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GoGreenNation news

Wolf killings in Oregon at all-time high while population remains stagnant

News Feed
Monday, April 15, 2024

Oregon’s wolf population count remained the same as last year, although the animals continue to expand their habitat westward, according to a new state report.Large numbers of wolves killed by people likely contributed to the plateauing number, environmental groups said. Wildlife officials also cited limited habitat in northeastern Oregon, where most packs now live.Thirty-six wolves died last year –  the highest number since wolves have rebounded in the state – and 33 of those were killed by people. Poachers killed 12, including several by poisoning, four wolves were killed in car crashes and one was lawfully shot for personal safety reasons. The rest were killed because they were preying on livestock.Twenty wolves were killed in 2022 (17 of them by people), 26 in 2021 (21 by people) and nine in 2020 (seven by people).The state’s wolf population remained at 178 in 2023, the same number it was in 2022, according to an annual wolf report released by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.It’s the fourth year that the animals’ growth in Oregon has been nearly flat. Prior to that, wolf numbers saw double-digit percentage increases for over a decade.Technically, the number of wolves in Oregon did increase by 10 last year, but in December Oregon captured and sent 10 of its wolves to Colorado to help Colorado meet its voter-approved reintroduction program.Oregon’s 2023 wolf count documented 22 packs – down from 24 in the previous year – with 15 of the packs meeting the criteria of breeding pairs, down by two from the previous year. A pack is defined as four or more wolves traveling together in winter.Most of the packs are concentrated in the Wallowas. State wildlife officials have attributed the wolves’ slow growth to turnover of breeding adults and the limited habitat available in that part of the state. Wolves can exist in a wide range of habitats, but they need open spaces and abundant food sources – they travel over large areas to hunt, as far as 30 miles a day, mostly preying on mule deer and elk.To seek out that habitat, wolves are slowly moving west, wildlife officials said. Although they’re not migratory animals, male wolves disperse widely to establish a new territory or join an existing pack.Officials in Oregon counted 10 resident groups of wolves in the western part of the state, up from seven groups in 2022 – meaning that a quarter of all known Oregon wolves now live in western Oregon.Of the 33 wolves killed by humans last year, 16 were lethally removed by ranchers, state or federal wildlife officials in response to chronic depredation in 2023. To many Oregon ranchers, wolves are a nuisance because they kill and harass livestock, especially young calves.The number of attacks on livestock by wolves slightly decreased from previous years, according to the wolf count report.In 2023, there were a total of 73 attacks on livestock by wolves, down from 76 in 2022. The state compensated livestock owners $70,264 for confirmed and probable losses to wolves and also paid for an additional $401,023 in preventive measures.In Oregon, wolves are considered a “special status game mammal” and protected by statute throughout the state. Oregon does not allow sport hunting of wolves. In western Oregon – west of Canyon City and Burns – wolves are federally protected and listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.— Gosia Wozniacka covers environmental justice, climate change, the clean energy transition and other environmental issues. Reach her at gwozniacka@oregonian.com or 971-421-3154.

Oregon’s wolf population count remained the same as last year, although the animals continue to expand their habitat westward, according to a new state report.

Oregon’s wolf population count remained the same as last year, although the animals continue to expand their habitat westward, according to a new state report.

Large numbers of wolves killed by people likely contributed to the plateauing number, environmental groups said. Wildlife officials also cited limited habitat in northeastern Oregon, where most packs now live.

Thirty-six wolves died last year –  the highest number since wolves have rebounded in the state – and 33 of those were killed by people. Poachers killed 12, including several by poisoning, four wolves were killed in car crashes and one was lawfully shot for personal safety reasons. The rest were killed because they were preying on livestock.

Twenty wolves were killed in 2022 (17 of them by people), 26 in 2021 (21 by people) and nine in 2020 (seven by people).

The state’s wolf population remained at 178 in 2023, the same number it was in 2022, according to an annual wolf report released by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

It’s the fourth year that the animals’ growth in Oregon has been nearly flat. Prior to that, wolf numbers saw double-digit percentage increases for over a decade.

Technically, the number of wolves in Oregon did increase by 10 last year, but in December Oregon captured and sent 10 of its wolves to Colorado to help Colorado meet its voter-approved reintroduction program.

Oregon’s 2023 wolf count documented 22 packs – down from 24 in the previous year – with 15 of the packs meeting the criteria of breeding pairs, down by two from the previous year. A pack is defined as four or more wolves traveling together in winter.

