skin is like a giant eye. 

“Just to be clear, we’re not arguing that hogfish skin functions like an eye,” Schweikert added in a statement. “We don’t have any evidence to suggest that’s what’s happening in their skin. They appear to be watching their own color change.”

The findings may help researchers develop better sensory feedback techniques for devices that need to fine-tune performance without eyesight or camera feeds, such as robotic limbs and self-driving cars.

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This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. It was published in collaboration with Earth Island Journal.

The floatplane bobs at the dock, its wing tips leaking fuel. I try not to take that as a sign that my trip to Chirikof Island is ill fated. Bad weather, rough seas, geographical isolation—visiting Chirikof is forever an iffy adventure.

A remote island in the Gulf of Alaska, Chirikof is about the size of two Manhattans. It lies roughly 130 kilometers southwest of Kodiak Island, where I am waiting in the largest town, technically a city, named Kodiak. The city is a hub for fishing and hunting, and for tourists who’ve come to see one of the world’s largest land carnivores, the omnivorous brown bears that roam the archipelago. Chirikof has no bears or people, though; it has cattle.

At last count, over 2,000 cows and bulls roam Chirikof, one of many islands within a US wildlife refuge. Depending on whom you ask, the cattle are everything from unwelcome invasive megafauna to rightful heirs of a place this domesticated species has inhabited for 200 years, perhaps more. Whether they stay or go probably comes down to human emotions, not evidence.

Russians brought cattle to Chirikof and other islands in the Kodiak Archipelago to establish an agricultural colony, leaving cows and bulls behind when they sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. But the progenitor of cattle ranching in the archipelago is Jack McCord, an Iowa farm boy and consummate salesman who struck gold in Alaska and landed on Kodiak in the 1920s. He heard about feral cattle grazing Chirikof and other islands, and sensed an opportunity. But once he’d bought the Chirikof herd from a company that held rights to it, he got wind that the federal government was going to declare the cattle wild and assume control of them. McCord went into overdrive.

In 1927, he successfully lobbied the US Congress—with help from politicians in the American West—to create legislation that enshrined the right of privately owned livestock to graze public lands. What McCord set in motion reverberates in US cattle country today, where conflicts over land use have led to armed standoffs and death.

McCord introduced new bulls to balance the herd and inject fresh genes into the pool, but he soon lost control of his cattle. By early 1939, he still had 1,500 feral cattle—too many for him to handle and far too many bulls. Stormy, unpredictable weather deterred most of the hunters McCord turned to for help thinning the herd, though he eventually wrangled five men foolhardy enough to bet against the weather gods. They lost. The expedition failed, precipitated one of McCord’s divorces, and almost killed him. In 1950, he gave up. But his story played out on Chirikof over and over for the next half-century, with various actors making similarly irrational decisions, caught up in the delusion that the frontier would make them rich.

By 1980, the government had created the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge (Alaska Maritime for short), a federally protected area roughly the size of New Jersey, and charged the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFW) with managing it. This meant preserving the natural habitat and dealing with the introduced and invasive species. Foxes? Practically annihilated. Bunnies? Gone. But when it came to cattle?

Alaskans became emotional. “Let’s leave one island in Alaska for the cattle,” Governor Frank Murkowski said in 2003. Thirteen years later, at the behest of his daughter, Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, the US Congress directed the USFW to leave the cattle alone.

So I’d been wondering: what are those cattle up to on Chirikof?

On the surface, Alaska as a whole appears an odd choice for cattle: mountainous, snowy, far from lucrative markets. But we’re here in June, summer solstice 2022, at “peak green,” when the archipelago oozes a lushness I associate with coastal British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. The islands rest closer to the gentle climate of those coasts than to the northern outposts they skirt. So, in the aspirational culture that Alaska has always embraced, why not cattle?

“Why not cattle” is perhaps the mantra of every rancher everywhere, to the detriment of native plants and animals. But Chirikof, in some ways, was more rational rangeland than where many of McCord’s ranching comrades grazed their herds—on Kodiak Island, where cattle provided the gift of brisket to the Kodiak brown bear. Ranchers battled the bears for decades in a one-sided war. From 1953 to 1963, they killed about 200 bears, often from the air with rifles fixed to the top of a plane, sometimes shooting bears far from ranches in areas where cattle roamed unfenced.

Bears and cattle cannot coexist. It was either protect bears or lose them, and on Kodiak, bear advocates pushed hard. Cattle are, in part, the reason the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge exists. Big, charismatic bears outshone the cows and bulls; bear protection prevailed. Likewise, one of the reasons the Alaska Maritime exists—sweeping from the Inside Passage to the Aleutian chain and on up to the islands in the Chukchi Sea—is to protect seabirds and other migratory birds. A cattle-free Chirikof, with its generally flat topography and lack of predators, would offer more quality habitat for burrow-nesting tufted puffins, storm petrels, and other seabirds. And yet, on Chirikof, and a few other islands, cows apparently outshine birds.

The remoteness, physically good for birds, works against them, too: most people can picture a Ferdinand the Bull frolicking through the cotton grass, but not birds building nests. Chirikof is so far from other islands in the archipelago that it’s usually included as an inset on paper maps. A sample sentence for those learning the Alutiiq language states the obvious: Ukamuk (Chirikof) yaqsigtuq (is far from here). At least one Chirikof rancher recommended the island as a penal colony for juvenile delinquents. To get to Chirikof from Kodiak, you need a ship or a floatplane carrying extra fuel for the four-hour round trip. It’s a wonder anyone thought grazing cattle on pasture at the outer edge of a floatplane’s fuel supply was a good idea.

Patrick Saltonstall, a cheerful, fit 57-year-old with a head of tousled gray curls, is an archaeologist with the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak. He’s accompanying photographer Shanna Baker and me to Chirikof—but he’s left us on the dock while he checks in at the veterinarian’s where he has taken his sick dog, a lab named Brewster.

The owners of the floatplane, Jo Murphy and her husband, pilot Rolan Ruoss, are debating next steps, using buckets to catch the fuel seeping from both wing tips. Weather is the variable I had feared; in the North it’s a capricious god, swinging from affable to irascible for reasons unpredictable and unknowable. But the weather is perfect this morning. Now, I’m fearing O-rings.

Our 8:00 a.m. departure ticks by. Baker and I grab empty red plastic jerrycans from a pickup truck and haul them to the dock. The crew empties the fuel from the buckets into the red jugs. This will take a while.

A fuel leak, plus a sick dog: are these omens? But such things are emotional and irrational. I channel my inner engineer: failing O-rings are a common problem, and we’re not in the air, so it’s all good.

Saltonstall returns, minus his usual smile: Brewster has died.

Dammit.

He sighs, shakes his head, and mumbles his bewilderment and sadness. Brewster’s death apparently mystified the vet, too. Baker and I murmur our condolences. We wait in silence awhile, gazing at distant snowy peaks and the occasional seal peeking its head above water. Eventually, we distract Saltonstall by getting him talking about Chirikof.

Cattle alone on an island can ruin it, he says. They’re “pretty much hell on archaeological sites,” grazing vegetation down to nubs, digging into the dirt with their hooves, and, as creatures of habit, stomping along familiar routes, fissuring shorelines so that the earth falls away into the sea. Saltonstall falls silent. Brewster is foremost on his mind. He eventually wanders over to see what’s up with the plane.

I lie on a picnic table in the sun, double-check my pack, think about birds. There is no baseline data for Chirikof prior to the introduction of cattle and foxes. But based on the reality of other islands in the refuge, it has a mix of good bird habitats. Catherine West, an archaeologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, studies Chirikof’s animal life from before the introduction of cows and foxes; she has been telling me that the island was likely once habitat for far more birds than we see today: murres, auklets, puffins, kittiwakes and other gulls, along with ducks and geese.

I flip through my notes to what I scrawled while walking a Kodiak Island trail through Sitka spruce with retired wildlife biologist Larry Van Daele. Van Daele worked for the State of Alaska for 34 years, and once retired, sat for five years on the Alaska Board of Game, which gave him plenty of time to sit through raucous town hall meetings pitting Kodiak locals against USFW officials. Culling ungulates—reindeer and cattle—from islands in the refuge has never gone down well with locals. But change is possible. Van Daele also witnessed the massive cultural shift regarding the bear—from “If it’s brown, it’s down” to it being an economic icon of the island. Now, ursine primacy is on display on the cover of the official visitor guide for the archipelago: a photo of a mother bear, her feet planted in a muddy riverbank, water droplets clinging to her fur, fish blood smearing her nose.

But Chirikof, remember, is different. No bears. Van Daele visited several times for assessments before the refuge eradicated foxes. His first trip, in 1999, followed a long, cold winter. His aerial census counted 600 to 800 live cattle and 200 to 250 dead, their hair and hide in place and less than 30 percent of them scavenged. “The foxes were really looking fat,” he told me, adding that some foxes were living inside the carcasses. The cattle had likely died of starvation. Without predators, they rise and fall with good winters and bad.

The shape of the island summarizes the controversy, Van Daele likes to say—a T-bone steak to ranchers and a teardrop to bird biologists and Indigenous people who once claimed the island. In 2013, when refuge officials began soliciting public input over what to do with feral animals in the Alaska Maritime, locals reacted negatively during the three-year process. They resentfully recalled animal culls elsewhere and argued to preserve the genetic heritage of the Chirikof cattle. Van Daele, who has been described as “pro-cow,” seems to me, more than anything, resistant to top-down edicts. As a wildlife biologist, he sees the cattle as probably invasive and acknowledges that living free as a cow is costly. An unmanaged herd has too many bulls. Trappers on Chirikof have witnessed up to a dozen bulls at a time pursuing and mounting cows, causing injury, exhaustion, and death, especially to heifers. It’s not unreasonable to imagine a 1,000-kilogram bull crushing a heifer weighing less than half that.

But, as an Alaskan and a former member of the state’s Board of Game, Van Daele chafes at the federal government’s control. Senator Murkowski, after all, was following the lead of her constituents, at least the most vocal of them, when she pushed to leave the cattle free to roam. Once Congress acted, Van Daele told me, “why not find the money, spend the money, and manage the herd in a way that allows them to continue to be a unique variety, whatever it is?” “Whatever it is” turns out to be not much at all.

Finally, Ruoss beckons us to the plane, a de Havilland Canada Beaver, a heroically hard-working animal, well adapted for wandering the bush of a remote coast. He has solved the leaking problem by carrying extra fuel onboard in jerrycans, leaving the wing tips empty. At 12:36 p.m., we take off for Chirikof.

Imagine Fred Rogers as a bush pilot in Alaska. That’s Ruoss: reassuring, unflappable, and keen to share his archipelago neighborhood. By the time we’re angling up off the water, my angst—over portents of dead dog and dripping fuel—has evaporated.

A transplant from Seattle, Washington, Ruoss was a herring spotter as a young pilot in 1979. Today, he mostly transports hunters, bear-viewers, and scientists conducting fieldwork. He takes goat hunters to remote clifftops, for example, sussing out the terrain and counting to around seven as he flies over a lake at 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour) to determine if the watery landing strip is long enough for the Beaver.

From above, our world is equal parts land and water. We fly over carpets of lupine and pushki (cow parsnip), and, on Sitkinak Island, only 15 kilometers south of Kodiak Island, a cattle herd managed by a private company with a grazing lease. Ruoss and Saltonstall point out landmarks: Refuge Rock, where Alutiiq people once waited out raids by neighboring tribes but couldn’t repel an attack from Russian cannons; a 4,500-year-old archaeology site with long slate bayonets; kilns where Russians baked bricks for export to California; an estuary where a tsunami destroyed a cannery; the village of Russian Harbor, abandoned in the 1930s. “People were [living] in every bay” in the archipelago, Ruoss says. He pulls a book about local plant life from under his seat and flips through it before handing it over the seat to me.

Today, the only people we see are in boats, fishing for Dungeness crab and salmon. We fly over Tugidak Island, where Ruoss and Murphy have a cabin. The next landmass will be Chirikof. We have another 25 minutes to go, with only whitecaps below.

For thousands of years, the Alutiiq routinely navigated this rough sea around their home on Chirikof, where they wove beach rye and collected amber and hunted sea lions, paddling qayat—kayaks. Fog was a hazard; it descends rapidly here, like a ghostly footstep. When Alutiiq paddlers set off from Chirikof, they would tie a bull kelp rope to shore as a guide back to safety if mist suddenly blocked their vision.

As we angle toward Chirikof, sure enough, a mist begins to form. But like the leaking fuel or Brewster’s death, it foreshadows nothing. Below us, as the haze dissipates, the island gleams green, a swath of velveteen shaped, to my mind, like nothing more symbolic than the webbed foot of a goose. A bunch of spooked cows gallop before us as we descend over the northeast side. Ruoss lands on a lake plenty long for a taxiing Beaver.

We toss out our gear and he’s off. We’re the only humans on what appears to be a storybook island—until you kick up fecal dust from a dry cow pie, and then more, and more, and you find yourself stumbling over bovid femurs, ribs, and skulls. Cattle prefer grazing a flat landscape, so stick to the coastline and to the even terrain inland. We tromp northward, flushing sandpipers from the verdant carpet. A peppery bouquet floats on the still air. A cabbagey scent of yarrow dominates whiffs of sedges and grasses, wild geraniums and flag irises, buttercups and chocolate lilies.

Since the end of the last ice age, Chirikof has been mostly tundra-like: no trees, sparse low brush, tall grasses, and boggy. Until the cattle arrived, the island never had large terrestrial mammals, the kind of grazers and browsers that mold a landscape—mammoths, mastodons, deer, caribou. But bovids have fashioned a pastoral landscape that a hiker would recognize in crossing northern England, a place that cows and sheep have kept clear for centuries. The going is easy, but Baker and I struggle to keep pace with the galloping Saltonstall, and we can’t help but stop to gape at bull and cow skeletons splayed across the grasses. We skirt a ground nest with three speckled eggs, barely hidden by the low scrub. We cut across a beach muddled with plastics—ropes, bottles, floats—and reach a giant puddle with indefinable edges, its water meandering toward the sea. “We call it the river Styx,” Saltonstall says. “The one you cross into hell.”

