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Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Are poachers rhinos only problem | Rhinos dont have it easy these days. Usually, they roam Two rhino species live in Kruger Park - white and black large areas in Africa and Eurasia. Now they occur almost only rhino. One curious finding is that each of them suffers from in protected areas due to poaching (forbidden hunting) and the drought in a different way - due to the different food destruction of their habitats. We had a close look at Kruger they eat. So keeping the poachers away is not enough to National Park in South Africa where many rhinos live. We conserve the rhinos. We also have to understand the effect found they face two problems: illegal hunters and droughts. of the climate. | Unrelenting poaching to feed the illegal trafficking of rhinoceros (rhino) horn remains the principle threat to the persistence of south-central black and southern white rhino that live in the Kruger National Park (Kruger), South Africa. Other global environmental change drivers, such as unpredictable climatic conditions, impose additional uncertainties on the management and persistence of these species. The drought experienced in Kruger over the 2015/2016 rainy season may have affected rhino population growth and thus added an additional population pressure to the poaching pressure already occurring. Under drought conditions, reduced grass biomass predicts increased natural deaths and a subsequent decrease in birth rate for the grazing white rhino. Such variance in natural death and birth rates for the browsing black rhino are not expected under these conditions. We evaluated these predictions using rhino population survey data from 2013 to 2017. Comparisons of natural deaths and birth rates between pre- (2013/2014 and 2014/15), during- (2015/2016) and post-drought (2016/2017) periods in Kruger showed increased natural mortality and decreased births for white rhino, but no significant changes for black rhino, supporting our predictions. As a result, despite reduced poaching rates, the total mortality rate of white rhino remains significantly higher than the birth rate. Decreased poaching, decreased natural deaths and no apparent drought effects in black rhino resulted in a lower total mortality rate than the estimated birth rate in 2017. Active biological management and traditional anti-poaching initiatives together therefore represent the most likely way to buffer the impacts of decreased population growth through climate change and wildlife crime on the persistence of rhinos. | https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0209678 | Elementary school; Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | Can microbes make fruit flies stronger | Have you ever thought of yourself as an ecosystem? Or Humans are not unique in having microbiomes! Insects - like even, a planet, hosting trillions of inhabitants! If not, get fruit flies - also host microbial communities. We examined used to the fact that you are one! Each and every one of the microbiomes of different fruit fly populations originating us provides a home for millions of microbes that live inside from six different places across Europe. We showed that our body, and on our skin. Some of these tiny creatures just their microbiomes were different, even though all flies had use us as their living space, without affecting us. Some do eaten the same food over the past four years. We also us harm. Many, however, benefit us immensely. They help examined the effect of microbes on fruit fly resistance to us digest food and fight off diseases, and might even be parasite attack. In some populations we found evidence important in keeping our brains healthy. The community of for this, but for other populations we did not find a clear microbes in our body is called our microbiome. connection. | In Drosophila, diet is considered a prominent factor shaping the associated bacterial community. However, the host population background (e.g. genotype, geographical origin and founder effects) is a factor that may also exert a significant influence and is often overlooked. To test for population background effects, we characterized the bacterial communities in larvae of six genetically differentiated and geographically distant D. melanogaster lines collected from natural populations across Europe. The diet for these six lines had been identical for ca. 50 generations, thus any differences in the composition of the microbiome originates from the host populations. We also investigated whether induced shifts in the microbiomein this case by controlled antibiotic administrationalters the hosts resistance to parasitism. Our data revealed a clear signature of population background on the diversity and composition of D. melanogaster microbiome that differed across lines, even after hosts had been maintained at the same diet and laboratory conditions for over 4 years. In particular, the number of bacterial OTUs per line ranged from 8 to 39 OTUs. Each line harboured 2 to 28 unique OTUs, and OTUs that were highly abundant in some lines were entirely missing in others. Moreover, we found that the response to antibiotic treatment differed among the lines and significantly altered the host resistance to the parasitoid Asobara tabida in one of the six lines. Wolbachia, a widespread intracellular endosymbiont associated with parasitoid resistance, was lacking in this line, suggesting that other components of the Drosophila microbiome caused a change in host resistance. Collectively, our results revealed that lines that originate from different population backgrounds show significant differences in the established Drosophila microbiome, outpacing the long-term effect of diet. Perturbations on these naturally assembled microbiomes to some degree influenced the hosts resistance against natural parasites. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0167726 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Can we save rhinos from extinction | In the past decade, poachers have increasingly hunted and this endangered species. We found that there is a way to killed South African white rhinoceroses, despite efforts to save rhinos from extinction but it requires combating the protect them. If the killing continues at this rate, these international mafias that buy and sell rhino horns as well rhinos will soon go extinct. We created a model that took as developing legal job opportunities for people currently both human actions and rhino survival in the wild into living in poverty near rhinos, so they dont have to resort to account in order to test which scenarios resulted in saving poaching for money. | The onslaught on the Worlds wildlife continues despite numerous initiatives aimed at curbing it. We build a model that integrates rhino horn trade with rhino population dynamics in order to evaluate the impact of various management policies on rhino sustainability. In our model, an agent-based sub-model of horn trade from the poaching event up through a purchase of rhino horn in Asia impacts rhino abundance. A data-validated, individual-based sub-model of the rhino population of South Africa provides these abundance values. We evaluate policies that consist of different combinations of legal trade initiatives, demand reduction marketing campaigns, increased anti-poaching measures within protected areas, and transnational policing initiatives aimed at disrupting those criminal syndicates engaged in horn trafficking. Simulation runs of our model over the next 35 years produces a sustainable rhino population under only one management policy. This policy includes both a transnational policing effort aimed at dismantling those criminal networks engaged in rhino horn traffickingcoupled with increases in legal economic opportunities for people living next to protected areas where rhinos live. This multi-faceted approach should be the focus of the international debate on strategies to combat the current slaughter of rhino rather than the binary debate about whether rhino horn trade should be legalized. This approach to the evaluation of wildlife management policies may be useful to apply to other species threatened by wildlife trafficking. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0167040 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Could this be a concrete solution to biodiversity loss | Did you know that in some parts of the world, we have for marine organisms. replaced over half of our natural shorelines with man-made We wanted to find out what effect creating artificial rock coastal defences? pools on these structures would have. Would it help to attract This is important because these structures arent usually as more species? Did the pools need to be a particular size good at supporting a wide range of different species (we call or at a particular shore height to work well? Was exposure this biodiversity) as natural rocky shores. The reason for this to wave action important? We set out to find the answers is that artificial structures lack important habitats like rock to these questions to help engineers and coastal managers pools, pits and crevices that trap water and provide shelter increase biodiversity on their man-made coastlines. | In coastal habitats artificial structures typically support lower biodiversity and can support greater numbers of non-native and opportunistic species than natural rocky reefs. Eco-engineering experiments are typically trialed to succeed; but arguably as much is learnt from failure than from success. Our goal was to trial a generic, cost effective, eco-engineering technique that could be incorporated into rock armouring anywhere in the world. Artificial rock pools were created from manipulated concrete between boulders on the exposed and sheltered sides of a causeway. Experimental treatments were installed in locations where they were expected to fail and compared to controls installed in locations in which they were expected to succeed. Control pools were created lower on the structure where they were immersed on every tidal cycle; experimental pools were created above mean high water spring tide which were only immersed on spring tides. We hypothesised that lower and exposed pools would support significantly higher taxon and functional diversity than upper and sheltered pools. The concrete pools survived the severe winter storms of 2013/14. After 12 months, non-destructive sampling revealed significantly higher mean taxon and functional richness in lower pools than upper pools on the exposed side only. After 24 months the sheltered pools had become inundated with sediments, thus failing to function as rock pools as intended. Destructive sampling on the exposed side revealed significantly higher mean functional richness in lower than upper pools. However, a surprisingly high number of taxa colonised the upper pools leading to no significant difference in mean taxon richness among shore heights. A high number of rare taxa in the lower pools led to total taxon richness being almost twice that of upper pools. These findings highlight that even when expected to fail concrete pools supported diverse assemblages, thus representing an affordable, replicable means of enhancing biodiversity on a variety of artificial structures. | http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/9/094015/meta | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Counting the fish catch why dont the numbers match | Fish and marine animals like shrimp (well call them all fish This made us realize that catches peaked at a much here), are an important food source for many people in the higher amount than the officially reported figures. It also world. They provide vital nutrients to people with poor diets. showed us that they are now declining much faster than people thought. There are various large and small-scale fisheries. Some people sell their catches, while others catch fish for their We need to check on fisheries better so that we have more families to eat. In order to know the total amount caught, accurate data. This will help us to be able to make the right we need accurate data on all fisheries catches. decisions to protect global fish stocks. We carried out a data collection project to calculate total catches from all marine fisheries in the world from to .We carried out a data collection project to calculate total catches from all marine fisheries in the world from 1950 to 2010. This made us realize that catches peaked at a much higher amount than the officially reported figures. It also showed us that they are now declining much faster than people thought. We need to check on fisheries better so that we have more accurate data. This will help us to be able to make the right decisions to protect global fish stocks. | Here we reply to a commentary by Ye et al. (Mar. Policy 2017; Ye et al.) on our article (Pauly and Zeller, 2017 [2]) commenting on FAO's interpretation of current fisheries trends in SOFIA 2016 (The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture). We show how arguments such as FAO's catch statistics being the best they can possibly be, and other manifestations of FAO's difficulties in constructively engaging with comments compromises FAO's stated goal to engage with academia and civil society. This is particularly serious in an age where the value of an open scientific discourse is increasingly under threat, as is the food security of many poor countries in which fish supplied by domestic fisheries constitutes a strong component of local diets. | https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10244 | Elementary school; Lower high school; Middle school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Do bats benefit from wildfires | Did you know that there are more than 1,000 species of bats? Theyre also the only mammals that can fly! These amazing animals are well adapted to life in the forest, but what happens when wildfires hit their homes? We wanted to find out how wildfires in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California affect bats. We looked at three different areas where there have been large fires and counted how many species of bat we found in those areas. We also looked at how different levels of fire severity affected bats.Our results showed that wildfires are beneficial to bats. This is mainly because fires make forests less cluttered, which makes it easier for bats to find food and roosting spots. Instead of preventing all fires, we should manage some fires burning far from people so that there is a mix of severities and bat habitats. This would help bats and also reduce the risk of out-of-control megafires happening in the future! | Wildfire is an important ecological process that influences species occurrence and biodiversity generally. Its effect on bats is understudied, creating challenges for habitat management and species conservation as threats to the taxa worsen globally and within fire-prone ecosystems. We conducted acoustic surveys of wildfire areas during 20142017 in conifer forests of Californias Sierra Nevada Mountains. We tested effects of burn severity and its variation, or pyrodiversity, on occupancy and diversity for the 17-species bat community while accounting for imperfect detection. Occupancy rates increased with severity for at least 6 species and with pyrodiversity for at least 3. Two other species responded negatively to pyrodiversity. Individual species models predicted maximum occupancy rates across burn severity levels but only one species occurred most often in undisturbed areas. Species richness increased from approximately 8 species in unburned forests to 11 in pyrodiverse areas with moderate- to high-severity. Greater accessibility of foraging habitats, as well as increased habitat heterogeneity may explain positive responses to wildfire. Many bat species appear well adapted to wildfire, while a century of fire suppression and forest densification likely reduced habitat quality for the community generally. Relative to other taxa, bats may be somewhat resilient to increases in fire severity and size; trends which are expected to continue with accelerating climate change. | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-52875-2 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | Do bees get the flu | Do bees scare you? Instead of fearing them, you should the viral load (virus concentration in the bees body) was appreciate their role in our ecosystem. In addition to low. We infected two wild bee species with high doses of providing us honey, they are responsible for pollinating viruses, and they didnt get sick immediately. This hopeful much of the food we eat. Unfortunately, wild bees and finding suggests that honey bees and wild bees can co- honey bees (Apis mellifera) are dying. Many honey bees exist even if some are infected with viruses. To be sure, die because of viruses and conservationists worry that though, we need to test if other viruses infect the many these viruses may transfer to wild bees. wild bee species that co-occur with honey bees. We tested wild bees for five common honey bee viruses. We found them in over 80% of the wild bees, yet . the viral load (virus concentration in the bees body) was low. We infected two wild bee species with high doses of viruses, and they didnt get sick immediately. This hopeful finding suggests that honey bees and wild bees can coexist even if some are infected with viruses. To be sure, though, we need to test if other viruses infect the many wild bee species that co-occur with honey bees | Evidence of inter-species pathogen transmission from managed to wild bees has sparked concern that emerging diseases could be causing or exacerbating wild bee declines. While some pathogens, like RNA viruses, have been found in pollen and wild bees, the threat these viruses pose to wild bees is largely unknown. Here, we tested 169 bees, representing 4 families and 8 genera, for five common honey bee (Apis mellifera) viruses, finding that more than 80% of wild bees harbored at least one virus. We also quantified virus titers in these bees, providing, for the first time, an assessment of viral load in a broad spectrum of wild bees. Although virus detection was very common, virus levels in the wild bees were minimalsimilar to or lower than foraging honey bees and substantially lower than honey bees collected from hives. Furthermore, when we experimentally inoculated adults of two different bee species (Megachile rotundata and Colletes inaequalis) with a mixture of common viruses that is lethal to honey bees, we saw no effect on short term survival. Overall, we found that honey bee RNA viruses can be commonly detected at low levels in many wild bee species, but we found no evidence that these pathogens cause elevated short-term mortality effects. However, more work on these viruses is greatly needed to assess effects on additional bee species and life stages. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166190 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Do fish have a home | Do you have a favorite place? One that makes you feel safe fish populations from decreasing. and has everything you need to survive? Now imagine you We tracked European bass (an important fish in Europe) for are in your favorite place and a skunk wanders in. You run a year to figure out where their favorite places were. We away because you dont want to end up stinky. found that most European bass stayed close to the coastal This same thing happens to young (juvenile) fish when their sites we caught them from. Our goal is to identify more of favorite places get polluted or are not protected. Fish might these coastal sites. That way, humans can protect them, and even get caught by fishermen. A lot of fish populations are fish populations can thrive. in danger because: too many individuals are caught there arent enough safe places for juveniles to hide. If we protect their favorite places, we might be able to keep | The European bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) support high value commercial and recreational fisheries, however the Spawning Stock Biomass (SSB) of the northern Atlantic stock (ICES divisions 4.bc, 7.a, and 7.dh) has rapidly declined to an unsustainable level. The decline in SSB has been attributed to high fishing pressure combined with poor recruitment. By tracking juvenile fish their spatial ecology can be identified, and appropriate fisheries management policies designed to boost recruitment can be implemented. Using acoustic telemetry 146 sub-adult European bass (25.260 cm fork length) were tracked for up to 370 d across three sites in the southwest of the UK. Tagged fish were detected 2 724 548 times (Range: 166106 393 detections per fish). Linear modelling estimated tagged fish were resident within 2.420.1 km of the site where they were first caught for 42.9-75.5% of the year. Some fish were however resident throughout summer and winter. Individual fish were also tracked moving up to 317 km to other coastal sites, 81% of which returned to their original capture site. Fisheries management should account for the high site fidelity displayed by juveniles and sub-adults of this species and coastal nursery sites should be considered essential habitat. | https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article/78/9/3121/6370941 | Elementary school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Do northern trees have cold feet about climate change | Imagine living in an area where it starts getting uncomfortably hot. Would you and your family just pack up and move somewhere else to be more comfortable? Unlike people, trees cannot escape to other climates quickly when temperatures rise as a result of global climate change. Will they suffer when it gets hotter? Or would they benefit instead?We wanted to understand how trees in northern (or boreal) forests would respond to rising temperatures. We analyzed results from transplant experiments that took seeds from one area and planted them in areas with different climates. We found that where a tree is located within its geographical range determines how it will be affected: trees growing in the northern part of their range will likely benefit from rising temperatures and grow faster, but trees growing in the southern part of their range will likely grow more slowly. Keep in mind that factors other than just temperature changes also have to be considered to understand how forests will respond to climate change. | The growth response of trees to ongoing climate change has important implications for future forest dynamics, accurate carbon accounting, and sustainable forest management. We used data from black spruce (Picea mariana) and jack pine (Pinus banksiana) provenance trials, along with published data for three other northern conifers, to identify a consistent growth response to climate warming in which cold-origin populations are expected to benefit and warm-origin populations are expected to decline. Specifically, populations from across the geographic range of a species appear to grow well at temperatures characteristic of the southern portion of the range, indicating significant potential for a positive growth response to climate warming in cold-origin populations. Few studies have quantified and compared this pattern across multiple species using provenance data. We present a forest regeneration strategy that incorporates these anticipated growth responses to promote populations that are both local to the planting site and expected to grow well under climate change. | http://www.nature.com/articles/srep43881 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Evolution in action Are voles shrinking | It is not easy being small. Especially when nature seems to causes, we separated genetic and environmental influences favor larger individuals. But why dont all animals evolve to on vole body size. be bigger? Is it sometimes better to be small? Or are some We found that young voles with genes for small bodies incapable of evolving? developed faster. This allowed them to survive better when To answer these questions, we studied a wild population of environmental conditions changed (earlier arrival of winter). snow voles (a small rodent species) in their alpine habitat. As a result, the population evolved towards a smaller body Genetic analysis indicated a hidden evolutionary change: size. Our study shows that populations can evolve rapidly. But voles evolved to become smaller but the average body size without a genetic perspective and understanding the underlying of population stayed the same. To understand the underlying causes, we may not be able to detect these changes. | In natural populations, quantitative trait dynamics often do not appear to follow evolutionary predictions. Despite abundant examples of natural selection acting on heritable traits, conclusive evidence for contemporary adaptive evolution remains rare for wild vertebrate populations, and phenotypic stasis seems to be the norm. This so-called stasis paradox highlights our inability to predict evolutionary change, which is especially concerning within the context of rapid anthropogenic environmental change. While the causes underlying the stasis paradox are hotly debated, comprehensive attempts aiming at a resolution are lacking. Here, we apply a quantitative genetic framework to individual-based long-term data for a wild rodent population and show that despite a positive association between body mass and fitness, there has been a genetic change towards lower body mass. The latter represents an adaptive response to viability selection favouring juveniles growing up to become relatively small adults, i.e., with a low potential adult mass, which presumably complete their development earlier. This selection is particularly strong towards the end of the snow-free season, and it has intensified in recent years, coinciding which a change in snowfall patterns. Importantly, neither the negative evolutionary change, nor the selective pressures that drive it, are apparent on the phenotypic level, where they are masked by phenotypic plasticity and a non causal (i.e., non genetic) positive association between body mass and fitness, respectively. Estimating selection at the genetic level enabled us to uncover adaptive evolution in action and to identify the corresponding phenotypic selective pressure. We thereby demonstrate that natural populations can show a rapid and adaptive evolutionary response to a novel selective pressure, and that explicitly (quantitative) genetic models are able to provide us with an understanding of the causes and consequences of selection that is superior to purely phenotypic estimates of selection and evolutionary change. | http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002592 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How can black rats change the behavior of reef fish | Every animal needs an environment where it can survive and thus reduce their population. So, the amount of nutrients thrive. Unfortunately, humans are having a serious impact reaching the coral reefs also decreases. on the natural world. Our behavior can harm ecosystems Coral reef fish need lots of energy from their food to be and the animals that call them home. aggressive and defend their homes from intruders. We In the 1700s, black rats arrived with humans on tropical thought there might be a connection between black rats, the islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Seabirds play an nutrients available on coral reefs, and the behavior of small important role in providing nutrients to coral reefs around reef fishes. Indeed, we discovered that invasive rats on land these islands. But the invasive rats feed on the seabirds and directly affect the behavior of fish in the sea! | Human-induced environmental changes, such as the introduction of invasive species, are driving declines in the movement of nutrients across ecosystems with negative consequences for ecosystem function. Declines in nutrient inputs could thus have knock-on effects at higher trophic levels and broader ecological scales, yet these interconnections remain relatively unknown. Here we show that a terrestrial invasive species (black rats,Rattus rattus) disrupts a nutrient pathway provided by seabirds, ultimately altering the territorial behaviour of coral reef fish. In a replicated ecosystem-scale natural experiment, we found that reef fish territories were larger and the time invested in aggression lower on reefs adjacent to rat-infested islands compared with rat-free islands. This response reflected changes in the economic defendability of lower-quality resources, with reef fish obtaining less nutritional gain per unit foraging effort adjacent to rat-infested islands with low seabird populations. These results provide a novel insight into how the disruption of nutrient flows by invasive species can affect variation in territorial behaviour. Rat eradication as a conservation strategy therefore has the potential to restore species interactions via territoriality, which can scale up to influence populations and communities at higher ecological levels. