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Column One: Why this UCLA professor is studying female animals to gain insights into women's health

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Friday, October 14, 2022

A dearth of research on medical conditions affecting women has led a UCLA researcher to look for insights from the female animal kingdom.

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Birds, bees and even plants might act weird during the solar eclipse

A total eclipse isn’t just a spectacle in the sky. Birds, insects and even plants will take notice, and might start acting strange.

A total eclipse isn’t just a spectacle in the sky. When the moon consumes the sun on April 8, day will plunge into twilight, the temperature will drop — and nature will take notice.Reports abound of unusual animal and plant behavior during eclipses. A swarm of ants carrying food froze until the sun reemerged during an 1851 eclipse in Sweden. A pantry in Massachusetts was “greatly infested” with cockroaches just after totality in 1932. Sap flowed more slowly in a 75-year-old beech tree in Belgium in 1999. Orb-weaving spiders started tearing down their webs and North American side-blotched lizards closed their eyes during an eclipse in Mexico in 1991.Plenty of scientists see eclipses as rare opportunities to bolster anecdotal reports by studying how nature responds — or doesn’t — to a few minutes of dusk in the middle of the day. That’s why teams across the country produced a swarm of studies about plant and animal behavior during the last total eclipse to cut across the United States in 2017.Some of these scientists found that when the sun vanished, insects, birds and plants seemed to enter into something approaching a nocturnal pattern. Case in point: Scientists in multiple states reported that fireflies started flashing, and a team in Idaho captured two species of voles that are normally active at night.Bat researchers in Georgia, on the other hand, weren’t convinced that the eclipse had any effect on behavior, though they noticed slightly more bat activity on the night after the eclipse than on previous or subsequent nights. Beetles flew around as normal in South Carolina.Understanding how eclipses affect nature writ large is nearly impossible. That’s because eclipses don’t follow one of the most basic rules of science: replication. They don’t happen with regularity in the same spot. They vary in length. They happen at different times of day, during different seasons.“A lot of the things we found in the literature were exactly that — a curiosity. It happens once every so often, so it’s curious, but not generally informative of animal behavior,” said Olav Rueppell, a scientist who studies honeybee biology at the University of Alberta in Canada.And while an eclipse is an incredible time to observe the natural world, there’s also a potential observer effect: People who might normally be at school, at work or simply distracted are looking and listening closely, and what they see as responses to the eclipse could just be normal behaviors that escape notice on a typical day.Adam Hartstone-Rose, a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University, led a study of how animals reacted to the 2017 eclipse at the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, S.C.“At any given point on Earth, a total eclipse occurs once every 375 years. So it’s not like you’re learning something now you can use again in the future, and that’s certainly true for animals,” Hartstone-Rose said.“But it’s a unifying event. All of us have this experience together,” he said, adding that during the April eclipse, “we’re all going to be communing with animals and thinking about how they experience it.”Experimenting with natureStudies of animal behavior during an eclipse tend to fall into two categories. Some biologists who are near the path of totality will design a study to see how the eclipse affects their favorite organism, whether it be honeybees or chimpanzees. Others try to activate members of the public to take data and make observations all across the path, which the scientists can use to discern broad patterns.The NASA-backed Eclipse Soundscapes project, for example, will collect audio data and observations from hundreds of people during the April eclipse to repeat, with a bit more rigor, a citizen-science study of animal responses to a 1932 eclipse.In his team’s 2017 study of zoo animals, Hartstone-Rose had researchers systematically observe 17 species, including baboons, flamingos and Galapagos tortoises.Most responded to the eerie darkness in some way — whether by starting their bedtime routines, acting anxious or mating. Giraffes that had been munching on lettuce and chewing their cud huddled near their barn or galloped through their exhibit. A Komodo dragon that hadn’t moved in a day raced around its enclosure and climbed up