On November 25, a healthy male Sumatran rhinoceros was born at a western Indonesian sanctuary. This birth is welcome news for the critically endangered species. There are less than 50 Sumatran rhinos left, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

[Related: Rhino horns are shrinking, and humans are to blame.]

A seven-year-old female rhino named Delilah gave birth to the 55 pound calf at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Way Kambas National Park (SRS TNWK) on the island of Sumatra. According to officials from the sanctuary, a conservation guard found her laying next to her calf early on Saturday morning. The birth was about 10 days before the baby’s expected due date. The baby’s father is a rhino named Harapan who was born at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in Ohio before coming to Sumatra. 

“You never know if a first-time mom will know what to do, but Delilah brought that calf into the world and started nursing it with no fuss or fanfare. It’s an incredible event that gives hope to the future of this critically endangered species,” International Rhino Foundation executive director Nina Fascione said in a press release. 

Sumatran rhinos are the smallest of all rhino species at about 1,000 to 2,100 pounds and three to four feet tall. They have two horns that are dark gray to black. The horns are usually very smooth and form a slender cone that is curved backwards in the wild. Poaching, illegal trading of rhino horns, and climate change have pushed these mammals to the brink of extinction. According to the IUCN Red List, they are currently extinct in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, India, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, according to the Red List. It is uncertain if they are still present in Myanmar. 

Successful births like this one are also rare. In 2012, a male rhino named Andatu born at Way Kambas became the first Sumatran rhino born in an Indonesian sanctuary in over 120 years.

“Two years ago there was only one captive Sumatran rhino pair in the world able to successfully produce offspring. Now there are three pairs–six rhinos–who are proven breeders. Those are much better odds for the long-term survival of this species,” said Fascione.

According to Indonesian Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar, this still-to-be-named calf is the fifth born under a semi-wild breeding program at the park. The new addition brings the rhino herd at Way Kambas up to 10 animals and follows the birth of another calf in September. 

[Related: Rhinos pay a painful price for oxpecker protection.]

The sanctuary is part of a special zone in the national park where all of the rhinos are protected and looked after by local experts.

“The main objective is to produce Sumatran rhino calves to maintain the survival of the Sumatran rhino species which is now threatened with extinction,” sanctuary Director General of Natural Resources and Ecosystem Conservation Satyawan Pudyatmoko said in a statement. “The Sumatran rhino calves are the result of a breeding program. In the future, at SRS TNWK they can be released back into their natural habitat.”

Veterinarians from the Rhino Foundation of Indonesia (Yayasan Badak Indonesia) and animal care staff will continue to closely monitor Delialah and her new calf as they bond.

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A person might wear their heart on their sleeve, but cuttlefish seem to wear their thoughts right on their skin.

Horst Obenhaus, a neuroscientist working with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is studying how these unusual creatures communicate with color. In particular, he and his team now think the unique patterns cuttlefish show on their skin while they sleep might be a colorful reflection of their inner thoughts—and, maybe, even of their dreams.

Cuttlefish are cephalopods—cousins of octopuses and squid. They’re clever animals with complex brains. Previous research has shown cuttlefish have decent short- and long-term memory and are social animals that can learn from past experiences. Cuttlefish have passed the marshmallow test, a commonly used psychological gauge of self-restraint and long-term planning. And they even experience something that looks like REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep. This is the phase of sleep during which humans dream. Sleeping cuttlefish have been seen moving their eyes rapidly, twitching, and altering the patterns on their skin, suggesting they might be experiencing something similar.

Even in people, sleep is a mysterious process. Scientists aren’t entirely sure why we do it. But one explanation is that sleep helps convert daily experiences into long-term memories, reactivating experiences we had while awake so that brain structures like the cortex can extract useful information. This, scientists think, helps us consolidate experiences and learn new skills.

So, Obenhaus wondered: are cuttlefish doing the same thing?

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we could pinpoint whether these animals reactivate experiences they’ve had during the day while they’re asleep?” he says.

Like other color-changing animals, including chameleons and some fish, cuttlefish change their hues using cells in their skin called chromatophores—“little sacs of pigment, surrounded by muscles,” says Sarah McAnulty, a squid biologist and founder of Skype a Scientist who was not involved with the research. A cuttlefish can flex these muscles to open the chromatophore, revealing the color inside.

Many other color-changing animals automatically change hue in response to changes in their environment or to their hormones. Cuttlefish, however, have incredible control over the color and patterning of their skin. A cuttlefish’s chromatophores are directly wired to the animal’s brain, McAnulty says. “So, they are changing color as quickly as they can think about it.”

In a way, this gives us a direct line to their inner worlds, says Obenhaus. “You just have to watch the skin and learn about what the brain does.”

To find out what cuttlefish’s dozing displays actually mean—if anything—Obenhaus’s team put pairs of dwarf cuttlefish together in tanks and then filmed them for several weeks. The scientists were looking to see if the cuttlefish’s slumbering skin patterns reflected their previous social encounters, similar to how people might revisit their social encounters in dreams.

So far, Obenhaus says, the team’s initial experiment found that while cuttlefish do show patterns on their skin as they’re sleeping, they don’t directly match the colorations the animals made when they were awake. However, some of the sleep-induced patterns did appear to be partial, more abstract versions of those the cuttlefish made during social interactions.

The question, says Obenhaus, is whether they can confirm an alignment between these strange patterns that occur during sleep and those that occur when the cuttlefish are awake.

That there’s any similarity at all between what cuttlefish and people do when they’re asleep, though, shouldn’t be taken for granted.

“Cephalopods diverged from us so long ago,” McAnulty says. “It’s really interesting to observe that other path of evolution that’s been moving alongside us but independently of us.”

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

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The sparkling blue water of Sarasota Bay, off Florida’s west coast, is a popular boating and fishing spot. The bay is also the year-round home for a population of wild bottlenose dolphins, whose daily lives scientists have been studying since the 1970s. Their research has shown that generations of dolphins have learned to approach people and their boats for an easy meal. That behavior can lead to social media–worthy interactions for people—but has dire consequences for the dolphins.

A recent study drawing on 28 years of data has confirmed the old adage: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The scientists found that dolphin mothers that interact with boaters have nearly twice as many babies as female dolphins that stay away. But those babies are nine times more likely to die before reaching adulthood. That high death rate poses a problem for the population as a whole.

It’s not just baby dolphins that die prematurely. “The number one cause of death and mortality in Sarasota Bay are those interactions associated with recreational fishing,” says Kylee DiMaggio, a marine biologist who led the study for the Chicago Zoological Society, which has run the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program since 1989.

In the United States, feeding dolphins is illegal under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, but it still happens often. “Even though we might not mean to, with just our presence, we’re conditioning animals to be around humans more,” DiMaggio says. That proximity increases a dolphin’s risk of being struck by a boat, entangled in a fishing line, or ensnared by a baited hook.

Dolphins are smart and social animals—and mooching has incentives. Getting fish from people instead of hunting could allow female dolphins to save time and energy that they can instead put toward reproduction. It makes sense that the dolphins snatching up bait, nabbing fish from a fisher’s line, and approaching boats for food can have more calves.

However, studies of other species around the world, such as green sea turtles in The Bahamas, show that animals that become reliant on human handouts stop foraging for food. This is true of Sarasota Bay’s dolphins, and it’s a preference that they pass on. DiMaggio says that dolphins from one lineage have been approaching boats for four generations. That behavior is even more dangerous for the youngsters—juvenile dolphins can be killed by boats or fishing gear as they try to stay close to their moms.

For these dolphin mothers, losing multiple babies in quick succession likely causes emotional distress, says DiMaggio. Over time, this stress on female dolphins and the deaths of so many calves could cause population numbers to fall.

“The way that we affect the lives of these animals in urban environments like Sarasota is really complicated,” says Andrew Read, a marine biologist at Duke University in North Carolina, who studies the effects of human activities on marine animal populations and was not involved in the study. He says dolphins in urban environments are even more likely to interact with people when their prey becomes scarce, such as during toxic red tides.

We can’t stop the dolphins from interacting with humans, DiMaggio says. But we can teach people to enjoy wild animals from a safe distance.

And for goodness’ sake, stop giving them food.

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

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Like jellyfish, fungi, sea worms, and fireflies, some species of sea cucumbers glow in the dark. A team of researchers from Nagoya University in Japan have found that 10 known deep-sea species are bioluminescent in their natural habitats. The findings are part of a new textbook called The World of Sea Cucumber published on November 10.

[Related: The deepest known ocean virus lives under 29,000 feet of water.]

There are roughly 1,200 species of sea cucumbers. These marine invertebrates are found in every ocean on Earth, but they are best represented in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean. They generally live in shallow waters, but some species live at depths of thousands of feet deep. Most closely related to sea urchins, sea stars (aka starfish), sea lilies, and sand dollars, these bottom-dwellers range from as small as one inch long up to six feet. Some sea cucumbers are also known to shoot out a tangle of sticky, noodle-like goo from their butts when provoked. 

The new textbook takes readers deep underwater and discusses the bioluminescent properties of some of these sea cucumbers. According to NOAA, the light emitted by bioluminescent animals is produced by energy released from interior chemical reactions that are sometimes ejected from the organism. Its function is still a mystery, but it is generally used to ward off or evade predators, find food, or as a form of communication. 

The authors drew on previous sea cucumber research to highlight the differences between the shallow-dwelling and a bit more drab species and their brilliantly glowing deep-sea relatives. The book also shows the evolution of sea cucumbers from the Jurassic era roughly 180 million years ago up to the present day. 

To uncover the 10 bioluminescent sea cucumber species, the team deployed a remotely operated vehicle about 3,280 feet below the surface of Monterey Bay, California. The vehicle was equipped with a very sensitive and an arm that was robotically controlled from the ship. Unlike the more uniform bioluminescence seen in specimens taken onto ships, the light was shining from the sea cucumber’s head to tail and then back up similar to a wave.  

According to the authors, the previously unknown luminosity in these 10 deep-sea species suggests that sea cucumbers are more diverse than scientists once believed. A member of the order Molpadia is included in this discovery, which was previously believed to be a non-luminescent order of animals. 

While these sea cucumbers dwell in some of Earth’s deepest parts, they are still not immune to the effects of overfishing and particularly the drilling and mining activities that threaten their ecosystem. 

[Related: This headless chicken is the deep-sea ‘monster’ of our dreams.]

“As deep-sea exploration and development continue, information on their biodiversity and ecology, such as this book, becomes important as it allows us to assess the impact of human activities on deep-sea ecosystems,” textbook co-author and Nagoya University biochemist Manabu Bessho-Uehara said in a statement. “Heavy metal pollution from the mud discarded during drilling operations and motor-derived noise disrupting sound communication are important problems, but the effects on organisms when bioluminescence signals are disturbed, such as when light is obscured by drilling mud, have not been examined. It is necessary to clarify the importance of bioluminescence on the deep-sea floor and find measures that will lead to sustainable development.”

Studying the flora and fauna living in these extreme locations can also provide valuable knowledge of all life on Earth. It can help us discover new viruses that thrive in hydrothermal vents and the factors at play in Earth’s climate and carbon cycle. 

“I believe that understanding deep-sea ecosystems and interactions among organisms will lead to a better understanding of life on Earth itself,” said Bessho-Uehara.

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Piping plovers are showing signs of recovery from major population losses in the state of Massachusetts. They’re listed as threatened in Massachusetts, due to habitat loss from increasing human impacts. According to Mass Audubon, they’ve identified roughly 1,145 breeding pairs nesting in the state this year. When the organization first started to monitor and protect the species in 1986, there were less than 200 breeding pairs in the Bay State. That’s a 500 percent increase in three decades.

[Related: Remembering Monty and Rose, the Chicago shorebirds that became the face of a movement.]

“While Piping Plovers remain a federally threatened species, this season’s data shows that these iconic birds are making real progress toward recovery in Massachusetts,” Mass Audubon officials wrote in a statement. “Massachusetts Piping Plover populations have recovered at a faster rate than those of most other states along the Atlantic Seaboard. As a result, approximately 50% of Piping Plovers worldwide now nest in Massachusetts. That makes coastal conservation even more important in our state—we’re responsible for safeguarding a huge portion of this threatened species’ worldwide population.”

Piping plovers are small migratory shorebirds that nest in sand and gravel beaches and mudflats across North America. There are three main populations of the endangered birds. One lives along the shores of the Great Lakes, one in the lakes and rivers of the Northern Great Plains, and another along the Atlantic coast. These roughly six to seven inch tall birds eat marine mollusks, beetles, worms, fly larvae, crustaceans, and other small marine animals. Piping plovers have a tendency to run for a short distance, stop, and then tilt forward to pull an insect or worm up from the sand. Raccoons, skunks, and foxes are their primary natural predators. 

Their main threat is habitat loss. According to the US Fish & Wildlife Service, human development on beaches has reduced the amount of suitable areas for the birds to spend the winter months. Disturbance by humans and domestic animals like cats and dogs can also force migrating and wintering birds to expend unnecessary energy, which can lead breeding plovers to abandon their nests and young.

They have been listed as endangered or threatened since 1985 and piping plovers living in other states are also seeing some success and cautious optimism.  

In Maine, breeding pairs increased for the sixth consecutive year. Maine Audubon saw 157 breeding pairs in 2023, with some new nesting areas. However, the chick survival rate was the lowest since 2007.

[Related: Endangered sea turtles build hundreds of nests on the Outer Banks.]

“When monitoring an endangered species population, it is always good to proceed with caution. Despite an increase in our breeding pairs, the low fledge rate we saw this summer could be a cause for concern,” Maine Audubon wrote in a press release. “Piping Plovers migrate as far south as Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean for the winter, then have to make the trek all the way back up to Maine for the breeding season. A lot of variables are at play that are in nature’s hands during these long migrations.”

In the Midwest, 80 unique breeding pairs were counted across all five Great Lakes with a total of 85 nests. There are eight more pairs than 2022 and and the most since the species was first added to the federal Endangered Species List. Scientists with the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa in High Island, Michigan have been monitoring the island’s plovers as they nest and fledge for two decades. 

“This is the best year that we’ve had for monitoring as far as the total number of adults observed and the number of nests and chicks produced,” Bill Parsons, a scientist in the tribe’s natural resources department, told MLive in August. “We’ve definitely, over that 20 years, seen that the population is slowly, incrementally successful, but we’re nowhere near the target for rehabilitation of the population.”

Some general ways to help protect piping plovers include reporting nest locations to state or federal wildlife officials, keeping dogs on a leash during walks to protect nests, and leaving any driftwood or algae found on beaches for the birds. 

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For the first time in over 60 years, a rare egg-laying mammal has been spotted by scientists. Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi) was caught on camera during a major expedition in the Cyclops Mountains in Indonesia’s Papua Province.

[Related: Dams are hurting this enigmatic Australian species.]

A sacred animal

The long-beaked echidna is named for wildlife documentarian and conservationist Sir David Attenborough and has only been recorded by scientists once in 1961. It is considered a monotreme, or an evolutionary distinct group of mammals who can lay eggs. The platypus is also a monotreme and there are only five remaining species of these strange types of mammal on Earth. 

They live in burrows and mainly eat insects, earthworms, and termites. They are listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and are only known to live in the Cyclops Mountains.

“Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna has the spines of a hedgehog, the snout of an anteater, and the feet of a mole. Because of its hybrid appearance, it shares its name with a creature of Greek mythology that is half human, half serpent,” University of Oxford biologist James Kempton said in a statement. “The reason it appears so unlike other mammals is because it is a member of the monotremes–an egg-laying group that separated from the rest of the mammal tree-of-life about 200 million years ago.”

The echidna also has cultural significance for the people in the village of Yongsu Sapari. They have lived on the northern slopes of the Cyclops Mountains for eighteen generations. Rather than fighting during conflicts, the tradition is for one party to go up into the Cyclops to find echidna while the other party goes to the ocean to search for a marlin. Both of these creatures were difficult to find and it would take decades to even whole generations to locate them. However, once they were found, the marlin and echidna would symbolize the end of the conflict.

Finding echidnas, whip scorpions, and forest shrimp

During an expedition that began in 2019, a group of scientists from institutions in multiple countries set up over 80 trail cameras. They did not see any signs of the echidna for four weeks of trekking through a “beautiful but dangerous land.” A sudden earthquake forced the team to evacuate, one team member broke his arm in two places, another contracted malaria, and another had a leech attached to his eye for a day and a half.

[Related: Meet the first electric blue tarantula known to science.]

On the last day of the expedition, they finally spotted Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna. The identification of the species was later confirmed by mammalogist Kristofer Helgen from the Australian Museum Research Institute.

In addition to this elusive egg-laying mammal, this expedition marked the first comprehensive assessment of mammal, reptile, amphibian, and invertebrate life in the Cyclops Mountains. They combined Western scientific techniques with the extensive local knowledge of Papuan team members. Among the new discoveries are several insect species that are completely new to science and an entirely new genus of ground and tree-dwelling shrimp.

“We were quite shocked to discover this shrimp in the heart of the forest, because it is a remarkable departure from the typical seaside habitat for these animals,” entomologist  Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History said in a statement. “We believe that the high level of rainfall in the Cyclops Mountains means the humidity is great enough for these creatures to live entirely on land.”

Some other funky underground species including blind spiders, blind harvestman, and a whip scorpion were also found living in a previously unexplored cave system. The team hope that its rediscovery of Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna and all of these new species will help bring attention to the conservation needs of the Cyclops Mountains and Indonesian New Guinea.

CORRECTION November 19, 2023 3:55 PM EST: An earlier version of the article summary said the animal was named after Richard Attenborough. Zaglossus attenboroughi is named for Sir David Attenborough. We regret the error.

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From Saskatchewan to Mexico, buffalofish have been swimming under scientists’ radar. They’re a group of non-game fish, relatively difficult to catch, and not considered economically important to the regions they live in. Compared to other freshwater fish, very little is known about different species of buffalofish and their behaviors.

It was once thought that buffalofish only lived up to 26 years in the wild. Then in 2019, a centenarian buffalofish was identified in Minnesota. Now in a new study, scientists caught and analyzed specimens from Apache Lake, Arizona, and confirmed that three of the buffalofish species there can live to be more than 100 years old—and possibly many years more, based on their health. That makes them only the second animal genus, after the marine rockfish Sebastes, known to have three or more species that can live past a century. The discovery could change how we manage buffalofish populations across North America, and lead to more experimental anti-aging research in the future. The findings were published in October in the journal Nature’s Scientific Reports.

[Related: World’s oldest living aquarium fish could be 100 years young]

To pinpoint the ages of these fish, researchers focused on otoliths, the stone-like structures found in the ears of 97 percent of fish species. “What’s really interesting about otoliths, and what makes them so valuable for age analysis, is that they put down rings as they go through slow growth periods,” says Alec Lackmann, an ichthyologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth and lead author of the new study. He and his team examined thinly sliced sections of the otoliths to estimate ages. They then cross checked their findings with radiocarbon dating, revealing signs that corresponded to historical events and environmental changes in the area. For example, samples from fish that lived through the 1950s and ’60s contained unique radiocarbon signatures from when the US was testing nuclear bombs in the West.

The smallmouth buffalofish the researchers found in the lake ranged from 11 to 101 years old; the black buffalofish were 106 to 108 years old; and the bigmouth buffalofish were 85 to 105 years old. What makes the fishes’ longevity even more remarkable is that they aren’t native to Arizona waters, Lackmann says—the three species were introduced to the state in 1918, likely from Iowa. So, based on the results of the study, it’s likely that some of Arizona’s first buffalofish are still in Lake Apache today.

“I found the new study very exciting and novel in that it was the first to look at multiple species of buffalofish,” says Jeff Sereda, a manager of ecological and habitat assessment at the Water Security Agency in Saskatchewan, Canada. Sereda has studied buffalofish and has previously collaborated with Lackmann, but was not involved in the latest research. “We don’t know what the fishes’ actual upper limit for age is,” he says, and that has “completely turned up our understanding of these species on its head.” 

Before, biologists thought buffalofish populations were relatively stable wherever they existed. But the fact that most of the tested fish were excessively old indicates that they might be more at risk of decline than we thought, Sereda explains. If they’re living for so long, but numbers are stable, it’s a sign they’re barely reproducing. Think of it like the declining birth rate among people in Japan, which is causing the average age of the population to rise and the overall size of the population to shrink each year.

Another aspect of buffalofish that isn’t well understood is their reproductive behavior. Researchers in Saskatchewan haven’t found evidence of new young buffalofish in about 40 years, Sereda says. The fish spawn sometimes but don’t survive to the juvenile stage. Buffalofish remain fertile through old age, even after decades of not spawning any young, Sereda adds. We just need more research to tell whether this is how they survive—living long lives and successfully rearing very few young—or if there’s something amiss. 

[Related: A rare fish with ‘hands’ is spotted in a surprising place]

Getting a clearer picture of how buffalofish in different waters live and reproduce can give us a more accurate idea of how they’re faring. They’re classified as “special concern” in Canada, in part because of the lack of data. While a few species have special conservation statuses in the US—bigmouth buffalofish are listed as endangered by Pennsylvania—researchers don’t have a good grasp on the population sizes or trends in most places where buffalofish are found. Without that information, it’s hard to know what the creatures’ exact needs are.

“There’s such mystery surrounding buffalofish,” Lackmann says. In the future, he would like to study the otoliths of other buffalofish of the same genus, including one species in Mexico. Getting a better grasp of how their genes contribute to their impressive lifespans could also provide insight into how vertebrates postpone aging, he adds. “It’s incredibly fascinating.”

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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.

Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, the coral was smaller than a grain of rice. It was also frozen solid. That is, until Narida, a graduate student at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, thawed it with the zap of a laser. Now, just beneath the coral’s tentacles, she spies a slight divot in the skeleton where a second coral is beginning to bud. That small cavity is evidence that her hood coral is reaching adulthood, a feat no other scientist has ever managed with a previously frozen larva. Narida smiles and snaps a picture.

“It’s like if you see Captain America buried in snow and, after so many years, he’s alive,” she says. “It’s so cool!”

For nearly 20 years, scientists have been cryopreserving corals—freezing them at temperatures as low as -196 °C for long-term storage. The goal has been to one day plant corals grown from cryopreserved samples on reefs plagued by bleaching and acidification. Yet, progress has been agonizingly slow. When Narida and her colleagues published a study earlier this year detailing how they successfully grew adult corals from cryopreserved larvae, it was a milestone for the field.

Coral cryopreservation is difficult in part because freezing and thawing wreak havoc on cells. As scientists lower the temperature, the water in the coral’s cells turns to ice, leaving them dehydrated and deflated. Reheating is just as delicate: if the coral is warmed too slowly, melting ice can refreeze and tear through the cells’ outer membranes. The result is a soggy mess, as the cells’ innards ooze out through jagged holes—picture a frozen strawberry becoming limp and shriveled as it thaws.

Through trial and error, though, cryobiologists have developed the techniques that helped Narida grow her hood coral to adulthood. To prevent ice damage, Narida says, she washes the animals in antifreeze first. Antifreeze can be toxic, but it also seeps into the larvae’s cells and pushes out the water, helping the coral survive the next step: being dunked in liquid nitrogen.

In 2018, researchers reported that they had managed to get a coral larva to survive freezing and thawing for the first time. The scientists had added gold nanoparticles to their antifreeze to help the corals warm evenly during reheating. However, the thawed larvae were unable to settle and develop into adults. Instead, they kept swimming until they died.

When Narida began her experiments with hood corals in 2021, she included gold in her antifreeze recipe and combined several different antifreeze chemicals to reduce the solution’s toxicity. To thaw the animals quickly and minimize damage, Narida used a high-powered laser designed for welding jewelry. Then, she carefully washed the antifreeze away with seawater, rehydrating the corals. In the end, a whopping 11 percent of larvae in the experiment survived thawing, then settled, and developed into adults.

Leandro Godoy, a coral cryobiologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, is impressed by how many larvae survived after settling. “It’s a huge step,” he says, considering that, in the wild, only about five percent of corals make it that far.

Narida’s oldest thawed coral has survived for nearly nine months and is still growing. But she has more work to do. The larvae that survive cryopreservation are exceptionally fragile and can experience side effects that slow their development. They need careful tending in the lab, like ICU patients after surgery, says Chiahsin Lin, a coral cryobiologist at Taiwan’s National Dong Hwa University and Narida’s coauthor on the study.

The challenge now is to boost the coral’s survival even more to make large-scale reef restoration from cryopreserved larvae practical, Godoy explains.

“We still need to improve,” says Narida. “But this is already a success story.”

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

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On November 14, 2016, a huge earthquake rocked Kaikōura, a town on New Zealand’s South Island, killing two people, triggering a tsunami, and thrusting stretches of coastline six meters up out of the sea. Biologists Ceridwen Fraser and Jon Waters were watching the aftermath on television. “We were seeing images of kelp and [abalone] lifted out of the water and dying,” says Waters.

For these two scientists who had spent much of the previous decade looking for evidence of ecological upheaval on the coast, Fraser says, there was only one thing to do. “We got on a plane.”

A decade or so earlier, in the mid-2000s, Fraser was a student in Waters’s lab at the University of Otago in New Zealand. The pair were studying how the genetics of New Zealand bull kelp vary across the southern hemisphere when they noticed something very strange.

The kelp living along the coast of mainland New Zealand, Fraser says, was highly genetically diverse. But the kelp inhabiting the cold, subantarctic islands scattered across the Southern Ocean was all very similar. Because of the vast distance between these smaller islands, Fraser had expected the kelp populations to be quite different from one another. The lack of genetic diversity revealed two things: the islands’ kelp had all been wiped out and later recolonized, and the recolonizing kelp had come from a single source. From there, it didn’t take Fraser and Waters long to realize they were really looking at places where kelp had recovered after a massive ecological disturbance. But what kind of disturbance?

“Bull kelp doesn’t like ice,” says Fraser. As the scientists went on to show, encroaching ice had wiped out the islands’ kelp during the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago. But, Fraser says, New Zealand itself was far enough north to avoid the worst of the Ice Age’s grip, explaining why its kelp populations are so much older and more genetically diverse.

This was a valuable insight for paleoclimatologists. “It’s actually really hard for researchers to work out where the ice was in the last ice age,” says Waters. “They have to take cores from the ocean floor—it’s incredibly expensive. But here we had a completely new approach.” The study showed that sea ice had extended a lot farther north during that period than scientists previously thought.

By 2016, Fraser and Waters had proven that they could uncover signs of historical environmental upsets by looking at kelp genetic diversity. So when the Kaikōura earthquake struck New Zealand, wiping out numerous kelp beds, the pair leaped at the opportunity to watch the process play out in the present.

Seven years on, says Fraser, the recovery is still only just beginning. The uplifted parts of the coast are slowly being recolonized by small algae. In time, bull kelp will once again get a foothold. It could come from the next bay or the other side of the world.

Bull kelp colonization is a high-stakes game of first come, first served. At any one time, there are an estimated 70 million individual chunks of bull kelp riding the currents of the Southern Ocean. The fronds—and the tiny creatures that live on them—can end up almost anywhere.

David Schiel, a marine ecologist from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, says bull kelp is almost purpose-built for long-distance travel. “When it breaks off, it floats. It can stay active for months and still go through its reproductive cycles.”

Despite the constant traffic, genetic exchange between far-flung islands is far from fluid. “We always think if something can get from A to B, then there must be gene flow between the populations,” says Fraser. “But actually, there’s not necessarily any gene flow because the local inhabitants have a real advantage.”

If a floating piece of bull kelp reaches a shore already dense with algae, there is almost no way it can get established, Schiel says. Bull kelp has the best chance of getting a foothold if it washes up on a completely bare stretch of rock. Once there, it needs to mingle its sperm or eggs with those of a reproductively active member of the opposite sex. In other words, “it’s hard to get in there,” says Schiel, “and when they do, there are probably not a lot of competitors getting in.”

But, says Fraser, when an earthquake, marine heatwave, or other deadly catastrophe occurs, “suddenly there are no locals left to compete with the immigrants, so when a few arrive, all of their gametes have a really good chance of getting a foot in the door.”

Once these bull kelp colonists become established, they and their offspring can dominate the population for centuries or even millennia to come.

That kelp tends to colonize quickly and then hang on for the long haul showed Fraser and Waters that studying kelp genetic diversity might be an even better way to identify historical natural disasters than they thought.

Having spent nearly 20 years developing their technique, 2023 brought Fraser and Waters an opportunity to flip their process on its head and really prove its worth. On a coastal rock platform near Rārangi, a town on the northeast end of New Zealand’s South Island, the team stumbled on another pocket of odd kelp genetics. The kelp, they found, shared the genes of a population from 300 kilometers away. Something had clearly happened here.

Subsequent geological studies confirmed what the kelp suggested: around 2,000 years ago, the Rārangi platform had been thrust skyward in an earthquake.

“We wouldn’t have even looked at that region if it wasn’t for the genetics showing us something unusual,” says Waters. “And hey, presto, the geologists had another look, and the evidence was really clear.”

Bull kelp, scientists are coming to understand, holds a record of the southern hemisphere’s turbulent tectonic past. It offers a way to confirm known disasters and find hints of previously undocumented ones.