Compared with the Emerald City behind us, the underworld across the Styx is a Kansas dust bowl, a sandy mess that looks as if it could swallow us. Saltonstall tells us about a previous trip when he and his colleagues pulled a cow out of quicksand. Twice. “It charged us—and we’d saved its life!”

Hoof prints scatter from the river. At one time, the river Styx probably supported a small pink salmon run. A team of biologists reported in 2016 that several Chirikof streams host pink and coho, with cameo appearances of rainbow trout and steelhead. This stream is likely fish-free, the erosion too corrosive, a habitat routinely trampled.

Two raptors—jaegers—cavort above us. A smaller bird’s entrails unspool at our feet. On a sandy bluff, Saltonstall pauses to look for artifacts while Baker and I climb down to a beach where hungry cattle probably eat seaweed in winter. We follow a ground squirrel’s tracks up the bluff to its burrow, and at the top meet Saltonstall, who holds out his hands: stone tools. Artifacts sprinkle the surface as if someone has shaken out a tablecloth laden with forks, knives, spoons, and plates—an archaeological site with context ajumble. A lone bovid’s track crosses the sand, winding through shoulder blades, ribs, and the femoral belongings of relatives.

After four hours of hiking, we turn toward the lake where we left our gear. So far on this hike, dead cattle outnumber live ones, dozens to zero. But wait! What’s that? A bull appears on a rise, across a welcome mat of cotton grass. Curious, he jogs down. Baker and Saltonstall peer through viewfinders and click off images. The bull stops several meters away; we stare at each other. He wins. We turn and walk away. When I look back, he’s still paused, watching us, or—I glance around—watching a distant herd running at us.

Again, my calm comrades-in-arms lift their cameras. I lift my iPhone, which shakes because I’m scared. Should I have my hands on the pepper spray I borrowed from Ruoss and Murphy? Closer, closer, closer they thunder, until I can’t tell the difference between my pounding heart and their pounding feet. Then, in sync, the herd turns 90 degrees and gallops out of the frame. The bull lollops away to join them. Their cattle plans take them elsewhere.

Saltonstall has surveyed archaeology sites three times on Chirikof. The first time, in 2005, he carried a gun to hunt the cattle, but his colleagues were also apprehensive about the feral beasts. At least one person I talked to suggested we bring a gun. But Saltonstall says he learned that cattle are cowards: stand your ground, clap, and cows and bulls will run away. But to me, big domesticated herbivores are terrifying. Horses kick and bite, cattle can crush you. The rules of bears—happier without humans around—are easier to parse. I’ve never come close to pepper spraying a bear, but I’m hot on the trigger when it comes to cattle.

The next morning, we set out for the Old Ranch, one of the two homesteads built decades ago on the island and about a three-hour amble one way. Ruoss won’t be picking us up till 3:00 p.m., so we have plenty of time. The cattle path we’re following crosses a field bejeweled with floral ambers, opals, rubies, sapphires, amethysts, and shades of jade. It’s alive with least sandpipers, a shorebird that breeds in northern North America, with the males arriving early, establishing their territories, and building nests for their mates. The least sandpiper population, in general, is in good shape—they certainly flourish here. High-pitched, sped-up laughs split the air. They slice the wind and rush across the velvet expanse. Their flapping wings look impossibly short for supporting flights from their southern wintering grounds, sometimes as far away as Mexico, over 3,000 kilometers distant. They flutter into a tangle of green and vanish.

From a small rise, we spot cattle paths meandering into the distance, forking again and again. Saltonstall announces the presence of the only other mammal on the island. “A battery killer,” he says, raising his camera at an Arctic ground squirrel, and he’s right. They are adorable. They stand on two legs and hold their food in their hands. To us humans, that makes them cute. Pretty soon, we’re all running down the batteries on our cameras and smartphones.

Qanganaq is Alutiiq for ground squirrel. An Alutiiq tailor needed around 100 ground squirrels for one parka, more precious than a sea otter cloak. Some evidence suggests the Alutiiq introduced ground squirrels to Chirikof at least 2,000 years ago, apparently a more rational investment than cattle. Squirrels were easily transported, and the market for skins was local. Still, they were fancy dress, Dehrich Chya, the Alutiiq Museum’s Alutiiq language and living culture manager, told me. Creating a parka—from hunting to sewing to wearing—was an homage to the animals that offered their lives to the Alutiiq. Archaeologist Catherine West and her crew have collected over 20,000 squirrel bones from Chirikof middens, a few marked by tool use and many burned.

Chirikof has been occupied and abandoned periodically—the Alutiiq quit the island, perhaps triggered by a volcanic eruption 4,000 years ago, then came people more related to the Aleuts from the west, then the Alutiiq again. Then, Russian colonizers arrived. The Russians lasted not much longer than the American cattle ranchers who would succeed them. That last, doomed culture crumbled in less than 100 years, pegged to an animal hard to transport, with a market far, far away.

Whether ground squirrels, some populations definitely introduced, should be in the Alaska Maritime is rarely discussed. One reason, probably, is that they are small and cute and easy to anthropomorphize. There is a great body of literature on why we anthropomorphize. Evolutionarily, cognitive archaeologists would argue that once we could anthropomorphize—by at least 40,000 years ago—we became better hunters and eventually herders. We better understood our prey and the animals we domesticated. Whatever the reason, researchers tend to agree that to anthropomorphize is a universal human behavior with profound implications for how we treat animals. We attribute humanness based on animals’ appearance, familiarity, and non-physical traits, such as agreeability and sociality—all factors that will vary somewhat across cultures—and we favor those we humanize.

Ungulates, in general, come across favorably. Add a layer of domestication, and cattle become even more familiar. Cows, especially dairy cows named Daisy, can be sweet and agreeable. Steve Ebbert, a retired USFW wildlife biologist living on the Alaska mainland outside Homer, eradicated foxes, as well as rabbits and marmots, from islands in the refuge. Few objected to eliminating foxes—or even the rabbits and marmots, he told me. Cattle are more complicated. Humans are supposed to take care of them, he said, not shoot them or let them starve and die: they’re for food—and of course, they’re large, and they’re in a lot of storybooks, and they have big eyes. Alaskans, like many US westerners, are also protective of the state’s ranching legacy—cattle ranchers transformed the landscape to a more familiar place for colonizers and created an American story of triumph, leaving out the messy bits.

We spot a herd of mostly cows and calves, picture-book perfect, with chestnut coats and white faces and socks. We edge closer, but they’re wary. They trot away.

Saltonstall, always a few leaps and bounds ahead, spots the Old Ranch—or part of it. A couple of bulls are hanging out near the sagging, severed rooms that cling to a cliff above the sea, refusing their fate. Ghostly fence posts march from the beach across a rolling landscape.

Close by is a wire exclosure, one of five Ebbert and his colleagues set up in 2016. The exclosure—big enough to park a quad—keeps out cattle, allowing an unaggravated patch of land to regenerate. Beach rye taller than cows soars within the fencing. This is what the island looks like without cattle: a haven for ground-nesting birds. The Alutiiq relied on beach rye, weaving the fiber into house thatching, baskets, socks, and other textiles; if they introduced ground squirrels, they knew what they were doing, since the rodents didn’t drastically alter the vegetation the way cattle do.

Saltonstall approaches a shed set back from the eroding cliff.

“Holy cow!” he hollers. No irony. He is peering into the shed.

On the floor, a cow’s head resembles a Halloween mask, horns up, eye sockets facing the door, snout resting close to what looks like a rusted engine. Half the head is bone, half is covered with hide and keratin. Femurs and ribs and backbone scatter the floor, amid bits and bobs of machinery. One day, for reasons unknown, this cow wedged herself into an old shed and died.

Cattle loom large in death, their bodies lingering. Their suffering—whether or not by human hands—is tangible. Through size, domestication, and ubiquity, they take up a disproportionate amount of space physically, and through anthropomorphism, they grab a disproportionate amount of human imagination and emotion. When Frank Murkowski said Alaska should leave one island to the cattle, he probably pictured a happy herd rambling a vast, unfenced pasture—not an island full of bones or heifer-buckling bulls.

Birds are free, but they’re different. They vanish. We rarely witness their suffering, especially the birds we never see at backyard feeders—shorebirds and seabirds. We witness their freedom in fleeting moments, if at all, and when we do see them—gliding across a beach, sipping slime from an intertidal mudflat, resting on a boat rail far from shore—can we name the species? As popular as birding is, the world is full of non-birders. And so, we mistreat them. On Chirikof, where there should be storm petrels, puffins, and terns, there are cattle hoof prints, cattle plops, and cattle bones.

Hustling back to meet the seaplane, we skirt an area thick with cotton grass and ringed by small hills. In 2013, an ornithologist recorded six Aleutian terns and identified one nest with two eggs. In the United States, Aleutian tern populations have crashed by 80 percent in the past few decades. The tern is probably the most imperiled seabird in Alaska. But eradicating foxes, which ate birds’ eggs and babies, probably helped Chirikof’s avian citizens, perhaps most notably the terns. From a distance, we count dozens of birds, shooting up from the grass, swirling around the sky, and fluttering back down to their nests.

Terns may be dipping their webbed toes into a bad situation, but consider the other seabirds shooting their little bodies through the atmosphere, spotting specks of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to raise their young, and yet it’s unsafe for them on this big, lovely island. The outcry over a few hundred feral cattle—a loss that would have absolutely no effect on the species worldwide—seems completely irrational. Emotional. A case of maladaptive anthropomorphism. If a species’ purpose is to proliferate, cattle took advantage of their association with humans and won the genetic lottery.

Back at camp, we haul our gear to the lake. Ruoss arrives slightly early, and while he’s emptying red jerrycans of fuel into the Beaver, we grab tents and packs and haul them into the pontoons. Visibility today is even better than yesterday. I watch the teardrop-shaped island recede, thinking of what more than one scientist told me: when you’re on Chirikof, it’s so isolated, surrounded by whitecaps, that you hope only to get home. But as soon as you leave, you want to go back.

Chirikof cattle are one of many herds people have sprinkled around the world in surprising and questionable places. And cattle have a tendency to go feral. On uninhabited Amsterdam Island in the Indian Ocean, the French deposited a herd that performed an evolutionary trick in response to the constraints of island living: the size of individuals shrank in the course of 117 years, squashing albatross colonies in the process. In Hong Kong, feral cattle plunder vegetable plots, disturb traffic, and trample the landscape. During the colonization of the Americas and the Caribbean, cattle came to occupy spaces violently emptied of Indigenous people. Herds ran wild—on small islands like Puerto Rico and across expanses in Texas and Panama—pulverizing landscapes that had been cultivated for thousands of years. No question: cattle are problem animals.

A few genetic studies explore the uniqueness of Chirikof cattle. Like freedom, “unique” is a vague word. I sent the studies to a scientist who researches the genetics of hybrid species to confirm my takeaway: the cattle are hybrids, perhaps unusual hybrids, some Brown Swiss ancestry but mostly British Hereford and Russian Yakutian, an endangered breed. The latter are cold tolerant, but no study shows selective forces at play. The cattle are not genetically distinct; they’re a mix of breeds, the way a labradoodle is a mix of a Labrador and a poodle.

Feral cattle graze unusual niches all over the world, and maybe some are precious genetic outliers. But the argument touted by livestock conservancies and locals that we need Chirikof cattle genes as a safeguard against some future fatal cattle disease rings hollow. And if we did, we might plan and prepare: freeze some eggs and sperm.

Cattle live feral lives elsewhere in the Alaska Maritime, too, on islands shared by the refuge and Indigenous owners or, in the case of Sitkinak Island, where a meat company grazes cattle. Why Frank Murkowski singled out Chirikof is puzzling: Alaska will probably always have feral cattle. Chirikof cattle, of use to practically no one, fully residing within a wildlife refuge a federal agency is charged with protecting for birds, with no concept of the human drama swirling around their presence, have their own agenda for keeping themselves alive. Unwittingly, humans are part of the plan.

We created cattle by manipulating their wild cousins, aurochs, in Europe, Asia, and the Sahara beginning over 10,000 years ago. Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, who could never find a place in human society, cattle trotted into societies around the world, making themselves at home on most ranges they encountered. Rosa Ficek, an anthropologist at the University of Puerto Rico who has studied feral cattle, says they generally find their niche. Christopher Columbus brought them on his second voyage to the Caribbean in 1493, and they proliferated, like the kudzu of the feral animal world. “[Cattle are] never fully under the control of human projects,” she says. They’re not “taking orders the way military guys are … They have their own cattle plans.”

The larger question is, Why are we so nervous about losing cattle? In terms of sheer numbers, they’re a successful species. There is just over one cow or bull for every eight people in the world. If numbers translate to likes, we like cows and bulls more than dogs. If estimates are right, the world has 1.5 billion cattle and 700 million dogs. Imagine all the domesticated animals that would become feral if some apocalypse took out humans.

I could say something here about how vital seabirds—as opposed to cattle—are to marine ecosystems and the overall health of the planet. They spread their poop around the oceans, nurturing plankton, coral reefs, and seagrasses, which nurture small plankton-eating fishes, which are eaten by bigger fishes, and so on. Between 1950 and 2010, the world lost some 230 million seabirds, a decline of around 70 percent.

But maybe it’s better to end with conjuring the exquisiteness of seabirds like the Aleutian terns in their breeding plumage, with their white foreheads, black bars that run from black bill to black-capped heads, feathers in shades of grays, white rump and tail, and black legs. Flashy? No. Their breeding plumage is more timeless monochromatic, with the clean, classic lines of a vintage Givenchy design. The Audrey Hepburn of seabirds. They’re so pretty, so elegant, so difficult to appreciate as they flit across a cotton grass meadow. Their dainty bodies aren’t much longer than a typical ruler, from bill to tail, but their wingspans are over double that, and plenty strong to propel them, in spring, from their winter homes in Southeast Asia to Alaska and Siberia.

A good nesting experience, watching their eggs hatch and their chicks fledge, with plenty of fish to eat, will pull Aleutian terns back to the same places again and again and again—like a vacationing family, drawn back to a special island, a place so infused with good memories, they return again and again and again. That’s called fidelity.

Humans understand home, hard work, and family. So, for a moment, think about how Aleutian terns might feel after soaring over the Pacific Ocean for 16,000 kilometers with their compatriots, making pit stops to feed, and finally spotting a familiar place, a place we call Chirikof. They have plans, to breed and nest and lay eggs. The special place? The grassy cover is okay. But, safe nesting spots are hard to find: massive creatures lumber about, and the terns have memories of loss, of squashed eggs, and kicked chicks. It’s sad, isn’t it?

