For the thousands of mammal, reptile, amphibian, and bird species that live in the Amazon, the wildfires’ impact will come in two phases: one immediate, one long-term.
“In the Amazon, nothing is adapted to fire,” says William Magnusson, a researcher specializing in biodiversity monitoring at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus, Brazil. [...]
The rainforest is so uniquely rich and diverse precisely because it doesn’t really burn, says Magnusson. While fires do sometimes happen naturally, they’re typically small in scale and burn low to the ground. And they’re quickly put out by rain. [...]
“You’ll have immediate winners and immediate losers,” says Sullivan. “In a system that isn’t adapted to fire, you’ll have a lot more losers than you will in other landscapes.”
When French explorer Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, and his crew were sailing along the coast of northern California on September 7, 1786, they spotted a smoky plume in the sky that looked like volcanic ash. The ship’s cartographers marked a volcanic eruption on their maps of the region.
But volcanologists have puzzled over the plume. They have never found ash deposits that matched the eruption’s proposed dates, and no other records detailing the alleged eruption have surfaced. This month, a team of scientists and historians doing a bit of detective work concluded the plume was not caused by a volcano but likely a grassland fire. So on August 6, Mount Shasta’s volcanic history became a little shorter when the 1786 eruption was officially struck from the record.
The volcanic housecleaning is part of a larger effort led by database manager Ed Venzke of the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program. He and his colleagues work to fact-check historical accounts of eruptions around the world. Sniffing out inaccuracies in these records can improve scientists’ understanding of a volcano’s behavior and activity. The strength and type of a past eruption offers clues about how future events might threaten certain areas; false records can throw those predictions off.
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One day in June 1919, workers in a busy Canadian cannery in Port Essington rushed to clean, cook, and can the bright red flesh of a huge number of sockeye salmon hauled from the nearby Skeena River. Watching the frenzy was a government “fisheries overseer” named Robert Gibson. Periodically, Gibson selected a fish, scraped off a few scales, and affixed them to the pages of a small notebook using the salmon’s own slime. Next to each sample—he collected a total of 125 on this day—Gibson wrote the weight, length, sex, and catch date. A U.S. fish biologist hired by British Columbia would follow up by calculating each fish’s age with the then-new technique of using a microscope to count the growth rings visible on the scales, much as botanists age a tree.
Over more than 3 decades, from 1912 to 1948, Gibson and colleagues filled dozens of notebooks with fish scales from the Skeena, Canada’s second-largest salmon river. Ultimately, however, the records were dumped in a box and largely forgotten.
Until now. This week, scientists unveiled a study that makes clever use of the fish DNA preserved in the battered, smeared books to reconstruct how wild Skeena salmon have fared over the past century. The conclusion is sobering: Declines have been more precipitous and widespread than previously understood, with the river’s 13 major wild sockeye salmon populations plummeting by 56% to 99% over the period from 1913 to 2014, largely because of overfishing.
Science Daily —
Big brains can help an animal mount quick, flexible behavioral responses to frequent or unexpected environmental changes. But some birds just don't need 'em.
A global study comparing 2,062 birds finds that, in highly variable environments, birds tend to have either larger or smaller brains relative to their body size. Birds with smaller brains tend to use ecological strategies that are not available to big-brained counterparts. Instead of relying on grey matter to survive, these birds tend to have large bodies, eat readily available food and make lots of babies. [...]
"What's really interesting is that we don't see any middle ground here," Fristoe said. "The resident species with intermediate brain size are almost completely absent from high latitude (colder and more climatically variable) environments. The species that don't go all in on either of the extreme strategies are forced to migrate to more benign climates during the winter."
"Having a large brain is typically associated with strong energetic demands and a slower life-history . . . Free from these constraints, species with small brains can exhibit traits and lifestyles that are never seen in larger-brained ones.
Quantum dots might constitute the foundation of quantum communication. They are an efficient interface between matter and light, with photons emitted by the quantum dots transporting information across large distances. However, structures form by default during the manufacture of quantum dots that interfere with communication. Researchers have now successfully eliminated these interferences.
How do big-game animals know where to migrate across hundreds of miles of vast Wyoming landscapes year after year?
Among scientists, there are two camps of thought. First is that animals use local cues within their vicinity to determine where to migrate. Animals might move up to areas with greener forage -- often termed green-wave surfing -- or move down from mountains with deeper snow. The second idea is that animals develop memory of the landscape where they live and then use that information to guide their movements.
Recent research from the University of Wyoming has found that memory explains much of deer behavior during migration: Mule deer navigate in spring and fall mostly by using their knowledge of past migration routes and seasonal ranges.