“We can now look into the past and find signatures of previous disturbances that weren’t known about,” says Waters. “There’s often a hidden history you can reveal using genetic approaches and thereby understand more about a region’s history.”

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

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North Carolina’s Outer Banks saw a busy sea turtle nesting season this year. The barrier islands stretching from Ocracoke Island north to the Virginia state saw 459 total nests between May and October, according to reporting from The Virginian-Pilot and three conservation groups in the state dedicated to sea turtle nesting.

[Related: This waddling robot could guide baby turtles to the sea.]

There are six species of sea turtles native to the United States—green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, loggerhead, and olive ridley. All six species are protected by the Endangered Species Act and four of them are known to nest in North Carolina. Human activities are the biggest threats to sea turtle species around the world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that their biggest threats are being caught in fishing gear, nesting and habitat loss, pollution and marine debris, boat strikes, climate change, and the direct harvest of sea turtles and eggs.

During the early to middle of the summer in the Outer Banks, female turtles return to the same beaches where they hatched to dig nests into the sand. They use their back flippers to dig a hole in the ground to deposit the eggs, and then cover it back up with sand. According to the National Park Service, the nesting process takes about one to three hours to complete. 

The tiny turtles hatch a few months later and follow the light of the moon to the ocean. However, their journey from their nests is quite hazardous, as they can be misdirected by artificial lights from homes and streets, crushed by human activity, or eaten by predators on their way to the ocean. 

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

At Cape Hatteras National Seashore, this year tied with 2022 as the second-busiest nesting season on record with 379 reported nests. The area covers more than 70 miles and stretches from Ocracoke Island north to Nags Head. The National Park Service says that the first nest was found on May 12 and the most recent was seen on October 29. The nests comprised 324 loggerhead turtles, 51 green turtles, three Kemp’s ridleys, and one leatherback. The leatherback nest was the first one seen on Hatteras National Seashore in 11 years.

Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on the northern end of Hatteras island reported its third-busiest nesting season since 2009. The refuge covers about 13 miles and saw 43 sea turtle nests this year. By species, 37 nests belonged to loggerhead turtles and six were green turtle nests, according to data from the Sea Turtle Nest Monitoring System.

The nonprofit Network for Endangered Sea Turtles (NEST) also reported its third-busiest nesting season since 2015. Vice President Susan Silbernagel said 30 nests belong to loggerhead turtles and seven were green turtle nests. The all-volunteer organization covers about 50 miles from Nags Head up to Virginia. 

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

To better protect the endangered turtles, volunteers and scientists have been regularly monitoring the region’s beaches since 1997. Staff members and volunteers at Cape Hatteras will establish a buffer zone around the nests for added protection. 

“We could not manage and monitor sea turtle nesting without the help of over 50 dedicated volunteers that assist with monitoring of our nests and reporting and responding to sea turtle strandings,” Michelle Tongue told The Virginian-Pilot. Tongue is the deputy chief of resource management and science for the National Park Service’s Outer Banks Group. 

Sea turtles spend the vast majority of their lives in the ocean and are among the largest reptiles in the world. Kemp’s ridley and green sea turtles weigh about 75 to 100 pounds, while leatherbacks can weigh about 2,000 pounds. Sea turtles are set apart from their pond or land-dwelling relatives by their flippers. Instead of these appendages, land and pond turtles have feet with claws. 

Continued monitoring and vigilance during the 2024 nesting season will hopefully increase survival rates for these endangered reptiles.

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“It’s been forever considered a garbage fish, but it’s probably the most delicious fish that we serve,” David Standridge says about the bottom-dwelling sea robin. Standridge is the executive chef of a farm-to-sea-to-fork restaurant The Shipwright’s Daughter in Mystic, Connecticut. For him, the historically maligned but mild tasting sea robin is the “poster child” for a fish that should be eaten more because it is so abundant.

“Part of supporting local and supporting small business is really building a more resilient food system,” says Standridge. “So that’s the first thing that we look at when we look at abundance, and what species we are choosing.”

Seared sea robin, smoked swordfish tater tots, and locally caught whiting wrapped in sugar kelp (tempura fried) are just some of the potentially sustainable dishes diners can find on the menu here. While using ingredients sourced by local farmers is difficult to scale up to more mainstream restaurants and grocery chains, The Shipwright’s Daughter’s creative work with both supply chains and flavor profiles make for a delicious starting point. 

[Related: Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics.]

The Shipwright’s Daughter is a 2023 James Beard Foundation Smart Catch leader, working with other restaurants and chefs to evaluate the environmental impact of the fish served. Standridge uses the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch–an assessment tool that helps consumers and chefs alike gauge the sustainability of their seafood–to evaluate every fish on the menu. This year, 97.3 percent of the fish served is certified sustainable, according to Standridge. 

While the menu adjusts to the seasons and what’s readily available, one of its popular items is a delightful soup with a subtly flavored local white fish called scup, served with kelp vinegar and smoked sea beans. The seared sea robin is surprisingly light. A member of the distinct Triglidae family of fish, sea robins are covered in spines. They use “walking rays” to crawl along the bottom of the ocean and help them sense the mollusks and crustaceans that they eat. Yet, the dish is approachable–for the more selective eaters.

These fish live along coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island, which cuts down on shipping costs and reduces the amount of fossil fuels used to bring fish from the water to the dinner plate. The entrees on the menu range from about $25 to $60, which is on par with smart casual restaurants in Mystic. The seaside town is an emerging New England food destination with everything from artisanal doughnuts to fusion cuisine from Bangladeshi chef Sheuli Solaiman. 

Standridge also works closely with nearby Stonington Kelp Co. co-owner and sugar kelp farmer Suzie Flores to incorporate this giant seaweed into many of their signature dishes. Alongside her husband, Flores farms three acres of kelp on sturdy mooring lines about a mile from shore in Fishers Island Sound. She sells it fresh from the docks of a local marina in season and at multiple farmers markets in Connecticut. From there, consumers have a wide range of ways to eat it, from fresh salads, pickled, or even powdered and sprinkled on pasta and pizza for a little kick of extra nutrients.

[Related: Eating sustainably may mean skipping the lobster for now.]

Standridge and Flores share a similar approach to both sustainability and food and Flores devotes a great deal of time promoting kelp and growing this viable market so people of all incomes can eventually benefit from it. 

“Sustainability is kind of a multi-faceted approach,” Flores tells PopSci. “It’s something that is grown while doing as little harm as you can. It’s also possibly about negating harm and can be restorative in some ways and can help support an economy and community. It’s not just about growing something using no fertilizer, not using any freshwater, or putting pressure on resources, but it also is about developing an economy around it as well.”

Flores cultivates sugar kelp which is a native seaweed that grows along the Northeastern United States and up into Canada. Farmed sugar kelp grows over the winter months and is harvested every spring. It absorbs excess nitrogen from the water, while also producing oxygen. Sugar kelp also grows as quickly as six and a half feet from the time it is planted to harvest, according to Flores. 

[Related: Why seaweed farming could be the next big thing in sustainability.]

Nutritionally, sugar kelp is an excellent source of fiber, vitamins C and K, calcium, and more. “I feel like it’s kind of common knowledge that fish is good for you, and the reason fish is good for you is because of all of the things that are present in seaweed,” says Flores.

Seaweeds like kelp could be major components of building a more sustainable food system. They can be used in cow feed to reduce methane emissions and research from Tufts University found that it could help tackle food insecurity. The plants with a reputation for being a messy nuisance can even be used in tasty desserts including the restaurant’s sea salt caramels and its light and sweet kelp cake. 

“We pickle as much as we can and then it’s just really a delicious kind of condiment for anything. In that form, you can mix it into soups and sauces, you can put it into salads,” says Standridge. “We can do a lot of things where you just kind of want a little bit of ocean flavor in something that’s not going to be overpowering. It’s a great product.”

One of the biggest challenges of sustainable agriculture is bringing it up to scale so healthy foods like kelp are more affordable. Standridge says that his restaurant and others that use seaweed can help encourage people to try to incorporate more of it into their diets because diners there are typically more open to trying something new. It can pique interest in kelp and other ingredients that consumers may be less familiar with.

Financial support from organizations like NOAA Sea Grant and the National Science foundation can help fund the next steps of scaling seaweed production up and using existing fishing infrastructure to keep seaweed sustainable and economical. Educational events like Kelp Harvest Week or maintaining a presence at farmer’s markets has also helped the public become more open to eating seaweed. 

“If you go to an apple orchard, there’s usually apples that are down on the bottom and rotting. You wouldn’t pick those up and have that be your representation of an apple,” says Flores. “We harvest our kelp fresh from a line out in the ocean, so it’s not the same seaweed that you find washed up on the shore. And that makes a huge difference.”

Bringing sustainable ingredients up to scale requires time, investment, and faces the tug of war of maintaining its low environmental impact without generating more waste or burning unnecessary fossil fuels. Despite the challenge, supporting smaller farms and fisheries could prove to be a tool in working towards a more sustainable food system for more of us, perhaps with a side of pickled kelp. 

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If you’ve ever spent time on a beach in the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean, there is a solid chance you stumbled across a slimy mass of stinky, sulfurous-smelling seaweed. The specific marine plant in question during those gross encounters is likely sargassum—while helpful for absorbing CO2, sargassum is also incredibly invasive, and can wreak havoc on both shoreline and ocean ecosystems. Cleanup efforts can cost tens of thousands of dollars while disrupting both tourist and fishing industries, but a recent aquatic robot project is showing immense promise in alleviating sargassum stress. In fact, AlgaRay’s recent successes have even earned it a spot on Time’s Best Inventions of 2023.

Co-designed by Seaweed Generation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to utilizing the versatile plant to help mitigate and remove carbon emissions, an AlgaRay prototype is currently patrolling off the coasts of Antigua. There, the roughly 9-foot-wide robot scoops up clumps of sargassum until its storage capacity is filled, at which point the autonomous bot dives 200m below the surface.

[Related: Rocks may be able to release carbon dioxide as well as store it.]

At this depth, the air pockets that make sargassum leaves so buoyant are so compressed by the water pressure that it simply can’t float anymore. Once released by AlgaRay, the seaweed then sinks to the ocean floor. According to a new writeup by Seaweed Generation’s partners at the University of Exeter, the robot can repeat this process between four and six times every hour. And thanks to a combination of solar panels, lithium batteries, and navigational tools connected to Starlink’s satellite internet constellation, AlgaRay will “ultimately be able to work almost non-stop,” reports the University of Exeter.

Of course, ocean ecosystems are complex and delicate balancing acts at any depth. AlgaRay’s designers are well aware of this, and assure its potential additional ocean floor CO2 deposits won’t be carried out recklessly. Additionally, they note sargassum blooms—exacerbated by human ecological disruption—are already causing major issues across the world.

“Sargassum inundations… cause environmental, social and economic disruption across the Caribbean, Central US and West African regions,” Seaweed Generation CEO Paddy Estridge and Chief of Staff Blythe Taylor, explain on the organization’s website. “Massive influxes of seaweed wash ashore and rot, releasing not just the absorbed CO2 but hydrogen sulfide gasses, decimating fragile coastal ecosystems including mangroves and seagrass meadows and killing countless marine animals.”

[Related: The US is investing more than $1 billion in carbon capture, but big oil is still involved.]

Estridge and Taylor write that humans “need to tread carefully” when it comes to depositing biomass within the deep ocean to ensure there are no “negative impacts or implications on the surrounding environment and organisms.” At the same time, researchers already know sargassum naturally dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

Still, “we can’t assume either a positive or negative impact to sinking sargassum, so a cautious pathway and detailed monitoring has been built into our approach,” Estridge and Taylor write. “The scale of our operations are such that we can measure any change to the ocean environment on the surface, mid or deep ocean. Right now, and for the next few years our operations are literally a drop in the ocean (or a teaspoon of Sargassum per m2).”

As the name might imply, the AlgaRay is inspired by manta rays, which glide through ocean waters while using their mouths to filter and eat algae. In time, future iterations of the robot could even rival manta rays’ massive sizes. A nearly 33-foot-wide version is in the works to collect upwards of 16 metric tons of seaweed at a time—equal to around two metric tons of CO2. With careful monitoring of deep sea repositories, fleets of AlgaRay robots could soon offer an efficient, creative means to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

“The [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]  has been very clear that we need to be able to remove (not offset, remove) 10 billion [metric tons] of carbon a year from the atmosphere by 2050 to have a hope of avoiding utter catastrophe for all people and all earth life,” write Estridge and Taylor. Knowing this, AlgaRay bots may be a key ally for helping meet that goal. If nothing else, perhaps some beaches will be a little less overrun with rotting seaweed every year. 

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ON A COMPUTER MONITOR, in a laboratory half the size of a galley kitchen, I’m taking a look at the future. But the grainy object on the screen isn’t all that remarkable. It’s just a horse egg in a petri dish, blown up to the point where I can see the outline of its outer membrane. That’s when a white-coated scientist directs my attention to the device at my right: a high-powered microscope projecting the image of the horse egg, with two metal spikes the size of syringes angled at each side of the plate. Beneath me on the floor is an orange pedal I’m instructed to press with my foot. Suddenly, on the screen, I see a laser beam carve an incision into the membrane of the horse egg, like a hot knife going through butter.

In a few more years, the same laser-guided system will be used to punch a hole into an egg taken from an Asian elephant, remove the nucleus of that cell, and insert a nucleus containing edited genes required for surviving arctic temperatures, such as fuzzy hair and extra fat—all in the pursuit of creating the closest animal to a woolly mammoth to walk the Earth in many millennia.

The lab is one stop on my tour of the bioengineering facility of Colossal Biosciences. Co-founded in 2021 by Harvard geneticist George Church and serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm, Colossal is the world’s first de-extinction company. Its purpose? To rewild lost species. In June, I traveled to Dallas to get an in-person look at the 26,000-square-foot research facility where the startup’s innovative might is brought to bear. 

Colossal’s plan is to design a hybrid of a prehistoric woolly mammoth—which Church has described as “the cuddly version of a velociraptor”—as well as the thylacine, a marsupial from Australia and Papua New Guinea that died out in 1936, and the quintessential symbol of human-made extinction, the dodo, the last of which was snuffed out on its native island of Mauritius in 1662. 

De-extinction as an idea is not new. Church has discussed engineering a new lineage of woolly mammoths from frozen genetic material since 2008. The nonprofit organization Revive & Restore harbors aspirations of returning the extinct passenger pigeon to the skies. Scientists at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance hope to make gametes from cryopreserved skin cells of northern white rhinoceroses, a subspecies down to its last two members. What makes Colossal unique is its unicorn status: It has raised $225 million in investment capital in just two years and is now valued at $1.45 billion. Peter Thiel, Chris and Liam Hemsworth, the Winklevoss twins, Paris Hilton, and even the not-for-profit partner of the Central Intelligence Agency have all chipped in. (So has Matt Sechrest, co-founder of Recurrent Ventures, which owns Popular Science.)

Which raises a thorny question: What happens when you venture-fund nature?

Lamm, an energetic 41-year-old with a shoulder-length mop of dark hair, is well versed in this space. He comes from the tech world and has founded six different companies in his native Texas. (One of them, an artificial intelligence defense platform that counts the US Space Force and NASA as customers, was just acquired by a Texas-based private equity firm in August.) But the focus on money and investors belies the larger point. De-extinction, Lamm says, is a way to return keystone species to degraded ecosystems while developing the techniques to support future conservation projects. If we can genetically engineer a dodo, for example, what’s to stop us from breeding a more disease-resistant offshoot of Hawaiian honeycreepers, who are currently being decimated by avian malaria?

“[Some of] the technology advances that are going to be necessitated to de-extinct a creature are exactly the same technologies that will be necessary to help creatures not fall over the brink,” says Kenneth Lacovara, a paleontologist and geologist at Rowan University who agrees with Colossal’s mission.

Critics, meanwhile, say it’s misguided to scrape the natural world for genetic material to fulfill scientific whims. Why de-extinct obsolete species when there are more than 1,300 endangered and threatened ones in the United States alone that need protection? Observers also argue that introducing the genetic traits of dead creatures into modern analogs is not a means to conservation when the habitats of still-living endangered animals are continually under threat.

“We should protect species and do what we can,” says Lamm. “But that current model of just putting our arms around it, protecting it, just doesn’t work at the same speed at which we are destroying environments.”

The pioneering work Lamm speaks of will take decades. The company expects to birth a mammoth-like calf in about five years and then build up to a whole herd of woolly proxies. But in Colossal’s vision, the reintroduction of lost species is not only a way to right the wrongs of humanity but also a way to generate significant scientific know-how—so we can sustain species currently at risk in an increasingly inhospitable world, lest they perish forever.

THAT AN EARTHBOUND CREATURE like a woolly mammoth could vanish was once utterly unbelievable. French naturalist Georges Cuvier eventually delivered the sobering truth. He made his bones in 1790s Paris studying elephant fossils. Concluding that the remains were too distinct to be directly related to modern-day elephants, Cuvier posited the notion of espèces perdues, “lost species.” It was clear to him that the skeletons belonged to another megafauna that had vanished. Voilà: Extinction became a dilemma for modern science to solve.

Lamm’s fascination began with an introductory call to Church in 2019. His business acumen lay in using artificial intelligence for satellite software systems, and he wondered if the machines could also help with synthetic biology—the practice of building living systems from DNA and other small molecules. At the end of the call, after he idly asked Church what else he was working on, the mammoth comeback came up. “I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ I stayed up all night reading” everything Church had written about his quest, recalls Lamm. Soon he teamed up with the geneticist to form Colossal, where he is now CEO. In September 2021, the company launched with $15 million in seed funding and announced its plan to revive a version of the woolly mammoth.

Colossal widened its focus to the thylacine after Lamm was introduced to Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne, who had already been conducting research on the marsupial and now consults on the company’s project on the species. More money came in, at which point investors asked the obvious question: What can we do for extinction’s mascot, the dodo? Beth Shapiro, who co-directs the Paleogenomics Lab at the University of California at Santa Cruz and has studied the flightless bird’s genome for almost two decades, advises Colossal’s avian genomics work. A few years ago, she and collaborators from other institutions had assembled the first complete genome of the dodo.

To any expert in this field, the tools in Colossal’s Texas labs aren’t unfamiliar. There are desktop gene sequencers and centrifuges. Hooded substations in a tissue culture lab for manipulating bits of animals. Computers that peer into sequenced DNA and analyze nucleotide bases. The laser-guided microscope I saw in the embryology lab is a proprietary device Colossal invented. In a company of 116 people, more than 60 are cell engineers and geneticists using these tools daily.

What’s important to understand, however, is that despite its talk of de-extinction, not to mention the graphics peppering its website, Colossal will never resurrect an animal. There’s no way to truly reanimate an extinct species by synthesizing its DNA from scratch—even with cutting-edge technology and living cells from an organism, and there are no such cells of a mammoth, dodo, or thylacine. 

“It’s still not possible to bring an extinct species back to life if what you mean is an exact copy,” says Shapiro. “What we’re working to do is to create proxies for these extinct species using some of their traits.”

Colossal’s real aim is to take existing species closely related to extinct animals, modify their DNA to give them traits similar to the company’s de-extinction targets, and place them in ecological settings that are as similar as possible to where previously extinct species once lived. For the dodo, it may be the Nicobar pigeon, a living cousin that inhabits islands in southeast Asia. For the thylacine, it’s the fat-tailed dunnart, a marsupial that resembles a rat. Modern-day elephants are also in the mix: Although the woolly mammoth has been gone for anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 years, it has a close relative in the Asian elephant—so close, in fact, that more than 99 percent of the animals’ genomes are identical.

“A mammoth to an Asian elephant is more closely related than an African elephant is to an Asian elephant,” says Eriona Hysolli, Colossal’s head of biological sciences, who works closely with Church out of his lab in Boston and supervises the mammoth work.

What Colossal scientists are trying to do is understand links between genotype and phenotype: how the sequence of letters in DNA code translates to how an animal looks and behaves. Hysolli says they are targeting about 65 sequences in the mammoth genome that confer various cold-adaptive traits, like subcutaneous fat, woolly hair, and dome-shaped craniums. In the genome engineering lab, computers compare the ancient DNA of the mammoth to that of the Asian elephant to identify areas of the elephant genome that must be modified in a future hybrid to express extinct characteristics. 

“Are all the phenotypes there? Are all the ecological functions there? That is, for us, what we’re saying is de-extinction,” says Matt James, a former director of animal care at the Dallas Zoo, now chief animal officer at Colossal. “We de-extincted critical genes for these species.”

To do that, Colossal is trying out pluripotent stem cells, which are capable of turning into any adult cell type. Those are created inside the company’s tissue culture lab from Asian elephant cells donated from various sources. (Colossal partners with 11 zoos across the US.) This is where genome engineering and cell manipulation will eventually intersect. There are two ways to insert mammoth genes into an elephant cell: use the ever-popular CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing tool to insert enzymes that make changes to nucleotide bases along the Asian elephant’s genome, or make multiple sequence changes at once, a process known as multiplexing, with the help of other molecular tools. 

Finally, to complete the mammothification of an Asian elephant, a nucleus from a regular elephant egg would be swapped with the nucleus from a cell modified with snippets of the mammoth genome—something they are planning for by early 2026 so Colossal can meet its projected date of 2028. Known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, it’s the same technique scientists used to make the famous clone Dolly the sheep in 1996. Colossal’s scientists are already practicing with gametes from animals like cows and horses. 

Once the hybrid egg develops into an embryo, it will be implanted into a female Asian elephant. The gestation period for a mammoth is the same as for an Asian elephant: around 22 months. And if that fetus survives long enough to be born, it should, hypothetically, be adapted to cold weather because it possesses mammoth traits. It probably won’t have massive tusks, but it will be 200 pounds of flesh, fat, and protective fur.  

James is confident that Colossal will be able to produce a mammoth by implanting a modified embryo into a surrogate. To increase its chances, though, he says the team will develop multiple eggs and work with a couple of female elephants. Even so, the first generation of mammoth hybrids won’t go anywhere near the wild. “They will be in what we would call a managed care facility,” says James, which means a sanctuary or some other facility where their anatomy, physiology, and behavior can be studied regularly. The mammoths will have to prove they have the skills to live and thrive independently in the wild. 

Skeptics might say the means, in this case, don’t justify the end. “It’s not necessarily accurate to say that the animals will benefit more by being brought back to life rather than just staying dead,” says Zohar Lederman, a physician and bioethicist at the University of Hong Kong. 

Others are much more strident. “It seems like a terrible idea to me,” says Karl Flessa, a geosciences professor at the University of Arizona who centers his research work on conservation biology and habitat and species restoration. “Why are you bringing back a Pleistocene animal as the world continues to warm and all of the habitats that were once available for mammoths are pretty much gone? Why would you want to do that?”

IN AN OP-ED for Rolling Stone in July, Colossal CEO Lamm argued that the company’s efforts are absolutely essential to sustaining the biodiversity of the planet. “I came to the conclusion,” he wrote, “that the question is no longer should we practice de-extinction science but how long do we have to get it right.”

Global authorities continually point out that Earth is currently in the middle of an extinction crisis. In 2019, the United Nations published a landmark report stating that one million animal and plant species are close to dying out, which is more than ever before in our history. A subsequent report issued in 2020 by the World Wildlife Fund found that wildlife populations had decreased by two-thirds in the last half-century alone, mainly due to human activities like deforestation, insecticide use, and poaching. In May, four researchers published a study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution linking climate change to another mass extinction. They evaluated almost 36,000 species on land and in the ocean and used climate models to show that 15 percent of those organisms will experience dangerous and potentially fatal temperatures if the planet warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Lamm, Church, and the rest of Colossal’s corporate chain contend that those sorts of numbers animate the underlying principle of the company: that their lab-made proxies aren’t just some well-funded science project—they can legitimately be used to build resilience in species by pushing them toward the right adaptations in a changing world. The mammoth-elephant hybrid is the classic example. Asian elephants are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Merging snippets of woolly mammoth genome with the Asian elephant might give the big mammal a chance to inhabit a place like Pleistocene Park, a large tract of tundra in Russian Siberia that’s free from our interference.

“People say we should be working on endangered species. That’s exactly what we’re working on,” Church told me via video call the day after I toured Colossal’s lab. “One of the advantages of making a hybrid starting from an endangered species is that you give that endangered species a whole new place to live, which is much larger and less encumbered by human conflict than their current location.”

At the same time, the genomic sequencing Colossal currently leads is being put toward the development of a vaccine for a herpesvirus—the primary cause of death of young Asian elephants in zoos in North America.

But geneticist Stephan Schuster remains incredulous. Schuster was part of the Pennsylvania State University team that, in 2008, was the first to sequence nearly a full genome of an extinct animal when it assembled 2.9 billion base pairs from the genome of an 18,000-year-old woolly mammoth found in Siberia. “If there is a single person on the planet that I would trust to get the project accomplished, it is George Church,” he says. But, he adds, talk of resurrecting a mammoth has gone on for a decade, without much to show for it.

Schuster has a long list of queries about Colossal’s methodology. Will changes made to Asian elephant DNA lead to unpredictable mutations elsewhere on the genome? How many elephant pregnancies must happen to create one transgenic animal? How do you implant a mammoth-hybrid embryo into the uterus of an Asian elephant, which is deep inside the animal? “Just show success,” says Schuster. “All the rest, it’s just blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Another one of the scientific community’s main criticisms of Colossal is money versus impact. A $225 million capital fund for species restoration is nothing to sneeze at. Meanwhile, based on an analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity and other conservation groups, the US Fish and Wildlife Service requires a total of $841 million to fully fund all recovery efforts under the Endangered Species Act. The agency’s 2023 budget for protection efforts is just $331 million.

Colossal retains the exclusive license to commercialize any biotechnology that emerges from its de-extinction projects. Lamm assures me that anything that might be applicable to human healthcare—for gene therapy and the like—will be strictly proprietary. The one exception is how the instruments, like its laser-guided embryo-editing tool, are employed for various species preservation projects. “We may open-source some of the technology for its application to conservation,” he says.

The proxies themselves, once born, are also likely to be wholly owned by Colossal, at least for a while. Early hybrids will live in a vast fenced-in area like a nature preserve. Once there are enough members of each de-extincted target that can live and survive in the wild, they will start being released. And that’s when, Colossal says, ownership transfers to the natural world.

“They would become more of a natural resource for the area where they’ve been rewilded,” says chief animal officer James. It would be similar to how we might view elephants already existing in the wild. A specific country doesn’t own an African elephant—although it might be argued that those countries do have a responsibility to protect wildlife. (One location that Colossal is considering for future mammoths is North Dakota; the state development fund invested $3 million in the company earlier this year.)

Skeptics of Colossal’s overall strategy also wonder what will happen should de-extinction efforts prove successful. Creatures that have been gone for tens, hundreds, and thousands of years would suddenly emerge into a vastly different world—one that, by the very metrics Colossal cites, is already far too dangerous for the organisms that are still alive.

“Having mammoths isn’t going to solve any of those problems,” says Ronald Sandler, director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University. “It’s not going to reduce habitat loss. It’s not going to reduce carbon emissions. It’s not going to help us prevent a currently extant species from going extinct.”

Take the infamous flightless dodo, which could be an inspiration for shoring up vanishing populations of endemic island pigeons. The scientific process for creating its replacement is different from those for the mammoth and thylacine proxies. Currently, there’s no way to genetically edit a living bird. Scientists can manipulate the egg cell of a mammal when it’s ready to be fertilized because its nucleus is easy to get to—but the yolk of a bird egg makes that impossible. Instead, Colossal plans to create primordial germ cells, which can become sperm or egg cells, and inject them into developing embryos of a living bird. One prime candidate is the Nicobar pigeon. A male and female Nicobar would each then grow up with gametes containing the edits required to birth offspring with the characteristics that so distinguished the dodo, like its flightlessness, S-shaped body, and hooked beak. Say that works multiple times over, enough to generate a population of dodo proxies. What good does that do if its historic home of Mauritius is filled with invasive predators and may be flooded in 100 years?

“I’m critical of de-extinction, but I also do think it has a role to play,” says Tom Gilbert, a paleogenomics researcher at the University of Copenhagen. He also worked with Shapiro to produce the dodo genome and is a member of Colossal’s scientific advisory board. In his eyes, releasing “a bad mutant mismatch of something else not adapted to the environment” doesn’t strike him as an effective means of ecosystem restoration. “But if you can excite a generation of young people using crazy de-extinction projects to love nature and get into science, that is going to save the world,” he adds. “If it requires a mutant mammoth-elephant hybrid to get the people excited, that is a valid reason to do it.”

THE BIGGEST OPEN QUESTION is whether Colossal can and will use the bioengineering toolkit it’s developing for the greater conservation good. The startup certainly claims it will: It recently joined forces with Thomas Hildebrandt, another member of its scientific advisory board, who currently leads BioResponse, an international consortium attempting to create a new population of northern white rhinoceroses. Colossal’s supporting role will be to gather DNA from museum specimens of the near-extinct species, analyze the data, and then use its gene-editing tools to help create more diverse northern white rhino embryos. The genetic variation should, in theory, help protect the rare mammals from disease in captive-breeding programs and, eventually, in the wild.