This story was made possible in part by the Fund for Environmental Journalism and the Society of Environmental Journalists.

The post This is what happens when feral cows take over a remote Alaskan island appeared first on Popular Science.

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Ocean temperatures are surging worldwide largely due to human-made climate change and natural El Niño driven patterns. The rise is wreaking havoc on the planet’s coral reefs, however a study published August 22 in the journal Nature Communications found that the coral reefs in one part of the Pacific Ocean can likely adjust to some rises in temperature. This adaptation has the potential to reduce future coral bleaching as the climate continues to change. 

[Related: The heroic effort to save Florida’s coral reef from a historic heatwave.]

“We know that coral reefs can increase their overall thermal tolerance over time by acclimatization, genetic adaptation or shifts in community structure, however we know very little about the rates at which this is occurring,” study co-author and Newcastle University coral reef ecologist James Guest said in a statement. 

The rate at which coral reefs can naturally increase thermal tolerance, and if it can match pace with warming, is largely unknown. So the team started their work by investigating historic mass bleaching events that have occurred since the late 1980s in a remote Pacific coral reef system. 

They focused on a reef system Palau, an island country in the western Pacific Ocean, and found that increases in the heat tolerance of reefs is possible. Reefs here are known as a bevy of biodiversity and provide a barrier from storms. The team used decades of data to create models of multiple future coral bleaching trajectories for Palauan reefs. Each model had a different simulated rate of thermal tolerance enhancement. The team found that if coral heat tolerance continues to rise throughout this century at the most-likely high rate, significant reductions in bleaching impacts are actually possible.

The results affirm the general scientific consensus that the severity of future coral bleaching will depend on reducing carbon emissions. For example, if the commitments of the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit future warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, high-frequency bleaching can be fully mitigated at some reefs under low-to-middle emissions scenarios. These bleaching impacts are unavoidable under high emissions scenarios where society continues to rely on fossil fuels.  

Coral communities will need to persist under constant climate change and will likely need to endure progressively more intense and frequent marine heatwaves. The team believes that the observed increase in tolerance suggests that some natural mechanisms, such as genetic adaptation or acclimatization of corals or their symbiotic microalgae, may contribute to the increased heat tolerance. 

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

While this is some positive news for Pacific coral, the resilience comes at a high cost. Adaptations like these can reduce reef diversity and growth, and without cutting future greenhouse gas, the Pacific’s reefs won’t be able to provide the habitat resources and protection from waves that residents depend on.

“Our study indicates the presence of an ecological resilience to climate change, yet also highlights the need to fulfill Paris Agreement commitments to effectively preserve coral reefs,” study co-author and Newcastle University coral reef ecologist Liam Lachs said in a statement. “We quantified a natural increase in coral thermal tolerance over decadal time scales which can be directly compared to the rate of ocean warming. While our work offers a glimmer of hope, it also emphasizes the need for continued action on reducing carbon emissions to mitigate climate change and secure a future for these vital ecosystems.”

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Memes galore centered on the “orca revolution” have inundated the online realm. They gleefully depict orcas launching attacks on boats in the Strait of Gibraltar and off the Shetland coast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonhuman animal protest is everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creaturely escape artists

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

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

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

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

What is solidarity with nonhuman animals?

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

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

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

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

Everyday deeds can likewise convey solidarity.

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

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

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

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

Might an ‘otter world’ be possible?

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

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

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

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The heartbeat of the reef

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A MASH unit for corals

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

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

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

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

Protecting corals still in the ocean

I.CARE launched another type of emergency response.

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

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

Monitoring for corals at risk

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

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

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

Rebuilding the reef

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Related: Letters From Charles Darwin.]

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

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

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

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Over 23 million years ago, an ancient relative of modern seals called Potamotherium valletoni was possibly one of the first pinnipeds to use their whiskers to forage for food and explore their watery world. The findings were published August 17 in the journal Communications Biology and provide more insight into how ancient seals transition from a life lived on land into one mostly underwater. 

[Related: Baby seals are born with a great sense of rhythm.]

The relatives of present day pinnipeds primarily lived on land and in freshwater environments, unlike our recognizable harbor seals which spend most of their time under the waves in saltwater. These early seals had legs for walking instead of flippers, a long tail, and were much longer, and looked a bit like present-day otters. 

“Pinnipeds (seals, sea lions and walruses) diversified tremendously since their ancestors entered the seas,” study co-author Alexandra van der Geer, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands tells PopSci. “All living pinnipeds are very distantly related to Potamotherium, so one could say that in a way all living pinnipeds are equally closely related to Potamotherium. That is why Potamotherium is called a stem (or basal) pinniped.”

Some early species used their forelimbs to explore their surroundings, and prior to this study, scientists were unsure when seals and their relatives began using their whiskers to forage. Whiskers are thick wiry hairs with tons of nerve endings at their base and they’re very sensitive to movement. They can be used to help detect vibrations in the water, making it easier to find fish. 

Van der Geer and colleagues from institutions in Italy, Greece, and Sweden were inspired to look into this area of neurobiology by a visit to Chicago’s Field Museum. There, they studied the museum’s collection of special skull models called endocasts.  “An endocast is the infilling of the inside of the skull, so it fills up the space of the (former) brain. The brain is soft tissue and does not fossilize, but decomposes and disappears after death,” explains van der Geer.

In the study, they used these endocasts to investigate the evolution of whisker-foraging behaviors. They compared the brain structures of Potamotherium with six extinct and 31 living carnivorous mammals, including bears, mustelids, and seal relatives. The team compared the size and structure of a brain region called the coronal gyrus. Some earlier studies suggest that this region is involved in processing signals from seal whiskers. 

[Related: Seals snooze during 20-minute ‘sleeping dives’ to avoid predators.]

They found that Potamotherium had a larger coronal gyrus than both ancient and living land-based mammals that use their forelimbs to forage, such as the Asian small-clawed otter. However, it had a similar sized coronal gyrus to other ancient seal relatives and semiaquatic mammals that use whiskers to explore, including the Eurasian otter. This shows that Potamotherium may have used a combination of forelimbs and whiskers to forage.  

The team was surprised by the convergent evolution they saw in their study. “Not just seals but also some otters, civets and other carnivore mammals that are unrelated to seals, yet use their whiskers for foraging their prey underwater in the same way as seals, developed the same part of the brain,” van der Geer says. 

Additionally, they were surprised to see that coronal gyrus looks the same species with the same behavior, independent of their family ties. The team believes that whisker-based foraging may have already been present in seal relatives before they transitioned to their fully aquatic lifestyles of today. Using whiskers may have helped the Miocene-era creatures adapt to finding food underwater.

The study also shows the value of studying brain endocasts to look into the past. “By looking at the details of the brain endocast one can infer behavior and function in fossil species,” says van der Geer.

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

[Related: Snakes can actually hear really well.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Related: Oyster architecture could save our coastlines.]

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

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

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

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California’s Sierra Nevada is now home to a newly identified pack of gray wolves. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), this new pack is roaming at least 200 miles away from the nearest known pack. It joins three known gray wolf packs living in Northern California: the Beckwourth Pack, the Whaleback Pack, and the Lassen Pack.

[Related: Snowy weather could determine life or death for Wisconsin’s poached gray wolves.]

In July, CDFW received a wolf sighting report from a spot in Sequoia National Forest. They found wolf tracks and other signs that wolves were present and collected 12 feces and hair samples from the area. 

DNA analysis determined that the samples are in fact from wolves and also revealed the sex, coat color, individual identity, relation to one another, and the pack’s origin. All 12 samples were confirmed to belong to gray wolves and the pack consists of at least five individuals that have not previously been detected in California. One of the adult females is a direct descendant of the first wolf documented in California’s recent history (a male named OR7) and four offspring (two females, two males). They did not detect any samples of any adult males, but the genetic profile indicates that the breeding male is a descendant of the Lassen pack.

Gray wolves are native to the state,, but were hunted to near extinction in California by the 1920s. Sometime in late 2011, OR7 crossed the state line from Oregon into California and became the first gray wolf in nearly a century to include the Golden State in its range. OR7 eventually returned to Oregon to form the Rogue Pack.

[Related: Wolves and beavers can have magical ecosystem effects—if they have space to thrive.]

In California, gray wolves are considered a recovering endangered species and are protected under California’s Endangered Species Act and the federal Endangered Species Act. While both laws mean it is illegal to kill them, wolves remain unprotected across much of the Northern Rockies, following decades of lawsuits over these regulations and concern from farmers. Researchers have advocated for an expansion of protected lands for the gray wolves, saying that they are important to the ecosystem’s overall health as a keystone species. 

Gray wolves are carnivores and their primary sources of prey are large native species such as deer and elk. They will also eat birds and reptiles, opportunistically scavenge carrion and may prey on large livestock. They can weigh anywhere between 70 and 120 pounds and can run in short bursts of up to 35 miles per hour. Their fur also comes in many colors including white, tan, black, brown, and the name “gray” refers to the color of their undercoat that can be visible before the warmer summer months. 

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Two newly-discovered types of moles have possibly been hiding in eastern Turkey’s mountains for as many as three million years. These hide-and-seek champions are named Talpa hakkariensis and Talpa davidiana tatvanensis, and they belong to a group of subterranean, invertebrate-eating mammals found across parts of Europe and Western Asia. The potential new species are described in a study published late last month in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

[Related: Like humans, naked mole-rats have regional accents.]

At least seven mole species are known to burrow in the grounds of North America and only one species (Talpa europaea) is in Britain. East of the United Kingdom, there are a number of different moles and many of them have small geographical regions. 

In this study, the team used DNA to confirm that these moles are distinct from others within the group and family. Both live in the mountains of eastern Turkey are able to survive conditions that range to over six feet of snow during the winter months to temperatures over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. 

“It is very rare to find new species of mammals today. There are only around 6,500 mammal species that have been identified across the world and, by comparison, there are around 400,000 species of beetles known, with an estimated 1-2 million on Earth,” study co-author and University of Plymouth biologist David Bilton said in a statement. 

On the surface, the moles in this study look similar to other mole species, since their underground dwellings can constrain the evolution of their shape and size.

“Our study highlights how, in such circumstances, we can under-estimate the true nature of biodiversity, even in groups like mammals, where most people would assume we know all the species with which we share the planet,” said Bilton. 

With these new additions, scientists have now identified 18 Eurasian moles and each of them have distinct genetic and physical characteristics. The team closely studied the size and shape of their various bodily structures, which helped them use specimens collected during the 19th century that are in museum collections. The complementary DNA analysis that compared them to other known mole species confirmed that they are distinct.

Found in the Hakkari region in southeastern Turkey, Talpa hakkariensis was identified as a completely new mole species. 

[Related: Star-nosed moles are nature’s speed-eating champions.]

Talpa davidiana tatvanensis is also found in southeastern Turkey near Bitlis. It was also identified as being morphologically distinct, but it has been classified as a subspecies of Talpa davidiana that was first identified in 1884. T. davidiana it is listed as data deficient by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

“We have no doubt that further investigations will reveal additional diversity, and that more new species of mole remain undiscovered in this and adjacent regions. Amid increasing calls to preserve global biodiversity, if we are looking to protect species we need to know they exist in the first place,” Bilton said. “Through this study, we have established something of a hidden pocket of biodiversity and know far more about the species that live within it than previously. That will be critical for conservation experts, and society as a whole, when considering how best to manage this part of the planet.”

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Antarctic blue whales, the largest animals on Earth, can reach 98 feet from mouth to tail. But to get to this massive length, these mammals needed the right conditions to grow, whether that was more food or protection from danger—perks of living in water. 

Four hundred million years ago, the pre-mammalian ancestors of the ocean’s behemoths roamed on land on four legs. Ancestral whales returned to the sea 350 million years later. They likely spent so much of their lives in the water that, over time, their bodies completely adapted to swimming. But it’s unclear how much of this evolutionary history was amphibious before they fully submerged in the ocean.

Paleontologists in Egypt now have a better idea of what happened during this critical period of whale evolution. In a study published Thursday in Communications Biology, they unearthed fossilized remains of a miniature whale species that lived 41 million years ago. This extinct family, the basilosaurids, represents one of the earliest whale species to become fully aquatic. Though, if you saw one swimming in today’s seas, you might initially mistake it for a large fish. The newfound whale was only 8.2 feet long—12 times smaller than today’s blue whale.

[Related: This giant sea cow-like whale may have been the heaviest creature to ever live on Earth]

The study authors named the mini whale Tutcetus rayanensis, after the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun—a fitting name for a family of whales known as the “king of ancient seas,” says Hesham Sallam, an Egyptian paleontologist at The American University in Cairo and senior author of the study. The fossilized whale, like King Tut, died very young.

How the vertebrate and skull bones are fused suggests the whale was close to adulthood but did not reach it. It’s likely this whale specimen died before adulthood, though it was already sexually mature. The fossil remains show it was old enough to have adult molars but too young to have permanent premolars. Meanwhile, its enamel, the outer layer of its teeth, was very smooth, indicating it fed on fish, octopus, or other soft prey. Both are common features in mammals with shorter life cycles. According to Sallam, the teeth patterns also told them how this whale spent all of its time in the ocean, rather than an amphibious lifestyle like they previously envisioned for whale ancestors of this time.

The transition from a semiaquatic lifestyle to a fully aquatic one, as the basilosaurids did, is an area where more fossil data is needed to understand how these creatures evolved, says Ryan Bebej, an associate professor of biology at Calvin University in Michigan, who was not involved in the study. “Given its geologic age and phylogenetic position, Tutcetus is an important data point in helping us understand the earliest fully aquatic cetaceans.”

But why were these aquatic creatures dwarves compared to other basilosaurids? Basilosaurids around this time period were 13 to 59 feet in length. In contrast, this ancient whale was approximately 8 feet long and weighed around 412 pounds, making it “the smallest whale ever,” Sallam says. Today’s smallest whale, the dwarf sperm whale, grows just a little longer, at up to 9 feet. 