When it comes to climate change, moving people and development away from at-risk areas can be viewed, not as a defeat, but as a smart strategy that allows communities to adapt and thrive.
That's the case for carefully planned "managed retreat" made by three environmental researchers in an article published Aug. 22 in the Policy Forum section of the journal Science. [...]
"We need to stop picturing our relationship with nature as a war," said Siders, who is a core faculty member of UD's Disaster Research Center and an assistant professor of public policy and administration and of geography.
"We're not winning or losing; we're adjusting to changes in nature. Sea levels rise, storms surge into flood plains, so we need to move back."
(emphasis added)
phys.org —
It's no secret crows are smart. They're notorious for frustrating attempts to keep them from tearing into garbage cans; more telling, however, is that they are one of the few animals known to make tools.
But would you believe doing it actually makes them happy?
That's the finding of a recent paper, co-authored by Dakota McCoy, a graduate student working in the lab of David Haig, George Putnam Professor of Biology, who found that crows behaved more optimistically after using tools. The study is described in an Aug. 19 paper in Current Biology. [...]
But how can making and using tools make an animal feel good? A clue, McCoy said, lies in looking at how complex actions make humans feel.
"I think we tend to under-anthropomorphize animals, especially really intelligent animals," she said. "It's not that they are machines, and we are feeling beings. Clearly, animals also have emotional reactions and moods."
And one of those emotions is the pleasure of accomplishment.
(emphasis added)
A new study indicates that some exoplanets may have better conditions for life to thrive than Earth itself has. "This is a surprising conclusion," said lead researcher Dr. Stephanie Olson, "it shows us that conditions on some exoplanets with favourable ocean circulation patterns could be better suited to support life that is more abundant or more active than life on Earth." [...]
"We have used an ocean circulation model to identify which planets will have the most efficient upwelling and thus offer particularly hospitable oceans. We found that higher atmospheric density, slower rotation rates, and the presence of continents all yield higher upwelling rates. A further implication is that Earth might not be optimally habitable—and life elsewhere may enjoy a planet that is even more hospitable than our own.
(emphasis added)
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Japan has found evidence of slow slip earthquakes impeding the progression of large destructive quakes. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study of both types of earthquakes and the events surrounding the large Tohoku-Oki quake in 2011, and what they found. Heidi Houston, with the University of Southern California, has published a Perspective piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.
Foods fried in vegetable oil are popular worldwide, but research about the health effects of this cooking technique has been largely inconclusive and focused on healthy people. For the first time, UMass Amherst food scientists set out to examine the impact of frying oil consumption on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and colon cancer, using animal models.
...paper published Aug. 23 in Cancer Prevention Research. . . showed that feeding frying oil to mice exaggerated colonic inflammation, enhanced tumor growth and worsened gut leakage, spreading bacteria or toxic bacterial products into the bloodstream...
... "it's not our message that frying oil can cause cancer."
Rather, the new research suggests that eating fried foods may exacerbate and advance conditions of the colon. "In the United States, many people have these diseases, but many of them may still eat fast food and fried food," says Guodong Zhang. "If somebody has IBD or colon cancer and they eat this kind of food, there is a chance it will make the diseases more aggressive."
(emphasis added)
Keep your cats inside, bag (don't flush) cat feces, restore wetlands, and replace pavement with permeable surfaces.
Many wild southern sea otters in California are infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, yet the infection is fatal for only a fraction of sea otters, which has long puzzled the scientific community. A study from the University of California, Davis, identifies the parasite’s specific strains that are killing southern sea otters, tracing them back to a bobcat and feral domestic cats from nearby watersheds.
The study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, marks the first time a genetic link has been clearly established between the Toxoplasma strains in felid hosts and parasites causing fatal disease in marine wildlife.
If you don’t have time to sit and read a physical book, is listening to the audio version considered cheating? To some hardcore book nerds, it could be. But new evidence suggests that, to our brains, reading and hearing a story might not be so different.
In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers from the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley scanned the brains of nine participants while they read and listened to a series of tales from “The Moth Radio Hour.” After analyzing how each word was processed in the the brain’s cortex, they created maps of the participants’ brains, noting the different areas helped interpret the meaning of each word.
They mapped out the results in an interactive diagram, which is due to be published on the Gallant Lab website this week.
Looking at the brain scans and data analysis, the researchers saw that the stories stimulated the same cognitive and emotional areas, regardless of their medium. It’s adding to our understanding of how our brains give semantic meaning to the squiggly letters and bursts of sound that make up our communication.