Still, there is no hybrid mammoth, thylacine, or dodo to point to at the moment. For Lamm, generating those ancient species is the priority. “If Colossal does nothing else in conservation or de-extinction, and we cure elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus and are responsible for saving elephants, that was a pretty good day,” he tells me just after our walk-through of the lab. “But fundamentally…if we aren’t successful in our de-extinction efforts, I will personally not see it as success.” 

Yet there is a danger in pursuing ghosts and still-fictional creatures. Mammothlike elephants or big-beaked pigeons or fiercer dunnarts could overshadow wildlife teetering on the precipice of oblivion right now. After all, who cares, really, about the orangefoot pimpleback, an endangered freshwater mussel, or the Oahu tree snail?

When I present paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara with that conundrum, he deems it a false choice. “Yes, we have to do everything we can to conserve species that are on the brink,” he says. “And yes, we should try to bring back species that have gone extinct that were pushed into extinction by humans. I think that’s justice. Those two things are not at odds with each other.”

Maybe not. Could the return of a mammoth-like beast backed by millions of dollars in capital funds stabilize an ancient Arctic ecosystem that traditionally helped trap greenhouse gases deep inside the frozen tundra? “When a species is introduced to a landscape, you can’t always predict what every one of the consequences is going to be,” says Shapiro.

But we certainly know what happens when a species is removed from where it belongs, be that the fault of overzealous humans or larger environmental degradation. Consider the reintroduction of gray wolf packs to Yellowstone National Park, perhaps the preeminent example of the positive ecological effects born from restoring fauna in their native habitats. As one of the top predators in the region, wolves helped bring other wildlife and natural cycles back into balance. 

We don’t know what will happen if a woolly mammoth hybrid makes its debut in the 21st century. But the future that Colossal envisions is one in which the act of protecting the animal kingdom goes beyond building fences, zoos, or preserves—one in which humans invest in and invent tools that could prime species for survival, including those that haven’t been dead for thousands of years. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Back in 2015, the US Department of Energy estimated wind farms could supply over a third of the nation’s electricity by 2050. Since then, numerous wind turbine projects have been green-lit offshore and across the country. However, when it comes to building, it can get tricky, like in the case of a planned wind farm 15 miles off the southeast coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Danish wind farm company Ørsted recently promised to cut New Jersey a $100 million check if the company’s massive Ocean Wind 1 offshore turbines weren’t up and running by the end of 2025. Less than a week after the wager, however, officials in the state’s southernmost county have filed a US District Court lawsuit to nix the 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines, alleging regulatory sidesteps and ecological concerns.

[Related: The NY Bight could write the book on how we build offshore wind farms.]

According to the Associated Press, Cape May County government’s October 16 lawsuit also names the Clean Ocean Action environmental group alongside multiple seafood and fishing organizations as plaintiffs. The filing against both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management claims that the Ocean Wind 1 project sidestepped a dozen federal legal requirements, as well as failed to adequately investigate offshore wind farms’ potential environmental and ecological harms. However, earlier this year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released its over 2,300 page Final Environmental Impact Statement on Ocean Wind 1, which concluded the project is responsibly designed and adequately protects the region’s ecological health.

An Ørsted spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit for PopSci, but related the company “remains committed to collaboration with local communities, and will continue working to support New Jersey’s clean energy targets and economic development goals by bringing good-paying jobs and local investment to the Garden State.”

[Related: A wind turbine just smashed a global energy record—and it’s recyclable.]

Wind turbine farm companies, Ørsted included, have faced numerous issues in recent years thanks to supply chain bottleneck issues, soaring construction costs, and legal challenges such as the latest from Cape May County. Earlier this year, Ørsted announced its US-based projects are now worth less than half of their initial economic estimates.

Other clean energy advocates reiterated their support for the New Jersey wind farm. In an email to PopSci, Moira Cyphers, Director of Eastern Region State Affairs for the American Clean Power Association, described the lawsuit as “meritless.”

“Offshore wind is one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation and is critical for meeting New Jersey’s clean energy and environmental goals,” Cyphers continued. “Shore towns can’t wait for years and years for these projects to be constructed. The time to move forward is now.”

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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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There’s no better indicator of the health of the oceans than the amount of phytoplankton that resides in them. That’s not only because this microalgae produces at least 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe, but also because it’s the start of the marine food chain, determining what other creatures live and thrive in any given area.

The changing seasons and the climate crisis may play a big role in the presence of phytoplankton over time, so it’s of the utmost importance for researchers to know what levels look like in oceans around the world. Sailors, boaters, and interested sea-faring travelers can help track and study this microorganism by using one simple tool: the Secchi disk. You can contribute to important citizen science by building one and taking it with you the next time you head to the ocean.

What is a Secchi disk?

A Secchi disk is an impressively low-tech piece of scientific equipment invented in 1865 by Italian astronomer Angelo Secchi to measure water transparency and turbidity. In deep-water ocean environments, these factors are determined by biological material like phytoplankton, explains Verena Meraldi, chief scientist for HX Hurtigruten Expeditions, a cruise line that invites passengers to participate in scientific data collection.

The tool itself is usually a round piece of white plastic with a diameter of 30 centimeters (about 12 inches), that is attached to the end of a tape measure or line marked at 20 centimeters (about 8 inches) and 1-meter intervals (a little more than 1 yard). 

We’ll explain in more detail below, but using a Secchi disk is easy: just lower the disk on a line into the water and record the depth at which you lose sight of the contraption. This measurement is called Secchi depth. Deeper measurements mean there’s less phytoplankton in the water, whereas shallow measurements indicate an abundance of the microalgae and therefore, a healthier environment.

Once you have a reading, you can log your findings in the Secchi app (available for iPhone and Android). The platform is part of the Secchi Disk Study citizen science program launched in 2013 by marine biologist Richard Kirby after a controversial 2010 report published in Nature that claimed phytoplankton levels had declined 40 percent between 1950 and 2008. Kirby’s initiative collects data to track the presence of this crucial microalgae worldwide.

Researchers have long collected data on phytoplankton by measuring ocean surface color using satellites. But this information is not enough, so this is where citizen scientists come in.  

“You need some means of determining in situ measurements, and the simplest way to do that is to measure the clarity of the water with a Secchi disk,” Kirby explains.

How to make a Secchi disk

There are two kinds of Secchi disks: the ones made to measure clarity in freshwater are painted in black and white, and are smaller than the white-only Secchi disks designed for the ocean. To participate in Kirby’s study, you’ll need the latter.

You can order a Secchi disk online, but you can also make your own, as they are easy to make and much cheaper, too.

[Related: How to become a citizen scientist]

Please note that some of the measurements in this project are in metric units. This is important because the Secchi Disk Study measures depth in centimeters, so the data you provide must be measured accordingly.   

Stats

• Time: 30 to 60 minutes
• Cost: about $8
• Difficulty: easy 

Materials

• 12-by-12-inch piece of wood, plastic, or styrofoam board, ⅛-inch or ¼-inch thick
• 50 meters (165 feet) of sturdy light-colored cord
• 2-pound fishing weight (or anything heavy enough to pull the disk down)
• (Optional) 4-inch eyebolt
• (Optional) 2 washers
• (Optional) 2 hex nuts
• (Optional) 50-meter (165-foot) fiberglass surveyors tape
• (Optional) White matte paint
• (Optional) Carabiner

Tools

• Heavy-duty scissors, box cutter, or saw
• Measuring tape
• 2 permanent markers of contrasting colors
• Drill
• Ruler

1. Cut a disk with a 30-centimeter diameter. You can craft your Secchi disk from just about any material, including metal or wood, though plastic is most common as it’s often easier to cut to size. A trimmed 5-gallon paint bucket lid, a thick signboard, or even a cutting board will work well. Just make sure that whatever material you choose won’t break easily and end up polluting the waters you’re trying to study and protect. 

2. (Optional) Paint your disk matte white. If the material you chose is already matte white, you can skip this step. If it’s not, paint your disk with matte-finish white paint and let it completely dry. You can use whatever you have at hand—just keep in mind that you may need more than one coat to get the required opacity.

3. Drill a small hole in the center of the disk. Use a ruler to find the center and drill a hole that’s just a bit bigger than the width of your cord.

5. Securely attach the weight to the bottom side of the disk. The weight can be a 2-pound fishing weight, repurposed link of mooring chain, or anything else that will help the disk sink. 

• Pro tip: “Be creative—you just need a lump of heavy metal,” Kirby says.

6. Mark your line. Once everything is knotted securely, use a permanent marker to draw lines on the cord at 20-centimeter intervals. Use the contrasting color to make marks at 1-meter intervals.

How to use a Secchi disk

Once you have your disk, head for the ocean. Make sure it’s at least partly sunny and that you embark ideally between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., as the angle of the sun will affect light penetration. Don’t set sail unless you’re accustomed to being on a boat, wearing proper safety equipment (like a life jacket), and know how to swim.

If you’re not comfortable on the water or don’t have a way to leave shore, no data is uninteresting, Kirby says. That means you can still join in and if you can only take readings once from a jetty or pier near shore where you live, you can still join in. Although the instructions below require a boat, you should be able to adapt them to wherever you are.

To pick a good reading location, Kirby says to find a spot at least 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) from shore where you can’t see the ocean floor, so around 25 meters deep (82 feet) deep. This depth and distance from shore will help reduce the amount of tannins and sediment obscuring visibility that could alter the measurement. 

Take off your sunglasses if you’re wearing them, and drop your clean disk into the water on the shady side of your boat. Keeping a firm grip on your measuring tape or rope, slowly let out the line. If you think it might slip from your fingers, tie it off to a secure surface for extra peace of mind. Watch carefully as your disk descends, and make sure it sinks vertically. If it doesn’t, the sinking weight might be off-balance or the current may be too strong, in which case you may have to make some adjustments and try again later.

Stop when you can no longer make out the disk beneath the surface. Raise and lower the disk a few times to pinpoint exactly the point where you lose sight of it. This will help you get the most accurate reading and make sure your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. When you’re ready, record your Secchi depth by looking at your measuring tape at the point where it touches the water, or counting the submerged interval markers. You’ll need the average measurement when you use the app. Finish by opening the Secchi app at the drop site—follow the prompts and instructions to record your GPS location and enter your data.

You can repeat this procedure anytime you’re on the ocean. In fact, if you visit far-flung destinations or regularly return to the same spot, all the better: repeated readings from various times of the day, different seasons, and from hard-to-reach locales are extremely valuable for helping scientists understand how phytoplankton levels change over time and around the world.

The Secchi Disk Study has published two research papers on phytoplankton, with more in the works. That’s thanks to citizen science contributions: cruise passengers, avid sailors, recreational kayakers, and anyone who even occasionally takes to open water and wants to contribute to important and quantifiable environmental science. You can add yourself to that list now too.

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Officials from the US Coast Guard confirmed on Tuesday that a salvage mission successfully recovered the remaining debris from the OceanGate Titan submersible. The 22-foot-long vessel suffered an implosion en route to the Titanic almost four months ago. Five passengers died during the privately funded, $250,000-per-seat voyage intended to glimpse the historic tragedy’s remains, including OceanGate’s CEO and Titan pilot, Stockton Rush.

According to the Coast Guard’s October 10 press release, salvage efforts were underway via an agreement with the US Navy Supervisor of Salvage & Diving following initial recovery missions approximately 1,600-feet away from the Titanic wreckage. Searchers discovered and raised the remaining debris on October 4, then transferred them to an unnamed US port for further analysis and cataloging. The US Coast Guard also confirmed “additional presumed human remains” were “carefully recovered” from inside the debris, and have been sent for medical professional analysis.

[Related: OceanGate confirms missing Titan submersible passengers ‘have sadly been lost’.]

OceanGate’s surface vessel lost contact with the Titan submersible approximately 105 minutes into its nearly 2.5 mile descent to the Titanic on June 18. Frantic, internationally coordinated search and rescue efforts scoured over 10,000 square surface miles of the Atlantic Ocean as well as the North Atlantic ocean floor. On June 22, OceanGate and US Coast Guard representatives confirmed its teams located remains indicative of a “catastrophic implosion” not far from the voyage’s intended destination.

Submersible experts had warned of such “catastrophic” issues within Titan’s design for years, and repeatedly raised concerns about OceanGate’s disregard of standard certification processes. In a March 2018 open letter to the company obtained by The New York Times, over three dozen industry experts, oceanographers, and explorers “expressed unanimous concern” about the submersible’s “experimental” approach they believed “could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

“Your [safety standard] representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold,” reads a portion of the 2018 letter.

Although salvage efforts have concluded, the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) plans to continue conducting evidence analysis alongside witness interviews “ahead of a public hearing regarding this tragedy.” A date for the hearing has not yet been announced, although as The Washington Post notes, the Coast Guard could recommend new deep-sea submersible regulations, as well as criminal charges to pursue.

OceanGate announced it suspended “all commercial and expedition operations” on July 6.

The post What the US Coast Guard found on their last OceanGate Titan salvage mission appeared first on Popular Science.

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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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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.

Sponges. Is there anything they can’t do? For millennia, humans have used dried natural sponges to clean up, to paint, and as vessels to consume fluids like water or honey; we’ve even used them as contraceptive devices. Whether synthetic or natural, sponges are great at ensnaring tiny particles in their many pores. And as scientists around the world are beginning to show, sponges’ cavity-filled forms mean they could provide a solution to one of our era’s biggest scourges: microplastic pollution.

In August, researchers in China published a study describing their development of a synthetic sponge that makes short work of microscopic plastic debris. In tests, the researchers show that when a specially prepared plastic-filled solution is pushed through one of their sponges, the sponge can remove both microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics from the liquid. These particles typically become trapped in the sponge’s many pores. Though the sponges’ effectiveness varied in experiments, in part depending on the concentration of plastic and the acidity and saltiness of the liquid, optimal conditions allowed the researchers to remove as much as 90 percent of the microplastics. They tried it in everything from tap water and seawater to—why not—soup from a local takeaway.

The plastic-gobbling sponges are made mostly from starch and gelatin. Looking a bit like large white marshmallows, the biodegradable sponges are so light that balancing one atop a flower leaves the plant’s petals upright and unyielding, which the researchers suggest ought to make them cheap and easy to transport. Inside, the sponges’ structure appears less like lots of tiny bubble-like cavities and more like a jagged surface.

According to Guoqing Wang, a materials chemist at Ocean University of China and coauthor on the paper, the sponge formula is adjustable. By tweaking the temperature when the two compounds are mixed, he says, the sponges can be made more or less porous. This affects the size of particles collected—highly porous sponges have lots of very small pores, which is good for catching very tiny particles.

The sponges, if ever produced at an industrial scale, Wang says, could be used in wastewater treatment plants to filter microplastics out of the water or in food production facilities to decontaminate water.

It would also be possible to use microplastic-trapping sponges like this in washing machines, suggests Christian Adlhart, a chemist at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland who has also experimented with creating sponge filters for collecting microplastics. Some microplastics enter waterways after being shed by synthetic fabrics when they are swirled around in the wash. “You could place such a sponge inside the drum,” says Adlhart. “I think it would absorb a large fraction of the fibers.”

Sponges like this work thanks to a duo of mechanisms, he adds. If water is actively driven through one, for example as it is squeezed and released, microplastic particles get trapped inside the sponge’s pores like collecting marbles in buckets. But even when the sponge is simply floating in still water, electrostatic interactions mean that some plastic particles will cling to it.

There are hiccups to the sponge’s potential adoption, though. One, says Adlhart, is that starch and gelatin are important to the food industry, meaning that there could be competition for the key ingredients in the future. However, similar sponges can be made with different materials. The version that Adlhart and his colleagues developed, for instance, uses chitosan—a sugar derived from the shells of crustaceans—to provide the sponge’s structure. Chitosan isn’t widely used commercially, says Adlhart, so it wouldn’t face the same competition.

Adlhart says his sponge design, which involves spinning together a matrix of chitosan nanofibers, was inspired by the filter-feeding activity of oysters, which trap particles in their gills as they pump seawater through them.

Chitosan, starch, and gelatin are all biodegradable. However, the process developed by Wang and his colleagues to make their sponge uses formaldehyde, a highly toxic compound, and there were traces of this in the sponges themselves. Wang says they’re working to come up with an alternative so that they can make a completely environmentally friendly sponge.

Anett Georgi, a chemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany who wasn’t involved in the research, says that when it comes to cleaning up microplastic pollution in the ocean, the key is to stem the flow. We should start, she says, by targeting wastewater treatment plants that don’t yet employ technologies that already exist—such as filters made with sand or activated carbon—to remove plastic.

That’s something that could be realized quickly, says Georgi: “We don’t have to wait for crazy material.” But for smaller-scale applications, such as removing microplastics from household water supplies, the new sponge filters could be useful, Georgi suggests.

What’s still lacking, says Alice Horton at the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre, is proof that any of these newer sponge-based technologies can be cost effective and successful in removing microplastics from water at a large scale. But one thing she is confident about is that efforts to remove microplastics after they have already reached the ocean are probably doomed to fail.

“I don’t think there is anything we can do on a large enough scale that will have any impact,” she says of that. “We have to stop it getting there in the first place.”

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

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Trees are magicians with carbon, pulling it out of the air at remarkable rates to store it in their bodies. They are so good at removing this greenhouse gas that “planting trees” is often synonymous with doing environmental good. 

And lots of people are planting trees. The number of tree-planting organizations has grown by almost 300 percent in the past 30 years, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Biological Conservation. Those groups have planted nearly 1.4 billion trees across 74 countries since 1961. But while tree planting can capture a great amount of carbon, it is hardly a silver bullet for the climate crisis—experts estimate that even if we maximized our available lands for trees, this alone would not be enough to counteract anthropogenic carbon emissions. Plus, many plantations grow the same few species in monocultures, which can hurt local biodiversity. 

A planted tree will suck up carbon regardless of species or its planters’ motivation. But it’s difficult to make blanket statements about the efficacy of carbon capture forestry: Tree plantations are found all over the world, surrounded by different ecosystems with their own native species and local populations who live and rely on these lands—there will be no “one tree fits all” solution.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to selecting, planting, and protecting a new tree]

The minority of tree plantations are set up with carbon capture solely, or even primarily in mind, says Jacob Bukoski, a forestry scientist at Oregon State University. Most trees are planted with the goal of harvesting timber or wood pulp for paper. Tree-planting organizations are more likely to create plantations for agroforestry or commercial reasons, the authors of the 2021 paper also note, rather than for biodiversity or carbon capture. 

These groves sometimes support voluntary carbon markets, also known as carbon offset markets, where corporations pay for activities like planting trees as a way to offset their total emissions. People tend to like using carbon credits for tree plantation over other options because the goal is clear, Bukoski says. You can tangibly understand that your carbon offsets will result in planted trees that are ideally managed and monitored afterward. But only a small minority of trees are planted for these carbon markets, he says. 

In forestry, there’s a saying that you have to plant “the right tree in the right place, for the right reason.” But when many tree plantations are established for commercial purposes, the tree that is planted is often not the “right” tree, says Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, an ecologist at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. 

In a paper published recently in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Aguirre-Gutiérrez and colleagues argue that focusing on the goal of carbon sequestration causes organizations to ignore the importance of restoring balanced ecosystems. Globally, tree plantations tend to plant the same species such as teak, eucalyptus, mahogany, and a few others valued by the timber, paper, and other industries, Aguirre-Gutiérrez says. The result is a swath of trees that do not support local organisms or promote biodiversity in the way native plant species would have. 

[Related: We need billions more baby trees to regrow US forests]

These problems are present in plantations all over the world, but Aguirre-Gutiérrez and his colleagues are particularly concerned about the tropics. Land there is vast, and conditions such as stable temperatures and high humidity promote tree growth—“that’s why there’s been a boom in plantations in these locations,” he says. At the same time, the tropics are host to an incredible variety of plants and animals found nowhere else. Ignoring them while planting trees is damaging. When plantations increased the woody cover of the Brazilian savannah by 40 percent, this “resulted in an about 30 percent reduction in the diversity of plants and ants,” Aguirre-Gutiérrez and his co-authors write in the new paper.

Aguirre-Gutiérrez doesn’t want to discourage people from growing more trees, he says. Rather, we need a better way to protect the natural ecosystems and species there, like encouraging the restoration of native forest tree species. Local plants will be “better adapted to the conditions” in these environments, he says, which means they, and nearby species, are more likely to thrive. “If we go in that direction, that will bring us the added value of capturing carbon, but also this sustainability.”

When assessing the utility or good of a tree plantation, “there’s a lot of nuance,” says Bukoski, and often cases need to be evaluated individually. For example, a plantation where the trees will be harvested for timber won’t provide long-term carbon capture benefits—does that make it not worthwhile? That’s not a conclusion you can necessarily draw without more information, he says.

Aguirre-Gutiérrez says we need more research quantifying the impacts tree plantations are having on their local ecologies, and the populations of people living in those areas, beyond carbon. “Because at the end of the day, the impacts of these plantations are going to be first felt by these local communities.”

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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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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 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. 

This investigation was co-produced with New Lines Magazine and supported in part by a grant from The Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land. 

Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war. 

Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have carried down from the mountains. A gritty wind stings their chapped cheeks as they load the heavy trucks beside them. In these parts of Achin, nothing else moves in the bleached landscape. For years, locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination.

In April 2017, the U.S. military dropped the most powerful conventional bomb ever used in combat here: the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, known unofficially as the “mother of all bombs,” or MOAB. 

Before the airstrike, Qudrat Wali and other residents of Asad Khel followed as Afghan soldiers and U.S. special forces were evacuated from the area. Eight months after the massive explosion, they were finally allowed to return to their homes. Soon after, Wali says, many of the residents began to notice strange ailments and skin rashes.

“All the people living in Asad Khel village became ill after that bomb was dropped,” says Wali, a 27-year-old farmer, pulling up the leg of his shalwar kameez to show me the red bumps stretched across his calves. “I have it all over my body.” He says he got the skin disease from contamination left by the MOAB.

When Wali and his neighbors returned to their village, they found that their land did not produce crops like it had before. It was devastated, he says, by the bomb’s blast radius, that reached as far as the settlement of Shaddle Bazar over a mile and a half away.

“We would get 150 kilograms of wheat from my land before, but now we cannot get half of that,” he says. “We came back because our homes and livelihoods are here, but this land is not safe. The plants are sick, and so are we.” 

The bomb residue plaguing the village is but one example of the war’s toxic environmental legacy. For two decades, Afghans raised children, went to work and gave birth next to America’s vast military bases and burn pits, and the long-term effects of this exposure remain unclear. Dealing with the consequences of the contamination will take generations.

“Devastated by toxic exposures”

America’s 20-year military occupation devastated Afghanistan’s environment in ways that may never be fully investigated or addressed. American and allied military forces, mostly from NATO countries, repeatedly used munitions that can leave a toxic footprint. These weapons introduced known carcinogens, teratogens and genotoxins—toxic substances that can cause congenital defects in a fetus and damage DNA—into the environment without accountability. 

Local residents have long reported U.S. military bases dumping vast quantities of sewage, chemical waste and toxic substances from their bases onto land and into waterways, contaminating farmland and groundwater for entire communities living nearby. They also burned garbage and other waste in open-air burn pits—some reported to be the size of three football fields—inundating villages with noxious clouds of smoke.

Afghanistan has suffered more than 40 years of rarely interrupted war. The evidence is everywhere, some of it static and buried, some of it still very much alive. The chemicals of war poisoned the land in ways that are still not well understood. Before the U.S. military arrived in Afghanistan, Soviet forces had been accused of deploying chemical weapons, including napalm. Their bases were then repurposed by the Americans. Left behind today are layers upon layers of medical, biological and chemical waste that may never be cleaned up.

From its first post-9/11 airstrikes aimed at the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001 through its chaotic withdrawal from the country two decades later, the U.S. military dropped over 85,000 bombs on Afghanistan. Most of these contained an explosive called RDX, which can affect the nervous system and is designated as a possible human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

Attributing specific illnesses to contamination in the air, water and soil is often extremely difficult, but villagers who lived in close proximity to major U.S. bases—and the Afghan doctors and public health officials who treated them—say the Pentagon’s unwillingness to employ even minimal environmental protections caused serious kidney, cardiopulmonary, gastrointestinal and skin ailments, congenital anomalies and multiple types of cancer.

In his 2022 State of the Union address, U.S. President Joe Biden was unequivocal about such causality, but only as it related to U.S. veterans. He described “toxic smoke, thick with poisons, spreading through the air and into the lungs of our troops.” He called on Congress to pass a law to “make sure veterans devastated by toxic exposures in Iraq and Afghanistan finally get the benefits and the comprehensive health care they deserve.”

A few months later, Congress passed a bill known as the Pact Act, adding 23 toxic burn pit and exposure-related health conditions for which veterans could receive benefits, including bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and nine newly eligible types of respiratory cancers, at a cost of more than $270 billion over the next decade. The law represented the largest expansion of veterans’ benefits in generations. 

But neither Biden nor Congress said anything, or promised any assistance, to the Afghans who lived near those U.S. military bases or worked on them and still suffer from many of the same illnesses and cancers. 

Under Section 120 of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, the Department of Defense is required—for U.S. sites on home turf—to take responsibility for all remedial action necessary to protect human health and the environment caused by its activities in the past. However, a DOD regulation prohibits environmental cleanups at overseas military bases that are no longer in use, unless required by a binding international agreement or a cleanup plan negotiated with the host country before the transfer. 

In 2011, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan reached a peak of about 110,000 personnel—NATO forces contributed an additional 20,000—generating roughly 900,000 pounds of waste each day, the bulk of which was burned without any pollution controls, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, a U.S. watchdog agency. Afghan laws forbidding burn pits were not applicable to U.S. and other international forces, and according to soldiers and residents, the U.S. military persisted in its use of burn pits until its withdrawal in August 2021, despite efforts to limit their use that began in 2009 and a 2018 prohibition on burn pits “except in circumstances in which no alternative disposal method is feasible.”

What America left behind 

My father came from Nangarhar, and I have wanted to tell this story for years. Although I was adopted and grew up overseas, when I returned to the country as a journalist, in 2019, I began to understand the true scale of the damage that America’s military inflicted on Afghanistan. Some bases were like small cities, belching round-the-clock smoke that tainted the skyline while processions of waste-filled trucks flooded out of them. 

When I learned about the millions of pounds of hazardous waste that the bases produced, I filed a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request to SIGAR to obtain photographs of active burn pits. Using GPS coordinates embedded in the photo’s metadata, I mapped and measured the sizes of the burn pits at bases across the country. I saw the rusting hulks of Soviet-era planes and American military vehicles piled up on the bases. A 2011 photograph of the scrap in Shindand base in the western province of Herat looks exactly the same on satellite today. According to satellite imagery designed to monitor active fires and thermal anomalies, several burn pit locations at Bagram were last active in mid-June of 2021.

In the summer of 2022, I visited the sites of three of the largest former U.S bases in Afghanistan—in the provinces of Nangarhar, Kandahar and Parwan—to document what was left on the ground by America.

A year earlier, I spent months traveling across Iraq to report on the effects of pollution and military contamination on Iraqis and the environment. I knew that the American military’s effect on Afghanistan and its people mirrored problems in Iraq but was far less documented. 

It was only after the Taliban moved back into power, ending the American war in August 2021, that I had the opportunity to dig deeper into the issue. On my fourth journey back to the country since the takeover, I landed on the airstrip at Kabul airport and spotted a stub of cement “T-wall” with “Clean up your fucking trash” graffitied in English, presumably by a member of the international forces during their chaotic evacuation. But the Americans had left more than just garbage: They had filled the air with toxic pollutants and dumped their raw sewage in fields and waterways across Afghanistan.

No longer facing the same threat, the enormous former U.S. bases still hold an array of poisonous detritus and sit silently against the majestic landscape, with one or two Taliban guards lazing in watchtowers on their phones. 

The skies, too, have changed since the Taliban takeover. The burn pits’ noxious black plumes, the surveillance blimps and the buzz of helicopters are all but a memory now. New faces occupied the driver’s seats of the police and military vehicles. And for many, particularly in rural areas of the country, the end of the airstrikes and night raids was long overdue and a welcome relief. There were, however, new problems to contend with under the Taliban government, including an extreme clampdown on women’s rights and a severely weakened economy. 

Over the course of six months, I traveled across the country and spoke with 26 medical practitioners and 52 Afghan residents living near those bases about their health problems, which they believe are a direct result of waste from the bases.

Farmers told me that they witnessed U.S. military contractors dump sewage and waste into their fields. Residents described how, for years, they had bathed in sewage-clogged streams that flowed from inside the base walls and breathed in the billowing clouds of poisonous pollutants from the open-air burn pits. I saw young children making a living scavenging scrap metal from the bases who are now suffering from eye infections and persistent skin diseases, according to the doctors treating them. 