Most of the packs are concentrated in the Wallowas. State wildlife officials have attributed the wolves’ slow growth to turnover of breeding adults and the limited habitat available in that part of the state. Wolves can exist in a wide range of habitats, but they need open spaces and abundant food sources – they travel over large areas to hunt, as far as 30 miles a day, mostly preying on mule deer and elk.

To seek out that habitat, wolves are slowly moving west, wildlife officials said. Although they’re not migratory animals, male wolves disperse widely to establish a new territory or join an existing pack.

Officials in Oregon counted 10 resident groups of wolves in the western part of the state, up from seven groups in 2022 – meaning that a quarter of all known Oregon wolves now live in western Oregon.

Of the 33 wolves killed by humans last year, 16 were lethally removed by ranchers, state or federal wildlife officials in response to chronic depredation in 2023. To many Oregon ranchers, wolves are a nuisance because they kill and harass livestock, especially young calves.

The number of attacks on livestock by wolves slightly decreased from previous years, according to the wolf count report.

In 2023, there were a total of 73 attacks on livestock by wolves, down from 76 in 2022. The state compensated livestock owners $70,264 for confirmed and probable losses to wolves and also paid for an additional $401,023 in preventive measures.

In Oregon, wolves are considered a “special status game mammal” and protected by statute throughout the state. Oregon does not allow sport hunting of wolves. In western Oregon – west of Canyon City and Burns – wolves are federally protected and listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.

— Gosia Wozniacka covers environmental justice, climate change, the clean energy transition and other environmental issues. Reach her at gwozniacka@oregonian.com or 971-421-3154.

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Environmentalists, Politicians, Celebrities Recall Life and Influence of Primatologist Jane Goodall

Tributes poured in from around the world honoring the life and influence of Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist whose death at the age of 91 was announced on Wednesday

Jane Goodall was a pioneer, a tireless advocate and a deeply compassionate conservationist who inspired others to care about primates — and all animals — during a long life well lived, according to tributes from around the world.U.S. Sen Cory Booker of New Jersey posted a video of Goodall to social media, and thanked her for her “lasting legacy of conservation.” Journalist Maria Shriver said Goodall was a “legendary figure and a friend” who “changed the world and the lives of everyone she impacted."Here’s a roundup of some notable reaction to Goodall's death and legacy: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres “I’m deeply saddened to learn about the passing of Jane Goodall, our dear Messenger of Peace. She is leaving an extraordinary legacy for humanity & our planet.” — on X. UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay “Dr. Jane Goodall was able to convey the lessons of her research to everyone, especially young people. She changed the way we see Great Apes. Her chimpanzee greetings at UNESCO last year — she who so strongly supported our work for the biosphere — will echo for years to come.” — written statement.“Jane Goodall’s brilliant mind, compassionate heart, and pioneering spirit helped us better understand our connection to nature and our responsibility to defend it — and she inspired generations to do their part. It was an honor to have her alongside us just last week to share with leaders a message that is more urgent than ever.” — on X.“Thank you Jane Goodall for a lasting legacy of conservation, service to all of us, and for always being brave.” — on X. Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “Heartbroken to hear of Dr. Jane Goodall’s passing. She was a pioneer whose research and advocacy reshaped our understanding of the natural world. Her wisdom and compassion will live on in every act of conservation. All of us who were so greatly inspired by her will miss her deeply.” — on X.“Jane Goodall was a legendary figure and a friend. I admired her, learned from her, and was so honored to get to spend time with her over the years. She stayed at her mission and on her mission. She changed the world and the lives of everyone she impacted. The world lost one of its best today, and I lost someone I adored.” — on X. PETA Founder Ingrid Newkirk “Jane Goodall was a gifted scientist and trailblazer who forever changed the way we view our fellow animals. Caring about all animals, she went vegan after reading Animal Liberation, and helped PETA with many campaigns, calling her 1986 visit to a Maryland laboratory full of chimpanzees in barren isolation chambers ‘the worst experience of my life.’ We could always count on her to be on the animals’ side, whether she was urging UPS to stop shipping hunting trophies, calling for SeaWorld’s closure, or a shutdown of the Oregon National Primate Research Center.” — in written statement. Kitty Block, president and CEO of Humane World for Animals “Goodall’s influence on the animal protection community is immeasurable, and her work on behalf of primates and all animals will never be forgotten.” — in written statement.“My friend Jane Goodall was the wisest and most compassionate person I’ve ever met. She could make anybody feel hopeful about the future … no matter the hardships of the present. Just this weekend, she wrote to let me know she was thinking about what she could do to alleviate all of the suffering in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, and beyond. She was my hero, my inspiration. I will miss her every single day.” — on X.“Jane Goodall was a groundbreaking scientist and leader who taught us all so much about the beauty and wonder of our world. She never stopped advocating for nature, people, and the planet we share. May she rest in peace.” — on X.The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Sept. 2025