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01931-8 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How can cheetahs and farmers get along better | Sometimes humans and animals come into conflict with each other. This can threaten peoples livelihoods and also threaten the animals lives. In central Namibia, farmers have a problem with cheetahs. The cheetahs prey on their baby cows (calves). In turn, the farmers often try to kill the wild cats in order to protect their cattle! Wouldnt it be great if we could study the situation and find a solution that suits both the farmers and the cheetahs? This is what we did. We tracked the cheetah's behavior. We figured out how farmers could manage their cattle so that cheetahs dont eat the calves. This could prevent farmers from losing their valuable livestock and stop them from trying to kill the cheetahs. | Significance The cheetah is a prominent example for humancarnivore conflicts and mitigation challenges. Its global population suffered a substantial decline throughout its range. Here, we present an in-depth and new understanding of the socio-spatial organization of the cheetah. We show that cheetahs maintain a network of communication hubs distributed in a regular pattern across the landscape, not contiguous with each other and separated by a surrounding matrix. Cheetahs spend a substantial amount of their time in these hubs, resulting in high local cheetah activity, which represents a high local predation risk for livestock. Implementing this knowledge, farmers were able to reduce livestock losses by 86%. Humanwildlife conflicts occur worldwide. Although many nonlethal mitigation solutions are available, they rarely use the behavioral ecology of the conflict species to derive effective and long-lasting solutions. Here, we use a long-term study with 106 GPS-collared free-ranging cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) to demonstrate how new insights into the socio-spatial organization of this species provide the key for such a solution. GPS-collared territory holders marked and defended communication hubs (CHs) in the core area of their territories. The CHs/territories were distributed in a regular pattern across the landscape such that they were not contiguous with each other but separated by a surrounding matrix. They were kept in this way by successive territory holders, thus maintaining this overdispersed distribution. The CHs were also visited by nonterritorial cheetah males and females for information exchange, thus forming hotspots of cheetah activity and presence. We hypothesized that the CHs pose an increased predation risk to young calves for cattle farmers in Namibia. In an experimental approach, farmers shifted cattle herds away from the CHs during the calving season. This drastically reduced their calf losses by cheetahs because cheetahs did not follow the herds but instead preyed on naturally occurring local wildlife prey in the CHs. This implies that in the cheetah system, there are problem areas, the CHs, rather than problem individuals. The incorporation of the behavioral ecology of conflict species opens promising areas to search for solutions in other conflict species with nonhomogenous space use. | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002487117 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | How can leopard seals survive climate change | Have you ever been by yourself and needed to get something at variability in the traits and behaviors of polar predators to off a high shelf, but couldnt reach? Now imagine you had assess how they will adapt to climate change. your whole class with you. Its likely that someone in your We tagged and studied a population of leopard seals in class could reach the high shelf. Antarctica. We looked at their morphology, movement Variability in traits (and behaviors) is a good thing. It means patterns, and diving behavior. We found lots of variability that groups of organisms can adjust and survive when in these traits in the leopard seal population, especially environments change. We know that animals living at the between males and females. We think this high variability North and South Poles, especially large predators, are in may help leopard seals survive better in the changing danger because of the changing climate. We wanted to look Antarctic environment. | Animals that display plasticity in behavioral, ecological, and morphological traits are better poised to cope with environmental disturbances. Here, we examined individual plasticity and intraspecific variation in the morphometrics, movement patterns, and dive behavior of an enigmatic apex predator, the leopard seal (Hydrurga leptonyx). Satellite/GPS tags and time-depth recorders were deployed on 22 leopard seals off the Western Antarctic Peninsula. Adult female leopard seals were significantly larger (45459 kg) and longer (30211 cm) than adult males (30222 kg, 27611 cm). As females were 50% larger than their male counterparts, leopard seals are therefore one of the most extreme examples of female-biased sexual size dimorphism in marine mammals. Female leopard seals also spent more time hauled-out on land and ice than males. In the austral spring/summer, three adult female leopard seals hauled-out on ice for 10+ days, which likely represent the first satellite tracks of parturition and lactation for the species. While we found sex-based differences in morphometrics and haul-out durations, other variables, including maximum distance traveled and dive parameters, did not vary by sex. Regardless of sex, some leopard seals remained in near-shore habitats, traveling less than 50 kilometers, while other leopard seals traveled up to 1,700 kilometers away from the tagging location. Overall, leopard seals were short (3.00.7 min) and shallow (298 m) divers. However, within this general pattern, some individual leopard seals primarily used short, shallow dives, while others switched between short, shallow dives and long, deep dives. We also recorded the single deepest and longest dive made by any leopard seal1, 256 meters for 25 minutes. Together, our results showcased high plasticity among leopard seals tagged in a single location. These flexible behaviors and traits may offer leopard seals, an ice-associated apex predator, resilience to the rapidly changing Southern Ocean. | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2022.976019/full | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | How can offshore mussel farms help to repair the ocean | Lots of people around the world love eating seafood! Unfortunately, some fishing practices harm seafloor habitats. Is there a way to enjoy resources from the ocean and help the environment at the same time? Mussels are a kind of shellfish that can be farmed at sea and collected for food. They grow in clumps, which may attract other animals looking for food and shelter. We wondered if building an offshore mussel farm could help restore ocean habitats damaged by years of harmful fishing practices. We used underwater videos to investigate how the number and type of animals found inside and outside a mussel farm changed over four years. We found that the areas inside the farm contained more mussels than areas outside. There were also more fish and seafood (such as lobster and crab) inside the farm than outside. Our findings show that offshore mussel farms may revitalize damaged ocean habitats. They also benefit humans and other marine animals. | The United Kingdom's first large-scale, offshore, long-line mussel farm deployed its first ropes in 2013 in Lyme Bay, southwest United Kingdom, located in an area of seabed that was heavily degraded due to historic bottom-towed fishing. It was hypothesised that due to the artificial structures that accumulate mussels and exclude destructive fishing practices, the seabed could be restored. To assess the restoration potential of the farm and its ecosystem interactions over time, a multi-method, annual monitoring approach was undertaken. Here, we tested the effects of the farm trial stations on the seabed habitat, epifauna and demersal species over 5 years. Responses of % mussel cover, sessile and sedentary, and mobile taxa were measured using three video methods. Within 2 years of infrastructure deployment, mussel clumps and shells were detected below the headlines, increasing the structural complexity of the seabed. After 4 years, there was a significantly greater abundance of mobile taxa compared to the Controls that remained open to trawling. Commercial European lobster and edible crab were almost exclusively recorded within the farm. We discuss whether these findings can be considered a restoration of the seabed and how these data can be used to inform the future management of offshore mariculture globally. | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aff2.77 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can oyster farms create homes for fish | Fish are fascinating animals. Individual fish have places they watch their behaviors. Environmental DNA helped us find call home as well as their own daily routines. We wanted to the species that are hard to see on camera, like very small find out whether oyster cages (gear used to farm oysters) or nocturnal fish. provide habitat for fish. Do they like to hang out there? Do We found fish species on video and species using they live there? Which species spend time there and what environmental DNA. Some species were abundant at the do they get up to? oyster cages. We even watched them getting up to behaviors We used two methods, underwater video cameras and like foraging for food and sheltering from predators and environmental DNA, to uncover the secret lives of fish. The currents. Oyster cages can act as artificial reefs, providing videos let us see which species hung out at the cages and valuable habitat for fish! | Multi-tiered oyster aquaculture cages may provide habitat for fish assemblages sim- ilar to natural structured seafloor. Methods were developed to assess fish assemblages associatedwith aquaculture gear and boulder habitat using underwater video census combined with envi-ronmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding. Action cameras were mounted on 3 aquaculture cages ata commercial eastern oyster Crassostrea virginica farm (cage) and among 3 boulders on a natural rock reef (boulder) from June to August 2017 in Long Island Sound, USA. Interval and continu-ous video recording strategies were tested. During interval recording, cameras collected 8 minvideo segments hourly from 07:00 to 19:00 h on cages only. Continuous video was also collectedfor 2?3 h on oyster cages and boulders. Data loggers recorded light intensity and current speed.Seawater was collected for eDNA metabarcoding on the reef and farm. MaxN measurements offish abundance were calculated in video, and 7 fish species were observed. Black sea bass Centro - pristis striata , cunner Tautogolabrus adspersus , scup Stenotomus chrysops , and tautog Tautoga onitis were the most abundant species observed in both oyster cage and boulder videos. In contin- uous video, black sea bass, scup, and tautog were observed more frequently and at higher abun-dance on the cage farm, while cunner were observed more frequently and at higher abundanceon boulders within the rock reef. eDNA metabarcoding detected 42 fish species at the farm andreef. Six species were detected using both methods. Applied in tandem, video recording andeDNA provided a comprehensive approach for describing fish assemblages in difficult to samplestructured oyster aquaculture and boulder habitats. | https://www.int-res.com/articles/aei2021/13/q013p277.pdf | Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | How can polar bears survive longer in a changing climate | Polar bears are decreasing in number because of climate fjords. They use ice from glaciers as well as sea ice to hunt. change. Polar bears depend on Arctic sea ice to hunt for their We conducted a study looking at their movement, genetics, food. In a warming climate, sea ice is disappearing. Because and demography. We found that Southeast Greenland polar of this, many polar bears around the Arctic are expected to bears dont travel much because of the rugged environment. disappear. Are there any places in the Arctic where polar They have been isolated from other polar bears for about bears might have a chance to survive when the sea ice years and are a genetically distinct group. Future studies disappears? What would those habitats look like? Would the of these polar bears will help with conservation efforts for polar bears that live there look or act differently? We found the species. a group of polar bears in Southeast Greenland that live in | Polar bears are susceptible to climate warming because of their dependence on sea ice, which is declining rapidly. We present the first evidence for a genetically distinct and functionally isolated group of polar bears in Southeast Greenland. These bears occupy sea-ice conditions resembling those projected for the High Arctic in the late 21st century, with an annual ice-free period that is >100 days longer than the estimated fasting threshold for the species. Whereas polar bears in most of the Arctic depend on annual sea ice to catch seals, Southeast Greenland bears have a year-round hunting platform in the form of freshwater glacial m?lange. This suggests that marine-terminating glaciers, although of limited availability, may serve as previously unrecognized climate refugia. Conservation of Southeast Greenland polar bears, which meet criteria for recognition as the worlds 20th polar bear subpopulation, is necessary to preserve the genetic diversity and evolutionary potential of the species. | https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abk2793 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can protecting lobsters be good for fishermen | Millions of animals, plants, and other organisms live in the they will lose their jobs and cannot provide fish for people to eat. ocean. Humans rely on marine ecosystems for seafood and Our study shows this worry is not necessarily true. Protecting other resources. Fishing is important, but if fishermen are not the marine environment can actually benefit fishermen, and careful, they can overfish and damage the ocean habitats with therefore all of us. their fishing gear. So, many people are working to protect the ocean. However, sometimes people living closest to the ocean worry that protecting it might harm their jobs. Fishermen depend on the oceans resources. If they are not allowed to continue fishing, | Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are designed to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services. Some MPAs are also established to benefit fisheries through increased egg and larval production, or the spillover of mobile juveniles and adults. Whether spillover influences fishery landings depend on the population status and movement patterns of target species both inside and outside of MPAs, as well as the status of the fishery and behavior of the fleet. We tested whether an increase in the lobster population inside two newly established MPAs influenced local catch, fishing effort, and catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) within the sustainable California spiny lobster fishery. We found greater build-up of lobsters within MPAs relative to unprotected areas, and greater increases in fishing effort and total lobster catch, but not CPUE, in fishing zones containing MPAs vs. those without MPAs. Our results show that a 35% reduction in fishing area resulting from MPA designation was compensated for by a 225% increase in total catch after 6-years, thus indicating at a local scale that the trade-off of fishing ground for no-fishing zones benefitted the fishery. | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82371-5 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | How can vultures and wind farms co-exist | Imagine how it would feel to fly through the sky on wings so We collected data on existing and proposed wind farms in wide, when you catch some rising warm air you soar for miles! south-eastern Europe, and compared them with data on the This is how vultures fly as they look out for their next meal. areas that cinereous vultures (Aegypius monachus) live in. We found that if the new wind farms go where planned, this Unfortunately, places that are best for vultures can also be population of vultures could be at serious risk of extinction. good locations for wind farms because theres lots of wind to turn their turbines and make electricity. When vultures fly We suggest an approach that would allow for Greece to exceed close to these turbines, the moving blades can hit them, killing its wind power targets, while protecting these vultures. or severely wounding them. | Wind farm development can combat climate change but may also threaten bird populations persistence through collision with wind turbine blades if such development is improperly planned strategically and cumulatively. Such improper planning may often occur. Numerous wind farms are planned in a region hosting the only cinereous vulture population in south-eastern Europe. We combined range use modelling and a Collision Risk Model (CRM) to predict the cumulative collision mortality for cinereous vulture under all operating and proposed wind farms. Four different vulture avoidance rates were considered in the CRM. Cumulative collision mortality was expected to be eight to ten times greater in the future (proposed and operating wind farms) than currently (operating wind farms), equivalent to 44% of the current population (103 individuals) if all proposals are authorized (2744 MW). Even under the most optimistic scenario whereby authorized proposals will not collectively exceed the national target for wind harnessing in the study area (960 MW), cumulative collision mortality would still be high (17% of current population) and likely lead to population extinction. Under any wind farm proposal scenario, over 92% of expected deaths would occur in the core area of the population, further implying inadequate spatial planning and implementation of relevant European legislation with scant regard for governmental obligations to protect key species. On the basis of a sensitivity map we derive a spatially explicit solution that could meet the national target of wind harnessing with a minimum conservation cost of less than 1% population loss providing that the population mortality (5.2%) caused by the operating wind farms in the core area would be totally mitigated. Under other scenarios, the vulture population would probably be at serious risk of extinction. Our win-win approach is appropriate to other potential conflicts where wind farms may cumulatively threaten wildlife populations. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0172685 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How can we help improve human-elephant conflict | When humans and wildlife share the same areas, they can To understand more about these types of conflict, we did come into conflict over resources. This is called human- interviews with rural people in Myanmar. The results of this wildlife conflict. This can be a big problem when the study will help wildlife managers find ways for elephants wildlife in question are large mammals (like tigers, lions, or and people to live side-by-side with less conflict! elephants). Can you imagine living alongside such giants? | Human-wildlife conflict has direct and indirect consequences for human communities. Understanding how both types of conflict affect communities is crucial to developing comprehensive and sustainable mitigation strategies. We conducted an interview survey of 381 participants in two rural areas in Myanmar where communities were exposed to human-elephant conflict (HEC). In addition to documenting and quantifying the types of direct and indirect impacts experienced by participants, we evaluated how HEC influences peoples attitudes towards elephant conservation. We found that 99% of participants suffered from some type of indirect impact from HEC, including fear for personal and family safety from elephants and fear that elephants will destroy their home. Despite experiencing moderate levels of indirect impacts from HEC at the community level, participants expressed attitudes consistent with supporting future elephant conservation programs. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253784 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Social-Science Articles | How can we keep our mountains healthy | Mountains are places people often go to visit and enjoy themselves. But mountains are also complex ecosystems that provide diverse resources, such as food, water, and energy, for over half the population worldwide! Without mountains, our normal everyday life would not be sustainable for long. Unfortunately, there are many threats to mountain habitats around the world. We wanted to identify those threats and to find solutions to them. We found that politics pose the greatest threat to mountain ecosystems and that these ecosystems are best managed by local communities based on their own community needs. | Mountain social-ecological systems (MtSES) are vital to humanity, providing ecosystem services to over half the planet's human population. Despite their importance, there has been no global assessment of threats to MtSES, even as they face unprecedented challenges to their sustainability. With survey data from 57 MtSES sites worldwide, we test a conceptual model of the types and scales of stressors and ecosystem services in MtSES and explore their distinct configurations according to their primary economic orientation and land use. We find that MtSES worldwide are experiencing both gradual and abrupt climatic, economic, and governance changes, with policies made by outsiders as the most ubiquitous challenge. Mountains that support primarily subsistence-oriented livelihoods, especially agropastoral systems, deliver abundant services but are also most at risk. Moreover, transitions from subsistence- to market-oriented economies are often accompanied by increased physical connectedness, reduced diversity of cross-scale ecosystem services, lowered importance of local knowledge, and shifting vulnerabilities to threats. Addressing the complex challenges facing MtSES and catalyzing transformations to MtSES sustainability will require cross-scale partnerships among researchers, stakeholders, and decision makers to jointly identify desired futures and adaptation pathways, assess trade-offs in prioritizing ecosystem services, and share best practices for sustainability. These transdisciplinary approaches will allow local stakeholders, researchers, and practitioners to jointly address MtSES knowledge gaps while simultaneously focusing on critical issues of poverty and food security. | https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018EF001024 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we make sure to catch only the fish we want to eat | How much do you think seafood is worth? Would it surprise solutions! you to know that the worlds seafood market was worth We wanted to find out whether we could use lights to over $ billion in ?! And its not just money. billion make gillnet fishing better. Could using illuminated nets people (over / of the worlds population) rely on seafood reduce the amount of bycatch? as their main source of protein. We found that illuminated gillnets reduced the amount of But the way that we fish is harming marine life. Bycatch, bycatch. Even better, fishers using the nets still caught lots where animals like sharks and turtles are accidentally of the fish that they were targeting and spent less time caught, is a big problem. We urgently need to find retrieving the nets. Its a win-win! | Small-scale fisheries are vital for food security, nutrition, and livelihoods in coastal areas throughout the worlds oceans As intricately linked social-ecological systems, small-scale fisheries require management approaches that help ensure both ecological and socioeconomic sustainability. Given their ease of use and lucrative nature, coastal gillnet fisheries are globally ubiquitous.10,15 However, these fisheries often result in high discarded capture of non-target organisms (bycatch) that can lead to significant cascading effects throughout trophic chains16, 17, 18 and costly fisheries restrictions that result in important revenue losses in coastal communities with scarce economic alternatives.19,20 Despite these challenges, few solutions have been developed and broadly adopted to decrease bycatch in coastal gillnet fisheries, particularly in developing nations.5,21 Here we used controlled experiments along Mexicos Baja California peninsula to show that illuminating gillnets with green LED lightsan emerging technology originally developed to mitigate sea turtle bycatchsignificantly reduced mean rates of total discarded bycatch biomass by 63%, which included significant decreases in elasmobranch (95%), Humboldt squid (81%), and unwanted finfish (48%). Moreover, illuminated nets significantly reduced the mean time required to retrieve and disentangle nets by 57%. In contrast, there were no significant differences in target fish catch or value. These findings advance our understanding of how artificial illumination affects operational efficiency and changes in catch rates in coastal gillnet fisheries, while illustrating the value of assessing broad-scale ecological and socioeconomic effects of species-specific conservation strategies. | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960982221017371 | Elementary school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we protect fish better | People love eating fish, fishing for them, and seeing them underwater while snorkeling or diving. In fact, fish provide billions of dollars to the U.S. (and world) economy each year. Unfortunately, overfishing has depleted many fish populations. How can we protect them better, to ensure sustainable fisheries that keep us fed and support our economies in the future?Protecting fish while they are reproducing is a critical part of an effective fisheries management plan. But to do this, we need to understand when and where spawning (fish mating) happens. We analyzed over 30 years of data from the southeast Atlantic coast of the US. This allowed us to create models to predict the locations of spawning grounds and other factors that are important for fish reproduction, such as time of the year and ocean characteristics (water temperature and features on the seafloor). | Managed reef fish in the Atlantic Ocean of the southeastern United States (SEUS) support a multi-billion dollar industry. There is a broad interest in locating and protecting spawning fish from harvest, to enhance productivity and reduce the potential for overfishing. We assessed spatiotemporal cues for spawning for six species from four reef fish families, using data on individual spawning condition collected by over three decades of regional fishery-independent reef fish surveys, combined with a series of predictors derived from bathymetric features. We quantified the size of spawning areas used by reef fish across many years and identified several multispecies spawning locations. We quantitatively identified cues for peak spawning and generated predictive maps for Gray Triggerfish (Balistes capriscus), White Grunt (Haemulon plumierii), Red Snapper (Lutjanus campechanus), Vermilion Snapper (Rhomboplites aurorubens), Black Sea Bass (Centropristis striata), and Scamp (Mycteroperca phenax). For example, Red Snapper peak spawning was predicted in 24.729.0C water prior to the new moon at locations with high curvature in the 2430 m depth range off northeast Florida during June and July. External validation using scientific and fishery-dependent data collections strongly supported the predictive utility of our models. We identified locations where reconfiguration or expansion of existing marine protected areas would protect spawning reef fish. We recommend increased sampling off southern Florida (south of 27 N), during winter months, and in high-relief, high current habitats to improve our understanding of timing and location of reef fish spawning off the southeastern United States. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0172968 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we protect valuable marine habitats for fisheries | Have you ever wondered where the fish you eat comes from? Many fisheries all over the world are declining and need protection. But it is hard. Fishery species dont stay in one place. In fact, many fishery species use many habitats over their lifetime. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) can help protect marine ecosystems and fisheries. They can restrict fishing or ban harmful fishing equipment. We wanted to understand the role that MPAs and different habitats have in supporting fisheries. So we looked at data from fisheries in Jersey and France. We found that subtidal sediments were the most valuable habitats. Yet they were the least protected by MPAs. We also found that different species were protected to varying degrees depending on the habitats they relied on. It will be important to consider species habitat use when designing management plans for fisheries in the future. | Fisheries are in decline worldwide, and Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are being advocated as tools that can not only protect and restore biodiversity but also improve fisheries sustainability and protect fisher livelihoods. To understand the role of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in underpinning commercial fisheries, this study demonstrates the economic value of Jersey's benthic substrates (habitats) for five predominant species fished by Jersey and French vessels: Homarus gammarus, Cancer pagurus, Maja brachydactyla, Pecten maximus and Buccinum undatum. Value was apportioned between habitats that support these commercial species across their essential life history stages, and the proportional economic value that was protected from bottom-towed fishing within MPAs was analysed. Multiple habitats across Jersey's territorial waters contributed a total economic value of 14,664,729, with 4,127,999 protected within MPAs. Overall, subtidal sediment was the most valuable habitat to both Jersey (2.12 million) and French (2.47 million) fisheries but was also the least protected habitat from bottom-towed fishing (2.73%). Our findings support an ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management and emphasise the importance of considering species life histories, and their habitat requirements, in management plans. | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/fme.12571 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How can we protect wildlife through ecotourism | Many countries try to use ecotourism as a tool for wildlife conservation, hoping that the increased income for local people will make them value wildlife more. But this strategy is not always as successful as conservationists have hoped. This is why we wanted to test a new model: what if the amount of money local people receive depends on how many and what type of animals tourists will see? We tested this approach for four years in a protected area in Laos in Southeast Asia. Our preliminary results were promising: the illegal hunting of animals declined near the ecotourism site, and wildlife sightings by tourists increased. | Ecotourism as a strategy for achieving biodiversity conservation often results in limited conservation impact relative to its investment and revenue return. In cases where an ecotourism strategy has been used, projects are frequently criticized for not providing sufficient evidence on how the strategy has reduced threats or improved the status of the biodiversity it purports to protect. In Lao PDR, revenue from ecotourism has not been directly linked to or dependent on improvements in biodiversity and there is no evidence that ecotourism enterprises have contributed to conservation. In other developing countries, direct payments through explicit contracts in return for ecosystem services have been proposed as a more cost-effective means for achieving conservation, although further research is needed to evaluate the impact of this approach. To address this need, a new model was tested in the Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area (NPA) in Lao PDR using a direct payments approach to create ecotourism incentives for villagers to increase wildlife populations. Over a four-year period, we monitored along a theory of change to evaluate assumptions about the linkages between intermediate results and biological outcomes. Preliminary results show a negative correlation between ecotourism benefits and hunting infractions in target villages; no increase in hunting sign in the ecotourism sector of the NPA relative to a three-fold increase in hunting sign across the NPAs non-tourism sectors; and an overall increase in wildlife sightings. This case provides key lessons on the design of a direct payments approach for an ecotourism strategy, including how to combine threat monitoring and data on wildlife sightings to evaluate strategy effectiveness, on setting rates for wildlife sightings and village fees, and the utility of the approach for protecting very rare species. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0186133 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How can we quickly assess the status of eagles | Can you predict how a movie will end by looking only at And we are glad we did, because we found that they are a couple of snapshots from some early scenes? Thats not reliable. Commonly used measures like how many what many ecologists have to do to quickly assess birds are able to breed and how young birds are when whether an animal population is at risk: they need a they begin to occupy nests do not accurately predict the method to collect data quickly to predict how animal status of an eagle population unless they are combined populations will fare in the future. This is especially with other data such as the birds survival rate or how difficult with animals that live long lives (like a really long much food and habitat is available to them. movie!), such as whales, sea turtles, and birds of prey. Here, we used a mathematical model to examine whether two commonly used snapshot metrics for assessing the health of long-lived eagle populations are reliable. | The development of snapshot metrics that can serve as reliable diagnostic tools for rapidly assessing population status has great appeal. We used stochastic simulation modeling and recursive partitioning to evaluate the reliability of two proposed snapshot metrics in territorial raptors: the floater/breeder ratio and the rate of nest occupancy by immature subadults. A demographic model, parameterized with field data from an intensively studied population of golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), showed that neither metric, alone or together, is a good indicator of population status. However, one snapshot metric, the floater/breeder ratio, can help predict the risk of population decline when considered in combination with other information about the population or environment that may be quickly appraised in the field or literature. Specifically, qualitative knowledge of adult survival and whether the population is limited by prey or habitat availability can help with rapid risk assessment of raptor populations. | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320717305116 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we reduce the impact of fishing | How many times do you think you have eaten fish this year? Fish is delicious and its really good for you, but we need to make sure that we dont over-fish our seas and oceans (Fig. ). That way there are enough fish left to feed us for all the years to come. We propose three simple rules for fisheries management, which would reduce the impact of fishing on the major fish species. The rules would also help to rebalance the ecosystems and reduce the damage that fishing causes when boats scrape their nets over the seabed to catch fish. Figure : Large fishing nets allow for a ton catch of mackerel in one big sweep. | Minimizing the impact of fishing is an explicit goal in international agreements as well as in regional directives and national laws. To assist in practical implementation, three simple rules for fisheries management are proposed in this study: 1) take less than nature by ensuring that mortality caused by fishing is less than the natural rate of mortality; 2) maintain population sizes above half of natural abundance, at levels where populations are still likely to be able to fulfil their ecosystem functions as prey or predator; and 3) let fish grow and reproduce, by adjusting the size at first capture such that the mean length in the catch equals the length where the biomass of an unexploited cohort would be maximum (Lopt). For rule 3), the basic equations describing growth in age-structured populations are re-examined and a new optimum length for first capture (Lc_opt) is established. For a given rate of fishing mortality, Lc_opt keeps catch and profit near their theoretical optima while maintaining large population sizes. Application of the three rules would not only minimize the impact of fishing on commercial species, it may also achieve several goals of ecosystem-based fisheries management, such as rebuilding the biomass of prey and predator species in the system and reducing collateral impact of fishing, because with more fish in the water, shorter duration of gear deployment is needed for a given catch. The study also addresses typical criticisms of these common sense rules for fisheries management. | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/faf.12146/abstract | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we track life in the ocean | Have you ever tried to count all the different species in a pond? Its very hard, especially when you try to find all the tiny animals hiding among the weeds. Now, imagine if you wanted to count all the species in the sea! Scientists struggle to monitor life in the ocean because it is so vast and deep. Yet, we need to know exactly whats down there in order to protect it.We wanted to use the bits of DNA that organisms leave behind in their environment to work out which species were present. This is called environmental DNA (eDNA). We looked at interactions between different life forms in Monterey Bay, California. We also looked at how they responded to seasonal and environmental change. We found that different species were present throughout the year. Warmer waters changed what was there. We also found that certain species (such as humpback whales) can be especially useful for telling us about the environment. Environmental DNA proved to be an exciting new method for tracking and protecting life in the ocean! | Environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis allows the simultaneous examination of organisms across multiple trophic levels and domains of life, providing critical information about the complex biotic interactions related to ecosystem change. Here we used multilocus amplicon sequencing of eDNA to survey biodiversity from an eighteen-month (20152016) time-series of seawater samples from Monterey Bay, California. The resulting dataset encompasses 663 taxonomic groups (at Family or higher taxonomic rank) ranging from microorganisms to mammals. We inferred changes in the composition of communities, revealing putative interactions among taxa and identifying correlations between these communities and environmental properties over time. Community network analysis provided evidence of expected predator-prey relationships, trophic linkages, and seasonal shifts across all domains of life. We conclude that eDNA-based analyses can provide detailed information about marine ecosystem dynamics and identify sensitive biological indicators that can suggest ecosystem changes and inform conservation strategies. Increasingly, eDNA is being used to infer ecological interactions. Here the authors sample eDNA over 18 months in a marine environment and use co-occurrence network analyses to infer potential interactions among organisms from microbes to mammals, testing how they change over time in response to oceanographic factors. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-14105-1.pdf | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How do bees choose what to eat | Hard working bees play a crucial role in our ecosystem, and fats. We tested three types of pollen to see if they help helping plants reproduce. They are also vital for us they bees grow. We then gave the bees a choice between the help produce a lot of our food! Bees have a special menu of three types of natural pollen and between modified pollen. their own: they eat pollen and drink nectar from flowers. We This allowed us to analyze the bees preferences and to wanted to know if honey bees can evaluate the quality of the conclude that honey bees either cant or dont evaluate the pollen to see if it has the right mixture of different proteins nutritional values of pollen. | Honey bee workers (Apis mellifera) consume a variety of pollens to meet the majority of their requirements for protein and lipids. Recent work indicates that honey bees prefer diets that reflect the proper ratio of nutrients necessary for optimal survival and homeostasis. This idea relies on the precept that honey bees evaluate the nutritional composition of the foods provided to them. While this has been shown in bumble bees, the data for honey bees are mixed. Further, there is controversy as to whether foragers can evaluate the nutritional value of pollens, especially if they do not consume it. Here, we focused on nurse workers, who eat most of the pollen coming into the hive. We tested the hypothesis that nurses prefer diets with higher nutritional value. We first determined the nutritional profile, number of plant taxa (richness), and degree of hypopharyngeal gland (HG) growth conferred by three honey bee collected pollens. We then presented nurses with these same three pollens in paired choice assays and measured consumption. To further test whether nutrition influenced preference, we also presented bees with natural pollens supplemented with protein or lipids and liquid diets with protein and lipid ratios equal to the natural pollens. Different pollens conferred different degrees of HG growth, but despite these differences, nurse bees did not always prefer the most nutritious pollens. Adding protein and/or lipids to less desirable pollens minimally increased pollen attractiveness, and nurses did not exhibit a strong preference for any of the three liquid diets. We conclude that different pollens provide different nutritional benefits, but that nurses either cannot or do not assess pollen nutritional value. This implies that the nurses may not be able to communicate information about pollen quality to the foragers, who regulate the pollens coming into the hive. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191050 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How do corals spread in the deep sea | Did you know that more people have been on the moon than We used clever genetic analysis to unlock information to the very bottom of the sea? Science is hard to do at such hidden in the corals DNA and found that this was true for depths, which is a problem for deep sea animals its hard to one species, but not for the other. We believe that ocean look after something if you dont know much about it! currents are also important in how corals disperse. This new information can help us to protect these important animals We wanted to know how seamounts (underwater mountains) (and others!) in the future. affect the populations of two species of deep sea coral. Can they act as stepping stones helping the corals to disperse (spread) throughout the sea? Hi, Im Diane (D. dianthus)! | Ecological processes in the deep sea are poorly understood due to the logistical constraints of sampling thousands of metres below the oceans surface and remote from most land masses. Under such circumstances, genetic data provides unparalleled insight into biological and ecological relationships. We use microsatellite DNA to compare the population structure, reproductive mode and dispersal capacity in two deep sea corals from seamounts in the Southern Ocean. The solitary coral Desmophyllum dianthus has widespread dispersal consistent with its global distribution and resilience to disturbance. In contrast, for the matrix-forming colonial coral Solenosmilia variabilis asexual reproduction is important and the dispersal of sexually produced larvae is negligible, resulting in isolated populations. Interestingly, despite the recognised impacts of fishing on seamount communities, genetic diversity on fished and unfished seamounts was similar for both species, suggesting that evolutionary resilience remains despite reductions in biomass. Our results provide empirical evidence that a group of seamounts can function either as isolated islands or stepping stones for dispersal for different taxa. Furthermore different strategies will be required to protect the two sympatric corals and consequently the recently declared marine reserves in this region may function as a network for D. dianthus, but not for S. variabilis. | https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46103 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How do dams affect fish populations | Hydroelectric dams look like barriers between bodies of water, where fish on one side of the dam live and breed without interacting with fish on the other side. We wanted to know how a Winnipeg River dam, the Slave Falls Generating Station (GS), had actually impacted a long-lived fish, the Lake Sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens). Do the sturgeon upstream and downstream of the dam live and interact differently since the dam was built? We caught fish and analyzed their size and genetics on both sides of the dam and compared our results to a computer simulation that modeled fish population genetics. We found that the Slave Falls GS is not that different than the waterfall that existed nearby in the recent past, in terms of preventing Lake Sturgeon from swimming upstream and mating with the fish that live in that area. | Many hydroelectric dams have been in place for 50 - >100 years, which for most fish species means that enough generations have passed for fragmentation induced divergence to have accumulated. However, for long-lived species such as Lake Sturgeon, Acipenser fulvescens, it should be possible to discriminate between historical population structuring and contemporary gene flow and improve the broader understanding of anthropogenic influence. On the Winnipeg River, Manitoba, two hypotheses were tested: 1) Measureable quantities of former reservoir dwelling Lake Sturgeon now reside downstream of the Slave Falls Generating Station, and 2) genetically differentiated populations of Lake Sturgeon occur upstream and downstream, a result of historical structuring. Genetic methods based on ten microsatellite markers were employed, and simulations were conducted to provide context. With regards to contemporary upstream to downstream contributions, the inclusion of length-at-age data proved informative. Both pairwise relatedness and Bayesian clustering analysis substantiated that fast-growing outliers, apparently entrained after residing in the upstream reservoir for several years, accounted for ~15% of the Lake Sturgeon 525750 mm fork length captured downstream. With regards to historical structuring, upstream and downstream populations were found to be differentiated (FST = 0.011, and 0.0130.014 when fast-growing outliers were excluded), and heterozygosity metrics were higher for downstream versus upstream juveniles. Historical asymmetric (downstream) gene flow in the vicinity of the generating station was the most logical explanation for the observed genetic structuring. In this section of the Winnipeg River, construction of a major dam does not appear to have fragmented a previously panmictic Lake Sturgeon population, but alterations to habitat may be influencing upstream to downstream contributions in unexpected ways. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0174269 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How do deep-sea hot spring ecosystems work | We have all heard that living creatures need the sun to survive, either directly through photosynthesis or by consuming biomass produced by photosynthesis. But is this really true for all of them? Some organisms survive in the deep sea where there is no sunlight using energy from our planet instead of our sun in a process known as chemosynthesis. We wanted to know more about these microorganisms, especially the ones that live below the sea floor at deep-sea hot springs. So we examined fluids from a hot spring in the Pacific at in situ pressure and temperature and measured their productivity and rates of metabolism. Our study showed that sub-seafloor microorganisms were highly productive and fast-growing. Our estimates allow us to assess the importance of hot springs for global cycles of essential elements, such as carbon and nitrogen. | The existence of a chemosynthetic subseafloor biosphere was immediately recognized when deep-sea hot springs were discovered in 1977. However, quantifying how much new carbon is fixed in this environment has remained elusive. In this study, we incubated natural subseafloor communities under in situ pressure/temperature and measured their chemosynthetic growth efficiency and metabolic rates. Combining these data with fluid flux and in situ chemical measurements, we derived empirical constraints on chemosynthetic activity in the natural environment. Our study shows subseafloor microorganisms are highly productive (up to 1.4 Tg C produced yearly), fast-growing (turning over every 1741 hours), and physiologically diverse. These estimates place deep-sea hot springs in a quantitative framework and allow us to assess their importance for global biogeochemical cycles. | http://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6756 | Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How do dogs make trouble for wildlife in the Andes | What do pets and wild animals have in common? Some pets like dogs, for instance can easily turn back into wild animals when abandoned or let loose. This is especially true for places where people lack resources or education to properly take care of their pets. Right now, we have over 1 billion feral (wild) dogs roaming our planet, often in packs. These dogs are probably impacting native wildlife. We wanted to know whether dogs were a problem for eight naturally occurring carnivores in the Andean mountains in Ecuador. We set up over 500 camera traps with motion sensors to document whether there are fewer carnivores in areas where dogs are present. We found that roaming dogs did indeed have a negative impact on four of the native carnivores we studied. | Although the Andes have long been occupied by people, habitat loss, fragmentation through deforestation, and other human activities such as introduction of invasive species have increased drastically during the past century. The Ecuadorian Andes are considered a biodiversity hotspot. However, the fauna and threats to the region are poorly studied, and understanding of factors that shape the distribution of species in habitats disturbed by human activities is needed to identify and mitigate region-wide threats to wildlife. We evaluated factors associated with patterns of occurrence of Andean carnivores in landscapes of the northern Ecuadorian Andes, particularly habitat loss, fragmentation, and occupancy of domestic dogs, and determined whether thresholds occurred for these factors beyond which carnivore occurrence declined markedly. Five study areas (each 20 x 20 km) were surveyed with a total effort of 2,800 camera trap nights. Occupancies of four of the eight carnivores known from the region were best predicted by occupancy of domestic dogs rather than measures of habitat loss and fragmentation [Andean fox (Pseudalopex culpaeus), puma (Puma concolor), striped hog-nosed skunk (Conepatus semistriatus), and Andean bear (Tremarctos ornatus)]. The two largest carnivores, puma and Andean bear, demonstrated significant threshold responses to the presence of domestic dogs at two sites. Four smaller carnivores were recorded too infrequently to model occupancy, and at least two of these species appear to be in decline. The magnitude of domestic dog impacts on native species in tropical areas like the Ecuadorian Andes currently are not recognized. Results of our study indicate that small and large carnivores are in urgent need of conservation and clearly point to dogs as a significant threat to a broad range of native species. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0192346 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles | How do nutrients change flowering in prairies | Farmers today apply more synthetic fertilizers to farm fields Do they all just grow better? Or could there be any negative than ever before but not all of these nutrients are used by side effects? To answer these questions, we systematically crops: some fertilizer escapes through the air, soil, or water. added nutrients to experimental patches of prairie. We Nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium flow off farm fields found that these added nutrients (specifically nitrogen) when it rains, billow into the air when fields are plowed, and made early-season plants thrive while reducing the amount drift with the wind to other areas. Extra nutrients are also of late-season plants, but only in some prairie types. This released to the air when people burn fossil fuels. We wanted change could have serious implications for the way prairie to find out: what happens when these extra nutrients land ecosystems function. on wild prairie ecosystems? How do its wild plants respond? | The distribution of flowering across the growing season is governed by each species evolutionary history and climatic variability. However, global change factors, such as eutrophication and invasion, can alter plant community composition and thus change the distribution of flowering across the growing season. We examined three ecoregions (tall-, mixed, and short-grass prairie) across the U.S. Central Plains to determine how nutrient (nitrogen (N), phosphorus, and potassium (+micronutrient)) addition alters the temporal patterns of plant flowering traits. We calculated total community flowering potential (FP) by distributing peak-season plant cover values across the growing season, allocating each species cover to only those months in which it typically flowers. We also generated separate FP profiles for exotic and native species and functional group. We compared the ability of the added nutrients to shift the distribution of these FP profiles (total and sub-groups) across the growing season. In all ecoregions, N increased the relative cover of both exotic species and C3 graminoids that flower in May through August. The cover of C4 graminoids decreased with added N, but the response varied by ecoregion and month. However, these functional changes only aggregated to shift the entire communitys FP profile in the tall-grass prairie, where the relative cover of plants expected to flower in May and June increased and those that flower in September and October decreased with added N. The relatively low native cover in May and June may leave this ecoregion vulnerable to disturbance-induced invasion by exotic species that occupy this temporal niche. There was no change in the FP profile of the mixed and short-grass prairies with N addition as increased abundance of exotic species and C3 graminoids replaced other species that flower at the same time. In these communities a disturbance other than nutrient addition may be required to disrupt phenological patterns. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0178440 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How do oil spills impact fiddler crabs | Crude oil which is used to make gasoline, fuel oils, asphalt, We analyzed data collected by five different studies over a and some plastic products can be toxic for many coastal and -year period in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon marine animals and plants when spilled in the environment. oil spill. We saw that the oil spill reduced the number of fiddler Thats why oil spills in the ocean can be a problem. We wanted crabs, likely killed many of them directly, and changed the to know what impact a large spill might have on fiddler crabs. species of fiddler crabs present in the marsh for years after the These small crabs play a big role in their coastal salt marsh spill. Changes in fiddler crab populations may have affected ecosystem, so if something harms them, other parts of the other parts of the ecosystem, including marsh plant growth, ecosystem could suffer. soils, and predators of fiddler crabs. | TheDeepwater Horizonoil spill was the largest marine oil spill in US waters to date and one of the largest worldwide. Impacts of this spill on salt marsh vegetation have been well documented, although impacts on marsh macroinvertebrates have received less attention. To examine impacts of the oil spill on an important marsh invertebrate and ecosystem engineer, we conducted a meta-analysis on fiddler crabs (Ucaspp.) using published sources and newly available Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) and Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) data. Fiddler crabs influence marsh ecosystem structure and function through their burrowing and feeding activities and are key prey for a number of marsh and estuarine predators. We tested the hypothesis that the spill affected fiddler crab burrow density (crab abundance), burrow diameter (crab size), and crab species composition. Averaged across multiple studies, sites, and years, our synthesis revealed a negative effect of oiling on all three metrics. Burrow densities were reduced by 39% in oiled sites, with impacts and incomplete recovery observed over 20102014. Burrow diameters were reduced from 2010 to 2011, but appeared to have recovered by 2012. Fiddler crab species composition was altered through at least 2013 and only returned to reference conditions where marsh vegetation recovered, via restoration planting in one case. Given the spatial and temporal extent of data analyzed, this synthesis provides compelling evidence that theDeepwater Horizonspill suppressed populations of fiddler crabs in oiled marshes, likely affecting other ecosystem attributes, including marsh productivity, marsh soil characteristics, and associated predators. | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12237-016-0072-6 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How do our outdoor activities impact wildlife | Do you love seeing wildlife when youre wandering around in are common, but capercaillie are on the brink of extinction in the woods? Like a majestic deer, or a beautiful bird? Well, the that area. love might not be very mutual. In fact, many animals avoid us, We found that both red deer and capercaillie avoided hiking even if we dont mean any harm. trails in our study areas. Interestingly, the extent of avoidance So, what impact do our outdoor activities have on wildlife? changed between the seasons, and, in the case of deer, even We set out to answer this question by radio tracking the between day and night! Effective natural area management whereabouts of red deer and capercaillie (also called wood plans that aim at protecting wildlife and reducing human animal grousea kind of bird) in the Black Forest in Germany. Deer conflict need to take these temporal differences into account. | The rapid spread and diversification of outdoor recreation can impact on wildlife in various ways, often leading to the avoidance of disturbed habitats. To mitigate human-wildlife conflicts, spatial zonation schemes can be implemented to separate human activities from key wildlife habitats, e.g., by designating undisturbed wildlife refuges or areas with some level of restriction to human recreation and land use. However, mitigation practice rarely considers temporal differences in human-wildlife interactions. We used GPS telemetry data from 15 red deer to study the seasonal (winter vs. summer) and diurnal (day vs. night) variation in recreation effects on habitat use in a study region in south-western Germany where a spatial zonation scheme has been established. Our study aimed to determine if recreation infrastructure and spatial zonation affected red deer habitat use and whether these effects varied daily or seasonally. Recreation infrastructure did not affect home range selection in the study area, but strongly determined habitat use within the home range. The spatial zonation scheme was reflected in both of these two levels of habitat selection, with refuges and core areas being more frequently used than the border zones. Habitat use differed significantly between day and night in both seasons. Both summer and winter recreation trails, and nearby foraging habitats, were avoided during day, whereas a positive association was found during night. We conclude that human recreation has an effect on red deer habitat use, and when designing mitigation measures daily and seasonal variation in human-wildlife interactions should be taken into account. We advocate using spatial zonation in conjunction with temporal restrictions (i.e., banning nocturnal recreation activities) and the creation of suitable foraging habitats away from recreation trails. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0175134#pone.0175134.ref011 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles; Pollution Articles | How do pesticides get into honey | Honey is natures sweetest gift. But did you know that honey Since , the European Union banned neonicotinoids may contain pesticides? Farmers use pesticides to kill pests in flowering crops that bees visit. We wanted to know that harm their crops. But pesticides also hurt honey bees how effective this policy was. Does UK honey still contain and other beneficial insects. Furthermore, when bees collect neonicotinoids? Here, we collected and tested honey samples nectar from flowers which received pesticide treatments, from beekeepers across the UK. We found that about a fifth these chemicals make their way into the honey. In the of all honey contained neonicotinoids. These chemicals are past, scientists found neonicotinoids (a class of pesticides) not at dangerous levels for human health but may harm the in about half of the honey samples collected in the United bees in the long run. Kingdom. | Due to concerns over negative impacts on insect pollinators, the European Union has implemented a moratorium on the use of three neonicotinoid pesticide seed dressings for mass-flowering crops. We assessed the effectiveness of this policy in reducing the exposure risk to honeybees by collecting 130 samples of honey from bee keepers across the UK before (2014: N = 21) and after the moratorium was in effect (2015: N = 109). Neonicotinoids were present in about half of the honey samples taken before the moratorium, and they were present in over a fifth of honey samples following the moratorium. Clothianidin was the most frequently detected neonicotinoid. Neonicotinoid concentrations declined from May to September in the year following the ban. However, the majority of post-moratorium neonicotinoid residues were from honey harvested early in the year, coinciding with oilseed rape flowering. Neonicotinoid concentrations were correlated with the area of oilseed rape surrounding the hive location. These results suggest mass flowering crops may contain neonicotinoid residues where they have been grown on soils contaminated by previously seed treated crops. This may include winter seed treatments applied to cereals that are currently exempt from EU restrictions. Although concentrations of neonicotinoids were low (<2.0 ng g-1), and posed no risk to human health, they may represent a continued risk to honeybees through long-term chronic exposure. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189681 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | How do plants keep in touch | If someone behind you tapped you on the shoulder, your first response would probably be to turn around. All living organisms respond to stimuli, and plants are no exception to this rule. Since they cannot turn around, though, how would they respond to light contact with neighboring plants? Are plants in touch with their neighbors? We searched for the answer to this question. We applied a light touch to potato plants and measured changes in their trichomes (plants hair), biomass distribution, and the volatile compounds they released. We also analyzed changes in plant structure, physiology, and interactions with insects. Our results showed that plants do respond to light touch by their neighboring plants. This affects their structure in a way that makes them shorter and stockier compared to the untouched plants. Curiously, insects do not find the smell of touched plants very attractive and prefer their untouched counterparts. | In natural habitats plants can be exposed to brief and light contact with neighbouring plants. This mechanical stimulus may represent a cue that induces responses to nearby plants. However, little is known about the effect of touching on plant growth and interaction with insect herbivores. To simulate contact between plants, a soft brush was used to apply light and brief mechanical stimuli to terminal leaves of potato Solanum tuberosum L. The number of non-glandular trichomes on the leaf surface was counted on images made by light microscope while glandular trichomes and pavement cells were counted on images made under scanning electronic microscope. Volatile compounds were identified and quantified using coupled gas chromatographymass spectrometry (GC-MS). Treated plants changed their pattern of biomass distribution; they had lower stem mass fraction and higher branch and leaf mass fraction than untouched plants. Size, weight and number of tubers were not significantly affected. Touching did not cause trichome damage nor change their total number on touched terminal leaves. However, on primary leaves the number of glandular trichomes and pavement cells was significantly increased. Touching altered the volatile emission of treated plants; they released higher quantities of the sesquiterpenes (E)--caryophyllene, germacrene D-4-ol and (E)-nerolidol, and lower quantities of the terpenes (E)-ocimene and linalool, indicating a systemic effect of the treatment. The odour of touched plants was significantly less preferred by the aphids Macrosiphum euphorbiae and Myzus persicae compared to odour of untouched plants. The results suggest that light contact may have a potential role in the detection of neighbouring plants and may affect plant-insect interactions. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0165742 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How do seabirds share | Imagine you and your friends are working together on a project for art class. But theres a problem. You only have one pencil for each color needed to complete it. Uh-oh! Each of you wants to start with yellow, so what do you do? Argue over the yellow pencil? Or divide the pencils so one person starts with yellow, while someone else uses green, and another person starts with red? You guessed right! Arguing is not as smart as finding a way to split up the pencils. Did you know seabirds know the importance of sharing too? They live in large groups with hundreds of birds and many types of seabirds. They also have limited resources not pencils, but their food. We wanted to know how seabirds split up their limited resources to survive together! | Sympatric species must sufficiently differentiate aspects of their ecological niche to alleviate complete interspecific competition and stably coexist within the same area. Seabirds provide a unique opportunity to understand patterns of niche segregation among coexisting species because they form large multi-species colonies of breeding aggregations with seemingly overlapping diets and foraging areas. Recent biologging tools have revealed that colonial seabirds can differentiate components of their foraging strategies. Specifically, small, diving birds with high wing-loading may have small foraging radii compared with larger or non-diving birds. In the Gulf of St-Lawrence in Canada, we investigated whether and how niche differentiation occurs in four incubating seabird species breeding sympatrically using GPS-tracking and direct field observations of prey items carried by adults to chicks: the Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica), razorbill (Alca torda), common murre (Uria aalge), and black-legged kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla). Although there was overlap at foraging hotspots, all species differentiated in either diet (prey species, size and number) or foraging range. Whereas puffins and razorbills consumed multiple smaller prey items that were readily available closer to the colony, murres selected larger more diverse prey that were accessible due to their deeper diving capability. Kittiwakes compensated for their surface foraging by having a large foraging range, including foraging largely at a specific distant hotspot. These foraging habitat specialisations may alleviate high interspecific competition allowing for their coexistence, providing insight on multispecies colonial living. | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-81583-z | Elementary school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How do woodpeckers choose where to nest | Many human activities disturb the natural habitats of various species. This is why it is very important for wildlife managers to determine and protect high-quality habitats, which are habitats the most reproductively successful individuals choose. When it comes to breeding birds, researchers usually identify habitat by comparing the characteristics of the vegetation where pairs choose to nest to the characteristics of the other available but neglected vegetation. We suspected that this method was not reliable for identifying high-quality habitat, because it doesnt account for the preferences of early breeders, who are usually a lot more experienced and reproductively successful birds. This is why we contrasted the choices of earlier breeding yellow-bellied sapsucker pairs to those of the later ones. We then compared this method to the one usually used. We found that measuring the preferences of early breeders led to a better ability to measure the quality of the habitat. | Despite the prevalent use of nest-site selection studies to define habitat quality for birds, many studies relying on use-availability analysis have found poor correlations between selected vegetation and reproductive success. Using 3 years of data from northeastern British Columbia (20072009), we determined timing of breeding from hatching dates and contrasted the nest-site selection of earlier (n = 22) with later-nesting pairs (n = 36) of yellow-bellied sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus varius), because early breeders were expected to be more reproductively successful. We then compared these choices with those identified from use-availability analysis, and determined whether reproductive performance (fledgling production) was related to selected vegetation. None of the vegetation characteristics selected for nest sites from available vegetation predicted reproductive performance. Earlier-nesting pairs fledged more young on average than later breeders (4.41, SE = 0.18 versus 3.92, SE = 0.16), and chose less decayed aspen trees for nesting, that were surrounded on average by 3 times the number of food trees (paper birch, Betula papyrifera). Potential preference for birch trees was masked in the use-availability analysis, because the selection rate was dominated by the choices of the larger number of later-nesting pairs. Similarly, the majority (69%) of nest cavity entrances faced south, but earlier breeding pairs excavated northward-oriented cavities more frequently than did later breeding pairs, which strongly predicted their higher fledgling production. To our knowledge, our study is the first to compare the choices of early versus later breeders to test the efficacy of use-availability studies in defining habitat quality. We found that use-availability analysis was inadequate for determining vegetation characteristics related to reproductive performance. In contrast, measuring the distinct preferences of earlier breeders resulted in an improved ability to measure habitat quality and explain the spatial distribution of yellow-bellied sapsuckers, a keystone species of the mixedwood boreal forest. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203683 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How does climate change affect the Great Lakes | Scientists agree that some human activities, like burning the sediments. From these samples, we could see that the fossil fuels, cause the Earths atmosphere to trap more amount of algae in Lake Superior has slowly increased over heat, leading to climate change. We wanted to find out time. However, in the past hundred years, the amount of how climate change affected large freshwater lakes, so algae and plants in the Lake has increased dramatically. we took a series of sediment cores in Lake Superior (the We think this recent drastic change happened because biggest of the Great Lakes in North America) to study human-caused climate change led to warmer temperatures samples of the mud at the lake bottom. Back in the lab, we and longer ice-free periods in the lake. This made it easier analyzed tiny bits of dead plants and algae trapped within for algae and plants to grow in the water. | Anthropogenic climate change has the potential to alter many facets of Earths freshwater resources, especially lacustrine ecosystems. The effects of anthropogenic changes in Lake Superior, which is Earths largest freshwater lake by area, are not well documented (spatially or temporally) and predicted future states in response to climate change vary. Here we show that Lake Superior experienced a slow, steady increase in production throughout the Holocene using (paleo)productivity proxies in lacustrine sediments to reconstruct past changes in primary production. Furthermore, data from the last century indicate a rapid increase in primary production, which we attribute to increasing surface water temperatures and longer seasonal stratification related to longer ice-free periods in Lake Superior due to anthropogenic climate warming. These observations demonstrate that anthropogenic effects have become a prominent influence on one of Earths largest, most pristine lacustrine ecosystems. | https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15713 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How does climate change make fish late for dinner | Imagine you are a young and hungry fish looking for food Now imagine someone turning up the heat (like we humans in an estuary (the part of a river where it meets the ocean). are doing by changing the climate). Could the rising water You need to grow big and strong before you migrate to the temperatures mess up the timing for you, the predator, and ocean, and depend on tiny floating creatures (plankton) your prey? To answer this question we looked at climate for food. However, the occurrence of these tiny creatures related changes in the synchronization of predator and prey in the estuary varies seasonally. Lucky for you, nature has in the biggest estuary in Western Europe. And indeed, we synchronized both your time in the estuary and that of your found signs of temporal mismatches in its aquatic food web. prey, and you survive. This synchronization depends on many We fear that the observed changes can put this important different factors, among them the temperature of the water. ecosystem and its role as a big fish nursery at risk. | Alterations of species phenology in response to climate change are now unquestionable. Until now, most studies have reported precocious occurrence of life cycle events as a major phenological response. Desynchronizations of biotic interactions, in particular predator-prey relationships, are however assumed to strongly impact ecosystems functioning, as formalized by the Match-Mismatch Hypothesis (MMH). Temporal synchronicity between juvenile fish and zooplankton in estuaries is therefore of essential interest since estuaries are major nursery grounds for many commercial fish species. The Gironde estuary (SW France) has suffered significant alterations over the last three decades, including two Abrupt Ecosystem Shifts (AES), and three contrasted intershift periods. The main objective of this study was to depict modifications in fish and zooplankton phenology among inter-shift periods and discuss the potential effects of the resulting mismatches at a community scale. A flexible Bayesian method was used to estimate and compare yearly patterns of species abundance in the estuary among the three pre-defined periods. Results highlighted (1) an earlier peak of zooplankton production and entrance of fish species in the estuary and (2) a decrease in residence time of both groups in the estuary. Such species-specific phenological changes led to changes in temporal overlap between juvenile fish and their zooplanktonic prey. This situation questions the efficiency and potentially the viability of nursery function of the Gironde estuary, with potential implications for coastal marine fisheries of the Bay of Biscay. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173752 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles | How does reducing air pollution help birds | When you think of pollution, what image comes to mind? Litter? Oil spills? We think of these types of pollution first because they are visible. But the most dangerous form is one that we cannot see: air pollution. We know that chemicals and small particles in the air can harm human health, so governments create laws and programs to reduce air pollution. We wanted to know if these same programs also positively affect birds. After all, birds are such an important part of our world! We built a mathematical model using bird population and air pollution data to see which air pollutants (tropospheric ozone and/or fine particulate matter) harm birds. Then we looked at how a United States air pollution reduction program affected the bird populations. From this analysis, we found that air pollution programs not only benefit humans, but they also protect birds. | Massive wildlife losses over the past 50 y have brought new urgency to identifying both the drivers of population decline and potential solutions. We provide large-scale evidence that air pollution, specifically ozone, is associated with declines in bird abundance in the United States. We show that an air pollution regulation limiting ozone precursors emissions has delivered substantial benefits to bird conservation. Our estimates imply that air quality improvements over the past 4 decades have stemmed the decline in bird populations, averting the loss of 1.5 billion birds, ?20% of current totals. Our results highlight that in addition to protecting human health, air pollution regulations have previously unrecognized and unquantified conservation cobenefits. | https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/30900 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Social-Science Articles | How does rock climbing impact birds | Do you enjoy exploring the great outdoors? Hiking and different directions (north, east, west, and south). Half of the camping are great ways to connect with nature. Lately, cliffs are visited by lots of climbers and half by very few or another outdoor activity, rock climbing, has become very no climbers. We compared the number and species of birds popular. As a result, the number of people using cliffs on these different cliffs. We found that east-facing cliffs have has increased rapidly. Cliff ecosystems are home to many the greatest number and diversity of birds. Our results show living things, including birds. Since climbing is a fairly new that north-facing cliffs are the best option for new climbing activity, we dont know its impact on cliff ecosystems. Here, routes when it comes to protecting wildlife. Our solution may we studied how climbers affect birds that nest on cliffs in help the area to handle the growing number of climbers The Flatirons area in Colorado. We selected cliffs that face while protecting cliff ecosystems. | As the sport of outdoor rock climbing rapidly grows, there is increasing pressure to understand how it can affect communities of organisms in cliff habitats. To that end, we surveyed 32 cliff sites in Boulder, Colorado, USA, and assessed the relative roles of human recreation and natural habitat features as drivers of bird diversity and activity. We detected only native avian species during our observations. Whereas avian abundance was not affected by climbing, avian species diversity and community conservation value were higher at low-use climbing formations. Models indicated that climber presence and cliff aspect were important predictors of both avian diversity and avian cliff use within our study area, while long-term climbing use frequency has a smaller, but still negative association with conservation value and cliff use by birds in the area. In contrast, the diversity of species on the cliff itself was not affected by any of our measured factors. To assess additional community dynamics, we surveyed vegetation and arthropods at ten site pairs. Climbing negatively affected lichen communities, but did not significantly affect other vegetation metrics or arthropods. We found no correlations between avian diversity and diversity of either vegetation or arthropods. Avian cliff use rate was positively correlated with arthropod biomass. We conclude that while rock climbing is associated with lower community diversity at cliffs, some common cliff-dwelling birds, arthropods and plants appear to be tolerant of climbing activity. An abiotic factor, cliff aspect strongly affected patterns of both avian diversity and cliff use, suggesting that the negative effects of rock climbing may be mitigated by informed management of cliff habitat that considers multiple site features. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209557 | Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How does sunscreen make corals sick | Picture yourself diving into a tropical ocean. The sun is bright, and the water is clear and warm. What do you see? Colorful fish, playful dolphins, waving seaweed? Maybe you even see something that looks like a beautiful underwater garden a coral reef! Coral reefs are important habitats for a huge diversity of animals. But sadly, warming oceans and pollution threaten most coral reefs. An example of this threat is actually sunscreen! Oxybenzone is a chemical found in many sunscreens that can harm corals and other animals. But scientists didnt know exactly how oxybenzone harmed corals. We set up an experiment to find out how corals and sea anemones (which are closely related to corals) reacted to oxybenzone in the water. | The reported toxicity of oxybenzone-based sunscreens to corals has raised concerns about the impacts of ecotourist-shed sunscreens on corals already weakened by global stressors. However, oxybenzones toxicity mechanism(s) are not understood, hampering development of safer sunscreens. We found that oxybenzone caused high mortality of a sea anemone under simulated sunlight including ultraviolet (UV) radiation (290 to 370 nanometers). Although oxybenzone itself protected against UV-induced photo-oxidation, both the anemone and a mushroom coral formed oxybenzoneglucoside conjugates that were strong photo-oxidants. Algal symbionts sequestered these conjugates, and mortality correlated with conjugate concentrations in animal cytoplasm. Higher mortality in anemones that lacked symbionts suggests an enhanced risk from oxybenzone to corals bleached by rising temperatures. Because many commercial sunscreens contain structurally related chemicals, understanding metabolite phototoxicity should facilitate the development of coral-safe products. | https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn2600 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How does war affect gorillas | The Grauers gorilla is one of two subspecies of the Eastern park rangers and found that the global population had gorilla. The whole population of Grauers gorilla lives in the decreased by % since . There are now only , forests of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) individuals left. in Central Africa. This makes this ape Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red In a civil war started in the DRC, which killed million List of Threatened Species and now makes both gorilla people. We wanted to find out what effect the civil war species (Eastern and Western) and all four subspecies had on the population of Grauers gorillas. We carried out Critically Endangered. This is the highest category of threat field surveys and used data from local communities and before extinction. | Grauers gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri), the Worlds largest primate, is confined to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and is threatened by civil war and insecurity. During the war, armed groups in mining camps relied on hunting bushmeat, including gorillas. Insecurity and the presence of several militia groups across Grauers gorillas range made it very difficult to assess their population size. Here we use a novel method that enables rigorous assessment of local community and ranger-collected data on gorilla occupancy to evaluate the impacts of civil war on Grauers gorilla, which prior to the war was estimated to number 16,900 individuals. We show that gorilla numbers in their stronghold of Kahuzi-Biega National Park have declined by 87%. Encounter rate data of gorilla nests at 10 sites across its range indicate declines of 82100% at six of these sites. Spatial occupancy analysis identifies three key areas as the most critical sites for the remaining populations of this ape and that the range of this taxon is around 19,700 km2. We estimate that only 3,800 Grauers gorillas remain in the wild, a 77% decline in one generation, justifying its elevation to Critically Endangered status on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0162697 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How much ocean should we protect | If you closed your eyes, spun a globe, and then randomly human-made climate change. However, we do far too little to placed your finger on the map, where do you think you protect these gifts. We wanted to know how much ocean we would land? Did you know that your finger would be much must protect in order to safeguard its immense biodiversity more likely to end up in the ocean than on land? That is and all the many valuable ecosystem services it provides. because oceans cover more than twice as much of the We found out that current protected areas cover far too little Earths surface as land does. We humans need them: oceans of the ocean. We need to set up many more protected areas and their diverse inhabitants provide us with food, water, to ensure the oceans and our own long-term well-being and fresh air, income, and recreation, and they even slow down sustainability. | We provide updated estimates of the change of oceanheat content and the thermosteric component of sea levelchange of the 0700 and 02000 m layers of the WorldOcean for 19552010. Our estimates are based on historicaldata not previously available, additional modern data, andbathythermograph data corrected for instrumental biases.We have also used Argo data corrected by the Argo DAC ifavailable and used uncorrected Argo data if no correctionswere available at the time we downloaded the Argo data.The heat content of the World Ocean for the 02000 mlayer increased by 24.01.91022J(2S.E.) correspondingtoarateof0.39Wm2(per unit area of the World Ocean) and avolume mean warming of 0.09C. This warming correspondstoarateof0.27Wm2per unit area of earthssurface.Theheat content of the World Ocean for the 0700 m layerincreased by 16.71.61022J corresponding to a rate of0.27 W m2(per unit area of the World Ocean) and a volumemean warming of 0.18C. The World Ocean accounts forapproximately 93% of the warming of the earth system that hasoccurred since 1955. The 7002000 m ocean layer accountedfor approximately one-third of the warming of the 02000 mlayer of the World Ocean. The thermosteric component of sealevel trend was 0.54.05 mm yr1for the 02000 m layerand 0.41.04 mm yr1for the 0700 m layer of the WorldOcean for 19552010 | https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12247 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | How special do you have to be to live in acidic soil | While you are reading this, special alliances are being containing AM fungi along an acidity gradient in Japan. We formed underground invisible to the human eye. But also exposed fungi from two soils of different pH (acidic/ they are crucial to plants, and help them conquer extreme neutral) to changes in their soils acidity levels in the lab, environments such as acidic soil. Were talking arbuscular and observed their response. mycorrhizal (AM) fungi who help plants improve their Surprisingly, we discovered that the fungi in the acidic soils nutrient uptake. also occurred in the less acidic and neutral soils, making But how can these fungi themselves tolerate acidic soil? them generalists! We believe that being generalists opens Are they acidic soil specialists, who can thrive despite up many opportunities for AM fungi (and for their associated the acidity? We tested this hypothesis by collecting soil plants) to colonize new or quickly changing habitats. | Soil acidity is a major constraint on plant productivity. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi support plant colonization in acidic soil, but soil acidity also constrains fungal growth and diversity. Fungi in extreme environments generally evolve towards specialists, suggesting that AM fungi in acidic soil are acidic-soil specialists. In our previous surveys, however, some AM fungi detected in strongly acidic soils could also be detected in a soil with moderate pH, which raised a hypothesis that the fungi in acidic soils are pH generalists. To test the hypothesis, we conducted a pH-manipulation experiment and also analyzed AM fungal distribution along a pH gradient in the field using a synthesized dataset of the previous and recent surveys. Rhizosphere soils of the generalist plant Miscanthus sinensis were collected both from a neutral soil and an acidic soil, and M. sinensis seedlings were grown at three different pH. For the analysis of field communities, rhizosphere soils of M. sinensis were collected from six field sites across Japan, which covered a soil pH range of 3.07.4, and subjected to soil trap culture. AM fungal community compositions were determined based on LSU rDNA sequences. In the pH-manipulation experiment the acidification of medium had a significant impact on the compositions of the community from the neutral soil, but the neutralization of the medium had no effect on those of the community from the acidic soil. Furthermore, the communities in lower -pH soils were subsets of (nested in) those in higher-pH soils. In the field communities a significant nestedness pattern was observed along the pH gradient. These observations suggest that the fungi in strongly acidic soils are pH generalists that occur not only in acidic soil but also in wide ranges of soil pH. Nestedness in AM fungal community along pH gradients may have important implications for plant community resilience and early primary succession after disturbance in acidic soils. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0165035 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | How will climate change affect Arctic birds | Peregrine falcons are famous for their super-fast diving summer and winter habitats to the computer prediction. flights. But thats not the only thing that theyre good at. We found that summer habitats (where the birds breed) Peregrines are also world travelers! We tracked peregrine are shrinking, while winter habitats are growing. This is falcons migrating from the Arctic to their winter habitat. due to climate change. Some went all the way from northern Russia to the We tracked migration paths for peregrines from six places tropics! in the Eurasian Arctic. We found that some peregrines We wanted to know how climate change and genetics traveled more than five times as far as other peregrines! affect the way peregrines migrate. So we used a computer When we looked at the peregrines DNA, we saw that program to predict how the Arctic would change over there were differences between the peregrines who had the next years. We compared the peregrines current short migrations and those who had long migrations. | Millions of migratory birds occupy seasonally favourable breeding grounds in the Arctic1, but we know little about the formation, maintenance and future of the migration routes of Arctic birds and the genetic determinants of migratory distance. Here we established a continental-scale migration system that used satellite tracking to follow 56peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) from 6populations that breed in the Eurasian Arctic, and resequenced 35genomes from 4of these populations. The breeding populations used five migration routes across Eurasia, which were probably formed by longitudinal and latitudinal shifts in their breeding grounds during the transition from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene epoch. Contemporary environmental divergence between the routes appears to maintain their distinctiveness. We found that the geneADCY8is associated with population-level differences in migratory distance. We investigated the regulatory mechanism of this gene, and found that long-term memory was the most likely selective agent for divergence inADCY8among the peregrine populations. Global warming is predicted to influence migration strategies and diminish the breeding ranges of peregrine populations of the Eurasian Arctic. Harnessing ecological interactions and evolutionary processes to study climate-driven changes in migration can facilitate the conservation of migratory birds. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03265-0 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | How will dragonflies adapt to a warmer Earth | The Earth is getting warmer, and we can already see dragonflies living in warm climates to dragonflies living in problems from it. Floods, storms, and deserts are all getting cooler climates. worse. People, animals, and plants all have to make changes We found that male dragonflies living in warmer climates if we want to survive. have smaller and lighter areas of dark color on their wings. Male dragonflies use dark coloring on their wings to attract This is because the darker coloring can make the dragonfly females. It also helps them scare off other males. We too hot. (Its hard to be active when youre in a hot place wanted to know if this dark coloring might change as the with warm clothes on, right?) Less or lighter coloring is more climate gets warmer. We created a database to compare helpful for the dragonflies in warmer climates. | Adaptation to different climates fuels the origins and maintenance of biodiversity. Detailing how organisms optimize fitness for their local climates is therefore an essential goal in biology. Although we increasingly understand how survival-related traits evolve as organisms adapt to climatic conditions, it is unclear whether organisms also optimize traits that coordinate mating between the sexes. Here, we show that dragonflies consistently adapt to warmer climates across space and time by evolving less male melanin ornamentationa mating-related trait that also absorbs solar radiation and heats individuals above ambient temperatures. Continent-wide macroevolutionary analyses reveal that species inhabiting warmer climates evolve less male ornamentation. Community-science observations across 10 species indicate that populations adapt to warmer parts of species ranges through microevolution of smaller male ornaments. Observations from 2005 to 2019 detail that contemporary selective pressures oppose male ornaments in warmer years; and our climate-warming projections predict further decreases by 2070. Conversely, our analyses show that female ornamentation responds idiosyncratically to temperature across space and time, indicating the sexes evolve in different ways to meet the demands of the local climate. Overall, these macro- and microevolutionary findings demonstrate that organisms predictably optimize their mating-related traits for the climate just as they do their survival-related traits. | https://www.pnas.org/content/118/28/e2101458118 | Lower high school; Middle school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Is Antarctica losing its penguins | Why is Antarctica called the frozen continent? Because it populations. We monitored a colony (large group) in is ICY! The majority of the land, including the South Pole the northernmost region of the continent. For years, is covered with ice. There are even sheets of ice on the we kept track of adults and juveniles (young penguins). ocean -sea ice. Antarctic animals rely on sea ice as habitat We recorded how successful they were at surviving and for finding food. But Antarctica is warming up lately, reproducing each year. Then, we created a mathematical sea ice is melting, and the ecosystem is changing. As a model that could help us predict the size of a colony in the result, many animals are suffering and their populations future. We found out that, as climate conditions worsen, are declining rapidly. Here, we studied effects of changing this colony and many other colonies of penguins in the climate conditions on Adelie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) northern region may disappear within the next years. | Predicting population responses in changing environments is an important task for ecologists. In polar regions, climate warming, loss of sea ice, and more frequent anomalous events suggest that further reductions in ice-dependent animal populations are likely. We assess the risk of near-term (30-year) depletion of an Ad?lie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) population with a stochastic matrix model parameterized with 30 yr (19822011) of data from the Copacabana colony on King George Island, Antarctica. The model was fitted to nest census data by estimating correction factors for survival rates estimated from a multi-state markrecapture model. We modeled future survival and fecundity scenarios during the projection period (20122041) based on a two-state Markov chain that randomly assigned survival rates and reproductive success from their respective historical distributions to represent good and poor years. Monte Carlo simulation was used to estimate population trajectories across a range of progressively worse survival conditions. The results suggest that, given historical distributions of survival and reproductive success, a limited scope for recovery of the population is present, commensurate with recent stabilization in population size at the study site. However, our projections mainly suggest that the Ad?lie penguin population will decline if the frequency of years with poor survival remains at, or increases above, its 30-year mean. The risk of local depletion within 30 yr, defined according to International Union for Conservation of Nature categories for endangered and critically endangered species, was 33% for >90% declines, but near 100% for 50% declines given status-quo conditions. As survival conditions worsen, the risk of substantive depletions rose rapidly. Given expectations of further environmental and ecosystem changes in the northern Antarctic Peninsula region, continued declines in Ad?lie penguin population size at the northern extent of their range should be expected. | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.1666/full | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Is climate change shrinking our fish | Imagine you are rushing home and need to breathe harder fish also need more oxygen in warmer waters. So with the and harder, but there is less oxygen in the air around you. higher demand and the lower supply of oxygen, the growth This is the situation most marine fish are facing with warmer of the fish gills (their breathing organs), cannot keep up. ocean temperatures due to climate change. They breathe This is causing ocean fish species to grow to smaller sizes! the same oxygen we do, except that they have to get it out We created a model that can predict by how much fish are of the water, which is a much harder task. Warmer water shrinking, and also developed a theory called GOLT that holds less oxygen than cold water. To make matters worse, explains what is going on. | One of the main expected responses of marine fishes to ocean warming is decrease in body size, as supported by evidence from empirical data and theoretical modeling. The theoretical underpinning for fish shrinking is that the oxygen supply to large fish size cannot be met by their gills, whose surface area cannot keep up with the oxygen demand by their three-dimensional bodies. However, Lefevre et al. (Global Change Biology, 2017, 23, 34493459) argue against such theory. Here, we re-assert, with the Gill-Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT), that gills, which must retain the properties of open surfaces because their growth, even while hyperallometric, cannot keep up with the demand of growing three-dimensional bodies. Also, we show that a wide range of biological features of fish and other water-breathing organisms can be understood when gill area limitation is used as an explanation. We also note that an alternative to GOLT, offering a more parsimonious explanation for these features of water-breathers has not been proposed. Available empirical evidence corroborates predictions of decrease in body sizes under ocean warming based on GOLT, with the magnitude of the predicted change increases when using more species-specific parameter values of metabolic scaling. | https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1691 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Is the Amazon rainforest tougher than we thought | If the Amazon Rainforest was a country, it would be the 9th biggest in the world. The rainforest has many important functions. It is home to a huge variety of different plants and animals. It also acts like a large carbon sink (a storage place for carbon) by sucking it up from the atmosphere and storing it in plants and soil. This slows down global climate change and is another reason why it is so important to preserve our rainforests. Researchers worry that large parts of the Amazon could change from forest to savanna if put under pressure from drought or deforestation. They are concerned that it would then be very hard for the forests to recover again. We carried out a data analysis to look at the factors that can cause a shift in state from forest to savanna (or the other way around) and to look at the effect of humans. To explain our observations, we made a mathematical model that takes into account natural tree growth and deforestation. Our evidence suggests that the Amazon rainforest is not as fragile as previously thought. | A bimodal distribution of tropical tree cover at intermediate precipitation levels has been presented as evidence of fire-induced bistability. Here we subdivide satellite vegetation data into those from human-unaffected areas and those from regions close to human-cultivated zones. Bimodality is found to be almost absent in the unaffected regions, whereas it is significantly enhanced close to cultivated zones. Assuming higher logging rates closer to cultivated zones and spatial diffusion of fire, our spatiotemporal mathematical model reproduces these patterns. Given a gradient of climatic and edaphic factors, rather than bistability there is a predictable spatial boundary, a Maxwell point, that separates regions where forest and savanna states are naturally selected. While bimodality can hence be explained by anthropogenic edge effects and natural spatial heterogeneity, a narrow range of bimodality remaining in the human-unaffected data indicates that there is still bistability, although on smaller scales than claimed previously. | https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15519 | Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles; Water-Resources Articles | More river prawns less snail fever | Scientists have long known that in the tropics, dams increase the number of people getting a vicious disease called snail fever. But it is less clear why this happens. We identified the key players in this mystery and put together different geographical, ecological and epidemiological maps to figure it out. It turns out that dams limit the migrations of river prawns, which are important predators of the snails that host the parasites that make people sick. With fewer prawns, there are more snails, and thus more parasites infecting more people. We estimate that almost 400 million people are affected by this ecological and technological chain reaction. Our results suggest that the restoration of river prawns can be an effective tool for decreasing snail fever worldwide. | Dams have long been associated with elevated burdens of human schistosomiasis, but how dams increase disease is not always clear, in part because dams have many ecological and socio-economic effects. A recent hypothesis argues that dams block reproduction of the migratory river prawns that eat the snail hosts of schistosomiasis. In the Senegal River Basin, there is evidence that prawn populations declined and schistosomiasis increased after completion of the Diama Dam. Restoring prawns to a water-access site upstream of the dam reduced snail density and reinfection rates in people. However, whether a similar cascade of effects (from dams to prawns to snails to human schistosomiasis) occurs elsewhere is unknown. Here, we examine large dams worldwide and identify where their catchments intersect with endemic schistosomiasis and the historical habitat ranges of large, migratory Macrobrachium spp. prawns. River prawn habitats are widespread, and we estimate that 277385 million people live within schistosomiasis-endemic regions where river prawns are or were present (out of the 800 million people who are at risk of schistosomiasis). Using a published repository of schistosomiasis studies in sub-Saharan Africa, we compared infection before and after the construction of 14 large dams for people living in: (i) upstream catchments within historical habitats of native prawns, (ii) comparable undammed watersheds, and (iii) dammed catchments beyond the historical reach of migratory prawns. Damming was followed by greater increases in schistosomiasis within prawn habitats than outside prawn habitats. We estimate that one third to one half of the global population-at-risk of schistosomiasis could benefit from restoration of native prawns. Because dams block prawn migrations, our results suggest that prawn extirpation contributes to the sharp increase of schistosomiasis after damming, and points to prawn restoration as an ecological solution for reducing human disease. | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5413875/ | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Not just ivory another threat for Asian elephants | For centuries, people have hunted and killed both African and Asian elephants for their ivory. Despite many efforts to protect these animals, elephant populations worldwide are still declining. The rapidly increasing human population, on the other hand, has led to elephants habitat shrinking. This further endangers elephants, leading to more frequent encounters between them and humans, which only makes things worse. When trying to find a solution to this problem, we stumbled upon some disturbing findings: poachers in Myanmar have started to kill elephants for their skin and meat instead of just their ivory. This makes all elephants a target, including females and juveniles, not only the males who have tusks. Myanmar has the largest remaining natural areas suitable for sustaining elephant populations, so a rapid decline in their populations there would pose a great risk to their global populations. | In the southern Bago Yoma mountain range in Myanmar, Asian elephants are being killed at a disturbing rate. This emerging crisis was identified initially through a telemetry study when 7 of 19 of collared elephants were poached within a year of being fitted with a satellite-GPS collar. Subsequent follow up of ground teams confirmed the human caused death or disappearance of at least 19 elephants, including the seven collared individuals, within a 35 km2 area in less than two years. The carcasses of 40 additional elephants were found in areas located across south-central Myanmar once systematic surveys began by our team and collaborators. In addition to the extreme rate of loss, this study documents the targeting of elephants for their skin instead of the more common ivory, an increasing trend in Myanmar. Intensive research programs focused on other conservation problems identified this issue and are now encouraging local authorities to prioritize anti-poaching efforts and improve conservation policies within the country. Myanmar represents one of the last remaining countries in Asia with substantial wildlands suitable for elephants. Increasing rates of human-elephant conflict and poaching events in this country pose a dire threat to the global population. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194113 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | Palm oil is everywhere but where did it come from | What do lipstick, frozen pizza, and laundry detergent have Here, farmers have cleared the forest (an activity called in common? Palm oil. This tropical vegetable oil that most deforestation) quite recently. Similarly, palm plantations in people have never heard of is in half the packaged goods South America are also from recent deforestation. Elsewhere sold in the supermarket. Almost certainly, people are going though, the forest was cleared decades ago, often for other to continue to use it. That makes it important to know when purposes before people even thought much about palm oil. and where forests were cut down to make the palm tree Our research shows that in the future, major palm plantations plantations (from which we get the palm oil), where future are likely to emerge in Africa and South America and continue plantations might be, and how they endanger plant and to spread through Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea. animal species. Palm plantations in any of these regions though would put The largest areas of palm plantations are in Southeast Asia. at risk many plant and animal species. | Palm oil is the most widely traded vegetable oil globally, with demand projected to increase substantially in the future. Almost all oil palm grows in areas that were once tropical moist forests, some of them quite recently. The conversion to date, and future expansion, threatens biodiversity and increases greenhouse gas emissions. Today, consumer pressure is pushing companies toward deforestation-free sources of palm oil. To guide interventions aimed at reducing tropical deforestation due to oil palm, we analysed recent expansions and modelled likely future ones. We assessed sample areas to find where oil palm plantations have recently replaced forests in 20 countries, using a combination of high-resolution imagery from Google Earth and Landsat. We then compared these trends to countrywide trends in FAO data for oil palm planted area. Finally, we assessed which forests have high agricultural suitability for future oil palm development, which we refer to as vulnerable forests, and identified critical areas for biodiversity that oil palm expansion threatens. Our analysis reveals regional trends in deforestation associated with oil palm agriculture. In Southeast Asia, 45% of sampled oil palm plantations came from areas that were forests in 1989. For South America, the percentage was 31%. By contrast, in Mesoamerica and Africa, we observed only 2% and 7% of oil palm plantations coming from areas that were forest in 1989. The largest areas of vulnerable forest are in Africa and South America. Vulnerable forests in all four regions of production contain globally high concentrations of mammal and bird species at risk of extinction. However, priority areas for biodiversity conservation differ based on taxa and criteria used. Government regulation and voluntary market interventions can help incentivize the expansion of oil palm plantations in ways that protect biodiversity-rich ecosystems. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0159668 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Should we let the ocean in or not | Global sea levels are rising there is no doubt about it. But what comes next? Some land near the coast is very likely to be flooded. Should we let it? Or should we try to build dams to keep the water out? We tried to answer this question by studying what happens when you flood uninhabited coastal land. Would it just turn into some sort of underwater wasteland, or into a functioning aquatic habitat that both animals and people can use? To find out, we followed the creation of the Gyldensteen Coastal Lagoon, an area in Denmark set aside to become a natural reserve, for two years. We conducted lab experiments and field observations to see how some marine bristle worms respond to flooding. We found that they did well, they changed the chemistry of their environment, and the newly flooded land developed into something resembling a functioning new marine ecosystem. | How will coastal soils in areas newly flooded with seawater function as habitat for benthic marine organisms? This research question is highly relevant as global sea level rise and coastal realignment will cause flooding of soils and form new marine habitats. In this study, we tested experimentally the capacity of common marine polychaetes, Marenzelleria viridis, Nereis (Hediste) diversicolor and Scoloplos armiger to colonize and modify the biogeochemistry of the newly established Gyldensteen Coastal Lagoon, Denmark. All tested polychaetes survived relatively well (2889%) and stimulated carbon dioxide release (TCO2) by 97105% when transferred to newly flooded soils, suggesting that soil characteristics are modified rapidly by colonizing fauna. A field survey showed that the pioneering benthic community inside the lagoon was structurally different from the marine area outside the lagoon, and M. viridis and S. armiger were not among the early colonizers. These were instead N. diversicolor and Polydora cornuta with an abundance of 1603 and 540 ind m-2, respectively. Considering the species-specific effects of N. diversicolor on TCO2 release and its average abundance in the lagoon, we estimate that organic carbon degradation was increased by 219% in the first year of flooding. We therefore conclude that early colonizing polychaetes modify the soils and may play an important role in the ecological and successional developments, e.g. C cycling and biodiversity, in newly flooded coastal ecosystems. Newly flooded soils have thus a strong potential to develop into well-functioning marine ecosystems. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196097 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Soil bacteria help or hindrance for moving plants | Some plant species tend to spread easily across continents we studied the spread of legumes, a family of plants that and to islands, either because people bring them deliberately includes peas and beans (Fig. ), as well as the mutualistic or because the plants seeds hitchhike, attached to human bacteria that live amongst some of their roots. Although these travelers and their stuff. We wanted to find out why some bacteria help some legumes grow in their native ranges, plant species spread more easily than others. Once a plant is we found that the species of legumes that form mutualistic introduced (on purpose or accidentally) to a new area, what relationships with soil bacteria are less likely to colonize new allows it to establish and spread? To answer these questions, areas than species of legumes without mutualistic bacteria. | Microbial symbiosis is integral to plant growth and reproduction, but its contribution to global patterns of plant distribution is unknown. Legumes (Fabaceae) are a diverse and widely distributed plant family largely dependent on symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing rhizobia, which are acquired from soil after germination. This dependency is predicted to limit establishment in new geographic areas, owing to a disruption of compatible host-symbiont associations. Here we compare non-native establishment patterns of symbiotic and non-symbiotic legumes across over 3,500 species, covering multiple independent gains and losses of rhizobial symbiosis. We find that symbiotic legume species have spread to fewer non-native regions compared to non-symbiotic legumes, providing strong support for the hypothesis that lack of suitable symbionts or environmental conditions required for effective nitrogen-fixation are driving these global introduction patterns. These results highlight the importance of mutualisms in predicting non-native species establishment and the potential impacts of microbial biogeography on global plant distributions. | https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14790 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | What are the most dangerous places for sharks | Many people are scared of sharks, but they are actually a very important part of the oceans ecosystem. Did you know that falling coconuts are actually more deadly to humans than sharks? Each year, tens of millions of sharks are caught by fishing vessels (ships). So actually, they should be afraid of us. And instead of fearing them, we should protect them from ourselves!We wanted to find out where sharks are most at risk from fishing across all of the worlds oceans. We used tracking data from both sharks and fishing vessels to create maps of where sharks like to hang out and where ships go fishing. When they overlap, sharks are at risk of being caught! We found the areas that are most dangerous for sharks to swim. These areas are unique to different species and different oceans. We can use our findings to tell people who manage the seas how to best protect sharks and the other marine life that rely on them. | Effective ocean management and the conservation of highly migratory species depend on resolving the overlap between animal movements and distributions, and fishing effort. However, this information is lacking at a global scale. Here we show, using a big-data approach that combines satellite-tracked movements of pelagic sharks and global fishing fleets, that 24% of the mean monthly space used by sharks falls under the footprint of pelagic longline fisheries. Space-use hotspots of commercially valuable sharks and of internationally protected species had the highest overlap with longlines (up to 76% and 64%, respectively), and were also associated with significant increases in fishing effort. We conclude that pelagic sharks have limited spatial refuge from current levels of fishing effort in marine areas beyond national jurisdictions (the high seas). Our results demonstrate an urgent need for conservation and management measures at high-seas hotspots of shark space use, and highlight the potential of simultaneous satellite surveillance of megafauna and fishers as a tool for near-real-time, dynamic management. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1444-4 | Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | What can bat migration patterns tell us about Ebola epidemics | What does the migration of bats have to do with Ebola fault on their own, can pass it on to humans. Here we develop a epidemics? More than you (and even a lot of Ebola researchers) mathematical model to predict how the seasonal flight patterns might think. In general, bats are very beneficial for us humans. (migrations) of bats, their food sources, as well as the way they They pollinate important food plants and also eat tons of react to Ebola infections might help spread the Ebola virus. We insects that can either hurt us (like mosquitoes) or eat our show that these and other factors, like seasonal changes and crops (like caterpillars). However, like all animals, they have the way humans change bats habitats by cutting down forests, diseases and parasites, and sometimes these affect us. For need to be considered when trying to understand diseases like example, some species of bats carry Ebola and, through little Ebola. | Understanding Ebola necessarily requires the characterization of the ecology of its main enzootic reservoir, i.e. bats, and its interplay with seasonal and enviroclimatic factors. Here we present a SIR compartmental model where we implement a bidirectional coupling between the available resources and the dynamics of the bat population in order to understand their migration patterns. Our compartmental modeling approach and simulations include transport terms to account for bats mobility and spatiotemporal climate variability. We hypothesize that environmental pressure is the main driving force for bats migration and our results reveal the appearance of sustained migratory waves of Ebola virus infected bats coupled to resources availability. Ultimately, our study can be relevant to predict hot spots of Ebola outbreaks in space and time and suggest conservation policies to mitigate the risk of spillovers. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179559 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles; Water-Resources Articles | What can sea lettuce tell us about coastal pollution | Did anyone ever say you looked green when you were pollution from human activities such as agriculture, farms, sick? This can happen to oceans, too! In fact, people factories or towns enters coastal waters. sometimes observe the coastal waters of Ireland (and in We wanted to find out if one particular seaweed, the many other parts of the world) turning green. So green commonly found sea lettuce (Ulva rigida), could serve as that they call it a green tide. What is going on? a living (bio-)indicator of water quality at the coast. (It The green color comes from certain seaweed that grow can.) We also looked for a clear connection between the so much that they can change the color on the beaches. amounts of these seaweed and certain harmful metals in These seaweed blooms occur after nitrogen or phosphate the water (but did not find a significant one). | Enrichment of nutrients and metals in seawater associated with anthropogenic activities can threaten aquatic ecosystems. Consequently, nutrient and metal concentrations are parameters used to define water quality. The European Unions Water Framework Directive (WFD) goes further than a contaminant-based approach and utilises indices to assess the Ecological Status (ES) of transitional water bodies (e.g. estuaries and lagoons). One assessment is based upon the abundance of opportunistic Ulva species, as an indication of eutrophication. The objective of this study was to characterise Irelands Ulva blooms through the use of WFD assessment, metal concentrations and taxonomic identity. Furthermore, the study assessed whether the ecological assessment is related to the metal composition in the Ulva. WFD algal bloom assessment revealed that the largest surveyed blooms had an estimated biomass of 2164 metric tonnes (w/w). DNA sequences identified biomass from all locations as Ulva rigida, with the exception of New Quay, which was Ulva rotundata. Some blooms contained significant amounts of As, Cu, Cr, Pb and Sn. The results showed that all metal concentrations had a negative relationship (except Se) with the Ecological Quality Ratio (EQR). However, only in the case of Mn were these differences significant (p = 0.038). Overall, the metal composition and concentrations found in Ulva were site dependent, and not clearly related to the ES. Nevertheless, sites with a moderate or poor ES had a higher variability in the metals levels than in estuaries with a high ES. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169049 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles | What do baby fish make of oil spills | Since people started drilling for oil there have been We studied the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill accidental oil spills at sea that are harmful to marine life. For (DWHOS) and found that the number of Red Snapper larvae instance, birds and other animals get covered in the thick did not change before, during, and after the spill but the oil and many die as a result. Although some of the negative health of larvae was poorer after the accident. Although impacts of oil spills are immediately noticeable, the long- we cannot conclude that the oil spill caused this decrease term effects on animals like fish are less certain. Therefore, in health, we think that some combination of factors that we wanted to determine what effect a major oil spill can coincided with the event negatively impacted larval Red have on the number and health of recently hatched fish Snapper. (larva is singular, larvae is plural) in a marine environment. | The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DWHOS) spatially and temporally overlapped with the spawning of many fish species, including Red Snapper, one of the most economically important reef fish in the Gulf of Mexico. To investigate potential impacts of the DWHOS on larval Red Snapper, data from a long-term ichthyoplankton survey off the coast of Alabama were used to examine: (1) larval abundances among pre-impact (20072009), impact (2010), and post-impact (2011, 2013) periods; (2) proxies for larval condition (size-adjusted morphometric relationships and dry weight) among the same periods; and (3) the effects of background environmental variation on larval condition. We found that larval Red Snapper were in poorer body condition during 2010, 2011, and 2013 as compared to the 20072009 period, a trend that was strongly (and negatively) related to variation in Mobile Bay freshwater discharge. However, larvae collected during and after 2010 were in relatively poor condition even after accounting for variation in freshwater discharge and other environmental variables. By contrast, no differences in larval abundance were detected during these survey years. Taken together, larval supply did not change relative to the timing of the DWHOS, but larval condition was negatively impacted. Even small changes in condition can affect larval survival, so these trends may have consequences for recruitment of larvae to juvenile and adult life stages. | http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/9/094019 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | What happens to sea lampreys if catfish move in | Sea lampreys travel through many of the rivers in Europe one that would let us track their movements in the Garonne and North America as they migrate between the places and Dordogne Rivers in France and one that would tell us if where they lay eggs and the ocean. Now they face a new they were eaten by another fish. We found that many sea threat: the enormous European catfish people have brought lampreys are eaten by European catfish, and these new fish to the rivers where sea lampreys have always traveled. So pose a serious threat to the survival of sea lampreys in their what happens when sea lampreys meet these catfish? To native habitat. answer this question, we attached sensors to sea lampreys: | Sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) is a unique jawless vertebrate among the most primitive of all living vertebrates. This migratory fish is endangered in much of its native area due to dams, overfishing, pollution, and habitat loss. An introduced predator, the European catfish (Silurus glanis), is now widespread in Western and Southern European freshwaters, adding a new threat for sea lamprey migrating into freshwater to spawn. Here, we use a new prototype predation tag coupled with RFID telemetry on 49 individuals from one of the largest sea lamprey European populations (Southwestern France) to quantify the risk of predation for adult sea lampreys during its spawning migration in rivers with large populations of European catfish. We found that at least 80% of tagged sea lampreys (39 among 49) were preyed upon within one month, and that 50% of the released lampreys were rapidly consumed on average 8 days after tagging. This very high predation rate suggests that the European catfish represents a supplementary serious threat of extirpation for the native sea lamprey population we studied. This threat is likely to happen throughout most of the native lamprey distribution area, as the European catfish is becoming established almost everywhere the sea lamprey is. | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62916-w | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | What if a salmon meets a catfish | Do you like to eat salmon? If so, youre not alone. European catfish, a large freshwater fish introduced into Europe for sport fishing, has also developed a taste for it. We wanted to know what happens when salmon and catfish meet in rivers that humans have changed (for instance: by building a power plant). We picked a big river with a power plant, the Garonne in South-West France, to address this question. With the help of video and acoustic cameras in a special waterway for fish around the power plant, as well as radio-transmitters attached to individual fish, we can confidently say that catfish prey on salmon in these altered parts of the river. In fact, they seem to even shift the time theyre active (from night time to more daylight hours) to increase their chances of catching salmon. And while salmon populations are declining in Europe, catfish seem to be doing better and better. | The Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is one of the worlds most emblematic freshwater fish. Despite conservation and rehabilitation plans, populations of this species are dramatically declining due to human impacts such as habitat fragmentation, overfishing and water pollution. Owing to their large body size, anadromous adults were historically invulnerable to fish predation during their spawning period migration. This invulnerability has disappeared in Western Europe with the introduction of a new freshwater predator, the European catfish (Silurus glanis). Here we report how adults of Atlantic salmon are predated in the fishway of a large river of SW France, where the delayed and narrow passage created by the structure increases the probability of predator-prey encounter. We assessed predation risk by monitoring salmon and catfish in one fishway of the River Garonne, using video fish-counting from 1993 to 2016. We analysed the predation strategy of catfish using observations made with acoustic camera and RFID telemetry in 2016. Our results demonstrate a high predation rate (35%14/39 ind.) on salmon inside the fishway during the 2016 spawning period migration. Our results suggest that a few specialized catfish individuals adapted their hunting behaviour to such prey, including their presence synchronized with that of salmon (i.e, more occurrences by the end of the day). Such results suggest that the spread of European catfish will potentially impact migration of anadromous species through anthropized systems. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196046 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | What kinds of landscapes keep bees healthy | Imagine a world without apples, watermelons, and sunflowers It doesnt sound very good, does it? Unfortunately, it could actually happen. Bees help these (and many other) plants grow, but they have been dying. One reason for this is that bees are suffering from more diseases. But where do these bee diseases come from? Does it have to do with our changing landscapes?To find out, we collected 890 bumble bees and screened them for three pathogens. We also looked at the types and qualities of the landscapes where we found these bees. Then we created a mathematical model to help us work out how different landscapes affect bees. We found out that landscapes with lots of food (flowers) for bees and more nesting sites led to healthier bees. Our results highlight the need to protect natural landscapes to conserve wild bees. | The pollination services provided by bees are essential for supporting natural and agricultural ecosystems. However, bee population declines have been documented across the world. Many of the factors known to undermine bee health (e.g., poor nutrition) can decrease immunocompetence and, thereby, increase bees susceptibility to diseases. Given the myriad of stressors that can exacerbate disease in wild bee populations, assessments of the relative impact of landscape habitat conditions on bee pathogen prevalence are needed to effectively conserve pollinator populations. Herein, we assess how landscape-level conditions, including various metrics of floral/nesting resources, insecticides, weather, and honey bee (Apis mellifera) abundance, drive variation in wild bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) pathogen loads. Specifically, we screened 890 bumble bee workers from varied habitats in Pennsylvania, USA for three pathogens (deformed wing virus, black queen cell virus, andVairimorpha(=Nosema)bombi),Defensinexpression, and body size. Bumble bees collected within low-quality landscapes exhibited the highest pathogen loads, with spring floral resources and nesting habitat availability serving as the main drivers. We also found higher loads of pathogens where honey bee apiaries are more abundant, a positive relationship betweenVairimorphaloads and rainfall, and differences in pathogens by geographic region. Collectively, our results highlight the need to support high-quality landscapes (i.e., those with abundant floral/nesting resources) to maintain healthy wild bee populations. | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-78119-2 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | What makes some species successful invaders | Alien invaders are among us. Its true! Every day, foreign plants and animals are turning up in new places. Some of these non-native species do extremely well and out-compete native species. They can cause environmental and economic harm. If they do so, we call them invasive species. Fortunately, not all non-native species are invasive. But what makes some species successful invaders and some not? Could beneficial partners be helping out? To find the answer, we studied some invasive legumes (plants in the bean and pea family) and their rhizobial partners. Rhizobia are beneficial bacteria located in legumes roots. We found that invasive species can work with a broad variety of rhizobia under greenhouse conditions. However, native and invasive legumes in the wild hosted different types of rhizobia. To our surprise, invasive species had rhizobia similar to the ones in their native land. The question now becomes where did they get these familiar rhizobia? Could it be a co-invasion? | Abstract Mutualistic interactions can strongly influence species invasions, as the inability to form successful mutualisms in an exotic range could hamper a host's invasion success. This barrier to invasion may be overcome if an invader either forms novel mutualistic associations or finds and associates with familiar mutualists in the exotic range. Here, we ask (1) does the community of rhizobial mutualists associated with invasive legumes in their exotic range overlap with that of local native legumes and (2) can any differences be explained by fundamental incompatibilities with particular rhizobial genotypes? To address these questions, we first characterized the rhizobial communities naturally associating with three invasive and six native legumes growing in the San Francisco Bay Area. We then conducted a greenhouse experiment to test whether the invasive legume could nodulate with any of a broad array of rhizobia found in their exotic range. There was little overlap between the Bradyrhizobium communities associated with wild?grown invasive and native legumes, yet the invasive legumes could nodulate with a broad range of rhizobial strains under greenhouse conditions. These observations suggest that under field conditions in their exotic range, these invasive legumes are not currently associating with the mutualists of local native legumes, despite their potential to form such associations. However, the promiscuity with which these invading legumes can form mutualistic associations could be an important factor early in the invasion process if mutualist scarcity limits range expansion. Overall, the observation that invasive legumes have a community of rhizobia distinct from that of native legumes, despite their ability to associate with many rhizobial strains, challenges existing assumptions about how invading species obtain their mutualists. These results can therefore inform current and future efforts to prevent and remove invasive species. | https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.3310 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | What makes tree pests more successful | Have you ever noticed tiny bumps on the branches of a tree? environment. For this reason, we investigated the combined These may have been scale insects. These small insects feed effects of urban warming and drought on trees and their on tree sap. Scale insects on urban trees are notably more insect pests. We measured drought stress in trees, counted abundant than those on rural trees. As a result, urban trees the number of insects on each tree, the embryos developing suffer from heavy infestations, and are often unhealthy or inside female insects, and measured their body sizes. die. To protect and restore urban tree health, we needed The warmer, more drought-stressed trees harboured more to determine the factors that make these tree pests more successful pests than cooler, less drought-stressed trees. Our successful in urban habitats. data suggest that as cities and natural habitats become hotter Living organisms interact closely with each other and their and drier, damaging scale insects will become more abundant. | Urban habitats are characterized by impervious surfaces, which increase temperatures and reduce water availability to plants. The effects of these conditions on herbivorous insects are not well understood, but may provide insight into future conditions. Three primary hypotheses have been proposed to explain why multiple herbivorous arthropods are more abundant and damaging in cities, and support has been found for each. First, less complex vegetation may reduce biological control of pests. Second, plant stress can increase plant quality for pests. And third, urban warming can directly increase pest fitness and abundance. These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, and the effects of temperature and plant stress are particularly related. Thus, we test the hypothesis that urban warming and drought stress combine to increase the fitness and abundance of the scale insect, Melanaspis tenebricosa, an urban tree pest that is more abundant in urban than rural areas of the southeastern U.S. We did this by manipulating drought stress across an existing mosaic of urban warming. We found support for the additive effect of temperature and drought stress such that female embryo production and body size increased with temperature and was greater on drought-stressed than watered trees. This study provides further evidence that drivers of pest insect outbreaks act in concert, rather than independently, and calls for more research that manipulates multiple abiotic factors related to urbanization and climate change to predict their effects on ecological interactions. As cities expand and the climate changes, warmer temperatures and drought conditions may become more widespread in the native range of this pest. These changes have direct physiological benefits for M. tenebricosa, and potentially other pests, that may increase their fitness and abundance in urban and natural forests. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0173844 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Social-Science Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Whats harming our oceans | Earth looks like a beautiful blue marble from space. What these benefits, we need to look after ocean habitats. In this makes it so blue? The ocean! Ocean covers % of our study, we used a mathematical model to understand human planet. More than a third of the worlds population lives threats to the Atlantic coast of the United States. We looked close to the ocean. But the ocean impacts all of us! Marine at different causes of risk and their combined effects on and coastal habitats provide us with many things such as habitats. We found that rising sea surface temperatures and food, transport, protection from floods, and the chance commercial fishing are the major threats. Also, the habitats for some fun activities. Yet, these human uses can harm on the coastline and a narrow offshore (out at sea) region ocean habitats and put them at risk. To continue receiving are at greatest risk. We suggest ways to reduce these risks. | Coastal habitats provide important benefits to people, including habitat for species targeted by fisheries and opportunities for tourism and recreation. Yet, such human activities also can imperil these habitats and undermine the ecosystem services they provide to people. Cumulative risk assessment provides an analytical framework for synthesizing the influence of multiple stressors across habitats and decision-support for balancing human uses and ecosystem health. To explore cumulative risk to habitats in the U.S. Northeast and Mid-Atlantic Ocean Planning regions, we apply the open-source InVEST Habitat Risk Assessment model to 13 habitats and 31 stressors in an exposure-consequence framework. In doing so, we advance the science priorities of EBM and both regional planning bodies by synthesizing the wealth of available data to improve our understanding of human uses and how they affect marine resources. We find that risk to ecosystems is greatest first, along the coast, where a large number of stressors occur in close proximity and secondly, along the continental shelf, where fewer, higher consequence activities occur. Habitats at greatest risk include soft and hard-bottom nearshore areas, tidal flats, soft-bottom shelf habitat, and rocky intertidal zoneswith the degree of risk varying spatially. Across all habitats, our results indicate that rising sea surface temperatures, commercial fishing, and shipping consistently and disproportionally contribute to risk. Further, our findings suggest that management in the nearshore will require simultaneously addressing the temporal and spatial overlap as well as intensity of multiple human activities and that management in the offshore requires more targeted efforts to reduce exposure from specific threats. We offer a transparent, generalizable approach to evaluating cumulative risk to multiple habitats and illustrate the spatially heterogeneous nature of impacts along the eastern Atlantic coast and the importance of spatial scale in estimating such impacts. These results offer a valuable decision-support tool by helping to constrain the decision space, focus attention on habitats and locations at the greatest risk, and highlight effect management strategies. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188776 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles; Paleoscience Articles | Where did flying reptiles come from | Have you heard of flying dinosaurs named pterodactyls [terr- But here the mystery deepens. For a long time it seemed like oh-dak-tlz]? Well, you may be surprised to hear that they there was a huge evolutionary gap between pterosaurs and are not technically dinosaurs. Pterodactyls, part of the group most other animals. How did they come about? By looking pterosaurs [terr-oh-sorz], were reptiles. They were related at fossils, we found out that lagerpetids [la-jer-pe-tids] (a to dinosaurs, which are also reptiles, but do not belong to small group of non-flying reptiles) are close relatives of that group. pterosaurs. Finding out about lagerpetids told us a bit about Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates that were able to how pterosaurs started to fly. fly by flapping their wings. This makes them all the more interesting. Have you ever thought about how it is possible that some animals started to fly? How did they get their wings? The general answer is: evolution. | Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight1and comprised one of the main evolutionary radiations in terrestrial ecosystems of the Mesozoic era (approximately 25266million years ago), but their origin has remained an unresolved enigma in palaeontology since the nineteenth century2,3,4. These flying reptiles have been hypothesized to be the close relatives of a wide variety of reptilian clades, including dinosaur relatives2,3,4,5,6,7,8, and there is still a major morphological gap between those forms and the oldest, unambiguous pterosaurs from the Upper Triassic series. Here, using recent discoveries of well-preserved cranial remains, microcomputed tomography scans of fragile skull bones (jaws, skull roofs and braincases) and reliably associated postcrania, we demonstrate that lagerpetidsa group of cursorial, non-volant dinosaur precursorsare the sister group of pterosaurs, sharing numerous synapomorphies across the entire skeleton. This finding substantially shortens the temporal and morphological gap between the oldest pterosaurs and their closest relatives and simultaneously strengthens the evidence that pterosaurs belong to the avian line of archosaurs. Neuroanatomical features related to the enhanced sensory abilities of pterosaurs9are already present in lagerpetids, which indicates that these features evolved before flight. Our evidence illuminates the first steps of the assembly of the pterosaur body plan, whose conquest of aerial space represents a remarkable morphofunctional innovation in vertebrate evolution. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3011-4 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Where does Australias wildlife hide | hide away in wild natural parks. But it turns out that many of them might be much closer than we expect right under our noses in the cities where we live. We began this scientific People often think that endangered plants and animals are research to find out exactly how many threatened species live tucked away in a protected park somewhere in the wilderness. in our cities. Yet, we know that many species, threatened with extinction, live much closer to us in our own neighborhoods. We began our research to find out exactly how much threatened wildlife lives in Australian cities. We overlapped maps of species habitats with maps of urban areas and discovered that half of the threatened animals and a quarter of the threatened plants live in cities! If we care about giving them a chance to survive, we need to learn to share our space with them. | Although urbanization impacts many species, there is little information on the patterns of occurrences of threatened species in urban relative to non-urban areas. By assessing the extent of the distribution of threatened species across all Australian cities, we aim to investigate the currently under-utilized opportunity that cities present for national biodiversity conservation. Australian mainland, Tasmania and offshore islands. Distributions of Australia's 1643 legally protected terrestrial species (hereafter threatened species) were compiled. We assessed the extent to which they overlapped with 99 cities (of?more than 10,000 people), with all non-urban areas, and with simulated dummy cities which covered the same area and bioregion as the true cities but were non-urban. We analysed differences between animals and plants, and examined variability within these groups using species accumulation modelling. Threatened species richness of true versus dummy cities was analysed using generalized linear mixed-effects models. Australian cities support substantially more nationally threatened animal and plant species than all other non-urban areas on a unit-area basis. Thirty per cent of threatened species were found to occur in cities. Distribution patterns differed between plants and animals: individual threatened plant species were generally found in fewer cities than threatened animal species, yet plants were more likely to have a greater proportion of their distribution in urban areas than animals. Individual cities tended to contain unique suites of threatened species, especially threatened plants. The analysis of true versus dummy cities demonstrated that, even after accounting for factors such as net primary productivity and distance to the coast, cities still consistently supported a greater number of threatened species. This research highlights that Australian cities are important for the conservation of threatened species, and that the species assemblages of individual cities are relatively distinct. National conservation policy should recognize that cities play an integral role when planning for and managing threatened species. | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/geb.12404 | Elementary school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Where will plants migrate as it gets warmer | We know that the climate is changing. All living things have one of three options: move, adapt or die. Migrating to a more suitable climate is a typical response from animals. But plants, which we think of as stationary organisms, can do that too. Indeed, we expect that many plant communities may shift to new territories, more suitable for their preferred lifestyle (in terms of air temperature, rainfall and amount of sunlight). Will they find such places, though? We set off to try to understand that change better. | Changes in climate projected for the 21st century are expected to trigger widespread and pervasive biotic impacts. Forecasting these changes and their implications for ecosystem services is a major research goal. Much of the research on biotic responses to climate change has focused on either projected shifts in individual species distributions or broad-scale changes in biome distributions. Here, we introduce a novel application of multinomial logistic regression as a powerful approach to model vegetation distributions and potential responses to 21st century climate change. We modeled the distribution of 22 major vegetation types, most defined by a single dominant woody species, across the San Francisco Bay Area. Predictor variables included climate and topographic variables. The novel aspect of our model is the output: a vector of relative probabilities for each vegetation type in each location within the study domain. The model was then projected for 54 future climate scenarios, spanning a representative range of temperature and precipitation projections from the CMIP3 and CMIP5 ensembles. We found that sensitivity of vegetation to climate change is highly heterogeneous across the region. Surprisingly, sensitivity to climate change is higher closer to the coast, on lower insolation, north-facing slopes and in areas of higher precipitation. While such sites may provide refugia for mesic and cool-adapted vegetation in the face of a warming climate, the model suggests they will still be highly dynamic and relatively sensitive to climate-driven vegetation transitions. The greater sensitivity of moist and low insolation sites is an unexpected outcome that challenges views on the location and stability of climate refugia. Projections provide a foundation for conservation planning and land management, and highlight the need for a greater understanding of the mechanisms and time scales of potential climate-driven vegetation transitions. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0130629 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Who knocks down the most trees humans or elephants | If you push a tree really, really hard, do you think you could We wanted to find out who had the greatest effect on make it fall down? You would probably struggle, even if it treefall in African woodlands known as savannas humans, looks quite small and thin. But its easy work for an elephant! or elephants. We collected data on treefall rates and patterns and found that elephants had the greatest effect, We call elephants ecosystem engineers because they can but that humans were also responsible for high numbers of have a great effect on their landscape, pushing trees down treefall. Although this doesnt always kill the trees as they as they search for food and water. However, humans can are resilient to disturbance, but, combined with other factors also have a big impact on a landscape, cutting trees for humans and elephants can put the woodlands at risk. fuelwood for cooking or opening space for crops. | Humans have played a major role in altering savanna structure and function, and growing land-use pressure will only increase their influence on woody cover. Yet humans are often overlooked as ecological components. Both humans and the African elephant Loxodonta africana alter woody vegetation in savannas through removal of large trees and activities that may increase shrub cover. Interactive effects of both humans and elephants with fire may also alter vegetation structure and composition. Here we capitalize on a macroscale experimental opportunity brought about by the juxtaposition of an elephant-mediated landscape, human-utilized communal harvesting lands and a nature reserve fenced off from both humans and elephants to investigate the influence of humans and elephants on height-specific treefall dynamics. We surveyed 6812 ha using repeat, airborne high resolution Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) to track the fate of 453 685 tree canopies over two years. Human-mediated biennial treefall rates were 23.5 fold higher than the background treefall rate of 1.5% treefall ha1, while elephant-mediated treefall rates were 5 times higher at 7.6% treefall ha1 than the control site. Model predictors of treefall revealed that human or elephant presence was the most important variable, followed by the interaction between geology and fire frequency. Treefall patterns were spatially heterogeneous with elephant-driven treefall associated with geology and surface water, while human patterns were related to perceived ease of access to wood harvesting areas and settlement expansion. Our results show humans and elephants utilize all height classes of woody vegetation, and that large tree shortages in a heavily utilized communal land has transferred treefall occurrence to shorter vegetation. Elephant- and human-dominated landscapes are tied to interactive effects that may hinder tree seedling survival which, combined with tree loss in the landscape, may compromise woodland sustainability. | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecog.02549/abstract | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | Who lives in Texas groundwater | Did you know that some salamander species in Texas live To learn more, we collected DNA from salamanders living in in water underground and never see the light of day? the springs and caves of the Edwards-Trinity aquifer system Unfortunately, overuse of groundwater, pollution, and in Texas. Differences in DNA showed that the individual habitat loss threaten them with extinction. Before we can salamanders we collected fall into different species. Three decide how best to protect these animals, we need to know of those species were new discoveries! Then, we investigated more about them. For example, how many species are how the different species were related, providing clues to there? Where do they live? What do they need to survive? how they evolved over millions of years. | Groundwater-dependent species are among the least-known components of global biodiversity, as well as some of the most vulnerable because of rapid groundwater depletion at regional and global scales. The karstic EdwardsTrinity aquifer system of west-central Texas is one of the most species-rich groundwater systems in the world, represented by dozens of endemic groundwater-obligate species with narrow, naturally fragmented distributions. Here, we examine how geomorphological and hydrogeological processes have driven population divergence and speciation in a radiation of salamanders (Eurycea) endemic to the EdwardsTrinity system using phylogenetic and population genetic analysis of genome-wide DNA sequence data. Results revealed complex patterns of isolation and reconnection driven by surface and subsurface hydrology, resulting in both adaptive and nonadaptive population divergence and speciation. Our results uncover cryptic species diversity and refine the borders of several threatened and endangered species. The US Endangered Species Act has been used to bring state regulation to unrestricted groundwater withdrawals in the Edwards (Balcones Fault Zone) Aquifer, where listed species are found. However, the Trinity and EdwardsTrinity (Plateau) aquifers harbor additional species with similarly small ranges that currently receive no protection from regulatory programs designed to prevent groundwater depletion. Based on regional climate models that predict increased air temperature, together with hydrologic models that project decreased springflow, we conclude that EdwardsTrinity salamanders and other codistributed groundwater-dependent organisms are highly vulnerable to extinction within the next century. | https://www.pnas.org/content/116/7/2624 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Whos eating all the shrimp | Whether in prawn cocktail, shrimp gumbo, or grilled on the We studied the relationship between the abundance of barbeque, youve probably eaten shrimp lots of times. Its shrimp and the fish that eat them, and found that there the most common seafood in the US. An American eats on was a statistical link between the two. Although we cannot average pounds of it every year! conclude that this is entirely due to the abundance of shrimp, we believe that our research shows that shrimp are a really While we know that shrimp is a popular seafood, we wanted important prey for these fish species. to find out how important it was in supporting other valuable fish species in the Gulf of Mexico. | This study investigated the contribution of shrimp stocks in supporting the production of valuable predator species. Fishery-independent data on white shrimp, brown shrimp, and selected fish species (spotted seatrout, red drum, and southern flounder) were collected from 1986 to 2014 by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and converted to catch-per-unit effort (CPUE). Here, the associations between the CPUEs of fish species as predators and those of shrimp species as prey in each sampled bay and sampling season were analyzed using co-integration analysis and Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR). Co-integration analysis revealed significant associations between 31 of 70 possible fish/shrimp pairings. The analysis also revealed discernible seasonal and spatial patterns. White shrimp in August and brown shrimp in May were associated with fish CPUEs in bays located along the lower coast of Texas, whereas white shrimp in November was more strongly associated with fish CPUEs in bays located on the upper coast. This suggests the possible influence of latitudinal environmental gradient. The results of the PLSR, on the other hand, were not conclusive. This may reflect the high statistical error rates inherent to the analysis of short non-stationary time series. Co-integration is a robust method when analyzing non-stationary time series, and a majority of time series in this study was non-stationary. Based on our co-integration results, we conclude that the CPUE data show significant associations between shrimp abundance and the three predator fish species in the tested regions. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166479 | Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Why are catfish bad neighbors for allis shad | The allis shad is a type of migratory fish. While they typically We wanted to find out if catfish truly are a threat to the already live in the ocean, they travel to rivers during the spring months endangered allis shad. To do this, we monitored a part of the to lay eggs. Sadly, this journey can be deadly for many allis Garonne (a large river in France) where allis shad like to lay shad. This is because humans fish for them, they get blocked their eggs, and then we studied catfish hunting behavior. by dams, or the rivers are too polluted. And if these dangers werent enough, a new species called the European catfish likes to eat the allis shad. | Silurus glanisis a large non-native opportunistic predator able to develop hunting strategy in response to newly available prey where it has been introduced. Migrating spawning anadromous prey such as allis shadAlosa alosacould represent this available and energy-rich food resource. Here, we report an impressive catfish hunting behavior on shad spawning act in one of the main spawning grounds in Europe (Garonne River, Southwest France). Shad spawning act consists of at least one male and one female swimming side by side, trashing the water surface with their tail which, therefore, produces a splashing noise audible from the river bank. The catfish hunting behavior on shad spawning act was studied, at night, during spring months, using both auditory and video survey. Simultaneously, catfish individuals were fishing to analyze their stomach content. Catfish disturbed 12% of the 1024 nocturnal spawning acts we heard, and this proportion increased to 37% among the 129 spawning acts when estimated with low-light camera recording. Stomach content analyses on 251 large catfish individuals (body length?