I also spoke with Afghan and American soldiers who believe their health problems and diseases are directly related to their work on the American military bases in Afghanistan. One former Afghan soldier I spoke with, who didn’t give his name for fear of repercussions from the Taliban, trained new recruits at the Kandahar airfield for 13 years. He said he was close to the burn pits for the entirety of his service and had respiratory problems as a result. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Medical professionals with years of experience treating those affected, including military doctors who worked on U.S. bases caring for both Afghan and U.S. soldiers, told me that there was, categorically, no way that the burning and dumping of waste did not affect the health of everyone in the surrounding areas—and still does.

The “mother of all bombs”

In Achin in Nangarhar, Wali hides his rash and leans over the counter in the small shop where he sells snacks and drinks, on a bridge near Momand Dara village. Below him, a stream burbles quietly. 

“I know my skin disease is from the bomb because there were no such diseases before it,” he says pointedly. 

He looks out at the silent Mohmand Valley ahead of him. Fields thick with shrubs and trees fill the valley floor. As it narrows, the hills on either side merge into mountains. In the distance, the magnificent Spin Ghar, or White Mountains, mark the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nearby is the Tora Bora cave complex, built with CIA assistance for the mujahedeen, after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, it became an al-Qaida stronghold. It was also the site of the U.S. government’s failed attempt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden at the start of America’s war in Afghanistan. 

The MOAB was dropped about 550 yards from Wali’s home—a seven-minute walk from his shop, he says, as he hops from stone to stone across a narrow brook leading the way. 

Containing nearly 19,000 pounds of Composition H6, a powerful mix of TNT, RDX, aluminum, and nitrocellulose explosives, the MOAB’s destructive force is roughly equivalent to the smallest of the Cold War-era tactical nuclear devices in the American arsenal. It was pushed from the rear of an MC-130 cargo plane and dropped on a cave complex used by Islamic State militants, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said at the time. President Donald Trump, who had promised during his 2016 campaign to go after the Islamic State and “bomb the shit out of ’em,” called the strike “another very, very successful mission.” Afghan defense officials claimed that 36 Islamic State fighters were killed in the attack.

When Wali returned home months later, the bomb’s destruction was hard to see. There was no obvious massive crater; only some scorched stones and a few burned trees marked the site of the bombing. 

His home still stands, though not all dwellings in Asad Khel survived, the rubble now inhabited by straying goats. Ten families are living in the village in rebuilt homes, Wali says. His neighbors have the same itchy red rash.

“All but two or three people in each home have the skin rash,” he says, “and everyone thinks that their skin diseases are from the bomb.”

His mother, Wali Jana, 60; his wife, Nafisa, 20; and their two children, Mir Hatam, 3, and Qasim, 2, all have the same skin condition. 

“Whatever medicine the doctors are giving us is not making us better,” Wali says. 

The rashes don’t heal. They itch constantly and continue to leak a pus-like liquid, he tells me. After dozens of trips to the doctor and many tests, he has yet to find any relief or explanation for the rash. 

“All we can do is try to take measures to stay away from this disease,” he says. “I wash twice a day and change my clothes daily.”

This was not the first bomb to hit this area, he says. “But this one was different.”

In Nangarhar, “everything is poisoned” 

The Jalalabad airfield sits southeast of the city. For 20 years, it was home to Afghan and U.S. soldiers. Its eastern and southern walls are surrounded by agricultural land and mechanic and scrap metal shops packed with everything from gas masks to tools with the American flag printed on them, medical equipment, treadmills and a framed poster of the film “The Terminator.” Just down the road, there are warehouses with busted Humvees waiting to be dismantled into parts for sale. To the north is the Jalalabad-Torkham highway leading to the Pakistani border. The streams that run out of the base and under the highway flood through a cluster of villages whose residents use the water to drink from and wash in.

“The water was very clean before the Americans came,” says 36-year-old Mohammed Ajmal, pointing to a milky gray stream flowing from a hole in the high wall surrounding the base. Casting a broad shadow over the murky water, he adds, “Some people in this area have kidney problems. Others have breathing problems and skin diseases. I am not sure if these diseases came from the chemicals in the missiles from the base or from the polluted waste they put in the stream.”

“Everything is poisoned,” he says. 

Dr. Mohammad Nasim Shinwari, who has worked from his small clinic near the base for the past 17 years, says that pollution from the base is responsible for the most common health problems he sees. Only a small dried-up field separates his clinic from the burn pits that were blazing at least once a week, he says. “Now imagine breathing that for your whole life.” 

Residents filed complaints that U.S.-hired contractors from the base were unloading the tankers of waste in front of their houses and in their fields, Sadullah Kakar, a former employee of the Ministry of Border and Tribal Affairs, told me weeks earlier. Shinwari says that up until the Americans’ exit from the base, the contractors were dumping waste “secretly” in some locations. “Other times, they were just dumping it in the fields right here, by the base. No one could stop them.”

As patients crouch on the curb outside the two-room clinic, grasping plastic folders of medical documents in their hands, Shinwari scribbles down the location where tanker trucks from the base would dump raw sewage in farmers’ fields. 

Like Ajmal, Shinwari also attributes many of the illnesses he has seen to the chemicals from the bombs, missiles and other munitions that fell on fields and villages. The doctor described how, in his home district of Shinwar and neighboring Achin, few plants have grown on the land in the five years since the MOAB was dropped. 

“People thought that the Americans had sprayed chemicals in the air or added something to the source of water,” Shinwari says. “But it was the MOAB bomb.”

For Ajmal, the polluted waterway flowing from the base is a lingering reminder of America’s longest war. 

“The wells in our homes are also contaminated,” he says, his brow furrowed. “Every week they would bring the sewage tankers from the base and empty them in the stream and in the land around. The water would get very dark and would have a very bad smell. Many people here have kidney problems, and if you look at the trees growing in the river, they are also damaged,” he says, pointing to a row of trees along the bank, half-submerged in the murky water. 

Then there were the missiles and rockets, Ajmal says, pointing toward the heavily fortified concrete walls of the Jalalabad airfield, looming over the low-rise homes. 

“You could smell the chemicals. We were breathing them.” He wipes the tip of his nose at the memory. The U.S. military deployed its High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, and Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, both guided surface-to-surface weapons, in Afghanistan. 

A wide range of rockets and missiles contain propellants with hazardous components, including perchlorate, the main ingredient of rocket and missile fuel, which can affect thyroid function, may cause cancer and persists indefinitely in the environment. U.S. forces have also been accused of using potentially toxic depleted uranium munitions in Afghanistan, as they did in Iraq, although they have denied the claim. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) says exposure to DU from friendly fire has had no effect on the kidneys of American soldiers but that there is a possible link to lower bone density. 

One of the weapons misfired and struck a relative’s home next to his, Ajmal tells me, destroying both homes. His wife was pregnant with their son, Mohammed Taha, at the time. The boy, now 10, has been ill since birth and has a rash on his scalp that leaves bald itchy patches. 

Ajmal, his three brothers and their families live just 160 yards from the airfield, in an area called Qala-e-Guljan. Nine members of Ajmal’s extended family have serious health issues. His two sons have suffered from heart problems since birth—medical records show that one has a hole in his heart. His 15-year-old daughter, Soma, also has a chronic skin rash that stretches across her back, chest and thighs. 

Similar accounts of rampant, unusual health issues afflicting entire families are commonplace in the villages around the base. 

Wali Ur Rahman, 26, takes a rest from the sweltering 108 degrees Fahrenheit June heat under a concrete gazebo in the center of his field, which sits next to Ajmal’s home. Rahman and his father, brother, sister-in-law, uncle and nephew, have lived here for the past 22 years. All have kidney problems, according to doctors’ reports that I reviewed, from kidney calcification and kidney stones to renal failure. His son and his nephew also have respiratory problems. 

Doctors told Rahman that without treatment he will need a kidney transplant, which he cannot afford. 

The family eats the food they grow in their field, which is irrigated by the stream—there are no other options. He suspected that the sewage-infested stream by their home was the cause of his family’s health problems, so he dug a well inside their home for drinking water. Now, he thinks the well is supplying dirty water; shortly after his young nieces and nephews began using it, they also became sick.

Groundwater wells are the main source of drinking water in Afghanistan. A report from 2017 in the scientific journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment mapped water quality for half of the country, finding a range of potentially toxic substances, including boron, as well as high levels of arsenic and fluoride in several areas. Although some of these substances can be naturally occurring, they are also associated with industrial use. Other water quality studies conducted at select locations in Afghanistan found nickel, mercury, chromium, uranium and lead—heavy metals that can cause serious harm to the body, from impairing children’s mental and physical development to kidney damage. 

Dumped in Jalalabad’s fields, “Tankers full of American toilet waste”

A few minutes’ drive from Rahman’s field is a wide dirt road that runs parallel to the Jalalabad-Torkham highway. On the other side are open fields. Here, I meet Khan Mohammad as he navigates his way through a carefully landscaped field in District 9 of Jalalabad, about 100 yards from the base. Mohammad stops under the shade of a small almond tree and sits down, folding his legs beneath him. He has been working in these fields for 20 years and remembers how the contractors’ trucks from the base would carry two types of waste and dump them where he was planting crops.

“One was colored green-blue, which would destroy the plants. The other was a white-gray milky substance, which had a very bad smell, like acid. Sometimes they would dump a mix of both,” he tells me. 

A group of six farmers from neighboring fields joined us under the tree. “These were tankers full of American toilet waste. At one time, the tankers were dumping twice a day, in the morning and evening,” says 30-year-old Omar Hiaran, recalling how this continued until the Americans left the base in 2021. “It was white soapy water and had toilet paper in it.” 

Hiaran’s father, also a farmer, has had health problems for the past nine years. 

“After he became ill, he told me to wear gloves when I was working in the field so that I didn’t touch the sewage like he had,” Hiaran says.

While waste from local residents is also dumped into the city’s canals and smaller landfills along the roads, it cannot compete with the sheer amount of hazardous waste that came from the airfield. 

The blue liquid Mohammad saw was a dye used in the portable toilets at the base. The chemicals used in these toilets can be toxic to human health in high doses. According to an article by Matthew Nasuti, a former U.S. Air Force captain who advised on environmental cleanups, the washroom facilities at the American bases generated both gray and black water. The gray wastewater came from sinks and showers, carrying soap residue that contains phosphates and other chemicals. Black water pollution came from the toilets. While the American military has to adhere to strict rules regarding the disposal of toilet waste on home turf, he said that it faced no restrictions in Afghanistan.

When Mohammad and other villagers confronted the contractors driving the tankers, they were told that the sewage would “benefit the crops and would bring a good harvest, and they reminded us that using the sewage was cheaper than buying fertilizer and was good to use as water also,” he says.

A 2021 report by the Sierra Club and Ecology Center found that even the sewage sludge found in American fertilizers can contain a harmful array of chemicals, including dioxins, microplastics, furans, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and alarming levels of toxic PFAS—also known as “forever chemicals”—that can take decades or even centuries to break down naturally. PFAS are also present in several substances that were used by the U.S. military, including foams used to combat petroleum-based fires. 

By mid-2022, the U.S. military had reportedly still not begun cleanups at any of the hundreds of DOD sites across the United States identified as highly contaminated with PFAS.

Studies have linked higher levels of PFAS exposure to an array of health problems, including liver damage, cardiovascular diseases, increased risk of kidney cancer, increased risk of thyroid disease and immune system dysfunction. A federal study published in July established, for the first time, a direct link between PFAS and testicular cancer in thousands of U.S. service members. Pregnant women exposed to PFAS have an increased risk of high blood pressure and diabetes. Babies in the womb and infants are also vulnerable, as studies have found that PFAS can affect placental function and be present in breast milk. PFAS exposure has also been linked to decreased infant birth weight, developmental dysfunction among infants and increased disease risk later in life.

Even if such sewage goes through a treatment process, research has shown that PFAS and other toxic chemicals cannot be removed. 

In 2017, Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency, or NEPA, said that 70 percent of the underground water in Kabul was contaminated with harmful bacteria, microbes and chemicals and was not safe for human consumption. Other major cities, including Jalalabad, faced the same problem, the agency said. 

Afghanistan’s capital had one public facility for sewage treatment, the Makroyan Wastewater Treatment Plant, which processed at least 21,000 gallons of raw sewage each month from portable toilets at the U.S. Embassy and 12,000 gallons from those used by U.S. and coalition troops. All of this was piped into the Kabul River, according to Afghan officials and Malika and Refa Environmental Solutions, the company that serviced the NATO headquarters in Kabul and at Bagram airfield. The plant stopped working in 2018, and the untreated wastewater was dumped into the river before flowing into the city drains, endangering the health of thousands of residents.

The U.S. Geological Survey notes that pollutants found in wastewater include phosphorus, nitrogen and ammonia, which promote excessive plant growth—something that Mohammad and the other farmers saw in their fields. The sewage dumped in the fields around Jalalabad airfield did not go through treatment processes on the base, according to an Afghan engineer named Faridun (he gave only his first name) who had worked on the base for 12 years. 

“They have infected every part of Afghanistan”

At his home on the edge of the field he farms, Mohammad explains that his two youngest sons are suffering from serious kidney issues. “But we do not know about the exact cause of their diseases, whether it’s pollution or something else,” he says. He suspects the sewage dumping.

His eldest son Farooq, who has issues with his bladder, emerges from the home with a thick stack of papers and folders cradled in his slim arms. Mohammad combs through the mountain of documents—there are 44 doctor reports alone for his 7-year-old son, Umar, who sits crouched at his feet. 

Umar has had kidney problems since he was 1 year old, Mohammad says. I look through the reports: Doctors in Afghanistan and Pakistan had diagnosed him with a pleural effusion (fluid around the lungs), moderate ascites (fluid in the abdomen) and chronic kidney and liver disease. His 5-year-old brother, Ameen, has kidney damage, and his blood tests show he is also anemic. Both boys help their father work the land every day along with Mohammad’s mother, Bibi Haro, 60, who shows me her skin condition, which she has had for eight years. At first, it was red and leaking pus, but it has now settled into a permanent itch. 

Umar has been going to the doctor for four years, his grandmother says. “He is still in pain now. Every day he is suffering. Last year he went to a kidney center hospital in Pakistan. And just a week ago, we returned to the doctor with him,” she says. 

His cousins Bibi Ameena and Hamidullah, who also work the fields by the home, have both had kidney problems for the past five years.

Mohammad looks down at Umar, nestled under his arm. “When he coughs, there is blood,” he says. “The only thing I owned was a tractor, and I sold it for his treatment. Now, the doctors in Peshawar say they need 5 million Pakistani rupees [about $16,000] to replace his kidneys, but I don’t have that much money.”

As tears of anger stream down her face, Bibi Haro tells me how her brother is deaf as a result of an American drone crash in the field by the home. “They would fly low every night and scare us while we slept,” she says. “They bombed Nangarhar for years, and their smoke filled our sky. They have infected every part of Afghanistan.” 

Jalalabad doctors: Diagnosing the contaminants of war 

Doctors at the public hospital in Jalalabad attribute many of the health problems their patients face to water, air and soil pollution from the American base. I meet one of them, Dr. Latif Zeer, in a deserted restaurant in the city center. As soon as we sit down at a long table, the power cuts out. The ornate gold fans above us slow to a stop, letting the hum of the city outside flood into the room.

He explains how heavy metal poisoning in “all the water” may be related to contamination from chemicals used on military installations or chemical residue from weapons and ammunition. In his view, this has led to the hospital’s many cases of kidney problems and gastroenteritis, an inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract including the stomach and intestine, usually caused by viruses, bacteria or other microbes. Gastroenteritis can also be caused by food or water contaminated by chemicals and heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury or cadmium. “Anywhere they dropped bombs or the airstrikes were conducted, definitely, the water would be contaminated,” he adds. 

Over the years, the DOD has faced a string of lawsuits over contaminated water on its bases at home and abroad, including claims of contamination from jet fuel and depleted uranium. In response to my emailed questions, the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM denied that the U.S. military had dumped wastewater, black or gray, in waterways in Afghanistan, saying that specially designed “lagoons/settling ponds and leach fields” were used instead that “did not directly discharge onto the land.” Wastewater was “gathered and hauled off” by contractors to a host nation’s treatment and disposal facility, it added. 

CENTCOM also said it last operated an open-air burn pit in Afghanistan on December 28, 2020, refuting what dozens of residents told me.

Zeer, who has spent two decades at the hospital in Jalalabad, tells me the gastroenteritis cases he saw were unusual. At one point, the national Ministry of Public Health sent a team from Kabul to observe patients and test the water, he says. The infectious disease specialists could only explain the cause as “chemical substances.” 

Patients usually got better after a few days or with antibiotics, he says, “but we were seeing patients with AGE [acute gastroenteritis] symptoms and respiratory problems [who were] dying, and so I thought this was some kind of chemical poisoning of the water caused by chemicals used in the fighting.” 

But it is difficult to definitively diagnose chemical poisoning as the cause of gastroenteritis, he says. Doctors in Afghanistan lack the resources and equipment to deduce the primary causes of many of the illnesses they see daily. Adding to their woes is a record-keeping system that is largely analog and often does not include basic details, such as home district and age. 

“People don’t know their family medical history, and we often cannot do follow-ups with patients because they are moving due to fighting or they cannot afford to come back,” Shinwari told me. 

In the last four years of the war, Zeer treated a flood of patients from Nangarhar and neighboring Kunar, mostly suffering from acute gastroenteritis. Most of these cases came from districts that had seen prolonged fighting over the years, including Achin, Khogyani and Shirzad in Nangarhar.

The head of the Jalalabad hospital’s pulmonary department for 14 years, Dr. Sabahuddin Saba, cites multiple causes for an array of respiratory illnesses suffered across the region. He says that the air pollution can come from working with materials like silicon or coal, for example: “Some farmers have what we call ‘farmer’s lung’ because they work in the dust.”

But he also notes that Afghanistan has been devastated by bombs and airstrikes that “left chemicals that would spread to the surrounding areas and would be breathed by people all around.”

“We see many patients with chronic coughs, and when we took chest CT scans, we found lung cancer,” Saba says. “Many other patients have bronchial asthma, COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], bronchiolitis and emphysema.” 

He believes that some of these patients were exposed to “irritating or chemical dust”  residue from the bombs. In 2018, patients traveling from Kunar arrived at his hospital in Jalalabad suffering from shortness of breath and coughing up blood. Some died. The hospital had no comprehensive system for managing patients’ records or advanced toxicology equipment that would have enabled doctors to identify what chemicals were responsible for the apparent poisoning; they only had drug test kits provided by the United Nations Population Fund. Other patients, Saba says, arrived at the hospital with mysterious eye infections and nosebleeds, both of which he believes were caused by a chemical substance. 

An Afghan oncologist who has worked in Nangarhar for more than 20 years tells me that he and other doctors in the province see many cancer cases, mostly lung and pancreatic, followed by breast cancer. He says that the majority of patients go to Pakistan and India for treatment because Afghanistan does not have chemotherapy and other medicines readily available. The patients mostly have stage 3 or 4 cancer “because they are not getting regular checkups, we do not catch the cancer sooner. I have treated many soldiers who have lung cancer,” he says.

“If we have good facilities and a good system in place, we would do lots of research but we don’t have technical people here now,” he adds. “This is Afghanistan, if people die from cancer, who will record it? There is no one counting how many have died. This is the first time that someone came here and asked such things.”

In Kandahar, “deadly” burn pits and contaminated water

A badly beaten 300-mile stretch of road links Kabul with Kandahar, passing south through the provinces of Maidan Wardak, Ghazni and Zabul. Post-apocalyptic dust storms blur the pockmarked road ahead. The drive takes 12 hours, and the route is choked with overloaded trucks trudging along with little attempt to avoid the potholes. Strewn along the sides of the highway are bullet-riddled police cars and Humvees, the remnants of the Taliban’s triumphant storm across the country toward the capital in 2021. 

At the regional NEPA office in Kandahar city, staff member Matiullah Zahen describes his struggles with waste burning and sewage dumping by contractors at the giant 3,633-acre Kandahar airfield used by American and Afghan forces. 

“One and a half years ago, we went to the base and told them what they can and can’t burn and where—that it had to be a specific place, not just dumping and burning everywhere,” he says. 

But waste disposal was not high on the list of priorities for the commanders at the base, he says, and nothing changed. 

“The kind of thinking of the base commanders was: ‘It’s the contractor’s job to handle the waste, I don’t care how he does it, just get it out of my face. I got other problems, I’m fighting a war,’” Zahen says. 

Zahen accompanies me to the airfield and we drive out, my letters of permission from several ministries and the governor in hand. We wait for the base commander to show us where one of the burn pits was, behind a now-padlocked gate that leads to the international side of the airfield. Two hours later, we are told to leave. 

After we leave the maze of high blast walls winding out of the base, we turn off the main road into the Khoshab area, just to its west, home to about 15,000 people who earn a living from the surrounding agricultural land. Khoshab is the closest village to the airfield.

Here, I find 22-year-old Laal Mohammed working his land in the shadow of the airfield’s walls. Despite the brutal hazy midday heat, he doesn’t break a sweat. His wheat and vegetable fields are less than 100 yards from the base’s perimeter. 

His family’s home is surrounded by a carefully kept garden with rows of vegetables and a burst of blossoming flowers. Inside is a 60-foot-deep well dug 15 years ago where they get their drinking water. They moved here eight years ago from neighboring Zabul province. 

Five years ago, both he and his sister Nazaka, 21, started having kidney problems. “The doctors found kidney stones many times,” he tells me. “The doctors we went to see told us to stop drinking the water here,” he says, adding that they can’t use their neighbors’ water as they have the same wells. “And we cannot afford to buy bottled water.” 

He takes me to a site across from the base that locals call Qazi Qarez, where he says the tankers used to dump sewage and trash once or twice a week. From 2014 until the Americans left, they would burn the waste in five locations here, he says, pointing to the spots. Today, it’s an open, empty stretch of land, but just a year and a half ago, he says, plumes of thin smoke could be seen trailing upward to the sky.

“Indefensible” burn pits

Although U.S. military waste management guidance from as far back as 1978 specifies that solid waste should not be burned in an open pit if an alternative is available, burn pits persisted in Afghanistan. DOD officials stated that the management of solid waste is not always a high priority during wartime, according to the Government Accountability Office. 

CENTCOM regulations specified that when an installation exceeds 100 U.S. personnel for 90 days, it must develop a plan for installing alternatives to open-air burn pits for waste disposal. CENTCOM officials told SIGAR that “no U.S. installation in Afghanistan has ever complied with the regulations.”

The U.S. military used open-air burn pits almost exclusively to dispose of its solid waste during its first four years in Afghanistan. Only in 2004 did the DOD begin introducing new disposal methods, including landfills and incineration, a year after soldiers returning from deployment complained of shortness of breath and asthma. 

And while CENTCOM attempted to limit the use of burn pits beginning in 2009, reliance on them continued: In April 2010, the Pentagon reported to Congress that open-air burning was the safest, most effective and expedient manner of solid waste reduction during military operations until research and development efforts could produce better alternatives. Shortly afterward, CENTCOM estimated that there were 251 active burn pits in Afghanistan, a 36.4 percent increase from just four months earlier. That same year, health studies raised concerns that the burn pits’ smoke, contaminated with lead, mercury and dioxins, could harm the adrenal glands, lungs, liver and stomach. In 2011, guidance finally stated that burn pits should be placed far away from areas near troops. 

The DOD hired contractors such as KBR Inc., formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, to manage the burn pits. Over the years, KBR has faced numerous lawsuits related to the burn pits and the water treatment plants it operated in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The waste burned in the open-air pits, according to multiple reports, including one in 2010 by Nasuti, the former U.S. Air Force captain, included petroleum and lubricants; paints, asbestos, solvents, grease, cleaning solutions and building materials that contain formaldehyde, copper, arsenic and hydrogen cyanide; hydraulic fluids, aircraft de-icing fluids, antifreeze, munitions and other unexploded ordnance; metal containers, furniture and rubber, Humvee parts and tires; and discarded food, plastics, Styrofoam, wood, lithium-ion batteries, electrical equipment, paint, chemicals, uniforms, pesticides and medical and human waste. Animal and human carcasses, including body parts, were also thrown in. 

Though CENTCOM regulation prohibits a host of materials and hazardous chemicals from being burned, these and other discarded items were set on fire using JP-8 jet fuel, which released benzene, a known carcinogen. Plumes of the burnt waste hovered over the base and seeped into soldiers’ sleeping, working and dining quarters, often less than a mile away. The smoke included heavy metals, dioxins, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, hydrocarbons and hydrochloric acid, among numerous other toxic substances. 

Kandahar airfield generated more than 100 tons of solid waste per day in 2012 and more than 5 million gallons of sewage water from 30,000 portable toilets. The DOD first brought 23 incinerators to Kandahar that year at a cost of almost $82 million, but the machines proved extremely unreliable and costly to operate. One incinerator was delivered two years late and required $1 million of repairs before it could even be turned on. An inspection by SIGAR from 2012 to 2014 found serious mechanical problems and a reliance on burn pits instead. In 2015, SIGAR’s inspector general called the use of open-air burn pits “indefensible.” 

A few weeks before I headed to Kandahar, I spoke with an American official familiar with burn pits who had witnessed all manner of toxic waste being burned in the massive pits on U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

The official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, told me that the trash at the base in Kandahar “was all over the place” and that no one was paying attention to the specifications on what could be burned in the pit and when. The contractors “would just burn everything,” the official said. “I expected to see a big pile of ash, but all you saw was things that were blackened. It didn’t effectively burn everything down to nothing. I was like, why bother?”

They said the enormous burn pits would be dug deep enough to be used many times and “when it got to a level where they couldn’t burn anymore, they would just shovel dirt over it and dig another one in another spot. They smelled horrible.” 

Most of the incinerators did not work properly or at all and wouldn’t be fixed, the official told me. At other times, personnel weren’t trained properly on how to use them, “so what all the bases did was go back to what they did before,” which was to either use burn pits or dump waste. 

The military doctors

Abdul Sami, 32, and Zabiullah Amarkhil, 31, Afghan doctors, know well the damage from the burn pits. The pair studied medicine together before working as trauma surgeons in military hospitals inside bases in Kunduz, Nangarhar, Kabul and Balkh as well as Kandahar, where they still work today. 

“I have seen patients with skin problems and eye infections. Others had kidney problems because of the contaminated water, American soldiers also. We also had patients with acute gastroenteritis,” says Amarkhil as we bundle into the back of a beat-up taxi. I had collected the doctors from the airfield after they finished their shift.

On all the bases, they treated soldiers and civilians with the same array of pulmonary and respiratory problems witnessed by the doctors in Jalalabad. Most of their patients were those who were working close to the burn pit, they say.

In Jalalabad, Sami recalls at one point registering up to 200 patients a day with respiratory isssues, skin diseases and stomach problems. 

“Most of these patients were from the military base,” he says. The military quarters, he adds, were just 650 yards west from one of the pits.

Amarkhil says the waste at Kandahar airfield was dumped and burned both inside and outside the base. He drew a map marking the base’s biggest burn pit, between the American and Afghan sides of the airfield, and another location where trash and other refuse were dumped in a landfill. Up until 2016, he said, “they were doing burn pits once a week, always on Wednesday. The flames were about 4 meters high.”

The burn pit was very close to the military training center that housed new trainee soldiers, who were not used to the heavy air pollution, Amarkhil tells me. In 2016, he would see as many as 10 trainee soldiers a day with respiratory problems. An additional 10 to 15 had skin issues, he says. He adds that waste from Forward Operating Base Gamberi, in Laghman province near Jalalabad, was dumped at the Darunta Dam to the west of the city, where it polluted the water. But in Kandahar everything would go to the burn pits, Amarkhil says, including a specific container used for medical waste and equipment. 

“When it was full, the container would be burnt also,” he says.

Momand Khosti, a military doctor, called the burn pits “deadly.” Khosti worked in senior positions in both the Afghan and American hospitals at Kandahar airfield and five other airfields since 2007, and as the deputy director for health affairs in the Ministry of Defense until the Taliban takeover. 

When we met weeks earlier in Kabul, sitting in the back corner of a restaurant, he marked the location of a Kandahar burn pit on a napkin, about a mile from the hospital on the Afghan side of the base. 

“We also burned medical waste and equipment in a smaller burn pit, 100 meters from the hospital,” he says.

The last time he saw active burn pits was in June 2021, he says.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of the respiratory problems, cancers, skin conditions and kidney problems that patients at Kandahar airfield were suffering, Khosti believes that “many” of the cases were directly linked to military activities and the bases themselves. 

“One night, 30 soldiers came into the hospital with diarrhea and vomiting,” he says. “In the days following, more came in.” Staff members at the hospital then found that the water on the base had been contaminated.

Khosti, who specializes in cancers of the liver, gallbladder and bile duct, described how a soldier with late-stage lung cancer had come to see him just two days earlier. “I asked him about his lifestyle and work background. He told me he worked on the bases or on the battlefield. He was coughing up a black-colored mucus. Because he worked as a soldier for so many years, I believe his cancer is because of the pollution from the burn pits.” 