the wall.Hartstone-Rose is repeating the observations this year at the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas, and he is drafting more than a thousand volunteers across the country to collect records of animal behavior through a project called Solar Eclipse Safari. He’s as interested in the anomalous behavior of animals as he is in learning how observing animals and trying to understand their experience affects humans, perhaps widening their sense of wonder and awe.One common report is that birds go to roost and go quiet during an eclipse. But when a team of ornithologists from Cornell University made recordings along an old logging road near the town of Corinna, Maine, for the 1963 eclipse, they heard the per-chic-o-ree of a goldfinch in the middle of totality, along with a hermit thrush, a Swainson’s thrush and a veery.“Perhaps no two lists of birds heard before, during, and after the eclipse would be anywhere near similar,” they wrote in their summary of the observations.In the 50 minutes before and after totality in 2017, researchers monitoring flying insects and birds via the weather radar network found that the skies went eerily quiet, but there was an intriguing uptick of activity right at totality. The researchers speculated that it might be some kind of insect reacting to the sudden darkness, while the birds possibly grew still due to confusion.“Some previous research shows that insects react much more immediately to light cues, while birds are more like, ‘What’s going on?’” said Cecilia Nilsson, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden. “Totality only lasts a few minutes, so by the time you’re figuring it out, it’s over.”For bird lovers, the many uncontrollable variables of an eclipse can be scientific opportunities, too.One exciting aspect of the 2024 eclipse is that it is happening during the spring, whereas the North American eclipse of 2017 took place very early in the fall migration season, Nilsson said. Many birds, she noted, migrate at night and are often more motivated during the spring migration, so it’s possible that abrupt darkness will have a different effect this time around.Rueppell, the honeybee scientist, was based in North Carolina during the total eclipse in 2017. He decided with collaborators to try to bring some rigor to previous observations of honeybee behavior.A crowdsourced compilation of observations from a 1932 total eclipse, for example, included reports of a swarm of 200 bees showing “apprehensiveness” in the minutes before totality. Another observer reported that “as darkness increased the outgoing bees diminished in numbers and the return battalions grew larger.”Rueppell and colleagues at Clemson University in South Carolina enlisted observers to watch the entrances of hives, counting how many honeybees were exiting and how many were returning from foraging trips before, during and after totality. They made some hives hungrier than others by taking the bees’ honey away before the eclipse, to see if that changed their willingness to forage.The researchers found that the environmental cues overrode bees’ own internal circadian clocks, with darkness causing them to return to the hive and hunker down. Those findings square with another study that found bees stopped buzzing around flowers during totality. But hives that were stressed by hunger shut down less completely than those that weren’t.They also conducted a second experiment, putting fluorescent powder on bees and releasing them away from their hives, then measuring how quickly they returned.Right before totality, they found the bees were returning faster, almost as if they were panicked.The forests full of treesDaniel Beverly, a plant ecophysiologist at Indiana University, studied how sagebrush in Wyoming reacted during the 2017 eclipse. A total eclipse last passed over Wyoming in 1918, though it traversed different parts of the state.“These plants are 60 to 100 years old, and they’ve never seen this midday darkness,” he said. The scientists found that photosynthesis plummeted during totality, then took hours to recover from the shock of the sun reemerging minutes later.This year Beverly will be measuring ecological responses to the eclipse at a forest in Indiana that is part of a long-term project monitoring carbon, water and energy flux through the ecosystem. Because the Morgan-Monroe State Forest is already the subject of intense scientific scrutiny, scientists can take advantage of existing instruments to measure factors such as carbon flux and water movement in white oak, tulip poplars, sassafras and sugar maples.Beverly noted that he’s excited to get as much of the data collection automated as possible so he and his team can fully appreciate the brief but wondrous moment of totality.“It is pretty awesome and life-changing,” Beverly said. “Just the spectacle of it. I don’t know what it does to the human brain.”