Its little stature was likely an evolutionary response from a global warming event called the Lutetian thermal maximum. Forty-two million years ago, temperatures in the South Atlantic ocean rose by about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Because smaller bodies lose heat more quickly than larger bodies, the mini size of these whales probably helped them survive. Sallam says this biological trait—prioritizing a tiny shape—is still seen today in animals living in warmer climates.

We don’t know how big (or small) this ancient whale would have grown to as an adult. But its bones provide valuable information on the evolution of aquatic creatures As they adapted to life in the water, cetaceans diversified in a variety of ways, and this little king of the ancient seas is just one regal example.

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

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

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

All for the ‘gram

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

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

Leave the spray paint at home 

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

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

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

Keep your hands (and tongue) to yourself

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

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

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

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The people of Miami suburb Pinecrest, Florida are facing a particularly unique dilemma this summer—an exploding population of feral peacocks. The community of around 18,000 human residents are trying out a new way to keep the flock of colorful menaces under control: vasectomies. 

[Related: Florida suburb is overrun by fluffy rabbits after breeder goes rogue.]

According to the Miami Herald, the birds that are native to India and Sri Lanka, were brought to the city to be exotic yard ornaments. Peacocks, by nature, are a very vocal force, primarily all in the name of finding a mate. The distinct calls are disturbing locals, particularly at sunrise and sunset, and their residents have also complained about slipping and falling on peacock poop. Many residents still do not want their feathered neighbors to be killed, and hope to co-exist with them in peace. The vasectomies are part of that strategy. 

“Peacocks are bona fide polygamists,” veterinarian Don J. Harris told The New York Times. “We’re going to catch one peacock and probably stop seven females from reproducing. It’s going to have an exponential benefit.” Pinecrest hired Harris to perform the precise procedure on the male birds that display the bird’s signature plumage which also attracts potential mates. 

In September, the town plans to take part in a pilot program in an attempt to curb the bird population through surgical vasectomies. The bold birth control plan was approved by the Miami-Dade County Commission in July.  

“Most people see one peacock and they’re like, oh that’s nice, two—we’re talking about large numbers of birds that take up a lot of space and get very aggressive and protective of their nest,” District 7 Commissioner Raquel Regalado told NBC 6 South Florida.

The plan will involve trapping the male peacocks and sterilizing them. The dominant males will keep the already established pecking order and walk around town with their plumage, while the females will continue to lay eggs. The only real difference after the vasectomies is that the males won’t be able to fertilize the eggs, which should keep the population down. 

Pinecrest plans to spend $7,500 a month on the vasectomies, and an additional $15,000 for medical gear from the county commissioner. 

Iridescent peacocks like these have been a presence in some Miami neighborhoods for decades—with residents expressing mixed emotions about their feathery acquaintances. In 2001, when the peacock population was smaller, Miami-Dade County officially made killing or capturing them illegal, but homeowners could still remove the birds from their property without harming the peacocks. 

[Related: Elephants once roamed Florida—and scientists just stumbled on a graveyard full of them.]

According to Zoo Miami communications director Ron Magill, South Florida’s balmy climate is very accommodating to many exotic species. 

“When those animals get out here in South Florida, they’ve entered Club Med,” Magill told The New York Times. “This is paradise.”

The proof of this is all over the state. Southern Florida has become home to invasive to Burmese pythons that are wreaking havoc on the Everglades in the past decade. Further north in Gainesville, giant land snails up to 10 inches long have been eating their way through plants, stucco from houses, and even car tires while carrying a dangerous human parasite. 

Arguably the most adorable invasion has come from the lionhead rabbits taking over a Fort Lauderdale suburb. Multiple rescue organizations are working to trap and rescue the rabbits that face dangers from cars and the Sunshine State’s extreme heat. 

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What goes into the body, must ultimately come out.  The same goes for the parasites living within a host. The parasite-host relationship is also pretty old, and some newly found fossilized feces show the ancient parasites infected an aquatic predator more than 200 million years ago. The findings are published August 9 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

[Related: ‘Brainwashing’ parasites inherit a strange genetic gap.]

Despite being a common and important player in the food web due to their role in regulating overpopulation within the ecosystem, ancient parasites are difficult to study in the fossil record. They typically inhabit their host’s soft tissues, which are not usually preserved in fossils like tougher parts like bones. However, traces of parasites can sometimes be identified in fossilized feces which are called coprolites. 

“Coprolite is a significant paleontological treasure trove, containing several undiscovered fossils and expanding our understanding of ancient ecosystems and food chains,” the authors wrote in a statement.

In this study, the team describes evidence found in coprolite dating back to the Late Triassic from Thailand’s Huai Hin Lat Formation, which is over 200 million years old. The coprolite is shaped like a cylinder and more than 2.7 inches long. The team believes that it was likely produced by some species of a crocodile-like predator called a phytosaur based on the shape of the fossilized poop and the remains of phytosaurs have been found in the area for decades. 

Within the thin sections of coprolite, the team found six small, round, organic structures roughly between only 50 to 150 micrometers long. One of these microscopic beauties is an oval-shaped structure with a thick shell which the team identified as the egg of a parasitic nematode worm called Ascaridida. The other five structures possibly represent additional worm eggs or protozoan cysts. 

“The discovery of at least six parasites with at least five different morphotypes in a single coprolite suggests that multi-parasite infection was common had already diversified by the late

Triassic,” the authors wrote in the study. 

It is believed to be the first record of parasites in a terrestrial vertebrate host in Asia from the Late Triassic period, when the Earth was warmer and more humid than it is today. It also offers a glimpse into an ancient animal who was infected by multiple species of parasite as it went about its life. 

[Related: What prehistoric poop reveals about extinct giant animals.]

“The presence of the Ascaridida eggs and the evidence for multi-infection found in the coprolite can presumably be explained by the predatory habits of the host, which would have been parasitized by feeding on parasitized fishes, amphibians, or other reptiles,” they wrote.

This finding also adds to the few known examples of nematode eggs preserved within the fossilized poop in prehistoric animals and will add more understanding to how parasites were distributed on Earth millions of years ago.

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Baleen whales like humpbacks, northern and southern rights, and minkes are some of nature’s best known filter feeders. These mammals use the tough keratin baleen plates in their mouths to literally take in huge amounts of water and extract the small organisms like krill or plankton to snack on. However, an ancient reptile may have been the first animal to eat this way. 

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

A team of scientists from the United Kingdom and China found some remarkable new fossils that belong to a group of reptiles that were already using filter feeding about 250 million years ago. The findings are described in a study published August 7 in the journal BMC Ecology and Evolution.

Whales are not the only modern day animals to use filter feeding. Fish like basking sharks use their gills to take in food from water. Until now, there has been very little evidence from the fossil record that suggests ancient marine reptiles from the Mesozoic Era (about 252 to 66 million years ago) were filter feeders. 

In this study, the team found two new fossilized skulls that belong to an early marine reptile called Hupehsuchus nanchangensis. The roughly three foot long creature lived in China about 248 million years ago in the Early Triassic period. The high competition for food at this time may have caused H. nanchangensis to develop a specialized feeding system.

“This was a time of turmoil, only three million years after the huge end-Permian mass extinction which had wiped out most of life. It’s been amazing to discover how fast these large marine reptiles came on the scene and entirely changed marine ecosystems of the time,” study co-author and University of Bristol vertebrate paleontologist Michael Benton said in a statement. 

One of the specimens is well-preserved from head to clavicle (collarbone), and the other is a nearly complete skeleton. The team compared the shape and dimensions of the latter skull to 130 skulls from different aquatic animals, including 15 species of baleen whale, 52 species of toothed whale, 23 seal species, 14 crocodilians, 25 bird species, and the platypus. 

They found that Hupehsuchus skulls had soft structures such as an expanding throat region, which likely allowed the reptiles to take in huge amounts of water that had tiny shrimp-like prey, and baleen whale-like structures that filtered the food as it swam forward.  

[Related: Biologists vastly underestimated how much whales eat and poop.]

The Hupehsuchus skulls also have some grooves and notches located along the edge of its jaws that are similar to baleen whales. These present day mammals have keratin strips in their mouths instead of teeth like Odontoceti or toothed whales. 

The mostly complete fossilized skulls also had a long snout composed of unfused and straplike bones, as well as a long space between them and the length of the animal’s snout. This skull shape is only seen in baleen whales and is what allows them to eat krill. 

“We were amazed to discover these adaptations in such an early marine reptile,” study co-author and Wuhan Center of China Geological Survey paleontologist Zichen Fang said in a statement. “The hupehsuchians were a unique group in China, close relatives of the ichthyosaurs, and known for 50 years, but their mode of life was not fully understood.” 

Due to its rigid body, H. nanchangensis was likely a slow swimmer, and this lack of speed suggests that it may have filter fed similarly to today’s bowhead or right whales. These whales swim with their mouths wide open near the surface of the ocean to strain the food from the water. 

These new findings are an example of convergent evolution, a process where similar features evolved independently in different species.

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Spatial learning is an important and complex skill in the animal kingdom, as it helps animals find a meal when food sources are scarce. Insects such as bees and ants that are social and live in communal nests are known to do this, and now we know some butterflies can as well.  A study published August 7 in the journal Current Biology found that the Heliconius butterfly genus is capable of spatial learning. 

[Related: A ‘butterfly tree of life’ reveals the origins of these beautiful insects.]

According to the authors, the results provide the first known experimental evidence of long-range spatial learning for traplining in any butterfly or moth species. Heliconius or “passion vine” butterflies are tropical butterflies from South and Central America known for a variety of wing patterns. The beautiful creatures have evolved a novel foraging behavior amongst butterflies which includes feeding on pollen that utilizes large scale spatial information, according to the team. 

“Wild Heliconius appear to learn the location of reliable pollen sources and establish long-term traplines,” study co-author and University of Bristol evolutionary neurobiologist Stephen Montgomery said in a statement. “Traplines are learnt foraging routes along which food sources are repeatedly returned to over consecutive days, an efficient foraging strategy similar to the behavior of some orchid bees and bumblebees. However, the spatial learning abilities of Heliconius, or indeed any butterfly, had not yet been experimentally tested.”

In the study, the team conducted spatial learning experiments in Heliconius butterflies over three spatial scales that each represented ecologically-relevant behaviors.  

First, they tested the insect’s ability to learn the location of a food reward in a grid made up of 16 fake flowers. This test represented foraging within a single resource patch.  

Next, the team increased the spatial scale and tested if Heliconius could learn to associate food with either the left or right side of a two-armed maze, to represent multiple plants at a single place.  

Finally, they increased the distances and used a facility of outdoor cages called the Metatron in southern France to test if Heliconius can learn the location of good in a 196 foot wide maze shaped like the letter T. This set up represents foraging between places and is closer to the range Heliconius forages in in the wild. 

[Related: What busy bees’ brains can teach us about human evolution.]

The experiments that the Heliconius does show signs of spatial learning and can memorize the spatial location of their food sources. In future studies, the team plans to test if Heliconius are more proficient spatial learners than closely related species that don’t eat pollen. Understanding this would help reveal how enhanced cognitive abilities can be shaped by an animal’s ecology. 

The team also plans to uncover the unknown mechanisms by which Heliconius navigates. Panoramic views and other visual cues are believed to be important for these butterflies, but the insects may rely on other cues such as a sun or geomagnetic compass in addition to what they can see.  

 “It’s been almost a century since the publication of the first anecdotal story on the spatial capabilities of these butterflies,” study co-author and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte biologist Priscila Moura said in a statement. “Now we are able to provide actual evidence on their fascinating spatial learning. And this is just the beginning.”

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Best for hummingbirds		Perky-Pet 8116-2 Red		SEE IT	This affordable and antique-inspired pick will attract hummingbirds to your yard with its nectar reservoir.
Best window		Nature Gear Window Bird Feeder		SEE IT	Get a glimpse of nature up-close with this see-through window adhesive pick.
Best squirrel-proof		Droll Yankees YF-M Yankee Flipper		SEE IT	Avoid your bird feed being eaten by pesky squirrels with slim and impenetrable design.

Birds are fascinating wildlife and endlessly enjoyable to watch. The best bird feeders will not only help support the local bird population, but they will also bring these delightful animals into your yard and into your trees, making bird watching possible from the comfort of your home. Feeders can be especially useful to birds in the late winter and early spring when their natural food sources are scarce. With so many feeders on the market, we’ll explain the differences and help you find a beautiful, durable feeder sure to bring you hours of viewing enjoyment. 

• Best for hummingbirds: Perky-Pet 8116-2 Red
• Best window: Nature Gear Window Bird Feeder
• Best for cardinals: Perky-Pet Red Cardinal Bird Feeder
• Best squirrel-proof: Droll Yankees YF-M Yankee Flipper
• Best budget: First Nature 3055 32-ounce Hummingbird Feeder

How we picked the best bird feeders

Narrowing down the best bird feeders requires you to consider the types of bird species you want to attract, the frequency of maintenance that is realistic for you, your overall budget, and the best location around your home. Backyard bird enthusiasts know that adding a feeder will not only attract birds, but any other wildlife that thinks they can steal a quick meal. If squirrels are a concern for you, consider a squirrel-proof bird feeder. Nectar-style bird feeders should be drip-proof to prevent unwanted ants and bees. 

Picking the perfect location will also affect how you shop. A bird feeder pole can be installed anywhere, while hanging style feeders require either a tree branch or another structure to allow for hook installation. Choosing a location that will keep your birds safe is important as well: low feeders near bushes can set birds up to be attacked by cats, while hanging feeders too far away from cover can endanger birds from other predators such as hawks. If you want to try and get the closest view you can for birdwatching, consider a window bird feeder which uses a translucent design suction cupped to your window. We’ve selected the best bird feeders on the market for your consideration.

The best bird feeders: Reviews & Recommendations

Attracting birds to your backyard can require some thought, but the payoffs for both kids and experienced bird watchers are immense. Here are the best bird feeders for a variety of situations you may encounter.

Best for hummingbirds: Perky-Pet 8116-2 Red

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If you want to get the chance to view one of nature’s most amazing small birds zipping around, hovering, or even flying backward (they are the only birds that can), you can add a hummingbird feeder to your yard. The best hummingbird feeders are brightly colored (evidence suggests bright red, yellow, and orange feeders work best),  easy to fill with nectar, and offer a drip- and leak-proof design that only a hummingbird can reach. 