Animals
Climate
Conservation

Evolution may explain why women live longer than men

In most mammals, females live longer than males, but in birds the trend goes the other way – a study of over 1000 species points to possible reasons for these differences

Women live longer than men on average in every countryPeter Cavanagh/Alamy We now have a better idea of why women live longer than men, on average, thanks to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the differences in lifespan between male and female mammals and birds. The average global life expectancy is about 74 years for women and 68 years for men. There are various ideas to explain why women tend to live longer than men, including the suggestion that young men are more likely to die in accidents or conflicts, and that women are better protected against potentially harmful mutations in the sex-determining chromosomes than men, but the picture is far from complete. To search for clues from other animals, Johanna Stärk at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and her colleagues analysed data on life expectancy in 1176 species – 528 mammals and 648 birds – in zoos as well as in wild populations. They found that in 72 per cent of the mammal species, females live longer than males, by 12 or 13 per cent on average. But in birds, males tend to outlive females in 68 per cent of the species, surviving about 5 per cent longer on average. The researchers say this trend backs up the idea that sex chromosomes account for some of the differences in lifespan. In mammals, having two copies of the X chromosome makes an individual genetically female, while males have two different sex chromosomes, an X and a Y. In theory, females are better protected against harmful mutations in the sex chromosomes, because the second copy of the X chromosome acts as a backup. In birds, the sex determination system is the other way around: females have two different sex chromosomes, called Z and W, while males have two Z chromosomes. So the different life expectancy trends in mammals and birds back up the idea that the sex with different chromosomes – the heterogametic sex – incurs a longevity cost. “But what was very interesting is that we found exceptions,” says team member Fernando Colchero, also at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “And with those exceptions, our idea was to test other evolutionary hypotheses for why these sex differences occur.” Digging deeper into the data, the team found that mating systems seem to play a role. In polygamous mammals where there is strong competition for mates – such as baboons, gorillas and chimpanzees – males generally die earlier than females. “Due to competition for mating opportunities, individuals – typically the males – will invest into traits favoured by sexual selection, such as large body size, ornamental feathers or antlers,” says Nicole Riddle at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “These traits are costly to produce, and there are typically other costs associated with the competition for mating opportunities, for example through fights with other males.” These factors will mean that the individual has less resources available to invest in its own long-term survival, she says. Males that invest in costly traits to win mates may have shorter lifespans as a resultRebius/Shutterstock This is also true of birds with polygamous mating systems. “Overall, this may also explain why the male advantage in birds is considerably lower than the female advantage in mammals,” says Pau Carazo at the University of Valencia in Spain. He says that in mammals, both the genetic factor and sexual selection traits work in the same direction in shortening male lifespan, whereas in birds the pressures may balance each other out, because males are often involved in strong sexual selection, but females bear the costs of heterogamy. Stärk and her colleagues also found that the sex that invests more in raising offspring tends to live longer. In mammals, this is often the females. In long-lived species like humans or other primates, this is probably evolutionarily advantageous, because it helps females survive until their offspring are sexually mature themselves. However, there were exceptions. “Birds of prey are the opposite of everything that we’re finding in the other species,” says Stärk. “The females are larger, and it’s often the females that engage much more in protection of the territory, but still females live longer.” Why is a mystery, she says. The lifespan differences between sexes are smaller in zoo populations than in wild populations, says Carazo, probably because life in captivity minimises environmental pressures like fights, predation and disease. This control over the environment might also be why lifespan differences between the sexes in humans have been shrinking, he says, although they might never go away entirely. “There are still some very strongly coded differences – physiological differences and genetic differences – between men and women,” says Colchero. “Who knows where medical sciences are going to take us, but in general, we don’t expect that those differences are completely going to disappear.”

Animals
Science

A Revolution in Tracking Life on Earth

A suite of technologies are helping taxonomists speed up species identification.