U.S. service members exposed to burn pit pollution in Afghanistan also coughed up black mucus they called “plume crud” or “black goop,” studies later revealed. They reported suffering from severe chronic respiratory disease, including constrictive bronchiolitis, a rare and often fatal lung disorder for which there is no cure. Other symptoms included unexplained diarrhea, severe headaches, weeping lesions, chronic skin infections and rashes, severe abdominal pain, leukemia, lung cancer, nosebleeds, severe heart conditions, sleep apnea, anemia, ulcers, unexpected weight loss and vomiting.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) insisted until 2021 that there was conflicting and insufficient research to show that long-term health problems have resulted from burn pit exposure, and denied most benefit claims related to toxic exposure. The VA estimates that more than 3.5 million veterans and service members were exposed to the toxic fumes from burn pits during overseas deployments since 1990, according to a 2015 VA report.

The Khoshab clinic

In Kandahar, Afghan doctors allege that toxic substances from the burn pits harmed the development of fetuses. At a small clinic in Khoshab about 100 yards from the Kandahar airfield, Dr. Suhela Muhammadi, 40, bustles through a crowd of mothers and children in the clinic’s small waiting room. She tells me about heart anomalies, genetic disorders and other birth defects in babies whose mothers lived near the base, saying these were not seen at such high levels 20 years ago. 

“I think that most of them were caused by the war, when their mothers were pregnant,” she says.

The number of congenital birth defects in Afghanistan per 1,000 people is more than twice as high as that in the U.S., according to 2017 research published by the Royal Tropical Institute in the Netherlands. The paper also notes that increased maternal exposure to certain chemicals may affect development of the fetus and contribute to congenital anomalies. Increased risk of congenital anomalies was reported in Afghan women working in agriculture sectors and those living near hazardous waste sites. 

While the environmental toxicologist Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani was working at the University of Michigan, she published several studies on Iraq, where birth defects have been better studied than in Afghanistan. She found infants and children had been exposed to potentially toxic metals such as tungsten, titanium, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, thorium and uranium that are heavily used in weaponry and military hardware. 

“The most common resulting anomalies are heart defects and neural tube defects,” she told me.

Abdul Wali Abid, the Khoshab clinic’s manager for more than a decade, tells me that in the weeks before the Americans left the base, the staff saw smoke billowing from burn pits every week. An engineer working inside the Kandahar airfield for the past eight years said that right before the U.S. military left the base, they burned a lot of things, “even cars.” There was a river at the back side of the base coming out the wall “where they were dumping sewage until the end.” 

As I leave the clinic, I meet 35-year-old Abdul Raziq, a clinic guard who has lived in the area all his life. He knows the “river” that the engineer had told me about, he says, leading me out of the clinic to show me the three places where the water was coming out of the airfield walls. 

We head out and drive around the southern side of the base, bumping over dry agricultural land. A metal grate covered the outflow to one of the pipes, which emptied into a 26-foot-wide trench carved out in front of it. Not long ago, water would flow out of the base, flooding into smaller streams, which fed nearby agricultural lands, Raziq tells me. 

“It was dirty, soapy water, with rubbish in it,” he says. “But when the Americans left the base, it stopped.” 

Kandahar airfield’s scrap metal collectors

Along the road on the northeast side of the base is a string of makeshift shops stuffed with a random assortment of scrap, from Humvee seats to car engines and ammunition boxes. I had seen the same in Nangarhar, where shop owners had once built a bustling economy on the waste from the base. 

Here, I find Fida Mohammad, 17, and Esanullah, 15, hiding from the midday sun inside their ramshackle hut, surrounded by piles of metal. They are originally from Ghazni province, but after their father died of a heart attack seven years ago, they moved to Kandahar with their mother and three younger brothers, hoping to make a living from scrap metal trading. 

When the U.S. soldiers were still at the base, the boys could earn as much as 15,000 to 20,000 afghanis ($185 to $250) a month from collecting scrap that came from the base, they say. 

“Some things were burned by the people at the base, like TVs, radios, computers, mobile phones and all sorts of electronics, but we would go through it and collect the metal that survived the fire,” Fida Mohammad tells me. 

For the past five years, Esanullah has suffered from breathing problems, and his hands are riddled with a rash that started two years ago. 

“Our younger brother got sick also. He was small, so my mother told me to bring him with us to our work. He was playing with all the things and then he got the same skin problems as Esanullah,” says Fida Mohammad.

Two years ago, Esanullah traveled to Quetta in Pakistan to see a doctor with his mother. “I couldn’t talk properly or stand,” he says. “The real problem was my chest. I was there for two and a half months. But even now, I have problems with my breathing.”

The doctors in Pakistan didn’t give a diagnosis for the cause, but the boys believe that the source of Esanullah’s health problems is the airfield. 

The two would collect everything from plastic bottles to vehicle engines to “the bad things” like live grenades, as well as ammunition and shell casings, says Fida Mohammad. 

He leads me outside and points to these deadly remnants of the American occupation: unexploded artillery shells and a box filled with 40 mm grenades.

Khosti had told me that around Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province, people suffered from eye infections. There were even cases of children, some as young as 6 or 7 years old, developing eye tumors, he said. “They were collecting scrap metal from the base, and areas around where the U.S. military was conducting weapons testing, and sometimes they would take the explosive materials, so I believe their eye tumors were related to this.”

Bagram, “Everyone is sick here” 

Anyone who lives near Bagram airfield knew the burn pits by the smell of the raging barbecue of trash, usually overseen by Afghan employees, few of whom bothered to wear masks to protect themselves from the smoke and ash spewing from the pits.

“When you are doing this kind of work for 10 years, 15 … there is nothing that can keep you safe,” one of the former base employees tells me. 

The enormous U.S. stronghold, about 15 miles north of Kabul, was home to 40,000 military personnel and civilian contractors at its peak, with airplanes and helicopters taking off and landing at all hours of the day and night. There were underground bars, a private airstrip, a Burger King and other fast-food joints, an Oakley sunglasses store and, until 2014, a secret detention facility. A giant diesel generator farm powered the base 24 hours a day, emitting a constant stream of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and sulfur. 

A 13-building waste management complex built in 2014 to house the base’s new incinerators seemingly had little effect on the discharges. Until the U.S. exit in the middle of a July night two years ago, a haze of aerosolized garbage would emerge every week from what the American soldiers called “the shit pit” and mix with the already dust-clogged air in Parwan province, residents told me.

A half-hour drive away from Bagram, southeast of the provincial capital of Charikar, a graveyard of rusting trucks, tanks and helicopter engines used by the Soviet Union lay baking in the summer sun, the vehicles’ corroding residue leaching into the soil and water. Lining the road below were trucks belonging to scrap dealers, waiting to take the debris on to Pakistan. A few weeks later, it was all gone.

While I had permission letters from the relevant Taliban ministries, I needed the authorization of Obaidullah Aminzada, Parwan’s new governor, to visit the sprawling base. As a member of the Taliban, Aminzada had been a prisoner at Bagram for four years while it was under the control of the U.S. military. Now, he was effectively in charge of what had been the Pentagon’s largest military base in Afghanistan. 

“When the blasts started, we knew it was a Friday,” the governor tells me coolly in his office, surrounded by his assistants, in the heart of Charikar. While he was a detainee, he was kept in darkness but knew from the sound “and that smell” that the military was conducting controlled detonations of military equipment and ordnance at Bagram. “We knew what day of week it was by the detonations,” he laughs, turning to one of his assistants, who nods in agreement.

Aminzada invites me to lunch with the governor of Bagram district. I had been promised access to the sprawling base and I’m eager to see inside, post-American control. So I accept the invitation despite my reservations. The lunch involves me, the only woman, sitting alone in one room for an hour and a half, with the men in another, their rollicking laughter floating across the courtyard. Finally, we say our goodbyes and head out to the base. We make it to the gates, but no further. The commander, from whom I need permission, was not at the base, I was told — the same thing that had happened to me at the bases in Nangarhar and Kandahar.

I watch as the gates to the base open to let a Ford Ranger roll in. Children carrying sacks larger than themselves stuffed with an array of scrap try to sneak in, only to get chased away by a Taliban guard perched atop a rundown Humvee decorated with plastic flowers. 

Almost all of the waste “was still going to the burn pit”

The moment is a far cry from the scene that greeted the bioenvironmental engineer and U.S. Air Force Reserves colonel Kyle Blasch when he arrived at Bagram in the summer of 2011. The commander of the security forces at Bagram had contacted his team about researching the base’s burn pit. Blasch’s team conducted the only occupational sampling study on U.S. personnel near the military’s burn pits in Afghanistan. 

At the peak of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, Bagram was burning between 2,300 and 4,000 cubic yards of refuse per day—enough to fill 175 to 300 dump trucks. Smoke from the burn pits, mixed with dust and other pollution, choked the guards as they worked 12-hour shifts at the base’s checkpoints and 10-yard-high guard tower. 

New rules from the DOD had come in prohibiting the burning of specific materials, but it didn’t matter, as the researchers found that 81 percent of waste was still going to the burn pit, including prohibited items such as plastic bags, packaging materials, broken construction materials and aerosol cans.

The purpose of the study was to see what the soldiers were actually breathing. Blasch’s team outfitted members of the security forces with personal sampling monitors. He was able to outfit the study subjects with four monitors each, which included pumps, filters and breathing tubes. Blasch said they were eager to help. 

The results were unequivocal. The levels of airborne pollutants registered by the monitors worn by each soldier exceeded the short-term military exposure guideline level. Those near the burn pit and waste disposal complex exceeded the U.S. EPA’s air quality thresholds by a factor of more than 50. 

“Right now, we have a lot of question marks,” said Blasch, who is now associate regional director for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northwest-Pacific Islands.

In 2011, an Army memo stated that the high concentrations of dust and burned waste present at Bagram airfield were likely to affect veterans’ health for the rest of their lives. The memo noted that the amount of pollutants in Bagram’s air far exceeded the levels permitted under U.S. government guidelines.

 “Everyone breathed the same air” 

The day after I was denied access to Bagram by the Taliban authorities, Noor Mohammad Ahmadi, 41, a village head, leads me down a narrow maze of walkways to his home, just outside the base. 

He lives in the village of Gulai Kali, where streams meander through tightly packed homes and the roads that encircle the base. Driving around the perimeter, I count 16 locations where water flowed into or out of the base from small culverts in the high walls. Families use the doors of shipping containers as gates to their compounds and shops. Above them, the white Taliban flag flutters in the wind. 

The neighborhood is abuzz with activity. A pair of girls carrying their baby sisters walk alongside a stream, deep in chatter. Men stride across nearby wheat fields, hands clasped behind their backs, as children run past, their heads cocked to the pink sky, eyes locked on their kites above.

In 2011, Ahmadi and 17 other village leaders from the area wrote an application to the Parwan governor, Abdul Basir Salangi, saying that the Bagram base was destroying their drinking water, he tells me. 

His ancestors had lived in Gulai Kali for years, but when the Taliban first came to power in the 1990s, the villagers left. “When the new government came in, we came back, so we have been here now for 20 years,” he says.

“We sent two applications to the governor. One was about our property; the Americans took our lands and expanded the base here. And the second was about our water problem,” he says. The base had stopped the Panjshir River from reaching their fields for agriculture, he says. “They were also dumping lavatory water into our waterways and fields.” 

He pulls out a stack of carefully organized papers in plastic sleeves. “I have all the letters.” 

Streams from the Panjshir River enter the base from the north and depart from it in the south and east. The airfield was diverting the water, he says. “Nine hundred families are living here in Gulai Kali village, and they were without water.”

The governor promised to talk to the military and send a team to examine the water. Two weeks later, a team made up of the district’s representative from the Ministry of Agriculture and Water, a representative from the Ministry of Public Health, an Afghan translator and “two international military people from the base” came to the villages and took samples from the wells, Ahmadi says.

“After this, the governor called a big meeting at his office with the international military people, a representative from each village, an Afghan commander named Safiullah Safi and the team who took the samples,” he says. “They told us the water is clean and there were no problems with it, but they did not show us any results in documents or reports.” 

The governor instructed the airfield personnel to dig a well 100 yards deep for the villagers, but it never happened, he says. 

Three men from the village join us in Ahmadi’s home. One man, Ajab Gul, says he has respiratory problems and has had multiple surgeries to remove recurrent kidney stones. “In our area, we do not have clean water,” he says. “Maybe this is the cause.” 

“Everyone is sick here,” Mohammad Salim, a farmer, speaks up. “When the international community came to Afghanistan, my problems started.” He says he has had issues with his lungs for the past 17 years. The base was burning waste at least three times a week, he says, and the winds would blow it over his village and the lands he farms, about 50 yards from the base.

“When we saw the smoke, we took our children inside the home and still had to cover our mouths and noses because of the bad smell,” Salim adds. “It was a big problem for us.”

Salim traveled to see a doctor in Pakistan three times between 2012 and 2019. 

“The doctors took my blood, did a lot of tests and gave me medicine, but I am still not well. If there is any smoke, I can’t breathe again, and I cannot control my coughing. My eyes cry when I cough. I’m coughing a mucus that stings my throat.”

“Lots of farmers from this area are sick,” Salim says. They call it ‘Bagram Lung.’ Just knock on any door and you will find it. … The Americans who were on the base are sick, but so are we. Everyone breathed the same air.” Over the years, the international aid workers, journalists and diplomats stationed in Kabul came up with their own name, “Kabul cough,” to describe the chronic hacking, bronchitis and sinus infections. The symptoms were particularly persistent in the winter months, when the smog from coal and oil burning heaters enveloped the Kabul basin. 

 While the cause of Salim’s problem has not been determined, his description of “Bagram Lung” brought to mind tests performed in the U.S. on soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division. 

While they all tested normal on conventional pulmonary function, a doctor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center performed surgical lung biopsies on more than 50 and found that nearly all of them had constrictive bronchiolitis, a narrowing of the smallest and deepest airways in the lungs—an irreversible and chronic condition. Other medical studies have found a host of other toxic substances, including partially combusted jet fuel, in the lungs of veterans serving near burn pits.

Then there was the sewage dumping. In Gulai Kali, everyone says the water is as dirty as the sky. Every day, American contractors from the base “were bringing seven to 10 tankers carrying the lavatory water and dumping it in the canals [and we still] cannot even wash there,” says Salim, the farmer.

“I have kidney and bladder problems and I feel very weak,” says Zia ul Haq, a villager sitting next to Salim. For days at a time, he was too tired to stand, he says.

He has lived next to Bagram for the past 15 years and has been unwell for seven of them. “I worked inside the base for two years in the big refrigerator where food and energy drinks were stored,” he says. “I have a big pain in my kidneys and I cannot control my bladder. The doctor told me I have not been drinking clean water, but we are using water from our well.”

Every other house outside Bagram’s walls has a water pump well because the river no longer flows to the village. 

“The people don’t drink the canal water now; it’s too dirty,” he says. 

The people in Gulai Kali heard explosions, loud and frequent, coming from the base in June 2021, not realizing that the Americans were getting ready to depart once and for all  and were destroying ordnance, weapons and military vehicles so the Taliban couldn’t make use of them. 

Even Zainul Abiden Abid, head of NEPA, was kept away. “Our staff were not allowed inside the base that month,” but “we could see the clouds of smoke rising,” he told me.

As the Americans in Kabul frantically packed up in late August 2021, an Afghan worker at the U.S. Embassy took a video of a burn pit being used by embassy staffers right in the heart of Kabul. “We were told to take everything out of the office and go to this designated area and throw everything in there where it was set alight,” he told me. “On the top of the burn pit was a picture of John Sopko”—the American inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

Using EPA-approved sampling equipment provided by the U.S.-based Eurofins Environment Testing, the journalist Kern Hendricks and an Afghan scientist specializing in water sampling collected water, soil and blood samples from villages around the Jalalabad, Bagram and Kandahar airfields where the journalist Lynzy Billing conducted interviews and obtained medical records from residents.

The sampling equipment traveled from the United States to Afghanistan via the United Kingdom and Turkey. The coolers containing the samples are now on their way back to Eurofins Environment Testing in the U.S. for lab analysis, via Pakistan.

We plan to test these samples for the presence of PFAS, which were present in materials used by the U.S. military and do not naturally occur in the environment.

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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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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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As their giant petals open, the blooming of flowers in the genus Rafflesia brings with them an overwhelming odor mimics the smell of rotting flesh. While their pungent stink might keep humans away and attract flies, a study published September 19 in the journal Plants People Planet found that 67 percent of the habitats for these notorious plants is at risk of destruction. 

[Related: Corpse flowers across the country are swapping pollen to stay stinky.]

Rafflesia are the largest flowers in the world and have been a botanical enigma for centuries. In addition to their infamous stink, corpse flowers are actually a parasite that infects vines in the tropical jungles of Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. It remains hidden from sight for the majority of its lifecycle, existing as a system of tiny thread-like filaments that invades its host. At unpredictable intervals, the parasite produces a cabbage-like bud that will break through a vine’s bark and eventually form a giant, five-lobed flower, up to 3.2 feet across. The flower produces its signature rotten meat smell to attract pollinating flies.

This elusive lifecycle and ability to remain hidden makes them very poorly understood by botanists, and new species are still being discovered by botanists. With such an elusive lifecycle, Rafflesia remains poorly understood, and new species are still being recorded. 

In the study, an international group of researchers established the first coordinated global network to assess the threats facing Rafflesia. This network found most of the 42 known species of Rafflesia are severely threatened, but only one is listed on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. This leaves many unprotected by regional or national conservation strategies. The scientists classified 25 species as Critically Endangered and 15 as Endangered, according to the IUCN’s criteria for classification. 

Chris Thorogood of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden in England co-authored the study and an upcoming book on the team’s years devoted to documenting these plants. In a statement, Thorogood said that this work, “Highlights how the global conservation efforts geared towards plants–however iconic–have lagged behind those of animals. We urgently need a joined-up, cross-regional approach to save some of the world’s most remarkable flowers, most of which are now on the brink of being lost.”

Additionally, Rafflesia species often have very restricted geographical distributions, making them particularly vulnerable to habitat destruction. Many of the remaining populations of corpse flowers have only a few individuals in unprotected areas that are at risk of being converted for agricultural use, according to the study. While these and other similarly smelly flowers famously exist in some botanical gardens, these institutions have had limited success in breeding them, making habitat conservation an urgent priority.

[Related: These parasitic plants force their victims to make them dinner.]

The four-point action plan proposed by the team for local governments, research centers, and conservation organizations  includes greater habitat protections, better understanding of the full diversity of the Rafflesia that exists to better inform policy making, developing better methods to breed them outside their native habitat, and introducing new ecotourism initiatives to engage local communities in Rafflesia conservation.

The study also highlighted some valuable success stories that may offer important insights for Rafflesia conservation elsewhere, including the Bogor Botanic Garden in West Java, Indonesia, that saw a series of successful blooming events and villagers in West Sumatra benefitting from Rafflesia ecotourism by forming “pokdarwis” or tourism awareness groups linked to social media.

“Indigenous peoples are some of the best guardians of our forests, and Rafflesia conservation programmes are far more likely to be successful if they engage local communities,” Adriane Tobias, a study co-author and forester from the University of the Philippines Los Baños, said in a statement. “Rafflesia has the potential to be a new icon for conservation in the Asian tropics.”

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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 clownfish, life begins with an adventure. In 2003’s Finding Nemo, young Nemo takes a dizzying journey from coral reef to captivity and back again. In real life, it’s a different kind of quest: soon after hatching, tiny translucent clownfish larvae swim for 10 to 15 days, traveling up to 35 kilometers through open ocean. It’s the biggest trip they’ll ever take. After this brief excursion, young clownfish develop their iconic orange and white coloring and settle down on an anemone, where they dwell for the rest of their days.

But recent research suggests that climate change could disrupt this delicate life stage. In laboratory experiments, graduate student Billy Moore at Japan’s Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and colleagues found that clownfish larvae raised in water 3 °C warmer than normal zoom through early development. After 18 days, fish raised at 31 °C instead of 28 °C had bodies 16 percent longer, on average. The fish raised in warmer water also grew complete fins and pelvic fin spines—a key stage of clownfish development—two days faster than the fish raised under cooler conditions.

Timothy Ravasi, study coauthor and marine scientist at OIST, says that faster growth in a warming world could become a problem for wild clownfish. If climate change causes clownfish larvae to develop too quickly, they might arrive on an anemone when there’s not enough food to go around. Or fish that grow faster might not swim as far—if they settle close to home and mate with nearby fish, clownfish genetic diversity could suffer.

But the fish’s quicker growth could have benefits. Emily Fobert, a marine ecologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved in the study, suggests that faster maturing clownfish larvae may spend less time in the open ocean where they are vulnerable to predators.

Either way, clownfish are a prime choice for studying the consequences of climate change because, unlike many coral reef fishes, they are easy to breed in captivity. This gives researchers the chance to study their entire life cycle up close, and probe questions about how warming water might affect wild fish at each stage of their development. Plus, Ravasi jokes, “everyone loves Nemo.”

The clownfish that Moore raised in warmer water also had faster metabolisms, which the scientists determined by measuring how much oxygen the clownfish consumed in a tiny swim tunnel. This squares with previous research on older clownfish, as well as Ravasi’s not-yet-published research on juvenile grouper.

The researchers based the warmer temperature in their study on the projection of future climate change if carbon dioxide emissions double by the year 2100. Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a 3 °C increase in average ocean temperatures by 2100 under that scenario, temperature spikes are already common during ocean heatwaves. This year, ocean temperatures have broken records around the world, with the North Atlantic more than 1 °C warmer than normal, on average. Some spots are seeing even higher temperatures, like the 10 °C jump near coastal Newfoundland in July.

“The temperature is going to increase, marine heatwaves are going to increase, so we do need to understand how these fish will respond,” says Moore.

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

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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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The Pacific Ocean is a juggernaut. It’s the largest ocean on our planet, almost double the size of the Atlantic. Its vast expanse, exposure to trade winds, and range of temperatures makes it incredibly dynamic. All these factors contribute to create the El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern that affects seasonal precipitation, heat, storms, and more around the world. 

ENSO is made up of three stages: El Niño and La Niña, which can both increase the likelihood of extreme weather from the Philippines to Hawaii to Peru—and the neutral phase that we are typically in. El Niño is currently underway and is predicted to go strong until winter. With it come a slew of weather patterns like exacerbated heat waves in the northern US and Canada, increased risk of flooding in the south and southeast US, delayed rainy seasons, and even droughts in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. And this is for an El Niño period that is predicted to be strong, but not particularly extreme. But as the Pacific warms due to human-driven climate change and temperature gradients across the ocean widen, scientists warn that El Niño and La Niña periods are becoming longer, more extreme, and more frequent.

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory]

In one recent study published in the journal Nature Reviews, researchers looked at different climate models to see how ENSO has changed through the past century, and how it may shift in coming years. While El Niño and La Niña ordinarily last nine to 12 months, the vast majority of models predict that we will see them stretch out over multiple years. “In the 20th century you got about one extreme El Niño per 20 years,” says Wenju Cai, chief research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and lead author of the Nature Reviews paper. “But in the future, and in the 21st century on average, we will get something like one extreme event per 10 years—so it’s doubling.”

Longer and more intense periods of El Niño and La Niña mean that the risks of extreme weather—hurricanes, cyclones, flooding, drought—are heightened for most countries lying in the Pacific or flanking it. For example, El Niño pulls warm water farther east, so if tropical cycles (storms that tend to move westward) develop, they’ll have more time and distance to cover until they reach land. “While they’re traveling in the ocean, these tropical cyclones are energized by the heat and moisture from the ocean,” says Cai. By the time they reach countries to the west like North Korea, South Korea, Japan, or China, they could be more catastrophic than the tropical storms those places experience today.

Since “global warming is already making extreme events more extreme” like intensifying storms and weather patterns, Cai says, it’s a “double whammy.” 

But even the less dramatic effects of ENSO could still amount to damage. The fluctuations in ocean temperatures that ENSO brings, for example, can be dramatic and too quick for marine life like corals to adapt, says John Burns, a marine and data scientist at the University of Hawaii. “All that can exacerbate coral bleaching,” which has already been documented in Hawaiian reefs. 

And because creatures and systems are so intrinsically interconnected, this has resounding implications for a number of species and industries. Burns has created technologies that can reconstruct water habitats, and he’s used those models to study the implications of coral loss. “We’ve actually mathematically connected how these habitats influence the abundance of reef fish,” he says, “which are one of the primary sources of protein for the global economy, especially in Southeast Asia.” So not only will climate change and ENSO harm fish and fisheries, but that could also have ripple effects on tourism, as well as the local and global economies. 

In a recent report in the journal Science, climate researchers from Dartmouth College estimated that extreme El Niño events from 1982 and 1997 alone cost the global economy about $4 trillion to $6 trillion, respectively, in the following years. The authors also estimated that this current El Niño period could rack up $3 trillion in losses over the next five years. The damages aren’t just limited to buildings and infrastructure, Cai says: They include social pillars people may not even consider, like jobs, farmland, food stocks, and individual health. As a result, some countries and organizations are taking a proactive approach against El Niño. Peru, for instance, is dedicating more than $1 billion to prevent and contain the carnage it might bring.

[Related: The Pacific heat blob’s aftereffects are still warping ocean ecosystems]

But there is time to bring ENSO and the Pacific Ocean back into balance, bit by bit. While it can be useful at times to consider these global changes on a large scale, it’s important to “recognize that solutions will be very locally based,” says Burns. Even if we project the overall trends, he explains, understanding how specific habitats will be affected and what solutions are feasible requires local and native wisdom and knowledge. 

“It’s a shame if we get dismayed by these larger-scale changes and come to a conclusion of ‘there’s nothing we can do,’” Burns says. “It’s definitely not that simple … and we need strategies that are place-based to protect these systems.”

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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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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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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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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.

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Researchers at MIT have designed a new underwater communication system that employs 70-year-old technology while also requiring one-millionth the energy needed for existing arrays. Not only that, but the team’s design allows for transmissions that can travel 15 times farther than current devices.

“What started as a very exciting intellectual idea a few years ago—underwater communication with a million times lower power—is now practical and realistic,” Fadel Adib, director of MIT Media Lab’s Signal Kinetics group and an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, said in a September 6 announcement. “There are still a few interesting technical challenges to address, but there is a clear path from where we are now to deployment.”

The key to their long-range, efficient Van Atta Acoustic Backscatter (VAB) can be found within the system’s name. As The Register explains, Van Atta arrays, first designed over seven decades ago, are composed of connected nodes capable of both triangulating and reflecting signals back towards their source instead of simply reflecting them outwards in all directions. This makes them not only more efficient, but capable of making much farther transmissions.

[Related: Why the EU wants to build an underwater cable in the Black Sea.]

Backscattering, meanwhile, refers to what occurs when signals such as sound waves reflect back to their point of origin. The phenomenon underpins technology such as ultrasounds, as well as mapping sea floors. Configure Van Attay arrays to boost backscattering capabilities, and you get the MIT team’s new VAB technology.

“We are creating a new ocean technology and propelling it into the realm of the things we have been doing for 6G cellular networks,” Adib said, via MIT’s announcement. “For us, it is very rewarding because we are starting to see this now very close to reality.”

With additional refinement and experimentation, researchers hope their VAB will soon be able to “map the pulse of the ocean,” reports Interesting Engineering. According to one of the team’s forthcoming studies, installing underwater VAB networks could help continuously measure a variety of oceanic datasets such as pressure, CO2, and temperature to refine climate change modeling, as well as analyze the efficacy of certain carbon capture technologies.

“Our design introduces multiple innovations across the networking stack, which enable it to overcome unique challenges that arise from the electro-mechanical properties of underwater backscatter and the challenging nature of low-power underwater acoustic channels,” reads a portion of one of their studies’ abstracts. “By realizing hundreds of meters of range in underwater backscatter, [we present] the first practical system capable of coastal monitoring applications.”

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On January 15, 2022, the drowned caldera under the South Pacific isles of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Haʻapai in Tonga blew up. The volcanic eruption shot gas and ash 36 miles up into Earth’s mesosphere, higher than the plume from any other volcano on record. The most powerful explosion observed on Earth in modern history unleashed a tsunami that reached Peru and a sonic boom heard as far as Alaska.

New research shows that when the huge volume of volcanic ash, dust, glass fell back into the water, it reshaped the seafloor in a dramatic fashion. For the first time, scientists have reconstructed what might have happened beneath the Pacific’s violently strewn waves. According to a paper published in Science today, all that material flowed underwater for dozens of miles.

“These processes have never been observed before,” says study author Isobel Yeo, a marine volcanologist at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre.

About 45 miles from the volcano, the eruption cut off a seafloor fiber-optic cable. For Tongans and rescuers, the broken cable was a major inconvenience that severely disrupted the islands’ internet. For scientists, the abrupt severance of internet traffic provided a timestamp of when something touched the cable: around an hour and a half after the eruption.

The cut also alerted scientists to the fact that the eruption had disrupted the seafloor, which isn’t easy to spot. “We can’t see it from satellites,” says Yeo. “We actually have to go there and do a survey.” So in the months after the eruption, Yeo and her fellow researchers set out to fish clues from the surrounding waters and piece them back together.