This antique-looking hummingbird feeder comes in several vibrant colors, and holds a sizable 24 ounces of nectar. It’s easy to fill and screw on, although the small opening does require the use of a bottle brush for deep cleaning. Take care when cleaning, as this bottle is actually clear glass that is painted to attract more birds.

Best window: Nature Gear Window Bird Feeder

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Take the squinting and the binoculars out of the equation, and bring the birds to you with the best window bird feeder. Window bird feeders are typically constructed out of clear acrylic and mount directly to your window with suction cups. There really is no closer way to attract birds, other than the birds being inside your home (which we don’t recommend). 

Strong suction cups keep this charming acrylic window bird feeder attached securely to your windows. The feeding tray and house detach for easier cleaning. A circular cutout helps to increase the visibility of birds from inside your home. 

Best for cardinals: Perky-Pet Red Cardinal Bird Feeder

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If you’re interested in attracting colorful, non-migratory species, consider a cardinal bird feeder. These colorful birds are some of the most awe-inspiring and beautiful species in nature. Local cardinal populations will benefit from the extra food in a feeder particularly in the fall and winter months when their food sources are scarce. 

This feeder holds up to 2.5 pounds of black-oil sunflower seeds, a favorite snack for cardinals. The circular perch design lets cardinals sit and rest while they snack, and the red-on-red color protects, by helping them blend in. A special zinc-plated finish makes this metal design more durable and resistant to rust.

Best squirrel-proof: Droll Yankees YF-M Yankee Flipper

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There’s a reason why there are so many cartoon scenes about this— it can be downright comical to watch how many inventive ways squirrels come up with to steal food from bird feeders. While amusing, depending on your level of seriousness at attracting birds, it’s important to find a good squirrel-proof bird feeder.

Easy to assemble, this squirrel-proof bird feeder uses weight detection to start spinning the feeder sending any squirrels that make it on, right off again. This squirrel-spinning bird feeder can hold up to five pounds of birdseed and offers four feeding ports.

Best budget: First Nature 3055 32-ounce Hummingbird Feeder

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Luckily, it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to feed your neighborhood birds. There are many budget-priced bird feeders on the market that are well-rated and attractive. This is a simple, well-reviewed, affordable hummingbird feeder. This feeder features an extra-wide mouth which makes the reservoir easy to fill and clean, and it can hold up to 32 ounces of nectar.

Things to consider before purchasing a bird feeder

What birds do you want to attract?

Hummingbirds spend their lives searching and consuming food. In fact, they need to drink nectar every ten minutes to maintain their fast metabolism. You can make your own nectar at home using granulated sugar and water, or buy a premade nectar. Hummingbirds can visit 1,000 to 2,000 flowers a day in search of their food, which means that regardless of where the nectar comes from, they will be grateful for the easy energy from a well-stocked feeder. Known for their amazing memories, hummingbirds are able to remember nectar locations and may pay a visit to your feeder during their migrations. 

To make your yard a hummingbird’s paradise, garden experts advise luring the birds with nectar-producing flowers, either planted in the ground or in pots and planters. Once in your yard, they will discover your feeder and will be sure to remember their new feeding spot. It’s best to keep your feeder in the partial shade to avoid any spoiling of nectar. To keep ants and bees at bay, keep the exterior of the feeder clean and dry, and give it a wash every one to two weeks with warm soap and water.

Cardinals are most attracted to food sources that are easy and safe for them to access. A cardinal feeder is typically a cylindrical tube (which is either hung up, or supported from below), or a rectangular style, which includes a wide trough at the base filled with seeds. Platform bird feeders are another option, but these can become overwhelmed with other types of birds as well. Stock your cardinal bird feeder with fresh sunflower seeds to make your red beauties happy and healthy.

Build quality

The best window bird feeders are lightweight, just large enough to house your feeding bluebird, and constructed out of good-quality clear acrylic. Look for window feeders that have a pitched roof design to provide shelter from snow and rain. Another important feature is a feeding tray that includes drainage holes. If any water enters the feeder, it will drain away, which will help prevent the seeds from spoiling. 

Most window bird feeders are not designed to be squirrel-proof, so if that’s a concern you may need to experiment with different windows and heights to try and prevent these crafty critters from leaping or dangling onto the window feeder for stolen snacks. Window bird feeders are usually affordable, and a fun way to experiment with bird watching. Reviewers rave about how much children and house cats enjoy these as well. 

Tired of squirrels stealing your bird seed?

Squirrel-proof bird feeders use a few methods to deter squirrels. Some utilize a simple, metal-made tube feeder with chew-resistant enclosures. Another solution can be pole-mounted feeders, which should be a minimum of six feet off the ground, and far enough away from jump-off points that squirrels can use to leap onto the feeder. Finally, some squirrel-proof bird feeders have an engineered design which uses weight detection, so if a squirrel stands on the feeder the seed port immediately closes. All of these options should help keep your bird feeder safe for only birds.

Looking to attract birds without spending a lot of money?

When it comes to features, you can expect more cost-conscious feeders to be constructed out of less expensive materials like plastic. Also expect the size and capacity to be smaller for budget feeders.

The majority of the best bird feeders for hummingbirds (outside of handmade fancy specialty items) are very reasonable in price, as are the majority of small window feeders. Hanging feeders range from very inexpensive to high priced. The good news is there are a lot of options and especially if this is a new hobby, it can make sense to start off small and see if you enjoy owning, viewing, and maintaining bird feeders in your garden before you invest in the more expensive models.

FAQs

Our final thoughts on the best bird feeders

• Best for hummingbirds: Perky-Pet 8116-2 Red
• Best window: Nature Gear Window Bird Feeder
• Best for cardinals: Perky-Pet Red Cardinal Bird Feeder
• Best squirrel-proof: Droll Yankees YF-M Yankee Flipper
• Best budget: First Nature 3055 32-ounce Hummingbird Feeder

The best bird feeders will attract fascinating birds into your yard, while helping your local bird populations thrive. Whether you wish to bring hummingbirds, cardinals, or a variety of local birds to your home, the best feeders will allow for safe, comfortable feeding and keep birdseed fresh. With options in size, color, style, and price, there’s no reason not to start birding right from your own window.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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

[Related: Coral is reproducing in broad daylight.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When the world shut down in the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, people needed to find entertainment and stimulation somewhere. Binging Tiger King on Netflix or making sourdough starter or taking daily walks in nature rapidly became the thing to do. Now, scientists are beginning to quantify just how much collective interest in another COVID hobby—watching and feeding birds—picked up during lockdown. 

[Related: Lockdown made cities friendlier for some birds.]

In a study published August 2 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, a team of researchers used data from Google search index and found that interest in bird feeding surged 115 countries while people were home due to the lockdowns. The work is offering new insight into human-bird interactions around the world. 

Previous research shows that interest in common bird species and friend birds increased during lockdown. The latest study’s team used Google search data to analyze whether there was an increased interest in bird feeding and wild birds at a global and individual-country scale during and after COVID-19 lockdowns compared with before the restrictions began. They also looked at if the level of interest in bird feeding in a country is linked to species richness.

“This study first tests whether this pattern—increased interest in bird feeding in response to COVID-19 lockdowns—holds true for all countries, including those in the Southern Hemisphere,”study co-author and Griffith University in Australia Professor Emeritus Darryl Jones said in a statement.  “If so, COVID-19 lockdowns offered a way to reveal the global extent of bird feeding interest, something that is poorly understood.”

They observed the weekly frequency of search terms such as “bird feeder,” “bird food,” and “bird bath” for all countries that had sufficient search volumes from January 1, 2019 to May 31, 2020 to see if there was an increase in bird-specific searches during each country’s specific lockdown period (typically around February to April 2020). Data on nation-level bird species from BirdLife International was used to measure species richness.

For a period of 52 weeks before the lockdowns, they found that the search intensity was similar to the weeks preceding lockdown on average. After roughly two weeks of lockdowns, a dramatic spike in bird feeding search intensity was evident and the result mirrored the interest in these topics found in the United States, a country with well-documented interest in bird feeding. 

[Related: Expert-approved ways to feed all your favorite birds.]

Countries that did not have bird-related search interest had an average of 294 bird species, whereas the countries that showed a search interest had an average of 511 bird species. Since the proxy measurement for bird feeding interest is a Google search, lower income countries and those with less internet access may not have been captured as well despite an interest in bird feeding practices. The authors note that their method did still capture a surge of interest outside of the United States and the United Kingdom in countries such as Kenya and Pakistan. 

This knowledge on supplementary bird feeding around the world can help scientists better understand bird communities and their migratory patterns. According to the authors, while providing supplementary food for wild birds can be beneficial in terms of survival during lean times and improve health, there is also evidence that suggests that bird feeding may change ecological communities and may have negative effects on species biodiversity.

“If bird feeding is common in other parts of the world, this could impact migration and disease patterns,” said Jones. “It is imperative that we understand the global extent of bird feeding in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of its potential impacts on both avian and human well-being at a continental and global scale.”

Additionally, the team found that some of the reasons for the increased interest in feeding the birds during lockdown was likely related to changes in the relative costs of leisure activities and the psychological benefits of connecting with the natural world during stressful events. 

[Related: Owls, puffins, and even city pigeons glam it up in winning bird photos.]

“If access to other nature-based activities was also reduced, this would make bird feeding seem relatively more attractive,” said Jones. “Moreover, forced time at home during lockdowns may have increased opportunities for people to notice birds in their gardens and may have piqued their interest in bird feeding.”

Future studies could further explore the feeding patterns in parts of the world with limited formal data collection and increase the cultural and biophysical diversity of the locations where local bird feeding is studied.

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It’s hard to deny that whales are some of the most charismatic megafauna on our planet. The blue whale, specifically, with its massive size, friendly demeanor, and devastating backstory is one that has captured imaginations for decades. But there may be a new contender for the largest animal to live on earth—or at least there was one around 40 million years ago.

An international team of scientists recently uncovered some giant bones in a fossil-filled coastal desert Peru, namely 13 vertebrae, four ribs and a hip bone. These fossils lead them to a discovery of a sea-dwelling mammal that would’ve weighed up to 340 metric tons. Blue whales have gotten to around 190 metric tons at their heaviest, and the most massive dinosaur, the supersized sauropod Argentinosaurus, was estimated to weigh around 76 tons. 

[Related: Millions of years ago, marine reptiles may have used Nevada as a birthing ground.]

Despite their incredible size, the newly-named Perucetus colossus was likely not a fighter, similar to some of the world’s other favorite sea mammals. 

“Because of its heavy skeleton and, most likely, its very voluminous body, this animal was certainly a slow swimmer. This appears to me, at this stage of our knowledge, as a kind of peaceful giant, a bit like a super-sized manatee. It must have been a very impressive animal, but maybe not so scary,” paleontologist Olivier Lambert of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels told Reuters. Lambert and his colleagues published their findings August 2 in Nature. 

The chilled-out attitude of the Perucetus was likely not the only thing they had in common with today’s manatees. Its dense, vast skeleton was even estimated to be twice as heavy as a blue whale’s at 5 to 8 tons, even though length-wise, the blue whale still had them beat. 

“It took several men to shift them [the fossils] into the middle of the floor in the museum for me to do some 3D scanning,” author Rebecca Bennion from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels told the BBC. “The team that drilled into the center of some of these vertebrae to work out the bone density—the bone was so dense, it broke the drill on the first attempt.”

This characteristic doesn’t exist in today’s cetaceans (the family including whales, dolphins and porpoises), but it does appear in sirenians. One author especially noted the Steller’s sea cow, which was discovered in the 1700s only to go extinct within three decades of its discovery due to overhunting. 

[Related: These now-extinct whales were kind of like manatees.]

Like manatees, the Perucetus also appears to have had front limbs. Strangely enough, the animal also possessed vestigial back limbs, a possible evolutionary hangover from when whales evolved from land-based, dog-sized mammals 50 million years ago. 

One looming question about the Perucetus is how it ate—the researchers unfortunately didn’t find it’s skull, so the authors have multiple hypotheses: it may have scavenged, ate sea grass, or even scooped up shellfish and worms from the mud floor like today’s gray whales. 

Nevertheless, just finding a creature that could’ve been this size opens a whole new can of worms for paleontologists to uncover. 

“The extreme skeletal mass of Perucetus suggests that evolution can generate organisms with characteristics that go beyond our imagination,” study author and Italian paleontologist Giovanni Bianucci told CNN. And that is a massive deal. 

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Many plants and animals will do whatever it takes to reproduce, from “wingmen” dolphins to pee sniffing giraffes to daisies that trick flies into pollinating with them. Now, a team of scientists have identified a specific blend of pheromone chemicals and a newly unveiled aphrodisiac that male moths use during courtship. The findings were published on August 1 in the journal Current Biology and are showing more detail on this complex blend of chemicals that are used in the short-range communications between male and female moths.

[Related: Does ‘vabbing’ work? The truth about vaginal pheromones.]

The male pheromone mixture used in mating was first discovered almost 35 years ago, but the male moth aphrodisiac found in this study is a chemical called methyl salicylate. It is derived from plants and is emitted when herbivores move in to attacks and eat them. Methyl salicylate acts as both a healing mechanism in the plants and as a cry for help to the enemies of the herbivores eating the plants, to alert them that there is potential food nearby. 

The moth family in this study feeds on roughly 350 plant species across North and South America, including the tobacco budworm, the corn earworm, and the fall armyworm. Male Chloridea virescens moths–also called the tobacco budworm moth–use methyl salicylate in their pheromone blend that the team on this study say likely helps the male show dominance. Basically, this natural perfume is proof that the moth was able to defeat the plant’s defenses and could be considered a way of signaling that it is a worthy mating option. 

“These close-range interactions provide valuable insight into both species recognition— how females recognize males of the same species—and female choice in mate selection,” study co-author and North Carolina State University entomologist Coby Schal said in a statement. “This interaction gives females some insight into a particular male’s history.”

The female moths will begin the mating process by emitting an attraction pheromone blend made up of fatty acids over a longer range of distance and the males respond to these cues by flying closer to the females. Once they’re close enough, the males emit their own unique blend of pheromones made up of different alcohols. The females then use the male’s blend to help them decide whether the male is partner material. 