Across a Swiss meadow and into its forested edges, the drone dragged a jumbo-size cotton swab from a 13-foot tether. Along its path, the moistened swab collected scraps of life: some combination of sloughed skin and hair; mucus, saliva, and blood splatters; pollen flecks and fungal spores.Later, biologists used a sequencer about the size of a phone to stream the landscape’s DNA into code, revealing dozens upon dozens of species, some endangered, some invasive. The researchers never saw the wasps, stink bugs, or hawk moths whose genetic signatures they collected. But all of those, and many more, were out there.The researchers, from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, were field-testing a new approach to biodiversity monitoring, in this case to map insect life across different kinds of vegetation. They make up one of many teams now deploying a suite of technologies to track nature at a resolution and pace once unimaginable for taxonomists. “We know a lot more about what’s happening,” Camille Albouy, an environmental scientist at ETH Zurich, and member of the team, told me, “even if a lot still escapes us.”Today, autonomous robots collect DNA while state-of-the-art sequencers process genetic samples quickly and cheaply, and machine-learning algorithms detect life by sound or shape. These technologies are revolutionizing humanity’s ability to catalog Earth’s species, which are estimated to number 8 million—though perhaps far, far more—by illuminating the teeming life that so often eludes human observation. Only about 2.3 million species have been formally described. The rest are nameless and unstudied—part of what biologists call dark taxa.Insects, for example, likely compose more than half of all animal species, yet most (an estimated four out of five) have never been recorded by science. From the tropics to the poles, on land and in water, they pollinate, prey, scavenge, burrow, and parasitize—an unobserved majority of life on Earth. “It is difficult to relate to nonspecialists how vast our ignorance truly is,” an international consortium of insect scientists lamented in 2018. Valerio Caruso, an entomologist at the University of Padua, in Italy, studies scuttle flies, a skittering family containing an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 species. Only about 4,000 have been described, Caruso told me. “One lifetime is not enough to understand them all.”The minute distinctions within even one family of flies matter more than they might seem to: Species that look identical can occupy entirely different ecological niches—evading different predators and hunting different prey, parasitizing different hosts, pollinating different plants, decomposing different materials, or carrying different diseases. Each is a unique evolutionary experiment that might give rise to compounds that unlock new medicines, behaviors that offer agricultural solutions, and other adaptations that could further our understanding of how life persists.Only with today’s machines and technology do scientists stand a chance of keeping up with life’s abundance. For most of history, humans have relied primarily on their eyes to classify the natural world: Observations of shape, size, and color helped Carl Linnaeus catalog about 12,000 species in the 18th century—a monumental undertaking, but a laughable fraction of reality. Accounting for each creature demanded the meticulous labor of dehydrating, dissecting, mounting, pinning, labeling—essentially the main techniques available until the turn of the 21st century, when genetic sequencing allowed taxonomists to zoom in on DNA bar codes. Even then, those might not have identified specimens beyond genus or family.Now technologies such as eDNA, high-throughput sequencing, autonomous robotics, and AI have broadened our vision of the natural world. They decode the genomes of fungi, bacteria, and yeasts that are difficult or impossible to culture in a lab. Specialized AI isolates species’ calls from noisy recordings, translating air vibrations into an acoustic field guide. Others parse photo pixels to tease out variations in wing veins or bristles as fine as a dust mote to identify and classify closely related species. High-resolution 3-D scans allow researchers to visualize minuscule anatomies without lifting a scalpel. Other tools can map dynamic ecosystems as they transform in real time, tracking how wetlands contract and expand season by season or harnessing hundreds of millions of observations from citizen-science databases to identify species and map their shifting ranges.One unassuming setup in a lush Panamanian rainforest involved a UV light luring moths to a white panel and a solar-powered camera that snapped a photo every 10 seconds, from dusk to dawn. In a single week, AI processed many thousands of images each night, in which experts detected 2,000 moth species—half of them unknown to science. “It breaks