A Tongan charter boat owner named Branko Sugar had caught the initial eruption with a mobile phone camera, giving an exact time when volcanic ejecta began to fall into the water. Several months later, the boat RV Tangaroa sailed from New Zealand to survey the seafloor and collect volcanic flow samples. Unlike in much of the ocean, the seafloor around Tonga had already been mapped, allowing scientists to corroborate changes to the topography. 

[Related: The centuries-long quest to map the seafloor’s hidden secrets]

The scene researchers reconstructed, had it unfolded above ground, might fit neatly into Roland Emmerich disaster film. The volcano moved as much matter in a few hours as the world’s rivers delivered into the oceans in a whole year. These truly immense flows traveled more than 60 miles from their origin, carving out gullies as tall as skyscrapers.

When the volcano blew, it spewed out immense quantities of rock, ash, glass, and gas that fell back to earth. This is bog-standard for such eruptions, and it typically produces the fast-moving pyroclastic flows that menace anything in their path. But over Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, that falling mass had nowhere to go but out to sea.

“It’s that Goldilocks spot of dropping huge amounts of really dense material straight down into the ocean, onto a really steep slope, eroding extra material,” says Michael Clare, a marine geologist at the National Oceanographic Centre and another author. “It bogs up, it becomes more dense, and it just really goes.”

Scientists estimated the material fanned out from Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai at 75 miles per hour—as fast as, or faster than, the speed limit of most U.S. interstate highways. If correct, that’s 50 percent faster than any other underwater flow recorded on the planet. That rushing earth gushed back up underwater slopes as tall as mountains.

“It’s like seeing a snow avalanche, thinking you’re safe on the mountain next to it, and this thing just comes straight up against you,” says Clare.

These underwater flows, according to the researchers, had never been observed before. But understanding volcanic impacts on the seafloor is about more than scientific curiosity. In the last two centuries, we’ve laid vital infrastructure below the water: first for telegraph cables, then telephone lines, and now optical fibers that carry the internet.

Trying to prepare a single cable for an eruption of this scale is like trying to prepare for being struck by a train—it can’t really be done. Instead, a surer way to protect communications is to lay more cables, ensuring that one disaster won’t break all connectivity.

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

In many parts of the globe, that’s already the case. Fishing accidents break cables all the time, without much lasting effect. If, for instance, the world experienced a repeat of the 1929 earthquake-induced landslide that cut off cables off Newfoundland, we probably wouldn’t notice too much: There are plenty of other routes for internet traffic to run between Europe and North America.

As a global map of seafloor cables shows, though, that isn’t true everywhere. In Tonga in 2022, a single severed cable all but entirely cut the archipelago off from the internet. Many other islands, especially in the developing world, are similarly vulnerable.

And those cables are of great value to geologists, too. “Without having the cables, we’d probably still be in the dark and wouldn’t know these sorts of events happen on the scale that they do,” says Clare.

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Food delivery and take-out has had a renaissance in the past few years. Not only did it provide an economic lifeline to the restaurants amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but it also kept people safe and fed by limiting exposure to the virus. However, our to-go favorites often come with a huge side of waste. In 2021, over 400 million metric tons of plastic waste of all kinds was produced worldwide and the United States uses more than 36 billion plastic utensils every year. Plastic pollution is also expected to outpace the efforts to reduce waste and could even outpace coal’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

[Related: How to make your takeout order less wasteful.]

Plastic cutlery from delivery orders presents new challenges, but a study published September 7 in the journal Science found that the “green nudges” that encourage customers to skip asking for cutlery with take-out orders were very successful. They could even be a new policy tool in reducing single-use waste. 

“Few policies target plastic waste production at the consumer level, except charges on plastic bags,” co-author and EPIC-China’s research director and Hong Kong University Business School economist Guojun He said in the statement. “Our findings show that simple nudges can make a big difference in changing consumers’ behaviors and could become a tool for policymakers as they confront the immense challenge of plastic waste.”

According to the team, reducing single-use cutlery waste in the food-delivery industry is particularly important in China as the country is the world’s largest producer and consumer of single-use cutlery. Over 540 million Chinese citizens were active users of food-delivery services as of 2019, consuming more than 50 million sets of single-use cutlery per day. In an effort to reduce waste, policy-makers set a target of reducing single-use cutlery usage in food deliveries by 30 percent by 2025.

For the study, the team worked with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s online food-ordering platform called Eleme. The platform is China’s second largest food-delivery company, with more than 753 million users last year, and is similar to DoorDash and Uber Eats in the United States. The team evaluated the effectiveness of Alibaba’s green nudges to reduce single-use cutlery consumption. These nudges included switching the default selection on the platform to “no cutlery” and including green points as rewards for not using the cutlery. Green points could then be redeemed to plant a tree under the customer’s name (but that’s a whole other can of worms).

They studied each user’s monthly food-ordering history for two years through 2019 to 2021 in 10 major Chinese cities. Of these cities, Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin had green nudges, while Qingdao, Xi’an, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuhan, and Chengdu served as control cities without green nudges. They then randomly sampled about 200,000 active users who had placed at least one order between 2019 and 2020.

[Related: Are reusable takeout boxes worth the resources needed to make them?]

They found that changing the default to “no cutlery” and rewarding consumers with green points increased the share of no-cutlery orders by 648 percent, all without affecting Alibaba’s revenue.  If these green nudges were applied to all of China, the team found that more than 21.75 billion sets of single-use cutlery could be saved annually, eliminating 3.26 million metric tons of plastic waste. It could also potentially save 5.44 million trees annually since it would reduce the need for wooden chopsticks.

“Other food delivery platforms, such as UberEats and DoorDash, could try similar nudges to reduce cutlery consumption and plastic waste globally,” said He.

In other places in the world, efforts to trim down on unnecessary plastic have sprouted as well. In June, the “Skip the Stuff” rule went into effect in New York City, which aims to reduce single-use cutlery and condiments. Restaurants have until June 30, 2024 to comply before risking potential fines. The United Kingdom has also set a ban on single-use plastic cutlery set to go into effect in October. The European Union banned single-use cutlery among other types of plastic pollution in July 2021.  

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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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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 late 2013, a mass of warm water now known as the Blob appeared in the northeast Pacific—a massive marine heatwave that cooked coastal ecosystems from Alaska to California. Later, bolstered by an El Niño, the vast and potent heatwave wreaked havoc on marine ecosystems: thousands of seabirds died, while blooms of harmful algae poisoned marine mammals and shellfish. The suddenly warmed water also brought an influx of new animals to the northeast Pacific: ocean sunfish appeared in Alaska, while yellow-bellied sea snakes popped up in Southern California.

By 2017, the Blob had waned and many of these more tropical species had retreated. Yet not all. Some of the species that colonized new habitats during the heatwave have stuck around. And now, says Joshua Smith, a marine ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California who documented in new research how the Blob triggered a range of subtle yet persistent shifts in the spread of marine species, “I’m starting to sort of question whether those communities will ever look the way they did.”

Historically, it’s common enough that a handful of individuals from warm-water species will make their way north during warmer years, but there wouldn’t be enough of them to sustain a long-term population, says Jenn Caselle, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor of the new paper. But because the Blob was so intense and lasted so long, sizable populations made the move into these normally cooler habitats—populations that were potentially large enough to establish more permanent footholds.

Señorita fish, for example—a bright-orange wrasse that showed up in huge numbers in central California during the heatwave—are still there, Smith says. Ocean whitefish, while historically common around Southern California’s Channel Islands, are now dominant, Caselle says, while California sheephead, a bulbous red-and-black fish, are now also much more abundant near Santa Barbara.

These changes in coastal communities, Caselle says, can have knock-on effects on how these ecosystems function. Sometimes, when one species is extirpated from a community—like a predatory fish that keeps a population of smaller fish in check or a seaweed species that provides a home for invertebrates—the ecosystem loses some kind of important function. But if that lost species is replaced by a new species that does the same thing, that new species could provide some resilience to the ecosystem, Caselle says, even if the community doesn’t look the same as it always did.

People can also adjust to new ecological realities, she says, pointing to fishers’ recently acquired fondness for the now-abundant ocean whitefish.

The Blob was one of the most intense marine heatwaves in recorded history, so it makes sense that it had a big effect on marine ecosystems. But big marine heatwaves have affected the northeast Pacific every year since 2019, including this year. Meanwhile, the current El Niño is further heating the northeast Pacific, and climate change means marine heatwaves will likely continue to be even more frequent.

As oceans continue to warm and the heatwave hits keep coming, William Cheung, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the new research, says fish populations could be in trouble. In his own research, Cheung previously showed how warming and marine heatwaves will stress fish populations in the northeast Pacific. Usually, he says, fish populations can bounce back after a heatwave. But if heatwaves start occurring more frequently, populations will have less time to replenish themselves.

These changes are unlikely to go unnoticed. “The place where humans interact with the ocean the most is right at the coast. It’s where most of the biodiversity lives, and it’s where a lot of the productivity is,” Caselle says. “As these systems change, it can affect our everyday lives.”

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

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Preserving coral reef ecosystems is absolutely vital to ensuring a stable, healthy ocean environment. Sadly, ongoing climate crises continue wreaking havoc on experts’ efforts to avert the worst effects of die-offs and coral bleaching. With new advancements, however, one potential solution could involve cryopreservation–collecting and containing coral samples at temperatures as low as -321 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to a recent study in Nature Communications, a team at Texas A&M University has developed a novel cryopreservation technique called “isochoric vitrification.” First, fragments of coral are actually strategically bleached in a lab using a combination of menthol and light. Then, coral fragments’ temperatures are quickly lowered to -196 degrees Celsius, or nearly -321 degrees Fahrenheit inside special aluminum containers. But despite the low temperatures, the coral is cooled without immediate injury.

Although any kind of bleaching often removes symbiotic algae crucial to coral photosynthesis, not doing so ahead of isochoric vitrification results in the formation of deadly ice pockets. By removing the algae ahead of vitrification, however, fragments could be preserved in a “glassy state” via submerging the coral in a chemical solution in aluminum containers cooled using liquid nitrogen. Later, the coral could be revived by slowly warming samples with the reintroduction of filtered seawater.

[Related: Mass coral reef bleaching in Florida as ocean temperatures hit 100 degrees.]

“It’s this collaborative marriage of fundamental thermodynamic advancements and fundamental advancements in coral biology and husbandry that have enabled our breakthrough success in whole coral cryopreservation,” Matthew Powell-Palm, the project’s lead author and an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, explains in a statement.

Although the team notes that coral cryopreservation has already been used in the past, the methods require collecting samples during coral reproduction cycles. Such breeding periods only occur a few days a year, often in difficult-to-reach areas. In contrast, isochoric vitrification allows researchers to harvest and preserve coral regardless of time of year. What’s more, the new method is vastly simpler than alternative cryopreservation techniques.

“Compared to other emergent vitrification techniques—which frequently require lasers, electromagnetic implements or other high-tech laboratory equipment—our isochoric vitrification approach… requires no moving parts or electronics, and the protocol can be implemented by a field technician with no background in thermodynamics,” Powell-Palm continues in their statement. “This is essential to the practicality of any conservation technique because when this is deployed in real marine field stations, the high-tech lab infrastructure common to many laboratories will not be available.”

“From a purely technological perspective, the technique is simple, rugged and ready for the field,” Powell-Palm explained via the announcement.

After honing their new technique, researchers tested the isochoric vitrification process on coral fragments at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. Currently, coral samples’ post-thaw lifespans post-thaw only lasted less than 24 hours, but the team believes reducing the procedure’s overall stress effects will extend the method’s viability.

“Coral reefs are essential to the baseline health of our oceans, and cryo-conservation of endangered coral species can help to ensure that these invaluable and marvelous organisms do not go extinct,” wrote Powell-Palm.

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Last year, the Biden administration announced an ambitious goal: enough offshore wind to power 10 million homes by 2030. The move would reduce carbon emissions, create jobs, and strengthen energy security. It would also help the United States—which was responsible for just 0.1 percent of the world’s offshore wind capacity last year—catch up with renewable energy leaders like China and Europe.

The plan is already well underway: Massive turbines are rising off the coast of Massachusetts, and more projects are planned up and down the U.S. coastlines. Advocates say these turbines, and other offshore projects around the world, are a crucial tool in minimizing the effects of climate change: The technology is touted as clean, renewable, and plentiful. And, since offshore wind farms aren’t located in anyone’s backyard, they are, at least in theory, less prone to the political pushback onshore wind power has faced.

It will take a lot of turbines to meet Biden’s 2030 goal, and while wind turbines don’t use fossil fuels or generate carbon emissions, they are enormous structures, with some reaching heights of more than 850 feet above the water’s surface. (The Statue of Liberty, in comparison, stands a little over 300 feet.) As such, they will likely have some effect on the ocean environment.

Scientists already know some of the local impacts of wind farms. For example, they can, somewhat counterintuitively, reduce local wind speed. They also create their own local climates, and cause disturbances in the water in the form of a downwind wake. But what those changes might mean for marine life or for industries that depend on ocean resources is something that scientists are still trying to figure out.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., offshore wind has become the subject of bitter political disagreement and fear, fueling lobbying and lawsuits aimed at halting projects before they even begin. As researchers work to model potential outcomes, they stress that they don’t want to derail offshore wind, but rather seek to better understand it so that any negative effects can be minimized, and positive effects maximized.

Scientists have a lot more work to do before they can know the true effect of thousands of offshore wind turbines, as well as how and where they should be built. There may even be questions they haven’t thought to ask yet, said Ute Daewel, a scientist who studies marine ecosystems at The Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon in Germany.

“It’s so complex,” she said, “that I sometimes think we probably also miss a lot of things that might happen.”

Advocates of offshore wind turbines can point to a range of benefits—starting with their proximity to the places most in need of clean energy. Around 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of the ocean. Energy demand in densely populated coastal regions tends to be high, so offshore wind farms will be located close to where they are most needed.

Evidence suggests offshore wind power could lower energy costs, especially during extreme events like cold snaps when energy demands are high and wholesale prices peak. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy says that, in addition to reducing carbon emissions, the technology would improve human health by cutting air pollution from fossil fuels.

But wind farms have also come under intense criticism from a diverse coalition of stakeholders, including conservation nonprofits worried about the impact on marine ecosystems, fishing industry groups concerned about access to traditional fishing grounds, coastal homeowners keen to maintain their views, and groups that appear to be funded by large oil companies hoping to stifle competition.

Some of those criticisms focus on the impact on animals. Like onshore wind, the turbines can kill birds, though some researchers studying large-bodied waterbirds like sea ducks and geese have found they tend to avoid the turbines, which may mean less bird mortality offshore. Recent criticism from Republican lawmakers also suggests that the noise from offshore wind turbines might kill whales, although the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there’s no evidence to back up this concern.

Meanwhile, some research suggests wind farms might even help fish and other marine life. “A lot of people say, hey, this is going to be a habitat improvement because there’s going to be rocks on the bottom, which make artificial reefs,” said Daphne Munroe, a shellfish ecologist at Rutgers University. “And that’s absolutely true. But it’s a shift away from what was there.”

Munroe studies pressures on marine ecosystems, including the effects of climate, pollution, and resource exploitation. She’s also the lead author of a 2022 Bureau of Ocean Energy Management study on the impacts of offshore wind on surfclams—a type of clam commonly used to make chowders, soups, and stews. (The BOEM study was funded by the federal agency; Munroe has received funding from wind farm developers to conduct other projects.)

The fishing industry fears wind farms will affect their ability to yield a profitable catch — especially since the windy, shallow waters that support a rich diversity of sea life also tend to be ideal locations for turbines. Some scientists say these fears have been overblown—a 2022 study, for example, concluded that the Block Island Wind Farm located off the coast of Rhode Island does not appear to negatively impact bottom-dwelling fish. (Coastal regulators in the state of Rhode Island mandated the study be conducted and paid for by wind farm developers.) Others, like Munroe, say specific fisheries such as Atlantic surfclams will be significantly affected.

Surfclam fishing in wind farm areas, said Munroe, is logistically difficult, if not impossible, since vessels use dredges that drag though the sand to collect the clams. The presence of power cables on the ocean floor, she said, would make it too dangerous to use this kind of equipment around wind farms.

Installed boulders surrounding turbine foundations will also create obstacles, according to Munroe. “Each of the foundations is going to have what’s called scour protection,” she said. “So basically, big boulder fields that are going to be placed around the base of the turbine foundation in order to prevent the sand from scouring away.”

Currently, there are no legal restrictions on fishing in windfarm areas, Munroe said, just physical ones. “They could still get out there, but in order to fish efficiently and be able to get the catch they need and get back to the dock in a reasonable amount of time, it just wouldn’t be feasible,” she said. In her 2022 study, Munroe and her co-authors concluded that the presence of large offshore wind farms could cause fleet revenues to decline by up to 14 percent in some areas.

The industry has also been vocal about other consequences, such as habitat destruction and the possibility that the turbines’ sound might affect fish populations. In Maine, lobstermen worry that heavy mooring lines will drive their catch away. In Massachusetts, groups that represent fishing interests have filed lawsuits against the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on the grounds that the agency failed to consider the fishing industry when it approved the 62-turbine Vineyard Wind project.

“The Bureau made limited efforts to review commercial fishing impacts,” wrote the plaintiffs in one of the Vineyard Wind lawsuits. “The limited effort that was made focused almost solely on impacts to the State of Massachusetts and on the scallop fishery, despite other fisheries being more active in the lease areas.”

Physical changes to the ecosystem, such as the placement of turbine foundations and scour protection, are some of the more obvious impacts of offshore wind turbines. But wind farms might elicit more subtle changes in local weather, affecting wind patterns and water currents, which models predict could reverberate through the food chain.

A 2023 study led by oceanographer Kaustubha Raghukumar, for example, found that turbine-driven alterations in wind speed could produce changes in ocean upwelling—a natural process where cold water from the deeper parts of the ocean rises to the surface—“outside the bounds of natural variability.” Those cold waters contain nutrients that support phytoplankton, the single-celled plants and other tiny organisms that form the basis of the oceanic food chain. Shifts in upwelling could have an impact on phytoplankton—although those impacts are still in question, particularly as climate change alters the equation.

Raghukumar and his colleagues at Integral, an environmental consulting company, based their predictions off historical data. But such an approach might not create an accurate picture of what will happen in the future as some scientists predict warmer global temperatures will produce stronger winds and increased upwelling, while others foresee localized decreases in upwelling. In their 2023 paper, which was funded by the California Energy Commission and the Ocean Protection Council, the authors noted that wind farms might reinforce—or even counteract—some of these climate change-driven changes in upwelling, but that all remains uncertain.

While Raghukumar’s study didn’t model how changes in upwelling might affect marine life, other scientists are closely studying possible changes to the ecosystem, though these are also likely to be complex and difficult to predict. A 2022 paper modeled the effect that planned wind farms might have in the North Sea, off the coasts of the U.K. and Norway, and concluded that they could influence phytoplankton, which could alter the food web.

Daewel, the study’s lead author, stopped short of drawing conclusions about what these changes might mean for the ecosystem as a whole. “We cannot say if that’s really a bad thing or a good thing because the ecosystem is very dynamic, especially in the North Sea,” she said.

Changes to ocean processes could impact fish survival, but, again, no one is really sure how. “Young fish need to be in a specific area at a specific time to find the right types of prey,” said Daewel. “So this redistribution of ecosystem parameters, that could mean that there might be a mismatch, or a better match also, for fishery life stages. But this is purely hypothetical.”

With or without wind farms, climate change is already altering the timing of critical ecosystem processes, said Robert Dorrell, lead author of a 2022 paper that investigated the effects of offshore wind on seasonally stratified shelf seas—coastal regions where water separates during the spring into different layers, with warm water at the top and colder water at the bottom. Shelf seas only represent about 8 percent of the ocean, but the phytoplankton that bloom there generate an estimated 15 to 30 percent of the organic matter that forms the basis of the food web.

In seasonally stratified shelf seas, phytoplankton grow in the upper layers, using up nutrients but also creating a food source for a myriad of marine animals. When the bloom is over, ocean mixing, a natural process driven by wind and waves, helps bring oxygen to the bottom layers and nutrients to the top, ensuring that creatures at every level can thrive. But climate change is expected to increase ocean stratification, which interferes with natural ocean mixing.

“When you have cold water underneath, which is of a higher density, that density difference makes it harder in general to mix water vertically, upwards or downwards,” said Dorrell.

Dorrell and his co-authors believe that wind farms could provide a partial solution to this problem by introducing artificial mixing of stratified shelf seas. This process, Dorrell said, is a little like stirring a cup of French coffee. “We have a nice coffee on the bottom and then you have foamy milk on the top. And if you would get a spoon and stir your French coffee you would mix the light milk up with the heavier coffee below.”

In much the same way, the downwind wake generated by an offshore turbine could help mix the warm and cold layers of water, which might help offset some of the effects of climate change.

Fortunately, scientists like Dorrell say, there is time to figure out the more subtle nuances of offshore wind and its larger effects on the marine ecosystem. “I think what we have to remember with offshore wind is that although there are plans underway at the moment, they are long-term plans,” he said. “In the U.K., for example, there are targets for 2030 certainly, but there are targets all the way through to 2050 and beyond. And there’s certainly time there for research to inform and support and maximize the best delivery of offshore wind for the benefit of everybody.”

Daewel added that papers like hers, which might suggest potential problems, aren’t an argument against wind farms. Instead, they are a call to closely monitor existing wind farms and those that will be built in the future. “I think that’s kind of the rule here, to be cautious and make sure that you understand what’s happening to your system while you’re building,” she said.

It’s possible that the way wind farms are built and where they are placed might help reduce potential negative impacts on the ocean ecosystem, though that research has yet to be done. “I think it will be a really interesting optimization kind of study, to kind of place the turbines in different locations and different densities,” said Raghukumar. The information gleaned from such a study, he said, could be used to balance the benefits of wind energy against any adverse consequences.

As research into the impacts of offshore wind energy continues, scientists say it’s important to maintain a sense of perspective, since fossil fuels also affect the ocean by driving changes to the climate.

“It’s not our intention to say this is a negative development. It’s also not our intention to say wind parks destroy the ecosystem. That’s not what our research shows,” Daewel said. “I just want to stress the research shows that we need to expect changes, and it’s better to learn that as soon as possible.”

Becki Robins is a freelance writer who lives with her family in rural Northern California. She writes about science, nature, history, and travel; her favorite stories include a little of all four. Her work has appeared in Science News, Comstock’s Magazine, Hakai Magazine, and others.

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

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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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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.

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Jesus Campanero Jr. was a teenager when he noticed there was something in the water. He once found a rash all over his body after a swim in nearby Clear Lake, the largest freshwater lake in California. During summertime, an unbearable smell would waft through the air.

Then, in 2017, came the headlines, after hundreds of fish washed up dead on the shore. “That’s when it really started to click in my head that there’s a real issue here,” says Campanero, now a tribal council member for the Robinson Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians of California, whose ancestors have called the lake home for thousands of years.

The culprit? Harmful algal blooms (HABs). Often marked by unsightly layers of blue-green scum, these blooms happen when certain algae or microbes called cyanobacteria grow out of control, fueled by warm temperatures and phosphorus- and nitrogen-rich pollution.

The impact of harmful algal blooms ranges from disruptive to deadly. Some species of cyanobacteria release toxins, including one called microcystin that can damage the liver. Contact exposure can lead to symptoms like Campanero’s rash as well as headaches, eye irritation, wheezing and more. In recent years, HAB advisories warning residents not to drink their tap water have appeared in cities across the nation; 18 dogs in California died from suspected exposure to HAB-polluted waters in 2017.

The US National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms estimates that the blooms cost the nation upwards of $50 million annually in costs related to health, fisheries, recreation, tourism and monitoring. A 2017 survey of nearly 1,200 US lakes revealed that about a third of the lakes contained cyanobacterial toxins. And that number is growing.

“There’s no question that, in the freshwater field, there’s more of these events happening, more people being affected, in some cases more significant events,” says Donald Anderson, director of the national HAB office in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

The ecosystems suffer as well: As the algae in blooms decompose, they deplete the waters of dissolved oxygen, causing fish to suffocate. But perhaps counterintuitively, in the case of Clear Lake, removing one specific species of fish may be a key tool for rehabilitation. Along with other efforts, an audacious plan is now underway to remove invasive carp, which kick up phosphorous in the lake, feeding the blooms.

Threats to water and to traditions

The Clear Lake watershed has sustained Native peoples for millennia. Campanero recalls stories from his elders of the lake teeming with wildlife from birds to bears to fish, including a revered minnow, the Clear Lake hitch.

But for more than a century, the lake has endured many assaults: Runoff has leached into the water from an abandoned open-pit mercury mine, now a Superfund site; runoff also comes from gravel mines, unchecked septic systems, cannabis farms and vineyards. Hitch are now on the brink of species extinction.

Local tribes had asked California’s Lake County to monitor the water quality but county officials said they didn’t have the capacity, says Sarah Ryan, environmental director for the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians. So in 2014, after a bad bloom, Ryan and Karola Kennedy, then environmental director of the Elem Indian Colony of Pomo Indians, began their own water testing program.

The team focused on sampling water from areas often used for traditional tribal activities and ceremonies, uses of water that are not protected by maximum pollutant allowances stated in the 1972 Clean Water Act, Ryan says.

An early result found more than 17,000 micrograms of microcystins per liter in a water sample, dramatically higher than the 8 micrograms per liter cutoff recommended by the US Environmental Protection Agency for recreational water use, which includes swimming and fishing.

Sixty percent of Lake County gets its drinking water from the lake, and even before the monitoring started, people were sometimes afraid to drink their water, Ryan says. Big Valley’s monitoring program now provides regular updates to the community on Clear Lake’s water quality.

Monitoring hasn’t made the problem go away, though. A 2022 study published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coauthored by Ryan, analyzed the tap water of homes drawing from the lake and found that 58 percent of them had microcystin levels at or above levels that require a drinking water health advisory from the EPA.

A team with a plan

Change may finally be coming. In 2017, a state assembly bill established a committee to set a plan in motion. The multimillion-dollar effort, which is ongoing, brings to the table representatives from the tribes as well as scientists and county officials.

Keeping nutrient-rich runoff from seeping into the lake would be an obvious step—for some lakes, it reduces the levels of nutrients fueling the blooms. But it is very difficult to implement and enforce such measures, at Clear Lake or anywhere else, says Anderson, coauthor of an overview of HABs in the Annual Review of Marine Science. “It’s just an extraordinary challenge,” Anderson says. In any case, at Clear Lake, estimates suggest that most of the phosphorus driving the harmful algal blooms has already accumulated in the sediment.

Several of the committee’s proposals aim to tackle that preexisting phosphorus burden.

One approach would be to inject pure oxygen into the lake bottom to slow the release of phosphorus from the sediment. This tactic has been used since the 1980s and has successfully reduced algal blooms in other ecosystems, but the technology is expensive and has to be regularly maintained or else its benefits quickly dissipate. A team led by environmental engineer Geoffrey Schladow of the University of California, Davis, aims to implement such a pilot program in 2024 or 2025.

Another team, led by the Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance, a collaborative organization that includes several local tribes and the US Forest Service, wants to restore tule (Schoenoplectus acutus), a plant, along the lake’s edges. Tule acts as a natural water filter for the lake and is a culturally important material that tribes use for making mats, toys, boats and more. Controlled burns of tule have long been used by the tribes in the Clear Lake Basin to keep populations of the plant healthy—and help the lake too—but these were banned when laws through the late 1800s and early 1900s made cultural burns illegal.

And then there are the carp. The hardy fish can grow up to two feet in length and weigh up to 40 pounds. In the late 1800s, colonizers imported carp from Europe to the US, where they quickly spread to freshwater bodies across the country. Experts estimate that there are millions of pounds of carp in Clear Lake. These “rough fish,” as they’re termed, kick up massive amounts of sediment while foraging and spawning, unlocking pollutants from the lakebed. Fisheries biologist Luis Santana and his colleagues estimate the density of carp at 173 pounds per acre, which is roughly double the threshold beyond which invasive carp are thought to cause ecological damage.

“Imagine being at the beach … and you kind of just kick the sand and it’s like, ‘Oh, that was really easy.’ Well, a carp just does that all day, every day,” Santana says. “And the bigger they are, the better they are at it.”

Managing the carp population by removing them or poisoning them has proved effective at lakes in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Manitoba, Canada, and has led to marked improvement in water quality. In Clear Lake, the measure may provide other benefits as well: Carp uproot tule and feed on native fish, such as the threatened hitch. Santana, who works for the Robinson Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians, is helping lead a project to physically remove the carp from Clear Lake to keep the phosphorus buried. “The hypothesis is if we take out all these carp, other fish populations will flourish,” Santana says. This includes the Clear Lake tule perch, another native fish that’s threatened by the large-scale changes to the lake.

This spring, the team tested some commercial fishing techniques for catching carp in the almost 70-square-mile lake, a trial run that will inform the broader capture scheduled for later this year.

Clear Lake has a long road to rehabilitation, but residents are determined to keep fighting. “If we let this lake go, well, it’s bad for all of us. We all drink water. We need water to create our food, to feed crops, everything going on,” Campanero says.

“My hope is that we come together—more than just tribes, this is not a tribe thing—just as people, and understand that without water, there is no life.”