In the study, the team used a method where chemical compounds are separated in a controllable oven called gas chromatography, to determine the chemicals that make up the male pheromone blend. Some of these ingredients were not found in the initial characterization first made by scientists over three decades ago. 

[Related: The alluring tail of the Luna moth is surprisingly useless for finding a mate.]

They discovered that the methyl salicylate elicited a huge response from the females in the lab, notably because the female moth antennae have two smell receptors specifically for picking up this chemical. 

The team was also able to reduce the amount of methyl salicylate the males emitted and saw that mating success suffered. When these males then received smaller quantities of methyl salicylate, their mating success rates returned to normal, demonstrating how the chemical works more like an aphrodisiac.

Additionally, the team found small amounts of methyl salicylate in moths that had been eating an artificial diet in the lab, but those caught in North Carolina soybean fields had large amounts of the chemical. The chemical was stored in their hairpencils, male organs that emit their special mating pheromone blend. Adding the chemical into the diet of male moths in the lab through a sugar water drink that mimicked nectar demonstrated how male moths incorporated the chemical and sequestered it in their hairpencils. When they were encouraged to vigorously court females, those hairpencils had lower amounts of methyl salicylate since the males used a lot of it in their pheromone cocktail.

“It was surprising to find methyl salicylate in male moth pheromone blends, but the evidence from this paper suggests that male moths take up and sequester methyl salicylate as larvae while chewing up plants or as adults by drinking flower nectar,” Schal said. “Males may have evolved sexual signals that match the sensory bias exhibited by females in responding to methyl salicylate.”

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Despite lacking blood, a heart, or a brain, slimy jellyfish are one of Earth’s most ubiquitous sea creatures and various species live in all of the planet’s oceans. They are some of the Earth’s oldest animals, having been around for roughly more than 500 million years (that’s 250 million years older than the earliest dinosaurs). Now, scientists with Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum have found the oldest swimming jellyfish in the fossil record. The discovery of the newly named Burgessomedusa phasmiformis is described in a study published August 1 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

[Related: These jellyfish seem to cheat death. What’s their secret?]

Jellyfish belong to a clade of animals called medusozoans, which includes the box jellies, hydroids, stalked jellyfish, and true jellyfish that swim in the oceans today. Medusozoans are part of the group Cnidaria, which also includes sea anemones and corals. The discovery of Burgessomedusa shows that large, swimming jellyfish that are bell or saucer-shaped had already evolved over 500 million years ago.  

Jellyfish are made of roughly 95 percent water, making them tricky to capture in the fossil record. However, the Burgessomedusa fossils are exceptionally well preserved in the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies.  The Royal Ontario Museum now holds close to 200 specimens that were used to learn more about the internal anatomy and tentacles of ancient jellyfish, with some specimens measuring more than seven inches long. Like some modern jellyfish, Burgessomedusa would also have been capable of free-swimming. Their tentacles would have helped it catch pretty big prey.

“Although jellyfish and their relatives are thought to be one of the earliest animal groups to have evolved, they have been remarkably hard to pin down in the Cambrian fossil record. This discovery leaves no doubt they were swimming about at that time,” study co-author and University of Toronto PhD candidate Joe Moysiuk said in a statement. 

This study uses fossil specimens that were discovered at the Burgess Shale during the late 1980s and 1990s. The fossils demonstrate that the Cambrian food chain was much more complex than paleontologists previously believed, and the large swimming arthropods of the time like Anomalocaris were not the only predators. 

[Related: Italian chefs are cooking up a solution to booming jellyfish populations.]

One of the more gnarly parts of the complex life cycle of Cnidarians is that they can have more than one body form. A vase-shaped and non-free swimming body is called a polyp, while medusozoans have a bell or saucer-shaped body–called a medusa or jellyfish–that can be free-swimming or not. Fossilized polyps have been found in about 560-million-year old rocks, but the origin of the more free-swimming medusa or jellyfish is not well understood. Their evolutionary history is primarily based on microscopic fossilized larval stages and molecular studies performed on living species. 

“Finding such incredibly delicate animals preserved in rock layers on top of these mountains is such a wondrous discovery. Burgessomedusa adds to the complexity of Cambrian foodwebs, and like Anomalocaris which lived in the same environment, these jellyfish were efficient swimming predators,” study co-author and Royal Ontario Museum’s invertebrate paleontology curator Jean-Bernard Caron said in a statement. “This adds yet another remarkable lineage of animals that the Burgess Shale has preserved chronicling the evolution of life on Earth.”

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

As a veterinary science researcher, equine surgeon and sports medicine and rehabilitation specialist, I’ve seen firsthand the similarities between horses and humans.

Both horses and people with endocrine disorders like Type 2 diabetes can suffer multiple types of musculoskeletal disorders. For example, horses with pituitary pars intermedia dysfunction—similar to Cushing’s disease in people—suffer from tendon and ligament degeneration. Horses can also experience muscle loss, which can cause joint instability. That, and the chronic low-grade inflammation associated with endocrine disorders, can contribute to osteoarthritis.

There’s a principle in medicine called One Health, which says that animals, humans and the environment are inextricably connected—for one to be healthy, all must be healthy. It also means that we can learn a lot about our own health by studying the health of animals, and vice versa, including the many parallels in endocrine disorders between humans and horses.

Human and horse endocrine systems

Your endocrine system produces hormones that support many of your body’s basic functions, including growth and development, metabolism, sleep and more. Your hormones also play a role in the health of your bones, tendons and ligaments. Some endocrine disorders change how your body produces and releases hormones and can lead to osteoporosis, arthritis, ligament injury and other orthopedic diseases.

Humans aren’t the only species affected by this dynamic—horses are, too. In fact, approximately 20 percent of horses and over 34 percent of people in the U.S. are affected by endocrine disorders such as metabolic syndrome. These disorders are often accompanied by obesity.

For both species, the degree to which endocrine disorders are connected to obesity and its associated negative health effects is complex. As mammals, horses and people share similar anatomy and endocrine physiology, and researchers have noted their parallel genetic links between obesity and metabolic disease.

Like people, obese horses with endocrine disorders often develop low-grade inflammation. Inflammation is a normal response to injuries and sickness. But chronic, low-grade inflammation can have long-term negative effects on the body. For example, low-grade inflammation is associated with metabolic osteoarthritis in people, and my laboratory is studying this possible link in horses.

In people, childhood obesity, which is related to maternal obesity, is associated with a type of joint disease called osteochondrosis. Foals born from obese mares are also predisposed to this same type of joint disease.

Research to note

Because of the similarities between people and horses, research on diagnostics and treatments for metabolic conditions could provide health benefits to both species.

For example, a class of drug called glucagonlike peptide-1 agonists, which includes such brands as Trulicity (dulaglutide) and Ozempic (semaglutide), is commonly used to treat metabolic syndrome and Type II diabetes in people. This class of medication is also effective in treating these conditions in horses, similarly slowing down how quickly food empties the stomach and blunting glucose release into the bloodstream.

Another class of drugs called sodium-glucose cotransporter protein-2 inhibitors, which include such treatments as Jardiance (empagliflozin) and Farxiga (dapagliflozin), are used to treat Type 2 diabetes in people and a similar condition in horses. These drugs alter the kidneys’ ability to absorb sugar from urine such that the body eliminates some of the glucose it would normally absorb. This greatly reduces blood insulin spikes, which can help prevent obesity, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease in both horses and people.

Some dietary supplements, such as resveratrol, especially when used in combination with an amino acid called leucine, also help with weight loss, mobility and insulin sensitivity in people and horses. Lowering blood insulin concentrations can also prevent horses from developing laminitis, a disease that inflames tissues in hooves that can necessitate euthanasia because of incurable pain.

Expanding precision medicine

I find one of the most exciting avenues of research in both animals and people to be the expansion of precision medicine. Instead of the standard one-size-fits-all protocol, precision medicine uses information from a person’s genes, environment and medical history to create a customized treatment plan. For example, precision medicine is often applied in oncology when doctors gather genetic information about the patient’s tumor to inform which treatments might work best for them.

In horses, precision medicine currently focuses on DNA-based diagnostic tests to inform exercise regimens, treatment and breeding decisions. Recent work with horses also suggests that measuring the heritability of certain metabolic traits could be used to screen for metabolic syndrome in the future.

Within precision medicine, doctors aim to get a full-picture view of an individual and their metabolic health by using multiomic analysis. Multiomics entails looking at multiple “omics”–or information from a range of biological disciplines, such as epigenomics, lipidomics, genomics and transcriptomics–to better treat an individual patient.

The more researchers learn from individual patients, including horses, the better doctors will be able to treat every patient. My lab and others use multiomic analysis to generate data that may one day help us identify more effective and safer therapies for horses and–likely–people with metabolic conditions.

Jane Manfredi is an associate professor of pathobiology and diagnostic investigation at Michigan State University. Manfredi receives funding from the Michigan Alliance for Animal Agriculture, USDA NIFA, AAVMC CIVME. Michigan State University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

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

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This article originally appeared on MIT Press Reader. This article is excerpted from Eva Meijer’s book “Animal Languages.“

Several years ago, there was big news: Dolphins call one another by name. Like humans, they all have a unique sound that they use to introduce themselves to new dolphins and to call one another. Dolphins are far from the only animals that have names. Parrots receive a name from their parents. Squirrel monkeys have a special “chuck” sound for each individual. Bats have names that they use to call one another so that they can stay together in the darkness. This can be particularly useful in a big group. A name is handy because it allows you to call someone else and to indicate that it is you who is coming.

Identity is not only communicated by voice. Hyenas live in fluid social relationships in which the females are dominant. In their interaction, they make use of scent signals from their anal glands, which occur in 252 different arrangements and form an individual profile that changes over time. The scents are also overwritten by other members of the group, which allows passing outsiders to form a good picture of both the individuals who live somewhere—their age, gender, status, health, perhaps their mood—and the strength of the group as a whole. With dogs, the scent from the anal glands—every dog lover knows it well—also provides a similar sort of profile. Urine and excrement provide information about identity too. Sometimes dogs in the city, who have never met before, seem to have an inexplicable antipathy towards each other; most likely they have long been aware of the other’s existence because of the traces of scent they have previously encountered, and they have some reason for hostility.

Parrots receive a name from their parents. Bats have names that they use to call one another so that they can stay together in the darkness.

Many animals make use of scent in excrement and urine. Hippos, for example, like to mark out their territory with dung, as do rabbits. Lobsters have little tubes under their eyes that are filled with urine, which they spray into others’ faces. The males do this when they are fighting. Lobsters fight often and remember who they have fought. They also have a mental map of who lives where. Only the strongest male mates with the females and female lobsters only mate when they have just shed their shells. They spray urine in the male’s face to daze him and they dance a little. During mating, the male protects the female, but when she has a new shell the male leaves, and the next female might come along. Females do not fight one another.

Like cats, snakes have a Jacobson’s organ. Located in the roof of the mouth, this is an organ of chemoreception that is part of the olfactory system, which these animals use to smell. Their tongues capture scent particles that they place in the Jacobson’s organ, which has two openings, allowing them to smell the world in stereo. Snakes use this to find both predators and prey, and to communicate with other snakes. The trail that their body leaves behind and the air that they pass through contain pheromones with information about their gender and age, and whether they are pregnant. Young snakes follow this trail to find the location of the shared hibernation space. Puff adders, venomous snakes found mainly in southern Africa, not only leave behind scents for others to follow but also camouflage their own scent in order to deceive predators. Snakes also communicate by touch, and some cobras make low growls.

Wolves make use of similar scent signals to dogs. In addition, they howl. Both in the frequency and in the harmony, they give clues about their own identity and about their relationships; wolves howl or sing longer and louder to wolves with whom they have a stronger bond. Their howls probably share information with each other, but we do not yet know precisely what. Coyotes sing and share information about their identity as well. The howling of coyotes is also a way to call members of their own group and to let other packs know that they are there.

Dingos—Australian feral dogs that are genetically somewhere between the wolf and the dog—can both bark and howl. They bark rarely, their barking is shorter than that of domestic dogs and they sing less than wolves. Howling can be an individual matter (to discuss food or hierarchy) and because the sound travels over long distances it is a good way to communicate in the Australian wilderness. Dingos also sing in groups, as an expression of pleasure, to warn others and to communicate with other groups about the size of the pack without having to engage in a confrontation. When more dingos are singing, the frequency rises.

Within species, different groups of animals sometimes have their own dialect. The songs of whales differ from group to group. Sometimes whales pick up a popular song from a certain group and it becomes a hit in that group too. Parrots live in communities of 20 to 300 animals, which all have different dialects. Some parrots can speak the dialect of more than one group. The territories of the white-crowned sparrow are so sharply defined that when you stand on the border you can hear one dialect in the songs on the left and another on the right.

Parrots live in communities of 20 to 300 animals, which all have different dialects.

Great tits have dialects too, and research has also been carried out into their transmission of social norms. Captive tits were taught to use a red or blue door to open a food cage containing a mealworm, a particular delicacy for these birds. Then the birds were released into a wild population, which they quickly taught how to get the mealworm. Small trackers recorded which birds reached the mealworm and through which door. Twenty days later, three-quarters of the population understood how it worked, and the vast majority chose the door that had been taught to the first bird. When the cage was removed and put back a year later, the birds immediately started using the same door again. This is remarkable, as three-fifths of the birds from the original population had died in the meantime. The researchers believe that social norms probably also exist in other animals that live in stable social groups; behavioral innovation, passing on new skills, helps populations to survive.

To determine whether animals are aware of who they are, or of the fact that they are someone, researchers have developed the mirror test. This test involves sticking a red dot to the animal’s forehead and placing the animal in front of a mirror. If the animal attempts to remove the dot from his or her forehead, this is an indication of self-awareness — that is, the animals are able to recognize themselves as selves in the mirror. Elephants, magpies, chimpanzees, pigs, and many other animals have been found to have this self-awareness.

There are problems with the mirror test though: First, there are some animals who do not mind having a sticker on their skin. Second, in some cultures looking at yourself in the mirror is not good form. Third, it is not that suitable for animals whose other senses are more important than sight.