my heart to see people think science is about wrapping up the last details of understanding, and that all the big discoveries are done,” David Rolnick, a computer scientist at McGill University and Mila - Quebec AI Institute, who was part of the expedition, told me. In Colombia, one of the world’s most biodiverse countries, the combination of drone-collected data and machine learning has helped describe tens of thousands of species, 200 of which are new to science.These tools’ field of view is still finite. AI algorithms see only as far as their training data, and taxonomical data overrepresent the global North and charismatic organisms. In a major open-access biodiversity database, for example, less than 5 percent of the entries in recent years pertained to insects, while more than 80 percent related to birds (which account for less than 1 percent of named species). Because many dark taxa are absent from training data sets, even the most advanced image-recognition models work best as triage—rapidly sorting through familiar taxa and flagging likely new discoveries for human taxonomists to investigate.AI systems “don’t have intuition; they don’t have creativity,” said Rolnick, whose team co-created Antenna, a ready-to-use AI platform for ecologists. Human taxonomists are still better at imagining how a rare feature arose evolutionarily, or exploring the slight differences that can mark an entirely new species. And ultimately, every identification—whether by algorithm or DNA or human expert—still depends on people.That human labor is also a dwindling resource, especially in entomology. “The number of people who are paid to be taxonomists in the world is practically nil,” Rolnick said. And time is against them. The world’s largest natural-history museums hold a wealth of specimens and objects (more than 1 billion, according to one study) yet only a fraction of those have digitally accessible records, and genomic records are accessible for just 0.2 percent of biological specimens. Many historical collections—all those drawers packed with pinned, flattened, and stuffed specimens; all those jars of floating beings—are chronically underfunded, and their contents are vulnerable to the physical consequences of neglect. Preservation fluids evaporate, poor storage conditions invite pests and mold, and DNA degrades until it is unsequenceable.Today’s tools are still far from fully capturing the extent and complexity of Earth’s biodiversity, and much of that could vanish before anyone catalogs it. “We are too few, studying too many things,” Caruso, the Padua entomologist, said. Many liken taxonomy to cataloging an already burning library. As Mehrdad Hajibabaei, chief scientific officer for the Center for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph, in Canada, told me: “We’re not stamp-collecting here.” Taxonomists are instead working to preserve a planetary memory—an archive of life—and to decode which traits help creatures adapt, migrate, or otherwise survive in a rapidly changing climate.The climate crisis is unraveling the life cycles of wildlife around the world—by one estimate, for about half of all species. Flowers now bloom weeks before pollinators stir; fruit withers before migrating birds can reach it. Butterflies attuned to rainfall falter in drought. Tropical birds and alpine plants climb toward cooler, though finite, mountaintops. Fish slip farther out to sea; disease-carrying mosquitoes ride the heat into new territories. Extreme weather at the poles stresses crucial moss and lichen, and shreds entire habitats in hours. Mass die-offs are now routine.“Once you lose one species, you’ll probably lose more species,” Caruso said. “Over time, everything is going to collapse.” One in eight could vanish by century’s end—many of them dark taxa, lost before we ever meet them. Most countries—and global bodies such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature—cannot assess, and therefore cannot protect, unnamed organisms. As Edward O. Wilson told Time in 1986: “It’s like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.”Today’s machine-assisted taxonomy faces the same problem Linnaeus did: Nature’s complexity still far outstrips human insight, even with machines’ assistance. “We don’t perceive the world as it is in all its chaotic glory,” the biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon wrote in her 2010 book, Naming Nature. “We sense a very particular subset of what surrounds us, and we see it in a particularly human way.” On the flip side, every new data point sharpens the predictive models guiding conservation, says Evgeny Zakharov, genomics director for the Center for Biodiversity Genomics. “The more we know about the world, the more power we have to properly manage and protect it,” he told me. With tools, the speed of taxonomists’ work is accelerating, but so is the countdown—they will take all the help they can get.