Tien Nguyen is an independent journalist, documentary filmmaker and reformed PhD chemist. Her work spans science, history and culture with a focus on stories that highlight historically oppressed communities. You can find more at tienminhnguyen.com.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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

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

Tree nurseries lack seedling availability and diversity

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

[Related: What successful forest restoration looks like.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Remember When, a weeklong exploration of what happened to the climate solutions that once clogged our social feeds.

The camera pans slowly across a close-up of crispy, golden McDonald’s fries, standing tall like ears of corn. “We used to think this was the best thing a plant could grow into,” a deep voice proclaims during the commercial. “And then we made this.” Into view emerges a glistening cheeseburger topped with lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles. “Introducing the new McPlant,” the narrator continues, “made with the first plant-based patty worthy of being called a McDonald’s burger.”

The ad, from early 2022, seemed like a sign that plant burgers had made it big. Six years after they arrived on the market, America’s biggest restaurant chain had endorsed them. The news garnered cautious praise from some environmental advocates: Not only could meatless meat patties reduce animal cruelty, but they also promised to ease climate change. They looked, tasted, and bled like beef but had none of the drawbacks — no cows that burp methane, no butchered animals, and barely any cholesterol. 

By most metrics, plant-based meat has been a resounding success. Brands like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Gardein are sold in thousands of grocery stores and restaurants across the country. Dollar sales in the U.S. have tripled over the past decade. Ten years ago, you couldn’t buy fake-blood burgers anywhere. Today, they’re on the grill at Burger King, Carl’s Jr., and other restaurants all over the world. When Beyond Meat went public in 2019, its stock climbed more than 700 percent. The buzz was compared to that of Bitcoin.

Yet a tour of recent headlines suggests that something has gone awry. Last year, Forbes described a “lifeless market for meatless meat.” The Guardian asserted that “plant-based meat’s sizzle fizzled in the U.S.” A Bloomberg headline in January went further, declaring that fake meat was “just another fad.” As for the McPlant, McDonald’s erased it from its menu in the U.S. last August, less than a year after it started a trial run.

The industry had hit its first big stumbling block. In 2022, U.S. plant-based meat sales declined for the first time — 8 percent by volume. Beyond Meat, a behemoth in the sector and the supplier of McPlant patties, saw its stock price plummet 94 percent from its peak in 2020 as sales slid more than 20 percent last year. The company laid off one-fifth of its employees last fall. Impossible Foods — Beyond’s biggest rival — has fared better, but it also ended up laying off roughly 16 percent of its workforce this spring. The layoffs were intended to bring costs “more in line” with revenue and to position the company for “sustainable, balanced growth over the long term,” according to a statement from Impossible. 

“Today, basically, we’re in a little bit of this trough of disillusionment,” said T.K. Pillan, co-founder and chairman of Veggie Grill, one of the country’s biggest plant-based food chains and the first to sell the Beyond Burger. “Expectations and hype got fueled really high.” 

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods said their inventions could do something earlier brands — Tofurky, Boca, Gardenburger — couldn’t. Although the two companies make discrete products with different ingredients and characteristics, they are often talked about in one breath because they share a novel and uncanny resemblance to meat. Impossible’s plant burger could compete with beef even among “uncompromising meat consumers,” Pat Brown, the founder of the company, claimed during a TED Talk in 2015. 

“People around the world love to eat meat. And who can blame them? It’s delicious,” Brown said. “The problem isn’t that people love meat. The problem is how we produce it.” 

As Brown described a “wildlife holocaust” caused by clearing forests around the world for agriculture, a woman behind him flipped an Impossible Burger on a griddle. “Cows aren’t getting any better at turning plants into meat,” Brown said. “And they never will. We’re getting better at it every day. And we’re going to keep getting better.” 

Climate advocates hoped that this new class of faux meat could lure people away from cow meat. Livestock contribute roughly 14 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and factory-farmed cattle are the worst offenders. “I know it sounds insane to replace a deeply entrenched trillion-dollar-a-year global industry that’s been a part of human culture since the dawn of human civilization,” Brown said in the TED Talk. “But it has to be done.” When he was interviewed by the New Yorker in 2019, Brown said Impossible could help end animal agriculture by 2035. 

Today, that ambitious goal sounds even more ambitious. Plant-based patties haven’t displaced real meat yet — the vast majority of people who buy plant burgers also buy animal protein, and they don’t seem to be buying less of it. According to a survey last year by the consulting firm Deloitte, half of U.S. shoppers have already purchased plant-based meat, but the market has reached a “saturation point.” The report found that people don’t view the food as favorably as they once did. So what happened?

There’s no shortage of theories. For starters, the burgers are made by machines. While they’ve been fine-tuned to include less fat and cholesterol than real beef, early products were full of sodium and used additives for taste and texture, like sugar and carrageenan — an extract from seaweed that’s the subject of health concerns among some scientists and nutritionists. Companies like Beyond and Impossible have tinkered with recipes to get rid of additives and make fake meat more nutritious, but the fact remains that their burgers are lab creatures.

“The big problem with plant-based meats is they fall into the category of ultra-processed,” said Marion Nestle, a longtime food studies professor at New York University. Even though plant-based meat might be healthier than red meat on a nutritional basis, it’s still part of a broader class of processed foods, including cereal and sodas, that have been linked to poor health outcomes. “There’s just tons of evidence that these are the kinds of foods to avoid,” Nestle said. “The ingredient list is lengthy and very impressive, and that has been the basis of attack by the meat industry.” 

Soon after Beyond and Impossible burgers took off, the Center for Consumer Freedom — a corporate-backed advocacy group perhaps best known for defending the tobacco industry — launched a campaign targeting plant-based meats. “Fake meat or dog food?” read a full-page ad the group placed in the Los Angeles Times in 2019. One of the organization’s main tactics has been to highlight that plant burgers come from factories, not farms.

“The meat industry really made a concerted effort to make people think [plant-based meat] is not healthy,” Pillan said. “They do a great job. They’re good marketers. They’re good lobbyists.”

The industry’s push came at a convenient moment: Around the same time, a health movement promoting “clean” foods — meat and vegetables that aren’t processed — entered the mainstream. “The meat alternatives have run up against this other trend,” said Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue University. Lusk often hears the refrain: “If I wanted plants, I’d just eat plants.” 

Plant-based meat now finds itself in a strange spot, simultaneously seen as healthy and unhealthy, with attitudes starting to tip toward the “junk food” designation. “Healthfulness” was the top reason people bought plant-based meat in 2021, according to an International Food Information Council survey. That same year, a Deloitte survey found that 68 percent of buyers thought the novel burgers were healthier than beef. In 2022, that figure slipped to 60 percent.  

Even more than health perceptions, “Taste and price are the two main reasons people don’t buy” plant patties, said Tessa Hale, director of corporate engagement at the Good Food Institute, a think tank that promotes alternative meats. “They don’t want to try it because they just have this idea that it’s going to taste bad,” Hale said.

Or they simply can’t afford to shell out for a pricier product, made even more expensive by inflation. Plant-based meats often cost two or three times more than their cow-based counterparts at the grocery store. In 2019, the average retail price of meat alternatives was $9.87 per pound, while that of conventional meat was $3.53. Today, Walmart sells Beyond Burgers at $9.68 per pound and beef patties for as little as $3.94 per pound. Some compare the cost gap to that between electric and gas-powered vehicles: Until prices come down, the premium, climate-friendly option won’t be widely adopted. 

For each of the top concerns — price, health, and taste — proponents say there’s reason to be optimistic. They observe that inflation has been worse for real meat than the products that imitate it. As production scales up and new technologies get perfected, the price curve for plant-based foods “is expected to keep on coming down,” said Chris Bryant, an alternative proteins researcher in the United Kingdom. 

Impossible Foods cut sale prices by 20 percent in 2021, and Beyond Meat has said it plans to sell at least one of its products for less than the going price of meat by 2024. In the Netherlands, growing demand and government support for faux meat reportedly have helped fake burgers achieve price parity with real ones. “We seem to be at the tipping point,” Bryant said. 

As for the health question, Pillan acknowledged that plant-based burgers aren’t always the healthiest option — next to, say, a salad or lentils. But he said what matters is that they’re healthier than beef. They have less cholesterol and fat, and some research suggests they lower risk of heart disease compared to red meat. 

A Beyond Meat spokesperson cited a similar case made by the company’s chief executive, Ethan Brown, on an earnings call in February. Brown criticized the “drummed up misperception that our products are overly processed and utilize complex ingredients” and pointed to a study suggesting that eating Beyond’s products instead of animal meat could lead to lower cholesterol levels.

Veggie Grill, for its part, has closed several locations in recent months, but also plans to launch a franchise program. In the company’s early days, “The West Coast was really where we could put multiple Veggie Grills and make the concept work,” Pillan said. “Now we could put multiple Veggie Grills in Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami.”

Meanwhile, producers aren’t done fiddling with the recipes for fake meat. Scientists are honing techniques like precision and biomass fermentation to reduce the number of ingredients needed to turn plants into meat. One company, Meati, is marketing steak and chicken products made almost entirely from mushrooms, touting it as being simultaneously low in fats and high in protein, vitamins, and minerals. 

All in all, the industry’s supporters aren’t that worried about the dire tone of the recent media coverage. “I still believe there is a lot of hype,” Hale said. “It’s a very nascent category, all things considered.” There remains a sense among proponents, much as there was 10 years ago, that meat made from plants could one day make a meaningful dent in the market for animal meat, living up to its many promises.

Consider the assurance that Brown, Impossible’s founder, offered to a group of kids four years ago when they toured his startup’s office to learn about his team’s invention: “I promise that by the time you are adults, the meat you eat will not come from dead animals,” Brown told the kids, who had donned white lab coats for the occasion. “You can come find me and beat me up if I’m wrong.”

*This piece has been updated to include a response from Beyond Meat.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/plant-based-meat-beyond-beef-sales-decline-impossible-burger/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does coastal erosion work?

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

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

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

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

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

Where do people factor into all this?

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

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

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

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

What solutions are there?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Cook Islands appear to embrace deep-sea mining—but at what risk? appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.  

The post Eavesdropping on pink river dolphins could help save them appeared first on Popular Science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Related: Behold the world’s tallest trees]

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

What is a ‘mother tree’?

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

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

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

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

What’s the scientific evidence?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What role do fungi play?

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

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

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

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

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

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This article was originally published on Undark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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At the end of May, Brazilian lawmakers approved legislation that would invalidate Indigenous land claims and open protected Indigenous lands to mining, road-building, agriculture, and other extractive industries.

The legislation was overwhelmingly endorsed in the nation’s conservative-dominated lower house and has now progressed to the Senate for approval.

But the bill is moving slowly. That’s because a central piece of the legislation is already being examined in Brazil’s Supreme Court. The legal thesis under examination, marco temporal, has been moving through the courts since 2007 and, depending on the court’s interpretation, could determine the future of Indigenous land in the Brazilian Amazon that has yet to be recognized by the Brazilian government. The ruling would also have major impacts on the constitutionality of the legislation.

“If the ‘marco temporal’ thesis is approved, all Indigenous lands, regardless of their status and region, will be evaluated according to the thesis, putting all 1393 Indigenous Lands under direct threat,” said United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay in a statement.

But what is marco temporal? 

Brazil’s constitution gives Indigenous people the right to claim lands they “traditionally occupied”, and since the adoption of the constitution in 1988, more than 700 Indigenous territories have been claimed. To date, 496 have been officially recognized, or demarcated, by the government, which defines property boundaries and guarantees the possession of the land and the exclusive use of its natural resources to the Indigenous peoples who live on it.

First introduced in 2007, marco temporal, is the idea that if Indigenous communities weren’t on the land they claimed in 1988, when the constitution was passed, they have no claim to those lands. 

For most of Brazil’s history, land occupied by Indigenous peoples was technically owned by the government. The Indian Statute of 1973, contains rules on the relations of the state and Brazilian society with the indigenous communities, and gave Indigenous people the same legal status as children, meaning they didn’t have standing to represent themselves in the state’s legal system—including in land matters.

“At the time, the idea behind the legislation was that Indigenous peoples had to be emancipated from their condition as Indigenous peoples in order to be fully, standing Brazilians citizens,” said Tracy Divine, associate professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami and research fellow for the Washington Brazil Office. “It wasn’t until the 1988 constitution that the state decided that people in Brazil could be indigenous and Brazilian at the same time.”

This means even if Indigenous peoples were occupying traditional lands before 1988, they weren’t allowed to register their land ownership with the Brazilian government which renders their arguments in court as unprovable. 

If accepted, the legal thesis of marco temporal would empower Congress to accept, or reject, Indigenous land claims, instead of the President, making the protection of Indigenous territories more difficult, and create opportunities to change currently accepted territorial boundaries. 

“It goes against the Constitution of the country because the constitution of the country uses the term ‘original rights to land’,” said Divine. “But what the constitution says is that Indigenous peoples have original rights to the land, which would mean that their rights pre-date even the formation of Brazil as a country.”

Marco temporal has its origins in agribusiness and has been adopted and pushed by a variety of developers, loggers, miners and farmers with business interests in the Amazon–areas that may already be protected due to the Indigenous communities that manage their territories or could be protected in the future.

Many marco temporal proponents cite economic development as a key reason to codify the idea, especially for soybean production, cattle farming, and mining. Lobbyists for those industries have been quite vocal in their support.  

Indigenous peoples, however, argue that the lands in question have been theirs since time immemorial regardless of their history with the government, that the constitution backs their claims, and that further development in the Amazon would be detrimental to their health, and that of the rainforest.

It’s estimated that Indigenous peoples safeguard nearly 80 percent of the planet’s remaining biodiversity with the Brazilian rainforest containing almost a quarter of all terrestrial biodiversity and 10 percent of all known species on earth.

Over the last four years, deforestation in the Amazon rose 56 percent with an estimated 13,000 square miles of land destroyed by development. During that time, Indigenous peoples lost an estimated 965 square miles of their traditional territories under former president Jair Bolsonaro’s policies.

Since legislators in the lower house passed the controversial legislation, protests have taken place in Brasilia, the nation’s capital and Indigenous groups have blocked roads outside of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, burning tires and using bows and arrows against police who responded with tear gas. 

At this point, Indigenous peoples in Brazil await the court’s decisions as well as congress’s actions, and while President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could ultimately veto the bill, there is fear he could approve legislation that adheres to marco temporal to satisfy the agro industry which constitutes a bulk of the country’s economic survival. Brazil ranks among the top 12 largest economies in the world with their gross domestic product (GDP) estimated at US$1.65 trillion in 2021. The country supplies more than 50 percent of the world’s soybean trade from crops produced on 17 percent of the country’s arable land.

“We knew the right would have a reaction against any pro-indigenous and pro-environment measures taken by Lula,” said Ana Carolina Alfinito, a legal adviser on Brazilian affairs for Amazon Watch. “What we didn’t expect is that this action would be so fast and so intense.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/global-indigenous-affairs-desk/in-brazil-the-legal-theory-that-could-strip-indigenous-peoples-of-their-land/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Some people may be picky eaters, but as a species we are not. Birds, bugs, whales, snails, we’ll eat them all. Yet our reliance on wild animals goes far beyond just feeding ourselves. From agricultural feed to medicine to the pet trade, modern society exploits wild animals in a way that surpasses even the most voracious, unfussy wild predator. Now, for the first time, researchers have attempted to capture the full picture of how we use wild vertebrates, including how many, and for what purposes. The research showcases just how broad our collective influence on wild animals is.

Previously, scientists have tallied how much more biomass humans take out of the wild than other predators. But biomass is only a sliver of the total picture, and researchers wanted a fuller understanding of how human predatory behavior affects biodiversity. Analyzing data compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, researchers have now found that humans kill, collect, or otherwise use about 15,000 vertebrate species. That’s about one-third of all vertebrate species on Earth, and it’s a breadth that’s up to 300 times more than the next top predator in any ecosystem.

The predators that give us the biggest run for our money, says Rob Cooke, an ecological modeler at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a coauthor of the study, are owls, which hunt a notably diverse array of prey. The Eurasian eagle owl, for instance, is one of the largest and most widely distributed owls in the world. Not a picky eater, this owl will hunt up to 379 different species. According to the researchers’ calculations, humans take 469 species across an equivalent geographical range.

Yet according to Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a coauthor of the study, the biggest shock isn’t how many species we affect but why we take them. The “ta-da result,” he says, “is that we remove, or essentially prey on, more species of animals for non-food reasons than for food reasons.” And the biggest non-food use, the scientists found, is as pets and pet food. “That’s where things have gone off the rails,” he says.

There is some nuance to this broad trend. When it comes to marine and freshwater species, our main take is for human consumption. For terrestrial animals, however, it depends on what kind of animal is being targeted. Mammals are mostly taken to become people food, while birds, reptiles, and amphibians are mainly trapped to live in captivity as pets. In all, almost 75 percent of the land species humans take enter the pet trade, which is almost double the number of species we take to eat.

The problem is especially acute for tropical birds, and the loss of these species can have rippling ecological consequences. The helmeted hornbill, a bird native to Southeast Asia, for example, is captured mainly for the pet trade or for its beak to be used as medicine or to be carved like ivory. With their massive bills, these birds are one of the few species that can crack open some of the largest, hardest nuts in the forests where they live. Their disappearance limits seed dispersal and the spread of trees around the forest.

Another big difference between humans’ influence on wild animals and that of other predators is that we tend to favor rare and exotic species in a way other animals do not. Most predators target common species since they are easier to find and catch. Humans, however, tend to covet the novel. “The more rare it is,” says Cooke, “the more that drives up the price, and therefore it can spiral and go into this extinction vortex.”

That humans target the largest and flashiest animals, Cooke says, threatens not only their unique biological diversity and beauty, but also the roles they play in their ecosystems. Of the species humans prey on, almost 40 percent are threatened. The researchers suggest industrialized societies can look to Indigenous stewardship models for ways to more sustainably manage and live with wildlife.

Andrea Reid, a citizen of the Nisg̱a’a Nation and an Indigenous fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, notes that people have been fishing for millennia. “But the choices that shape industrial fishing,” she says, like how people consume fish that were caught far away from their own homes, “are what contribute to these observed high levels of impact on fish species.”

If we want wild species—fish and beyond—to survive, Reid says, we need to reframe our relationship with them, perhaps from predator to steward.

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

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Seeing a majestic superpod or “stampede” of hundreds of free-ranging dolphins swimming and surfacing in the ocean is not only a spectacle for the eye, but can help scientists better monitor populations of the marine mammal. A study published in June in the journal Ecology and Evolution found that using unoccupied aerial systems, or drones, to photograph bottlenose dolphins can inform their conservation efforts.

[Related: How echolocation lets bats, dolphins, and even people navigate by sound.]

When a dolphin swims up to the surface to breathe, their blowhole and dorsal fin are visible. Measuring the distance between these two body parts can help researchers estimate their total length—and therefore the dolphin’s age. The team on the study developed a technique of inferring age based on length for each dolphin measured in a group. The spots that appear with age on some cetaceans like Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins can also reveal the animals’ age to scientists.

“This method can help us quantify the age-structure of free-ranging populations,” co-author and PhD candidate at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Fabien Vivier said in a statement. “Healthy dolphin populations usually contain a certain proportion of newborn, immature, and mature animals, while deviances from this distribution may be interpreted as a population growth or decline.”

Earlier studies on using drone photos to measure the body condition and sizes of large whales showed encouraging results, but this is the first to show how this aerial approach can be used to study smaller mammals like bottlenose dolphins.

“Because it is difficult working with free-ranging animals, we could not be sure if it would work out as planned,” said Vivier.

In the study, the team collaborated with a swim with the dolphins program called Dolphin Quest O‘ahu to test out this measuring method on that population of bottlenose dolphins. They then took what they learned with those dolphins and applied it to free-ranging dolphins by collaborating with the world’s longest running dolphin research project, Sarasota Dolphin Research Program in Florida.

The research program provided the team with the total body length, distance between the blowhole and dorsal fin, and age for many of the individuals within their study community. They used this data to test the accuracy of this measurement method and age estimates on the free-range dolphins. 

[Related: Male dolphins form alliances to help each other pick up mates.]

“Our hope in developing and using this method is that we can quickly monitor the health of free-ranging dolphin populations,” said Vivier. “This may facilitate the detection of early signs of population changes, for example, a decrease in the number of calves, and provide important insights for timely management decisions.”

This method was initially developed for bottlenose dolphins that are found in temperate and tropical waters around the world. This species, known for their intelligence and echolocation, are well studied due to their proximity to humans, but can also run a high risk of injury due to their closeness to people. 

Currently, the team is applying it to the spinner dolphins, which have a longer snout and smaller stature than bottlenose dolphins, in the main Hawaiian Islands. These mammals are known in the Pacific Ocean for their habit of leaping from the water and spinning in the air before plunging back into the water.

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Around the world, communities are bracing for sea level rise: the Netherlands is stabilizing its dikes, Senegal is relocating neighborhoods, Indonesia is moving its entire capital city. These projects are hefty, expensive, and slow.

But they may need to pick up the pace. As new research shows, in many places, sea level rise will cause coastal flooding and other disruptions much sooner than anyone realized. It’s not that the water is rising faster; it’s that the land was lower to begin with.

Calculating when a rising sea will flood any one place involves a lot of math: you need to know the height of the water, the range of the tide, the elevation and slope of the land, the pace of sea level rise, and how much the land itself is rising or falling, among myriad other factors. As with all of science, the accuracy of these predictions is only as good as the data flowing into them.

The problem, according to the new study by Ronald Vernimmen and Aljosja Hooijer, two data analysts working on flood risk in Southeast Asia, is that time after time, the measurements of coastal elevation that scientists feed into their models have been wildly inaccurate. In tropical forests, says Vernimmen, these misinterpretations can be off by 20 meters or more. “Obviously, you can’t use that,” he says.

The problem stems from limitations in the technology typically used to measure elevation: radar. Radar blankets an area in radio waves, then measures how long it takes the waves to bounce back. But radar isn’t precise enough to separate treetops from terra firma, and a patch of pines or cluster of condos can easily exaggerate the elevation. Many studies of sea level rise still use radar elevation data collected by the space shuttle in 2000.

Lidar is a lot like radar, but it uses lasers instead of radio waves. A lidar detector like the one on the ICESat-2 satellite, which NASA launched in 2018, can send up to one million pulses each second, firing lasers that can pinpoint the gaps between buildings and trees to more accurately gauge the elevation of the land underneath. Analysts still need algorithms to filter that barrage of information into a functional map, but the results are far more precise.

Vernimmen and Hooijer spent the past few years filtering the new satellite data for Earth’s immense coastline, comparing elevation estimates gathered from radar with the newer lidar-based measurements. It wasn’t pretty.

The scientists’ big finding is that forests and buildings along the coast have skewed radar maps, presenting planners with inaccurate elevation data. Lidar showed coastlines often lower than first realized. This has two important implications: the same amount of sea level rise will be able to reach much farther inland, and it’s going to happen a lot sooner than expected.

The scientists’ new lidar-based estimate predicts that roughly 482,000 square kilometers of land will be submerged with one meter of sea level rise, nearly triple the 123,000 square kilometers predicted by radar-based projections. That’s an extra Cameroon-sized chunk of Earth, currently home to roughly 132 million people, that will be underwater by 2100 under a high-emissions scenario.

The risk is greatest for river deltas in tropical regions where the land is flat, the population is often high, and the data tends to be old. With two meters of sea level rise, by around the year 2150 under a high-emission scenario, the Niger Delta in West Africa and Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta will have five times more land underwater than the older radar-based estimates suggested. The same is true for the Chao Phraya delta, which spans metropolitan Bangkok, Thailand’s capital of 11 million.

To Vernimmen, the recalculation means society needs to rethink some things. “There are huge construction projects underway in areas that really should not be built on,” he says.

The researchers made their elevation data set publicly available in hopes that governments take note of the new timeline, adds Hooijer.

Mir Matin, a remote sensing expert at United Nations University in Ontario who was not involved in the study, says these estimates could be made even more accurate by using airborne lidar—the type attached to drones or airplanes—rather than passive satellite-based readings. Though more accurate, airborne lidar is also more expensive, requiring pilots, planes, and planning. Some rich countries and large cities have shelled out for airborne lidar surveys, but Matin says developing countries would benefit as well. Rich countries—responsible for the bulk of global warming—could cover the cost, he says. “At the end, climate change is a global phenomenon,” Matin adds.

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

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OceanGate announced on Thursday afternoon it believes a “debris field” discovered near the Titanic indicates all five passengers aboard OceanGate’s Titan submersible “have sadly been lost.” The experimental, uncertified vessel disappeared on Sunday during its 2.5 mile descent to briefly visit the historic ship’s remains. The Titan’s $250,000-per-seat inhabitants included a billionaire British explorer Hamish Harding, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, Sulemanthe father-and-son scions of a Pakistani fertilizer company, French maritime expert Paul Henry Nargeolet, and OceanGate’s own CEO Stockton Rush.

“The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said in a news conference on Thursday.

[Related: Why finding the missing Titanic-bound tourist submersible is so challenging.]

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” reads a portion of OceanGate’s statement, as reported via CNN. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”

The news arrives after more than four days of frantic international search efforts that spanned over 10,000 square surface miles, as well as North Atlantic ocean floor. On Monday, experts estimated Titan possessed roughly 96 hours of oxygen reserves—according to US Coast Guard officials’ calculations, the Titan’s oxygen likely would have run out around 7:10am EST on Thursday morning. But even with some leeway given to that estimation, recovery teams reportedly still needed as long as 8 hours to return an intact submersible to the ocean’s surface.

On Thursday afternoon, however, US Coast Guard officials confirmed a newly located debris field clearly originating from the missing vessel. The discovery came via video evidence collected by a remote operating vehicle (ROV) deployed by the Canadian vessel, Horizon Arctic. Among the international, state-of-the-art fleet also searching for Titan were at least nine other ships, including US and Canadian Coast Guard vessels, deep sea pipeline construction ships, and multiple other ROVs including the French vessel L’Atalante’s Victor 6000. On Tuesday evening, Canadian aircraft also reportedly detected “underwater noises” of potential human origin within the search area. Subsequently redirected resources failed to determine or locate the sounds’ sources.

[Related: Staggering 3D scan of the Titanic shows the wreck down to the millimeter.]

Mike Reiss, a tourist aboard four previous Titan trips including one to the Titanic, described signing waivers that “mentioned death three times on the first page.” On each voyage, Reiss alleged the submersible briefly lost communications with OceanGate’s surface crew. During his trip to the Titanic, Reiss also recalled the vessel being briefly carried off course by ocean currents as the compass appeared to malfunction, and spending three hours attempting to locate the wreckage despite being only 500 yards from the site.

In the years since its initial debut, submersible experts warned of “catastrophic” issues within Titan’s design, and voiced concerns regarding OceanGate disregarding standard certification processes. In a March 2018 open letter to OceanGate obtained by The New York Times, over three dozen industry leaders, oceanographers, and explorers “expressed unanimous concern” about the Titan’s “experimental” approach that they believed “could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

[Related: Watch never-before-seen footage of the Titanic shipwreck from the 1980s.]

“Your marketing material advertises that the Titan design will meet or exceed the DNV-GL safety standards, yet it does not appear that OceanGate has the intention of following DNV-GL class rules,” the letter reads, referring to the internationally recognized maritime industry regulatory organization. “Your representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold.”

In a blog post published by OceanGate the following year entitled “Why Isn’t Titan Classed?,” unnamed authors argued, “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”

“The entire OceanGate family is deeply grateful for the countless men and women from multiple organizations of the international community who expedited wide-ranging resources and have worked so very hard on this mission,” the company wrote in its statement Thursday. “We appreciate their commitment to finding these five explorers, and their days and nights of tireless work in support of our crew and their families.”

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The world’s oceans are heating up at an alarming rate, threatening marine life, food security, and livelihoods. According to climate scientists and experts, the time to protect the oceans is now. In December 2022, nearly 200 countries agreed to the United Nations’ pledge of classifying 30 percent of the world’s maritime space as marine protected areas (MPAs) by 2030 and the High Seas Treaty signed in March aims to further protect marine life in the open ocean.

A study published June 22 in the journal Nature Sustainability finds that limiting human activity from fishing, boating, etc. in parts of the ocean can both enhance the health of marine environments, while also protecting the well-being of the coasting communities nearby. The researchers found that MPAs are part of the solution to reaching multiple sustainable development goals around the world.

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

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) defines MPA’s as a defined region designated and managed for the long-term conservation of marine resources, ecosystems services, or cultural heritage. Roughly 26 percent of the waters in the United States are designated at MPA’s, including Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii. At 582,578 square miles, it is the world’s largest no-fishing zone and has also proven to be beneficial to both humans and marine life alike.

In this new study, researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), looked at the impacts of MPAs in the Mesoamerican Reef region. This nearly 700-mile-wide region within the Caribbean Sea contains the largest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere.

The team discovered that the MPA’s with the toughest fishing restrictions helped sustain critical fisheries. They also found a link between marine protections and increased income and the food security in nearby coastal communities in counties such as Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.  