Aellopobatis bavarica: Scientists Discover New 150 Million-Year-Old Species of Rays

A new species of fossil ray, Aellopobatis bavarica, has been discovered in Bavarica, Germany, dating back to the Late Jurassic period. In a new study...

Aellopobatis bavarica: The newly discovered species, complete fossils are only known from Germany. This species is also the largest species of all and can grow up to 170 cm in size. Credit: Türtscher et al. (2024, Figure 4)A new species of fossil ray, Aellopobatis bavarica, has been discovered in Bavarica, Germany, dating back to the Late Jurassic period.In a new study recently published in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, an international team of scientists led by palaeobiologist Julia Türtscher from the University of Vienna has explored the puzzling world of rays that lived 150 million years ago and discovered a previously hidden diversity – including a new ray species.This study significantly expands the understanding of these ancient cartilaginous fish and provides further insights into a past marine ecosystem.In her new study, palaeobiologist Julia Türtscher from the Institute of Palaeontology at the University of Vienna examined 52 fossil rays from the Late Jurassic period. These rays are 150 million years old, from a time when Europe was largely covered by the sea, except for a few islands, comparable to today’s Caribbean. The Late Jurassic specimens are particularly valuable to scientists because they are among the oldest known fully preserved ray specimens. As only the teeth of fossilized rays are usually preserved, such rare skeletal finds provide exciting insights into the early evolution of this group. Although the exceptionally well-preserved fossils (from Germany, France, and the UK) have been known for some time, they have been largely unexplored. Türtscher’s study is the first comprehensive analysis of the variation in body shape in these rays.Palaeobiologist Julia Türtscher in the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Geology in Munich, where several specimens of the new ray species are on display. Credit: Patrick L. JamburaThe results show a greater diversity of holomorphic (fully preserved) rays in the Late Jurassic than previously thought. “Until now, only three holomorphic ray species have been confirmed from the Late Jurassic, but thanks to this study, a total of five species have now been identified,” says Türtscher.Based on their analyses, the researchers were able to confirm a fourth species that had been discussed for some time, as well as documenting and introducing a new, previously undiscovered ray species: Aellopobatis bavarica. This species, which can grow up to 170 cm long, was previously thought to be a large form of the much smaller French Spathobatis bugesiacus, which is 60 cm long. However, by analyzing the skeletal structures and body shapes in detail, the scientists were able to show that Aellopobatis bavarica is a separate species.The new results also suggest that the five species occurred in very restricted areas, but the authors are reluctant to jump to conclusions about possible endemisms: “Further studies on the tooth morphology of the specimens and subsequent comparisons with isolated teeth from other sites may help to reconstruct the palaeogeographic distribution of Late Jurassic rays,” explains Türtscher.Insight into past marine ecosystemsThe results of this new study not only contribute to the understanding of the biodiversity and evolution of rays in the Upper Jurassic, but also have direct implications on the identification of fossil ray species that are known from isolated teeth solely. Continual new discoveries about these fascinating animals provide insights into the dynamics of past marine ecosystems and highlight the importance of well-preserved fossils in the reconstruction of our geological past. “We can only draw accurate conclusions about living species if we also understand the past of a group, including its evolution, its adaptations to changing environmental factors over time, and the extinction this group has faced during its evolutionary history. Palaeobiological knowledge enables us to better understand the dynamics behind evolution and extinction of species and thus aids to develop more effective conservation measures for today’s endangered species” says second author Patrick L. Jambura from the Institute of Palaeontology at the University of Vienna.Reference: “Rostral and body shape analyses reveal cryptic diversity of Late Jurassic batomorphs (Chondrichthyes, Elasmobranchii) from Europe” by Julia Türtscher, Patrick L. Jambura, Eduardo Villalobos-Segura, Faviel A. López-Romero, Charlie J. Underwood, Detlev Thies, Bruce Lauer, René Lauer and Jürgen Kriwet, 19 March 2024, Papers in Palaeontology.DOI: 10.1002/spp2.1552

We Can Still Save the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge

The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge belongs to the planet. And we can still save it.

One of the hardest things to reconcile about living in the American South is how this region of extraordinary natural beauty, this still-wild place of irreplaceable biodiversity, is mostly in the hands of politicians who will gladly sell it to the highest bidder. It’s hard to reconcile how even land that’s ostensibly protected is never truly safe. And how state regulators charged with protecting it will often look the other way when the highest bidder violates the state’s own environmental regulations.An egregious example of this pattern is unfolding now in Georgia, where state officials are poised to approve a strip mine on the southeastern edge of the magnificent Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.At 407,000 acres, the Okefenokee is the largest ecologically intact blackwater swamp in North America and the largest National Wildlife Refuge east of the Mississippi River. It hosts or shelters a huge range of plant and animal life, including endangered and threatened species. It is a crucial way station for migratory birds. Designated a Wetland of International Importance under the RAMSAR Convention of 1971, it sequesters an immense amount of carbon in the form of peat.The proposed mine poses a profound risk to the swamp. Trail Ridge, the site where Twin Pines Minerals will begin operations, is a geological formation that functions as a low earthen dam holding the waters of the Okefenokee in place. The mine would remove the topsoil, dig out the sand pits, separate the titanium from the sand, and then return sand and soil to some approximation of their original place. To manage all this, Twin Pines would need to pump 1.4 million gallons of groundwater a day from the aquifer that serves the Okefenokee.It doesn’t sound too bad, I guess, unless you know that this destroy-extract-replace plan is effectively mountaintop-removal mining transferred to the watery lowlands. There is no restoring an ecosystem after an assault like that. Aquatic plants and animals die off if waterways become clogged with silt. Drinking water can be contaminated by heavy metals. Ancient land formations and the habitats they underpin are lost forever. The living soil is left barren.As a species, we have never let ecological necessity get in the way of something we think we need from the land. Thing is, we don’t need this mine. Titanium dioxide is used primarily as pigment in a range of products, including paint and toothpaste. It is not difficult to find in less environmentally sensitive areas.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

Grey-headed flying-fox population is stable – 10 years of monitoring reveals this threatened species is doing well

Ten years of data from Australia’s comprehensive national flying-fox monitoring program reveals the grey-headed flying fox (fruit bat) population is stable. It’s good news for this threatened species.