Animals
Climate
Conservation

The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests

MIT researchers traced chemical fossils in ancient rocks to the ancestors of modern-day demosponges.

A team of MIT geochemists has unearthed new evidence in very old rocks suggesting that some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge.In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that they have identified “chemical fossils” that may have been left by ancient sponges in rocks that are more than 541 million years old. A chemical fossil is a remnant of a biomolecule that originated from a living organism that has since been buried, transformed, and preserved in sediment, sometimes for hundreds of millions of years.The newly identified chemical fossils are special types of steranes, which are the geologically stable form of sterols, such as cholesterol, that are found in the cell membranes of complex organisms. The researchers traced these special steranes to a class of sea sponges known as demosponges. Today, demosponges come in a huge variety of sizes and colors, and live throughout the oceans as soft and squishy filter feeders. Their ancient counterparts may have shared similar characteristics.“We don’t know exactly what these organisms would have looked like back then, but they absolutely would have lived in the ocean, they would have been soft-bodied, and we presume they didn’t have a silica skeleton,” says Roger Summons, the Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology Emeritus in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).The group’s discovery of sponge-specific chemical fossils offers strong evidence that the ancestors of demosponges were among the first animals to evolve, and that they likely did so much earlier than the rest of Earth’s major animal groups.The study’s authors, including Summons, are lead author and former MIT EAPS Crosby Postdoctoral Fellow Lubna Shawar, who is now a research scientist at Caltech, along with Gordon Love from the University of California at Riverside, Benjamin Uveges of Cornell University, Alex Zumberge of GeoMark Research in Houston, Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University in Sweden, and José-Luis Giner of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.Sponges on steroidsThe new study builds on findings that the group first reported in 2009. In that study, the team identified the first chemical fossils that appeared to derive from ancient sponges. They analyzed rock samples from an outcrop in Oman and found a surprising abundance of steranes that they determined were the preserved remnants of 30-carbon (C30) sterols — a rare form of steroid that they showed was likely derived from ancient sea sponges.The steranes were found in rocks that were very old and formed during the Ediacaran Period — which spans from roughly 541 million to about 635 million years ago. This period took place just before the Cambrian, when the Earth experienced a sudden and global explosion of complex multicellular life. The team’s discovery suggested that ancient sponges appeared much earlier than most multicellular life, and were possibly one of Earth’s first animals.However, soon after these findings were released, alternative hypotheses swirled to explain the C30 steranes’ origins, including that the chemicals could have been generated by other groups of organisms or by nonliving geological processes.The team says the new study reinforces their earlier hypothesis that ancient sponges left behind this special chemical record, as they have identified a new chemical fossil in the same Precambrian rocks that is almost certainly biological in origin.Building evidenceJust as in their previous work, the researchers looked for chemical fossils in rocks that date back to the Ediacaran Period. They acquired samples from drill cores and outcrops in Oman, western India, and Siberia, and analyzed the rocks for signatures of steranes, the geologically stable form of sterols found in all eukaryotes (plants, animals, and any organism with a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles).“You’re not a eukaryote if you don’t have sterols or comparable membrane lipids,” Summons says.A sterol’s core structure consists of four fused carbon rings. Additional carbon side chain and chemical add-ons can attach to and extend a sterol’s structure, depending on what an organism’s particular genes can produce. In humans, for instance, the sterol cholesterol contains 27 carbon atoms, while the sterols in plants generally have 29 carbon atoms.“It’s very unusual to find a sterol with 30 carbons,” Shawar says.The chemical fossil the researchers identified in 2009 was a 30-carbon sterol. What’s more, the team determined that the compound could be synthesized because of the presence of a distinctive enzyme which is encoded by a gene that is common to demosponges.In their new study, the team focused on the chemistry of these compounds and realized the same sponge-derived gene could produce an even rarer sterol, with 31 carbon atoms (C31). When they analyzed their rock samples for C31 steranes, they found it in surprising abundance, along with the aforementioned C30 steranes.“These special steranes were there all along,” Shawar says. “It took asking the right questions to seek them out and to really understand their meaning and from where they come.”The researchers also obtained samples of modern-day demosponges and analyzed them for C31 sterols. They found that, indeed, the sterols — biological precursors of the C31 steranes found in rocks — are present in some species of contemporary demosponges. Going a step further, they chemically synthesized eight different C31 sterols in the lab as reference standards to verify their chemical structures. Then, they processed the molecules in ways that simulate how the sterols would change when deposited, buried, and pressurized over hundreds of millions of years. They found that the products of only two such sterols were an exact match with the form of C31 sterols that they found in ancient rock samples. The presence of two and the absence of the other six demonstrates that these compounds were not produced by a random nonbiological process.The findings, reinforced by multiple lines of inquiry, strongly support the idea that the steranes that were found in ancient rocks were indeed produced by living organisms, rather than through geological processes. What’s more, those organisms were likely the ancestors of demosponges, which to this day have retained the ability to produce the same series of compounds.“It’s a combination of what’s in the rock, what’s in the sponge, and what you can make in a chemistry laboratory,” Summons says. “You’ve got three supportive, mutually agreeing lines of evidence, pointing to these sponges being among the earliest animals on Earth.”“In this study we show how to authenticate a biomarker, verifying that a signal truly comes from life rather than contamination or non-biological chemistry,” Shawar adds.Now that the team has shown C30 and C31 sterols are reliable signals of ancient sponges, they plan to look for the chemical fossils in ancient rocks from other regions of the world. They can only tell from the rocks they’ve sampled so far that the sediments, and the sponges, formed some time during the Ediacaran Period. With more samples, they will have a chance to narrow in on when some of the first animals took form.This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Crosby Fund, the Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship program, the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Origins of Life, and the NASA Exobiology Program. 