“Marine protected areas are hailed as a way to protect fisheries and ecosystems and promote well-being in coastal communities simultaneously,” study co-author and SERC marine biologist Steve Canty said in a statement. “This is one of the first attempts to evaluate these benefits together. Our data critically shows that well-enforced, no-take zones help rebuild fish populations and that these zones are associated with higher well-being in nearby coastal communities.”

The team used a mix of data from ecological and social organizations in the area, including repurposed data on reef fish from the Healthy Reefs Initiative. Social datasets from the US Agency for International Development helped the team assess factors such as income, food security, and the likelihood of developmental issues in young children due to chronic malnutrition.

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

The scientists calculated the presence of fish in terms of their biomass–the total mass of the fish population within a given area. The MPA’s with the highest protections had on average 27 percent more biomass than those without any restrictions. There was also a greater abundance of commercially valuable fish like grouper, with 35 percent more biomass.

Additionally, they found that young children living near an MPA were about half as likely to have stunted growth, which is a key indicator of food insecurity. The average wealth index was also 33 percent higher in communities near the best-protected MPAs.

“MPAs unquestionably help improve the health of reefs and fisheries and, in some cases, may positively impact the well-being of coastal communities,” study co-author and Penn State University PhD candidate in rural sociology Sara E. Bonilla-Anariba said in a statement. “However, there is an ongoing debate about the factors influencing their positive outcomes.”

The study was unable to discern which groups saw the most benefits from MPA’s—whether it was fishing households or those with income from tourism and other industries in the region. The power of community-led MPAs is also worth closer study.

 “The goals of sustainably managing marine resources, increasing food security and reducing poverty in local communities do not always lead to tradeoffs—these positive outcomes can occur in the same places,” study co-author and SERC research ecologist Justin Nowakowski said in a statement. “Under the right conditions, conservation interventions like MPAs may be central strategies for achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals.”

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For decades, drivers in the United States have been able to think about the efficiency of their gas-powered vehicles with a simple criteria: miles per gallon. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency started publishing the mpg metric for vehicles in the 1970s, and it makes intuitive sense. Theoretically, how far could your car travel on a single gallon of gasoline? The mpg figure is the answer.

But with electric vehicles—as well as plug-in hybrids—the situation gets a tad more complex. A pure EV does not burn gasoline. It gets the energy for its batteries from the grid, and is better for the environment. 

Enter the MPGe metric, which stands for mile per gallon of gasoline-equivalent and “allows [for] a reasonable comparison between vehicles using different fuels,” the EPA says.

What is MPGe?

New EPA vehicle labels debuted in 2012. For electric vehicles, it includes the EV’s “fuel economy” listed in MPGe, as well as other metrics, like its range. You can check out the EPA’s EV label on the agency’s site. For plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles, that PHEV label shows both the car’s efficiency when running on just battery power (in MPGe), as well as its efficiency if it were just burning gasoline, in mpg. And of course, a traditional vehicle that burns only gasoline has a label with the regular mpg metric. 

One commonality between the mpg metric and MPGe is that a larger number means better efficiency. “Miles per gallon is designed such that bigger numbers are better,” says David Gohlke, an energy and environmental analyst at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. “Higher miles per gallon means you go farther—you get more goodness out of the gallon of gasoline that you’re burning.” 

[Related: Volvo’s new electric EX30 is cheaper than a Tesla Model 3]

The bigger-is-better metric might sound obvious, but that’s not always the case with other measurement metrics for vehicle efficiency. For example, the gasoline vehicle sticker also features a gallons-per-100-miles figure, and in that case, a lower number represents better fuel efficiency—ideally, you want to burn as few gallons as possible when driving 100 miles. Ditto, on an EV’s sticker you’ll find the kilowatt-hours-per-100-miles metric, with lower being more efficient. And a PHEV vehicle’s sticker contains both of those lower-is-better metrics. 

But with the proliferation of EVs, the main metric to keep in mind is MPGe. “The EPA said, ‘Okay, well we’re going to need some way of describing these electric vehicles to the average person,” Gohlke says. “The EPA has come up with a conversion factor that translates from a kilowatt-hour of energy into the equivalent amount of energy in terms of a gallon of gasoline.” 

How is MPGe calculated?

The kilowatt hours (kWh) equivalent from gas comes from “the total heat content that exists in a gallon of gasoline,” Gohlke says. “They say, ‘Okay, if we took this gallon of gasoline, and set it on fire, effectively, how much heat energy can we get out of that?’” 

The answer to that question is 33.7 kWh. An EPA spokesperson notes via email that this figure is “a standard number for the energy content in gasoline.”

[Related: How to use less gas when driving with Google Maps]

So now the question becomes: How far can an EV travel on 33.7 kWh, which is equal to the energy in 1 gallon of gas? And that’s where the MPGe figure comes from. 

For context when it comes to understanding kWh, the average American home used about 886 kWh of electricity each month in 2021, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Considering a 30-day month, that means daily electric use is about 30 kWh. If you have a 1,000-watt (1 kilowatt) microwave and use it for an hour, you’ve used 1 kWh of electricity. So MPGe is saying: Here’s how many miles this EV can travel on an amount of electricity that is just a bit more than the average US household consumes each day. 

How can you find an EV’s MPGe? 

To see how the EPA rates an EV with this MPGe metric, you can look up the vehicle at fueleconomy.gov. For example, one variant of the 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 6 gets 140 MPGe, when combining its city (153) and highway (127) ratings. That’s superb. A 2023 Tesla Model 3 gets 132 MPGe. What about the gargantuan GMC Hummer EV? It’s rated for 47 MPGe. The Hyundai and the Tesla are way more efficient than the Hummer. 

Even if the MPGe measurement takes some getting used to, Paul Waatti, manager of industry analysis at AutoPacific, argues that it plays an important role. That’s because an EV’s range, which is also listed on the sticker, isn’t the full story. “That doesn’t necessarily tell you how efficient the vehicle actually is,” he says. “You might have a really high range number, like [with the electric] Hummer for example, but if you look at the MPGe figure for that, it shows that it’s very inefficient.” 

Ultimately, the MPGe metric isn’t perfect, but it’s good to have. “From a consumer perspective, I think there’s still quite a bit of confusion on what it actually means,” Waatti says. Still, he argues that it’s an important metric for giving people a sense of the car’s efficiency. 

Bottom line: A higher MPGe means the EV is more efficient, and right now, a number at or close to 140 is ideal.

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WHEN VALER CLARK and Josiah Austin moved to El Coronado cattle ranch in southern Arizona in the 1980s, the seasonal rain didn’t soak into the soil but roared through arroyos and washes, cutting them deeper into the earth. The erosion was threatening a road, so they placed a few rocks across the adjacent wash. The tiny structure worked as intended, slowing water, catching soil, and fostering the return of long-gone plants. Clark and Austin had instinctually re-created an Indigenous technique for managing water in drylands. 

Ultimately, the duo added around 20,000 small rock barriers across tributaries of the often-dry Turkey Creek, which ran through their 1,800-acre property in the Chiricahua Mountains. Within a few monsoon seasons, water seeped from the structures year-round, and the creek corridor turned green with plants. Downstream landowners were suspicious, claiming that Clark and Austin were holding on to “their” water. But when Laura Norman, a physical scientist from the US Geological Survey, measured the flow in 2013, she found that the barriers weren’t just slowing flash floods and extending supply into the dry season: They’d actually raised the stream’s flow by 28 percent. 

Today, the Southwest is staggering through a “megadrought”—possibly the worst in 1,200 years. The Colorado River, which quenches the demands of more than 40 million people in seven US states and Mexico, is seeing average flows that are 19 percent lower than in the last century. Climate change is making the region’s water woes more severe, scientists say. But drought is partly determined by the gap between supply and human demand, and right now, demand is greater than the region’s supply. What’s more, our development choices—urban sprawl, industrial forestry and agriculture, intensive cattle grazing, and the concrete infrastructure we use to try to control water—are sapping the river’s natural systems and resilience. 

Modern development tends to erase places where water slows down: wetlands, flood plains, mountain meadows, and forests. These ecosystems absorb high flows, prevent floods, and move water underground, which raises the water table. A healthy groundwater system supplies streams, wetlands, and rivers during the dry season and hydrates soil and plants, making them less likely to burn in wildfires and allowing them to release water into the atmosphere, contributing to rain. But humans have dramatically altered the water cycle by draining or filling as much as 87 percent of global wetlands over the past three centuries, interrupting the flow of two-thirds of rivers, and doubling the land area of paved cities since 1992. All told, we have transformed 75 percent of the world’s total land area for housing, agriculture, and industry.

Clark and Austin’s approach to land management has shown one way to reverse these negative trends, and the strategy is now spreading across the Southwest and northern Mexico. Their streambed structures, coupled with Norman’s in-depth studies on the benefits, led to the USGS co-founding the Sky Island Restoration Collaborative, a group of government agencies, nonprofits, private landowners, scientists, and restorationists in the US and Mexico who are building thousands of slow-water structures.

Called natural infrastructure in dryland streams, or NIDS, these structures include beaver dams, human versions of beaver dams, one-rock dams, check dams, log dams, leaky weirs, earthen berms, and gabions. The appropriate intervention depends on the specific site’s width and slope, nearby natural materials, and other factors. Despite the fact that several have “dam” in the name, these features do not block downstream flows like concrete hydropower dams; they just slow it down. They’re intentionally leaky to detain water, not retain it. “They’re a totally different beast,” says Norman.

She and her colleagues have documented NIDS’ effectiveness in storing carbon dioxide and mitigating flooding, water scarcity, pollution, heat, erosion, dust, wildlife loss, and food insecurity. These interventions—combined with levee setbacks to reconnect rivers with flood plains, forest and grassland restoration, and support for beavers’ comeback after they were hunted nearly to extinction—are part of the global “slow water movement” that could help boost water availability throughout the Colorado River basin.

At the rim of the Grand Canyon, the all-powerful nature of water is explicit: The reflective squiggle a mile below carved the natural cathedral out of rock over millions of years. Yet Euro-American culture has interpreted that force as a challenge and tried to control it. Viewed solely in terms of human need, water is either considered a threat or a commodity—the new billion-dollar Colorado River deal involving the US government and three Western states is just one example. But that’s not the only way people relate to water. Other cultures, including many Indigenous groups in North America, perceive it as a friend or relative. With that perspective, the right to water comes with the responsibility to care for it, along with the many elements and organisms—soils, rocks, microbes, insects, and more—that also have relationships with it. 

Choosing to return land to water might seem wasteful to some. But by restoring drylands to wetlands, or ciénegas in Spanish, Clark and Austin have shown how healthy slow-water systems can repair delicate desert landscapes that humans have destroyed.  

A sick land

In early March, the morning after a fierce windstorm made saguaros sway and dropped snow on the low desert, I drove south from Tucson with Norman through the tiny hamlets of Elgin and Sonoita. We left behind the saguaros and paloverde trees of the Sonoran Desert and entered the Chihuahuan Desert, studded with big tuffets of sacaton grass and grazing pronghorns. At the roughly 28,000-acre Babacomari Ranch, we walked a channel of the San Pedro watershed. Norman, clad in a black cowboy hat, hiking boots, and a thick Wrangler work jacket, was meeting up with a fellow researcher to take soil samples. The channel has several gabions and log structures, installed eight years ago by Borderlands Restoration, a nonprofit that belongs to the Sky Island Restoration Collaborative. 

Gabions are chicken wire containers filled with rocks. More engineered than other NIDS interventions, but still low profile, they are typically used in valley bottoms and anchored deep into the sides of the stream banks. The pieces of wood in the log structures are spaced 6 to 12 inches apart, pushed vertically into the streambed. They are meant to help water move underground and create “messiness” in the stream that slows water, captures sediment, and creates habitat. Both features have acted as intended: Parts of them are barely visible because trapped sediment has raised the riverbed and allowed new plants, including sacaton grass, to take root.

Borderlands Restoration founder Ron Pulliam served in the Clinton administration’s Department of the Interior and taught ecology at the University of Georgia. He says major results from NIDS, such as streams flowing year-round, can take 10 to 20 years—but small improvements in erosion and vegetation can happen in just a year of two. Seeing those quick results three decades ago encouraged Clark and Austin to stick with their unconventional efforts at Turkey Creek and beyond. 

While the couple divorced several years back and sold El Coronado, Clark owns several other properties on both sides of the border. In consultation with ranchers and conservationists, she founded a nonprofit called Cuenca Los Ojos that builds NIDS and teaches these practices to other landowners and community members. Cuenca is also part of the Sky Islands group, and Clark’s daughter, Valerie Gordon, sits on the board.

This hard, dirty work is a long way from Clark’s early life in New York City. Then, in her 40s, she and Austin moved to El Coronado. The landscape “was so novel and so beautiful, it became the focus of my life,” she says. Curiosity about fire, water, plants, and lichen consumed her. “I’d never looked at ants before. I thought, There’s so much life going on here that I know nothing about.” 

That attention has served her well. “Valer has amazing powers of observation,” says Pulliam, a longtime friend and slow water ally. “She has a genius for understanding the movement of water and wildlife. She can’t explain it technically. But she has this intuitive feeling for how things work.” 

Now 83, Clark recalls her first summer at El Coronado in the 1980s. “The monsoon season hit and I was terrified, because I saw how much damage the flooding was doing in the hills. It was a lot of erosion. The vegetation was being flattened. I remember asking, ‘What do the cows eat? Rocks?’” She felt something was wrong and began studying the history of the area. She discovered that local trees were cut down in the 1800s to fuel copper production. Without them, grass boomed, so settlers brought in vast herds of cattle and sheep, who made short work of the vegetation. Mining and cotton production took a toll as well. Then when rain struck the denuded land, the water cut deep channels into the earth. 

What water wants

By placing rocks across a stream channel to slow water, Clark and Austin had intuitively re-created a technique that Indigenous peoples in the Southwest and northern Mexico had deployed for centuries to slow water, buffer against drought, and reverse desertification. 

Soon after the couple added those first structures, a group of men came to El Coronado from Mexico, looking for work. Clark showed them the little rock dam. “I said, ‘It’s wetter here, and grasses are coming in. What if we do that in the hills because they’re quite bare?’ And they said, ‘We do that at home.’” For generations, they had used a similar practice to grow corn. 

The men returned seasonally for 20 years and created some 20,000 rock structures throughout Turkey Creek’s side channels in the hills. As the low barriers caught sediment and deep-rooted grasses returned, “the mountains became sponges,” Clark recalls. “The wash became a stream, and scientists came and put fish in the stream.”

Gordon says the tenacity required to see this vision through is part of Clark’s personality. “My mother is very comfortable taking an unconventional path. She is not afraid of a challenge. And I think she also likes to do what other people don’t want to do.” 

Indigenous rock structures similar to those at El Coronado can be found throughout the Southwest. Over the last decade, Pulliam saw several on land purchased by Borderlands Restoration in Arizona, and was struck by how different the watersheds looked from others in the region that were severely washed out. “All of the little side draws in this area have almost no erosion,” he says. “If you look carefully, there are ancient rock structures at least 1,200 years old still working.”

Indigenous peoples are still creating and using slow-water structures for various purposes today. Michael Kotutwa Johnson is a member of the Hopi Tribe and has a Ph.D. in natural resources. But his most important credential, according to his University of Arizona profile, is that “he continues to practice Hopi dry farming, a practice of his people for millennia.”

The Hopi, like most Indigenous cultures, are “place-based societies,” says Johnson. Their place receives just 6 to 10 inches of precipitation a year, so they have developed methods designed to conserve soil moisture. Johnson explains some of them.

Hopi read the landscape and natural water flows, then build rock dams at the bases of mesas to divert runoff into fields. They also use rock detention structures to capture nutrient-bearing sediment to hold moisture, allowing farmers to plant different varieties of crops without fertilizers or irrigation. “Crops always need new soil with nutrients,” Johnson says. Contour farming—planting across the slope of the land at a certain angle—also slows water and wind. Another strategy includes leaving the stalks, cobs, and leaves on the ground after a corn harvest to catch snow, allowing it to melt and be absorbed into the soil. 

But there’s more to the Hopis’ resilience than a series of slow-water techniques, Johnson says. “It’s about having a relationship with the environment in a place that you’ve been living for a long, long time” and about the associated cultural belief system.

Rather than trying to maximize production, Hopi growers read the landscape to see what is possible for nature to provide that year. The timing and quantity of springtime vegetation serve as “biological indicators,” Johnson says. He notes that Hopi women select plants for certain traits and keep many varieties of seed for different annual conditions. “We’ve had 200-year droughts in our history. Our place is a testament to our resilience.”

Because traditional ecological knowledge doesn’t conform to Western science’s norms, the latter has been slow to recognize it as legitimate. Johnson counters, “When you have 3,000 years of replication, that is a science.” 

Making a convincing argument

Norman, whose expertise lies in forestry, watershed management, and remote sensing, agrees strongly with Johnson’s sentiment. But she realized that nature-inspired structures, whether built by Indigenous peoples or permaculture-minded land owners such as Clark and Austin, would not be recognized as a legitimate strategy by some unless their benefits were measured according to the Western scientific method. “My science is meant to address these misconceptions about the structures,” Norman says.

She has now dedicated a decade to leading the USGS Aridland Water Harvesting Study. Her work, with geomorphologists, biologists, botanists, and hydrologists, has proven that small stones and other natural materials placed across streams can restore and create permanent wetlands, regrow plants, store carbon dioxide, reconnect streams with flood plains, recharge groundwater, and increase stream flow. 

Norman grew up in Rhode Island, then moved west to Oregon for college and on to Arizona for graduate school. She first encountered rock detention structures when researching her Ph.D. dissertation, which used satellite data and flood modeling to make sense of environmental justice impacts from poor land management in Nogales, Mexico, and its twin city in Arizona. Erosion was releasing fine particle dust into the air, resulting in human health problems; flooding was endangering people; and heavy sediment loads were causing sewers to overflow. While working with the International Boundary and Water Commission to identify locations where structures could help address these problems, she became fascinated by the way small changes to the terrain could alter water flow and ultimately the shape and character of the land. 

Not long after, Norman heard rumors of an oasis in the Chiricahuas. Intrigued, she visited El Coronado Ranch after a rain. The rock structures detained huge pools of water, keeping the washes running. “Seeing that with my own eyes was mind-blowing,” she says.

To measure the effects, she compared a tributary of Turkey Creek with neighboring Rock Creek, which had no rock structures. Using modified stream gauges and precipitation measurements, she found that the subtle barriers reduced peak flows from summer monsoons by half and extended base flows into fall by three to four weeks. The check dams kept more water in the system, resulting in that incredible 28 percent increase of water flowing downstream. What’s more, they captured 200 tons of soil per year, cleaning the water of sediment and supporting verdant vegetation that attracted animals. 

Norman explains why there was more water in the treated stream. In contrast to Turkey Creek’s series of wetland sponges, Rock Creek has bare bedrock. “When water runs over an impervious surface and is exposed to elements, it evaporates,” Norman says. Compacted and dry soils also repel water, or become hydrophobic—“scared of water.” But when barriers make the life-giving liquid linger, it can permeate the soil.

“A lot of practitioners and ranchers were of the opinion that they were able to create more water [with rock detention structures],” says Norman. “But to be able to document that was amazing. More water storage and more water availability for everything, to reverse that degradation cycle into a restoration cycle.”

Pulliam, who has collaborated with Norman on some of her papers, says her scientific rigor has led to wider acceptance of these practices. “Early on, even at USGS, people were skeptical. But as evidence accumulated, they began to see Laura as a really innovative scientist,” he says. “Like Valer, she persisted through a period where no one had much faith in [the structures’] efficacy.”  

In 2021, the American Water Resources Association awarded Norman a medal of excellence, saying her “research is the foundation of a burgeoning community of practice and a shift in policy implementation in the arid Southwest.”

Desert oases

Studies from atmospheric scientists have found that, in the Colorado River basin, the warmer climate is creating a thirstier atmosphere, which could evaporate more water out of the soil and plants and sometimes turn snow directly to water vapor. They predict that Colorado River flows could be 20 to 30 percent lower by 2050, meaning state negotiators of the river’s sharing agreement should be planning for even less water than they have today.

But Norman and other experts studying water cycle restoration assert that it’s not just climate change making the West drier. People have also dried out the land over the last two centuries by killing beavers, cutting forests, overgrazing grasslands, and cutting off rivers from their flood plains and wetlands with levees, channels, and diversions. What if slow water interventions, including Natural Infrastructure in Dryland Streams, were deployed widely across the West? Could they heal the land-water relationship and reverse desertification?

“Yes,” Norman says, without hesitation.

In a paper published last fall, Norman and co-authors reviewed many studies that support the claim of region-wide restoration being able to counteract desertification. One reason is that NIDS create localized humidity and cooling. In a park in Phoenix, Norman found the air is up to 3 degrees Celsius cooler around structures for two days after a rainfall. 

Another reason is that about 40 percent of rain over land, on average, is formed from evaporation from soil and transpiration from plants. With forests cut, grasslands overgrazed, soil compacted, and more wetlands and flood plains paved over, that moisture is missing from the Colorado River’s water cycle. 

To undo part of the damage, slow-water projects need to be distributed throughout water basins, not centralized. The interventions are typically small, but their impact on flood protection, water storage, and localized cooling is cumulative, much as how solar panels on many roofs can generate a lot of electricity. “The whole Colorado River basin, plugged full of structures?” says Norman. “At that scale, you’d see a regional response that might impact the climate by sequestration of carbon and by cooling of temperatures from bringing moisture back into the atmosphere.”

These changes also support wildlife, providing critical refuges for animals native to the Sky Islands, one of the most biodiverse regions in North America. Supporting an array of animals—Gila monsters, black bears, mountain lions, ocelots, bobcats, coatis, javelinas, foxes, deer—is part of Cuenca Los Ojos’ mission and what drives Clark to heal land and water. “The horny toad [or horned lizard] squirts blood out of its eyes to scare you. There are just so many delightful creatures in the region.” The fact that she thinks blood-squirting eyes are delightful epitomizes her enthusiasm for everything she encounters on the land.

Scientists, including Pulliam, have been documenting the return of wildlife. They even recorded an endangered jaguar near the rock structures at Cienega Ranch, a site in the Aridland Water Harvesting Study.  “Because there’s water, the animals come,’’ says Norman.

One critter they’re tracking is famous for building its own infrastructure in water. Beavers have returned to southern Arizona after trappers wiped them out 150 years ago. They’ve also been found on Clark’s ranches in northern Mexico. “Beavers won’t settle in desiccated areas,” Pulliam says, “but if you provide seed areas where they can get established, they can gradually improve adjacent areas.”

The upwelling of a movement

Nature-based solutions are gaining ground worldwide, including in the US—incentivized by the Biden administration’s Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts. But they are still often dismissed as insignificant in the challenge of buffering human communities from flood, drought, and climate change. That attitude reveals a misunderstanding of the scale of human disruption to the water cycle, and therefore, the scale needed for projects like NIDS to repair that damage.

Because the federal government influences the way so much land and water in the American West is managed, it could make a monumental difference by embracing slow-water practices, says Clark. But while some federal employees support them, so far, it’s not part of the official policy at the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, or Bureau of Land Management. 

Still, the federal agencies are coming around, says Pulliam. One lightbulb moment came after wildfires roared through the Chiricahuas about a decade ago. “Watersheds with rock structures had much, much less damage, and the Forest Service started noticing,” Pulliam explains, adding that the department is now giving contracts to Cuenca Los Ojos and Borderlands Restoration to build structures on its land. Overall, however, he says the US government retains a bias for modern engineering in its funding. State agencies, on the other hand, are much more open to NIDS. “They all buy in. They see it. It’s in their backyard.” 

Local Indigenous communities have shown what close attention to nature’s ways can yield. “Water is really life to us,” says Johnson, the Hopi farmer, contrasting that attitude with the dominant society’s view that water is a commodity. “People are so far removed from the relationship that we have with water that they just don’t understand the complexities, and they keep making the same mistakes over and over again.” 

Maybe we can improve our relationship with water, as individuals like Johnson, Clark, and Austin demonstrate how to heal water systems, and scientists like Norman and Pulliam document the intricacies of how they work. In response to water scarcity in the Southwest, many people think the answer is to bring in more from elsewhere via dams, aqueducts, and desalination plants. But slow-water practitioners make the most of the water that’s already there. Norman recalls a local saying, half-jokingly, “Ah, that would be great if there were some magic water that just appeared!” When she started studying ecosystems benefiting from slow-water techniques, “I was like, I think we found some, you know?”

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The raging wildfires in Canada recently engulfed the Northeastern US in smoke, causing the air quality to plummet to some of the worst ever recorded in the region. To minimize the exposure to hazardous air, health officials recommended that people stay indoors and wear masks. However, animals are also vulnerable to smoke inhalation. Zoos across New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia closed last week to bring their animals indoors, but free-roaming ones had nowhere to go to escape the smoke.

How animals are affected by wildfire smoke

Like humans, animals can inhale wildfire smoke and experience respiratory irritation and detrimental impacts on their cardiovascular system, says Lisa Miller, professor of anatomy, physiology, and cell biology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. All creatures that breathe air, whether they live on land or at sea, are vulnerable to airborne toxins found in wildlife smoke, such as fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen cyanide. Inhaling smoke can make them susceptible to carbon monoxide poisoning, a life-threatening condition that limits oxygen supply to the blood, tissues, and organs.

Smoke inhalation can further result in tachycardia and respiratory symptoms like labored breathing, panting, and coughing. Death from smoke-induced asphyxiation is also a possibility. Repeated or prolonged exposure to smoke can weaken animals’ immune response or result in chronic heart disease, but long-term, adverse health impacts may also come from a single smoke event.

[Related: Almost everyone in the world breathes unhealthy air]

The health effects of smoke can vary greatly because the toxicity depends on the distance from the burn site and the type of fire, says Miller. As the pollutants travel, their properties may be altered by the sun and other chemicals in the air. What’s burned in the wildfire also matters, whether it’s only biomass like trees and plants or human-made materials like homes and cars. “All of these factors make understanding the science of wildfires so challenging,” Miller adds.

Some groups of animals, like birds, are at greater risk of experiencing negative health outcomes. “Birds are highly sensitive to air pollution because their respiratory system supports highly efficient gas exchange and lacks some of the mechanisms mammals use to clear particles from their airways,” says Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at the La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science. Aside from physiology, behavior and habitat use may also influence how much smoke a creature is exposed to, and, subsequently, the short- or long-term health issues they might face.

However, there are still some major questions on the harms of wildfire smoke on wildlife.

Checking up on wildlife health after fires

According to a 2022 review in the journal Environmental Research Letters by Sanderfoot and her collaborators, there are a limited number of published studies investigating the health outcomes and behavioral responses of animals who’ve inhaled wildfire smoke. For example, there is a lot left to learn about any strategies animals may use to reduce their exposure to air pollution, says Sanderfoot.

The difficulty of conducting this kind of research may be a contributor. Monitoring animals before, during, and after wildfires is difficult to plan and may put the health and safety of workers at risk. And while studying animal response in controlled environments like labs or outdoor enclosures may be easier to implement, scientists can’t reproduce the exact air quality and visibility conditions that occur in the environment.

In her research, Sanderfoot uses citizen science data to learn more about how smoke affects birds. She encourages people in areas affected by wildfires or hazardous air quality to contribute wildlife observations to online databases like eBird or iNaturalist, which gather and provide data for research and conservation purposes. Observations on smoky days would be particularly useful, she adds, but it’s important to wear an N95 mask when going out.

Ways to protect animals from wildfire smoke

Understanding how wildfire smoke affects wildlife is crucial in preventing dangerous health impacts as the planet gets even hotter. Climate change can make wildfires more frequent and intense with increased drought, high air temperatures, and strong winds, resulting in hotter, drier, and longer fire seasons in some regions. The number of wildfires is expected to increase globally by up to 14 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2100. A feedback loop occurs: Fires can also exacerbate climate change because burning ecosystems like peatlands and rainforests releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The best way to protect wildlife from smoke inhalation, habitat loss, and other fire-related issues is to prevent high-severity wildland fires in the first place. According to a 2023 review in the journal Conservation, a combination of public and personal land management, social governance, and efficient fire suppression efforts like fire lines are needed to reduce wildfire risk and improve response mechanisms. This could cover measures ranging from proper land regulation to protections for areas with endangered species.

[Related: Longleaf pine forests in Alabama are making a comeback—thanks to fire]

Raising awareness about the risks of setting small blazes, like campfires, in the dry season is also essential. A 2017 study in the journal PNAS analyzed US wildfire data from 1992 to 2012, excluding controlled agricultural fires and those with an unknown cause. They found that human-started fires accounted for 84 percent of all wildfires.
More information about the impacts of smoke on wildlife is needed to possibly adjust conservation plans in fire-heavy times of the year, says Sanderfoot. After large wildfires, agencies like the US Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management work together to restore animal habitats and support population comebacks. “Sometimes, science feels slow, but every day we make a little bit more progress,” says Sanderfoot. “Soon I hope we’ll have a much better sense of how we help wildlife endure both hotter and smokier summers.”

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