>?128cm) caught in the same river stretch revealed shad represented 88.5% of identified prey items in catfish diet. This work demonstrates that European catfish predation must be considered as a significant factor of mortality of allis shad. In a context of the extension of the European catfish range area in western and southern European freshwaters, this new trophic impact, with other ones previously described for salmon or lamprey, has to be considered in European conservation plans of anadromous species. | https://doi.org/10.1007/s10452-020-09811-8 | Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Why are some parasites picky eaters | Nematodes are microscopic roundworms that live in soil, used as biological pest control in the United States. oceans, and lakes (Fig. ). Scientists estimate that there Some parasites are generalists and can infect a wide variety could be a million species of nematodes and that many of hosts while others are specialists and only infect certain of them are parasites. Sometimes farmers use parasitic hosts. We wanted to determine if S. scapterisci really is nematodes as a natural enemy to kill some pests. This is a specialist parasite and why it is a picky eater (showing one type of biological pest control. a preference for one insect over another). To do this we We studied a particular parasitic nematode called studied how these nematodes behave when given different Steinernema scapterisci. It infects insects and has been insects as food. | Entomopathogenic nematodes are a subgroup of insect-parasitic nematodes that are used in biological control as alternatives or supplements to chemical pesticides. Steinernema scapterisci is an unusual member of the entomopathogenic nematode guild for many reasons including that it is promiscuous in its association with bacteria, it can reproduce in the absence of its described bacterial symbiont, and it is known to have a narrow host range. It is a powerful comparative model within the species and could be used to elucidate parasite specialization. Here we describe a new method of efficiently producing large numbers of S. scapterisci infective juveniles (IJs) in house crickets and for quantifying parasitic activation of the IJs upon exposure to host tissue using morphological features. We found that parasite activation is a temporal process with more IJs activating over time. Furthermore, we found that activated IJs secrete a complex mixture of proteins and that S. scapterisci IJs preferentially activate upon exposure to cricket tissue, reaffirming the description of S. scapterisci as a cricket specialist. | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169410 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Why are whales in trouble again | Imagine you are standing on a boat. You look out, searching To find out, we analyzed data from the feeding grounds in all directions for a glimpse of a whale. But you cant find of the North Atlantic Right whale. We found that warmer any. Your excitement fades. Where are the whales? ocean temperatures made food harder to find. Without enough food, fewer whales were born. Also, whales started Many years ago, an ocean without whales was a real concern swimming north to find more food. This puts them in danger because we hunted them too much. Then we banned from getting hit by ships and tangled in fishing nets. So now whaling and their populations grew. Yet some whale species they face a new threat from humans: climate change. are declining again. Why? | Ocean warming linked to anthropogenic climate change is impacting the ecology of marine species around the world. In 2010, the Gulf of Maine and Scotian Shelf regions of the Northwest Atlantic underwent an unprecedented regime shift. Forced by climate-driven changes in the Gulf Stream, warm slope waters entered the region and created a less favorable foraging environment for the endangered North Atlantic right whale population. By mid-decade, right whales had shifted their late spring/summer foraging grounds from the Gulf of Maine and the western Scotian Shelf to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The population also began exhibiting unusually high mortality in 2017. Here, we report that climate-driven changes in ocean circulation have altered the foraging environment and habitat use of right whales, reducing the population’s calving rate and exposing it to greater mortality risks from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement. The case of the North Atlantic right whale provides a cautionary tale for the management of protected species in a changing ocean. | https://tos.org/oceanography/article/ocean-regime-shift-is-driving-collapse-of-the-north-atlantic-right-whale-population | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | Why can some monkeys live high in the mountains | Geladas are an unusual primate. They eat mostly grass the DNA of wild geladas. We found a surprising difference in instead of fruit or meat. They are known as bleeding heart how DNA is packaged between geladas from two different monkeys for the bright red patch of skin on their chests. regions of Ethiopia. Also, we know that some animals react to They also live high in the mountains instead of in the jungle or low oxygen by increasing the amount of hemoglobin in their the savanna. The air is thinner high in the mountains, so it is blood. But we learned that geladas dont do that. Instead, harder to get enough oxygen. How can geladas thrive in that they might have evolved to have larger lungs to help them environment? Thats what we wanted to find out. We studied get more oxygen with each breath. | Primates have adapted to numerous environments and lifestyles but very few species are native to high elevations. Here we investigated high-altitude adaptations in the gelada (Theropithecus gelada), a monkey endemic to the Ethiopian Plateau. We examined genome-wide variation in conjunction with measurements of haematological and morphological traits. Our new gelada reference genome is highly intact and assembled at chromosome-length levels. Unexpectedly, we identified a chromosomal polymorphism in geladas that could potentially contribute to reproductive barriers between populations. Compared with baboons at low altitude, we found that high-altitude geladas exhibit significantly expanded chest circumferences, potentially allowing for greater lung surface area for increased oxygen diffusion. We identified gelada-specific amino acid substitutions in the alpha-chain subunit of adult haemoglobin but found that gelada haemoglobin does not exhibit markedly altered oxygenation properties compared with lowland primates. We also found that geladas at high altitude do not exhibit elevated blood haemoglobin concentrations, in contrast to the normal acclimatization response to hypoxia in lowland primates. The absence of altitude-related polycythaemia suggests that geladas are able to sustain adequate tissue-oxygen delivery despite environmental hypoxia. Finally, we identified numerous genes and genomic regions exhibiting accelerated rates of evolution, as well as gene families exhibiting expansions in the gelada lineage, potentially reflecting altitude-related selection. Our findings lend insight into putative mechanisms of high-altitude adaptation while suggesting promising avenues for functional hypoxia research. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01703-4 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | Why do bats need more food to call louder | Have you ever been somewhere noisy and had to shout to animals on earth. Being louder means they can find insects be heard? Imagine having to speak at that volume all day. more easily in the dark, but most bats don\'t "shout" louder Would you feel more tired if you shouted all the time or than a certain level. spoke at a normal volume? We wanted to find out if this is because bats use more Bats are very unusual animals because they can use sound energy when echolocating louder. To do this, we recorded to see at night. Bats use very loud echolocation to hear tiny and analyzed the calls of bats while they were flying. We insects that are far away, but their calls are at a frequency then studied how much energy they were using. that we cannot hear. In fact, bats are some of the loudest | Vocalizations are of pivotal importance for many animals, yet sound propagation in air is severely limited. To expand their vocalization range, animals can produce high-intensity sounds, which can come at high energetic costs. High-intensity echolocation is thought to have evolved in bats because the costs of calling are reported to be negligible during flight. By comparing the metabolic rates of flying bats calling at varying intensities, we show that this is true only for low call intensities. Our results demonstrate that above 130?dB sound pressure level (SPL, at a reference distance of 10?cm), the costs of sound production become exorbitantly expensive for small bats, placing a limitation on the intensity at which they can call. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1249-8 | Elementary school; Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Why do bees use social distancing | Honey bees are important insects in many of the ecosystems We found that in infected colonies there was more social around us. However, they are constantly exposed to many distancing between different types of bees. We also threats. They are particularly vulnerable to disease and discovered that the infection led to higher interactions parasites because they live in colonies. Once a member of between bees of the same type. We think this helps bees the colony gets infected, it is very easy for the disease to fight the spread of the parasite. spread. This is why honey bees have some specific behaviors to help them fight infections. In this study we wanted to see how honey bee behavior changes when Varroa destructor mites come into the colony. | Social distancing in response to infectious diseases is a strategy exhibited by human and nonhuman animals to counteract the spread of pathogens and/or parasites. Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies are ideal models to study this behavior because of the compartmentalized structure of these societies, evolved under exposure to parasite pressure and the need to ensure efficient functioning. Here, by using a combination of spatial and behavioral approaches, we investigated whether the presence of the ectoparasite mite Varroa destructor induces changes in the social organization of A. mellifera colonies that could reduce the spread of the parasite. Our results demonstrated that honey bees react to the intrusion of V. destructor by modifying space use and social interactions to increase the social distancing between young (nurses) and old (foragers) cohorts of bees. These findings strongly suggest a behavioral strategy not previously reported in honey bees to limit the intracolony parasite transmission. | https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj1398 | Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Why do invasive species do so well | Did you know that several different kinds of microbes live in our bodies and that they perform lots of important functions? For example, they can help us fight harmful infections and help us to get all the goodness out of the food we eat. Plants also have special relationships with microbes, particularly those that live around their roots. These microbes can help the plant to fight disease and are important to make them fitter and stronger. We studied a species of grass to see what was affecting the makeup of the microbial communities that lived around their roots. This will help us to understand how plants and microbes interact when an invasive plant is introduced to an environment. | Plantmicrobe interactions play crucial roles in species invasions but are rarely investigated at the intraspecific level. Here, we study these interactions in three lineages of a globally distributed plant,Phragmites australis. We use field surveys and a common garden experiment to analyze bacterial communities in the rhizosphere ofP. australisstands from native, introduced, and Gulf lineages to determine lineage-specific controls on rhizosphere bacteria. We show that within-lineage bacterial communities are similar, but are distinct among lineages, which is consistent with our results in a complementary common garden experiment. IntroducedP. australisrhizosphere bacterial communities have lower abundances of pathways involved in antimicrobial biosynthesis and degradation, suggesting a lower exposure to enemy attack than native and Gulf lineages. However, lineage and not rhizosphere bacterial communities dictate individual plant growth in the common garden experiment. We conclude that lineage is crucial for determination of both rhizosphere bacterial communities and plant fitness. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00626-0 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Why do invasive species like artificial lakes | It is gross to think about, but did you know that some worms of snails from North America that are new to the lake. The can live in your liver? Liver fluke, a type of flatworm, can infect majority of these snails were infected with a native liver fluke your liver and make you very sick. These parasites grow in parasite. We also found another non-native invasive species, freshwater snails before they invade a mammalian host. the water hyacinth, a floating water plant. The snail population Liver flukes infect millions of wild animals, farm animals, and was higher in areas where the hyacinth population was also humans worldwide. Here, we studied an invasive snail species high. Our study shows that artificial lakes are vulnerable to a and their liver fluke parasites in Lake Kariba in Africa - the chain of biological invasions. And this may promote the spread largest manmade lake in the world. We found large numbers of native parasites. | Parasite spillback, the infection of a non-indigenous organism by a native parasite, is a highly important although understudied component of ecological invasion dynamics. Here, through the first analysis of the parasite fauna of lymnaeid gastropods of Lake Kariba (Zimbabwe). We illustrate how the creation of an artificial lake may lead to a cascade of biological invasions in which an invasive aquatic plant promotes the proliferation of invasive gastropods, which in turn alters the epidemiology of trematodiases of potential medical and veterinary importance. Using a new multiplex Rapid Diagnostic PCR assay, we assessed the prevalence of Fasciola sp. infections in the gastropod populations. Both gastropod hosts and trematode parasites were identified using DNA barcoding. We provide the first record of the invasive North-American gastropod Pseudosuccinea columella in Lake Kariba. This species was found at 14 out of 16 sampled sites and its abundance was strongly positively correlated with the abundance of the invasive South-American water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes). About 65% of the P. columella specimens analysed were infected with a hitherto unknown Fasciola species. Phylogenetic analyses indicate close affinity to Fasciola hepatica and F. gigantica, which cause fasciolosis, an important liver disease affecting both ruminants and humans. In addition, another non-native Lymnaeid species was found: a Radix sp. that clustered closely with a Vietnamese Radix species. Radix sp. hosted both amphistome and Fasciola trematodes. By linking an invasion cascade and parasite spillback, this study shows how both processes can act in combination to lead to potentially important epidemiological changes. | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.12.307 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | Why is the worlds most expensive fungus disappearing | Meet the worlds most wanted parasite: a mummified caterpillar with a fungus growing right out of its face. Even stranger: it costs three times its weight in gold! This super-expensive fungus grows in the alpine regions of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau where it is cold and dry. Its promised health benefits include increased strength and cures for many diseases. Recently, it has become very popular around the world. Its price has increased and collectors have started harvesting more. But lately, some people have become concerned that the fungus populations are declining. We wanted to see if that is the case, and if so, why? So, we interviewed local harvesters and analyzed environmental models of the region. Our results showed that there is a decline in the caterpillar fungus populations, and the main causes are overharvesting and climate change. | Demand for traditional medicine ingredients is causing species declines globally. Due to this trade, Himalayan caterpillar fungus (Ophiocordyceps sinensis) has become one of the worlds most valuable biological commodities, providing a crucial source of income for hundreds of thousands of collectors. However, the resulting harvesting boom has generated widespread concern over the sustainability of its collection. We investigate whether caterpillar fungus production is decreasingand if so, whyacross its entire range. To overcome the limitations of sparse quantitative data, we use a multiple evidence base approach that makes use of complementarities between local knowledge and ecological modeling. We find that, according to collectors across four countries, caterpillar fungus production has decreased due to habitat degradation, climate change, and especially overexploitation. Our statistical models corroborate that climate change is contributing to this decline. They indicate that caterpillar fungus is more productive under colder conditions, growing in close proximity to areas likely to have permafrost. With significant warming already underway throughout much of its range, we conclude that caterpillar fungus populations have been negatively affected by a combination of overexploitation and climate change. Our results underscore that harvesting is not the sole threat to economically valuable species, and that a collapse of the caterpillar fungus system under ongoing warming and high collection pressure would have serious implications throughout the Himalayan region. | https://www.pnas.org/content/115/45/11489 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Would beavers make good firefighters | We all know beavers as cute animals with flat tails. They And this actually helps the plants around beaver dams to gnaw down trees with their sharp teeth and build dams in survive during wildfires! Therefore, we can think of beavers rivers. But beavers are much more than lumberjacks. By not only as great lumberjacks, but also as effective firefighters. building those dams, they reshape the whole environment around them and provide their surroundings with more water. | Beaver dams are gaining popularity as a low-tech, low-cost strategy to build climate resiliency at the landscape scale. They slow and store water that can be accessed by riparian vegetation during dry periods, effectively protecting riparian ecosystems from droughts. Whether or not this protection extends to wildfire has been discussed anecdotally but has not been examined in a scientific context. We used remotely sensed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data to compare riparian vegetation greenness in areas with and without beaver damming during wildfire. We include data from five large wildfires of varying burn severity and dominant landcover settings in the western USA in our analysis. We found that beaver-dammed riparian corridors are relatively unaffected by wildfire when compared to similar riparian corridors without beaver damming. On average, the decrease in NDVI during fire in areas without beaver is 3.05 times as large as it is in areas with beaver. However, plant greenness rebounded in the year after wildfire regardless of beaver activity. Thus, we conclude that while beaver activity does not necessarily play a role in riparian vegetation post-fire resilience, it does play a significant role in riparian vegetation fire resistance and refugia creation. | https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2225 | Elementary school; Middle school |
Biology Articles | Bullfrogs a Trojan horse for a deadly fungus | Did you know that amphibians have very special skin? They have helped spread Bd. Bullfrogs dont show signs of sickness use their skin to breathe and drink water. But a skin-eating when they are infected, which makes them Bd vectors. This fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), is killing them. is alarming because they are traded alive globally and could Since the 1970s, over species of amphibians have declined continue spreading Bd to amphibians around the world. Here, or gone extinct. Amphibians in the eastern US seem to be we analyzed the history of bullfrogs and Bd in the western US. unaffected by Bd, but Bd outbreaks have caused mass die- We found a link between bullfrogs arrival and Bd outbreaks. offs in the western US. A frog species native to the eastern Then we predicted areas with high disease risk. These results US, American bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana), may can help us control the spread of Bd and save amphibians. | Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), a causal agent of the amphibian fungal skin disease chytridiomycosis, has been implicated in the decline and extinction of over 200 species worldwide since the 1970s. Despite almost two decades of research, the history of Bd and its global spread is not well understood. However, the spread of the Global Panzootic Lineage of Bd (Bd-GPL), the lineage associated with amphibian die-offs, has been linked with the American bullfrog (Rana [Aqurana] catesbeiana) and global trade. Interestingly, R. catesbeiana is native to the eastern U.S., where no Bd-related declines have been observed despite Bds presence since the late 1800s. In contrast Bd has been found to have emerged in California and Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s, after which epizootics (i.e., epidemics in wildlife) ensued. We hypothesize that Bd-GPL spread from the eastern U.S. with the introduction of R. catesbeiana into the western US, resulting in epizootics and declines of native host species. Using museum records, we investigated the historical relationship between R. catesbeiana and Bd invasion in the western US and found that R. catesbeiana arrived in the same year or prior to Bd in most western watersheds that had data for both species, suggesting that Bd-GPL may have originated in the eastern US and R. catesbeiana may have facilitated Bd invasion in the western US. To predict areas with greatest suitability for Bd, we created a suitability model by integrating habitat suitability and host availability. When we incorporated invasion history with high Bd suitability, we found that watersheds with non-native R. catesbeiana in the mountain ranges of the West Coast have the highest disease risk. These findings shed light on the invasion history and disease dynamics of Bd in North America. Targeted historical surveys using archived specimens in natural history collections and present-day field surveys along with more localized, community-level studies, monitoring, and surveillance are needed to further test this hypothesis and grow our understanding of the disease ecology and host-pathogen dynamics of Bd. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188384 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | Can a spray make our crops better | Did you know the first genetically modified crop was what if we can change the crops without changing a tomato with delayed ripening? Genetically modified their DNA? organisms (GMOs) have been around for decades We tried using special molecules. They can change now. And they offer a lot of benefits. For example, cell activity. First, we have to insert them into plant they may grow more food or be more resistant to cells. For this, we tested sprays with nanocarriers. It diseases. But there are a few downsides as well. turned out to be a success! Many nanocarriers were Producing GMOs takes a lot of time and is often able to enter the plant cells. Then, we tried spraying expensive. Plus, many people think they are unsafe. nanocarriers with the special molecules. This was This is because they have some foreign DNA. But also a success! So, we could make the cell do what we wanted. | Genetic engineering of economically important traits in plants is an effective way to improve global welfare. However, introducing foreign DNA molecules into plant genomes to create genetically engineered plants not only requires a lengthy testing period and high developmental costs but also is not well-accepted by the public due to safety concerns about its effects on human and animal health and the environment. Here, we present a high-throughput nucleic acids delivery platform for plants using peptide nanocarriers applied to the leaf surface by spraying. The translocation of sub-micrometer-scale nucleic acid/peptide complexes upon spraying varied depending on the physicochemical characteristics of the peptides and was controlled by a stomata-dependent-uptake mechanism in plant cells. We observed efficient delivery of DNA molecules into plants using cell-penetrating peptide (CPP)-based foliar spraying. Moreover, using foliar spraying, we successfully performed gene silencing by introducing small interfering RNA molecules in plant nuclei via siRNA-CPP complexes and, more importantly, in chloroplasts via our CPP/chloroplast-targeting peptide-mediated delivery system. This technology enables effective nontransgenic engineering of economically important plant traits in agricultural systems. | https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.1c07723 | Elementary school; Lower high school; Middle school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles | Can armadillos show us how to regrow a liver | What if we could make our bodys old or sick cells act young again? Surprisingly, the bacteria that cause leprosy may show us how. Previously, we discovered that infecting cells with leprosy bacteria in a laboratory dish reprogrammed the cells back to an immature state. The cells may then be able to produce many different types of cells in the body and maybe even regenerate an organ. To test this in an actual animal, we infected nine-banded armadillos with leprosy bacteria. We compared their livers to the livers of uninfected armadillos. The livers of armadillos infected with leprosy were larger than those of uninfected armadillos. Importantly, these larger livers were healthy, with no signs of damage. We performed genetic analyses on the liver cells to determine which genes were active. Our results show that leprosy infection reprograms adult liver cells to make them resemble immature liver cells. Maybe someday we can adapt this natural process to regrow aging and damaged livers in humans. | Ideal therapies for regenerative medicine or healthy aging require healthy organ growth and rejuvenation, but no organ-level approach is currently available. Using Mycobacterium leprae (ML) with natural partial cellular reprogramming capacity and its animal host nine-banded armadillos, we present an evolutionarily refined model of adult liver growth and regeneration. In infected armadillos, ML reprogram the entire liver and significantly increase total liver/body weight ratio by increasing healthy liver lobules, including hepatocyte proliferation and proportionate expansion of vasculature, and biliary systems. ML-infected livers are microarchitecturally and functionally normal without damage, fibrosis, or tumorigenesis. Bacteria-induced reprogramming reactivates liver progenitor/developmental/fetal genes and upregulates growth-, metabolism-, and anti-aging-associated markers with minimal change in senescence and tumorigenic genes, suggesting bacterial hijacking of homeostatic, regeneration pathways to promote de novo organogenesis. This may facilitate the unraveling of endogenous pathways that effectively and safely re-engage liver organ growth, with broad therapeutic implications including organ regeneration and rejuvenation. | https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(22)00379-2 | Lower high school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles; Technology Articles | Can graphene in your clothing stop mosquito bites | Wouldnt it be great if there was clothing out there graphene indeed kept mosquitoes from biting people. that could fully protect us from mosquito bites? This We were surprised to realize that it not only acted as could reduce itching and the spread of mosquito- a physical barrier for the insects mouthparts, but also borne diseases. To find out, we tested whether a blocked important chemical signals that mosquitoes use super thin but really strong substance, graphene, to detect humans. Under dry conditions, our graphene has the potential to make clothing mosquito proof. layer therefore showed double potential for protection. In a lab experiment, we exposed humans wearing However, sweat or water made it less mosquito-proof. a) no protection or b) cheesecloth or c) cheesecloth But we found a modified form, reduced graphene, plus graphene to mosquitoes. And we found that the that protected humans even when it was wet. | Graphene-based materials are being developed for a variety of wearable technologies to provide advanced functions that include sensing; temperature regulation; chemical, mechanical, or radiative protection; or energy storage. We hypothesized that graphene films may also offer an additional unanticipated function: mosquito bite protection for light, fiber-based fabrics. Here, we investigate the fundamental interactions between graphene-based films and the globally important mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, through a combination of live mosquito experiments, needle penetration force measurements, and mathematical modeling of mechanical puncture phenomena. The results show that graphene or graphene oxide nanosheet films in the dry state are highly effective at suppressing mosquito biting behavior on live human skin. Surprisingly, behavioral assays indicate that the primary mechanism is not mechanical puncture resistance, but rather interference with host chemosensing. This interference is proposed to be a molecular barrier effect that prevents Aedes from detecting skin-associated molecular attractants trapped beneath the graphene films and thus prevents the initiation of biting behavior. The molecular barrier effect can be circumvented by placing water or human sweat as molecular attractants on the top (external) film surface. In this scenario, pristine graphene films continue to protect through puncture resistancea mechanical barrier effectwhile graphene oxide films absorb the water and convert to mechanically soft hydrogels that become nonprotective. | https://www.pnas.org/content/116/37/18304 | Middle school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | Can viruses save lives | Have you ever heard of bacteriophages? They are tiny protect us against bacterial diseases? Researchers have used viruses that can infect and kill bacteria, including the phage