Adam McKeown, CSIROFlying foxes, or fruit bats, are familiar to many Australians. So it may come as a surprise to learn two of the four mainland species, both grey-headed and spectacled flying foxes, are threatened with extinction. But our decade-long survey of one of these species – the grey-headed flying fox – brings some encouraging news. Our data show the population has been relatively stable since 2012, when surveys first began under the National Flying-fox Monitoring Program. Incredibly, the species emerged from the Black Summer of 2019–20 relatively unscathed. Flying foxes also suffer in heatwaves and many die, but overall numbers have remained stable. While this study is good news for the species, we must not become complacent. Heatwaves are expected to become more frequent and intense as the climate changes. Only further monitoring can determine its effects. Read more: Flying foxes pollinate forests and spread seeds. Here's how we can make peace with our noisy neighbours Hanging out with flying foxes The grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus) is common in most cities and towns across south-eastern Australia. More recently, colonies have become established in South Australia. The species can be found anywhere from Maryborough, on Queensland’s Fraser Coast, to Adelaide, with some outlying populations as far north as Ingham in north Queensland. There’s also a breakaway group in Port Augusta, 300km north of Adelaide. The “vulnerable” listing means the species is at risk of extinction. But it’s not as dire as if it were “endangered”. The original vulnerable assessment, endorsed in 2001, was based on a population decline of about 30% over ten years and the potential for ongoing land clearing in the grey-headed flying fox’s core range. But this is the flying fox you’re most likely to see and hear in south-east Australia, from Sydney to Adelaide. During the day, flying foxes like to hang out together. They rest and socialise in large roosts, sometimes numbering more than 100,000 animals. More than 150,000 grey-headed flying foxes roosted in Gympie, Queensland, after much of their habitat burned during the Black Summer of 2019-20. Eric Vanderduys, CSIRO As the sun sets, they take to the sky, departing in large streams to forage during the night in the surrounding landscape. They can travel long distances to find food, sometimes venturing more than 40km from home, and flying more than 300km in a single night. Their food of choice is nectar from a wide variety of eucalypt, bloodwood and melaleuca species. In return, they play an important pollination role, as if they were nocturnal bees with a one-metre wingspan. They also feed extensively on native figs. In urban areas, they feast on the nectar and fruit of introduced species found in gardens and street trees. Individuals regularly change roosts. They move throughout the species’ range, following food resources. That means the number of bats in roosts is constantly changing, depending on the availability of the surrounding resources, which makes accurate counting particularly challenging. Grey-headed flying foxes sleep and socialise during the day but are often well aware of approaching humans. Adam McKeown, CSIRO Monitoring a threatened species Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, co-ordinated the National Flying-fox Monitoring Program in partnership with federal and state environmental agencies from 2012 to 2022. The intention was to monitor the populations of the two nationally listed flying fox species on the mainland. It was specifically designed to understand their population trends. Here we focus on the grey-headed flying foxes. The program involved quarterly visits by federal, state and local government staff and volunteers to as many flying fox roosts as possible. Over the entire program almost 12,000 counts were conducted at 912 potential roosts. Grey-headed flying foxes were found at 469 of those roosts. This program would not have been possible without hundreds of hours of work around the clock by staff and volunteers, often in challenging conditions. Their work highlights the importance of long-term monitoring programs. From 2012 to 2022 we counted an average of 580,000 grey-headed flying foxes in each survey. But total numbers ranged between 330,000 and 990,000, with strong seasonal variation. This variation relates to their reproductive cycle and the availability of food within their range. Flying foxes pup late in the year. When those pups become independent, they can be counted. This results in a sudden increase in the numbers, typically around February. So while our data show peaks and troughs throughout each year, overall the population remained stable. We developed a model to allow for this seasonality and examine overall population trends. The model strongly suggests the population hovered around 600,000 adults for the ten years of the survey. We found a 70% chance of a slightly increasing population, versus a 30% chance the population has declined slightly. The population appeared to be stable despite exceptional events such as the 2019–20 megafires and severe heatwaves known to have killed thousands of flying foxes. The flying foxes seem resilient to these threats for two main reasons. First, they are nomadic and well adapted to travelling long distances. This allows them to evade threats such as fires and droughts. Second, grey-headed flying-foxes are likely to benefit from a “human-modified landscape”. In other words, they may well be urban “winners”, as the urban areas we’ve created provide diverse foraging opportunities. Grey-headed flying foxes continually occupied all major cities within their range throughout our monitoring program. These urban environments offer a smorgasbord of flowering and fruiting species, especially palms and figs. Many of these species are exotics, with flowering and fruiting patterns that flying foxes can readily exploit. We found continuous occupation of individual roosts was unusual. The few that were continuously occupied were all in urban areas, supporting the view that urban areas are increasingly important for this species. This young grey-headed flying fox is big enough to count. Eric Vanderduys, CSIRO Good news, but we need to be cautious After ten years of monitoring we can safely say the grey-headed flying fox is doing ok, for the time being. But threats to its survival remain. Climate change is expected to cause more heatwaves, bushfires and droughts within their range. This could turn their fate around. It’s also worth noting that while our monitoring continued for two years after the 2019–20 bushfires, the longer-term impacts are still unknown. Given this uncertainty, continuing monitoring using similar methods and incorporating updated technology would increase certainty about the population trajectory. Unfortunately, monitoring has paused since 2022, pending further funding discussions. Read more: To stop new viruses jumping across to humans, we must protect and restore bat habitat. Here's why Eric Vanderduys works for CSIRO. He receives funding from a range of federal and state government agencies.Adam McKeown receives funding from a variety of federal and state government agencies.Chris R. Pavey works for CSIRO. He receives funding from a variety of federal and state government agencies. John Martin works for Ecosure ecological consultancy. He receives funding from a variety of federal and state government agencies.Peter Caley works for the CSIRO. He receives funding from a range of federal and state government agencies.