Animals
Chemicals
Nature

The used oil from your french fry order may be fueling your next flight

We followed the trail of grease from the kitchens of Le Diplomat and other D.C. restaurants to the commercial planes using alternative fuels.

Le Diplomate had an emergency. After a week of frying frites, the kitchen at Washington’s famous standby for French cuisine was full to bursting with used grease.Two waist-high storage tanks in the back of the restaurant sloshed to the brim with dark, viscous oil. During the weekend rush, the staff stored some of the spent grease in plastic tubs, but they were quickly running out of places to put it.Restaurants are prohibited from dumping grease down the drain because it would clog city sewers. So on a Tuesday afternoon, James Howell nimbly backed his truck into an alley behind Le Diplomate. He hopped down from the cab and snaked a rubber hose to the kitchen. Then with the flip of a switch and a loud drone, the hose slurped the used cooking oil into the truck’s gleaming steel 2,200-gallon tank.James Howell of Mahoney Environmental collects used cooking oil behind Duke’s Grocery in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Three bottles — with raw oil on the left, half-processed produce in the middle and refined aviation fuel on the right — in the Neste laboratory in Rotterdam. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)The spent grease that restaurants unload as waste has become a valuable commodity. If you’ve been on a plane lately, there’s a chance that used cooking oil has helped launch you into the sky. Refineries recycle waste oil into kerosene pure enough to power a Boeing 777. The process is expensive — but it can create 70 to 80 percent less planet-warming pollution than making jet fuel out of crude oil, experts say.Last year, airlines burned 340 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) — nearly all of it made from used cooking oil or animal fat leftover from meat packaging.A series examining innovative and impactful approaches to addressing waste.That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 114 billion gallons of fuel airlines burned overall, which create 2.5 percent of humanity’s carbon pollution, according to the International Energy Agency. But airlines have vowed to use much more SAF to lower their greenhouse emissions. European regulators have set strict rules requiring airlines to use more SAF over time, while U.S. regulators dole out tax credits to coax companies into buying it.This is the airlines’ main plan for dealing with their greenhouse emissions. Upgrading new planes with more efficient engines helps a little. And, one day, planes may run on electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells — but those are still decades away and may never work for long flights. To manage most of their climate impact for the foreseeable future, airlines are betting everything on alternative fuels.“Ninety-eight percent of [our greenhouse emissions] come from the fuel we burn,” said Lauren Riley, chief sustainability officer at United Airlines. “We’ll continue to look everywhere we can around technology and innovation of the aircraft itself and the engine, but we have to look at replacing our fuel.”Experts say this plan can work, but it’ll require fuel refiners to dramatically raise SAF production and find new raw materials besides old cooking oil to turn into kerosene. Depending on what they use and how they refine it, this new class of fuel could make flying more sustainable or cause a whole new set of environmental headaches.Howell, of Mahoney Environmental, collects used cooking oil in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Harvesting the world’s greaseOn his rounds one day in early May, Howell made about two dozen stops at commercial kitchens around Washington, including an upscale cafe in the Michelin Guide, an assisted-living facility, a soul food spot where old chicken bones clogged the hose and an Italian restaurant where two unfortunate rats had drowned in a grease bin while diving for a wayward meatball. By midafternoon, his truck had about 1,200 gallons of grease in its belly.The company he works for, Mahoney Environmental, pays a few cents a gallon for the waste fat it collects from 90,000 businesses in the United States. Hundreds of companies gather grease around the globe — with an especially large haul in Southeast Asia, where densely packed restaurants serve up so much fried food that they’ve become the waste oil equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s rich petroleum fields.Waste oil from kitchens and animal tallow leftover from meatpacking plants used to be recycled into livestock feed. But now, they are mostly turned into fuel: Fat molecules hold a lot of energy, and they’re relatively easy to rearrange into diesel and kerosene.Turning fat into fuel keeps grease out of the landfill and petroleum in the ground. The demand, though, has begun to outstrip the supply.“There’s only so many waste oils to go around, and … you can’t really squeeze out much more,” said Nikita Pavlenko, who leads the aviation and fuels team at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation. “People aren’t going to be frying more food or processing more cattle to get waste tallow to make fuel. You’re kind of stuck with what you have.”A hose is deployed to suck used cooking oil into the tank of a collection truck. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Storage tanks for the feedstock (oil or tallow) at Neste in Rotterdam. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)As regulators push companies to buy and make more fuel from fat, the price of grease has been rising, along with the crime surrounding it.Thieves sometimes steal grease from collection bins and sell it themselves. Once, Howell said, he stopped at a restaurant only to find an empty bin and a confused cook, who told him an unmarked van had come by earlier and siphoned off their oil.Grease fraud is a problem, too. In some areas, used cooking oil sells for more than new cooking oil, prompting hucksters to sell virgin oil — including palm oil, which is associated with deforestation in Southeast Asia — as if it were used. It’s hard to catch, since fresh oil spiked with a little restaurant grease is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.“You’re potentially paying a premium for something that is worse than fossil fuel,” Pavlenko said.Fuel companies crack down on fraud by hiring inspectors to go out and check that their grease suppliers really are pumping their product out of deep fat fryers. On his route, Howell takes pictures of every bin before and after he drains it and uploads the proof to a Mahoney Environmental app that verifies where his oil came from.At the end of the day, Howell unloads his truck at a depot, where the oil is filtered to remove water, flour, spices and any other floating food chunks.Lab shift supervisor Jeroen van der Heijden in the laboratory at Neste. Neste produces sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), with a key presence in the Netherlands at its Rotterdam refinery. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)Turning fat into fuelUsed grease is a global commodity. Once it’s collected, tanker ships and pipelines carry it to fuel refineries around the world — much like they do for crude oil.Grease ships arrive a couple of times a week at a refinery in Rotterdam run by Neste, the world’s top producer of sustainable jet fuel.How grease is turned into jet fuelThe Neste facility, located in Europe’s largest port, is ramping up production of SAF made from used cooking oil. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)Fueling the appetite for sustainable fuelIn 2023, a Boeing 777 flew across the Atlantic Ocean burning fuel made from nothing but waste fat and sugar. The flight was a first, but it was really a publicity stunt — carrying Virgin Atlantic bigwigs, not paying passengers. The fuel is too expensive, and too scarce, for that to make business sense.Instead, Neste blends its french fry fuel with standard kerosene made from crude oil before delivering it to airports.SAF is almost identical to standard jet fuel, and it releases just as much CO2 when it’s burned. But experts say there’s a key difference: Drilling for oil takes carbon that was locked away underground and releases it into the atmosphere. Making fuel from used cooking oil and tallow takes carbon that was already circulating through the air and the bodies of plants and animals and recycles it. No new carbon moves from underground storage into the atmosphere.Sample vials at Neste. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)Site director Hanna van Luijk at Neste. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)It takes energy to collect and transport used cooking oil, rearrange fat molecules into jet fuel and get that fuel to planes. But, overall, making and burning SAF adds as much as 80 percent less carbon to the atmosphere as making and burning fossil fuel from crude oil.Because there isn’t enough waste oil in the world to satisfy the airline industry’s thirst, companies are developing other ways to make low-carbon jet fuel. One option is to grow more crops like soy that can be crushed for oil and turned into jet fuel — although that raises the risk that more land will be cleared for farming in fragile ecosystems like the Brazilian Amazon. Environmentalists have raised similar concerns about raising more corn, sugar cane or beets to create ethanol and convert it into kerosene.“The problem with crop-based biofuels is it takes land to produce them at a time when we’re already expanding cropland … which means more deforestation, and the carbon losses are far greater than the potential savings from reducing fossil fuel use,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment.Alternately, farmers could grow more cover crops on their fields between their regular planting seasons, which would create a new source of plant oils or ethanol without using extra land. Some companies have experimented with turning trash into jet fuel, but the most prominent player went bankrupt last year. Others are splitting water molecules to harvest their hydrogen and combining it with captured carbon to make fuel.Experts say it will take a combination of all these methods to make enough green fuel to power the world’s planes.Howell, of Mahoney Environmental, collects used cooking oil behind Umai Nori. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)The one thing every alternative fuel recipe has in common is that they are more expensive than fossil fuel — and experts say they always will be. Making SAF from waste oil is “locked in at a cost which is about two times the cost of fossil jet, and it’s going to be entirely reliant on subsidies,” according to Pavlenko. The other methods could be even more expensive, even after they’ve had time to raise production and lower costs.The future of the industry will depend on whether the United States keeps tax credits in place and the European Union stands by its green fuel mandates. Neste is expanding its Rotterdam refinery in anticipation of stricter E.U. blending rules, and in the United States, the first large-scale SAF operations started pumping out fuel in recent years in response to new tax credits that have since been weakened.Back at Le Diplomate, amid the evening dinner rush, frites flow out of the kitchen to feed hungry diners who are unwittingly helping launch planes into the sky with every bite.

Animals
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Climate

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