to treat disease in the past. But were they successful? harmful bacteria that make us sick! Scientists discovered We reviewed clinical reports of phage therapy for the last bacteriophages (phages) over a century ago. And they are years. Our research showed that phages can be quite actually all around us! Researchers have found phages in helpful and phage therapy was successful against bacterial sewage, soil, and even in our bodies. What if we used this infections. This is really important, because antibiotic natural enemy of bacteria to our advantage? Can phages resistance has become a major threat to our health. | Purpose Widespread antibiotic-resistant bacteria are threatening the arsenal of existing antibiotics. Not only are antibiotics less likely to be effective today, but their extensive use continues to drive the emergence of multidrug-resistant pathogens. A new-old antibacterial strategy with bacteriophages (phages) is under development, namely, phage therapy. Phages are targeted bacterial viruses with multiple antibacterial effector functions, which can reduce multidrug-resistant infections within the human body. This review summarizes recent phage therapy clinical trials and patient cases and outlines the fundamentals behind phage treatment strategies under development, mainly through bench-to-bedside approaches. We discuss the challenges that remain in phage therapy and the role of phages when combined with antibiotic therapy. Methods This narrative review presents the current knowledge and latest findings regarding phage therapy. Relevant case reports and research articles available through the Scopus and PubMed databases are discussed. Findings Although recent clinical data suggest the tolerability and, in some cases, efficacy of phage therapy, the clinical functionality still requires careful definition. The lack of well-controlled clinical trial data and complex regulatory frameworks have driven the most recent human data generation on a single-patient compassionate use basis. These cases often include the concomitant use of antibiotics, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions regarding the effectiveness of phages alone. However, human data support using antibiotics as phage potentiators and resistance breakers; thus, phage adjuvants are a promising avenue for near-term clinical development. Current knowledge gaps exist on the appropriate routes of administration, phage selection, frequency of administration, dosage, phage resistance, and pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties of the phages. In addition, we highlight that some phage therapies have mild adverse effects in patients. Implications Although more translational research is needed before the clinical implementation is feasible, phage therapy may well be pivotal in safeguarding humans against antibiotic-resistant infections. | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinthera.2020.07.014 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles; Technology Articles | Can we write biological software updates to cure disease | Did you know that each of the trillions of cells in your body makes decisions at every moment of the day? While cells do not have brains, they do have molecular sensors that tell them what to do if a certain molecule or signal is present around them. This makes them similar to a computer program: input in, response out. Unfortunately, just as a buggy software code can make a computer malfunction, sometimes bad genetic code inside our cells causes them to respond in a way that is bad for the body. A cancer cell, for example, has a broken code causing it to grow despite signals to shut down. Scientists have long sought to develop gene therapy a way to fix or replace a damaged or missing gene within a persons genome. Our team approached this challenge in a new way: we engineered something called a protein circuit and it seemed to work! | Synthetic protein-level circuits could enable engineering of powerful new cellular behaviors. Rational protein circuit design would be facilitated by a composable protein-protein regulation system in which individual protein components can regulate one another to create a variety of different circuit architectures. In this study, we show that engineered viral proteases can function as composable protein components, which can together implement a broad variety of circuit-level functions in mammalian cells. In this system, termed CHOMP (circuits of hacked orthogonal modular proteases), input proteases dock with and cleave target proteases to inhibit their function. These components can be connected to generate regulatory cascades, binary logic gates, and dynamic analog signal-processing functions. To demonstrate the utility of this system, we rationally designed a circuit that induces cell death in response to upstream activators of the Ras oncogene. Because CHOMP circuits can perform complex functions yet be encoded as single transcripts and delivered without genomic integration, they offer a scalable platform to facilitate protein circuit engineering for biotechnological applications. | http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/1252 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How are aging and gut bacteria related | We know that bacteria can be harmful and can cause a lot of diseases. But did you know that not all bacteria are bad? In fact, there are trillions of bacteria inside us that help us to live! These bacteria make up the gut microbiome. We wanted to understand the relationship between our gut bacteria and how we age. We found that as we get older, the different types of bacteria in our gut microbiome change. We also discovered that diseases and medication can affect this change. Knowing more about how our gut bacteria work can help us live healthier lives! | Gut microbial diversity decreases with aging, but existing studies have used stool samples, which do not represent the entire gut. We analyzed the duodenal microbiome in 251 subjects aged 18-35 (n = 32), 36-50 (n = 41), 51-65 (n = 96), and 66-80 (n = 82). Decreased duodenal microbial diversity in older subjects is associated with combinations of chronological age, number of concomitant diseases, and number of medications used, and also correlated with increasing coliform numbers (p < 0.0001). Relative abundance (RA) of phylum Proteobacteria increases in older subjects, with increased RA of family Enterobacteriaceae and coliform genera Escherichia and Klebsiella, and is associated with alterations in the RA of other duodenal microbial taxa and decreased microbial diversity. Increased RA of specific genera are associated with chronological age only (Escherichia, Lactobacillus, and Enterococcus), number of medications only (Klebsiella), or number of concomitant diseases only (Clostridium and Bilophila). These findings indicate the small intestinal microbiome changes significantly with age and the aging process. | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34592155/ | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Chemistry Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How are chemicals impacting our reproductive health | You might have heard of a chemical called BPA. Maybe you have seen a BPA Free label on a reusable water bottle. But did you know that BPA is just one chemical that is part of a much larger group known as endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs? EDCs are everywhere. They are in most food packaging, cosmetics, shampoo, and even in antibacterial soap! But now scientists are starting to understand that these chemicals could be the cause of many health problems, including reproductive problems. In this study we reviewed the scientific research looking at EDCs and reproduction in both fish and mammals. We wanted to understand what the research said about how these chemicals impact reproductive systems. The studies we reviewed used laboratory animals to better understand reproduction in fish and mammals. What we found was quite worrying. There is lots of evidence to show that EDCs can cause changes in how the reproductive system develops and grows. There is also evidence that EDCs have long-term impacts including fertility problems and reduced reproductive success. | Over the past century, evidence has emerged that endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) have an impact on reproductive health. An increased frequency of reproductive disorders has been observed worldwide in both wildlife and humans that is correlated with accidental exposures to EDCs and their increased production. Epidemiological and experimental studies have highlighted the consequences of early exposures and the existence of key windows of sensitivity during development. Such early in life exposures can have an immediate impact on gonadal and reproductive tract development, as well as on long-term reproductive health in both males and females. Traditionally, EDCs were thought to exert their effects by modifying the endocrine pathways controlling reproduction. Advances in knowledge of the mechanisms regulating sex determination, differentiation and gonadal development in fish and rodents have led to a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the effects of early exposure to EDCs on reproduction. In this manuscript, we review the key developmental stages sensitive to EDCs and the state of knowledge on the mechanisms by which model EDCs affect these processes, based on the roadmap of gonad development specific to fish and mammals. | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935121013359?via%3Dihub | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How can bacteria stop dengue | Vector-borne diseases are a major threat to human health. Diseases caused by viruses and parasites carried by mosquitoes kill millions of people every year. How can we control these diseases? One of the methods scientists have tried to develop recently is biocontrol the use of natural enemies to control mosquito populations and thus the diseases they carry. We wanted to try a slightly different approach: using bacteria that reduce the mosquitoes ability to transmit viruses. We introduced these bacteria in local Australian mosquitoes and then released them back into a town where a lot of dengue outbreaks have occurred to breed with wild mosquitoes. Soon enough the majority of the mosquitoes in the area carried the bacteria. This has led to a drastic reduction of human dengue cases. | Background: A number of new technologies are under development for the control of mosquito transmitted viruses, such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika that all require the release of modified mosquitoes into the environment. None of these technologies has been able to demonstrate evidence that they can be implemented at a scale beyond small pilots. Here we report the first successful citywide scaled deployment of Wolbachia in the northern Australian city of Townsville. Methods: The wMel strain of Wolbachia was backcrossed into a local Aedes aegypti genotype and mass reared mosquitoes were deployed as eggs using mosquito release containers (MRCs). In initial stages these releases were undertaken by program staff but in later stages this was replaced by direct community release including the development of a school program that saw children undertake releases. Mosquito monitoring was undertaken with Biogents Sentinel (BGS) traps and individual mosquitoes were screened for the presence of Wolbachia with a Taqman qPCR or LAMP diagnostic assay. Dengue case notifications from Queensland Health Communicable Disease Branch were used to track dengue cases in the city before and after release. Results: Wolbachia was successfully established into local Ae. aegypti mosquitoes across 66 km 2 in four stages over 28 months with full community support. A feature of the program was the development of a scaled approach to community engagement. Wolbachia frequencies have remained stable since deployment and to date no local dengue transmission has been confirmed in any area of Townsville after Wolbachia has established, despite local transmission events every year for the prior 13 years and an epidemiological context of increasing imported cases. Conclusion: Deployment of Wolbachia into Ae. aegypti populations can be readily scaled to areas of ~60km 2 quickly and cost effectively and appears in this context to be effective at stopping local dengue transmission. | https://gatesopenresearch.org/articles/2-36/v2 | Lower high school; Middle school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles; Technology Articles | How can gene editing cure disease | Did you know that the cell copies nucleotides (letters of In most cases, even this is okay. The baby is a carrier of DNA code) per second when it is dividing? And it only makes a bad copy of the gene, but often the good copy from the one mistake per million nucleotides! Thats like copying other parent will work well enough. In rare cases, though, the full volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica twelve times a baby may receive a bad copy from both parents. This and only making one typo! means they will have a genetic disease. Most times even these mistakes are caught and fixed. But There are several diseases that are caused by a single sometimes a mutation (mistake in the code) gets passed nucleotide mutation. Scientists have always wanted to use on. In eggs and sperm that means an unborn baby will get genetic editing to correct the bad part of the gene. We one bad copy of that gene. found a way to do it in real, live mice! | Genetic diseases can be diagnosed early during pregnancy, but many monogenic disorders continue to cause considerable neonatal and pediatric morbidity and mortality. Early intervention through intrauterine gene editing, however, could correct the genetic defect, potentially allowing for normal organ development, functional disease improvement, or cure. Here we demonstrate safe intravenous and intra-amniotic administration of polymeric nanoparticles to fetal mouse tissues at selected gestational ages with no effect on survival or postnatal growth. In utero introduction of nanoparticles containing peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) and donor DNAs corrects a disease-causing mutation in the -globin gene in a mouse model of human -thalassemia, yielding sustained postnatal elevation of blood hemoglobin levels into the normal range, reduced reticulocyte counts, reversal of splenomegaly, and improved survival, with no detected off-target mutations in partially homologous loci. This work may provide the basis for a safe and versatile method of fetal gene editing for human monogenic disorders. The correction of genetic defects in utero could allow for improved outcomes of gene therapy. Here, the authors demonstrate safe delivery of nanoparticles to fetal mouse tissues, and show that nanoparticles containing peptide nucleic acids to edit the beta-globin gene are effective in a mouse model of beta-thalassemia. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04894-2.pdf | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How can GM tomatoes help fight cancer | Did your parents ever tell you that eating your fruit and veggies is good for you? Well, theyre right! Fruits and vegetables contain powerful agents called antioxidants that can help us fight many diseases, including one of the biggest killers of all: cancer. With genetic engineering techniques, we created a new tomato that is even healthier than its traditional counterparts. In this study, we not only show that it contains more compounds that are beneficial to our health, but also that it has higher cancer-fighting powers than traditional tomatoes. We believe that our new tomato can aid in cancer prevention, either by simply eating it or by turning it into food supplements or cancer prevention medicine. | In recent years, by extensive achievements in understanding the mechanisms and the pathways affected by cancer, the focus of cancer research is shifting from developing new chemotherapy methods to using natural compounds with therapeutic properties to reduce the adverse effects of synthetic drugs on human health. We used fruit extracts from previously generated human type I InsP 5-ptase gene expressing transgenic tomato plants for assessment of the anti-cancer activity of established genetically modified tomato lines. Cellular assays (MTT, Fluorescent microscopy, Flow Cytometry analysis) were used to confirm that InsP 5-ptase fruit extract was more effective for reducing the proliferation of breast cancer cells compared to wild-type tomato fruit extract. Metabolome analysis of InsP 5-ptase expressing tomato fruits performed by LC-MS identified tomato metabolites that may play a key role in the increased anti-cancer activity observed for the transgenic fruits. Total transcriptome analysis of cancer cells (MCF-7 line) exposed to an extract of transgenic fruits revealed a number of differently regulated genes in the cells treated with transgenic extract compared to untreated cells or cells treated with wild-type tomato extract. Together, this data demonstrate the potential role of the plant derived metabolites in suppressing cell viability of cancer cells and further prove the potential application of plant genetic engineering in the cancer research and drug discovery. | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0175778 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Pollution Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we find oil-eating bacteria to clean up the sea | Crude oil is widely used in our everyday life to produce for cleaning up. The problem is that those other methods plastics, streets, fuel and other items. Unfortunately, oil is also harm the environment just not as much as oil does. toxic to plants and animals (including humans). If it gets We wanted companies to be more willing to use the spilled, for example in a transportation accident, it needs to environmentally friendly oil-eating bacteria for clean-ups. be cleaned up to prevent damage to the environment. We developed an inexpensive test to identify these special One way to do this is to use bacteria that eat oil. But microorganisms. If companies can pay less, they are more', 'methods': 'and take time. Consequently, other methods are often used while theyre at it! | Over the past 100 years, oil spills and long-term waste deposition from oil refineries have significantly polluted the environment. These contaminants have widespread negative effects on human health and ecosystem functioning. Natural attenuation of long chain and polyaromatic hydrocarbons is slow and often incomplete. Bioaugmentation of polluted soils with indigenous bacteria that naturally consume petroleum hydrocarbons could speed up this process. However, the characterization of bacterial crude oil degradation efficiency which often relies upon expensive, highly specialized gas-chromatography mass spectrometry analyses can present a substantial bottleneck in developing and implementing these bioremediation strategies. Here, we develop a low-cost, rapid, high-throughput fluorescence-based assay for identifying wild-type bacteria that degrade crude oil using the dye Nile Red. We show that Nile Red fluoresces when in contact with crude oil and developed a robust linear model to calculate crude oil content in liquid cell cultures based on fluorescence intensity (FI). To test whether this assay could identify bacteria with enhanced metabolic capacities to break down crude oil, we screened bacteria isolated from a former Shell Oil refinery in Bay Point, CA, and identified one strain (Cupriavidus sp. OPK) with superior crude oil depletion efficiencies (up to 83%) in only 3 days. We further illustrate that this assay can be combined with fluorescence microscopy to study how bacteria interact with crude oil and the strategies they use to degrade this complex substance. We show for the first time that bacteria use three key strategies for degrading crude oil: biofilm formation, direct adherence to oil droplets, and vesicle encapsulation of oil. We propose that the quantitative and qualitative data from this assay can be used to develop new bioremediation strategies based on bioaugmentation and/or biomimetic materials that imitate the natural ability of bacteria to degrade crude oil. | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2019.01318/full | Middle school |
Biology Articles; Paleoscience Articles | How can we find out about ancient Egyptian germs | Microbes are everywhere on Earth. Theyre in the soil, the rocks, the oceans, and in your body! The organisms living on you are called your microbiome. Your microbiome is important for your health. We wanted to know if we could use DNA to learn about the microbiome of mummified ancient Egyptian people. We used a new technique that matches up broken pieces of DNA. On the mummies, we found microbes that can cause gum disease. We also found evidence of germs that cause leprosy, hepatitis, and other infectious diseases. | Recent advances in sequencing have facilitated large-scale analyses of the metagenomic composition of different samples, including the environmental microbiome of air, water, and soil, as well as the microbiome of living humans and other animals. Analyses of the microbiome of ancient human samples may provide insights into human health and disease, as well as pathogen evolution, but the field is still in its very early stages and considered highly challenging. | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-020-00839-8 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How can we grow models of embryos in the lab | Studying embryos is important to understanding how stem cells can form structures that look like blastocysts. We humans develop. It can also help us understand some called these models blastoids. pregnancy complications. But access to embryos is very Blastoids grow and develop at a similar speed as blastocysts. limited. We wanted to find a way to study embryos without They also have the same size and cell composition. They actually needing any! We used stem cells to grow models of are not embryos and cannot develop into an organism. But blastocysts young embryos. Our experiments showed that blastoids are a useful way to study human development. | Limited access to embryos has hampered the study of human embryogenesis and disorders that occur during early pregnancy. Human pluripotent stem cells provide an alternative means to study human development in a dish1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Recent advances in partial embryo models derived from human pluripotent stem cells have enabled human development to be examined at early post-implantation stages8,9,10,11,12,13,14. However, models of the pre-implantation human blastocyst are lacking. Starting from naive human pluripotent stem cells, here we developed an effective three-dimensional culture strategy with successive lineage differentiation and self-organization to generate blastocyst-like structures in vitro. These structureswhich we term human blastoidsresemble human blastocysts in terms of their morphology, size, cell number, and composition and allocation of different cell lineages. Single-cell RNA-sequencing analyses also reveal the transcriptomic similarity of blastoids to blastocysts. Human blastoids are amenable to embryonic and extra-embryonic stem cell derivation and can further develop into peri-implantation embryo-like structures in vitro. Using chemical perturbations, we show that specific isozymes of protein kinase C have a critical function in the formation of the blastoid cavity. Human blastoids provide a readily accessible, scalable, versatile and perturbable alternative to blastocysts for studying early human development, understanding early pregnancy loss and gaining insights into early developmental defects. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03356-y | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Chemistry Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How can we make antimalarial medicine faster | For most people, getting a mosquito bite is annoying. For others, it could be life-threatening. Mosquitoes are carriers of many diseases, including malaria. According to the World Health Organization, in 2019 there were 229 million cases of malaria worldwide and about 409,000 people died from this disease. This is why scientists are trying to make the antimalarial medicine artemisinin more available.Artemisinin forms from dihydroartemisinic acid (DHAA). In this study, we collected data to see how heat and light affect how fast artemisinin forms from DHAA. We also looked at how the amount and chemical composition of DHAA affect the formation of artemisinin. Our data support the need for an optimal amount of ultraviolet light to produce artemisinin faster. We also discovered that the presence of hydrogen isotopes (deuteriums) on DHAA slows down the process of forming artemisinin. But increasing the amount of DHAA can significantly increase artemisinin production. | Artemisinin is the plant natural product used to treat malaria. The endoperoxide bridge of artemisinin confers its antiparasitic properties. Dihydroartemisinic acid is the biosynthetic precursor of artemisinin that was previously shown to nonenzymatically undergo endoperoxide formation to yield artemisinin. This report discloses the synthesis of [15,15,15-2H3]-dihydroartemisinic acid and its use to determine the mechanism of endoperoxide formation. Several new observations were made: (i) Ultraviolet-C (UV-C) radiation initially accelerates artemisinin formation and subsequently promotes homolytic cleavage of the O-O bond and rearrangement of artemisinin to a different product, and (ii) dideuterated and trideuterated dihydroartemisinic acid isotopologues at C3 and C15 converted to artemisinin at a slower rate compared to nondeuterated dihydroartemisinic acid, revealing a kinetic isotope effect in the initial ene reaction toward endoperoxide formation (kH/kD ? 2-3). (iii) The rate of conversion from dihydroartemisinic acid to artemisinin increased with the amount of dihydroartemisinic acid, suggesting an intermolecular interaction to promote endoperoxide formation, and (iv) 18O2-labeling showed incorporation of three and four oxygen atoms from molecular oxygen into the endoperoxide bridge of artemisinin. These results reveal new insights toward understanding the mechanism of endoperoxide formation in artemisinin biosynthesis. | https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.1c00246 | Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How can we outsmart Zika virus | The mosquito-transmitted Zika virus has been in the news a lot lately. Do you know what scientists are doing to protect us from it? When the virus infects pregnant women, it can cause neurological defects in their unborn children. Microcephaly (abnormally small heads) is the worst defect caused by Zika.Currently, there is no cure or vaccine preventing Zika infection. It is hard to develop a vaccine because of a special feature of this virus and its close relatives called antibody-dependent enhancement (more on that later). Thats why we decided to try a new approach against this virus. Instead of a vaccine, we wanted to introduce ready-to-go antibodies that could neutralize the infection. We first found a patient with a natural, strong immune response against Zika virus. We then identified the antibodies that were responsible for this antiviral effect and produced them in the lab. Then, we gave the purified antibodies to four macaques monkeys and injected the animals with Zika virus to see if this treatment can prevent virus replication. Our experiment showed promising results we found no trace of the virus in the antibody-treated macaques. | Therapies to prevent maternal Zika virus (ZIKV) infection and its subsequent fetal developmental complications are urgently required. We isolated three potent ZIKV-neutralizing monoclonal antibodies (nmAbs) from the plasmablasts of a ZIKV-infected patientSMZAb1, SMZAb2, and SMZAb5directed against two different domains of the virus. We engineered these nmAbs with Fc LALA mutations that abrogate Fc receptor binding, thus eliminating potential therapy-mediated antibody-dependent enhancement. We administered a cocktail of these three nmAbs to nonhuman primates 1 day before challenge with ZIKV and demonstrated that the nmAbs completely prevented viremia in serum after challenge. Given that numerous antibodies have exceptional safety profiles in humans, the cocktail described here could be rapidly developed to protect uninfected pregnant women and their fetuses. | http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/9/410/eaan8184 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | How can we protect bananas | A fungal disease, called Black Sigatoka, is threatening banana crops worldwide. The reason for this is the lack of genetic diversity in commercial bananas the Cavendish as all of these bananas are clones. So any disease that can kill one of them can kill them all. And this is the case with Black Sigatoka. Farmers can protect their crops by applying chemicals that kill fungi but this raises production costs and is bad for the environment. To better understand the problem, we explored the relationship between bananas and its pathogen. We found that due to continuous chemical spraying, most of the tested strains of the fungus that causes Black Sigatoka have developed resistance to the chemicals that are supposed to control them. We showed that wild resistant bananas carry resistance genes to Black Sigatoka that work by detecting a specific protein in the fungus. This is a very exciting discovery: disease resistance genes could be used to save the banana industry. | Black Sigatoka or black leaf streak disease, caused by the Dothideomycete fungus Pseudocercospora fijiensis (previously: Mycosphaerella fijiensis), is the most significant foliar disease of banana worldwide. Due to the lack of effective host resistance, management of this disease requires frequent fungicide applications, which greatly increase the economic and environmental costs to produce banana. Weekly applications in most banana plantations lead to rapid evolution of fungicide-resistant strains within populations causing disease-control failures throughout the world. Given its extremely high economic importance, two strains of P. fijiensis were sequenced and assembled with the aid of a new genetic linkage map. The 74-Mb genome of P. fijiensis is massively expanded by LTR retrotransposons, making it the largest genome within the Dothideomycetes. Melting-curve assays suggest that the genomes of two closely related members of the Sigatoka disease complex, P. eumusae and P. musae, also are expanded. Electrophoretic karyotyping and analyses of molecular markers in P. fijiensis field populations showed chromosome-length polymorphisms and high genetic diversity. Genetic differentiation was also detected using neutral markers, suggesting strong selection with limited gene flow at the studied geographic scale. Frequencies of fungicide resistance in fungicide-treated plantations were much higher than those in untreated wild-type P. fijiensis populations. A homologue of the Cladosporium fulvum Avr4 effector, PfAvr4, was identified in the P. fijiensis genome. Infiltration of the purified PfAVR4 protein into leaves of the resistant banana variety Calcutta 4 resulted in a hypersensitive-like response. This result suggests that Calcutta 4 could carry an unknown resistance gene recognizing PfAVR4. Besides adding to our understanding of the overall Dothideomycete genome structures, the P. fijiensis genome will aid in developing fungicide treatment schedules to combat this pathogen and in improving the efficiency of banana breeding programs. | http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005876 | Lower high school; Upper high school |