Oregon Is Now Home to the World's Largest Dark Sky Sanctuary

The Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary covers 2.5 million acres in the southeastern part of the state

Officials have been working toward the designation for four years. Travel Southern Oregon Calling all stargazers: Oregon is now home to the largest Dark Sky Sanctuary in the world. Earlier this month, DarkSky International certified a remote, 2.5 million-acre area in the southeastern part of the state. From this rugged swath of high desert landscape dotted with sagebrush, visitors who stay up late can see large numbers of stars, planets and other celestial bodies. “It’s surprising sometimes to see that many stars all at once,” says Bob Hackett, executive director of Travel Southern Oregon, to the Guardian’s Dani Anguiano. “It catches you, and it makes you pause because you feel like you can touch it … That vastness of the whole cosmos up there—it almost makes you get closer to the people you’re with on the ground.” DarkSky International is a nonprofit that certifies areas that have developed comprehensive protections against light pollution. To date, the group has certified more than 200 Dark Sky Places in 22 countries. The newly certified area is called the Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary, and officials spent four years working to earn the designation. They’ve implemented a lighting management plan that will help preserve the region’s unobstructed night sky views, which includes measures such as installing motion detectors and reducing the number of lights that point upward. Additionally, every light source within the sanctuary’s boundaries will need to comply with DarkSky International’s standards within the next decade, reports KLCC’s Nathan Wilk. In Dark Sky Sanctuaries, travelers can marvel at the cosmos without interference from light pollution. Travel Southern Oregon These efforts will not only benefit stargazers and astronomers but also help protect the many animals that call the region home, such as sage grouse, bighorn sheep, migratory birds and white-tailed jackrabbits. Light pollution can disrupt breeding, migration and other wildlife behaviors. Moths, for example, can congregate around street lights to the point of exhaustion, while sea turtle hatchlings can die after becoming disoriented by artificial lighting near the shore. Humans, too, suffer because of light pollution, which is getting worse year after year. In addition to obscuring views of the night sky, it is also a health hazard. Studies have linked light pollution to an array of problems, from sleep disorders and depression to obesity and diabetes. The new Oregon sanctuary is now the biggest in the world. But local officials want to make it even bigger: They hope someday to expand the sanctuary into neighboring Harney and Malheur counties, covering a total of 11 million acres, per KLCC. If they achieve this goal, they’ll have protected roughly one-fifth of the entire state, reports AFAR’s Bailey Berg. “As the population of Oregon and the trend of light pollution continue to rise, the unparalleled scale and quality of the Outback’s dark skies will long serve as a starry refuge to people and wildlife alike,” says Dawn Nilson, an environmental consultant who helped get the area certified, in a statement. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

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