To start with the first point: Elephants use mud to keep cool and to prevent itching, so they often do not object to a little thing like a sticker on their skin and therefore score badly in the mirror test, in spite of their intelligence and socially minded attitude. We find the second, cultural aspect in gorillas, who are social animals and assumed to be self-aware, but they are naturally shy and long eye contact is not common among their kind, so they too score badly on the mirror test. The same applies, incidentally, to children from some non-Western cultures. Out of 82 children from Kenya, only two passed the test, whereas Western children pass the test almost without exception — clearly the difference here is cultural, not cognitive. Thirdly, the test is also not very suitable for animals whose sight is not good. Dogs are more focused on scent than on sight, so animal ethologist Marc Bekoff came up with the yellow snow test, a variation on the mirror test. Dogs live in a universe of scents, which inspired Bekoff to carry out an experiment in which he collected pee from the snow and investigated how his dog reacted. The dog in question, Jethro, spent considerably less time sniffing his own pee than that of other dogs, so he was clearly reacting differently to the scent profile of other dogs than to his own.

These examples show us that there is more going on in the social lives of animals than we may think. Looking at their languages can help us to better understand their inner lives. However, as the mirror test demonstrates, there are also problems with research methods that are based on human capacities: Human bias distorts how we view other animals. Similarly, if we only study the languages of other animals on the basis of how much they resemble human language, many animals will not fare well. In order to move beyond anthropocentrism, power relations in research need to be taken into account, and we need to develop new research practices together with other animals. In this process, existing concepts such as language can be a starting point.

Eva Meijer is an author and philosopher. She is author of, among other books, “Bird Cottage,” a novel, “When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy,” “The Limits of My Language: Meditations on Depression,” and “Animal Languages,” from which this article is excerpted.

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A group of scientists uncovered a 46,000-year-old soil nematode from Siberian permafrost, and in an Sleeping Beauty-esque experiment woke the microscopic organism up from a millenniums’ long rest. The findings are described in a study published July 27 in the open access journal PLOS Genetics.

[Related: Oyster mushrooms release nerve gas to kill worms before eviscerating them.]

Also called roundworms, nematodes are a very adaptable group of sometimes microscopic animals. In addition to tardigrades and rotifers, some nematodes can survive harsh conditions by entering a dormant state known as cryptobiosis. This process basically shuts down the animals’ metabolic systems until they can be revived when environmental conditions become more favorable. 

After uncovering the animals in Siberia’s northern Kolyma River, the team successfully woke them from this frozen-in-time state. Radiocarbon analysis dated the roundworms to 45,839 to 47,769 years ago, when direwolves and Neanderthals were still on Earth. 

Sequencing the genome revealed that the roundworm is a new species of nematode. Panagrolaimus kolymaensis is a functionally extinct species and joins the ranks of some of Earth’s most ubiquitous organisms that dwell in water, soil, and on the ocean floor. 

“P. kolymaensis‘s highly contiguous genome will make it possible to compare this feature to those of other Panagrolaimus species whose genomes are presently being sequenced by Schiffer’s team and colleagues,” study co-author and Director Emeritus at the DRESDEN-concept Genome Center Eugene Myers said in a statement. 

According to the team, nematodes do not require a lot of coaxing to wake up and wiggle around and make more little roundworms. They have since nurtured more than 100 generations of P. kolymaensis in the lab, where each new generation lasts about 8 to 12 days.

“Basically, you only have to bring the worms into amenable conditions, on a culture (agar) plate with some bacteria, some humidity and room temperature,” study co-author and University of Cologne zoologist Philipp Schiffer explained to Vice. “They just start crawling around then. They also just start reproducing. In this case this is even easier, as it is an all-female (asexual) species. They don‘t need to find males and have sex, they just start making eggs, which develop.”

In addition to the excitement of reviving a species that has been sleeping deep within the earth this long, studying these small spindle-shaped creatures may help scientists better understand how animals can adapt to habitat changes due to global warming and shifting weather patterns at a molecular level. 

[Related from PopSci+: Cave worms could hold the secrets to a better life.]

They found that mild dehydration exposure before freezing helped P. kolymaensis prepare for cryptobiosis and increased survival at -112 degrees Fahrenheit. The nematodes produced a sugar called trehalose when it was mildly dehydrated in the lab, potentially enabling it to endure these freezing and intense dehydration. 

“Our findings are essential for understanding evolutionary processes because generation times can range from days to millennia and because the long-term survival of a species’ individuals can result in the re-emergence of lineages that would otherwise have gone extinct,” study Schiffer said in a statement. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A major offshore wind farm provider has just completed the construction of three massive artificial nesting structures (ANS) along England’s East Coast. The trio of massive bird houses is part of an agreement to protect a local, endangered seabird—the black-legged kittiwake gull. According to an announcement from UK-based marine contractor Red7Marine, each structure can house 500 nests for the gulls. The contractor hopes they will provide researchers with the means to monitor the bird population’s health over the course of the farm’s entire lifespan.

One of wind farms’ central drawbacks are their impacts on local bird populations, particularly the effects of off-shore turbines on vulnerable seabirds. And while climate change undoubtedly remains these species’ biggest existential threat, mitigating these unintended byproducts of green infrastructure expansion is key to ensuring a responsible transition towards a sustainable future.

[Related: When wind turbines kill bats and birds, these scientists want the carcasses.]

That outlook was central to the approval of the UK’s Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm, which is the country’s first turbine project to require “ecological compensation,” according to sustainable technology site Electrek on Friday. Once completed in 2025, Hornsea 3 will provide roughly 2.85-gigawatts of power to the country—enough to power over 3 million homes. Before that can happen, however, the Danish wind farm company Ørsted partnered with Red7Marine and others to design and erect the new kittiwake apartment complexes.

The three ANS are located less than a mile off the coast of England, and required a pair of “jack-up” barges alongside a host of other tools to build. According to Red7Marine, a team of architects, engineers, and ecologists collaborated to design the artificial eight-sided nesting walls, which feature narrow ledges to replicate kittiwakes’ natural cliffside habitats. The main structure is also intentionally painted off-white to blend in with both the ocean and sky, while the interior is furnished with tables, chairs, and whiteboards for researchers visiting the locales. Each nest nook also includes sliding Perspex paneling to allow for unobtrusive monitoring of the kittiwakes.

“Kittiwake are listed as at risk from extinction and with climate change as a key driver to their decline, a move towards a green energy system could help considerably in the long-term conservation of the species,” Ørsted’s environmental manager Eleni Antoniou said in a statement provided to Electrek. “In the meantime, the provision of these structures will provide a safe, nesting space to enable future generations to raise young away from predators and out of town centers.”

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Best overall		Celestron 71009 SkyMaster		SEE IT	The Celestron SkyMasters combine ultra-sharp focus and 15x magnification for optimal viewing.
Best ergonomics		Nikon Prostaff Binoculars		SEE IT	Lightweight and comfortable, the Nikon Prostaffs can withstand long sessions with ease.
Best budget		Tasco Essentials 8×42		SEE IT	The Tasco Essentials provide bright images with life-like colors in a small package.

The thrill of spotting a beautiful bird never gets old, especially when you’ve got binoculars for bird watching to see every feather in detail. If you’re new to birding, binoculars will help you see more from a single location. The best bird-watching binoculars capture light and color to make it feel like you could reach out and touch the feathers with your finger. Binoculars come in a wide range of prices, from ones that will make you wonder if you’re buying a small car to ones that are easier on the wallet. A pair that fits your budget, birding habits, and hands will let you spot birds like never before. Keep reading to get our views on the best bird-watching binoculars and get a few tips before buying.

• Best overall: Celestron 71009 SkyMaster
• Best close focus: Maven B1 10×42
• Best premium: Olympus 10×50 Binoculars
• Best ergonomic: Nikon Prostaff Binoculars
• Best for travel: Celestron – Nature DX 8×42 Binoculars
• Best waterproof: Bushnell H2O Waterproof/Fogproof Roof Prism Binoculars
• Best budget: Tasco Essentials 8×42

How we chose the best bird-watching binoculars

For a serious birder, binoculars are an investment, whereas a casual amateur doesn’t need quite the same features. But both users want the same thing: the ability to see birds with accurate colors and clear images. To meet that need, I judged the binoculars based on their image clarity, brightness, focus speed, close-focus performance, ergonomics, and weight.

Clarity and brightness: Clarity and brightness come down to the lens and prism design and their coatings. Coatings help target colors and reduce reflection to increase the light that enters the binoculars.

Focus speed: Birds move fast; binoculars that quickly focus mean you still get to see your target.

Close-focus performance: If you’re lucky enough to get within 10 feet of a bird, you want to be able to get even closer with your binoculars.

Ergonomics and weight: You might have to wait a long time for a bird to appear. Good ergonomics will make the experience easier on your hands and shoulders, and lighter options make them easier to hold while watching and waiting.

The best bird-watching binoculars: Reviews & Recommendations

If you enjoy seeing birds up close, you’re in good company. According to a 2016 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey, more than 45 million people identified as birders in the United States, and that number is believed to have increased during the pandemic. Whether you’re looking for a premium model with high-quality optics or binoculars you can easily toss into a backpack, there’s a pair that will suit your needs below.

Best overall: Celestron 71009 SkyMaster

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Why they made the cut: Equally well-suited for both expert and novice birders, the Celestron SkyMaster binoculars offer top-of-the-line features at an accessible price.

Specs

• Magnification: 15x
• Lens: 70mm
• Weight: 3.28 pounds

Pros

• Large center focus dial for ultra-sharp focus
• 15x magnification for detailed viewing
• Eyeglass-friendly eyecups

Cons

• Quite heavy

Ready to get up close to your favorite birds? The Celestron 71009 SkyMaster binoculars boast a 15x magnification level that brings you closer to nature than ever before. The large objective lens allows you to catch every moment, even in low-light conditions, and the rugged textured finish helps stabilize your grip.

Beyond these amazing attributes, Celestron has included many thoughtful additions. Your package includes an objective lens cap, tripod, and adapter for your binoculars. Note that this pair is quite heavy, weighing a hefty 3.28 pounds. For best function during extended bird-watching adventures, it’s recommended to use these with a tripod. For more options, check out our guide to the best binoculars for hiking.

Best close focus: Maven B1 10×42

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Why they made the cut: The Maven can get crystal-clear close focus and includes focus adjustments that are a cinch to do, even when you’re freaking out about being super close to a new bird.

Specs

• Magnification: 10x
• Lens: 42mm
• Weight: 1.76 pounds

Pros

• Easy to adjust focus
• Extra-low dispersion glass maximizes available light
• Excellent clarity and color at close distances

Cons

• Can be hefty for smaller users

The Maven B1 features impressive focus that’s a cinch to use. This pair also features extra-low dispersion glass that resists reflection to maximize the amount of light that enters the binoculars. For you, more light means better clarity and color even as conditions start to dim.

While we love this model for its close focus, the Maven is definitely up there with the top binoculars for distances as well. A wide field of view makes it easier to spot small, quick birds. This model is completed with a durable casing to protect them from the elements and comes with a microfiber storage bag.

Best premium: Olympus 10×50 Binoculars

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Why they made the cut: You’ll be able to count every feather with the wide field of view and magnification power of these Olympus binoculars.

Specs

• Magnification: 10x
• Lens: 50mm
• Weight: 1.88 pounds

Pros

• Wide field of view
• Aspherical lenses
• Responsive focus wheel

Cons

• Zoom lever can be difficult to operate

If you’re ready to take your bird watching to the next level, consider the Olympus 10×50 Binoculars. This pair boasts incredible optical clarity with zero chromatic aberration. The wide field of view means that even the smallest avian friends appear as sharp, bright images, with excellent color rendition and contrast.

Equally excellent for daytime or nighttime observation, these binoculars feel as good as they look. The body is coated in a protective rubber, adding a tactile edge to the equipment. Paired with the smooth hinge and included case, neck strap, and lens covers, this option will make you feel like a bird-watching pro atop your own Mt. Olympus.

Best ergonomic: Nikon Prostaff Binoculars

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Why they made the cut: Nikon’s cutting-edge technology, paired with the comfort birders crave, makes the Prostaff Binoculars an instant classic.

Specs

• Magnification: 8x
• Lens: 42mm 
• Weight: 1.43 pounds

Pros

• High-reflective mirror-coated prisms
• Shock resistant
• Waterproof
• Compatible with tripods

Cons

• No image stabilization

The Nikon Prostaff Binoculars are excellent for a devoted birder. Featuring turn-and-slide rubber eyecups and a specialized long eye relief design, they’re a perfect fit for all birdwatchers, including those who wear eyeglasses. This lightweight pair sits easily in hand, while rubber armoring provides shock resistance. They’re also waterproof, so in the event of an accidental rainstorm, your hearty binoculars should be OK.

The high-reflective mirror-coated prisms provide excellent light transmission, while nitrogen gas means fog and mold will not form inside the optical system. Even in foggy or darkening conditions, you can spot your favorite species in crisp detail with true-to-life colors. Nikon’s trusted technology allows this pair to rise above the rest when it comes to ergonomic comfort and design.

Best for travel: Celestron – Nature DX 8×42 Binoculars

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Why they made the cut: At 12.1 ounces, these lightweight binoculars are easy to stow into a backpack but come with premium features and protection.

Specs

• Magnification: 8x
• Lens: 42mm
• Weight: 3.28 pounds

Pros

• High-quality optics
• Waterproof
• Lightweight
• Protected by rubber

Cons

• Expensive

These binoculars are comfortable, light, and easy to handle. Whether you’re watching shorebirds flock or are fascinated by pigeons fighting over a french fry on the other side of the street, you’ll enjoy both a wide field of view at a distance and a sharp focus close-up.

Best waterproof: Bushnell H2O Waterproof/Fogproof Roof Prism Binocular

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Why they made the cut: These waterproof binoculars are rugged and great for taking on the water.

Pros

• Waterproof 
• Durable
• Fog-proof
• Eyecups good for people who wear glasses

Cons

• Heavier than some models

This pair is a good value all on its own. For intrepid birders in boats or braving wet conditions, the waterproof and fog-proof features make them a fine choice to pack alongside your rain jacket. People who wear glasses will appreciate the adjustable eyecups.

Best budget: Tasco Essentials 8×42

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Why they made the cut: The Tasco Essentials has just enough of everything for the beginner birder and won’t put you over a tight budget.

Specs

• Magnification: 8x
• Lens: 42mm
• Weight: 1.45 pounds

Pros

• Multi-coated lenses improve resolution and brightness
• Compact size and lightweight
• Weather-resistant housing

Cons

• Slow to focus

The Tasco Essentials 8×42 may not have the focal speed and crystal clarity of some of the more expensive models on our list, but they’re impressive in their price range. A lightweight design and weather-resistant housing create binoculars for those who don’t want to get weighed down while on more rugged birding adventures.

Prism and lens coatings create clearer images and offer good brightness at this price point. You might have to wait a little longer at dawn and dusk for the best visibility, but you’ll get great views without investing an arm and a leg in your binoculars. Where you’ll see a big performance difference with this model is that they are much slower to focus. However, be patient, and you’ll get your views.

Things to consider before buying bird-watching binoculars

Binoculars have numbers like 10×42 or 8×42 after the name. The first number is the magnification, and the second is the diameter of the objective lens. (The objective lens is the one closest to the bird.) The objective lens can give you a good idea of how big the binoculars are. Larger lenses also gather more light for brighter, clearer images.

Field of view

Birds are small, so you need to balance magnification with field of view. Birdwatchers tend to prefer 8x magnification for its wider field of view over the extra magnification offered with 10x models.

Lenses, prism design, and coatings

Lenses and prisms with high-tech coatings help focus colors and capture light to provide clear, accurate images. These coatings and lens designs are often why two pairs of binoculars may look the same on the outside but have hundreds of dollars difference in their price. On the inside, the more expensive binoculars have extra coatings that focus on colors for better accuracy and allow more light to enter the lens. That helps create brighter images and clarity from one end of the lens to the other.

FAQs

Final thoughts on bird-watching binoculars

• Best overall: Celestron 71009 SkyMaster
• Best close focus: Maven B1 10×42
• Best premium: Olympus 10×50 Binoculars
• Best ergonomic: Nikon Prostaff Binoculars
• Best for travel: Celestron – Nature DX 8×42 Binoculars
• Best waterproof: Bushnell H2O Waterproof/Fogproof Roof Prism Binoculars
• Best budget: Tasco Essentials 8×42

If you’re ready to invest in binoculars to use for every bird outing and conditions, the Olympus Binocular 10×50 are the ones. This pair’s color, clarity, and brightness outshine their price point. However, if you’re on a more conservative budget, the Tasco Essentials 8×42 provides great viewing with a smaller price tag.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post A flightless parrot is returning to mainland New Zealand after a 40-year absence appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We only conserve what we love.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing tastes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From monster to making it right

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

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

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

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

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The terrifying and fascinating saber toothed cats that once roamed the earth from California to China may have two new species to add to their family tree. After taking a deep-dive into a large collection of fossils from six to seven million years ago, scientists found two new species of these ancient sabertooth cats. The findings, published July 20 in the journal iScience, present the first family tree of the ancient sabertooths that roamed present day South Africa. The new feline lineage suggests that the distribution of the animals may have been more diverse than scientists thought. 

[Related: With bulging eyes and a killer smile, this sabertooth was an absolute nightmare.]

The team examined a collection of Pliocene Epoch fossils in Langebaanweg, north of the city of Cape Town in South Africa. This location holds some crucial information about the continent’s paleoenvironment, like how it transitioned as temperatures warmed.

“The known material of sabertooths from Langebaanweg was relatively poor, and the importance of these sabertoothed cats has not been properly recognized,” study co-author and Complutense University paleontologist Alberto Valenciano said in a statement. “Our phylogenetic analysis is the first one to take Langebaanweg species into consideration.”

This new study discusses four species in total—Dinofelis werdelini and Lokotunjailurus chimsamyae represent the two that were previously unknown. Fossilized remains of the Dinofelis sabertooth cats have been found on multiple continents including Asia, Europe, and North America. The team was expecting to find a new Dinofelis species from South Africa based on some prior research, but the other new species in the Lokotunjailurus genus has only been previously identified in Kenya and Chad. Finding a Lokotunjailurus species in South Africa suggests that these cats may have been distributed throughout the African continent between five and seven million years ago.

A team of colleagues from China, South Africa, and Spain classified the physical traits belonging to each sabertooth species, including jaw and skull shape, tooth structure, and the presence or absence of teeth. They then coded this information into a matrix that could help determine how closely each sabertooth species was related to their evolutionary cousins.

The resulting family tree of the sabertooths from Langebaanweg reflects the increasing global temperatures and environmental changes that the continent saw during the Pliocene. For instance, the presence of cats in the larger and faster subfamily Machairodontini suggests that  Langebaanweg once had open grassland environments, but the presence of the Metailurini cats suggests that the region also had more covered environments like forests. 

[Related: Life in Los Angeles was brutal for saber-toothed cats.]

The presence of both the tree-loving Metailurini and speedy Machairodonti species suggests that Langebaanweg did have a mixture of forest and grasslands about 5.2 million years ago. Still, the high proportion of Machairodonti species compared with other fossil hotspots in Europe, Asia, and other parts of Africa confirm that the southern parts of Africa was likely undergoing an ecological transition towards more open grasslands during this period.

The team notes that the composition of sabertooths in Langebaanweg is similar to that of those found in Yuanmou, China. These Chinese Longchuansmilus sabertooths may have a close evolutionary relationship with South Africa’s Lokotunjailurus species.

“This suggests that the ancient environment of the two regions was similar or that there was a potential migration route between the Langebaanweg and Yuanmou,” co-author and Peking University paleontologist Qigao Jiangzuo said in a statement. 

More fossil evidence could help the team understand exactly how these two fossil sites that are separated by almost 7,000 miles are related.

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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.

A bleary-eyed predawn traveler walking through the arrivals hall of Iceland’s Keflavik Airport blinks at a sight that’s hard at first to register: an enormous advertisement showing a shirtless man holding an infant. The man’s torso and visible arm show a swath of pucker-patterned skin. He looks half-aquatic, like a member of some superhero universe.

As it happens, this sleep-deprived analysis isn’t far off. The baby-holding man, Pétur Oddsson, is a power station worker. In 2020, he endured a 60,000-volt electrical shock; it left almost half his body covered in deep thermal burns that charred layers of his skin off. Such deep and extensive burns can be fatal—skin damaged in this way can’t make new cells to regenerate, and infections can easily set in. But Oddsson’s life was spared by an ingenious invention: grafted cod skin—7,000 square centimeters of it. The procedure adorned Oddsson’s upper body with the permanent, distinct imprint of scales.

Oddsson’s cod skin grafts are a marvel of medical technology. But they also represent something else: the manifestation of an unusual and ambitious experiment in environmental efficiency. The skin grafts are just one of a slew of products—including Omega-3 capsules, cold virus pretreatment sprays, and dog snacks—made from what was once Iceland’s cod catch detritus. They come largely from the efforts of 100% Fish—a project spurred by the incubator Iceland Ocean Cluster in collaboration with research institutes and private companies to determine how to repurpose byproducts from the country’s US $2-billion seafood sector.

So far, enterprising Icelanders have unlocked uses for almost 95 percent of a cod—a pretty recent jump forward. In 2003, people only knew what to do with about 40 percent of the fish.

Árni Mathiesen, the cluster’s senior adviser and the country’s former fisheries minister, says the 100% Fish Project has created jobs and manifested once-scarce domestically produced goods. It has also, adds Alexandra Leeper, the cluster’s head of research and innovation, provided lower-impact fish meal for a burgeoning aquaculture industry. Relatedly, 100% Fish is looking beyond cod, too. A company called Nordic Fish Leather is upcycling farmed salmon skin into leather for accessories and another, Primex, is extracting chitosan from the shells of wild-caught Atlantic northern shrimp, which can be used as a blood-clotting agent.

The cod skin grafts are the brainchild of Fertram Sigurjonsson, a chemist and the founder of biotech company Kerecis, which is part of the 100% Fish Project. The grafts come in several sizes—wide strips, for large wounds; glove shapes, for hands; and granules, which act like putty in smaller wounds—and have been used to treat thousands of burn victims, diabetes patients with open wounds, and women with infected C-sections. Doctors can perform some of these procedures with pigskin grafts, but those are harvested from animals engineered for the purpose. The fish skin, conversely, comes from cod caught for human consumption by fishermen in Sigurjonsson’s northwestern hometown of Isafjordur. (Fishermen who also own valuable shares in his company.)

Sigurjonsson says Kerecis currently transforms a mere 0.01 percent of Icelandic cod skins into grafts. But as demand grows, and as Kerecis’ research and development department determines more uses—they’re investigating breast reconstruction—he’s looking to expand.

By weight, a cod is about eight percent skin. Beyond making for good grafting material, cod skin is rich in collagen, a supplement for human skin, ligament, and bone health. Cod skin easily sheds this protein when it’s boiled in water with enzymes, says Hrönn Margrét Magnúsdóttir. She’s the founder of a collagen supplement and energy drink company called Feel Iceland, which uses collagen derived from 700 tonnes of fish skin per year.

Bones account for at least 35 percent of a cod’s weight. Icelandic companies have long dried fish heads and spines with the country’s abundant geothermal energy and exported them to Nigeria, where they’re the base of a protein-rich soup. But Margrét Geirsdóttir, a project manager at Matís, a food and biotechnology research institute that partners with the Iceland Ocean Cluster, says the unpredictability of that market has sent researchers looking for new applications—such as extracting calcium for supplements.

By far the most challenging holdouts to whole-fish use are the blood and eyeballs, says Geirsdóttir.

According to Icelandic lore, squeezing the liquid from a redfish eyeball onto a wound prevents infection. Matís scientists followed this up, studying whether cod eyeballs might have antiseptic properties. No such luck. They also had a project, says Geirsdóttir, to see whether the eyes contained valuable fats. They do, she says, “but it’s such a low amount and you would need to [extract] it by hand, so it’s not paying off.”

Fish blood, accounting for 10 percent of a fish’s weight, might be used to make products like those made from the blood of land animals, such as sausage filler, fish feed, or fertilizer. Yet Geirsdóttir says the hardest part about working with fish blood is collecting it. On a commercial fishing boat, cod are quickly bled to maintain their freshness. Convincing skeptical fishermen to invest in storing the fish intact means proving the endeavor is worthwhile.

There is an optimistic precedent, however. Fishermen once tossed cod livers overboard; now they’re an expensive delicacy that fishermen are happy to preserve. What changed? Several years back, Geirsdóttir says, fishermen began to see high profits from the sale of cod liver. “Then they started to see the value in it,” she says.

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

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About 125 million years ago, a carnivorous mammal and a large herbivorous dinosaur were locked in a fight to the death. The strangest part, however, is that the mammal was likely the primary aggressor. This unusual fossil discovery is described in a study published July 18 in the journal Scientific Reports, and challenges the idea that dinosaurs fully dominated in the Creteceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago) and lacked threats from their mammal contemporaries.

[Related: The ancestor of all placental mammals survived the dino-killing asteroid.]

“The two animals are locked in mortal combat, intimately intertwined, and it’s among the first evidence to show actual predatory behavior by a mammal on a dinosaur,” co-author and Canadian Museum of Nature palaeobiologist Jordan Mallon said in a statement. 

The dinosaur in this fossil is a species of Psittacosaurus, which were herbivores that were roughly the size of a large dog. They are also among the earliest known horned dinosaurs that lived in present-day Asia around 125 to 105 million years ago. 

An extinct badger-like mammal called Repenomamus robustus is the aggressive mammal. While the creature was not large by dinosaur standards at about 26 to 31 pounds and only three feet long, it was still one of the largest mammals of the Cretaceious period. Previously, paleontologists discovered that Repenomamus preyed on dinosaurs including Psittacosaurus due to clues left behind by the fossilized bones of baby dinosaurs found in the mammals’ stomach. 

“The co-existence of these two animals is not new, but what’s new to science through this amazing fossil is the predatory behavior it shows,” Mallon said.

The fossil in this study was unearthed in China’s Liaoning Province in 2012 and is now in the collections of the Weihai Ziguang Shi Yan School Museum in China’s Shandong Province. The skeletons of both animals are nearly complete, and they come from an area known as the that has been dubbed China’s Dinosaur Pompeii. Many of the fossilized mammals, lizards, dinosaurs, and amphibians that have been found there were buried following one or more volcanic eruptions. 

The fossil was in the care of study co-author Gang Han in China, who brought it to the attention of Canadian Museum of Nature palaeobiologist Xiao-Chun Wu. 

A close examination of the fossil shows Psittacosaurus is lying prone, with its hindlimbs folded on either side of its body, while Repenomamus coils to the right sitting on top of its prey and gripping the jaw of the larger dinosaur. The mammal is also biting into some of the dinosaur’s limbs and its back foot is gripping onto the dinosaur’s hind leg. 

“The weight of the evidence suggests that an active attack was underway,” said Mallon.

[Related: The fiery end of the dinosaurs kicked off the golden age of mammals.]

The team ruled out the possibility that the mammal was scavenging the remains of a dead dinosaur, partially because the bones of the dinosaur lack any known tooth marks. Additionally, it is unlikely that the two ancient animals would have become so intertwined if the mammal found the dead dinosaur.

They also note that smaller animals alive today are known to attack larger prey, such as some lone wolverines that are known to hunt caribou and domestic sheep. The wild dogs, jackals and hyenas of the African savanna are also known to attack when its prey that is still alive, which causes the prey to collapse out of shock. 

“This might be the case of what’s depicted in the fossil, with the Repenomamus actually eating the Psittacosaurus while it was still alive—before both were killed in the roily aftermath,” said Mallon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buy Kings of Their Own Ocean by Karen Pinchin here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

It’s a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound ricochets across the grassy meadow. A minute later, another bull answers from somewhere in the shadows.

Bugles are the telltale sound of elk during mating season. Now, new research finds that male elk’s bugles sound slightly different depending on where they live. Other studies have shown that whale, bat and bird calls have regional dialects, too, but a team led by Jennifer Clarke, a behavioral ecologist at the Center for Wildlife Studies and a professor at the University of La Verne in California, is the first to identify such differences in any species of ungulate. 

Hearing elk bugle in Rocky Mountain National Park decades ago inspired Clarke to investigate the sound. “My graduate students and I started delving into the library and could find nothing on elk communication, period,” she said. That surprised her: “Thousands of people go to national parks to hear them bugle, and we don’t know what we’re listening to.”